In the year 1800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, from the sunlit valleys of Calabria to the tormented Norwegian fiords, there was in every European heart capable of interests other than egoistical and personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquerable. That word was "Freedom"—freedom to the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the thralls who toiled and suffered throughout the network of principalities, kingdoms, and duchies, named "Germany"; freedom to the negro slave; freedom to the newer slaves whom factories were creating; freedom to Spain from the Inquisition, from the tyranny and shame of Charles IV and Godoy; freedom to Greece from the yoke of the Ottoman; to Italy from the slow, unrelenting oppression of the Austrian; freedom to all men from the feudal State and the feudal Church, from civic injustice and political disfranchisement, from the immeasurable wrongs of the elder centuries! A new religion, heralded by a new evangel, that of Diderot and Montesquieu, Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and sanctified by the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered itself to the world. But as if man, schooled by disillusionment, and deceived in the fifteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest this new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a concrete symbol and a reasoned basis for the intoxicating dream. Therefore, he spoke the word "Liberty" like a challenge, and as sentinel answers sentinel, straight there came the response, whispered in his own breast, or boldly uttered—"France and Bonaparte." Since the death of Mohammed, no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character. Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the first year of the century dedicates to him his Génie du Christianisme, that work which, after La Nouvelle Héloïse, most deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed. And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name "Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest achievement in art, save the Prometheus of Shelley, that the Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired. In that year, at Weimar, Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been in the first ardour of their friendship, by the aloofness or the disdain of the greater poet. Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even then the spell of Napoleon's name. And in that year, the greatest of English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul, with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel, the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in Europe and in the world. To the calmer devotion of genius was added the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany. And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men—an energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all around was trouble and disarray—the calm of a spirit habituated to the Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his youth upwards. Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here. If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the victor, it was but for a moment. In the universal horror and joy with which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.
The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched. In the gradual declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or solicitude which marks the closing years of the century. The first disillusionment came swiftly. Fifteen years pass, years of war and convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth century, the century of Alaric and Attila—and within that space, those fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the aspirations of men! The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race. France, the world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the armies of Europe, risen in arms against her! Emperors and kings, nations, cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Körner, warriors like Kutusov, Blücher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and one sole man—the world-deliverer of but fifteen years ago!
What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon? What marvel that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other of modern ages. Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France false to the Revolution. Man's action at its highest is, like his art, symbolic. To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty. To the Europe of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"—these were like the Bastille to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong, injustice and tyranny. And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor, the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the tyrants the hosts of the free. What were his own despotisms, his own rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouché, the stifled Press, the guet-apens of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary war followed by another—what were these things but the discipline, the necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and felicity of the centuries to come? Napoleon at the height of Imperial power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment. "The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can now be trusted to their own guidance." The hour of his death, whether by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart. That hour of penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into the silence and the darkness. Napoleon, trusting to the word and to the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels. But at the outset he has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits of the Celtic race, its passion for the figures on the veil of Maya, its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats. Yet it is in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland. Then, turning to the West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult, and Massena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain, and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination. The Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against its liberators! But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's, calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe against the Empire and capital of the White Czar.
Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants of Francis II or Frederick William III. At Vienna the gaily-plumaged diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the lingering anguish of Prometheus. And if not one man of supreme genius then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found; that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.
The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the abdication at the Elysée is a conflict between the two principles of Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for constitutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and the watchword of Humanity. In theory the divine right of peoples was arrayed against the divine right of kings. The conflict was waged bitterly; yet it was a conflict without a battle. The dungeon, the torture chamber, the Siberian mine, the fortresses of Spandau or Spielberg, which Silvio Pellico has made remembered—these were the weapons of the tyrants. The secret society, the Marianne, the Carbonari, the offshoots of the Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or transient revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in Italy, Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland—these were the sole weapons left to Liberty, which had once at its summons the legions of Napoleon. And in this singular conflict, what leaders! In Spain, the heroic Juan Martin, the brilliant Riego; in Germany, Görres, the morning-star of political journalism, Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist cause. It was not an army, but a crowd, without unity of purpose and without the possibility of united action. Opposed to these were the united purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim—the repression of the common enemy, "Revolution," in every State of Europe, in the great monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the smaller principalities of Germany, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany, Piedmont, Venetia, and Modena. To this war against Liberty the Czar Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de Krüdener's phrase, had struck down the black angel Napoleon, added something of the sanctity of a crusade. From God alone was the sovereign power of the princes of the earth derived, and it was the task of the Holy Alliance to compel the peoples to submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous despotism.
