The force and energy of Napoleon’s system of1813. government was evinced in a marvellous manner by the rapidity with which he returned to Germany, at the head of an enormous army, before his enemies had time even to understand the extent of his misfortunes in the Russian campaign. The victories of Lutzen and Bautzen then seemed to reinstate him as the arbiter of Europe. But those battles were fought with the heads of columns the rear of which were still filing out of France. They were fought also with young troops. Wherefore the emperor when he had given himself a fixed and menacing position in Germany more readily listened to the fraudful negociations of his trembling opponents, partly in hopes of attaining his object without further appeal to arms, partly to obtain time to organize and discipline his soldiers, confident in his own unmatched skill in directing them if war was finally to decide his fate. He counted also upon the family ties between him and Austria, and believed that power willing to mediate sincerely. Not that he was so weak as to imagine the hope of regaining some of its former power and possessions was not uppermost, nor was he unprepared to make concessions; but he seems to have been quite unsuspecting of the long course of treachery and deceit followed by the Austrian politicians.
It has been already shewn that while negociating with France an offensive and defensive treaty inVol. v. p. 49 1812, the Austrian cabinet was cognizant of, and secretly aiding the plan of a vast insurrection extending from the Tyrol to Calabria and the Illyrian provinces. The management of this scheme was entrusted by the English cabinet to general Nugent and Mr. King who were at Vienna; their agents went from thence to Italy and the Illyrian coast, many Austrian officers were engaged in the project; and Italians of great families entered into commercial[Appendix, No. 1.] houses to enable them with more facility to carry on this plan. Moreover Austria while actually signing the treaty with Napoleon was with unceasing importunity urging Prussia to join the Russians in opposition to him. The feeble operations of Prince Swartzenberg, the manner in which he uncovered the emperor’s right flank and permitted Tchitchagoff to move to the Beresina in the Russian campaign, were but continuations of this deceitful policy. And it was openly advanced as a merit by the Austrian cabinet that her offer of mediation after the battle of Bautzen was made solely with the view of gaining time to organize the army which was to join the Russians and Prussians. Finally the armistice itself was violated, hostilities being commenced before its termination, to enable the Russian troops safely to join the Austrians in Bohemia.
Nevertheless Napoleon’s genius triumphed at Dresden over the unskilful operations of the allies, directed by Swartzenberg, whose incapacity as a commander was made manifest in this campaign. Nor would the after misfortunes of Vandamme and Marshal Macdonald, or the defeat of Oudinot and Ney have prevented the emperor’s final success but for the continuation of a treachery, which seemed at the time to be considered a virtue by sovereigns who were unceasingly accusing their more noble adversary of the very baseness that they were practising so unblushingly. He had conceived a project so vast so original so hardy, so far above the imaginations of his contemporary generals, that even Wellington’s sagacity failed to pierce it, and he censured the emperor’s long stay on the Elbe as an obstinacy unwarranted by the rules of art. But Napoleon had more profoundly judged his own situation. The large forces he left at Dresden at Torgau, and Wittemberg, for which he has been so much blamed by shallow military critics as lessening his numbers on the field of Leipsic, were essential parts of his gigantic plan. He quitted Dresden, apparently in retreat, to deceive his enemies, but with the intention of marching down the Elbe, recrossing that river and throwing his opponents into a false position. Then he would have seized Berlin and reopening his communications with his garrisons both on the Elbe and the Oder have operated between those rivers; and with an army much augmented in power, because he would have recovered many thousand old soldiers cooped up in the garrisons; an army more compact and firmly established also, because he would have been in direct communication with the Danes and with Davoust’s force at Hamburgh, and both his flanks would have been secured by his chains of fortresses on the two rivers. Already had Blucher and the Swedes felt his first stroke, the next would have taught the allies that the lion was still abroad in his strength, if at the very moment of execution without any previous declaration the Bavarians, upon whose operations he depended for keeping the Austrians in the valley of the Danube in check, had not formed common cause with his opponents and the whole marched together towards the Rhine. The battle of Leipsic followed, the well-known treason of the Saxon troops led to the victory gained there by the allies, and Napoleon, now the prey of misfortune, reached France with only one-third of his army, having on the way however trampled in the dust the Bavarian Wrede who attempted to stop his passage at Hannau.
Meanwhile the allied sovereigns, by giving hopes to their subjects that constitutional liberty would be the reward of the prodigious popular exertions against France, hopes which with the most detestable baseness they had previously resolved to defraud, assembled greater forces than they were able to wield, and prepared to pass the Rhine. But distrusting even their immense superiority of numbers they still pursued their faithless system. When Napoleon in consequence of the Bavarian defection marched to Leipsic, he sent orders to Gouvion St. Cyr to abandon Dresden and unite with the garrisons on the Lower Elbe, the messengers were intercepted, and St. Cyr, too little enterprising to execute such a plan of his own accord, surrendered on condition of being allowed to regain France. The capitulation was broken and general and soldiers remained prisoners.
After the Leipsic battle, Napoleon’s adherents fell away by nations. Murat the husband of his sister joined Austria and thus forced prince Eugene to abandon his position on the Adige. A successful insurrection in favour of the prince of Orange broke out in Holland. The neutrality of Switzerland was violated, and more than half a million of armed men were poured across the frontiers of France in all the violence of brute force, for their military combinations were contemptible and their course marked by murder and devastation. But previous to this the allies gave one more notable example of their faithless cunning.
