interference of the foreigner provoked the Ultra-Royalists, and failed to excite energetic action on the part of King Louis, who dreaded the sour countenance of the Duchess of Angoulême more than he did Wellington’s reproofs. In the end the question of a settlement of the unfunded debt was allowed to remain open. The Government was unable to carry the sale of the Church forests, the Chamber did not succeed in its project of confiscation. The Budget for the year, greatly altered in the interest of the landed proprietors, was at length brought into shape. A resolution of the Lower House restoring the unsold forests to the Church was ignored by the Crown; and the Government, having obtained the means of carrying on the public services, gladly abstained from further legislation, and on the 29th of April ended the turmoil which surrounded it by proroguing the Chambers.
[Rising at Grenoble, May 6th. Executions.]
It was hoped that with the close of the Session the system of imprisonment and surveillance which prevailed in the Departments would be brought to an end. Vaublanc, the Minister of coercion, was removed from office. But the troubles of France were not yet over. On the 6th of May, a rising of peasants took place at Grenoble. According to the report of General Donnadieu, commander of the garrison, which brought the news to the Government, the revolt had only been put down after the most desperate fighting. “The corpses of the King’s enemies,” said the General in his despatch, “cover all the roads for a league round Grenoble.” [275] It was soon known that twenty-four prisoners had been condemned to death by court-martial, and sixteen of these actually executed: the court-martial recommended the other eight to the clemency of the Government. But the despatches of Donnadieu had thrown the Cabinet into a panic. Decazes, the most liberal of the Ministers, himself signed the hasty order requiring the remaining prisoners to be put to death. They perished; and when it was too late the Government learnt that Donnadieu’s narrative was a mass of the grossest exaggerations, and that the affair which he had represented as an insurrection of the whole Department was conducted by about 300 peasants, half of whom were unarmed. The violence and illegality with which the General proceeded to establish a régime of military law soon brought him into collision with the Government. He became the hero of the Ultra-Royalists; but the Ministry, which was unwilling to make a public confession that it had needlessly put eight persons to death, had to bear the odium of an act of cruelty for which Donnadieu was really responsible. The part into which Decazes had been entrapped probably strengthened the determination of this Minister, who was now gaining great influence over the King, to strike with energy against the Ultra-Royalist faction. From this time he steadily led the King towards the only measure which could free the country from the rule of the Count of Artois and the reactionists–the dissolution of Parliament.
[Decazes.]
[Dissolution of the Chamber, Sept. 5, 1816.]
Louis XVIII. depended much on the society of some personal favourite. Decazes was young and an agreeable companion; his business as Police-Minister gave him the opportunity of amusing the King with anecdotes and gossip much more congenial to the old man’s taste than discussions on finance or constitutional law. Louis came to regard Decazes almost as a son, and gratified his own studious inclination by teaching him English. The Minister’s enemies said that he won the King’s heart by taking private lessons from some obscure Briton, and attributing his extraordinary progress to the skill of his royal master. But Decazes had a more effective retort than witticism. He opened the letters of the Ultra-Royalists and laid them before the King. Louis found that these loyal subjects jested upon his infirmities, called him a dupe in the hands of Jacobins, and grumbled at him for so long delaying the happy hour when Artois should ascend the throne. Humorous as Louis was, he was not altogether pleased to read that he “ought either to open his eyes or to close them for ever.” At the same time the reports of Decazes’ local agents proved that the Ultra-Royalist party were in reality weak in numbers and unpopular throughout the greater part of the country. The project of a dissolution was laid before the Ministers and some of the King’s confidants. Though the Ambassadors were not consulted on the measure, it was certain that they would not resist it. No word of the Ministerial plot reached the rival camp of Artois. The King gained courage, and on the 5th of September signed the Ordonnance which appealed from the Parliament to the nation, and, to the anger and consternation of the Ultra-Royalists, made an end of the intractable Chamber a few weeks before the time which had been fixed for its re-assembling.
[Electoral law, 1817.]
France was well rid of a body of men who had been elected at a moment of despair, and who would either have prolonged the occupation of the country by foreign armies, or have plunged the nation into civil war. The elections which followed were favourable to the Government. The questions fruitlessly agitated in the Assembly of 1815 were settled to the satisfaction of the public in the new Parliament. An electoral law was passed, which, while it retained the high franchise fixed by the Charta, and the rule of renewing the Chamber by fifths, gave life and value to the representative system by making the elections direct. Though the constituent body of all France scarcely numbered under this arrangement a hundred thousand persons, it was extensive enough to contain a majority hostile to the reactionary policy of the Church and the noblesse. The men who had made wealth by banking, commerce, or manufactures, the so-called higher bourgeoisie, greatly exceeded in number the larger landed proprietors; and although they were not usually democratic in their opinions, they were liberal, and keenly attached to the modern as against the old institutions of France, inasmuch as their industrial interests and their own personal importance depended upon the maintenance of the victory won in 1789 against aristocratic privilege and monopoly. So strong was the hostility between the civic middle class and the landed noblesse, that the Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber sought, as they had done in the year before, to extend the franchise to the peasantry, in the hope of overpowering wealth with numbers. The electoral law, however, passed both Houses in the form in which it had been drawn up by the Government. Though deemed narrow and oligarchical by the next generation, it was considered, and with justice, as a great victory won by liberalism at the time. The middle class of Great Britain had to wait for fifteen years before it obtained anything like the weight in the representation given to the middle class of France by the law of 1817.
[Establishment of financial credit.]
Not many of the persons who had been imprisoned under the provisional acts of the last year now remained in confinement. It was considered necessary to prolong the Laws of Public Security, and they were re-enacted, but under a much softened form. It remained for the new Chamber to restore the financial credit of the country by making some equitable arrangement for securing the capital and paying the interest of the unfunded debt. Projects of repudiation now gained no hearing. Richelieu consented to make an annual allowance to the Church, equivalent to the rental of the Church forests; but the forests themselves were made security for the debt, and the power of sale was granted to the Government. Pending such repayment of the capital, the holders of unfunded debt received stock, calculated at its real, not at its titular, value. The effect of this measure was at once evident. The Government was enabled to enter into negotiations for a loan, which promised it the means of paying the indemnities due to the foreign Powers. On this payment depended the possibility of withdrawing the army of occupation. Though Wellington at first offered some resistance, thirty thousand men were removed in the spring of 1817; and the Czar allowed Richelieu to hope that, if no further difficulties should arise, the complete evacuation of French territory might take place in the following year.
[Character of the years 1816-18.]
Thus the dangers with which reactionary passion had threatened France appeared to be passing away. The partial renovation of the Chamber which took place in the autumn of 1817 still further strengthened the Ministry of Richelieu and weakened the Ultra-Royalist opposition. A few more months passed, and before the third anniversary of Waterloo, the Czar was ready to advise the entire withdrawal of foreign armies from France. An invitation was issued to the Powers to meet in Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle. There was no longer any doubt that the five years’ occupation, contemplated when the second Treaty of Paris was made, would be abandoned. The good will of Alexander, the friendliness of his Ambassador, Pozzo di Borgo, who, as a native of Corsica, had himself been a French subject, and who now aspired to become Minister of France, were powerful influences in favour of Louis XVIII. and his kingdom; much, however, of the speedy restoration of confidence was due to the temperate rule of Richelieu. The nation itself, far from suffering from Napoleon’s fall, regained something of the spontaneous energy so rich in 1789, so wanting at a later period. The cloud of military disaster lifted; new mental and political life began; and under the dynasty forced back by foreign arms France awoke to an activity unknown to it while its chief gave laws to Europe. Parliamentary debate offered the means of legal opposition to those who bore no friendship to the Court: conspiracy, though it alarmed at the moment, had become the resort only of the obscure and the powerless. Groups of able men were gathering around recognised leaders, or uniting in defence of a common political creed. The Press, dumb under Napoleon except for purposes of sycophancy, gradually became a power in the land. Even the dishonest eloquence of Chateaubriand, enforcing the principles of legal and constitutional liberty on behalf of a party which would fain have used every weapon of despotism in its own interest, proved that the leaden weight that had so long crushed thought and expression existed no more.
[Prussia after 1815.]
[Edict promising a Constitution, May 22, 1815.]
But if the years between 1815 and 1819 were in France years of hope and progress, it was not so with Europe generally. In England they were years of almost unparalleled suffering and discontent; in Italy the rule of Austria grew more and more anti-national; in Prussia, though a vigorous local and financial administration hastened the recovery of the impoverished land, the hopes of liberty declined beneath the reviving energy of the nobles and the resistance of the friends of absolutism. When Stein had summoned the Prussian people to take up arms for their Fatherland, he had believed that neither Frederick William nor Alexander would allow Prussia to remain without free institutions after the battle was won. The keener spirits in the War of Liberation had scarcely distinguished between the cause of national independence and that of internal liberty. They returned from the battlefields of Saxony and France, knowing that the Prussian nation had unsparingly offered up life and wealth at the call of patriotism, and believing that a patriot-king would rejoice to crown his triumph by inaugurating German freedom. For a while the hope seemed near fulfilment. On the 22nd of May, 1815, Frederick William published an ordinance, declaring that a Representation of the People should be established. [276] For this end the King stated that the existing Provincial Estates should be re-organised, and new ones founded where none existed, and that out of the Provincial Estates the Assembly of Representatives of the country should be chosen. It was added that a commission would be appointed, to organise under Hardenberg’s presidency the system of representation, and to draw up a written Constitution. The right of discussing all legislative measures affecting person or property was promised to the Assembly. Though foreign affairs seemed to be directly excluded from parliamentary debate, and the language of the Edict suggested that the representative body would only have a consultative voice, without the power either of originating or of rejecting laws, these reservations only showed the caution natural on the part of a Government divesting itself for the first time of absolute power. Guarded as it was, the scheme laid down by the King would hardly have displeased the men who had done the most to make constitutional rule in Prussia possible.
[Resistance of feudal and autocratic parties.]
But the promise of Frederick William was destined to remain unfulfilled. It was no good omen for Prussia that Stein, who had rendered such glorious services to his country and to all Europe, was suffered to retire from public life. The old court-party at Berlin, politicians who had been forced to make way for more popular men, landowners who had never pardoned the liberation of the serf, all the interests of absolutism and class-privilege which had disappeared for a moment in the great struggle for national existence, gradually re-asserted their influence over the King, and undermined the authority of Hardenberg, himself sinking into old age amid circumstances of private life that left to old age little of its honour. To decide even in principle upon the basis to be given to the new Prussian Constitution would have taxed all the foresight and all the constructive skill of the most experienced statesman; for by the side of the ancient dominion of the Hohenzollerns there were now the Rhenish and the Saxon Provinces, alien in spirit and of doubtful loyalty, in addition to Polish territory and smaller German districts acquired at intervals between 1792 and 1815. Hardenberg was right in endeavouring to link the Constitution with something that had come down from the past; but the decision that the General Assembly should be formed out of the Provincial Estates was probably an injudicious one; for these Estates, in their present form, were mainly corporations of nobles, and the spirit which animated them was at once the spirit of class-privilege and of an intensely strong localism. Hardenberg had not only occasioned an unnecessary delay by basing the representative system upon a reform of the Provincial Estates, but had exposed himself to sharp attacks from these very bodies, to whom nothing was more odious than the absorption of their own dignity by a General Assembly. It became evident that the process of forming a Constitution would be a tedious one; and in the meantime the opponents of the popular movement opened their attack upon the men and the ideas whose influence in the war of Liberation appeared to have made so great a break between the German present and the past.
[Schmalz’s pamphlet, 1815.]
