Editor’s note: This is the third of six lectures given by H.A.L. Fisher at the University of London in June, 1907. They were published in book form under the title, Bonapartism (London, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1908).
(Continued from Part 2)
To those who concentrate their attention upon the civil work of Napoleon, upon the chaos which he found and the order which he created, and above all upon the endurance of his settlement of church and army, law and administration, through a century of fevered change, it seems easy to forget that the medal has a dark as well as a shining face. The house of empire was built upon foundations some of which were of granite, others of treacherous sand. Napoleon appealed not only to the sound instincts of the French people, the Latin love of order and symmetry, the passion of the peasant for his little plot of land, of the bourgeois for his little investment in the funds, to the strong sense of family discipline, to the immemorial sentiment of religion and the fierce conviction of equality, but to other instincts also of inferior value. No government has exploited so systematically the national thirst for military glory. None has appealed more successfully to the material passions, or has presumed with such hardihood and success upon that administrative timidity of the French, part inertia, part egotism, which is content to surrender the conduct of affairs in exchange for a quiet life.
The wars of Napoleon may be regarded from many points of view. We may, if we choose, consider them as wars of propaganda containing the precious seed of revolutionary philosophy to scatter it broadcast through Europe. Or again, we may consider them as wars of aggrandizement deliberately undertaken to extend the boundaries of France and to minister to the ambition of her ruler. It has been held by a long series of inquirers that the true way to look at the great drama of the Napoleonic period is to conceive of it as centred round a duel between France and England; a duel in which England, representing the old idea, is the implacable aggressor, France representing the new forces of democracy, the spirited and resourceful defender, who, finding it impossible to strike her enemy at the heart, is compelled to cut off the supplies to the stomach, an operation which is found to involve the conquest of Europe. According to this view, the conquests of Napoleon were not intentional— not, as so often imagined, the results of a disordered ambition, but an inevitable consequence of the fact that England was an island, that she was at war with France, and would never consent to a durable peace so long as France was in possession of Belgium. Hence arises a great duel between the sea and the land, between England, who claims to blockade the continental coast, and France, who poses as the champion of the liberty of the seas. By the inexorable logic of history, Napoleon the Pacific is compelled to fight Austria and Prussia, to oust the Bourbons from Naples, to annex the states of the Church, to attempt the subjugation of the Iberian Peninsula, to leave the bones of a noble army bleaching in the Russian snows, because it is his duty as the heir of the Revolution to defend the prize which the armies of the Revolution had won. Others lay special stress upon the power exerted over Napoleon’s mind by historical memories. They regard his policy as moulded, not perhaps entirely, but to a greater extent than is often allowed for, by the tradition of Julius Caesar and Diocletian, of Charlemagne and Alexander. In his Egyptian and Syrian campaigns, in his plans for the conquest of India and the partition of Turkey, in the scheme sketched out once in conversation, but perhaps never seriously intended, for marching from Moscow to the Steppes, Napoleon is directly inspired by Alexander; just as in his assumption of the Iron Crown, in his settlement of Germany, in his general conception of an empire covering Western Europe and co-extensive with Latin Christianity, he is concerned to exhibit himself as the successor of Charlemagne. Thus his conquests and their organization may be regarded as the ultimate triumph of that classic spirit which acts sub-consciously on men of the Latin race, and was so potent and decisive a factor in the rhetorical education of the French Revolution. Or again, it may be shown how, intermingled with this classical conception of empire, there was a family policy derived from the deep instincts of the Corsican clan. Napoleon, ‘the miraculous child’, carves his way to fortune, but he does not arrive alone. His mother, his brothers and sisters, his wife’s relations, his uncle, his sister’s husband, crowd forward to seize the best places. They become kings and queens, princes and princesses, high dignitaries of state, some entrusted with grave responsibilities, like Joseph, the eldest brother, successively King of Naples and Spain; others kept merely for show, like the feeble Borghese, the husband of the lovely Pauline, who holds court in Turin. A family policy was no new idea in France. Shoots from the Bourbon tree had been made to sprout in Spain, in Naples, in Parma, after prolonged efforts of diplomacy and notable passages of war. But here was a family union covering a wider area of Europe, organized on a stricter plan as part of a fighting coalition against England. An obscure Corsican family had improved upon the old endemic brigand tradition of their mountainous island. They had boarded the state coach, turned out the drivers, and made off with the valuables. In 1810, before Napoleon’s second marriage, brothers were ruling in Holland, Spain, and Westphalia; Northern Italy was under a step-son; Southern Italy under a brother-in-law; Tuscany under a sister. Baden, Wurtemburg, and Bavaria had been compelled to marry into the house of parvenus. Then came the birth of an heir, and with it preparations for a more closely-jointed European state. Holland and the Hanseatic regions were incorporated in France, while provision was made for the viceroy of the Italian kingdom in a small German principality. A way was prepared for the union of Italy. It was settled that the King of Rome was to rule the whole peninsula, while Pope and Cardinals, the Archives of the Vatican, and the directing machinery of the Roman Church, were to be transferred to Paris.
