Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

by H. Morse Stephens

These great reforms in law, in finance, and in education outlasted Napoleon’s reconstitution of Europe. Their effect spread far beyond the actual limits of France. As a direct result of the French Revolution serfdom disappeared in Switzerland, in Belgium, and in Northern Italy. Napoleon carried on the work further to the east. In the Kingdom of Westphalia, and in all the states of Germany which he created or enlarged, serfdom was entirely abolished. The feudal system was suppressed wherever the influence of the French extended. Maximilian Joseph, King of Bavaria, and his minister, Montgelas, carried out the principles of the French Revolution by abolishing the privileges of the nobility and the clergy. In every direction the French codes were either adopted or imitated; the course of justice was made simple and cheap; education was organised; and the economical rules of the French administration introduced. In more distant countries the same reforms were carried out. By the constitution of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw the Polish serfs, perhaps the most miserable of all serfs, were freed from their bondage, and absolute equality before the law decreed. In Naples Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, and in Spain Joseph Bonaparte by himself, carried out the same great reforms; and though the reaction after 1815 tended to replace matters on their former footing, it proved to be impossible to restore the old evils in their entirety. Not less admirable was Napoleon’s vindication of the great principle of religious toleration. In Catholic states such as Bavaria Protestants received the priceless boon of religious liberty; in Protestant states like Saxony it was the Catholics who profited by the broad-mindedness of the French Emperor; and in every country the Jews were relieved from the degrading position in which they had been kept. In military organisation the reforms which had made the French army master of the world were introduced by Napoleon. With the disappearance of the petty German states disappeared also the feudal armies. Conscription may, indeed, appear a heavy burden on a state, but in Germany, at any rate, it created for the first time national armies to take the place of the ill-disciplined mercenaries who had hitherto been hired by the petty princes.

The Organisation of Prussia.

The most curious feature in the creation of a new Germany, which was the result of Napoleon’s reforms as much as of his victories, was the formation of new Prussia. In Germany proper, that is, in Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe, reforms were introduced under French supervision, if not always by French agents. In Prussia the reforms came on the initiative of a great minister. The speedy overthrow of the famed Prussian army in the campaign of Jena convinced Prussian statesmen of the necessity for sweeping changes. By the Treaty of Tilsit Prussia was shorn of all the acquisitions in Central Germany which she had received as the price of her consistent neutrality, and was thrust behind the Elbe. On the other side she lost her Polish provinces. Even the small Prussia thus left was occupied by French troops, and was forced to pay a war contribution of a hundred and forty millions as well as to maintain an army of 42,000 men for the service of Napoleon. It would seem that Prussia was to be driven back into the position of a second-rate state, but at this juncture Frederick William III. summoned to his ministry two remarkable men—the Freiherr vom Stein, a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire and a native of Nassau, and Scharnhorst, a Hanoverian officer. Neither of these men were Prussians, but they were both enthusiastic Germans. They believed that Prussia would yet form the key-stone on which German emancipation from the power of Napoleon could be reared. They understood that Prussia must be entirely reconstituted, and that an old-fashioned Prussia could neither combat Napoleon nor lead the new Germany which he had created. Stein, therefore, as Minister of the Interior, adapted the reforms of the French Revolution and of Napoleon to Prussia. He established equality before the law by the abolition of serfdom, he suppressed the territorial privileges of the nobility, and he gave permission to the bourgeois and the peasants to purchase land. He encouraged municipal life by introducing a system of election to municipal offices, and, as far as he could, abolished the social privileges of the nobility. Scharnhorst, as War Minister, reorganised the Prussian army on the French model. He changed it from an entity independent of the people into a national army. Since Prussia was only permitted to maintain an army of 42,000 men, he arranged that as many as possible should obtain a military training by passing through the ranks for a short period. He went further than Napoleon. He did not adopt a system of conscription by which a portion of the population designed by lot should enter the ranks, but insisted that every citizen was bound to military service. Between 1807 and 1810, and the system was continued after his retirement until 1813, Scharnhorst passed a large proportion of the youth of Prussia through the ranks of the army, and thus formed—what Napoleon so greatly needed at the crisis of his career—an effective reserve. It is interesting to observe that it was in the country most maltreated by Napoleon that the French reforms were most successfully initiated. Napoleon perceived the danger, and in 1808 he insisted on the dismissal of Stein, and in 1810 on that of Scharnhorst.

The revival of German national feeling.

It is a curious sequel to the benefits conferred upon Germany by Napoleon directly and by the influence of French principles that their result was to rouse in Germany, for the first time for many centuries, a truly national feeling. This was caused chiefly by the suppression of the Holy Roman Empire, and its being replaced by states large enough to arouse national patriotism; but it was partly due also to a sense of national degradation inspired by the presence of French armies, and to the fact that the benefits conferred were the gift of a foreign sovereign and not the result of national progress. A universal feeling of opposition to the French grew up in the hearts of the German people. The individualist doctrines, which found favour in the eighteenth century and reached their highest expression in philosophers and poets, such as Herder and Goethe, gave way to a new national sentiment, inspired by a new school of poets and political thinkers represented by Körner and Arndt, by Jahn and Friedrich von Gentz. The new spirit was mainly developed among the German youth. Secret societies and clubs were formed to obtain by force the freedom of Germany from the French, and the dissatisfied souls forgot the benefits they had received individually in their resentment at their being granted by France. Austria under the administration of Count Philip Stadion, who was largely inspired by Gentz, endeavoured, in 1809, to take advantage of the revival of German national feeling. But Austria was universally considered as a foreign power whose military prowess was derived from Hungary, and the Emperor Francis in taking the new title of Emperor of Austria gave countenance to this idea. The House of Hapsburg was not regarded as thoroughly German; it was looked on as a foreign dynasty, whose dominions were mainly inhabited by non-German races; its loyalty to the Roman Catholic religion caused it to be suspected by the Protestants; it was blamed for the disorganisation of past centuries; and contemned for its repeated defeats by the French and its selfish policy at the time of the treaties of Campo-Formio and Lunéville.

