They were tired of the wars. We have had enough glory, they said, even in the capital itself, and an acute German observer describes the feeling there as curiously mixed. Parisian gaiety often found vent in lampoons against the Emperor; and much satire at his expense might with safety be indulged in among a crowd, provided it were seasoned with wit. The people seemed not to fear Napoleon, as he was feared in Germany: the old revolutionary party was still active and might easily become far more dangerous than the royalist coteries of the Boulevard St. Germain. For the rest, they were all so accustomed to political change that they looked on his government as provisional, and put up with him only as long as the army triumphed abroad and he could make his power felt at home. Such was the impression of Paris gained by Varnhagen von Ense. Public opinion in the provinces seems to have been more favourable to Napoleon; and, on the whole, pride in the army and in the vigorous administration which that nation loves, above all, hatred of England and the hope of wresting from her the world's empire, led the French silently to endure rigorous press laws, increased taxes, war prices, licences, and chicory.
For Germans the hardships were much greater and the alleviations far less. They had no deep interest in Malta or in the dominion of the seas; and political economy was then only beginning to dawn on the Teutonic mind. The general trend of German thought had inclined towards the Everlasting Nay, until Napoleon flashed across its ken. For a time he won the admiration of the chief thinkers of Germany by brushing away the feudal[pg.226] cobwebs from her fair face. He seemed about to call her sons to a life of public activity; and in the famous soliloquy of Faust, in which he feels his way from word to thought, from thought to might, and from might to action, we may discern the literary projection of the influence exerted by the new Charlemagne on that nation of dreamers.[[237]] But the promise was fulfilled only in the most harshly practical way, namely, by cutting off all supplies of tobacco and coffee; and when Teufelsdröckh himself, admirer though he was of the French Revolution, found that the summons for his favourite beverage—the "dear melancholy coffee, that begets fancies," of Lessing—produced only a muddy decoction of acorns, there was the risk of his tendencies earthwards taking a very practically revolutionary turn.
In truth, the German universities were the leaders of the national reaction against the Emperor of the West. Fichte's pleading for a truly national education had taken effect. Elementary instruction was now being organized in Prussia; and the divorce of thought from action, which had so long sterilized German life, was ended by the foundation of the University of Berlin by Humboldt. Thus, in 1810, the year of Prussia's deepest woe, when her brave Queen died of a stricken heart, when French soldiers and douaniers were seizing and burning colonial wares, her thinkers came into closer touch with her men of action, with mutually helpful results. Thinkers ceased to be mere dreamers, and Prussian officials gained a wider outlook on life. The life of beneficent activity, to which Napoleon might have summoned the great majority of Germans, dawned on them from Berlin, not from Paris.
His influence was more and more oppressive. The final results of his commercial decrees on the trade of Hamburg were thus described by Perthes, a well-known writer and bookseller of that town: "Of the 422 sugar-boiling houses, few now stood open: the printing of cottons had ceased entirely: the tobacco-dressers were[pg.227] driven away by the Government. The imposition of innumerable taxes, door and window, capitation and land taxes, drove the inhabitants to despair." But the same sagacious thinker was able to point the moral of it all, and prove to his friends that their present trials were due to the selfish particularism of the German States: "It was a necessity that some great power should arise in the midst of the degenerate selfishness of the times and also prove victorious, for there was nothing vigorous to oppose it. Napoleon is an historical necessity."[[238]]
Thus, both in the abodes of learning and in the centres of industry men were groping after a higher unity and a firmer political organization, which, after the Napoleonic deluge had swept by, was to lay the foundation of a New Germany.
To all appearances, however, Napoleon's power seemed to be more firmly established than ever in the ensuing year. On March 20th, 1811, a son was born to him. At the crisis of this event, he revealed the warmth of his family instincts. On hearing that the life of mother or infant might have to be sacrificed, he exclaimed at once, "Save the mother."[[239]] When the danger was past, he very considerately informed Josephine, stating, "he has my chest, my mouth and my eyes. I trust that he will fulfil his destiny." That destiny was mapped out in the title conferred on the child, "King of Rome," which was designed to recall the title "King of the Romans," used in the Holy Roman Empire.
Napoleon resolved that the old elective dignity should now be renewed in a strictly hereditary Empire, vaster than that of Charlemagne. Paris was to be its capital, Rome its second city, and the future Emperors were always to be crowned a second time at Rome. Furthermore, lest the mediæval dispute as to the supremacy of Emperor or Pope in Rome should again vex mankind, the Papacy was virtually annexed: the status of the pontiff was defined in the most Erastian sense, imperial funds were[pg.228] assigned for his support, and he was bidden to maintain two palaces, "the one necessarily at Paris, the other at Rome."
It is impossible briefly to describe the various conflicts between Pius VII. and Napoleon. Though now kept in captivity by Napoleon, the Pope refused to ratify these and other ukases of his captor; and the credit which Napoleon had won by his wordly-wise Concordat was now lost by his infraction of many of its clauses and by his harsh treatment of a defenceless old man. It is true that Pius had excommunicated Napoleon; but that was for the crime of annexing the Papal States, and public opinion revolted at the spectacle of an all-powerful Emperor now consigning to captivity the man who in former years had done so much to consolidate his authority. After the disasters of the Russian campaign, he sought to come to terms with the pontiff; but even then the bargain struck at Fontainebleau was so hard that his prisoner, though unnerved by ill-health, retracted the unholy compromise. Whereupon Napoleon ordered that the cardinals who advised this step should be seized and carried away from Fontainebleau. Few of Napoleon's actions were more harmful than this series of petty persecutions; and among the influences that brought about his fall, we may reckon the dignified resistance of the pontiff, whose meekness threw up in sharp relief the pride and arrogance of his captor. The Papacy stooped, but only to conquer.
For the present, everything seemed to favour the new Charlemagne. Never had the world seen embodied might like that of Napoleon's Empire; and well might he exclaim at the birth of the King of Rome, "Now begins the finest epoch of my reign." All the auguries seemed favourable. In France, the voice of opposition was all but hushed. Italians, Swiss, and even some Spaniards, helped to keep down Prussia. Dutchmen and Danes had hunted down Schill for him at Stralsund. Polish horsemen had charged up the Somosierra Pass against the Spanish guns, and did valiant service on the[pg.229] bloody field of Albuera. The Confederation of the Rhine could send forth 150,000 men to fight his battles. The Hapsburgs were his vassals, and only faint shadows of discord as yet clouded his relations with Alexander. One of his Marshals, Bernadotte, had been chosen to succeed to the crown of Sweden; and at the other end of Europe, it seemed that Wellington and the Spanish patriots must ultimately succumb to superior numbers.
Surely now was the time for the fulfilment of those glowing oriental designs beside which his European triumphs seemed pale. In the autumn of 1810 he sent agents carefully to inspect the strongholds of Egypt and Syria, and his consuls in the Levant were ordered to send a report every six months on the condition of the Turkish Empire.[[240]] Above all, he urged on the completion of dockyards and ships of war. Vast works were pushed on at Antwerp and Cherbourg: ships and gunboats were to be built at every suitable port from the Texel to Naples and Trieste; and as the result of these labours, the Emperor counted on having 104 ships of the line, which would cover the transports from the Mediterranean, Cherbourg, Boulogne and the Scheldt, and threaten England with an array of 200,000 fighting men.[[241]]