Napoleon thought he had Spain within his grasp, and now suddenly everything was slipping from him. The Peninsula became the grave of whole armies and a battlefield Bailen. for England. Dupont capitulated at Bailen into the hands of Castaños, and Junot at Cintra to Wellesley; while Europe trembled at this first check to the hitherto invincible imperial armies. To reduce Spanish resistance Napoleon had in his turn to come to terms with the tsar Alexander at Erfurt; so that abandoning his designs in the East, he could make the Grand Army evacuate Prussia and return in force to Madrid.
Thus Spain swallowed up the soldiers who were wanted for Napoleon’s other fields of battle, and they had to be replaced by forced levies. Europe had only to wait, and he Wagram. would eventually be found disarmed in face of a last coalition; but Spanish heroism infected Austria, and showed the force of national resistance. The provocations of Talleyrand and England strengthened the illusion: Why should not the Austrians emulate the Spaniards? The campaign of 1809, however, was but a pale copy of the Spanish insurrection. After a short and decisive action in Bavaria, Napoleon opened up the road to Vienna for a second time; and after the two days’ battle at Essling, the stubborn fight at Wagram, the failure of a patriotic insurrection in northern Germany and of the English expedition against Antwerp, the treaty of Vienna (December 14, 1809), with Peace of Vienna. the annexation of the Illyrian provinces, completed the colossal empire. Napoleon profited, in fact, by this campaign which had been planned for his overthrow. The pope was deported to Savona beneath the eyes of indifferent Europe, and his domains were incorporated in the Empire; the senate’s decision on the 17th of February 1810 created the title of king of Rome, and made Rome the capital of Italy. The pope banished, it was now desirable to send away those to whom Italy had been more or less promised. Eugène de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s stepson, was transferred to Frankfort, and Murat carefully watched until the time should come to take him to Russia and install him as king of Poland. Between 1810 and 1812 Napoleon’s divorce of Joséphine, and his marriage with Marie Louise of Austria, followed by the birth of the king of Rome, shed a brilliant light upon his future policy. He renounced a federation in which his brothers were not sufficiently docile; he gradually withdrew power from them; he concentrated all his affection and ambition on the son who was the guarantee of the continuance of his dynasty. This was the apogee of his reign.
But undermining forces were already at work: the faults inherent in his unwieldy achievement. England, his chief enemy, was persistently active; and rebellion both of the governing and the governed broke out everywhere. Beginning of the end. Uprising of nationalism. Napoleon felt his impotence in coping with the Spanish insurrection, which he underrated, while yet unable to suppress it altogether. Men like Stein, Hardenberg and Scharnhorst were secretly preparing Prussia’s retaliation. Napoleon’s material omnipotence could not stand against the moral force of the pope, a prisoner at Fontainebleau; and this he did not realize. The alliance arranged at Tilsit was seriously shaken by the Austrian marriage, the threat of a Polish restoration, and the unfriendly policy of Napoleon at Constantinople. The very persons whom he had placed in power were counteracting his plans: after four years’ experience Napoleon found himself obliged to treat his Corsican dynasties like those of the ancien régime, and all his relations were betraying him. Caroline conspired against her brother and against her husband; the hypochondriacal Louis, now Dutch in his sympathies, found the supervision of the blockade taken from him, and also the defence of the Scheldt, which he had refused to ensure; Jerome, idling in his harem, lost that of the North Sea shores; and Joseph, who was attempting the moral conquest of Spain, was continually insulted at Madrid. The very nature of things was against the new dynasties, as it had been against the old.
