This was in general the profound misfortune of the fifteen or twenty last years,—thought these enlightened patriots,—that rancor and bad humor had played such a great rôle in the grave affairs of the world: sad sentiments surely, and from which the present chancellor of Germany has alone been able to preserve himself! It was through anger at the conduct of the cabinet of St. Petersburg in the Italian question, that Austria took under its protection the insurgents of Poland; it was through bad humor towards England in the question of the congress that Napoleon III. abandoned the cause of Denmark, and Alexander Mikhaïlovitch yielded to such motives more than to any others; he was the first to practice this "policy of spite" with his imaginary grievances against Austria in the war of the Orient, as he was also not the last to cherish a certain "policy de pour-boire" with his league of the neutrals which hindered any concerted action of the Powers. What happy opportunities for the preservation of Europe, for the glory of his nation and the splendor of his august master, has not the Russian chancellor let pass through love for Prussia: in the spring of 1867, when France and Austria offered him such large concessions in the Orient; in the autumn of 1870, when England and Austria solicited him to take the initiative in the work of peace! What illusions also in that belief, that Prince Gortchakof has sacrificed nothing during those ten years of association with his formidable colleague! Was the port of Kiel, the key of the Baltic, delivered into the hands of the Germans, nothing? Was that nothing, the dismemberment of the Danish monarchy, the country of the future empress? Was the vassalage of Queen Olga nothing? The overturning and spoliation of so many reigning families allied by blood to the House of Romanof, the loss of the independence of these secondary States always so devoted and so faithful to Russia? Lastly, was this profound overturning of the ancient European equilibrium, and the unmeasured, gigantic aggrandizement of a neighboring Power, nothing?
"Greatness is a relative thing, and a country can be diminished, while remaining the same, when new forces accumulate around it."[144] These words, which Napoleon III. heard on the day after Sadowa, Russia could well apply to itself, since the day of Sedan, for assuredly no one would wish to pretend that the abolition of Article III. of the treaty of Paris is the equivalent of the forces accumulated by Prussia in the centre of Europe. As to the hopes in the Orient, they are very contingent, like every speculation of heritage: the sick man has already so many times deceived the expectations of his doctors, one can no longer count the mortal crises which should have carried him off, and perhaps it is not Russia that should complain of this prolongation of the agony. It is still a question in truth if Russia is now in a position to take care of the succession, if it is sufficiently supplied with implements for such a vast establishment; if, in a word, it has all its military and financial strength, as well as all the administrative personnel indispensable to advantageously occupy the domains as various as extended. It cannot take possession of European provinces like the countries along the Amour and Syr-Daria; it runs the risk of finding more than one ungovernable Poland among those peoples of the Danube and the Balkan; and the unity of the law, the uniformity of the svod, will not be so easy to establish in the countries where, side by side, the most incongruous institutions have flourished from the régime of the cimeter to that of the parliament. Will not the transformation of Turkey transform, however, in turn the Muscovite people, and will not history on this occasion be careful to repeat the great and pathetic lessons of Græcia capta? Will Russia still be Russia the day when it rules the Oriental peninsula, and can an empire bathed by the blue waves of the Bosphorus preserve its capital on the icy banks of Finland? Grave and obscure problems before which it is allowable to stop, to conceive apprehensions and doubts. What is not doubtful, on the contrary, is that at the destined hour Prussia will make its conditions and will stipulate its compensations. It will not be a debt of gratitude which it will think of paying then, it will be a new bargain which it will make. Will it demand as the price of its consent, Holland, Jutland, or the German territories of Austria? the frontier of the Vistula, or the provinces of the Baltic?