The first public utterance of the reaction was a pamphlet issued in July, 1815, by Schmalz, a jurist of some eminence, and brother-in-law of Scharnhorst, the re-organiser of the army. Schmalz, contradicting a statement which attributed to him a highly honourable part in the patriotic movement of 1808, attacked the Tugendbund, and other political associations dating from that epoch, in language of extreme violence. In the stiff and peremptory manner of the old Prussian bureaucracy, he denied that popular enthusiasm had anything whatever to do with the victory of 1813, [277] attributing the recovery of the nation firstly to its submission to the French alliance in 1812, and secondly to the quiet sense of duty with which, when the time came, it took up arms in obedience to the King. Then, passing on to the present aims of the political societies, he accused them of intending to overthrow all established governments, and to force unity upon Germany by means of revolution, murder, and pillage. Stein was not mentioned by name, but the warning was given to men of eminence who encouraged Jacobinical societies, that in such combinations the giants end by serving the dwarfs. Schmalz’s pamphlet, which was written with a strength and terseness of style very unusual in Germany, made a deep impression, and excited great indignation in Liberal circles. It was answered, among other writers, by Niebuhr; and the controversy thickened until King Frederick William, in the interest of public tranquillity, ordered that no more should be said on either side. It was in accordance with Prussian feeling that the King should thus interfere to stop the quarrels of his subjects. There would have been nothing unseemly in an act of impartial repression. But the King made it impossible to regard his act as of this character. Without consulting Hardenberg, he conferred a decoration upon the author of the controversy. Far-sighted men saw the true bearing of the act. They warned Hardenberg that, if he passed over this slight, he would soon have to pass over others more serious, and urged him to insist upon the removal of the counsellors on whose advice the King had acted. [278] But the Minister disliked painful measures. He probably believed that no influence could ever supplant his own with the King, and looked too lightly upon the growth of a body of opponents, who, whether in open or in concealed hostility to himself, were bent upon hindering the fulfilment of the constitutional reforms which he had at heart.
[The promised Constitutions delayed in Germany.]
In the Edict of the 22nd of May, 1815, the King had ordered that the work of framing a Constitution should be begun in the following September. Delays, however, arose; and when the commission was at length appointed, its leading members were directed to travel over the country in order to collect opinions upon the form of representation required. Two years passed before even this preliminary operation began. In the meantime very little progress had been made towards the establishment of constitutional government in Germany at large. One prince alone, the Grand Duke of Weimar, already eminent in Europe from his connection with Goethe and Schiller, loyally accepted the idea of a free State, and brought representative institutions into actual working. In Hesse, the Elector summoned the Estates, only to dismiss them with contumely when they resisted his extortions. In most of the minor States contests or negotiations took place between the Sovereigns and the ancient Orders, which led to little or no result. The Federal Diet, which ought to have applied itself to the determination of certain principles of public right common to all Germany, remained inactive. Though hope had not yet fallen, a sense of discontent arose, especially among the literary class which had shown such enthusiasm in the War of Liberation. It was characteristic of Germany that the demand for free government came not from a group of soldiers, as in Spain, not from merchants and men of business, as in England, but from professors and students, and from journalists, who were but professors in another form. The middle class generally were indifferent: the higher nobility, and the knights who had lost their semi-independence in 1803, sought for the restoration of privileges which were really incompatible with any State-government whatever. The advocacy of constitutional rule and of German unity was left, in default of Prussian initiative, to the ardent spirits of the Universities and the Press, who naturally exhibited in the treatment of political problems more fluency than knowledge, and more zeal than discretion. Jena, in the dominion of the Duke of Weimar, became, on account of the freedom of printing which existed there, the centre of the new Liberal journalism. Its University took the lead in the Teutonising movement which had been inaugurated by Fichte twelve years before in the days of Germany’s humiliation, and which had now received so vigorous an impulse from the victory won over the foreigner.
[The Wartburg Festival, Oct., 1817.]
On the 18th of October, 1817, the students of Jena, with deputations from all the Protestant Universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to celebrate the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves, and assembled within the venerable hall of Luther’s Wartburg Castle; sang, prayed, preached, and were preached to; dined; drank to German liberty, the jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God, and to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach, fraternised with the Landsturm in the market-place, and attended divine service in the parish church without mishap. In the evening they edified the townspeople with gymnastics, which were now the recognised symbol of German vigour, and lighted a great bonfire on the hill opposite the castle. Throughout the official part of the ceremony a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash words were, however, uttered against promise-breaking kings, and some of the hardier spirits took advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames, in imitation of Luther’s dealing with the Pope’s Bull, a quantity of what they deemed un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz’s pamphlet. They also burnt a soldier’s strait-jacket, a pigtail, and a corporal’s cane, emblems of the military brutalism of past times which were now being revived in Westphalia. [279] Insignificant as the whole affair was, it excited a singular alarm not only in Germany but at foreign Courts. Richelieu wrote from Paris to inquire whether revolution was breaking out. The King of Prussia sent Hardenberg to Weimar to make investigations on the spot. Metternich, who saw conspiracy and revolution everywhere and in everything, congratulated himself that his less sagacious neighbours were at length awakening to their danger. The first result of the Wartburg scandal was that the Duke of Weimar had to curtail the liberties of his subjects. Its further effects became only too evident as time went on. It left behind it throughout Germany the impression that there were forces of disorder at work in the Press and in the Universities which must be crushed at all cost by the firm hand of Government; and it deepened the anxiety with which King Frederick William was already regarding the promises of liberty which he had made to the Prussian people two years before.
[Alexander in 1818.]
Twelve months passed between the Wartburg festival and the beginning of the Conferences at Aix-la-Chapelle. In the interval a more important person than the King of Prussia went over to the side of reaction. Up to the summer of 1818, the Czar appeared to have abated nothing of his zeal for constitutional government. In the spring of that year, he summoned the Polish Diet; addressed them in a speech so enthusiastic as to alarm not only the Court of Vienna but all his own counsellors; and stated in the clearest possible language his intention of extending the benefits of a representative system to the whole Russian Empire. [280] At the close of the brief session he thanked the Polish Deputies for their boldness in throwing out a measure proposed by himself. Alexander’s popular rhetoric at Warsaw might perhaps be not incompatible with a settled purpose to permit no encroachment on authority either there or elsewhere; but the change in his tone was so great when he appeared at Aix-la-Chapelle a few months afterwards, that some strange and sudden cause has been thought necessary to explain it. It is said that during the Czar’s residence at Moscow, in June, 1818, the revelation was made to him of the existence of a mass of secret societies in the army, whose aim was the overthrow of his own Government. Alexander’s father had died by the hands of murderers: his own temperament, sanguine and emotional, would make the effects of such a discovery, in the midst of all his benevolent hopes for Russia, poignant to the last degree. It is not inconsistent either with his character or with earlier events in his personal history that the Czar should have yielded to a single shock of feeling, and have changed in a moment from the liberator to the despot. But the evidence of what passed in his mind is wanting. Hearsay, conjecture, gossip, abound; [281] the one man who could have told all has left no word. This only is certain, that from the close of the year 1818, the future, hitherto bright with dreams of peaceful progress, became in Alexander’s view a battle-field between the forces of order and anarchy. The task imposed by Providence on himself and other kings was no longer to spread knowledge and liberty among mankind, but to defend existing authority, and even authority that was oppressive and un-Christian, against the madness that was known as popular right.
[Conferences of Aix-la-Chapelle, Oct., 1818.]
[France evacuated.]
[Proposed Quintuple Alliance.]
[Canning.]
At the end of September, 1818, the Sovereigns or Ministers of the Great Powers assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Conferences began. The first question to be decided was whether the Allied Army might safely be withdrawn from France; the second, in what form the concert of Europe should hereafter be maintained. On the first question there was no disagreement: the evacuation of France was resolved upon and promptly executed. The second question was a more difficult one. Richelieu, on behalf of King Louis XVIII., represented that France now stood on the same footing as any other European Power, and proposed that the Quadruple Alliance of 1815 should be converted into a genuine European federation by adding France to it as a fifth member. The plan had been communicated to the English Government, and would probably have received its assent but for the strong opposition raised by Canning within the Cabinet. Canning took a gloomy but a true view of the proposed concert of the Powers. He foresaw that it would really amount to a combination of governments against liberty. Therefore, while recognising the existing engagements of this country, he urged that England ought to join in no combination except that to which it had already pledged itself, namely, the combination made with the definite object of resisting French disturbance. To combine with three Powers to prevent Napoleon or the Jacobins from again becoming masters of France was a reasonable act of policy: to combine with all the Great Powers of Europe against nothing in particular was to place the country on the side of governments against peoples, and to involve England in any enterprise of repression which the Courts might think fit to undertake. Canning’s warning opened the eyes of his colleagues to the view which was likely to be taken of such a general alliance by Parliament and by public opinion. Lord Castlereagh was forbidden to make this country a party to any abstract union of Governments. In memorable words the Prime Minister described the true grounds for the decision: “We must recollect in the whole of this business, and ought to make our Allies feel, that the general and European discussion of these questions will be in the British Parliament.” [282] Fear of the rising voice of the nation, no longer forced by military necessities to sanction every measure of its rulers, compelled Lords Liverpool and Castlereagh to take account of scruples which were not their own. On the same grounds, while the Ministry agreed that Continental difficulties which might hereafter arise ought to be settled by a friendly discussion among the Great Powers, it declined to elevate this occasional deliberation into a system, and to assent to the periodical meeting of a Congress. Peace might or might not be promoted by the frequent gatherings of Sovereigns and statesmen; but a council so formed, if permanent in its nature, would necessarily extinguish the independence of every minor State, and hand over the government of all Europe to the Great Courts, if only they could agree with one another.
[Declarations and Secret Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.]
It was the refusal of England to enter into a general league that determined the form in which the results of the Conference of 1818 were embodied. In the first place the Quadruple Alliance against French revolution was renewed, and with such seriousness that the military centres were fixed, at which, in case of any outbreak, the troops of each of the Great Powers should assemble. [283] This Treaty, however, was kept secret, in order not to add to the difficulties of Richelieu. The published documents breathed another spirit. [284] Without announcing an actual alliance with King Louis XVIII., the Courts, including England, declared that through the restoration of legitimate and constitutional monarchy France had regained its place in the councils of Europe, and that it would hereafter co-operate in maintaining the general peace. For this end meetings of the sovereigns or their ministers might be necessary; such meetings would, however, be arranged by the ordinary modes of negotiation, nor would the affairs of any minor State be discussed by the Great Powers, except at the direct invitation of that State, whose representatives would then be admitted to the sittings. In these guarded words the intention of forming a permanent and organised Court of Control over Europe was disclaimed. A manifesto, addressed to the world at large, declared that the sovereigns of the five great States had no other object in their union than the maintenance of peace on the basis of existing treaties. They had formed no new political combinations; their rule was the observance of international law; their object the prosperity and moral welfare of their subjects.
[Repressive tone of the Conference.]
[Metternich and Austrian principles henceforth dominant.]
The earnestness with which the statesmen of 1818, while accepting the conditions laid down by England, persevered in the project of a joint regulation of European affairs may suggest the question whether the plan which they had at heart would not in truth have operated to the benefit of mankind. The answer is, that the value of any International Council depends firstly on the intelligence which it is likely to possess, and secondly on the degree in which it is really representative. Experience proved that the Congresses which followed 1818 possessed but a limited intelligence, and that they represented nothing at all but authority. The meeting at Aix-la-Chapelle was itself the turning-point in the constitutional history of Europe. Though no open declaration was made against constitutional forms, every Sovereign and every minister who attended the Conference left it with the resolution to draw the reins of government tighter. A note of alarm had been sounded. Conspiracies in Belgium, an attempt on the life of Wellington, rumours of a plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena, combined with the outcry against the German Universities and the whispered tales from Moscow in filling the minds of statesmen with apprehensions. The change which had taken place in Alexander himself was of the most serious moment. Up to this time Metternich, the leader of European Conservatism, had felt that in the Czar there were sympathies with Liberalism and enlightenment which made the future of Europe doubtful. [285] To check the dissolution of existing power, to suppress all tendency to change, was the habitual object of Austria, and the Czar was the one person who had seemed likely to prevent the principles of Austria from becoming the law of Europe. Elsewhere Metternich had little to fear in the way of opposition. Hardenberg, broken in health and ill-supported by his King, had ceased to be a power. Yielding to the apprehensions of Frederick William, perhaps with the hope of dispelling them at some future time, he took his place among the alarmists of the day, and suffered the German policy of Prussia, to which so great a future lay open a few years before, to become the mere reflex of Austrian inaction and repression. [286] England, so long as it was represented on the Continent by Castlereagh and Wellington, scarcely counted for anything on the side of liberty. The sudden change in Alexander removed the one check that stood in Austria’s way; and from this time Metternich exercised an authority in Europe such as few statesmen have ever possessed. His influence, overborne by that of the Czar during 1814 and 1815, struck root at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, maintained itself unimpaired during five eventful years, and sank only when the death of Lord Castlereagh allowed the real voice of England once more to be heard, and Canning, too late to forbid the work of repression in Italy and in Spain, inaugurated, after an interval of forced neutrality, that worthier concert which established the independence of Greece.