Prussia, on the other hand, though, like Austria, it was not a truly German state, seemed fitted by history and tradition to embody the idea of German nationality. Even after the defeat of Jena, Frederick the Great and his victory over the French at Rossbach were recalled as distinctively German glories, and the eyes of patriotic Germans were turned to the diminished power of Prussia as the natural lever for the creation of a free Germany. The administrative system of Prussia and its strongly concentrated political theory of the essential unity of the State, as opposed to the new French idea of the omnipotence of the people, which was condemned in German eyes as having led to the absolutism of an adventurer, had always exercised a peculiar fascination over the best intellects of Germany. It was by means of statesmen of foreign birth that Prussia was reorganised and prepared to cope successfully with the power of Napoleon. Stein and Hardenberg, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, York and Lombard were none of them native Prussians; yet they were all in turn attracted into the Prussian service, and were instrumental in bringing about her resurrection as a German power. The war of 1809 first showed Napoleon that he was soon to have a national feeling to deal with in Germany as well as in Spain. While Napoleon was in the neighbourhood of Vienna a Prussian lieutenant of the name of Katt attempted to seize Magdeburg; a Prussian major named Schill pillaged the arsenal and treasury of the Duke of Anhalt, who had often expressed his outspoken admiration for the French Emperor, and invaded Saxony; and the fourth son of the Duke of Brunswick, the heir to the duchy which had been absorbed in the kingdom of Westphalia, raised his Black Legion, which he termed the Army of Vengeance, and carried on a partisan war. Even the person of Napoleon was not safe in Germany. A lad named Staps was shot for imagining an attack on his life at Schönbrunn in 1809, and many other conspiracies were discovered by the French police. Napoleon despised this ebullition of popular feeling in Germany, just as he did in Spain, and the measures which he took against it, such as arbitrary arrests, and the shooting of the bookseller Palm, only exasperated the new national patriotism.

Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise, 2nd April 1810.

The Emperor, as has been said, was a great believer in the hereditary idea, and his not having children to succeed him was more than a personal, it was a political subject of grief to him. The campaign of Wagram had raised him to the height of his power, and he wished to establish his dynasty on a firm foundation. It was therefore for personal, for political, and for European motives, that he resolved on his return from Vienna in 1809 to divorce his wife, the Empress Josephine. It was from no dislike for his wife, but from a stern conviction of political necessity that he took this step. He insisted, that Josephine should preserve her title of Empress, he granted her Malmaison as her palace, with a large income, and he continued his favours to his step-children, Eugène de Beauharnais, and Hortense, the wife of his brother Louis Bonaparte. On the 15th of December 1809 the divorce was pronounced on the ground that the religious marriage, which had taken place on the day before his coronation as Emperor, was not valid because of the absence of witnesses. The Emperor’s first intention was to wed a Russian grand duchess. He was still enamoured of his idea of dividing the world with the Emperor Alexander, and considered that a relationship with that monarch would best ensure his power. But the Emperor Alexander was beginning to throw off his infatuation for Napoleon. He now perceived, that in the alliance he had made, he gave more than he got, and various causes of discontent were sedulously fomented by his Court and his family. It was further the custom of the Russian Court for the mothers to have the chief choice in the disposing of their daughters’ hands. Now the Empress-mother was a princess of the House of Würtemburg, and had imbibed a profound hatred for the French Emperor. She persuaded her son to throw various delays in the path of the Emperor’s desires without actually rejecting his offer. Under these circumstances, Napoleon abruptly changed his mind, and at the suggestion, it is said, of Prince Schwartzenberg, the Austrian ambassador at Paris, demanded the hand of an Austrian archduchess. The Emperor Francis thought it necessary to yield, and on the 2nd of April 1810, the marriage took place between the French Emperor and the young Archduchess Marie Louise. The ceremony was of the utmost magnificence, and a new Court was formed for the new Empress, which contained many French nobles who had refused to wait on Josephine. On the 20th of March 1811, a son was born to the French Emperor who was created in his cradle King of Rome, and this birth was regarded by Napoleon as finally cementing his power, both in France and in Europe.

The Peninsular War, 1810–1812.

During the period from the Treaty of Vienna in 1809 to the invasion of Russia in 1812, Napoleon had but one declared enemy. The English Ministers, despite the overthrow of Austria and Prussia, and the alliance between France and Russia, persisted in opposing France. Just as Pitt and Grenville could not believe in the stability of the various French revolutionary governments, and therefore maintained the impossibility of concluding permanent peace with France, so their successors, Wellesley and Castlereagh, also declined to believe in the stability of Napoleon’s Empire, and argued that no permanent peace could be made with him. It is just possible, that while Fox was in office in 1806, a peace might have been concluded, but the succession of his victories had inspired Napoleon with a belief in his own invincibility, and he had no idea of negotiating on any basis but the complete recognition of his reconstitution of Europe. Finding it impossible to break the naval power of England, he endeavoured to ruin her commerce by the Continental Blockade, with the result of increasing England’s prosperity, and turning the people of the Continent against him.