But who knows if this prolonged drama of Turkish decadence is not yet destined to receive a dénoûment little or not at all foreseen, yet very original and nothing less than illogical. The publicists and the patriots of Berlin do not speak to-day of the mission of Austria in the countries of the Danube and the Bosphorus, which they say is called by Providence to strengthen in these countries German interests, to bring there "German culture." Since the great day of Sedan, especially, exhortations and summons are not wanting to this Power "to seek its centre of gravity elsewhere than at Vienna," in short, to justify its secular name of Ostreich, and to become an empire of the East, in the true meaning of the word. A monarchy constantly menaced with the early loss of its Germanic possessions on the Leitha may at length be brought to try the experiment, when, above all, care is taken to present to it this experiment as a necessity and as a virtue; a state which has never been strongly centralized, and which has always oscillated between dualism and a federal system more or less definite, will even have a great chance to appear to Europe as the most proper outline of this medley of races, of religions, of institutions, which stretches from the Iron Gates to the Golden Horn. An empire of the East of Germanic traditions and influences on the Bosphorus, more to the South a kingdom of Greece enlarged by Thessaly and Epirus, lastly, in the North a Germany completed in its unity by the Cisleithan provinces,—that will be something to fully content the world, not excepting England. We must acknowledge, one solution of the formidable Ottoman question is like another, and every hypothesis, every fantasy, has the right to appear, when one touches this fantastic world of the Orient, and that world not less mysterious and terrible which the great recluse of Varzin carries in his head.
What, in any case, is not within the domain of hypothesis and fantasy, what unfortunately is only a too evident and palpable reality, is, that in place of this "combination purely and exclusively defensive," as Prince Gortchakof one day so justly called the old Bund,—in place of a league of peaceful states, all devoted friends of Russia, and forming for it a continual succession of ramparts,—the empire of Alexander II. now sees before it, firmly settled all along its frontier, a formidable Power, the strongest Power of the Continent, ambitious, avaricious, enterprising, and having henceforward the undoubted mission of defending against it what they have agreed to call the interests of the Occident. This Power can always excite the Polish question, if it wishes to, according to its wants, and quite differently than the cabinets of Paris and London would do it: has not the argument for such a "coup au cœur" been very warmly sustained in 1871, by certain Hungarian statesmen in the confidence of the Prussian minister? The conduct of the government of Berlin at the time of the last insurrection of Warsaw did not injure it in the future: the passionate speeches of M. de Bismarck in 1849 against the revolt of the Magyars did not prevent him from arming, many years later, the legions of General Klapka. We cannot at least deny the Prussian plans in 1863 on the left bank of the Vistula, "the natural frontier;" now, do not the friends of Berlin occasionally insinuate that this would be the most efficacious means to end the spirit of Polonism? They do not speak of the provinces of the Baltic, as before Sadowa they repudiated all thoughts of ever wishing to free the Main; but the Teutonic effervescence from Courland and Livonia goes on increasing, and to what grievous sacrifices will the Hohenzollern not resign himself when he thinks that he hears a voice from above, the voice of "German brothers?"
Certainly it would have made the prince regent tremble in 1858, if any one had spoken to him then of a war against a Hapsburg, and of a companion in arms named Garibaldi; he ended, however, by accepting the hard necessity, and he gave the signal for a fratricidal combat, with grief in his soul and tears in his eyes. Is it not puerile, however, to measure the destinies of nations by the life, more or less long, of this or that sovereign? An emperor can reign in Germany who has neither affection for, nor the remembrance of Alexander II.; he can raise up "a Pharaoh who knows not Joseph," to speak with Holy Writ, and then there is something stronger in the world than czar and emperor: the necessity of history, the fatality of race. A formidable race that of these conquerors of Sadowa and Sedan, whose invading and conquering minds have from the beginning survived all transformations and accommodated themselves to all disguises! Humble, and at the same time presumptuous, temperate and prolific, expansive and tenacious, practicing with persistence their old proverb, ubi bene, ibi patria, and nevertheless always preserving a rough attachment for the mother country, the Germans infiltrate every country, penetrate all regions, disdain no corner of the habitable world. They have their friends and relations on all the thrones and in all the offices of the world; they people the industrial centres of Europe and the solitudes of the far West; they decide the presidential elections in the United States; they furnish the largest contingent of the high administrative personnel in the empire of the czars, and the remembrance is still recent of that statistic of the Russian army, which, in 100 superior officers, counts eighty of German origin.[145] So Germany appeared before the great strokes of fortune of 1866 and of 1870, before the era of iron and blood, before M. de Bismarck had awakened in it the secret of its strength, had said to it the magic word, tu regere imperio populos! Is it necessary to recall now the hatred which the Germans have always borne against the Sclavic name, the extermination which they lately vowed on the Elbe and the Oder; and does not the mind recoil in terror before a new conflict of the two races, to-day more probable than ever? It is allowable to treat all these apprehensions as boyish dreams, hollow thoughts of literati and professors; but the eminent men, the serious men, the augures and aruspices of politics, have they in our day treated otherwise many a formidable problem? Have they not used the same language on the question of Schleswig-Holstein and the German pretensions to Alsace, in regard to the unity of Italy and the plans of the National Verein? That would be a curious chapter of contemporaneous history to write, that of the Diplomats and Professors, and which could well show that of these two respectable bodies the most pedantic and the most ideological is not exactly the one which a vain people thinks.