[Metternich’s advice to Prussia, 1818.]
If it is the mark of a clever statesman to know where to press and where to give way, Metternich certainly proved himself one in 1818. Before the end of the Conference he delivered to Hardenberg and to the King of Prussia two papers containing a complete set of recommendations for the management of Prussian affairs. The contents of these documents were singular enough: it is still more singular that they form the history of what actually took place in Prussia during the succeeding years. Starting with the assumption that the party of revolution had found its lever in the promise of King Frederick William to create a Representative System, Metternich demonstrated in polite language to the very men who had made this promise, that any central Representation would inevitably overthrow the Prussian State; pointed out that the King’s dominions consisted of seven Provinces; and recommended Frederick William to fulfil his promise only by giving to each Province a Diet for the discussion of its own local concerns. Having thus warned the King against creating a National Parliament, like that which had thrown France into revolution in 1789, Metternich exhibited the specific dangers of the moment and the means of overcoming them. These dangers were Universities, Gymnastic establishments, and the Press. “The revolutionists,” he said, “despairing of effecting their aim themselves, have formed the settled plan of educating the next generation for revolution. The Gymnastic establishment is a preparatory school for University disorders. The University seizes the youth as he leaves boyhood, and gives him a revolutionary training. This mischief is common to all Germany, and must be checked by joint action of the Governments. Gymnasia, on the contrary, were invented at Berlin, and spring from Berlin. For these, palliative measures are no longer sufficient. It has become a duty of State for the King of Prussia to destroy the evil. The whole institution in every shape must be closed and uprooted.” With regard to the abuse of the Press, Metternich contented himself with saying that a difference ought to be made between substantial books and mere pamphlets or journals; and that the regulation of the Press throughout Germany at large could only be effected by an agreement between Austria and Prussia. [287]
[Stourdza’s pamphlet.]
With a million men under arms, the Sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon trembled because thirty or forty journalists and professors pitched their rhetoric rather too high, and because wise heads did not grow upon schoolboys’ shoulders. The Emperor Francis, whose imagination had failed to rise to the glories of the Holy Alliance, alone seems to have had some suspicion of the absurdity of the present alarms. [288] The Czar distinguished himself by his zeal against the lecturers who were turning the world upside down. As if Metternich had not frightened the Congress enough already, the Czar distributed at Aix-la-Chapelle a pamphlet published by one Stourdza, a Moldavian, which described Germany as on the brink of revolution, and enumerated half a score of mortal disorders which racked that unfortunate country. The chief of all was the vicious system of the Universities, which instead of duly developing the vessel of the Christian State from the cradle of Moses, [289] brought up young men to be despisers of law and instruments of a licentious Press. The ingenious Moldavian, whose expressions in some places bear a singular resemblance to those of Alexander, while in others they are actually identical with reflections of Metternich’s not then published, went on to enlighten the German Governments as to the best means of rescuing their subjects from their perilous condition. Certain fiscal and administrative changes were briefly suggested, but the main reform urged was exactly that propounded by Metternich, the enforcement of a better discipline and of a more rigidly-prescribed course of study at the Universities, along with the supervision of all journals and periodical literature.
[The murder of Kotzebue, March 23, 1819.]
Stourdza’s pamphlet, in which loose reasoning was accompanied by the coarsest invective, would have gained little attention if it had depended on its own merits or on the reputation of its author: it became a different matter when it was known to represent the views of the Czar. A vehement but natural outcry arose at the Universities against this interference of the foreigner with German domestic affairs. National independence, it seemed, had been won in the deadly struggle against France only in order that internal liberty, the promised fruit of this independence, should be sacrificed at the bidding of Russia. The Czar himself was out of reach: the vengeance of outraged patriotism fell upon an insignificant person who had the misfortune to be regarded as his principal agent. A dramatic author then famous, now forgotten, August Kotzebue, held the office of Russian agent in Central Germany, and conducted a newspaper whose object was to throw ridicule on the national movement of the day, and especially on those associations of students where German enthusiasm reached its climax. Many circumstances embittered popular feeling against this man, and caused him to be regarded less as a legitimate enemy than as a traitor and an apostate. Kotzebue had himself been a student at Jena, and at one time had turned liberal sentiments to practical account in his plays. Literary jealousies and wounded vanity had subsequently alienated him from his country, and made him the willing and acrid hireling of a foreign Court. The reports which, as Russian agent, he sent to St. Petersburg were doubtless as offensive as the attacks on the Universities which he published in his journal; but it was an extravagant compliment to the man to imagine that he was the real author of the Czar’s desertion from Liberalism to reaction. This, however, was the common belief, and it cost Kotzebue dear. A student from Erlangen, Carl Sand, who had accompanied the standard at the Wartburg festival, formed the silent resolve of sacrificing his own life in order to punish the enemy of his country. Sand was a man of pure and devout, though ill-balanced character. His earlier life marked him as one whose whole being was absorbed by what he considered a divine call. He thought of the Greeks who, even in their fallen estate, had so often died to free their country from Turkish oppression, and formed the deplorable conclusion that by murdering a decayed dramatist he could strike some great blow against the powers of evil. [290] He sought the unfortunate Kotzebue in the midst of his family, stabbed him to the heart, and then turned his weapon against himself. Recovering from his wounds, he was condemned to death, and perished, after a year’s interval, on the scaffold, calling God to witness that he died for Germany to be free.
[Action of Metternich.]
The effects of Sand’s act were very great, and their real nature was at once recognised. Hardenberg, the moment that he heard of Kotzebue’s death, exclaimed that a Prussian Constitution had now become impossible. Metternich, who had thought the Czar mad because he desired to found a peaceful alliance of Sovereigns on religious principles, was not likely to make allowance for a kind of piety that sent young rebels over the country on missions of murder. The Austrian statesman was in Rome when the news of Kotzebue’s assassination reached him. He saw that the time had come for united action throughout Germany, and, without making any public utterance, drew up a scheme of repressive measures, and sent out proposals for a gathering of the Ministers of all the principal German Courts. In the summer he travelled slowly northwards, met the King of Prussia at Teplitz, in Bohemia, and shortly afterwards opened the intended Conference of Ministers in the neighbouring town of Carlsbad. A number of innocent persons had already, at his instigation, been arrested in Prussia and other States, under circumstances deeply discreditable to Government. Private papers were seized, and garbled extracts from them published in official prints as proof of guilt. [291] “By the help of God,” Metternich wrote, “I hope to defeat the German Revolution, just as I vanquished the conqueror of the world. The revolutionists thought me far away, because I was five hundred leagues off. They deceived themselves; I have been in the midst of them, and now I am striking my blows.” [292] Metternich’s plan was to enforce throughout Germany, by means of legislation in the Federal Diet, the principle which he had already privately commended to the King of Prussia. There were two distinct objects of policy before him: the first, to prevent the formation in any German State of an assembly representing the whole community, like the English House of Commons or the French Chamber of Deputies; the second, to establish a general system of censorship over the Press and over the Universities, and to create a central authority, vested, as the representative of the Diet, with inquisitorial powers.
[The South-Western States become constitutional as Prussia relapses.]
[Bavarian Constitution, May 26, 1818.]
The first of these objects, the prevention of general assemblies, had been rendered more difficult by recent acts of the Governments of Bavaria and Baden. A singular change had taken place in the relation between Prussia and the Minor States which had formerly constituted the Federation of the Rhine. When, at the Congress of Vienna, Prussian statesmen had endeavoured to limit the arbitrary rule of petty sovereigns by charging the Diet with the protection of constitutional right over all Germany, the Kings of Bavaria and Würtemberg had stoutly refused to part with sovereign power. To submit to a law of liberty, as it then seemed, was to lose their own separate existence, and to reduce themselves to dependence upon the Jacobins of Berlin. This apprehension governed the policy of the Minor Courts from 1813 to 1815. But since that time events had taken an unexpected turn. Prussia, which once threatened to excite popular movement over all Germany in its own interest, had now accepted Metternich’s guidance, and made its representative in the Diet the mouthpiece of Austrian interest and policy. It was no longer from Berlin but from Vienna that the separate existence of the Minor States was threatened. The two great Courts were uniting against the independence of their weaker neighbours. The danger of any popular invasion of kingly rights in the name of German unity had passed away, and the safety of the lesser sovereigns seemed now to lie not in resisting the spirit of constitutional reform but in appealing to it. In proportion as Prussia abandoned itself to Metternich’s direction, the Governments of the South-Western States familiarised themselves with the idea of a popular representation; and at the very time when the conservative programme was being drawn up for the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the King of Bavaria published a Constitution. Baden followed after a short interval, and in each of these States, although the Legislature was divided into two Chambers, the representation established was not merely provincial, according to Metternich’s plan, or wholly on the principle of separate Estates or Orders, as before the Revolution, but to some extent on the type of England and France, where the Lower Chamber, in theory, represented the public at large. This was enough to make Metternich condemn the new Constitutions as radically bad and revolutionary. [293] He was, however, conscious of the difficulty of making a direct attack upon them. This task he reserved for a later time. His policy at present was to obtain a declaration from the Diet which should prevent any other Government within the League from following in the same path; while, by means of Press-laws, supervision of the Universities, and a central commission of inquiry, he expected to make the position of rebellious professors and agitators so desperate that the forces of disorder, themselves not deeply rooted in German nature, would presently disappear.
[Conference of Carlsbad, Aug., 1819.]
The Conference of Ministers at Carlsbad, which in the memory of the German people is justly associated with the suppression of their liberty for an entire generation, began and ended in the month of August, 1819. Though attended by the representatives of eight German Governments, it did little more than register the conclusions which Metternich had already formed. [294] The zeal with which the envoy of Prussia supported every repressive measure made it useless for the Ministers of the Minor Courts to offer an open opposition. Nothing more was required than that the Diet should formally sanction the propositions thus privately accepted by all the leading Ministers. On the 20th of September this sanction was given. The Diet, which had sat for three years without framing a single useful law, ratified all Metternich’s oppressive enactments in as many hours. It was ordered that in every State within the Federation the Government should take measures for preventing the publication of any journal or pamphlet except after licence given, and each Government was declared responsible to the Federation at large for any objectionable writing published within its own territory. The Sovereigns were required to appoint civil commissioners at the Universities, whose duty it should be to enforce public order and to give a salutary direction to the teaching of the professors. They were also required to dismiss all professors who should overstep the bounds of their duty, and such dismissed persons were prohibited from being employed in any other State. It was enacted that within fifteen days of the passing of the decree an extraordinary Commission should assemble at Mainz to investigate the origin and extent of the secret revolutionary societies which threatened the safety of the Federation. The Commission was empowered to examine and, if necessary, to arrest any subject of any German State. All law-courts and other authorities were required to furnish it with information and with documents, and to undertake all inquiries which the Commission might order. The Commission, however, was not a law-court itself: its duty was to report to the Diet, which would then create such judicial machinery as might be necessary. [295]
[Supplementary Act of Vienna, June, 1820.]
These measures were of an exceptional, and purported to be of a temporary, character. There were, however, other articles which Metternich intended to raise to the rank of organic laws, and to incorporate with the Act of 1815, which formed the basis of the German Federation. The conferences of Ministers were accordingly resumed after a short interval, but at Vienna instead of at Carlsbad. They lasted for several months, a stronger opposition being now made by the Minor States than before. A second body of federal law was at length drawn up, and accepted by the Diet on the 8th of June, 1820. [296] The most important of its provisions was that which related to the Constitutions admissible within the German League. It was declared that in every State, with the exception of the four free cities, supreme power resided in the Sovereign and in him alone, and that no Constitution might do more than bind the Sovereign to co-operate with the Estates in certain definite acts of government. [297]
In cases where a Government either appealed for help against rebellious subjects, or was notoriously unable to exert authority, the Diet charged itself with the duty of maintaining public order.
[The reaction in Prussia.]
