“The time will come when in Bourbon France the work of the Revolution will be set aside by the stroke of the pen, and absolute government decreed again. Even in England, free speech attempted at a public meeting will bring out the troops who will charge upon a mixed and unarmed multitude, wounding and slaying with a brutality born of bigoted royalism and class-tyranny. The cry for reform there will challenge such resistance that Wellington will hold his army ready to massacre English people.
“The time will come when these three kings—Alexander, Francis, and Frederick William—will form their Holy Alliance in the interest of aristocracy, hereditary privilege, clerical tyranny, and absolute royalty. By force of arms they will crush democracy wherever it appears; they will bring upon Europe a reign of terror; and the cause of human progress will seem to be lost forever.
“And as for you, Prince Metternich, the time will come when you will have been so identified with the oppressors of the people, so well known as their busy tool, their heartless advocate, their pitiless executioner, their polished liar, hypocrite, and comprehensive knave, that a minister of state will proclaim amid universal applause, ‘I sum up the infamy of the last decades in the name of Metternich!’”
All this might the Queen of Saxony have said to her insolent tormentor; for all this is literal truth. In the light of history the woman was right: Napoleon’s was the “sacred cause.”
* * * * *
When the Emperor reached Paris, his situation was as trying as any mortal was ever called upon to face. Not a legitimate king like Alexander, Frederick William, or Francis, his power could not rally from shocks which theirs had so easily survived. Great as had been his genius for construction, he could not give to his empire the solidity and sanctity which comes from age. He could create orders of nobility, and judicial, legislative, and executive systems; he could erect a throne, establish a dynasty, and surround it with a court; but he could not so consecrate it with the mysterious benediction of time that it would defy adversity, and stand of its own strength amid storms which levelled all around it.
The great Frederick and the small Frederick William remained the centre of Prussian hopes, Prussian loyalty, Prussian efforts even when Berlin was in the hands of the enemy, the army scattered in defeat, and the King almost a fugitive. Prussia, in all her battles, fought for the King; in her defeats, mourned with the King; in her resurrection from disaster, rallied round the King.
Austria had done the same. Her Emperor Francis had as little real manhood in him as any potentate that ever complacently repeated the formula of “God and I.” He was weak in war and in peace; in the head, empty; in the heart, waxy and cold; in the spirit, selfish, false, cowardly, and unscrupulous. Yet when this man’s unprovoked attacks upon Napoleon had brought Austria to her shame and sorrow,—cities burnt, fields wasted, armies destroyed, woe in every house for lives lost in battle,—Austria knew no rallying-point other than Francis; and when the poor creature came back to Vienna, after Napoleon had granted him peace, all classes met him with admiration, love, loyalty, and enthusiasm. Napoleon, returning to France victorious, was not more joyously acclaimed by the French than was this defeated and despoiled Francis applauded in Vienna.
The one was a legitimate king, the other was not. On the side of Francis and the Fredericks were time, training, habit, and system. Germans were born into the system, educated to it, practised in it, and died out of it—to be succeeded by generations who knew nothing but to follow in the footsteps of those that had gone before.
In France the old order had been overthrown and the new had not so completely identified itself with Napoleon that he could exert the tremendous force which antiquity and custom lend to institutions.