No estimate does justice to Napoleon which fails to recognize in him a disinterested passion for practical improvement. He was one of those rare men who assume that everything they come across, from a government to a saucepan, is probably constructed on wrong principles and capable of amendment. One day Chaptal found his master in high glee, for he had just effected a saving of thirty-five thousand francs a year upon his household budget at Malmaison. ‘I asked him,’ writes the famous chemist, on what objects he had effected his economies. “On coffee,” he replied. “They used to consume a hundred and fifty-five cups of coffee a day; every cup cost me two sous, which came to fifty-six thousand five hundred and seventy-five francs a year. I have suppressed the coffee and granted my household seven francs and sixpence by way of compensation. I shall spend twenty-one thousand a hundred and sixty-five francs, and save thirty-five thousand.”‘ The same incisive energy was shown in his plans for civil improvement. When he visited a town, he would throw out plans for avenues and parks, clarify the municipal finance, consolidate the charitable endowments, cross-question the traders and manufacturers of the region, and leave the whole place thrilling with new ideas and the bustle of change. So, too, wherever new conquests were organized, Napoleon took care to introduce the leading principles upon which the French state had been refashioned. Feudalism was abolished, equality was proclaimed, toleration and industrial freedom took the place of monopoly in Church and trade. After no great interval of time the Codes followed the eagles, equalizing property, legalizing divorce and civil marriage, and substituting for barbarous forms of criminal procedure the open trial and the jury. Skilled Frenchmen, trained in the finest school of administration which Europe has known, taught the secret of orderly account-keeping, enlightened finance, and the lucid drafting of laws. Hundreds of intelligent men who had lived under slow and secretive despotisms now for the first time understood the beauty of methodical design in government. Wherever a French state was founded the old social barriers disappeared. ‘Take care,’ wrote Napoleon to his youngest brother, Jerome, ‘to compose the majority of your Council of commoners. See to it that the third estate has most of the government posts…. This will go to the heart of Germany, and perhaps annoy the other class. Do not mind that. The declared principle is to choose talents wherever they can be found.’ To many a German and Italian Napoleon seemed to be the sword of the modern idea. Goethe and Hegel, Von Müller the historian of Switzerland, Pasolini, one of the future liberators of Italy, viewed him as a great world spirit whose mission it was to destroy that which was old and evil, and to establish that which was new and good. ‘Be a constitutional king,’ wrote Napoleon to the new sovereign of Westphalia, ‘it is necessary that your subjects should enjoy a degree of liberty, equality, and well-being unknown to the people of Germany. This will be a more powerful barrier against Prussia than the Elbe, or fortresses, or French protection. What people would wish to revert to Prussian despotism when it has once tasted the benefits of a wise and liberal government?’
