Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

by H. Morse Stephens

The foreign policy of the Emperor Joseph II. was dictated by the same leading principle as his internal reforms—the desire to form his various territories into a compact state. His schemes to exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria in order to unite his possessions in Swabia with the nucleus of the Hapsburg territories were frustrated by the policy of Frederick the Great. His attempt to make his authority as Emperor more than nominal, and to create a real German empire based on a German patriotic feeling, proved an utter failure. Foiled in these two projects, the creation of an Austrian compact state, which he deemed practicable, and the resurrection of a mighty Germany under his headship, which he acknowledged to be but a dream, Joseph II. turned his thoughts towards Russia. The ideal of his early manhood had been his mother’s foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia; the ideal of his later years was the Empress Catherine of Russia. Both were specimens of the enlightened despots of the age; both had extended the realms they ruled; both endeavoured to form their states into compact entities; both had succeeded in administration and in war; and both were cynical disciples of the eighteenth-century philosophers. They were successively his models. It is characteristic of the Emperor Joseph II. that the only picture in his private cabinet in the Hofburg at Vienna was a portrait of Frederick; the only picture in his bedroom one of Catherine. After the death of Frederick the Great, the Emperor Joseph II., despising his successor, expressed more loudly his admiration for Catherine. In 1787 he accompanied her in her famous progress to the Crimea. Fascinated by her personality and dazzled by her projects, the Emperor was persuaded to ally himself with Russia against the Turks, and hoped to partition Turkey with her, as his mother, Frederick, and Catherine had accomplished the first partition of Poland. In 1788 he accordingly declared war against the Sublime Porte. But he found that the Turks, in spite of the corruption of their government, were still no contemptible foes. His own army was demoralised by the misconduct of the aristocratic officers; disease decimated his troops; and the Emperor Joseph returned from the campaign of 1788 with the seeds of mortal illness in his system, but with his determination to pursue the war unabated.

Russia: Catherine.

Poland.

Russia, the chosen ally of Joseph II., was in 1789 ruled by the Empress Catherine II. This great monarch, though by birth a princess of the petty German state of Anhalt-Zerbst, ranks with Peter the Great as a founder of the Russian Empire; more Russian than the Russians, she understood the importance of the development of her adopted country geographically towards the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the capacity of her people to support her in her enterprises. She was at this time sixty years of age, in full possession of her remarkable powers, and having ruled for twenty-seven years, she had fortified her authority by experience. Peter the Great had seen the absolute necessity that the Russian Empire should have access to the sea, and had built Saint Petersburg; Catherine had moved southward and extended her dominions to the Black Sea. She hoped to make the Baltic and the Black Sea Russian lakes, and on that account was the consistent and watchful enemy of Sweden and the Turks. Upon the western frontier of Russia lay Poland. The natural policy of Russia was to maintain and even to strengthen Poland as a buffer between Russia and the military powers of Austria and Prussia. But the extraordinary Constitution of Poland, which provided for the election of a powerless king, and recognised the right of civil war and the power of any nobleman to forbid any measure proposed at the Diet by the exercise of what was called the liberum veto, kept the unfortunate country in a state of anarchy, unable either to defend or to oppose. It might have been possible to reform the Constitution, and make the Poles an organised nation, but the neighbouring monarchs considered it easier to share the country amongst them, and had, under the guidance of Frederick the Great, carried out in 1772 the first partition, which excluded Poland from the sea, brought the borders of the three powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, nearer to each other, and caused Russia to become an European instead of essentially an Eastern monarchy. Catherine grasped the fact that in her present position Russia must intervene in European politics, owing to the condition of Poland, and decided to derive what benefit she could from this circumstance. In her internal government Catherine was one of the benevolent despots. The patroness of Diderot, she expressed her admiration for the new doctrines of the Rights of Man, and even summoned a convention to draw up a Russian constitution. But she knew that the new doctrines were not applicable to the Russian people, and would be absurdly inappropriate to the nomad Tartar tribes which wandered over the southern districts of the Russian Empire. She was fully aware that their village organisation protected the peasants from many of the evils which prevailed in seemingly more enlightened countries, and gave them a right and interest in the soil to which they were attached. Russia, in fact, had experienced no Reformation, no Renaissance, no awakening of the ideas of individual and political liberty, and therefore was eminently fitted for the rule of a benevolent despot.

France: Louis XVI.