Is there not,—the same persons continue, more careful of the interests of the present and the future than of the unseasonable reminiscences of the past,—is there not ideological force, for instance, in the manner of assimilating the two epochs of 1814 and 1870, and of saluting in Field Marshal Moltke the continuator of the work of Koutouzof? At the time of the memorable war of which the burning of Moscow had given the heroic signal, it was all Europe that arose against an insolent master and bore deliverance to states trodden and ground down by a universal dominion. Was it the same in the last conflagration? and can one not rather say that it was France, on the contrary, that fought at this moment for the equilibrium of the world and the independence of kingdoms, trying to repair by a tardy and badly conceived effort a series of culpable errors, but from which it was not the only one to suffer? Different in their motives, the two epochs scarcely resemble each other more as to ways and means. It was "a war by means of revolutions" that the Prussian minister had early announced to M. Benedetti, and he has kept his word; he had regards, attenuations, comprehensions for the commune difficult to justify; now he openly protects the Republican régime in France against any attempt at restoration, thus sacrificing the monarchical principle and the highest considerations of European order to a purely selfish and vindictive calculation. That is not the spirit which animated the allies of 1814; the magnanimous Alexander I. especially understood differently the duties of sovereigns and the solidarity of conservative interests. And what a severe judgment would the Emperor Nicholas have given on every ensemble of the policy of Berlin, on that regeneration of Germany which has not ceased to be the revolution from above, from the federal execution in Holstein up to the arrest of the syndics of the crown; from the destruction of the Bund up to the overturning of the dynasty of the Guelphs; from the formation of the Hungarian legions and the close relations with Mazzini to the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church!
That we may not be deceived in fact, we can still say it is the revolution alone which finds its profit in the war made to-day in Germany on Catholicism, and very great, very naïve is the illusion of those who flatter themselves with seeing Protestant or Orthodox ideas, the religious spirit in general, benefited by the losses of Papacy. It suffices to cast a glance on the great battalions of the Kulturkampf to recognize their God; they bear on their banners very clearly the sign under whose name they expect to conquer. Are these sincere Protestants, these evangelical men for whom the Gospel is a truth, who first rush to the assault or who only follow it with their wishes and their prayers? Assuredly not; all those who from the Reformation have not kept the name in vain, but the strong doctrine, openly repudiate this dissension, while sighing in their souls. They have the just feeling that in our epoch, so overturned, so profoundly disturbed by the genius of negation, religious interests are conjointly responsible between them just as well as conservative interests. Those eager for the combat, the zealots "filled with the divine spirit," are precisely those who admit neither divinity nor spirit, who have no other positive religion than positivism; and it is not in them surely that Luther resuscitated would wish to recognize his children. The great adversary of Rome in the sixteenth century held on to the revelation, he held on to his Bible, to his dogma of pardon: are not all these things very "old-fashioned," and very laughable in the eyes of the disciples of Strauss and Darwin? The apostle of Wittemberg believed in justification through faith; the apostles of Berlin believe in justification through success.