A liberal government? In what sense can the term ‘liberal’ be applied to these parasitic governments of the Grand Empire? Among the many wise sayings of Napoleon there is one so wise that if it had guided his dealings with alien states as it inspired his policy within the borders of France, there might have been no cataclysm. It is this: ‘The strength of a people depends upon its history’, which means that you cannot rule a nation unless you adjust your political contrivances to suit the peculiar temperament which has been fashioned by historic forces. In his reconstruction of France Napoleon built upon the permanent elements of the national psychology. He gave France what she wanted, and his work has outlasted three Revolutions. The felicitous political compromise which he devised for Switzerland was another case of a political plan carefully adjusted to somewhat peculiar conditions. The problem was to reconcile the conflicting ideals of a democratic unitary state on the one hand, and jealously guarded cantonal liberties on the other; and the Act of Mediation solved it to the satisfaction of the Swiss. In Poland, again, a constitution was framed upon lines suggested by circumstances in the national history. But elsewhere there was little pretence of deference to the consecrated force of historical association. The constitutions given to the dependencies of the Empire are variations on one despotic archetype. They are devised not to direct but to resist the spontaneous tide of popular opinion. Everywhere there is the same model despotism, with its nominated council of state serving as the laboratory of legislation and government, its legislature deprived of initiative, deliberating in secret and in silence, and liable to reproof or suspension on the slightest sign of animation or volition. Freedom of election had been tried in France during the Revolution, and without success. How could it be expected that people so far inferior to the French as were the Italians, the Germans, and the Spaniards, should avail themselves wisely of this dangerous privilege? What sane man would entrust a vote to the priest-ridden peasantry of the Lombard plain, to the idle Lazzaroni of Naples, or to those valorous, debased Hessians whose matted hair and harsh features sent a shudder down the spine of the French traveller? Experience had already shown what even Robespierre had surmised, that the peoples of Europe were not burning to cast off their chains, and the lessons of experience were improved by the resources of egotism. ‘I know more,’ observed Napoleon, ‘ in my little finger than is known by all the heads in Italy put together ‘-a gratifying conviction for which a convenient and ingenious embodiment was devised at the Consulta of Lyons in 1802. Here it was arranged that the voting power of the new Italian republic should be distributed among three bodies, a college of proprietors, a college of savants, and a college of merchants and manufacturers. The members of these bodies were to be elected for life, to meet at least once in two years for a period not exceeding fifteen days, to submit to a small body of twenty-one persons styled the Censura a list of candidates for the legislature and the judicial bench, from which the Censura was to make the final selection. It was once a doctrine professed by Burke that all great public collections of men possess a marked love of virtue and an abhorrence of vice. No thesis could be more antipathetic to the views of Napoleon, or to the spirit embodied in the constitution which he devised for Northern Italy. It was his object not to provoke but to avert ‘great public collections of men’. The college of Possidenti was to meet at Milan, the College of Dotti at Bologna, the College of Commercianti at Brescia, while the grand electoral tribunal was to give a last solemn shake to the electoral sieve at Cremona. Since the First Consul took the precaution to nominate the legislature and never permitted a fresh election, that shake caused no tremor in the body politic. The Italian legislature was equally nugatory. One August day when Napoleon was enjoying the salt breezes of Boulogne, a dispatch came from Milan announcing that a chamber of Italian nominees had been protesting against certain cardinal items in the imperial programme, notably against the large sums of money allocated for the support of French troops. ‘My cousin,’ replied the Emperor to Prince Eugène, ‘you will have received a decree in which I have adjourned the legislative body. When these legislators have a king to themselves, he may be amused at these games of prisoner’s base, but as I have no time, and they are all passions and faction, I shall not summon them again.’
So much, then, for the political liberty of the Italian. The guarantees for civil liberty were equally precarious. At Cornalba, in the department of Serio, there was a certain Madellena Vastali, who, like the nun of Kent, passed as a saint and secured a considerable following among credulous and reactionary neighbours. She had ecstasies and visions, and professed to have received the stigmata. A parish priest acknowledged her claims and assisted in spreading her influence, proclaiming that a waxen image of the Virgin had made an inclination of respect towards the vessel of the Divine purpose. A government whose clerical policy was viewed with bitter suspicion in Rome did not permit miracles to occur with impunity. Prophetess and priest were arrested by the Director of Police, cast into a dungeon in Bergamo, where they might have time to reflect upon the relation between miracles and the penal code. Then the Viceroy was informed of the occurrence and asked for directions. Eugène was a mild, punctual, obedient servant, who knew something of his master’s mind. He directed that the prophetess should be shut up for six months in a house of correction, sentenced the priest to a similar term of imprisonment, and forthwith deprived him of his living. There was neither formal inquiry nor public trial. There was no witness heard in the defence, nor any consultation held, save with the Minister of Public Worship and the Director of Police.