Next to the Austro-Russian alliance, the Austro-French alliance, sealed by the Treaty of 1756, was of the greatest significance to the peace and welfare of Europe in 1789. As has been said, in neither country was the alliance popular; France and Austria were hereditary enemies; classical policy in both courts favoured a resumption of this enmity; the friendship was rather dynastic than national, the work of Kaunitz and Maria Theresa, the Abbé de Bernis, Madame de Pompadour, and Louis XV. France still appeared a very powerful nation. Its intervention in the American War of Independence had largely contributed to England’s loss of her American colonies, and the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 had involved a confession that England was beaten by her cession of the West India islands of St. Lucia and Tobago. But in spite of her seeming power, France was from political and economic causes really very weak. She had been unable in 1787 to effectually support the republican and French party in Holland, and had been forced to allow England and Prussia to reinstate the Stadtholder, the Prince of Orange. In spite of her alliance with Austria, she had been obliged in pursuance of a peace policy, made necessary by her financial condition, to draw near to England, and had made a commercial treaty with her in 1786. The weakness of France arose from internal circumstances. The State and the Court were financially identical. The Court was extravagant, and the result was a chronic national deficit. Efforts had been made to meet this deficit, but all expedients, even partial bankruptcy, had failed. It was evident that a systematic attempt must be made to rearrange the finances by introducing a regular scheme of taxation to take the place of the feudal arrangements for filling the royal treasury, which with some modifications still survived. But a regular scheme of taxation, which should abolish feudal privileges, and make the government responsible to the nation for its expenditure, could not be established without the consent of the people, and the educated classes, who were both numerous and prosperous, claimed a voice in its establishment. The feeling of political discontent went deeper. The French people had outgrown their system of government; the peasants and farmers resented the existence of the economic, social, and political privileges dating from the Middle Ages, which had survived the duties originally accompanying them; the bourgeois argued that they should have a share in regulating the affairs of the State; the educated classes sympathised with both. The day for benevolent despotism was over in France; Louis XVI. was benevolent in disposition, but too weak to reform the system under which he ruled; and it was the system, not the person of the monarch, which the French people disliked; it was the system as a whole which they had outgrown.

Spain: Charles IV.

Much of the strength of France rested on its intimate alliance with Spain. The two great Bourbon houses had been closely united by the ‘Pacte de Famille’ concluded in 1761, which bound them in an offensive and defensive alliance. Spain had loyally fulfilled her part of the bargain, and had suffered much in the War of American Independence against England. Spain had had the good fortune to be ruled by one of the most enlightened of the benevolent despots, Charles III., whose minister, Aranda, was one of the greatest statesmen of his century. Aranda is best known from his persecution of the Jesuits, who had spread their influence over the minds of the Spanish people so far as to be the dictators of education and opinion. Their expulsion contributed to the power of the Crown, which undertook the direction of every form of national energy. Aranda was a great administrator; he spent vast sums on the improvement of communications and on public works, and he built up a powerful Spanish navy. The two evils which had depressed the fame of Spain, the personal lethargy of the people, due to the stamping out of liberty of thought by the Inquisition, and the poverty, caused by the influx of gold from the Spanish colonies, which prevented any encouragement of national industry, were however too great for any administrator to subdue, without a national uprising and the development of a national love for liberty. Aranda was ably helped by Campomanes, who founded a national system of education to take the place of the Jesuits’ schools and colleges, by Jovellanos, a great jurist and political economist, by Cabarrus, a skilful financier, who founded the bank of St. Charles, and developed a system of national credit, and by Florida Blanca, who superintended the department of foreign affairs, and succeeded Aranda in supreme power in 1774. Charles III. died on 12th December 1788, and his successor, Charles IV., whose weakness of character was manifested throughout the period from 1789 to 1815, commenced his reign by maintaining Florida Blanca at the head of Spanish affairs, with Cabarrus and other experienced ministers.

Portugal: Maria I.

Portugal was the intimate ally of England as Spain was of France. The hereditary connection of Portugal and England dated back for many centuries, and had been strengthened by the Methuen Treaty in 1703, which had made Portugal largely dependent on England. The great Portuguese minister, Pombal, who had commenced the persecution of the Jesuits and had effected internal and administrative reforms, comparable to those of Aranda in Spain, had been disgraced in 1777, but the offices of State were filled by his pupils and managed on the principle, which he had initiated, of advancing the prosperity of the people. Pombal, while holding the strongest views on the importance of maintaining the royal absolutism, believed in the modern doctrines of reform; he had abolished slavery, encouraged education, and in the received ideas of political economy had encouraged by means of protection manufactures and agriculture. The essential weakness of Portugal rested, like that of Spain, on the exhaustion and consequent lethargy of its people; the Jesuits and the Inquisition had stamped out freedom of thought. Financially, also, its condition resembled that of Spain, for the sovereign derived such wealth from Brazil as to be independent of taxes, levied on the people. Politically the aim of the House of Braganza, during the latter part of the eighteenth century, had been to endeavour to free itself from dependence on England by uniting closely through inter-marriages with the reigning family in Spain. Queen Maria I., who had succeeded Joseph, the patron of Pombal, in 1777, was a fanatical lady of weak intellect, and in 1789 the royal power was in the hands of the heir-apparent, Prince John, who was recognised as Regent some years later, and eventually succeeded to the throne in 1816, as John VI.