St. Aignan the French resident minister at Gotha had been taken at Leipsic and treated at first as a prisoner of war. He remonstrated and being known to entertain a desire for peace was judged a good tool with which to practise deception. Napoleon had offered on the field of battle at Leipsic to negociate, no notice was taken of it at the time, but now the Austrian Metternich and the Russian Nesselrode had an interview with St. Aignan at Frankfort, and they assured him the Prussian minister agreed in all things with them. They had previously arranged that lord Aberdeen should come in during the conference as if by accident; nothing was put down in writing, yet St. Aignan was suffered to make minutes of their proposals in reply to the emperor’s offer to negociate. These were generally that the alliance of the sovereigns was indissoluble—that they would have only a general peace—that France was to be confined to her naturalDiplomatic Correspondence, MSS. limits, viz. the Alps the Rhine and the Pyrenees—that the independence of Germany was a thing not to be disputed—that the Spanish Peninsula should be free and the Bourbon dynasty be restored—that Austria must have a frontier in Italy the line of which could be afterwards discussed, but Italy itself was to be independent of any preponderating power—that Holland was also to be independent and her frontier to be matter for after discussion—that England was ready to make great sacrifices for peace upon these bases and would acknowledge that freedom of commerce and of navigation which France had a right to pretend to. St. Aignan here observed that Napoleon believed England was resolved to restrict France to the possession of thirty sail of the line, lord Aberdeen replied that it was not true.
This conference had place at the emperor of Austria’s head-quarters on the 10th of November, and lord Aberdeen inclosed the account of it in a despatch dated at Smalcalde the 16th of November. He had objected verbally to the passage relating to the maritime question with England, nevertheless he permitted it to remain in St. Aignan’s minutes. It was decided also that the military operations should go on notwithstanding the negociation, and in truth the allies had not the slightest design to make peace. They thought Napoleon would refuse the basis proposed, which would give them an opportunity to declare he was opposed to all reasonable modes of putting an end to the war and thus work upon the French people. This is proved by what followed. For when contrary to their expectations the emperor’s minister signified, on the 16th of November, that he accepted the propositions, observing that the independence of all nations at sea as well as by land had been always Napoleon’s object, Metternich in his reply, on the 25th of November, pretended to consider this answer as avoiding the acceptation of the basis. The emperor however put that obstacle aside, on the 2d of December, by accepting explicitly the basis, generally and summarily, such as it had been presented to him, adding, that France would make great sacrifices but the emperor was content if by like sacrifices on the part of England, that general peace which was the declared object of the allies could be obtained. Metternich thus driven from his subterfuge required Napoleon to send a like declaration to each of the allies separately when negociations might, he said, commence.
Meanwhile lord Aberdeen, who had permitted St. Aignan to retain the article relating to maritime rights in his minutes of conference, presented to Metternich on the 27th of November a note declaring that England would not admit the turn given by France to her share of the negociation; that she was ready to yield all the rights of commerce and navigation which France had a right to pretend to, but the question would turn upon what that right was. England would never permit her navigation laws to be discussed at a congress, it was a matter essentially foreign to the object of such an assembly, and England would never depart from the great principle thereby announced as to her maritime rights. Metternich approved of lord Aberdeen’s views, saying they were his own and those of his court, thus proving that the negociation had been a deceit from the beginning. This fact was however placed beyond doubt by lord Castlereagh’s simultaneous proceedings in London.
In a note dated the 30th November that minister told lord Aberdeen England admitted as a basis, that the Alps the Rhine and the Pyrenees should be the frontier of France, subject to such modifications as might be necessary to give a secure frontier to Holland, and to Switzerland also, although the latter had not been mentioned in the proposals given by St. Aignan. He applauded the resolution to pursue military operations notwithstanding the negociations, and he approved of demanding nothing but what they were resolved to have. Nevertheless he said that any sacrifice to be made by England was only to secure the independence of Holland and Switzerland, and the former having already declared for the house of Nassau was now out of the pale of discussion. Finally he recommended that any unnecessary delay or equivocation on the part of the enemy should be considered as tantamount to a rejection of the basis, and that the allies should then put forward the offer of peace to show that it was not they but France that opposed an honourable termination of the war. Having thus thrown fresh obstacles in the way of that peace which the allies pretended to have so much at heart, he, on the 21st December, sent notes to the different ambassadors of the allied powers then in London demanding explicit answers about the intentions of their courts as to England’s maritime code. To this they all responded that their cabinets would not suffer any question relative to that code to be entertained at a congress in which England was represented, and this on the express ground that it would mar the great object of peace.
Lord Castlereagh thus provided, declared that France should be informed of their resolutions before negociations commenced, but twenty days before this Napoleon having decreed a fresh levy of three hundred thousand conscripts the allies had published a manifesto treating this measure, so essentially a defensive one since they would not suspend their military operations, as a fresh provocation on his part, because the motives assigned for the conscription contained a just and powerful description of their past deceits and violence with a view to rouse the national spirit of France. Thus having first by a pretended desire for peace and a willingness on the part of England to consent to an arrangement about her maritime code, inveigled the French emperor into negociations and thereby ascertained that the maritime question was uppermost in his mind and the only obstacle to peace, they declared that vital question should not even be discussed. And when by this subtlety they had rendered peace impossible proclaimed that Napoleon alone resisted the desire of the world for tranquillity. And at this very moment Austria was secretly endeavouring to obtain England’s consent to her seizing upon Alsace a project which was stopped by lord Wellington who forcibly pointed out the danger of rousing France to a general insurrection by such a proceeding.