After national insurrections and family recriminations came treachery from Napoleon’s ministers. Talleyrand betrayed his designs to Metternich, and had to be dismissed; Fouché corresponded with Austria in 1809 and 1810, Treachery. entered into an understanding with Louis, and also with England; while Bourrienne was convicted of peculation. By a natural consequence of the spirit of conquest he had aroused, all these parvenus, having tasted victory, dreamed of sovereign power: Bernadotte, who had helped him to the Consulate, played Napoleon false to win the crown of Sweden; Soult, like Murat, coveted the Spanish throne after that of Portugal, thus anticipating the treason of 1813 and the defection of 1814; many persons hoped for “an accident” which might resemble the tragic end of Alexander and of Caesar. The country itself, besides, though flattered by conquests, was tired of self-sacrifice. It had become satiated; “the cry of the mothers rose threateningly” against “the Ogre” and his intolerable imposition of wholesale conscription. The soldiers themselves, discontented after Austerlitz, cried out for peace after Eylau. Finally, amidst profound silence from the press and the Assemblies, a protest was raised against imperial despotism by the literary world, against the excommunicated sovereign by Catholicism, and against the author of the continental blockade by the discontented bourgeoisie, ruined by the crisis of 1811.
Napoleon himself was no longer the General Bonaparte of his campaign in Italy. He was already showing signs of physical decay; the Roman medallion profile had coarsened, the obese body was often lymphatic. Mental degeneration, Degeneration of Napoleon. too, betrayed itself in an unwonted irresolution. At Eylau, at Wagram, and later at Waterloo, his method of acting by enormous masses of infantry and cavalry, in a mad passion for conquest, and his misuse of his military resources, were all signs of his moral and technical decadence; and this at the precise moment when, instead of the armies and governments of the old system, which had hitherto reigned supreme, the nations themselves were rising against France, and the events of 1792 were being avenged upon her. The three campaigns of two years brought the final catastrophe.
Napoleon had hardly succeeded in putting down the revolt in Germany when the tsar himself headed a European insurrection against the ruinous tyranny of the continental blockade. To put a stop to this, to ensure his own Russian campaign. access to the Mediterranean and exclude his chief rival, Napoleon made a desperate effort in 1812 against a country as invincible as Spain. Despite his victorious advance, the taking of Smolensk, the victory on the Moskwa, and the entry into Moscow, he was vanquished by Russian patriotism and religious fervour, by the country and the climate, and by Alexander’s refusal to make terms. After this came the lamentable retreat, while all Europe was concentrating against him. Pushed back, as he had been in Spain, from bastion to bastion, after the action on the Beresina, Napoleon had to fall back upon the frontiers of 1809, and then—having refused the peace offered him by Austria at the congress of Prague, from a dread of losing Italy, where each of his victories had marked a stage in the accomplishment of his dream—on those of 1805, despite Lützen and Bautzen, and on those of 1802 after his defeat at Leipzig, where Bernadotte turned upon him, Moreau figured Campaigns of 1813-14. among the Allies, and the Saxons and Bavarians forsook him. Following his retreat from Russia came his retreat from Germany. After the loss of Spain, reconquered by Wellington, the rising in Holland preliminary to the invasion and the manifesto of Frankfort which proclaimed it, he had to fall back upon the frontiers of 1795; and then later was driven yet farther back upon those of 1792, despite the wonderful campaign of 1814 against the invaders, in which the old Bonaparte of 1796 seemed to have returned. Paris capitulated on the 30th of March, and the “Delenda Carthago,” pronounced against England, was spoken of Napoleon. The great empire of East and West fell in ruins with the emperor’s abdication at Fontainebleau.
The military struggle ended, the political struggle began. How was France to be governed? The Allies had decided on the eviction of Napoleon at the Congress of Châtillon; and the precarious nature of the Bonapartist monarchy Downfall of the Empire. in France itself was made manifest by the exploit of General Malet, which had almost succeeded during the Russian campaign, and by Lainé’s demand for free exercise of political rights, when Napoleon made a last appeal to the Legislative Assembly for support. The defection of the military and civil aristocracy, which brought about Napoleon’s abdication, the refusal of a regency, and the failure of Bernadotte, who wished to resuscitate the Consulate, enabled Talleyrand, vice-president of the senate and desirous of power, to persuade the Allies to accept the Bourbon solution of the difficulty. The declaration of St Ouen (May 2, 1814) indicated that the new monarchy was only accepted upon conditions. After Napoleon’s abdication, and exile to the island of Elba, came the Revolution’s abdication of her conquests: the first treaty of Paris (May 30th) confirmed France’s renunciation of Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine, and her return within her pre-revolutionary frontiers, save for some slight rectifications.
