PREPARATIONS FOR HOSTILITY.
Peace had scarcely been proclaimed when the note of war was again heard in the distance; when a little cloud in the horizon betokened the rising of another furious storm. In the month of December the French government had sent a naval force, under General Le Clerc, for the purpose of recovering St. Domingo and Guadaloupe from the revolted negroes; and the English government sent Admiral Mitchell with seven sail of the line to watch his motions. But England had more cogent reasons for displeasure in the following year. At that time the interference and intrigues of the first consul were manifested in various parts of Europe. Thus, in the month of March, he presided over a meeting at which a treaty was signed with the Cisalpine republic, preparatory to his assuming the iron crown, in imitation of Charlemagne; and he not only procured the cession of Louisiana, but the duchy of Parma, from Spain. Disputes likewise having arisen respecting the formation of a new constitution in Switzerland, and the mediation of the first consul being solicited, the diet was dissolved by his troops, the Swiss patriots were arrested, and the independence of the country annihilated by the power on which it relied for protection. In the course of the year, moreover, Piedmont was turned into a provincial appendage to France; and in October the Spanish king, at the suggestion of the French government, annexed all the property of the Maltese knights in his dominion to his royal domains, by which act the treaty of Amiens was to a certain degree violated. All these events were indications of a future rupture; and another grand provocative to the rupture was the fierce and systematic hostility displayed by Napoleon against the commerce of Great Britain. Instead of being allowed, through the return of peace, to flow into its old channels, it was still more impeded in France and in the countries where the French held sway than it had been during the war. Every month, or week, indeed, the first consul made some new encroachment or advanced some new claim; while on the other hand he pretended to bind England to the strict observance of every article in the treaty of Amiens which was against her, and insisted on the immediate evacuation of Malta, the Cape of Good Hope, and of every place she had agreed to restore. It was, in truth, fully manifested, before the close of the year, that the treaty of Amiens was an experiment that had signally failed, and that recourse, at no distant day, would be again had to the sword to decide the contest for superiority between the two countries of France and England.
Nor was the conduct of Napoleon in Paris less indicative of war; ambition being conspicuous in every movement. Some of his measures were prudent and salutary, but many of them were unprincipled, unjust, and even criminal. His aim was to be the despot and sole ruler of France; not to be the venerated head of a great and free people. His first act exhibited the despot in lively characters. This was to put the press in chains: Fouche, with an army of “Arguses and police servants, mastered the domain of thought itself;” and when conspiracies arose from this arbitrary measure, then the executioner was called in to do his fearful work. At the same time Napoleon established special tribunals throughout the kingdom, composed of judges of his own appointment. His despotism extended itself to the civil code, and even to religion and the church. By his fiat, there was to be but one liturgy and one catechism in all France! During this year, indeed, Napoleon was approaching his object at a rapid pace. He already ventured to attack the idol of the revolutionary French, the fundamental principle of the revolution, that of equality, by proposing and carrying a law for the creation of a legion of honour—that is, for establishing a new nobility in the place of that which the revolutionists had destroyed, from the one end of France to the other. Public opinion declared loudly against this institution, but Napoleon was sufficiently strong to defy public opinion. Nay, about the same time, soon after the peace of Amiens, Chabot proposed that a signal national acknowledgment should be made to him, and he was created consul for life. The throne was, therefore, visibly rising over the grave of the republic—one step more, and Napoleon would be sitting thereon in all the pride and pomp of Imperial majesty. That step, as will be hereafter seen, was taken boldly and successfully. France again submitted to the rule of one man, a man whose little finger proved to be thicker than the loins of the monarchs of the house of Bourbon.