CHAPTER I.
Introduction.
The hostility of the European aristocracy caused the enthusiasm of republican France to take a military direction, and forced that powerful nation into a course of policy which, however outrageous it might appear, was in reality one of necessity. Up to the treaty of Tilsit, the wars of France were essentially defensive; for the bloody contest that wasted the continent so many years was not a struggle for pre-eminence between ambitious powers, not a dispute for some accession of territory, nor for the political ascendancy of one or other nation, but a deadly conflict to determine whether aristocracy or democracy should predominate; whether equality or privilege should henceforth be the principle of European governments.
The French revolution was pushed into existence before the hour of its natural birth. The power of the aristocratic principle was too vigorous and too much identified with that of the monarchical principle, to be successfully resisted by a virtuous democratic effort, much less could it be overthrown by a democracy rioting in innocent blood, and menacing destruction to political and religious establishments, the growth of centuries, somewhat decayed indeed, yet scarcely showing their grey hairs. The first military events of the revolution, the disaffection of Toulon and Lyons, the civil war of La Vendee, the feeble, although successful resistance made to the duke of Brunswick’s invasion, and the frequent and violent change of rulers whose fall none regretted, were all proofs that the French revolution, intrinsically too feeble to sustain the physical and moral force pressing it down, was fast sinking when the wonderful genius of Buonaparte, baffling all reasonable calculation, raised and fixed it on the basis of victory, the only one capable of supporting the crude production.
Sensible, however, that the cause he upheld was not sufficiently in unison with the feelings of the age, Napoleon’s first care was to disarm or neutralize monarchical and sacerdotal enmity, by restoring a church establishment, and by becoming a monarch himself. Once a sovereign, his vigorous character, his pursuits, his talents, and the critical nature of the times, inevitably rendered him a despotic one; yet while he sacrificed political liberty, which to the great bulk of mankind has never been more than a pleasing sound, he cherished with the utmost care political equality, a sensible good, that produces increasing satisfaction as it descends in the scale of society; but this, the real principle of his government, the secret of his popularity, made him the people’s monarch, not the sovereign of the aristocracy; hence, Mr. Pitt called him, “the child and the champion of democracy,” a truth as evident as that Mr. Pitt and his successors were the children and the champions of aristocracy; hence also the privileged classes of Europe consistently transferred their natural and implacable hatred of the French revolution to his person, for they saw that in him innovation had found a protector; that he alone had given pre-eminence to a system so hateful to them, and that he really was what he called himself, “the State.”
The treaty of Tilsit, therefore, although it placed Napoleon in a commanding situation with regard to the potentates of Europe, unmasked the real nature of the war, and brought him and England, the respective champions of equality and privilege, into more direct contact; peace could not be between them while both were strong, and all that the French emperor had hitherto gained only enabled him to choose his future field of battle.
When the catastrophe of Trafalgar forbade him to think of invading England, his fertile genius conceived the plan of sapping her naval and commercial strength, by depriving her of the continental market for her manufactured goods; he prohibited the reception of English wares in any part of the continent, and he exacted from allies and dependants the most rigid compliance with his orders; but this “continental system,” as it was called, became inoperative when French troops were not present to enforce his commands. It was thus in Portugal, where British influence was really paramount, although the terror inspired by the French arms seemed at times to render this doubtful; fear however is momentary, self-interest lasting, and Portugal was but an unguarded province of England.
From Portugal and Gibraltar, English goods freely passed into Spain; and to check this traffic by force was not easy, and otherwise impossible. Spain stood nearly in the same position with regard to France that Portugal did to England; a warm feeling of friendship Monsieur de Champagny’s Report, 21st Oct. 1807. for the enemy of Great Britain was the natural consequence of the unjust seizure of the Spanish frigates in a time of peace; but although this rendered the French cause popular in Spain, and that the court of Madrid was from weakness subservient to the French Emperor, nothing could induce the people to refrain from a profitable contraband trade; they would not pay that respect to the wishes of a foreign power, which they refused to the regulations of their own government; neither was the aristocratical enmity to Napoleon asleep in Spain. A proclamation issued by the Prince of Peace previous to the battle of Jena, although hastily recalled when the result of that conflict was known, sufficiently indicated the tenure upon which the friendship of the Spanish court was to be held.
Napoleon, in Las Casas, vol. ii. 4th part.
This state of affairs drew the French Emperor’s attention towards the Peninsula; a chain of remarkable circumstances fixed it there, and induced him to remove the reigning family, and to place his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain. He thought that the people of that country, sick of an effete government, would be quiescent under such a change; and although it should prove otherwise, the confidence he reposed in his own fortune, unrivalled talents, and vast power, made him disregard the consequences, while the cravings of his military and political system, the danger to be apprehended from the vicinity of a Bourbon dynasty, and above all the temptations offered by a miraculous folly which outrun even his desires, urged him to a deed, that well accepted by the people of the Peninsula, would have proved beneficial; but being enforced contrary to their wishes, was unhallowed either by justice or benevolence.