The working of Parliamentary government implies the responsibility of ministers to a popularly elected chamber, freedom of speech, and adequate guarantees for personal liberty. No one of these conditions was realized in any of the numerous states of the French Empire. Since the first few decades of the counter-reformation the free movement of human curiosity and human intelligence has never been so closely restrained over so large a surface of Europe. The lectures of university professors, the newspapers and books, the slightest pamphlet, the heaviest tome, were subjected to a vigilant censorship. Wherever the eagles flew, there followed a swarm of police spies opening letters, defaming reputations, spoiling careers, robbing private life of its security, and tainting the stream of public activity. That an atmosphere of apprehension might be created among the Germans, a bookseller was court-martialled and put to death in Nuremburg for selling a pamphlet which denounced the conduct of the French soldiers in Bavaria. It was an unlawful act to criticize the Emperor, to malign the French, to pass the faintest animadversion on the conscription, the blockade, or the taxes. As free reporting was dangerous, the Government provided its own bilingual organs, full of dull, innocuous pabulum, some laws and decrees, the account of a state reception or a treatise on Forestry, tricked out with items of Paris intelligence and the last imperial bulletins from the seat of war. The political news was for the most part calculated to mislead, for the Emperor who cheated at cards had no scruple in suppressing or falsifying facts. On a scale unparalleled in history he erected mendacity into an art of empire.
Yet sterilizing as censorship must necessarily be, these French governments provided a real form of education to the Germans and Italians who were caught up in the administration of public affairs. If the Empire demanded political servility, it shattered the obdurate crust of habit and substituted wide ideals of efficient combination for narrow, slovenly, lethargic provincialism. ‘You have,’ said Napoleon in a valedictory address to the Italians at Lyons, ‘nothing but special laws, henceforward you must have general laws. Your people has only local habits, it is necessary that it should take on national habits. Lastly, you have no army. The powers which may become your enemies have strong armies; but you have what can produce strong armies, a numerous population, a fertile country, and the example of the first people in Europe.’ In these penetrating and profound remarks, Napoleon diagnosed the remedy and prescribed the medicine. His net was widely and cunningly spread. Stendhal reports in 1818, that if you met an intelligent elderly man in the streets of Milan, it was safe to assume that he had served in the French administration.
It was the peculiarity of the Napoleonic Empire that it was built up with a view to conquest, that the ring of dependent states were the satellites of Mars. We have only to examine the conditions under which they worked to assure ourselves that it is not their interest which is consulted, but the interest of the Master of the Legions. The military contributions with which they were burdened rendered it impossible to carry out any educational schemes on a large scale. Half the domain from which the budget of the dispossessed princes was nourished was appropriated to the French Emperor and allotted to French generals, French favourites, or members of the French Civil Service. The new state was subjected to the conscription, and compelled to furnish a quota of troops often quite out of proportion to its population, to feed the wars of the Empire. In the wake of the conscription came a penal code imposing severe and elaborate penalties upon deserters and recalcitrant conscripts, and full of ingenious thumbscrews for extorting the required tribute of human flesh. The continental blockade was another attendant circumstance of French government little calculated to commend it to the favour of the commercial and manufacturing classes. Add to this the free quartering of French soldiery, the manifold extortions of generals and officers, the removal of objects of art and value from local museums to Paris, the heavy duties imposed on German and Italian wares at the French frontier, and it will readily be seen that administrative efficiency was purchased at a high price. The literature of invective which accumulated round the head of Malchus, the capable financier who procured resources for the government of Westphalia, the popular fury which caused the death of Prina in Milan, are evidence of the hatred which Napoleonic finance succeeded in inspiring. The downfall of the Empire was acclaimed all over Holland, Germany, and Belgium as a welcome and necessary relief from a tyranny too hard to be borne.
It may, however, be argued that these were merely temporary hardships, the result of the accident of war, rather than an essential ingredient in the Napoleonic system. But it is difficult to believe that Napoleon had any permanent plan for the settlement of Europe. There was never so restless a diplomatist. He would change the boundaries of states and open up new horizons from month to month, like a child who amuses itself with bricks, now making a castle, now a temple, now a farm-house, and now a wall. This manipulation of human souls and territories was of course no new feature in European politics. There had been the partition of Poland, then schemes for the partition of Bavaria, and finally in 1803 a great readjustment of German territories carried out in Paris as a consequence of the conquest of the Rhine frontier by France. But never did territorial changes follow one another with such bewildering rapidity, or from motives so difficult to descry, as during the last years of the Empire. The sense that everything was provisional, that nothing was intended to last, entered as a paralysing force into the calculations even of Napoleon’s best subordinates.