From this time whatever liberty existed in Germany was to be found in the Minor States, in Bavaria and Baden, and in Würtemberg, which received a Constitution a few days before the enrolment of the decrees of Carlsbad. In Prussia the reaction carried everything before it. Humboldt, the best and most liberal of the Ministers, resigned, protesting in vain against the ignominious part which the King had determined to play. He was followed by those of his colleagues whose principles were dearer to them than their places. Hardenberg remained in office, a dying man, isolated, neglected, thwarted; clinging to some last hope of redeeming his promises to the Prussian people, yet jealous of all who could have given him true aid; dishonouring by tenacity of place a career associated with so much of his country’s glory, and ennobled in earlier days by so much fortitude in time of evil. There gathered around the King a body of men who could see in the great patriotic efforts and reforms of the last decade nothing but an encroachment of demagogues on the rights of power. They were willing that Prussia should receive its orders from Metternich and serve a foreign Court in the work of repression, rather than that it should take its place at the head of all Germany on the condition of becoming a free and constitutional State. [298] The stigma of disloyalty was attached to all who had kindled popular enthusiasm in 1808 and 1812. To have served the nation was to have sinned against the Government. Stein was protected by his great name from attack, but not from calumny. His friend Arndt, whose songs and addresses had so powerfully moved the heart of Germany during the War of Liberation, was subjected to repeated legal process, and, although unconvicted of any offence, was suspended from the exercise of his professorship for twenty years. Other persons, whose fault at the most was to have worked for German unity, were brought before special tribunals, and after long trial either refused a public acquittal or sentenced to actual imprisonment. Free teaching, free discussion, ceased. The barrier of authority closed every avenue of political thought. Everywhere the agent of the State prescribed an orthodox opinion, and took note of those who raised a dissentient voice.
[The Commission at Mainz.]
The pretext made at Carlsbad for this crusade against liberty, which was more energetically carried out in Prussia than elsewhere, was the existence of a conspiracy or agitation for the overthrow of Governments and of the present constitution of the German League. It was stated that proofs existed of the intention to establish by force a Republic one and indivisible, like that of France in 1793. But the very Commission which was instituted by the Carlsbad Ministers to investigate the origin and nature of this conspiracy disproved its existence. The Commission assembled at Mainz, examined several hundred persons and many thousand documents, and after two years’ labour delivered a report to the Diet. The report went back to the time of Fichte’s lectures and the formation of the Tugendbund in 1808, traced the progress of all the students’ associations and other patriotic societies from that time to 1820; and, while exhibiting in the worst possible light the aims and conduct of the advocates of German unity, acknowledged that scarcely a single proof had been discovered of treasonable practice, and that the loyalty of the mass of the people was itself a sufficient guarantee against the impulses of the evil-minded. [299] Such was the impression of triviality and imposture produced at the Diet by this report, that the representatives of several States proposed that the Commission should forthwith be dissolved as useless and unnecessary. This, however, could not be tolerated by Metternich and his new disciples. The Commission was allowed to continue in existence, and with it the regime of silence and repression. The measures which had been accepted at Carlsbad as temporary and provisional became more and more a part of the habitual system of government. Prosecutions succeeded one another; letters were opened; spies attended the lectures of professors and the meetings of students; the newspapers were everywhere prohibited from discussing German affairs. In a country where there were so many printers and so many readers journalism could not altogether expire. It was still permissible to give the news and to offer an opinion about foreign lands: and for years to come the Germans, like beggars regaling themselves with the scents from rich men’s kitchens, [300] followed every stage of the political struggles that were agitating France, England, and Spain, while they were not allowed to express a desire or to formulate a grievance of their own.
[Prussian Provincial Estates, June, 1823.]
[Redeeming features of Prussian absolutism.]
In the year 1822 Hardenberg died. All hope of a fulfilment of the promises made in Prussia in 1815 had already become extinct. Not many months after the Minister’s death, King Frederick William established the Provincial Estates which had been recommended to him by Metternich, and announced that the creation of a central representative system would be postponed until such time as the King should think fit to introduce it. This meant that the project was finally abandoned; and Prussia in consequence remained without a Parliament until the Revolution of 1848 was at the door. The Provincial Estates, with which the King affected to temper absolute rule, met only once in three years. Their function was to express an opinion upon local matters when consulted by the Government: their enemies said that they were aristocratic and did harm, their partizans could not pretend that they did much good. In the bitterness of spirit with which, at a later time, the friends of liberty denounced the betrayal of the cause of freedom by the Prussian Court, a darker colour has perhaps been introduced into the history of this period than really belongs to it. The wrongs sustained by the Prussian nation have been compared to those inflicted by the despotism of Spain. But, however contemptible the timidity of King Frederick William, however odious the ingratitude shown to the truest friends of King and people, the Government of 1819 is not correctly represented in such a parallel. To identify the thousand varieties of wrong under the common name of oppression, is to mistake words for things, and to miss the characteristic features which distinguish nations from one another. The greatest evils which a Government can inflict upon its subjects are probably religious persecution, wasteful taxation, and the denial of justice in the daily affairs of life. None of these were present in Prussia during the darkest days of reaction. The hand of oppression fell heavily on some of the best and some of the most enlightened men; it violated interests so precious as those of free criticism and free discussion of public affairs; but the great mass of the action of Government was never on the side of evil. The ordinary course of justice was still pure, the administration conscientious and thrifty. The system of popular education, which for the first time placed Prussia in advance of Saxony and other German States, dates from these years of warfare against liberty. A reactionary despotism built the schools and framed the laws whose reproduction in free England half a century later is justly regarded as the chief of all the liberal measures of our day. So strong, so lasting, was that vital tradition which made monarchy in Prussia an instrument for the execution of great public ends.
[A new Liberalism grows up in Germany after 1820.]
[Interest in France.]
But the old harmony between rulers and subjects in Germany perished in the system of coercion which Metternich established in 1819. Patient as the Germans were, loyal as they had proved themselves to Frederick William and to worse princes through good and evil, the galling disappointment of noble hopes, the silencing of the Press, the dissolution of societies,– calumnies, expulsions, prosecutions,–embittered many an honest mind against authority. The Commission of Mainz did not find conspirators, but it made them. As years went by, and all the means of legitimately working for the improvement of German public life were one after another extinguished, men of ardent character thought of more violent methods. Secret societies, such as Metternich had imagined, came into actual being. [301] And among those who neither sank into apathy and despair nor enrolled themselves against existing power, a new body of ideas supplanted the old loyal belief in the regeneration of Germany by its princes. The Parliamentary struggles of France, the revolutionary movements in Italy and in Spain which began at this epoch, drew the imagination away from that pictured restoration of a free Teutonic past which had proved so barren of result, and set in its place the idea of a modern universal or European Liberalism. The hatred against France, especially among the younger men, disappeared. A distinction was made between the tyrant Napoleon and the people who were now giving to the rest of the Continent the example of a free and animated public life, and illuminating the age with a political literature so systematic and so ingenious that it seemed almost like a political philosophy. The debates in the French Assembly, the writings of French publicists, became the school of the Germans. Paris regained in foreign eyes something of the interest that it had possessed in 1789. Each victory or defeat of the French popular cause awoke the joy or the sorrow of German Liberals, to whom all was blank at home: and when at length the throne of the Bourbons fell, the signal for deliverance seemed to have sounded in many a city beyond the Rhine.
[France after 1818.]
[Richelieu resigns, Dec., 1818. Decazes keeps power.]
We have seen that in Central Europe the balance between liberty and reaction, wavering in 1815, definitely fell to the side of reaction at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. It remains to trace the course of events which in France itself suspended the peaceful progress of the nation, and threw power for some years into the hands of a faction which belonged to the past. The measures carried by Decazes in 1817, which gave so much satisfaction to the French, were by no means viewed with the same approval either at London or at Vienna. The two principal of these were the Electoral Law, and a plan of military reorganisation which brought back great numbers of Napoleon’s old officers and soldiers to the army. Richelieu, though responsible as the head of the Ministry, felt very grave fears as to the results of this legislation. He had already become anxious and distressed when the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle met; and the events which took place in France during his absence, as well as the communications which passed between himself and the foreign Ministers, convinced him that a change of internal policy was necessary. The busy mind of Metternich had already been scheming against French Liberalism. Alarmed at the energy shown by Decazes, the Austrian statesman had formed the design of reconciling Artois and the Ultra-Royalists to the King’s Government; and he now urged Richelieu, if his old opponents could be brought to reason, to place himself at the head of a coalition of all the conservative elements in the State. [302] While the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle was sitting, the partial elections for the year 1818, the second under the new Electoral Law, took place. Among the deputies returned there were some who passed for determined enemies of the Bourbon restoration, especially Lafayette, whose name was so closely associated with the humiliations of the Court in 1789. Richelieu received the news with dismay, and on his return to Paris took steps which ended in the dismissal of Decazes, and the offer of a seat in the Cabinet to Villèle, the Ultra-Royalist leader. But the attempted combination failed. Richelieu accordingly withdrew from office; and a new Ministry was formed, of which Decazes, who had proved himself more powerful than his assailants, was the real though not the nominal chief.
[Election of Grégoire, Sept., 1819.]
The victory of the young and popular statesman was seen with extreme displeasure by all the foreign Courts, nor was his success an enduring one. For awhile the current of Liberal opinion in France and the favour of King Louis XVIII. enabled Decazes to hold his own against the combinations of his opponents and the ill-will of all the most powerful men in Europe. An attack made on the Electoral Law by the Upper House was defeated by the creation of sixty new Peers, among whom there were several who had been expelled in 1815. But the forces of Liberalism soon passed beyond the Minister’s own control, and his steady dependence upon Louis XVIII. now raised against him as resolute an opposition among the enemies of the House of Bourbon as among the Ultra-Royalists. In the elections of 1819 the candidates of the Ministry were beaten by men of more pronounced opinions. Among the new members there was one whose victory caused great astonishment and alarm. The ex-bishop Grégoire, one of the authors of the destruction of the old French Church in 1790, and mover of the resolution which established the Republic in 1792, was brought forward from his retirement and elected Deputy by the town of Grenoble. To understand the panic caused by this election we must recall, not the events of the Revolution, but the legends of them which were current in 1819. The history of Grégoire by no means justifies the outcry which was raised against him; his real actions, however, formed the smallest part of the things that were alleged or believed by his enemies. It was said he had applauded the execution of King Louis XVI., when he had in fact protested against it: [303] his courageous adherence to the character of a Christian priest throughout the worst days of the Convention, his labours in organising the Constitutional Church when the choice lay between that and national atheism, were nothing, or worse than nothing, in the eyes of men who felt themselves to be the despoiled heirs of that rich and aristocratic landed society, called the Feudal Church, which Grégoire had been so active in breaking up. Unluckily for himself, Grégoire, though humane in action, had not abstained from the rhodomontades against kings in general which were the fashion in 1793. Louis XVIII., forgetting that he had himself lately made the regicide Fouché a Minister, interpreted Grégoire’s election by the people of Grenoble, to which the Ultra-Royalists had cunningly contributed, as a threat against the Bourbon family. He showed the displeasure usual with him when any slight was offered to his personal dignity, and drew nearer to his brother Artois and the Ultra-Royalists, whom he had hitherto shunned as his favourite Minister’s worst enemies. Decazes, true to his character as the King’s friend, now confessed that he had gone too far in the legislation of 1817, and that the Electoral Law, under which such a monster as Grégoire could gain a seat, required to be altered. A project of law was sketched, designed to restore the preponderance in the constituencies to the landed aristocracy. Grégoire’s election was itself invalidated; and the Ministers who refused to follow Decazes in his new policy of compromise were dismissed from their posts.
[Murder of the Duke of Berry, Feb. 13, 1820.]
[Reaction sets in.]
[Fall of Decazes. Richelieu Minister, Feb., 1820.]
A few months more passed, and an event occurred which might have driven a stronger Government than that of Louis XVIII. into excesses of reaction. The heirs to the Crown next in succession to the Count of Artois were his two sons, the Dukes of Angoulême and Berry. Angoulême was childless; the Duke of Berry was the sole hope of the elder Bourbon line, which, if he should die without a son, would, as a reigning house, become extinct, the Crown of France not descending to a female. [304] The circumstance which made Berry’s life so dear to Royalists made his destruction the all-absorbing purpose of an obscure fanatic, who abhorred the Bourbon family as the lasting symbol of the foreigner’s victory over France. Louvel, a working man, had followed Napoleon to exile in Elba. After returning to his country he had dogged the footsteps of the Bourbon princes for years together, waiting for the chance of murder. On the night of the 13th of February, 1820, he seized the Duke of Berry as he was leaving the Opera House, and plunged a knife into his breast. The Duke lingered for some hours, and expired early the next morning in the presence of King Louis XVIII., the Princes, and all the Ministers. Terrible as the act was, it was the act of a single resolute mind: no human being had known of Louvel’s intention. But it was impossible that political passion should await the quiet investigation of a law-court. No murder ever produced a stronger outburst of indignation among the governing classes, or was more skilfully turned to the advantage of party. The Liberals felt that their cause was lost. While fanatical Ultra-Royalists, abandoning themselves to a credulity worthy of the Reign of Terror, accused Decazes himself of complicity with the assassin, their leaders fixed upon the policy which was to be imposed on the King. It was in vain that Decazes brought forward his reactionary Electoral Law, and proposed to invest the officers of State with arbitrary powers of arrest and to re-establish the censorship of the Press. The Count of Artois insisted upon the dismissal of the Minister, as the only consolation which could be given to him for the murder of his son The King yielded; and, as an Ultra-Royalist administration was not yet possible, Richelieu unwillingly returned to office, assured by Artois that his friends had no other desire than to support his own firm and temperate rule.
