In this last body, therefore, were assembled three important classes: sincere Bonapartists like Roederer, Regnault de St.-Jean-d'Angély, and Boulay de la Meurthe; clever specialists like Ganteaume, Chaptal, and Fourcroy, who were quite willing to serve the First Consul; and a number of proselytes from among the royalists and other factions. For the most part these were men of great ability, and for a time they found in the First Consul a disinterestedness in serving France which made them his devoted servants. The personality of the council was Bonaparte's, and whatever independence it possessed was his. The court of appeals was duly organized by the senate, which had this right as being the guardian of the constitution. The justices and councilors of a supreme court, the copestone of the judiciary, were nominated by the same body. The other courts were also ably manned with officials who, though not servile, were stanch supporters of the new government.
Before the time when the campaign could open in the spring of 1800, all these parts were intended to be, and actually were, running smoothly; but they were running by the inspiration and activity of a single man. The council of state was his greater self, the senate his instrument of governing; the legislative body was as silent as the tribunate was noisy—neither was a serious check on his plans. Legislation of the greatest importance was under way; it was all devised for purposes of centralization, and was studied in detail by the First Consul. Administration was proceeding with scarcely any friction whatsoever; but this was because Bonaparte kept his eye on each separate office, and carefully superintended its working. By special arrangement foreign relations were considered and settled in secret consultation by the chief of state and Talleyrand; but the latter dared not pretend that in unraveling the threads of so tangled a web, or in their skilful rearrangement, the initiative was his. Carnot, at his old work, with his old genius unimpaired, needed little encouragement; but even in his department every corps, every battalion, every regiment, every company of all the arms,—cavalry, infantry, and artillery of every class, conscript, soldier, reserve, and home guard,—each and all were known to the First Consul. Incredible and exaggerated as such statements must appear, the testimony to their truth is so abundant and unimpeachable that it seems to the reader as if at this crisis there had appeared in Europe a being neither human, demoniac, nor celestial, but a man with superhuman powers of endurance, apprehension, and labor, an angel without perfection, a demon without malevolence. For, on the whole, Bonaparte's work, while replete with dangerous expedients, and, as the future conclusively proved, inspired by self-seeking, was beneficent, constructive, and permanent in regard not merely to France, but to Europe and the world.
In the opening months of 1800 the Continental situation was even more peculiar than usual. In 1799 the Directory had, as a financial measure, incorporated Belgium with France, and her provinces, like all other parts of the country, paid heavy taxes. This could not be changed; and in regard to the minor states still nominally independent, but really under French control, the old policy of the Directory could likewise not immediately be dropped. Masséna had just made a forced levy in Switzerland. Genoa was laid under a fresh contribution of two million francs, and menaced with a forced levy. It was arranged that Holland should pay forty million francs for the restitution of Flushing; and Amsterdam was invited to lend ten more, but refused. Hamburg was secretly held out to Prussia as the price of an alliance with France. Publicly the Hohenzollern monarchy was praised for its refusal to surrender some important political refugees to the coalition, and was offered the friendship of France at the price of four to six millions of francs. It was determined that Portugal, which, having been exhausted by a long alliance with England, now earnestly desired peace, should be told informally by Talleyrand that it could be purchased by a contribution of from eight to ten millions for the Army of Italy. Paul I of Russia, already angry with Austria, was confirmed in his friendship for France by many acts of courtesy. The Russian prisoners of war received new clothes, and were released; the First Consul, recognizing the Czar's quixotic interest in the Knights of Malta, sent to him the sword of Valetta, captured on the seizure of the island. A treaty of peace between France and Russia speedily ensued.