In an evil hour, for his own greatness and the happiness of others, he commenced this fatal project; founded in violence, executed with fraud and cruelty, it spread desolation through the fairest portions of the Peninsula; it was calamitous to France and destructive to himself. The conflict between his hardy veterans and the bloody vindictive race he insulted, assumed a character of unmitigated ferocity disgraceful to human nature; for the Spaniards did not fail to defend their just cause with hereditary cruelty, and the French army struck a terrible balance of barbarous actions.
Napoleon observed with surprise the unexpected energy of the people, and bent his whole force to the attainment of his object; while England coming to the assistance of the Peninsula employed all her resources to frustrate his efforts. Thus the two leading nations of the world were brought into contact at a moment when both were disturbed by angry passions, eager for great events, and possessed of surprising power.
The extent and population of the French empire, including the kingdom of Italy, the confederation of the Rhine, the Swiss Cantons, the Duchy of Warsaw, and the dependent states of Holland and Naples, enabled Buonaparte through the medium of the conscription to array an army, in number nearly equal to the great host that followed the Persian of old against Greece; like that multitude also his troops were gathered from many nations, but they were trained in a Roman discipline, and ruled by a Carthaginian genius. The organization[1] of Napoleon’s army was simple, the administration vigorous, the manipulations well contrived. The French officers, accustomed to success, were bold, enterprising, of great reputation, and feared accordingly. By a combination of discipline and moral excitement, admirably adapted to the mixed nature of his troops, the Emperor had created a power that appeared to be resistless, and, in truth, it would have been so, if applied to one great object at a time; but this the ambition of the man, or rather the force of circumstances, would not permit.
Exposé de l’Empire, 1807-8-9-13.
Napoleon’s Memoirs, Las Casas, 7th part.
Lord Collingwood’s letters, vide [Appendix.]
The ships of France were chained up in her harbours, and her naval strength was rebuked, but not destroyed; inexhaustible resources for building vessels, vast marine establishments, a coast line of many thousand miles, and the creative genius of Napoleon were nursing up a navy, formidable as a secondary arm; and the war then pending between the United States and Great Britain promised to nurture its growth, and to increase its efficacy.
Exposé, 1808-9. Napoleon, in Las Casas, vol. ii. 4th part.
Maritime commerce was indeed fainting in France, but her internal and continental traffic was robust; her manufactures were rapidly improving; her debt was small; her financial operations conducted on a prudent plan, and with exact economy. Ibid. 6th part. The supplies were all raised within the year without any very great pressure of taxation, and from a sound metallic currency; thus there seemed to be no reasonable doubt, that any war undertaken by Napoleon might be by him brought to a favourable termination.
On the other hand, England, omnipotent at sea, was little regarded as a military power. Her enormous debt was yearly increasing in an accelerated ratio; and this necessary consequence of anticipating the resources of the country, and dealing in a factitious currency, was fast eating into the vital strength of the state; for although the merchants and great manufacturers were thriving from the accidental circumstances of the times, the labourers were suffering and degenerating in character; pauperism and its sure attendant crime were spreading over the land, and the population was fast splitting into distinct classes,—the one rich and arbitrary, the other poor and discontented: the former composed of those who profited, the latter of those who suffered by the war. Of Ireland it is unnecessary to speak; her wrongs and her misery, peculiar and unparalleled, are too well known, and too little regarded, to call for remark.
This general comparative statement, so favourable to France, would however be a false criterion of the relative strength of the belligerents, with regard to the approaching struggle in the Peninsula. A cause manifestly unjust is a heavy weight upon the operations of a general: it reconciles men to desertion—it sanctifies want of zeal—is a pretext for cowardice—renders hardships more irksome, dangers more obnoxious, and glory less satisfactory to the mind of the soldier. Now the invasion of the Peninsula, whatever might have been its real original, was an act of violence on the part of Napoleon repugnant to the feelings of mankind. The French armies were burthened with a sense of its iniquity, the British troops exhilarated by a contrary sentiment. All the continental nations had smarted under the sword of Napoleon, but, with the exception of Prussia, none were crushed; a common feeling of humiliation, the hope of revenge, and the ready subsidies of England, were bonds of union among their governments stronger than the most solemn treaties. France could only calculate on their fears, England was secure in their self-love.