[Progress of the reaction in France.]
[Ultra-Royalist Ministry, Dec., 1821.]
[The Congregation.]
Returning to power under such circumstances, Richelieu became, in spite of himself, the Minister of reaction. The Press was fettered, the legal safeguards of personal liberty were suspended, the electoral system was transformed by a measure which gave a double vote to men of large property. So violent were the passions which this retrograde march of Government excited, that for a moment Paris seemed to be on the verge of revolution. Tumultuous scenes occurred in the streets; but the troops, on whom everything depended, obeyed the orders given to them, and the danger passed away. The first elections under the new system reduced the Liberal party to impotence, and brought back to the Chamber a number of men who had sat in the reactionary Parliament of 1816. Villèle and other Ultra-Royalists were invited to join Richelieu’s Cabinet. For awhile it seemed as if the passions of Church and aristocracy might submit to the curb of a practical statesmanship, friendly, if not devoted, to their own interests. But restraint was soon cast aside. The Count of Artois saw the road to power open, and broke his promise of supporting the Minister who had taken office at his request. Censured and thwarted in the Chamber of Deputies, Richelieu confessed that he had undertaken a hopeless task, and bade farewell to public life. King Louis, now nearing the grave, could struggle no longer against the brother who was waiting to ascend his throne. The next Ministry was nominated not by the King but by Artois. Around Villèle, the real head of the Cabinet, there was placed a body of men who represented not the new France, or even that small portion of it which was called to exercise the active rights of citizenship, but the social principles of a past age, and that Catholic or Ultramontane revival which was now freshening the surface but not stirring the depths of the great mass of French religious indifference. A religious society known as the Congregation, which had struck its first roots under the storm of Republican persecution, and grown up during the Empire, a solitary yet unobserved rallying-place for Catholic opponents of Napoleon’s despotism, now expanded into a great organism of government. The highest in blood and in office sought membership in it: its patronage raised ambitious men to the stations they desired, its hostility made itself felt against the small as well as against the great. The spirit which now gained the ascendancy in French government was clerical even more than it was aristocratic. It was monarchical too, but rather from dislike to the secularist tone of Liberalism and from trust in the orthodoxy of the Count of Artois than from any fixed belief in absolutist principles. There might be good reason to oppose King Louis XVIII.; but what priest, what noble, could doubt the divine right of a prince who was ready to compensate the impoverished emigrants out of the public funds, and to commit the whole system of public education to the hands of the clergy?
[Bourbon rule before and after 1821.]
In the middle class of France, which from this time began to feel itself in opposition to the Bourbon Government, there had been no moral change corresponding to that which made so great a difference between the governing authority of 1819 and that of 1822. Public opinion, though strongly affected, was not converted into something permanently unlike itself by the murder of the Duke of Berry. The courtiers, the devotees, the great ladies, who had laid a bold hand upon power, had not the nation on their side, although for a while the nation bore their sway submissively. But the fate of the Bourbon monarchy was in fact decided when Artois and his confidants became its representatives. France might have forgotten that the Bourbons owed their throne to foreign victories; it could not be governed in perpetuity by what was called the _Parti Prêtre_. Twenty years taken from the burden of age borne by Louis XVIII., twenty years of power given to Decazes, might have prolonged the rule of the restored family perhaps for some generations. If military pride found small satisfaction in the contrast between the Napoleonic age and that which immediately succeeded it, there were enough parents who valued the blood of their children, there were enough speakers and writers who valued the liberty of discussion, enough capitalists who valued quiet times, for the new order to be recognised as no unhopeful one. France has indeed seldom had a better government than it possessed between 1816 and 1820, nor could an equal period be readily named during which the French nation, as a whole, enjoyed greater happiness.
[General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.]
Political reaction had reached its full tide in Europe generally about five years after the end of the great war. The phenomena were by no means the same in all countries, nor were the accidents of personal influence without a large share in the determination of events: yet, underlying all differences, we may trace the operation of certain great causes which were not limited by the boundaries of individual States. The classes in which any fixed belief in constitutional government existed were nowhere very large; outside the circle of state officials there was scarcely any one who had had experience in the conduct of public affairs. In some countries, as in Russia and Prussia, the conception of progress towards self-government had belonged in the first instance to the holders of power: it had exercised the imagination of a Czar, or appealed to the understanding of a Prussian Minister, eager, in the extremity of ruin, to develop every element of worth and manliness existing within his nation. The cooling of a warm fancy, the disappearance of external dangers, the very agitation which arose when the idea of liberty passed from the rulers to their subjects, sufficed to check the course of reform. And by the side of the Kings and Ministers who for a moment had attached themselves to constitutional theories there stood the old privileged orders, or what remained of them, the true party of reaction, eager to fan the first misgivings and alarms of Sovereigns, and to arrest a development more prejudicial to their own power and importance than to the dignity and security of the Crown. Further, there existed throughout Europe the fatal and ineradicable tradition of the convulsions of the first Revolution, and of the horrors of 1793. No votary of absolutism, no halting and disquieted friend of freedom, could ever be at a loss for images of woe in presaging the results of popular sovereignty; and the action of one or two infatuated assassins owed its wide influence on Europe chiefly to the ancient name and memory of Jacobinism.
There was also in the very fact that Europe had been restored to peace by the united efforts of all the governments something adverse to the success of a constitutional or a Liberal party in any State. Constitutional systems had indeed been much praised at the Congress of Vienna; but the group of men who actually controlled Europe in 1815, and who during the five succeeding years continued in correspondence and in close personal intercourse with one another, had, with one exception, passed their lives in the atmosphere of absolute government, and learnt to regard the conduct of all great affairs as the business of a small number of very eminent individuals. Castlereagh, the one Minister of a constitutional State, belonged to a party which, to a degree almost unequalled in Europe, identified political duty with the principle of hostility to change. It is indeed in the correspondence of the English Minister himself, and in relation to subjects of purely domestic government in England, that the community of thought which now existed between all the leading statesmen of Europe finds its most singular exhibition. Both Metternich and Hardenberg took as much interest in the suppression of Lancashire Radicalism, and in the measures of coercion which the British Government thought it necessary to pass in the year 1819, as in the chastisement of rebellious pamphleteers upon the Rhine, and in the dissolution of the students’ clubs at Jena. It was indeed no very great matter for the English people, who were now close upon an era of reform, that Castlereagh received the congratulations of Vienna and Berlin for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act and the right of public meeting, [305] or that Metternich believed that no one but himself knew the real import of the shouts with which the London mob greeted Sir Francis Burdett. [306] Neither the impending reform of the English Criminal Law nor the emancipation of Irish Catholics resulted from the enlightenment of foreign Courts, or could be hindered by their indifference. But on the Continent of Europe the progress towards constitutional freedom was indeed likely to be a slow and a chequered one when the Ministers of absolutism formed so close and intimate a band, when the nations contained within them such small bodies of men in any degree versed in public affairs, and when the institutions on which it was proposed to base the liberty of the future were so destitute of that strength which springs from connection with the past.
CHAPTER XIV.
Movements in the Mediterranean States beginning in 1820–Spain from 1814 to 1820–The South American Colonies–The Army at Cadiz: Action of Quiroga and Riego–Movement at Corunna–Ferdinand accepts the Constitution of 1812–Naples from 1815 to 1820–The Court-party, the Muratists, the Carbonari–The Spanish Constitution proclaimed at Naples–Constitutional movement in Portugal–Alexander’s proposal with regard to Spain–The Conference and Declaration of Troppau–Protest of England–Conference of Laibach–The Austrians invade Naples and restore absolute Monarchy– Insurrection in Piedmont, which fails–Spain from 1820 to 1822–Death of Castlereagh–The Congress of Verona–Policy of England–The French invade Spain–Restoration of absolute Monarchy, and violence of the reaction– England prohibits the conquest of the Spanish Colonies by France, and subsequently recognises their independence–Affairs in Portugal–Canning sends troops to Lisbon–The Policy of Canning–Estimate of his place in the history of Europe.
[The Mediterranean movements, beginning in 1820.]
When the guardians of Europe, at the end of the first three years of peace, scanned from their council-chamber at Aix-la-Chapelle that goodly heritage which, under Providence, their own parental care was henceforth to guard against the assaults of malice and revolution, they had fixed their gaze chiefly on France, Germany, and the Netherlands, as the regions most threatened by the spirit of change. The forecast was not an accurate one. In each of these countries Government proved during the succeeding years to be much more than a match for its real or imaginary foes: it was in the Mediterranean States, which had excited comparatively little anxiety, that the first successful attack was made upon established power. Three movements arose successively in the three southern peninsulas, at the time when Metternich was enjoying the silence which he had imposed upon Germany, and the Ultra-Royalists of France were making good the advantage which the crime of an individual and the imprudence of a party had thrown into their hands. In Spain and in Italy a body of soldiers rose on behalf of constitutional government: in Greece a nation rose against the rule of the foreigner. In all three countries the issue of these movements was, after a longer or shorter interval, determined by the Northern Powers. All three movements were at first treated as identical in their character, and all alike condemned as the work of Jacobinism. But the course of events, and a change of persons in the government of one great State, brought about a truer view of the nature of the struggle in Greece. The ultimate action of Europe in the affairs of that country was different from its action in the affairs of Italy and Spain. It is now only remembered as an instance of political recklessness or stupidity that a conflict of race against race and of religion against religion should for a while have been confused by some of the leading Ministers of Europe with the attempt of a party to make the form of domestic government more liberal. The Hellenic rising had indeed no feature in common with the revolutions of Naples and Cadiz; and, although in order of time the opening of the Greek movement long preceded the close of the Spanish movement, the historian, who has neither the politician’s motive for making a confusion, nor the protection of his excuse of ignorance, must in this case neglect the accidents of chronology, and treat the two as altogether apart.
[Spain between 1814 and 1820.]
King Ferdinand of Spain, after overthrowing the Constitution which he found in existence on his return to his country, had conducted himself as if his object had been to show to what lengths a legitimate monarch might abuse the fidelity of his subjects and defy the public opinion of Europe. The leaders of the Cortes, whom he had arrested in 1814, after being declared innocent by one tribunal after another were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment by an arbitrary decree of the King, without even the pretence of judicial forms. Men who had been conspicuous in the struggle of the nation against Napoleon were neglected or disgraced; many of the highest posts were filled by politicians who had played a double part, or had even served under the invader. Priests and courtiers intrigued for influence over the King; even when a capable Minister was placed in power through the pressure of the ambassadors, and the King’s name was set to edicts of administrative reform, these edicts were made a dead letter by the powerful band who lived upon the corruption of the public service. Nothing was sacred except the interest of the clergy; this, however, was enough to keep the rural population on the King’s side. The peasant, who knew that his house would not now be burnt by the French, and who heard that true religion had at length triumphed over its enemies, understood, and cared to understand, nothing more. Rumours of kingly misgovernment and oppression scarcely reached his ears. Ferdinand was still the child of Spain and of the Church; his return had been the return of peace; his rule was the victory of the Catholic faith.
[The nation satisfied: the officers discontented.]
