Thus at one blow were abolished one hundred states governed by archbishops, bishops, and other clerical dignitaries, and one of the foundation stones of the empire, laid by Charlemagne himself, was shattered.
This extraordinary man, dreaming of universal empire, superstitiously believed that Fate intended him to hold Europe in his hand. But we can see now that he was designed by that remorseless Fate for a very different purpose, and a very brief office. He was a terrible instrument, which she intended to use for one specific purpose, and then to cast him aside.
This work was the destruction of the Romano-Germanic Empire. That lifeless mass, whose oppressive weight had crushed the life and hope out of Central Europe for centuries, needed some tremendous force from without to break up its time-encrusted rivets. And that force was now in the hands of a workman who supposed he was engaged in rearing a great edifice for himself. Instead of which he was overturning, and plowing, and harrowing Germany, and preparing the ground for new forms of political life; and nothing more effectually pulverized the old tyrannies than this secularization of the priestly dominions. When, added to this, we see the extinction of a multitude of petty states and the abolition of the special privileges of nearly a thousand "Imperial" noble families, we realize how he was relieving Germany from the incubus which had paralyzed her for centuries.
CHAPTER XVI.
The eighteenth century closed upon a strangely altered Europe. France was the ruling power on the Continent. Prussia had hidden herself in a timid neutrality, and left Austria to fight with foreign allies for the life of the empire. That battle had been a losing one, and now Francis II. sat upon a trembling throne and bore a title which had no longer any meaning.
But Napoleon was building his own edifice. In 1803 he had himself declared First Consul for life, and in 1804 he assumed the title of Napoleon, Emperor of the French. His coronation took place at Paris, where he compelled the Pope to come and perform that ceremony.
Then, after changing the groups of Italian republics into a Kingdom of Italy, he crowned himself, after the fashion of the Emperors whose successor he meant to be, with the Iron Crown of Lombardy.
He had entered upon the most daring scheme ever attempted in Europe: to convert the whole Continent into one vast empire, with the kings and princes over the several nations all subject to him.
Then there was a third coalition from which Prussia still held aloof, and which was composed of England, Austria, Russia, and Sweden. Alexander I. was now Emperor of Russia, and the timorous and unpatriotic policy of Prussia was guided by Frederick William III., who had succeeded his father Frederick William II.