It may be asked again whether the Napoleonic conquests were inspired by the idea of nationality. That the growth of nationalities was one of the results of Napoleon’s work is obvious to any student of modern history. In Germany, for instance, Napoleon carried out a great and salutary simplification of political geography. In 1803 the number of German principalities was reduced from 250 to 39 and a Protestant majority secured in the diet. Two years later Bavaria and Wurtemburg received important additions of territory, and then in 1806 the Holy Roman Empire was abolished and a confederation formed in its place under the protectorship of France. The elimination of Austria from the German system was an essential step towards the union of Germany, and though it is true that the skill of Metternich procured for Austria a dominant influence in the German confederation after the fall of Napoleon, the spell of a thousand years had been broken, and the formation of a united Germany without the Habsburgs became one of the permanent political ideas in the German mind. And apart from the direct influence which was thus exerted, there was the negative influence of the reaction. The war of liberation was an act of the whole German people, an event entirely different in character from the wars which had been waged by German sovereigns for their own dynastic interest in the eighteenth century. From every quarter, from poets and historians, from philosophers and men of action, came the cry that the German nation must be liberated from the Latin yoke. Even in the realm of law, where the French influence had been most beneficial, there was a pronounced reaction against a Code which was declared to be alien to the Teutonic genius and to the historic traditions of the race. But at the same time some Germans wisely apprehended the lesson of Bonapartism. ‘Democratic principles in a monarchical government seems to me,’ wrote the Prussian statesman Hardenburg, ‘to be the formula appropriate to the spirit of the times.’
It is one of the ironies of history that Napoleon I prepared the way for Bismarck, that the French made Germany, as the English made France, and as the Spanish kingdoms were the outcome of the long crusade against the Moors. It is, however, a wild paradox to assert that Napoleon had any intention of educating a German nation. The confederation of the Rhine was an old device of French diplomacy, carried out with resources far in excess of those which Mazarin had been able to command, but essentially identical in aim with the Rhenish federation of the seventeenth century. Its object was to create in Germany a clientèle of princes whose armies and treasuries would be at the disposal of the French Emperor. That these states should develop an independent or liberal life was the last thing which Napoleon intended. On the contrary, the more despotic the power of the prince the more regularly could the Emperor rely upon a punctual remittance of conscripts. The subject kings were accordingly encouraged to dispense with constitutional machinery, and so to recompense themselves for their subservience in foreign policy by autocracy at home. ‘Monsieur L’Abbé,’ said Napoleon to Dalberg, the subservient prince-primate, ‘I will tell you a secret. The small people in Germany wish to be protected against the big people; the big people wish to govern according to their fancy. Now as I only want men and money from the Confederation, and as it is the big people and not the small people who can supply me with these two requisites, I leave the big people in peace, and the others must get on as best they can.’ Il faut depayser l’Allemagne was the motto of the policy. The kingdom of Prussia was marked out for special humiliation, mutilated of its Westphalian and Polish provinces, condemned to pay a crushing war indemnity and to support the burden of a French army of occupation. It was one of Napoleon’s constant regrets that he had been too lenient to the Power which wiped out the memory of Jena on the field of Waterloo.