But the acquiescence of the mass of the people was not shared by the officers of the army and the educated classes in the towns. The overthrow of the Constitution was from the first condemned by soldiers who had won distinction under the government of the Cortes; and a series of military rebellion, though isolated and on the smallest scale, showed that the course on which Ferdinand had entered was not altogether free from danger. The attempts of General Mina in 1814, and of Porlier and Lacy in succeeding years, to raise the soldiery on behalf of the Constitution, failed, through the indifference of the soldiery themselves, and the power which the priesthood exercised in garrison-towns. Discontent made its way in the army by slow degrees; and the ultimate declaration of a military party against the existing Government was due at least as much to Ferdinand’s absurd system of favouritism, and to the wretched condition into which the army had been thrown, as to an attachment to the memory or the principles of constitutional rule. Misgovernment made the treasury bankrupt; soldiers and sailors received no pay for years together; and the hatred with which the Spanish people had now come to regard military service is curiously shown by an order of the Government that all the beggars in Madrid and other great towns should be seized on a certain night (July 23, 1816), and enrolled in the army. [307] But the very beggars were more than a match for Ferdinand’s administration. They heard of the fate in store for them, and mysteriously disappeared, so frustrating a measure by which it had been calculated that Spain would gain sixty thousand warriors.
[Struggle of Spain with its colonies, 1810-1820.]
The military revolution which at length broke out in the year 1820 was closely connected with the struggle for independence now being made by the American colonies of Spain; and in its turn it affected the course of this struggle and its final result. The colonies had refused to accept the rule either of Joseph Bonaparte or of the Cortes of Cadiz when their legitimate sovereign was dispossessed by Napoleon. While acting for the most part in Ferdinand’s name, they had engaged in a struggle with the National Government of Spain. They had tasted independence; and although after the restoration of Ferdinand they would probably have recognised the rights of the Spanish Crown if certain concessions had been made, they were not disposed to return to the condition of inferiority in which they had been held during the last century, or to submit to rulers who proved themselves as cruel and vindictive in moments of victory as they were incapable of understanding the needs of the time. The struggle accordingly continued. Regiment after regiment was sent from Spain, to perish of fever, of forced marches, or on the field. The Government of King Ferdinand, despairing of its own resources, looked around for help among the European Powers. England would have lent its mediation, and possibly even armed assistance, if the Court of Madrid would have granted a reasonable amount of freedom to the colonies, and have opened their ports to British commerce. This, however, was not in accordance with the views of Ferdinand’s advisers. Strange as it may appear, the Spanish Government demanded that the alliance of Sovereigns, which had been framed for the purpose of resisting the principle of rebellion and disorder in Europe, should intervene against its revolted subjects on the other side of the Atlantic, and it implied that England, if acting at all, should act as the instrument of the Alliance. [308] Encouragement was given to the design by the Courts of Paris and St. Petersburg. Whether a continent claimed its independence, or a German schoolboy wore a forbidden ribbon in his cap, the chiefs of the Holy Alliance now assumed the frown of offended Providence, and prepared to interpose their own superior power and wisdom to save a misguided world from the consequences of its own folly. Alexander had indeed for a time hoped that the means of subduing the colonies might be supplied by himself; and in his zeal to supplant England in the good graces of Ferdinand he sold the King a fleet of war on very moderate terms. To the scandal of Europe the ships, when they reached Cadiz, turned out to be thoroughly rotten and unseaworthy. As it was certain that the Czar’s fleet and the Spanish soldiers, however holy their mission, would all go to the bottom together as soon as they encountered the waves of the Atlantic, the expedition was postponed, and the affairs of America were brought before the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. The Envoys of Russia and France submitted a paper, in which, anticipating the storm-warnings of more recent times, they described the dangers to which monarchical Europe would be exposed from the growth of a federation of republics in America; and they suggested that Wellington, as “the man of Europe,” should go to Madrid, to preside over a negotiation between the Court of Spain and all the ambassadors with reference to the terms to be offered to the Transatlantic States. [309] England, however, in spite of Lord Castlereagh’s dread of revolutionary contagion, adhered to the principles which it had already laid down; and as the counsellors of King Ferdinand declined to change their policy, Spain was left to subdue its colonies by itself.
[Conspiracy in the Army of Cadiz.]
It was in the army assembled at Cadiz for embarkation in the summer of 1819 that the conspiracy against Ferdinand’s Government found its leaders. Secret societies had now spread themselves over the principal Spanish towns, and looked to the soldiery on the coast for the signal of revolt. Abisbal, commander at Cadiz, intending to make himself safe against all contingencies, encouraged for awhile the plots of the discontented officers: then, foreseeing the failure of the movement, he arrested the principal men by a stratagem, and went off to Madrid, to reveal the conspiracy to the Court and to take credit for saving the King’s crown (July, 1819). [310] If the army could have been immediately despatched to America, the danger would possibly have passed away. This, however, was prevented by an outbreak of yellow fever, which made it necessary to send the troops into cantonments for several months. The conspirators gained time to renew their plans. The common soldiers, who had hitherto been faithful to the Government, heard in their own squalor and inaction the fearful stories of the few sick and wounded who returned from beyond the seas, and learnt to regard the order of embarkation as a sentence of death. Several battalions were won over to the cause of constitutional liberty by their commanders. The leaders imprisoned a few months before were again in communication with their followers. After the treachery of Abisbal, it was agreed to carry out the revolt without the assistance of generals or grandees. The leaders chosen were two colonels, Quiroga and Riego, of whom the former was in nominal confinement in a monastery near Medina Sidonia, twenty miles east of Cadiz, while Riego was stationed at Cabezas, a few marches distant on the great road to Seville. The first day of the year 1820 was fixed for the insurrection. It was determined that Riego should descend upon the head-quarters, which were at Arcos, and arrest the generals before they could hear anything of the movement, while Quiroga, moving from the east, gathered up the battalions stationed on the road, and threw himself into Cadiz, there to await his colleague’s approach.
[Action of Quiroga and Riego, Jan. 1820.]
The first step in the enterprise proved successful. Riego, proclaiming the Constitution of 1812, surprised the headquarters, seized the generals, and rallied several companies to his standard. Quiroga, however, though he gained possession of San Fernando, at the eastern end of the peninsula of Leon, on which Cadiz is situated, failed to make his entrance into Cadiz. The commandant, hearing of the capture of the head-quarters, had closed the city gates, and arrested the principal inhabitants whom he suspected of being concerned in the plot. The troops within the town showed no sign of mutiny. Riego, when he arrived at the peninsula of Leon, found that only five thousand men in all had joined the good cause, while Cadiz, with a considerable garrison and fortifications of great strength, stood hostile before him. He accordingly set off with a small force to visit and win over the other regiments which were lying in the neighbouring towns and villages. The commanders, however, while not venturing to attack the mutineers, drew off their troops to a distance, and prevented them from entering into any communication with Riego. The adventurous soldier, leaving Quiroga in the peninsula of Leon, then marched into the interior of Andalusia (January 27), endeavouring to raise the inhabitants of the towns. But the small numbers of his band, and the knowledge that Cadiz and the greater part of the army still held by the Government, prevented the inhabitants from joining the insurrection, even where they received Riego with kindness and supplied the wants of his soldiers. During week after week the little column traversed the country, now cut off from retreat, exhausted by forced marches in drenching rain, and harassed by far stronger forces sent in pursuit. The last town that Riego entered was Cordova. The enemy was close behind him. No halt was possible. He led his band, now numbering only two hundred men, into the mountains, and there bade them disperse (March 11).
[Corunna proclaims the Constitution Feb. 20.]
[Abisbal’s defection March 4.]
With Quiroga lying inactive in the peninsula of Leon and Riego hunted from village to village, it seemed as if the insurrection which they had begun could only end in the ruin of its leaders. But the movement had in fact effected its object. While the courtiers around King Ferdinand, unwarned by the news from Cadiz, continued their intrigues against one another, the rumour of rebellion spread over the country. If no great success had been achieved by the rebels, it was also certain that no great blow had been struck by the Government. The example of bold action had been set; the shock given at one end of the peninsula was felt at the other; and a fortnight before Riego’s band dispersed, the garrison and the citizens of Corunna together declared for the Constitution (February 20). From Corunna the revolutionary movement spread to Ferrol and to all the other coast-towns of Galicia. The news reached Madrid, terrifying the Government, and exciting the spirit of insurrection in the capital itself. The King summoned a council of the leading men around him. The wisest of them advised him to publish a moderate Constitution, and, by convoking a Parliament immediately, to stay the movement, which would otherwise result in the restoration of the Assembly and the Constitution of 1812. They also urged the King to abolish the Inquisition forthwith. Ferdinand’s brother, Don Carlos, the head of the clerical party, succeeded in preventing both measures. Though the generals in all quarters of Spain wrote that they could not answer for the troops, there were still hopes of keeping down the country by force of arms. Abisbal, who was at Madrid, was ordered to move with reinforcements towards the army in the south. He set out, protesting to the King that he knew the way to deal with rebels. When he reached Ocaña he proclaimed the Constitution himself (March 4).
[Ferdinand accepts the Constitution 1812, March 9.]
It was now clear that the cause of absolute monarchy was lost. The ferment in Madrid increased. On the night of the 6th of March all the great bodies of State assembled for council in the King’s palace, and early on the 7th Ferdinand published a proclamation, stating that he had determined to summon the Cortes immediately. This declaration satisfied no one, for the Cortes designed by the King might be the mere revival of a mediæval form, and the history of 1814 showed how little value was to be attached to Ferdinand’s promises. Crowds gathered in the great squares of Madrid, crying for the Constitution of 1812. The statement of the Minister of War that the Guard was on the point of joining the people now overcame even the resistance of Don Carlos and the confessors; and after a day wasted in dispute, Ferdinand announced to his people that he was ready to take the oath to the Constitution which they desired. The next day was given up to public rejoicings; the book of the Constitution was carried in procession through the city with the honours paid to the Holy Sacrament, and all political prisoners were set at liberty. The prison of the Inquisition was sacked, the instruments of torture broken in pieces. On the 9th the leaders of the agitation took steps to make the King fulfil his promise. A mob invaded the court and threshold of the palace. At their demand the municipal council of 1814 was restored; its members were sent, in company with six deputies chosen by the populace, to receive the pledges of the King. Ferdinand, all smiles and bows, while he looked forward to the day when force or intrigue should make him again absolute master of Spain, and enable him to take vengeance upon the men who were humiliating, him, took the oath of fidelity to the Constitution of 1812. [311] New Ministers were immediately called to office, and a provisional Junta was placed by their side as the representative of the public until the new Cortes should be duly elected.
[Condition of Naples, 1815-1820.]
Tidings of the Spanish revolution passed rapidly over Europe, disquieting the courts and everywhere reviving the hopes of the friends of popular right. Before four months had passed, the constitutional movement begun in Cadiz was taken up in Southern Italy. The kingdom of Naples was one of those States which had profited the most by French conquest. During the nine years that its crown was held by Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, the laws and institutions which accompanied Napoleon’s supremacy had rudely broken up the ancient fixity of confusions which passed for government, and had aroused no insignificant forces of new social life. The feudal tenure of land, and with it something of the feudal structure of society, had passed away: the monasteries had been dissolved; the French civil code, and a criminal code based upon that of France, had taken the place of a thousand conflicting customs and jurisdictions; taxation had been made, if not light, yet equitable and simple; justice was regular, and the same for baron and peasant; brigandage had been extinguished; and, for the first time in many centuries, the presence of a rational and uniform administration was felt over all the south of Italy. Nor on the restoration of King Ferdinand had any reaction been permitted to take place like that which in a moment destroyed the work of reform in Spain and in Westphalia. England and Austria insisted that there should be neither vengeance nor counterrevolution. Queen Marie Caroline, the principal agent in the cruelties of 1799, was dead; Ferdinand himself was old and indolent, and willing to leave affairs in the hands of Ministers more intelligent than himself. Hence the laws and the administrative system of Murat remained on the whole unchanged. [312] As in France, a Bourbon Sovereign placed himself at the head of a political order fashioned by Napoleon and the Revolution. Where changes in the law were made, or acts of State revoked, it was for the most part in consequence of an understanding with the Holy See. Thus, while no attempt was made to eject the purchasers of Church-lands, the lands not actually sold were given back to the Church; a considerable number of monasteries were restored; education was allowed to fall again into the hands of the clergy; the Jesuits were recalled, and the Church regained its jurisdiction in marriage-causes, as well as the right of suppressing writings at variance with the Catholic faith.
[Hostility between the Court party and the Muratists.]