In this crusade Austria and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade. "I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to be the enemy of the Revolution." Nature, indeed, and the environment of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction. Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high with any generous impulse. He was hostile to nobility of thought, action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a living satire upon himself, his life, his aims. He despised history, for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy. But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading, and made rebellion seem uncultured and submission the mark of a thoughtful mind. Metternich's handsome figure, fine manners, and interminable billets-doux written between sentences of death, exile, the solitary dungeon, distinguish his appearance and habits from Philip II of Spain, but, like him, he governed Europe from his bureau, guiding the movements of a standing army of 300,000 men, and a police and espionage department never surpassed and seldom rivalled in the western world. There was nothing in him that was great. But he was indisputable master of Europe for thirty-three years. Nesselrode, Hardenberg, Talleyrand even—whose Memoirs seem the work of genius beside the beaten level of mediocrity of Metternich's—found their designs checked whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy. Congress after Congress—Vienna, Carlsbad, Troppau, Laybach, Verona—exhibited his triumph to Europe. At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's address to the professors there, and thence to all the professors throughout the Empire, was dictated by Metternich—"Hold fast by what is old, for that alone is good. If our forefathers found in this the true path, why should we seek another? New ideas have arisen amongst you, principles which I, your Emperor, have not sanctioned, and never will sanction. Beware of such ideas! It is not scholars I stand in need of, but of loyal subjects to my Crown, and you, you are here to train up loyal subjects to me. See that you fulfil this task!" Is there in human history a document more blasting to the reputation for political wisdom or foresight of him who penned it? It were an insult to the great Florentine to style such piteous ineptitudes Machiavellian. Yet they succeeded. The new evangel had lost its power; the freedom of Humanity was the dream of a few ideologues; the positive ideals of later times had not yet arisen. Well might men ask themselves: Has then Voltaire lived in vain, and the Girondins died in vain? Has all the blood from Lodi and Arcola to Austerlitz and the Borodino been shed in vain? Hard on the address to the universities there crept silently across Europe the message that Napoleon was dead. "It is not an event," said Talleyrand, "but a piece of news." The remark was just. Europe seemed now one vast Sainte Hélène, and men's hearts a sepulchre in which all hope or desire for Liberty was vanquished. The solitary grave at Longwood, the iron railings, the stunted willow, were emblems of a cause for ever lost.
The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a moment's radiance. Heine's letters still preserve the electric thrill which the glorious Three Days awakened. "Lafayette, the tricolour, the Marseillaise!" he writes to Varnhagen, when the "sunbeams wrapped in printer's ink" reached him in Heligoland, "I am a child of the Revolution, and seize again the sacred weapons. Bring flowers! I will crown my head for the fight of death. Give me the lyre that I may sing a song of battle, words like fiery stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces and illumine the cabins of the poor." But when Lafayette presented to France that best of all possible Republics, the fat smile and cotton umbrella of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain, Germany, insurrection was repressed still more coldly and cruelly; when Paskievitch established order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned the struggle—then the transient character of the outbreak was visible. France herself was weary of the illusion. "We had need of a sword," a Polish patriot wrote, "and France sent us her tears." The taunt was as foolish as it was unjust. France assuredly had done her part in the war for Liberty. The hour had come for the States of Europe to work out their own salvation, or resign themselves to autocracy, Jesuitism, a gagged Press, the omnipresent spy, the Troubetskoi ravelin, Spandau, and Metternich.
Eighteen years were to pass before action, but it was action for a more limited and less glorious, if more practical, ideal than the freedom of the world. Other despots died—Alexander I in 1825, the two Ferdinands, of Sicily and of Spain, Francis II himself in 1835, and Frederick William III in 1840. Gentz, too, was dead, Talleyrand, Hardenberg, and Pozzo di Borgo; but Metternich lived on—"the gods," as Sophocles avers, "give long lives to the dastard and the dog-hearted." The Revolution of July seemed but a test of the stability of the fabric he had reared. From Guizot and his master he found but little resistance. The new Czar Nicholas fell at once into the Austrian system; and, with Gerlach as Minister, Prussia offered as little resistance as the France of Guizot. Meanwhile, in 1840, by the motion of Thiers, Napoleon had returned from Saint Helena, and the advance of his coffin across the seas struck a deeper trouble into the despots of Europe than the march of an army.