This of course effectually checked Turkey, and soon afterward competent experts were appointed by Paul to consider the details of a combined Franco-Russian expedition for the invasion of India by land, and to parcel out Asia between the two powers. The scheme originated with an agent of the Directory, named Guttin, who after a sojourn in Russia had boldly suggested that as Russia could never be even touched by modern ideas, and as the international propaganda of cosmopolitan republicanism must needs stop at her frontiers, there was but one course open: to seek her alliance. Bonaparte carefully studied the long and persuasive report, began his preparations to realize the policy in the far future, was mindful of it at Tilsit, and, thwarted in his hope of keeping Russia an eastern power, found his first serious check in the campaign fought to coerce her. The expedition planned by him and Paul, as a side thrust at Great Britain, embraced both India and Persia in its details. Should it succeed, even the island kingdom might one day find itself a tamed and trained unit in the federation of western and central Europe under the ægis of a new western emperor, dividing the world with him who claimed to be the eastern; the heir and successor of those Romans who had reigned from Byzantium.
The center of gravity on the Continent remained in Prussia. As the land of Frederick, and the rival of Austria, she supposed herself to represent the liberal side of German life. In fact, there was a strong French party at Berlin, which felt that the republic had been fighting Prussia's battle in weakening the house of Austria. But Frederick William III, the young King, was timid, cautious, and full of self-esteem. He was overmastered by the specious idea, also cherished by his prime minister, that a firm neutrality would recuperate the strength of his country and people while internecine warfare was exhausting the rest of Europe. On this ground he had so far stood unshaken; and though the sympathies of his house had always been, in the main, on the side of absolutism, he refused the alliance of the absolutist coalition, and remained obstinate between the two alternatives. Nor did he falter until he destroyed his own prestige. The country itself would have been sacrificed but for the national uprising which some years later compelled him to take a decided stand. The Directory had longed to secure Prussia as part of the French system in Europe, and finally sent Sieyès to engage her as an ally. But the envoy spent more energy in intriguing against his employers, and in devising schemes for the monarchical system which was to supplant them in France, than in his proper work, and succeeded only in confirming the King of Prussia in his policy. Bonaparte sent two representatives, Duroc and Beurnonville, to renew the negotiation and obtain Prussia's active assistance. They were received with much show of kindness, and the hopes of the latter envoy rose high, but only to be shattered. Privately the King notified Sandoz, his minister in Paris, that if France were defeated in the inevitable impending conflict, Prussia would reclaim her territories on the left bank of the Rhine, and declare war to secure them. The treaties in which she had renounced them were waste paper in this case; but until the event were decided she would stir neither hand nor foot.
With Prussia persistently neutral, and all the minor states exasperated not only by the continued billeting of French troops upon them, but by new demands for money, France was virtually left alone against Austria and England in the coming campaign. This situation was perfectly clear to the French people; but in view of all that had happened since the change of government, it appeared to every one not only as if reasonable offers of peace on the part of the First Consul had been refused, but as if French honor were inseparably united with the policy of war forced upon him. Though not proved, it is reiterated that this was what Bonaparte wanted. Subsequent events support the hypothesis; and if it be true, no schemer ever met with such perfect success. A career of aggressive extension was apparently forced upon him.
Three great revolutionary concepts of foreign policy were therefore the outcome of Bonaparte's studies in the exhibition of Austrian and British policy, of French temperament and personal ambition: the mastery of the Mediterranean basin and thereby of the Orient; the extension of a revolutionary liberal system in Europe by the conquest and protectorate of the Continent; and the leadership of the world for the French nation, still as ever enthusiastic for lofty ideals and great deeds. Similar notions had not been foreign to the ancient régime, but England had prevented their fulfilment. The republic, having vaguely enlarged them, had fought for them as France had never fought before, because these things were not to be achieved for a dynasty, and were now illuminated by visions of human regeneration. Still England stood in the way. Bonaparte had given them new shape and new intensity with new definition; logically his success would stand for that most splendid of ideals which has ever dazzled poets, theologians, and kings—the universality of empire for peace and its arts, and the consequent elevation of all mankind. By the conquests of Alexander, Cæsar, and Charles the Great, animated as was each in turn by ambition and fiery zeal, nations, tribes, and institutions had been melted in one crucible. Each of those heroes had done a wondrous work in the advance of civilization, but their gains had been indirect. The experiment was to be tried for a fourth time. Would England again and finally dash the French Utopia into ruins?
