CHAPTER III
PROBLEMS OF THE NAPOLEONIC WARS

The career of Napoleon, which has long commanded the greatest interest, not to say enthusiasm, of students of history, aroused grave fears in the minds of most of the thoughtful men of his day who did not live in France. His design to conquer all his neighbors was most evident, and his apparent ability to carry it into execution caused him to be regarded as the embodiment of greed and insatiable ambition. Not since the days of Louis XIV had Europe felt such thrills of danger and horror. All its energy was called into play to withstand his attacks. Wars followed wars in a series of campaigns that ended after many years of extreme anxiety in his ruin, only when France had been worn out by his repeated victories. When he began his wars he was at the head of the best prepared nation in the world. He struck with sudden and vigorous blows against nations that were not united, defeating one after the other with startling effect. Their lack of preparation was most marked and was probably the most effective cause of his initial success. After years of conflict they learned how to oppose him. From his own example they learned the value of organization and method in fighting, and from their own disasters they at last acquired the sense of union that was necessary to give him the final blow that made him no longer a menace to their national integrity. It was not until 1815 that he was finally defeated and reduced to the state of ineffective personal power from which he had risen.

From the beginning of the struggle he was to his opponents the incarnation of all that was hateful in government. Few of the epithets now hurled at the kaiser were not as lavishly cast at Napoleon. He was tyrant, robber, brute, and murderer in turn, and it was pronounced a service to humanity to suppress him. In the beginning of the wars his pretensions were treated with disdain, but as his victories followed one another in bewildering rapidity, his power was treated with more respect, although there was no greater disposition to contemplate his triumph with complacency. As the struggle became fiercer, the other states than France began to think of some permanent form of coöperation for restraining him; and they even began to speculate on the possibility of some permanent arrangement by which the world might be saved from a recurrence of such a vast waste of life and treasure as was involved in the struggle. It was thus that suggestions were made during the Napoleonic era for abolishing war through international effort. For us, who are today burdened with the ruin of a similar but more stupendous struggle, these efforts have a special interest, and the space of a single chapter is none too much to give to their consideration.

It is singular that these plans should have found their most conspicuous supporters in the heads of the two governments most widely apart with reference to the popular character of their institutions. It was in autocratic Russia that one found the most advanced idea of dealing with the future, and in Great Britain, the most liberal of the great powers, that the most conservative design was held. Each plan was supported by the head of these two governments respectively, each ran through its own development while the armies were locked in deadly struggle, and each was debated with seriousness in the moment of victory when the statesmen of the winning powers met to arrange for the future relations of the states whose victories made them the arbiters of Europe.

The initiative was taken by Alexander I, of Russia. He was a man of the best intentions, and throughout the period with which we are now dealing he showed himself persistently favorable to views which, to say the least, were a hundred years ahead of his time. By temperament he was imaginative and sympathetic. In his personal life were irregularities, but not as many as in Napoleon’s, Louis XIV’s, or Talleyrand’s. He lacked the royal vice of despotism, and his escape from it was probably due to the influence of Fréderic César de La Harpe, an instructor of his youth, who arrived in Russia with his head full of the dynamic ideas of the French philosophers of the pre-revolutionary period.

While “liberty, equality, and fraternity” maddened France, long oppressed by the dull repression of the ancient régime, La Harpe was converting his royal pupil to the doctrine of the “Rights of Man.” So well was the lesson taught that a long series of encounters with the solid wall of Russian autocracy was necessary before the pupil ceased to try to do something to ameliorate the condition of his people. Historians have called Alexander a dreamer, but what is a man to do who is born a tsar and has the misfortune to believe in the doctrines for which we honor Lincoln and Jefferson? I am willing to call him impractical, but I cannot withhold sympathy from a man who tried, as he, to strike blows in behalf of the forms of government which makes my own country a home of liberty.

Alexander I came to the throne of Russia in 1801, anxious to carry out his liberal plans.[3] In 1804, through his minister in London, he suggested to Pitt, the prime minister, a plan for settling the affairs of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. France, he said, must be made to realize that the allies did not war against her people but against Napoleon, from whose false power they proposed to set her free. Once liberated she was to be allowed to choose any government she desired. From La Harpe he had imbibed a deep repugnance to the government of the Bourbons, and in all his future discussions of the subject he showed no enthusiasm for restoring that line to their throne.

[3] For an excellent treatment of the events discussed in this chapter see W. A. Phillips, The Confederation of Europe, London, 1914.