The hatred to what were called French principles was at this period in full activity. The privileged classes of every country hated Napoleon, because his genius had given stability to the institutions that grew out of the revolution, because his victories had baffled their calculations, and shaken their hold of power. As the chief of revolutionary France he was constrained to continue his career until the final accomplishment of her destiny, and this necessity, overlooked by the great bulk of mankind, afforded plausible ground for imputing insatiable ambition to the French government and to the French nation, of which ample use was made. Rapacity, insolence, injustice, cruelty, even cowardice, were said to be inseparable from the character of a Frenchman; and, as if such vices were nowhere else to be found, it was more than insinuated that all the enemies of France were inherently virtuous and disinterested. Unhappily history is but a record of crimes, and it is not wonderful that the arrogance of men, buoyed up by a spring-tide of military glory, should, as well among allies, as among vanquished enemies, have produced sufficient disgust to ensure a ready belief in any accusation, however false and absurd.
Napoleon was the contriver and the sole support of a political system that required time and victory to consolidate; he was the connecting link between the new interests of mankind and what of the old were left in a state of vigour; he held them together strongly, but he was no favourite with either, and consequently in danger from both. His power, unsanctified by time, depended not less upon delicate management than upon vigorous exercise; he had to fix the foundations of, as well as to defend, an empire, and he may be said to have been rather peremptory than despotic. There were points of administration with which he durst not meddle even wisely, much less arbitrarily; customs, prejudices, and the dregs of the revolutionary licence interfered with his policy, and rendered it complicated and difficult. It was not so with his inveterate adversaries; the delusion of parliamentary representation enabled the English government safely to exercise an unlimited power over the persons and the property of the nation, and through the influence of an active and corrupt press they exercised nearly the same power over the public mind.
The vast commerce of England, penetrating by a thousand channels (open or secret) as it were into every house on the face of the globe, supplied unequalled sources of intelligence. The spirit of traffic, which seldom acknowledges the ties of country, was universally on the side of Great Britain, and those twin curses, paper-money and public credit, so truly described as “strength in the beginning but weakness in the end,” were recklessly used by statesmen whose policy regarded not the interests of posterity. Such were the adventitious causes of England’s power; and her natural, legitimate resources were many and great.
If any credit is to be given to the census, the increasing population of the United Kingdom, amounted at this period to nearly twenty millions: France reckoned but twenty-seven millions when Frederick the Great declared that if he were her king, “not a gun should be fired in Europe without his leave.”
The French army was undoubtedly very formidable from numbers, discipline, skill, and bravery; but contrary to the general opinion, the British army was inferior to it in none of these points save the first, and in discipline it was superior, because a national army will always bear a sterner code than a mixed force will suffer. With the latter, the military not the moral crimes can be punished; men will submit to death for a breach of great regulations which they know by experience to be useful, but the constant restraint of petty though wholesome rules they will escape from by desertion, or resist by mutiny, when the ties of custom and country are removed; for the disgrace of bad conduct attaches not to them, but to the nation under whose colours they serve; great indeed is that genius that can keep men of different nations firm to their colours, and preserve a rigid discipline at the same time. Napoleon’s military system was, from this cause, inferior to the British, which, if it be purely administered, combines the solidity of the Germans with the rapidity of the French, excluding the mechanical dulness of the one, and the dangerous vivacity of the other; yet, before the campaign in the Peninsula had proved its excellence in every branch of war, the English army was absurdly under-rated in foreign countries, and absolutely despised in its own. It was reasonable to suppose that it did not possess that facility of moving in large bodies which long practice had given to the French; but the individual soldier was (and is still) most falsely stigmatized as deficient in intelligence and activity, the officers ridiculed, and the idea that a British could cope with a French army, even for a single campaign, considered chimerical.
The English are a people very subject to receive and to cherish false impressions; proud of their credulity as if it were a virtue, the majority will adopt any fallacy, and cling to it with a tenacity proportioned to its grossness. Thus an ignorant contempt for the British soldiery had been long entertained, before the ill success of the expeditions in 1794 and 1799 appeared to justify the general prejudice. The true cause of those failures was not traced, and the excellent discipline afterwards introduced and perfected by the duke of York was despised. England, both at home and abroad, was, in 1808, scorned as a military power, when she possessed, without a frontier to swallow up large armies in expensive fortresses, at least two hundred thousand[2] of the best equipped and best disciplined soldiers in the universe, together with an immense recruiting establishment, and through the medium of the militia, the power of drawing upon the population without limit. It is true that of this number many were necessarily employed in the defence of the colonies, but enough remained to compose a disposable force greater than that with which Napoleon won the battle of Austerlitz, and double that with which he conquered Italy. In all the materials of war, the superior ingenuity and skill of the English mechanics were visible, and that intellectual power that distinguishes Great Britain amongst the nations, in science, arts, and literature, was not wanting to her generals in the hour of danger.