For the moment Great Britain might be well content. India was safer for the overthrow of Tippoo, Ceylon was conquered, Egypt blockaded, and supremacy regained in the West Indies as well. Malta was in her hands, the Dutch fleet had been destroyed, the French and Spanish fleets were imprisoned at Brest. It is true the liberal agitations inaugurated and kept alive by the discontent of her middle and lower classes were hard to repress; but they were mercilessly crushed as they came to the surface, and on the whole, public opinion supported the policy. That Grenville was subsidizing Georges Cadoudal with half a million francs to reorganize the Chouannerie of western France, and strike the "essential blow," was barely suspected. The proof has only come to light a century later. Assassination is an ugly word: it was not used, but it was contemplated. If this were the temper of Great Britain, that of Austria, her ally, was even more irreconcilable. Expansion in Italy was the focal concept of her policy. There was no expense of money and men she would refuse to consider for erasing the blot of Campo Formio. She had recruited her treasury and her army by British aid, and was defiant. The letter to her Emperor from the First Consul, as of equal to equal, was a crowning insult.
The first four months of the Consulate had not left the First Consul without enemies at home both numerous and bitter; moreover, many narrow minds—men who, like Talleyrand, were ignorant of how impossible the permanent return of the Bourbons had become—considered Bonaparte's tenure of power only as a transition to the old order. But at the critical instant, in April of the last year of the eighteenth century, France as a whole, including even the factions which had hoped to use him as a tool, felt that her doctrines, her aspirations, and her fate were personified in the great Corsican. His own motives may properly be stigmatized as those of personal ambition; but they were much more. Half educated and half barbarous as he was in his disdain of human limitations, there was in his heart a clear conception that good can come only of good, and therefore he had a definite purpose to do the most possible in order to illuminate his own rise by the regeneration of society. Himself a man without a country,—for all his patriotic aspirations perished in Corsica's desperate failure,—he cared little for territorial limits, and utterly failed to comprehend the strength of national ties. Without sincere ecclesiastical feeling or an earnest faith, he partly understood the value of religious sentiment in the individual, but underrated utterly its moral preponderance in the social organism. The church to him was little more than a "white" police force. A consummate actor, he estimated at its full the influence of the dramatic word and situation on the common mind, but was often self-deceived while believing others misled or beguiled by his acting.
It is not at all inconsistent with a possible sincerity in the ostensibly pacific foreign policy he was pursuing that, even before the decision to fight had apparently been forced upon him, two manifestoes rang out to the troops. To the Army of the Rhine he said: "You have conquered Holland, the Rhine, and Italy, and have dictated peace under the walls of terrified Vienna. Now it is not a question of defending your borders, but of overpowering hostile states." To the Army of Italy in particular he said, with reference to a too notorious instance in which during the previous year a half-brigade had shown the white feather: "Are they all dead, the brave men of Castiglione, of Rivoli, and of Neumarkt? They would rather have perished than have been untrue to their colors; and they surely would have dragged their younger comrades on to honor and to duty. Soldiers, you say your rations are not regularly distributed. What would you have done if, like Four and Twenty-two of the light infantry, like Eighteen and Thirty-two of the line, you had found yourselves in the midst of the desert, without bread, without water, with nothing to eat but the flesh of horses and mules? 'Victory will give us bread,' said they; and you—you desert your standards!" Such words, from such a man, could leave no soldier of any nation unmoved. The Frenchmen in the ranks were thrilled by them; the general who wrote them understood that peace without glory was a broken reed for an aspiring ruler. He had proffered the olive-branch, but he must, in order completely to win his people, chastise those who had spurned it. Austria, in particular, must get another lesson in humility.