Italy was the land of Napoleon’s ancestors, and Italian was the language which came most readily to his lips. Under his rule, for the first time since the Lombard invasions, the whole Italian Peninsula was governed on a single plan. From the Alps to the Straits of Messina lawyers were administering the French codes, engineers were building roads and bridges, financial agents were making cadastral surveys, administrators were applying the wealth of the monasteries to secular uses, lighting towns, and enforcing the conscription. The three great obstacles to Italian unity—the foreign dynasties, the Papacy, the spirit of locality—were for the moment broken in the great movement of the French Empire. Marengo had sealed the fate of Austria in Lombardy, Austerlitz had cleared the Habsburgs out of Venice, a swift and easy campaign drove the Bourbons from Naples. In 1809 the states of the Church were carved into departments and incorporated in the French Empire. Here, then, in the army, in the codes, in the common system of administration, the foundations of a modern Italy were laid. And here the memory of Napoleon was not easily forgotten. Italians knew once more that the race of Michael Angelo had not exhausted its power of breeding prodigious men. They took on fresh courage, conceived new hopes, and were schooled to new virtues. The ablest sons of Italy entered the Civil Service, and threw themselves with zest into all the thrilling problems of a modern administration. The armies of the Empire opened out careers of manly adventure to men whose idleness had been spiced with verses, gossip, and flirtation. Chateaubriand disliked Napoleon, but this is what he says of the French work in Naples: ‘These new monarchies of a military dynasty brought life into a country which had been distinguished by the dying languor of an old race.’ And again: ‘We brought to Rome the germ of administration. Napoleon is great because he restored, enlightened, and administered Italy in a superior way.’ It should be remembered that Italy was spared some of the worst afflictions of the great war. It was not the main road to Austria or Russia, and the kingdom of Naples, owing to its geographical position, was immune from the military visitation which brought such financial disaster to the kingdom of Westphalia. With true insight into Italian character, Napoleon took care that some compensation should be afforded for the disappearance of the Princes. He sent Prince Borghese to hold court at Turin, while Eugène represented the Empire in Milan, Elise in Florence, and Murat in Naples. It was a design that the heir to the Empire should reside in Rome. But a closer study of Napoleon’s correspondence reveals the fact that Italy was not an end but a means. The possession of this convenient peninsula opens out the route to Vienna, Constantinople, and Cairo. The successive acquisitions of territory were determined not by a consideration of the interests of the Italians, but by a strict calculus of their utility to the diplomatic and military scheme of the Master of France. The Italian Republic was formed after Marengo to give Napoleon the control of the Valley of the Po and to bring France to Ancona, the convenient port for the Dalmatian coast. The annexation of the Papal States did not present itself as the consequence of any lofty view as to the incompatibility of spiritual functions and temporal government, though this is urged more than once in the Imperial Correspondence. Rather it was due to the fact that every sovereign of Italy must join the continental blockade or fall. When twelve duchies were created out of the Venetian territory to serve as an endowment for French generals, the Italians felt aggrieved and their complaints were forwarded to Paris. What did Napoleon reply? ‘The duchies ought to be the exclusive recompense of my soldiers. Doubtless I have treated Venice as a conquered country, but how have I obtained Venice except by conquest? You must not depart too far from this idea. When the fruits of victory have been realized, I shall behave as a good sovereign if they behave as good subjects. I forbid you ever to encourage a hope that an Italian or a Venetian may be promoted to any of the duchies.’ Nor was it from a sympathy with the principle of nationality that Napoleon encouraged the aspirations of the Poles. ‘I wish in Poland,’ he said to Narbonne, ‘a camp and not a forum. . . . The whole problem consists in exciting the national fibre of the Poles without awakening the liberal fibre.’ In other words, the Polish chivalry must be launched against Russia, and yet no encouragement must be given to that ancient spirit of freedom and anarchy which was the characteristic of the old Polish Constitution.
The Grand Empire was in fact a coalition against England, rather than a contrivance designed for the benefit of the peoples who were swept into it. The Belgians, an unwarlike, ultramontane population of manufacturers and peasants, who during the early period of the Consulate had enjoyed the benefits bestowed by a wise and equable administration, were alienated by the conscription, by the blockade, and above all by the treatment which the French government meted out to the Pope. They had revolted against the centralizing policy of Joseph II, but here was a system of centralization stricter than the Austrian, and involving among its incidents injury to the Catholic conscience and the ruin of Antwerp. For the Dutch, whose life-blood was free trade, the results of the continental system were even more distressing, and bitter memories were left of the Napoleonic Administration. This proud, obstinate, and simple race had, until the storm of the French Revolution burst upon it, conserved the aristocratic federalism of its great age. It had ceased to be a home of scholars or a laboratory of thought, its commerce had dwindled, and its colonies were torn from it during the war. In no quarter were national interests more deliberately sacrificed to the military needs of the Empire. Louis, the Emperor’s brother, who was charged with the government of the country in 1806, conceived it to be his primary duty to forward the interests of his Dutch subjects. He was not a man of robust health or tenacious will, he had little personal charm, and he never learnt to pronounce the Dutch language, but he was conscientious, well-meaning, and far above the general level of ability. If he had been left to himself he would have carried out great improvements in Holland, and his dynasty would have struck root. But he was reminded that he was a French prince above all things, and that his policy was subject to the general convenience of the Empire. ‘Holland in reality is only a part of France. We may define the country by saying that it is the alluvion of the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt—that is to say of the great arteries of the Empire. The nullity of its customs, the disposition of its agents, and the spirit of its inhabitants, which tends always to a fraudulent commerce with England—all this imposes on us the duty of interdicting to it the commerce of the Rhine and the Weser.’ A series of brutal reproofs conceived in this spirit drove Louis from the throne which he could no longer occupy with self-respect, and in 1810 Holland was incorporated in the Empire.