It is a grave matter,—at length conclude these men, alarmed in their patriotism and in their conservative sentiments,—an extremely perilous matter for a great state to abandon, in its relations with the Powers, certain established maxims, certain rules of conduct tried by long experience, become in a manner the arcana imperii, and Napoleon III. has just paid dearly for such a rupture with the ancient traditions in the exterior policy of France. Russia had also, in regard to Europe, sacred traditions, which have made the greatness and the strength of the preceding reigns; under these reigns, they were jealous in defending the liberty of the Baltic, they watched over the maintenance of the equilibrium of strength between Austria and Prussia, they appreciated the friendship and the devotion of the secondary States of Germany, and they caused the monarchical principle to be everywhere respected as opposed to revolution. Then Russia never had to repent at having turned aside from the ways hollowed out by the triumphal car of Peter the Great, of Catherine II., of Alexander I., and of Nicholas!
Thus spoke the independent minds on the banks of the Neva while the official world there displayed all the northern magnificence in honor of William the Conqueror: however, they only lent a reasoning and touching language to a vague, but intense and profound sentiment which agitated the very soul of Russia. With that habit of obedience and discipline that one can often accuse of a servile instinct, but which with this people is also sometimes a great and admirable patriotic instinct, the children of Rourik were careful not to cross the government in the brilliant reception which it gave the Prussian; they limited themselves to remaining impassible witnesses of a spectacle which did not appeal to their inmost feelings. The press showed itself abstemious of descriptions, more sparing still in reflections during these days of fêtes and festivals; the officials of Berlin only praised them with having maintained a decorous tone. Such was also the tone of Russian society taken as a whole; the beautiful perspectives of the imperial residence appealed to the moral as well as to the physical man; flowers from hot-houses on the first floor, ice under foot! The guests were not the last to see the contrast: with the exquisite perfumes of exotic plants, they breathed from time to time the sharp air of the country, the rough North wind, and it was not M. de Bismarck himself who did not seem to feel the circumambient atmosphere. One found in him more vivacity and enjoyment than of dash and warmth; his words preserved a measuredness which was not usual with him, and seemed to designedly avoid all éclat and all light. A curious matter, during this sojourn of two weeks in the capital of Russia, the former grumbling diplomat did not let any of his sallies and jokes escape, of which he is generally so prodigal,—none of those amazing indiscretions which are at once the amusement and the horror of the salons and the chancellors' offices. They only gleaned a single sensational expression fallen from those lips which have so often pronounced the decree of destiny, the expression "that he could not even admit the thought of being hostile to Russia." The declaration seemed explicit and reassuring, and like a discreet reply to an apprehension which did not dare to show itself openly. The incredulous or fretful souls could not, however, desist from observing that only ten years before such an assurance given to the empire of the czars by a minister of Prussia, would have seemed very superfluous, would have even provoked smiles.
Here ends the task which was imposed on us in undertaking this study. The meeting of the two chancellors in the capital of Peter the Great, in the spring of 1873, was like the epilogue of a common action which has lasted ten years, and which has contributed so much to change the face of the world. Since this epoch, Europe has known no tempest, although occasionally menacing and threatening clouds have not ceased to traverse its still obscured horizon. There were even glimmerings and indications that the old and fatal agreement between the cabinets of Berlin and St. Petersburg was no longer as absolute as in the past, that it admitted certain intermissions, or at least certain differences of opinions and appreciations. It is thus that the government of the czar refused to follow the chancellor of Germany in his Spanish campaign, in his feverish adhesion to the presidency of Marshal Serrano, and it did not seem doubtful that the personal intervention of Alexander II., strongly supported by England in the past year, turned from France an iniquitous aggression and a terrible calamity. Since that epoch, also, the adhesion of Austria to the official policy of the two Northern states has come—we cannot emphasize it too much—either to complete or to complicate an association in which it becomes difficult to discover any common interests, and which, up to this day at least, has only found harmony in silence. The future alone can unveil the importance and the virtue of this extolled alliance of three empires, as badly known as it is badly conceived, perhaps; but one will scarcely be deceived in supposing that to-day, in this double and troubled household, it is M. de Bismarck who can think himself the happiest of the three.