After the scourge of war, the horrors of conscription, and the despotism which had discounted glory, every one seemed to rejoice in the return of the Bourbons, which atoned for humiliations by restoring liberty. But questions of Faults of the Bourbons. form, which aroused questions of sentiment, speedily led to grave dissensions. The hurried armistice of the 23rd of April, by which the comte d’Artois delivered over disarmed France to her conquerors; Louis XVIII.’s excessive gratitude to the prince regent of England; the return of the émigrés; the declaration of St Ouen, dated from the nineteenth year of the new reign; the charter of June 4th, “concédée et octroyée,” maintaining the effete doctrine of legitimacy in a country permeated with the idea of national sovereignty; the slights put upon the army; the obligatory processions ordered by Comte Beugnot, prefect of police; all this provoked a conflict not only between two theories of government but between two groups of men and of interests. An avowedly imperialist party was soon again formed, a centre of heated opposition to the royalist party; and neither Baron Louis’ excellent finance, nor the peace, nor the charter of June 4th—which despite the irritation of the émigrés preserved the civil gains of the Revolution—prevented the man who was its incarnation from seizing an opportunity to bring about another military coup d’état. Having landed in the Bay of Jouan on the 1st of March, on the 20th Napoleon re-entered the Tuileries in triumph, while Louis XVIII. fled to Ghent. By the Acte additionnel of the 22nd of April he induced Carnot and Fouché—the The Hundred Days. March-June 1815. last of the Jacobins—and the heads of the Liberal opposition, Benjamin Constant and La Fayette, to side with him against the hostile Powers of Europe, occupied in dividing the spoils at Vienna. He proclaimed his intention of founding a new democratic empire; and French policy was thus given another illusion, which was to be exploited with fatal success by Napoleon’s namesake. But the cannon of Waterloo ended this adventure (June 18, 1815), and, thanks to Fouché’s treachery, the triumphal progress of Milan, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, and even of Moscow, was to end at St Helena.
The consequences of the Hundred Days were very serious; France was embroiled with all Europe, though Talleyrand’s clever diplomacy had succeeded in causing division over Saxony and Poland by the secret Austro-Anglo-French Louis XVIII. alliance of the 3rd of January 1815, and the Coalition destroyed both France’s political independence and national integrity by the treaty of peace of November 20th: she found herself far weaker than before the Revolution, and in the power of the European Alliance. The Hundred Days divided the nation itself into two irreconcilable parties: one ultra-royalist, eager for vengeance and retaliation, refusing to accept the Charter; the other imperialist, composed of Bonapartists and Republicans, incensed by their defeat—of whom Béranger was the Tyrtaeus—both parties equally revolutionary and equally obstinate. Louis XVIII., urged by his more fervent supporters towards the ancien régime, gave his policy an exactly contrary direction; he had common-sense enough to maintain the Empire’s legal and administrative tradition, accepting its institutions of the Legion of Honour, the Bank, the University, and the imperial nobility—modifying only formally certain rights and the conscription, since these had aroused the nation against Napoleon. He even went so far as to accept advice from the imperial ministers Talleyrand and Fouché. Finally, as the chief political organization had become thoroughly demoralized, he imported into France the entire constitutional system of England, with its three powers, king, upper hereditary chamber, and lower elected chamber; with its plutocratic electorate, and even with details like the speech from the throne, the debate on the address, &c. This meant importing also difficulties such as ministerial responsibility, as well as electoral and press legislation.
Louis XVIII., taught by time and misfortune, wished not to reign over two parties exasperated by contrary passions and desires; but his dynasty was from the outset implicated in the struggle, which was to be fatal to it, between old France and revolutionary France. Anti-monarchical, liberal and anti-clerical France at once recommenced its revolutionary work; the whole 19th century was to be filled with great spasmodic upheavals, and Louis XVIII. was soon overwhelmed by the White Terrorists of 1815.