‘You know history,’ said Napoleon to Villemain; ‘are you not struck with the resemblances between my government and that of Diocletian—its close far-reaching network, these all-pervading imperial eyes, the omnipotence of the civil authority in a military empire?’ The French empire was no doubt conceived upon the Roman model, and followed the main lines of the Roman political geometry. Europe again witnessed a vast area submitted to a common law, administered by a great centralized bureaucracy, and obedient to the will of a single master. Poles and Illyrians, Dutchmen and Germans, Italians and Belgians, worked under the common yoke. It was part of the settled policy to accelerate a fusion of the heterogeneous races. A contingent of skilled Illyrian seamen were ordered to Toulon, Dutch officers were stationed in France, while Frenchmen took over their commands in Holland. Whenever a new country was annexed, lists would be prepared of natives suitable for the Senate, or the Legislature, or the Council of State and its satellite bodies. ‘London,’ said Napoleon, ‘is the corner of the world, Paris is the centre.’ Representatives from Piedmont, Tuscany, and Rome, from Belgium, Holland, and the Hanseatic departments in Germany, might be seen in the capital assisting in the task of imperial administration. The spread of the French language was actively encouraged, not only by means of the Press and the schools, but also by travelling companies of comedians. Italian and German mothers who were ambitious for their sons sent them to France to learn the law and the language of the conqueror. German professors began to dissert upon the codes, the printing presses of Italy began to turn out works upon the art of war, which had again become interesting. Only in Spain was there entire insensibility to the civilization of the Empire and a complete abhorrence of French rule.
The foundations of Empire were unsound. Each acquisition of territory was a move in the game of conquest, each new dependency a fresh plate in the armour of a warlike Empire. Thus it was the principal mission of Holland to contribute seamen and naval arsenals; of Venice, endowments for French marshals; of all and every state, forts and tribute and conscripts. Of such an empire as this despotism was the soul and delation the shadow. Political interference thwarted the administration of justice, and abased the honour of the law. A mayor of Antwerp, an elderly and respected man, was brought before the assize court of Brussels on a charge of embezzlement. The accuser was the French commissioner of police, and the motive of the charge a private grudge arising from a woman’s quarrel. After a long trial, and in spite of the ingenuity of an unscrupulous prosecution, the mayor was honourably acquitted, amid the plaudits of his fellow-citizens. But the illuminations of Antwerp were premature, and the lovers of justice were to learn that though the good sense of a Belgian jury might foil the malevolence of a French police officer, it was of no account in the eyes of the Master of Europe. Napoleon, campaigning in Germany, heard of the occurrence, viewed it as a French disaster, and ordered the old man to be tried a second time before a different court and in another region. The prefect of the department protested and resigned; the Senate of France murmured and obeyed. Under the authority of a senatus-consult the innocent man was haled off to a prison in Douai, and there expired, his end hastened by shame, maltreatment, indignation, and surprise, before the servility of the local jury could be put to the proof.
Where the pocket of the administration was touched, the chances of a litigant were desperate. A government creditor might as well expect to recover the whole of his debt from the imperial administration, as a deserter from the colours to receive the Legion of Honour from one of Davout’s military tribunals. Great interests were systematically neglected and misunderstood, the interest of commerce on the one hand, of religion on the other. ‘Commerce dries up the soul, the merchant has neither faith nor country’; and to this distrust of commerce as a source of patriotic indifference or a bond of international amity Napoleon added an ignorance of its proper function and anatomy. That trade routes could be altered at will and the current of economic demand forcibly diverted from one channel to another, was part of the imperial philosophy which regarded commercial exchange as something sterile and light in the balance when compared with the solid interests of the farm and the factory. The magnet of Empire could entice the wealth of the East to Trieste; tariff walls could shut the Rhine provinces from Germany, build up the manufacturing power of the mainland, and liberate Europe from its dependence on colonial supplies. In the sphere of religion the old doctrine of Gallicanism was revived, as if a national principle could be adapted to a cosmopolitan Empire and a mutinous Church.
