That a reed shaken by every breeze should bow before Napoleon's will was not surprising; and late at night on July 20th Lord Yarmouth heard that the Russian envoy had just signed a separate peace with France, whereby the independence of the Ionian Isles was recognized (Russia keeping only 4,000 troops in Corfu), and Germany was to be evacuated by the French. But the sting was in the tail: for a secret article stipulated that Ferdinand IV. should cede Sicily to Joseph Bonaparte and receive the Balearic Isles from Napoleon's ally, Spain.
Such was the news which our envoy heard, after forcing his way to Oubril's presence, just as the latter was hurrying off to St. Petersburg. At that city an important change had taken place; Czartoryski had retired in favour of Baron Budberg, who was less favourable to a close alliance with England; and it appears certain that Oubril would not have broken through his instructions had he not known of this change. What other motives led him to break faith with England, Sicily, and Spain are not clearly known. He claimed that the new order of things in Germany rendered it highly important to get the French troops out of that land. Doubtless this was so; but even that benefit would have been dearly bought at the price of disgrace to the Czar.[[83]][pg.75]
Leaving for the present Oubril to face his indignant master, we turn to notice an epoch-making change, the details of which were settled at Paris in the midst of the negotiations with England and Russia. On July 17th was quietly signed the Act of the Confederation of the Rhine, that destroyed the old Germanic Empire.
Some such event had long been expected. The Holy Roman Empire, after a thousand years of life, had been stricken unto death at Austerlitz. The seizure of Hanover by Prussia had led the King of Sweden to declare that he, for his Pomeranian lands, would take no more share in the deliberations of the senile Diet at Ratisbon which took no notice of that outrage. Moreover, Ratisbon was now merely the second city of Bavaria, whose King might easily deny to that body its local habitation; and the use of the term Germanic Confederation in the Treaty of Pressburg sounded the death-knell of an Empire which Voltaire with equal wit and truth had described as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. In the new age of trenchant realities how could that venerable figment survive—where the election of the Emperor was a sham, his coronation a mere parade of tattered robes before a crowd of landless Serenities, and where the Diet was largely concerned with regulating the claims of the envoys of princes to sit on seats of red cloth or on the less honourable green cloth, or with apportioning the traditional thirty-seven dishes of the imperial banquet so that the last should be borne by a Westphalian envoy?[[84]]
Among these spectral survivals of an outworn life the incursion of Napoleon across the Rhine had aroused a[pg.76] panic not unlike that which the sturdy form of Æneas cast on the gibbering shades of the Greeks in the mourning fields of Hades. And when, on August 1st, 1806, the heir to the Revolution notified to the Diet at Ratisbon that neither he nor the States of South and Central Germany any longer recognized the existence of the old Empire, feebler protests arose than came from the straining throats of the scared comrades of Agamemnon. The Diet itself uttered no audible sound. The Emperor, Francis II., forthwith declared that he laid down his crown, absolved all the electors and princes from their allegiance, and retired within the bounds of the Austrian Empire.
Thus feebly flickered out the light which had shed splendour on mediæval Christendom. Kindled in the basilica of St. Peter's on Christmas Day of the year 800 in an almost mystical union of spiritual and earthly power, by the blessing of Pope Leo on Karl the Great, it was now trodden under foot by the chief of a more than Frankish State, who aspired to unquestioned sway over a dominion as great as that of the mediæval hero. For Napoleon, as Protector of the Rhenish Confederation, now controlled most of the German lands that acknowledged Charlemagne, while his hold on Italy was immeasurably stronger. Further parallels between two ages and systems so unlike as those of Charlemagne and his imitator are of course superficial; and Napoleon's attempt at impressing the imagination of the Germans seems to us to smack of unreality. Yet we must remember that they were then the most impressionable and docile of nations, that his attempt was made with much skill, and that none of the appointed guardians of the old Empire raised a voice in protest while he imposed a constitution on the fifteen Princes of the new Confederation.
They included the rulers of South Germany, as well as Dalberg the Arch-Chancellor, who now took the title of Prince Primate, the Grand-Duke of Berg, the Landgrave, now Grand-Duke, of Hesse-Darmstadt, two Princes[pg.77] of the House of Nassau, and seven lesser potentates. In some cases German laws were abolished in favour of the Code Napoléon. A close offensive and defensive alliance was framed between France and these States, that were to furnish in all 63,000 troops at the bidding of the Protector. Napoleon also gained some control over their fiscal and commercial codes—an important advantage, in view of the Continental System, that was soon to take definite form.[[85]]
As a set-off to this surrender of all questions of foreign policy and many internal rights, what did these rulers receive? As happened almost uniformly in Napoleon's aggrandizements, he struck a bargain extremely serviceable to himself, less so to those whose support he sought, and in which the losses fell crushingly on the weak. His statecraft in this respect was more cynical than that of the crowned robbers who had degraded eighteenth-century politics into a game of grab. Their robberies were at least direct and straightforward. It was reserved for Napoleon at the Treaty of Campo Formio to win huge gains mostly at the expense of a weak third party, namely, Venice. He pursued the same profitable tactics in the Secularizations, when France and the greater German Powers gained enormously at the final cost of the Church lands and the little States; and now he ground up the German domains that were to cement his new Rhenish system.
There were still numbers of Imperial Counts and Knights, as well as free cities, that had not been absorbed in 1803. The survivors were now wiped out by Napoleon for the benefit of his Rhenish underlings, the spoliation being veiled under the term Mediatization. The euphemism claims a brief explanation. In old German law the nobles and cities that gained local independence by shaking off the control of the local potentate were termed immediate, because they owed allegiance directly to the Emperor, without any feudal [pg.78] intermediary: if by mischance they fell under that hated control they were said to be mediatized. This term was now applied to acts that subjected the knight, or city, not to feudal control, but to complete absorption by the king or prince of Napoleon's creation. Six Imperial or Free Cities survived the Secularizations, namely, the three Hanse towns, and Augsburg, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg. The northern towns still held their ancient rights; but Augsburg and Nuremberg now fell to the King of Bavaria, and Frankfurt was bestowed by Napoleon on Dalberg, the Prince Primate of the Confederation.
German life began to lose much of the quaint diversity beloved of artists and poets; but it also gained much. No longer did the Count of Limburg-Styrum parade his army of one colonel, six officers, and two privates in the valley of the Roehr: he and his passed under the sway of Murat, and the lapse of these pigmy forces made a national army possible in the dim future. No more did the Imperial lawyers at Wetzlar browse on evergreen lawsuits: justice was administered after the concise methods of Napoleon. The crops of the Swabian peasant were now comparatively safe from the deer of His Translucency of the castle hard by; for the spirit of the French Revolution breathed upon the old game laws and robbed them of their terrors. And the German patriot of to-day must still confess that the first impulse for reform, however questionable its motives and brutal its application, came from the new Charlemagne.