But the legal and recognised changes which followed Ferdinand’s return by no means expressed the whole change in the operation of government. If there were not two conflicting systems at work, there were two conflicting bodies of partisans in the State. Like the emigrants who returned with Louis XVIII., a multitude of Neapolitans, high and low, who had either accompanied the King in his exile to Sicily or fought for him on the mainland in 1799 and 1806, now expected their reward. In their interest the efficiency of the public service was sacrificed and the course of justice perverted. Men who had committed notorious crimes escaped punishment if they had been numbered among the King’s friends; the generals and officials who had served under Murat, though not removed from their posts, were treated with discourtesy and suspicion. It was in the army most of all that the antagonism of the two parties was felt. A medal was struck for service in Sicily, and every year spent there in inaction was reckoned as two in computing seniority. Thus the younger officers of Murat found their way blocked by a troop of idlers, and at the same time their prospects suffered from the honest attempts made by Ministers to reduce the military expenditure. Discontent existed in every rank. The generals were familiar with the idea of political change, for during the last years of Murat’s reign they had themselves thought of compelling him to grant a Constitution: the younger officers and the sergeants were in great part members of the secret society of the Carbonari, which in the course of the last few years had grown with the weakness of the Government, and had now become the principal power in the Neapolitan kingdom.
[The Carbonari.]
The origin of this society, which derived its name and its symbolism from the trade of the charcoal-burner, as Freemasonry from that of the builder, is uncertain. Whether its first aim was resistance to Bourbon tyranny after 1799, or the expulsion of the French and Austrians from Italy, in the year 1814 it was actively working for constitutional government in opposition to Murat, and receiving encouragement from Sicily, where Ferdinand was then playing the part of constitutional King. The maintenance of absolute government by the restored Bourbon Court severed the bond which for a time existed between legitimate monarchy and conspiracy; and the lodges of the Carbonari, now extending themselves over the country with great rapidity, became so many centres of agitation against despotic rule. By the year 1819 it was reckoned that one person out of every twenty-five in the kingdom of Naples had joined the society. Its members were drawn from all classes, most numerously perhaps from the middle class in the towns; but even priests had been initiated, and there was no branch of the public service that had not Carbonari in its ranks. The Government, apprehending danger from the extension of the sect, tried to counteract it by founding a rival society of Calderari, or Braziers, in which every miscreant who before 1815 had murdered and robbed in the name of King Ferdinand and the Catholic faith received a welcome. But though the number of such persons was not small, the growth of this fraternity remained far behind that of its model; and the chief result of the competition was that intrigue and mystery gained a greater charm than ever for the Italians, and that all confidence in Government perished, under the sense that there was a hidden power in the land which was only awaiting the due moment to put forth its strength in revolutionary action.
[Morelli’s movement, July 2, 1820.]
After the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution, an outbreak in the kingdom of Naples had become inevitable. The Carbonari of Salerno, where the sect had its headquarters, had intended to rise at the beginning of June; their action, however, was postponed for some months, and it was anticipated by the daring movement of a few sergeants belonging to a cavalry regiment stationed at Nola, and of a lieutenant, named Morelli, whom they had persuaded to place himself at their head. Leading out a squadron of a hundred and fifty men in the direction of Avellino on the morning of July 2nd, Morelli proclaimed the Constitution. One of the soldiers alone left the band; force or persuasion kept others to the Standard, though they disapproved of the enterprise. The inhabitants of the populous places that lie between Nola and Avellino welcomed the squadron, or at least offered it no opposition: the officer commanding at Avellino came himself to meet Morelli, and promised him assistance. The band encamped that night in a village; on the next day they entered Avellino, where the troops and townspeople, headed by the bishop and officers, declared in their favour. From Avellino the news of the movement spread quickly over the surrounding country. The Carbonari were everywhere prepared for revolt; and before the Government had taken a single step in its own defence, the Constitution had been joyfully and peacefully accepted, not only by the people but by the militia and the regular troops, throughout the greater part of the district that lies to the east of Naples.
[Affairs at Naples, July 2-7.]
The King was on board ship in the bay, when, in the afternoon of July 2nd, intelligence came of Morelli’s revolt at Nola. Nothing was done by the Ministry on that day, although Morelli and his band might have been captured in a few hours if any resolute officer, with a few trustworthy troops, had been sent against them. On the next morning, when the garrison of Avellino had already joined the mutineers, and taken up a strong position commanding the road from Naples, General Carrascosa was sent, not to reduce the insurgents–for no troops were given to him–but to pardon, to bribe, and to coax them into submission. [313] Carrascosa failed to effect any good; other generals, who, during the following days, attempted to attack the mutineers, found that their troops would not follow them, and that the feeling of opposition to the Government, though it nowhere broke into lawlessness, was universal in the army as well as the nation. If the people generally understood little of politics, they had learnt enough to dislike arbitrary taxation and the power of arbitrary arrest. Not a single hand or voice was anywhere raised in defence of absolutism. Escaping from Naples, where he was watched by the Government, General Pepe, who was at once the chief man among the Carbonari and military commandant of the province in which Avellino lies, went to place himself at the head of the revolution. Naples itself had hitherto remained quiet, but on the night of July 6th a deputation from the Carbonari informed the King that they could no longer preserve tranquillity in the city unless a Constitution was granted. The King, without waiting for morning, published an edict declaring that a Constitution should be drawn up within eight days; immediately afterwards he appointed a new Ministry, and, feigning illness, committed the exercise of royal authority to his son, the Duke of Calabria.
[Ferdinand takes the Oath to the Spanish Constitution, July 13.]
Ferdinand’s action was taken by the people as a stratagem. He had employed the device of a temporary abdication some years before in cajoling the Sicilians; and the delay of eight days seemed unnecessary to ardent souls who knew that a Spanish Constitution was in existence and did not know of its defects in practice. There was also on the side of the Carbonari the telling argument that Ferdinand, as a possible successor to his nephew, the childless King of Spain, actually had signed the Spanish Constitution in order to preserve his own contingent rights to that crown. What Ferdinand had accepted as Infante of Spain he might well accept as King of Naples. The cry was therefore for the immediate proclamation of the Spanish Constitution of 1812. The court yielded, and the Duke of Calabria, as viceroy, published an edict making this Constitution the law of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But the tumult continued, for deceit was still feared, until the edict appeared again, signed by the King himself. Then all was rejoicing. Pepe, at the head of a large body of troops, militia and Carbonari, made a triumphal entry into the city, and, in company with Morelli and other leaders of the military rebellion, was hypocritically thanked by the Viceroy for his services to the nation. On the 13th of July the King, a hale but venerable-looking man of seventy, took the oath to the Constitution before the altar in the royal chapel. The form of words had been written out for him; but Ferdinand was fond of theatrical acts of religion, and did not content himself with reading certain solemn phrases. Raising his eyes to the crucifix above the altar, he uttered aloud a prayer that if the oath was not sincerely taken the vengeance of God might fall upon his head. Then, after blessing and embracing his sons, the venerable monarch wrote to the Emperor of Austria, protesting that all that he did was done under constraint, and that his obligations were null and void. [314]
[Affairs in Portugal, 1807-1820.]
A month more passed, and in a third kingdom absolute government fell before the combined action of soldiers and people. The Court of Lisbon had migrated to Brazil in 1807, when the troops of Napoleon first appeared upon the Tagus, and Portugal had since then been governed by a Regency, acting in the name of the absent Sovereign. The events of the Peninsular War had reduced Portugal almost to the condition of a dependency of Great Britain. Marshal Beresford, the English commander-in-chief of its army, kept his post when the war was over, and with him there remained a great number of English officers who had led the Portuguese regiments in Wellington’s campaigns. The presence of these English soldiers was unwelcome, and commercial rivalry embittered the natural feeling of impatience towards an ally who remained as master rather than guest. Up to the year 1807 the entire trade with Brazil had been confined by law to Portuguese merchants; when, however, the Court had established itself beyond the Atlantic, it had opened the ports of Brazil to British ships, in return for the assistance given by our own country against Napoleon. Both England and Brazil profited by the new commerce, but the Portuguese traders, who had of old had the monopoly, were ruined. The change in the seat of government was in fact seen to be nothing less than a reversal of the old relations between the European country and its colony. Hitherto Brazil had been governed in the interests of Portugal; but with a Sovereign fixed at Rio Janeiro, it was almost inevitable that Portugal should be governed in the interests of Brazil. Declining trade, the misery and impoverishment resulting from a long war, resentment against a Court which could not be induced to return to the kingdom and against a foreigner who could not be induced to quit it, filled the army and all classes in the nation with discontent. Conspiracies were discovered as early as 1817, and the conspirators punished with all the barbarous ferocity of the Middle Ages. Beresford, who had not sufficient tact to prevent the execution of a sentence ordering twelve persons to be strangled, beheaded, and then burnt in the streets of Lisbon, found, during the two succeeding years, that the state of the country was becoming worse and worse. In the spring of 1820, when the Spanish revolution had made some change in the neighbouring kingdom, either for good or evil, inevitable, Beresford set out for Rio Janeiro, intending to acquaint the King with the real condition of affairs, and to use his personal efforts in hastening the return of the Court to Lisbon. Before he could recross the Atlantic, the Government which he left behind him at Lisbon had fallen.
[Revolution at Oporto, August 1820.]
The grievances of the Portuguese army made it the natural centre of disaffection, but the military conspirators had their friends among all classes. On the 24th of August, 1820, the signal of revolt was given at Oporto. Priests and magistrates, as well as the town-population, united with officers of the army in declaring against the Regency, and in establishing a provisional Junta, charged with the duty of carrying on the government in the name of the King until the Cortes should assemble and frame a Constitution. No resistance was offered by any of the civil or military authorities at Oporto. The Junta entered upon its functions, and began by dismissing all English officers, and making up the arrears of pay due to the soldiers. As soon as the news of the revolt reached Lisbon, the Regency itself volunteered to summon the Cortes, and attempted to conciliate the remainder of the army by imitating the measures of the Junta of Oporto. [315] The troops, however, declined to act against their comrades, and on the 15th of September the Regency was deposed, and a provisional Junta installed in the capital. Beresford, who now returned from Brazil, was forbidden to set foot on Portuguese soil. The two rival governing-committees of Lisbon and Oporto coalesced; and after an interval of confusion the elections to the Cortes were held, resulting in the return of a body of men whose loyalty to the Crown was not impaired by their hostility to the Regency. The King, when the first tidings of the constitutional movement reached Brazil, gave a qualified consent to the summoning of the Cortes which was announced by the Regency, and promised to return to Europe. Beresford, continuing his voyage to England without landing at Lisbon, found that the Government of this country had no disposition to interfere with the domestic affairs of its ally.
[Alexander proposes joint action with regard to Spain, April, 1820.]
It was the boast of the Spanish and Italian Liberals that the revolutions effected in 1820 were undisgraced by the scenes of outrage which had followed the capture of the Bastille and the overthrow of French absolutism thirty years before. [316] The gentler character of these southern movements proved, however, no extenuation in the eyes of the leading statesmen of Europe: on the contrary, the declaration of soldiers in favour of a Constitution seemed in some quarters more ominous of evil than any excess of popular violence. The alarm was first sounded at St. Petersburg. As soon as the Czar heard of Riego’s proceedings at Cadiz, he began to meditate intervention; and when it was known that Ferdinand had been forced to accept the Constitution of 1812, he ordered his ambassadors to propose that all the Great Powers, acting through their Ministers at Paris, should address a remonstrance to the representative of Spain, requiring the Cortes to disavow the crime of the 8th of March, by which they had been called into being, and to offer a pledge of obedience to their King by enacting the most rigorous laws against sedition and revolt. [317] In that case, and in that alone, the Czar desired to add, would the Powers maintain their relations of confidence and amity with Spain.
[England prevents joint diplomatic intervention.]
This Russian proposal was viewed with some suspicion at Vienna; it was answered with a direct and energetic negative from London. Canning was still in the Ministry. The words with which in 1818 he had protested against a league between England and autocracy were still ringing in the ears of his colleagues. Lord Liverpool’s Government knew itself to be unpopular in the country; every consideration of policy as well as of self-interest bade it resist the beginnings of an intervention which, if confined to words, was certain to be useless, and, if supported by action, was likely to end in that alliance between France and Russia which had been the nightmare of English statesmen ever since 1814, and in a second occupation of Spain by the very generals whom Wellington had spent so many years in dislodging. Castlereagh replied to the Czar’s note in terms which made it clear that England would never give its sanction to a collective interference with Spain. [318] Richelieu, the nominal head of the French Government, felt too little confidence in his position to act without the concurrence of Great Britain; and the crusade of absolutism against Spanish liberty was in consequence postponed until the victory of the Ultra-Royalists at Paris was complete, and the overthrow of Richelieu had brought to the head of the French State a group of men who felt no scruple in entering upon an aggressive war.