The permanence of the Napoleonic fabric depended on the degree to which the policy of the Emperor could be adjusted to the real interests of France. But, as Talleyrand saw in 1808, the policy of Napoleon was becoming increasingly dissociated from the opinion and the tradition of France. The element of hyperbole and extravagance, the scheme of Oriental conquest sheathed in the treaty of Tilsit, the rash and fatal plunge into Spain, opened the eyes of thinking men to the real character of Napoleon’s conduct of affairs. And meanwhile, both in the army and in the administration, the momentum and the loyalty were being slowly impaired. It has been remarked by Chaptal how, as the despotic habit grew upon him, Napoleon became increasingly impatient of able and independent men. The spirit of free and vigorous criticism which had marked the early debates in the Council of State was silenced under the stiff etiquette of the Empire. Good wholesome advice was systematically neglected; the conduct of foreign affairs passed from Talleyrand to Champagny, and the typical servant of the later imperial time is Maret, the Duke of Bassano, a fluent and obedient scribe. As the spirit of servility grew, the administration became filled up with men of royalist antecedents and leanings, unaffected by the momentum of the Empire and unconcerned at its fall. The spirit of moderation and good sense which had been overcome by the brilliant romance of the early victories revolted against the extravagance which marked the later designs. If the wish of France could have been translated into words, it would have been for a continuation of the Empire without the restless egotism of Napoleon. And yet, when the Empire fell, the imagination of the world was touched by the sudden catastrophe of so much greatness. Here, in the field of action, were events more wonderful than the Arabian Nights, the matter for a thousand poems, histories, and romances. Aliens felt the spell as well as natives; those whose eyes had once beheld the conqueror in his famous little three-cornered hat, treasured the vision of him as the chief prize of memory. A German Jew, a native of the Grand Duchy of Berg, saw the Emperor once in 1811 as he rode into Düsseldorf, and long afterwards, having risen to fame for his bitter and passionate lyrics, thus described the great experience of his boyhood: ‘It was in that very avenue of the court garden at Düsseldorf. As I pressed through the gaping crowd, thinking of the doughty deeds and battles which Monsieur Le Grand had drummed to me, my heart beat the “general march” —yet at the same time I thought of the police regulation, that no one should dare ride through the avenue under penalty of a fine of five thalers. And the Emperor with his retinue rode directly through the avenue. The trembling leaves bowed towards him as he advanced, the sunbeams quivered, frightened, yet curious, through the green leaves, and in the blue heaven above there swam visibly a golden star. The Emperor wore his invisible-green uniform and the little world-renowned hat. He rode a white steed, which stepped with such calm pride, so confidently, so nobly—had I then been Crown Prince of Prussia I would have envied that steed. Carelessly, almost lazily, sat the Emperor, holding his rein with one hand, and with the other good-naturedly patting the horse’s neck. It was a sunny, marble hand, a mighty hand—one of those two hands which bound fast the many-headed monster of anarchy, and ordered the war of races—and it good-naturedly patted the horse’s neck. Even the face had that hue which we find in the marble of Greek and Roman busts; the traits were as nobly cut as in the antique, and on that face was written, “Thou shalt have no Gods before me”. A smile, which warmed and soothed every heart, flitted over the lips—and yet all knew that those lips needed but to whistle-et la Prusse n’existait plus; those lips needed but to whistle—and the entire clergy would have stopped their ringing and singing; those lips needed but to whistle—and the entire Holy Roman Empire would have danced. And those lips smiled and the eye smiled too. It was an eye clear as heaven; it could read the hearts of men, it saw at a glance all the things of this world, while we others see them only one by one and by their coloured shadows. The brow was not so clear, the phantoms of future battles were nestling there; there was a quiver which swept over that brow, and those were the creative thoughts, the great seven-mile-boot thoughts, wherewith the spirit of the Emperor strode invisibly over the world—and I believe that every one of those thoughts would have given to a German author full material wherewith to write, all the days of his life.
‘The Emperor rode quietly straight through the avenue. No policeman opposed him; proudly, on snorting horses and laden with gold and jewels, rode his retinue; the drums were beating, the trumpets were sounding; close to me the wild Aloysius was muttering his general’s name; not far away the drunken Gumpertz was grumbling, and the people shouted with a thousand voices, “Long live the Emperor!” ’
(Continued in Part 4)
