CHAPTER XX.
Rigors of the Continental System.[35]
Measures of Ecclesiastical Procedure — Reforms in the Church — Napoleon as Suzerain of the Pope — Methods of Defying the Continental System — Measures to Enforce it — Rearrangement of German Lands — Napoleon as a Smuggler — "Simulated Papers" — Evasions of the Imperial Restrictions — Visit to the Netherlands — Napoleon and his Brother Louis — The Latter Defiant — Louis's Negotiations with England — Fouché's Interference — His Counterplot.
1810.
The consolidation of Napoleonic power appeared to be progressing rapidly. In February a decree of the senate had declared the Papal States to be divided into two French departments, under the names of Rome and Trasimenus. The Eternal City was to give her name, as second city of the Empire, to the imperial heir. The Pope, endowed with a royal revenue of four millions, was to have a palace in each of several different places, and reside, according to his choice, in any one, or in all in turn. He was to swear that he would never contravene the judgments of the Gallican Church, and his successors were each to be similarly bound on their accession to office. Daunou wrote a book, which was published at the Emperor's expense, maintaining the two theses of Machiavelli: first, that the court of Rome had always used its spiritual power to increase its temporal estate; secondly, that its efforts had always been directed against the temporal power strongest at the moment in Italy. Unconquerable as was the resistance of Pius VII on the whole, he had nevertheless surrendered temporarily at the beginning of what might be called the second quarrel of investitures, by inducting into their offices the bishops nominated by Napoleon. After he had been thrown into captivity, however, he flatly refused to continue, and the Emperor cut the knot by installing in the bishoprics, as they fell vacant, men of his own choice, under the style of "vicars of the chapters."
This was but the initial step to an entire destruction of the administrative scheme devised and perfected by the Roman hierarchy. The college of cardinals had first been brought to Paris, and its members then banished in pairs to the great provincial towns; the ecclesiastical courts, with all their archives, were likewise transplanted from Rome to the French capital; the thirty episcopates of the two new French departments were reduced to four; the army of foreign prelates which had been supported by the papal system was dispersed into the various lands from which its members had come. The number of Roman parishes, too, was reduced, and all the convents were secularized. Such of the discharged priests as were ready to swear allegiance to the Emperor and the Gallican Church received a small pension; the rest—and they appear to have been in a majority—saw their personal as well as ecclesiastical goods confiscated and were themselves exiled.
These or similar measures being applied likewise to Piedmont, Liguria, Tuscany, Parma, and Placentia, the sums of money raised from confiscated estates became enormous. A large proportion of these funds flowed of course into the imperial coffers, and to this fact, as well as to the restored public confidence, was largely due the rise in prices on the stock exchange which occurred on the consummation of the Austrian marriage. These sweeping changes were of great service to true religion and to the lands in which they were made, breaking as they did the chains of an ecclesiastical oppression under which the populace had been reduced to poverty, ignorance, and apathy. Unfortunately the new rule, while more economical than the old, was not less arbitrary—military despotism being as little fitted for the development of a people as the rule of a corporation. Men looked aghast as the papacy and papal influence crumbled together, while the seat of real ecclesiastical power was removed from the banks of the Tiber to those of the Seine. Time seemed to be taking its revenge. Seven centuries earlier Lothair had been the vassal of Innocent II; Napoleon was now the suzerain of Pius VII. So contemptible had the Pope become, even in the eyes of devout Catholics, that de Maistre called the inflexible but supine Pontiff a punchinello of no importance.
It had been clear since Trafalgar that though France might dominate earth, air, and fire in Europe, she could not gain the mastery of the sea and its islands, at least, by the ordinary means. The Emperor's infatuation with the plausible scheme of destroying England's commerce by paper blockades and by embargoes on British goods had not been diminished either by his inconclusive struggle in Spain or by his victory over Austria. It was in vain that he had changed his naval policy from one of fleet-fighting to one of commerce-destroying; that he had seized and was continuing to seize neutral vessels laden with British wares; that he had expanded his political system by conquest until he was nominally master of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Baltic harbors. Since 1805 English trade with the Continent, so far from diminishing, had steadily increased in the hands of contrabandists and neutral carriers, until it had now reached annual dimensions of twenty-five millions sterling. In spite of the Tilsit alliance, even French soldiers occasionally wore English-made shoes and clothing. English ships carried naval stores out of Russian harbors, and colonial wares found their way from the wharves of Riga to the markets of Mainz. But the chief offenders in defying Napoleon's chimerical policy were the Dutch and Hanseatic cities. The resistance elsewhere in the Continent was passive compared with the energetic smuggling and the clandestine evasion of decrees which went on under the eyes of the officials in places like Amsterdam and Hamburg.
These facts had not been concealed from the Emperor of the French at any time, and he now made ready to enforce the threats which he had uttered in the agony of the late wars. It had come to a life-or-death struggle between the policies laid down respectively in the imperial decrees and in the British orders in council. Neither measure was in the strictest sense military, but it is easy to see that the two were irreconcilable in their intent, while the success of either one meant the ruin of the land which upheld the other. It was for the sake, apparently, of waging this decisive though unwarlike contest that Napoleon renounced leading his victorious legions into Spain for the expulsion of English troops from the peninsula. What he himself called the "Spanish ulcer" might weaken the French system, and one hundred thousand good troops, together with the imperial guard, were to be sent to heal it by overwhelming the great English general who had been made Duke of Wellington, and by seizing Lisbon. But the English commerce with the peninsula was slender in comparison with what she carried on with the Baltic and with Holland through the connivance of governments which were nominally her foes. The Continental System, therefore, must first be repaired, and it was to convert a nominal acquiescence into a real one that Davout was despatched to hold the fortresses from Dantzic westward, while Oudinot was to coerce Holland.
With such purposes in view, the lands taken from Austria were apportioned among Bavaria, Italy, Würtemberg, and Baden. Each of these vassal states was made to pay handsomely for its new acquisitions. The principality of Ratisbon was given to Dalberg, the prince-primate, and he in turn delivered that of Frankfort to Prince Eugène. The King of Westphalia received Hanover and Magdeburg, promising in return about ten millions a year of tribute, and engaging to support the eighteen thousand French troops who occupied his new lands. The gradual evacuation of South Germany began, and before long the entire coast-land between the Elbe and the Weser was held by soldiers who had fought at Essling and Wagram. Hamburg, Bremen, and the other Hanseatic towns, East Friesland, Oldenburg, a portion of Westphalia, the canton of Valais, and the grand duchy of Berg were destined very soon to be incorporated with France in order to round out the imperial domain. It might be possible for southern Europe to substitute flax and Neapolitan cotton for American cotton, chicory for coffee, grape syrup or beet sugar for colonial sugar, and woad for indigo, but the North could not. Like Louis, though in a less degree, Murat and Jerome, sympathizing with their peoples, had sinned against the Continental System, and were soon to do penance for their sins by the loss of important territories. But for the present the ostensible compliance of the northern dependencies was accepted.