[Naples and the Great Powers.]
[Austria.]
[England admits Austrian but not joint intervention.]
But the shelter of circumstances which for a while protected Spain from the foreigner did not extend to Italy, when in its turn the Neapolitan revolution called a northern enemy into the field. Though the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was in itself much less important than Spain, the established order of the Continent was more directly threatened by a change in its government. No European State was exposed to the same danger from a revolution in Madrid as Austria from a revolution in Naples. The Czar had invoked the action of the Courts against Spain, not because his own dominions were in peril, but because the principle of monarchical right was violated: with Austria the danger pressed nearer home. The establishment of constitutional liberty in Naples was almost certain to be followed by an insurrection in the Papal States and a national uprising in the Venetian provinces; and among all the bad results of Austria’s false position in Italy, one of the worst was that in self-defence it was bound to resist every step made towards political liberty beyond its own frontier. The dismay with which Metternich heard of the collapse of absolute government at Naples [319] was understood and even shared by the English Ministry, who at this moment were deprived of their best guide by Canning’s withdrawal. Austria, in peace just as much as in war, had uniformly been held to be the natural ally of England against the two aggressive Courts of Paris and St. Petersburg. It seemed perfectly right and natural to Lord Castlereagh that Austria, when its own interests were endangered by the establishment of popular sovereignty at Naples, should intervene to restore King Ferdinand’s power; the more so as the secret treaty of 1815, by which Metternich had bound this sovereign to maintain absolute monarchy, had been communicated to the ambassador of Great Britain, and had received his approval. But the right to intervene in Italy belonged, according to Lord Castlereagh, to Austria alone. The Sovereigns of Europe had no more claim, as a body, to interfere with Naples than they had to interfere with Spain. Therefore, while the English Government sanctioned and even desired the intervention of Austria, as a State acting in protection of its own interests against revolution in a neighbouring country, it refused to sanction any joint intervention of the European Powers, and declared itself opposed to the meeting of a Congress where any such intervention might be discussed. [320]
[Conference at Troppau, Oct. 1820.]
Had Metternich been free to follow his own impulses, he would have thrown an army into Southern Italy as soon as soldiers and stores could be collected, and have made an end of King Ferdinand’s troubles forthwith. It was, however, impossible for him to disregard the wishes of the Czar, and to abandon all at once the system of corporate action, which was supposed to have done such great things for Europe. [321] A meeting of sovereigns and Ministers was accordingly arranged, and at the end of October the Emperor of Austria received the Czar and King Frederick William in the little town of Troppau, in Moravia. France had itself first recommended the summoning of a Congress to deal with Neapolitan affairs, and it was believed for a while that England would be isolated in its resistance to a joint intervention. But before the Congress assembled, the firm language of the English Ministry had drawn Richelieu over to its side; [322] and although one of the two French envoys made himself the agent of the Ultra-Royalist faction, it was not possible for him to unite his country with the three Eastern Courts. France, through the weakness of its Government and the dissension between its representatives, counted for nothing at the Congress. England sent its ambassador from Vienna, but with instructions to act as an observer and little more; and in consequence the meeting at Troppau resolved itself into a gathering of the three Eastern autocrats and their Ministers. As Prussia had ceased to have any independent foreign policy whatever, Metternich needed only to make certain of the support of the Czar in order to range on his side the entire force of eastern and central Europe in the restoration of Neapolitan despotism.
[Contest between Metternich and Capodistrias.]
[Circular of Troppau, Dec. 8, 1820.]
[The principle of intervention laid down by three Courts.]
The plan of the Austrian statesman was not, however, to be realised without some effort. Alexander had watched with jealousy Metternich’s recent assumption of a dictatorship over the minor German Courts; he had never admitted Austria’s right to dominate in Italy; and even now some vestiges of his old attachment to liberal theories made him look for a better solution of the Neapolitan problem than in that restoration of despotism pure and simple which Austria desired. While condemning every attempt of a people to establish its own liberties, Alexander still believed that in some countries sovereigns would do well to make their subjects a grant of what he called sage and liberal institutions. It would have pleased him best if the Neapolitans could have been induced by peaceful means to abandon their Constitution, and to accept in return certain chartered rights as a gift from their King; and the concurrence of the two Western Powers might in this case possibly have been regained. This project of a compromise, by which Ferdinand would have been freed from his secret engagement with Austria, was exactly what Metternich desired to frustrate. He found himself matched, and not for the first time, against a statesman who was even more subtle than himself. This was Count Capodistrias, a Greek who from a private position had risen to be Foreign Minister of Russia, and was destined to become the first sovereign, in reality if not in title, of his native land. Capodistrias, the sympathetic partner of the Czar’s earlier hopes, had not travelled so fast as his master along the reactionary road. He still represented what had been the Italian policy of Alexander some years before, and sought to prevent the re-establishment of absolute rule at Naples, at least by the armed intervention of Austria. Metternich’s first object was to discredit the Minister in the eyes of his sovereign. It is said that he touched the Czar’s keenest fears in a conversation relating to a mutiny that had just taken place among the troops at St. Petersburg, and so in one private interview cut the ground from under Capodistrias’ feet; he also humoured the Czar by reviving that monarch’s own favourite scheme for a mutual guarantee of all the Powers against revolution in any part of Europe. Alexander had proposed in 1818 that the Courts should declare resistance to authority in any country to be a violation of European peace, entitling the Allied Powers, if they should think fit, to suppress it by force of arms. This doctrine, which would have empowered the Czar to throw the armies of a coalition upon London if the Reform Bill had been carried by force, had hitherto failed to gain international acceptance owing to the opposition of Great Britain. It was now formally accepted by Austria and Prussia. Alexander saw the federative system of European monarchy, with its principle of collective intervention, recognised as an established fact by at least three of the great Powers; [323] and in return he permitted Metternich to lay down the lines which, in the case of Naples, this intervention should follow. It was determined to invite King Ferdinand to meet his brother-sovereigns at Laibach, in the Austrian province of Carniola, and through him to address a summons to the Neapolitan people, requiring them, in the name of the three Powers, and under threat of invasion, to abandon their Constitution. This determination was announced, as a settled matter, to the envoys of England and France; and a circular was issued from Troppau by the three Powers to all the Courts of Europe (Dec. 8), embodying the doctrine of federative intervention, and expressing a hope that England and France would approve its immediate application in the case of Naples. [324]
[Protest of England.]
There was no ground whatever for this hope with regard to England. On the contrary, in proportion as the three Courts strengthened their union and insisted on their claim to joint jurisdiction over Europe, they drove England away from them. Lord Castlereagh had at first promised the moral support of this country to Austria in its enterprise against Naples; but when this enterprise ceased to be the affair of Austria alone, and became part of the police-system of the three despotisms, it was no longer possible for the English Government to view it with approval or even with silence. The promise of a moral support was withdrawn: England declared that it stood strictly neutral with regard to Naples, and protested against the doctrine contained in the Troppau circular, that a change of government in any State gave the Allied Powers the right to intervene. [325]
France made no such protest; but it was still hoped at Paris that an Austrian invasion of Southern Italy, so irritating to French pride, might be averted. King Louis XVIII. endeavoured, but in vain, to act the part of mediator, and to reconcile the Neapolitan House of Bourbon at once with its own subjects and with the Northern Powers.
[Conference at Laibach, Jan., 1821.]
The summons went out from the Congress to King Ferdinand to appear at Laibach. It found him enjoying all the popularity of a constitutional King, surrounded by Ministers who had governed under Murat, exchanging compliments with a democratic Parliament, lavishing distinctions upon the men who had overthrown his authority, and swearing to everything that was set before him. As the Constitution prohibited the King from leaving the country without the consent of the Legislature, it was necessary for Ferdinand to communicate to Parliament the invitation which he had received from the Powers, and to take a vote of the Assembly on the subject of his journey. Ferdinand’s Ministers possessed some political experience; they recognised that it would be impossible to maintain the existing Constitution against the hostility of three great States, and hoped that the Parliament would consent to Ferdinand’s departure on condition that he pledged himself to uphold certain specified principles of free government. A message to the Assembly was accordingly made public, in which the King expressed his desire to mediate with the Powers on this basis. But the Ministers had not reckoned with the passions of the people. As soon as it became known that Ferdinand was about to set out, the leaders of the Carbonari mustered their bands. A host of violent men streamed into Naples from the surrounding country. The Parliament was intimidated, and Ferdinand was prohibited from leaving Naples until he had sworn to maintain the Constitution actually in force, that, namely, which Naples had borrowed from Spain. Ferdinand, whose only object was to escape from the country as quickly as possible, took the oath with his usual effusions of patriotism. He then set out for Leghorn, intending to cross from thence into Northern Italy. No sooner had he reached the Tuscan port than he addressed a letter to each of the five principal sovereigns of Europe, declaring that his last acts were just as much null and void as all his earlier ones. He made no attempt to justify, or to excuse, or even to explain his conduct; nor is there the least reason to suppose that he considered the perjuries of a prince to require a justification. “These sorry protests,” wrote the secretary of the Congress of Troppau, “will happily remain secret. No Cabinet will be anxious to draw them from the sepulchre of its archives. Till then there is not much harm done.”
[Ferdinand at Laibach.]
[Demands of the Allies on Naples.]
Ferdinand reached Laibach, where the Czar rewarded him for the fatigues of his journey by a present of some Russian bears. His arrival was peculiarly agreeable to Metternich, whose intentions corresponded exactly with his own; and the fact that he had been compelled to swear to maintain the Spanish Constitution at Naples acted favourably for the Austrian Minister, inasmuch as it enabled him to say to all the world that negotiation was now out of the question. [326] Capodistrias, brought face to face with failure, twisted about, according to his rival’s expression, like a devil in holy water, but all in vain. It was decided that Ferdinand should be restored as absolute monarch by an Austrian army, and that, whether the Neapolitans resisted or submitted, their country should be occupied by Austrian troops for some years to come. The only difficulty remaining was to vest King Ferdinand’s conduct in some respectable disguise. Capodistrias, when nothing else was to be gained, offered to invent an entire correspondence, in which Ferdinand should proudly uphold the Constitution to which he had sworn, and protest against the determination of the Powers to force the sceptre of absolutism back into his hand. [327] This device, however, was thought too transparent. A letter was sent in the King’s name to his son, the Duke of Calabria, stating that he had found the three Powers determined not to tolerate an order of things sprung from revolution; that submission alone would avert war; but that even in case of submission certain securities for order, meaning the occupation of the country by an Austrian army, would be exacted. The letter concluded with the usual promises of reform and good government. It reached Naples on the 9th of February, 1821. No answer was either expected or desired. On the 6th the order had been given to the Austrian army to cross the Po.
[State of Naples and Sicily.]
[The Austrians enter Naples, March 24, 1821.]
[Third Neapolitan restoration.]
There was little reason to fear any serious resistance on the part of the Neapolitans. The administration of the State was thoroughly disorganised; the agitation of the secret societies had destroyed all spirit of obedience among the soldiers; a great part of the army was absent in Sicily, keeping guard over a people who, under wiser management, might have doubled the force which Naples now opposed to the invader. When the despotic government of Ferdinand was overthrown, the island of Sicily, or that part of it which was represented by Palermo, had claimed the separate political existence which it had possessed between 1806 and 1815, offering to remain united to Naples in the person of the sovereign, but demanding a National Parliament and a National Constitution of its own. The revolutionary Ministers of Naples had, however, no more sympathy with the wishes of the Sicilians than the Spanish Liberals of 1812 had with those of the American Colonists. They required the islanders to accept the same rights and duties as any other province of the Neapolitan kingdom, and, on their refusal, sent over a considerable force and laid siege to Palermo. [328] The contest soon ended in the submission of the Sicilians, but it was found necessary to keep twelve thousand troops on the island in order to prevent a new revolt. The whole regular army of Naples numbered little more than forty thousand; and although bodies of Carbonari and of the so-called Militia set out to join the colours of General Pepe and to fight for liberty, they remained for the most part a disorderly mob, without either arms or discipline. The invading