The credit of the Prussian regeneration belongs mainly to the great minister, the Baron vom Stein (1757-1831), and in the second place to the Chancellor Hardenberg (1750-1822), both of whom felt the influence of English ideas and of the French philosophy of the eighteenth century. On 9 October, 1807, Stein issued at Memel the famous Edict of Emancipation, which abolished the institution of serfdom throughout Prussia. Free trade in land was established, and land was left free to pass from hand to hand and class to class. Thus the Prussian peasants became personally free, although they were still bound to make fixed payments to their lords as rent. Moreover, all occupations and professions were thrown open to noble, commoner, and peasant alike. Stein's second important step was to strengthen the cabinet and to introduce sweeping changes in the conduct of public business, reforms too complicated and too technical to receive detailed explanation in this place. His third great measure was the grant (19 November, 1808) of local self-government, on liberal yet practical lines, to all Prussian towns and villages with a population in excess of 800. Stein undoubtedly intended the last law to be a corner-stone in the edifice of national constitutional government which he longed to erect in his country, but in this respect his plans were thwarted and Prussia remained another two generations without a written constitution. In 1811 Hardenberg continued the reform of the condition of the peasants by making them absolute owners of part of their holdings, the landlords obtaining the rest as partial compensation for their lost feudal and servile dues. During the same period, the army was likewise reorganized by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau; compulsory universal service was introduced, while the condition imposed by Napoleon that the army should not exceed 42,000 men was practically evaded by replacing each body of 42,000 men by another of the same size as soon as the first was fairly versed in military affairs. In this way every able-bodied male Prussian was in preparation for an expected War of Liberation.
Of course Napoleon had some idea of what was happening in Prussia: he protested, he threatened, he actually succeeded late in 1808 in securing the dismissal of Stein. But the redoubtable Prussian reformer spent the next three years in trying to fan the popular flame in Austria and thence betook himself to Russia to poison the ear and mind of the Tsar Alexander against the emperor of the French. In the meantime Napoleon was far too busy with other matters to give thorough attention to the continued development of the popular reforms in Prussia. There the national spirit burned ever brighter through the exertions of patriotic societies, such as the Tugendbund, or "League of Virtue," through the writings of men like Fichte and Arndt, and, perhaps most permanently of all, through the wonderful educational reforms, which, associated indissolubly with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), gave to Prussia the basis of her present common- school system and to the world the great University of Berlin (1809).
It was no longer true that the French had a monopoly of the blessed principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, for which to fight. It was no longer a fact that they were the only nation defending their homes, their lands, and their rights. By 1810 the despotism of Napoleon was more selfish and more directly galling to the Prussian people than had been the threatened tyranny of Austrian and Prussian monarchs to an emancipated French nation in the dark days of 1792. Prussia was bankrupt, shorn of half her provinces, enduring the quartering of foreign soldiers, and suffering the ruin of her crops and the paralysis of her trade. Thanks to the Continental System, which had been none of their doing, the Prussian people witnessed the decay of their seaports, the rotting of their ships in their harbors, paid exorbitant prices for tobacco, and denied themselves sugar, coffee, and spices. They were grumbling and getting into a temper that boded ill to the author of their injuries.
[Sidenote: Liberalism in Spain]
[Sidenote: The Spanish Constitution of 1812]
Meanwhile the warfare in Spain dragged on. In 1812 Wellington with his allied British and Spanish troops won the great victory of Salamanca, captured Madrid, and drove Joseph and the French north to Valencia. In the same year radical groups of Spaniards, who had learned revolutionary doctrines from the French, assembled at Cadiz and drafted a constitution for what they hoped would be their regenerated country. This written constitution, next in age to the American and the French, was more radical than either and long served as a model for liberal constitutions throughout southern Europe. After a preamble in honor of the "old fundamental laws of this monarchy," the constitution laid down the very principle of the Revolution: "Sovereignty is vested essentially in the nation, and accordingly it is to the nation exclusively that the right of making its fundamental laws belongs." The legislative power was intrusted to the Cortes, a single-chamber parliament elected for two years by indirect universal suffrage. The executive power was given to the king to be exercised by his ministers. The king could affix a suspensive veto to the acts of the Cortes. The constitution further proclaimed the principles of individual liberty and legal equality and sought to abolish the old régime root and branch: provision was made for a thorough reorganization of courts, local administration, taxation, the army, and public education. While the framers of the constitution affirmed that "the religion of the Spanish nation is and always will be the Apostolic Church of Rome, the only true Church," they persisted in decreeing the suppression of the Inquisition and the secularization of ecclesiastical property. That such a radical constitution would be understood and championed forthwith by the whole Spanish people, only the most confirmed and fanatical optimist could believe, but, on the other hand, it was certain that the Spaniards as a nation were resolved that the Continental System and the Bonaparte family must go. They might sacrifice equality but not national liberty.
At last the four fateful defects in the Napoleonic Empire,—the character of Napoleon himself, the nature of his army, the Continental System, and the rise of nationalism,—were painfully in evidence. The drama thenceforth led irresistibly through two terrible acts—the Russian campaign and the Battle of the Nations—to the dénouement in the emperor's abdication and to a sorry epilogue in Waterloo.
[Sidenote: Strained Relations between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander]
It was the rupture between Napoleon and the Tsar Alexander that precipitated the disasters. A number of events which transpired between the celebrated meeting at Tilsit in 1807 and the memorable year of 1812 made a rupture inevitable. Tilsit had purported to divide the world between the two emperors, but Alexander, as junior partner in the firm, soon found that his chief function was to assist Napoleon in bringing all western and central Europe under the domination of the French Empire while he himself was allowed by no means a free rein in dealing with his own country's hereditary enemies—Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. To be sure, Alexander had wrested Finland from Sweden (1809), but Napoleon's forcing of Sweden into a war with Great Britain (1810-1812), presumably as an ally of Russia as well as of France, had prevented him from extending his territory further in that direction. Then, too, the revival of a Polish state under the name of the grand-duchy of Warsaw and under French protection was a thorn in his flesh, which became all the more painful, more irritating, when it was enlarged after the Austrian War of 1809. Finally, Alexander's warfare against Turkey was constantly handicapped by French diplomacy, so that when the treaty of Bucharest was at length concluded (28 May, 1812) it was due to British rather than to French assistance that Russia extended her southern boundary to the River Pruth. Alexander was particularly piqued when Napoleon dethroned one of the tsar's relatives in Oldenburg and arbitrarily annexed that duchy to the French Empire, and he was deeply chagrined when the marriage of his ally with a Habsburg archduchess seemed to cement the bonds between France and Austria.
All these political differences might conceivably have been adjusted, had it not been for the economic breach which the Continental System ever widened. Russia, at that time almost exclusively an agricultural country, had special need of British imports, and the tsar, a sympathetic, kind-hearted man, could not endure the suffering and protests of his people. The result was a gradual suspension of the rigors of the Continental System in Russia and the eventual return to normal trade relations as they had existed prior to Tilsit. This simple fact Napoleon could not and would not recognize. "Russia's partial abandonment of the Continental System was not merely a pretext but the real ground of the war. Napoleon had no alternative between fighting for his system and abandoning the only method open to him of carrying on war against England."
[Sidenote: Preparations for War between France and Russia]