Chapter IV (2)

The allied Governments had so framed their plans that the most overwhelming victory could produce no result. Instead of entering France, Suvaroff was compelled to turn back into Switzerland, while the Austrians continued to besiege the fortresses of Piedmont. In Switzerland Suvaroff had to meet an enemy who was forewarned of his approach, and who had employed every resource of military skill and daring to prevent the union of the two Russian armies now advancing from the south and the north. Before Suvaroff could leave Italy, a series of admirably-planned attacks had given Massena the whole network of the central Alpine passes, and closed every avenue of communication between Suvaroff and the army with which he hoped to co-operate. The folly of the Austrian Cabinet seconded the French general's exertions. No sooner had Korsakoff and the new Russian division reached Schaffhausen than the Archduke Charles, forced by his orders from Vienna, turned northwards (Sept. 3), leaving the Russians with no support but Hotze's corps, which was scattered over six cantons. [80] Korsakoff advanced to Zürich; Massena remained in his old position on the Uetliberg. It was now that Suvaroff began his march into the Alps, sorely harassed and delayed by the want of the mountain-teams which the Austrians had promised him, and filled with the apprehension that Korsakoff would suffer some irreparable disaster before his own arrival.

[Second Battle of Zürich, Sept. 26.]

Two roads lead from the Italian lakes to central Switzerland; one, starting from the head of Lago Maggiore and crossing the Gothard, ends on the shore of Lake Lucerne; the other, crossing the Splügen, runs from the Lake of Como to Reichenau, in the valley of the Rhine. The Gothard in 1799 was not practicable for cannon; it was chosen by Suvaroff, however, for his own advance, with the object of falling upon Massena's rear with the utmost possible speed. He left Bellinzona on the 21st of September, fought his way in a desperate fashion through the French outposts that guarded the defiles of the Gothard, and arrived at Altorf near the Lake of Lucerne. Here it was discovered that the westward road by which Suvaroff meant to strike upon the enemy's communications had no existence. Abandoning this design, Suvaroff made straight for the district where his colleague was encamped, by a shepherd's path leading north-eastwards across heights of 7,000 feet to the valley of the Muotta. Over this desolate region the Russians made their way; and the resolution which brought them as far as the Muotta would have brought them past every other obstacle to the spot where they were to meet their countrymen. But the hour was past. While Suvaroff was still struggling in the mountains, Massena advanced against Zürich, put Korsakoff's army to total rout, and drove it, with the loss of all its baggage and of a great part of its artillery, outside the area of hostilities.

[Retreat of Suvaroff.]

The first rumours of the catastrophe reached Suvaroff on the Muotta; he still pushed on eastwards, and, though almost without ammunition, overthrew a corps commanded by Massena in person, and cleared the road over the Pragel at the point of the bayonet, arriving in Glarus on the 1st of October. Here the full extent of Korsakoff's disaster was made known to him. To advance or to fall back was ruin. It only remained for Suvaroff's army to make its escape across a wild and snow-covered mountain-tract into the valley of the Rhine, where the river flows below the northern heights of the Grisons. This exploit crowned a campaign which filled Europe with astonishment. The Alpine traveller of to-day turns with some distrust from narratives which characterise with every epithet of horror and dismay scenes which are the delight of our age; but the retreat of Suvaroff's army, a starving, footsore multitude, over what was then an untrodden wilderness of rock, and through fresh-fallen autumn snow two feet deep, had little in common with the boldest feats of Alpine hardihood. [81] It was achieved with loss and suffering; it brought the army from a position of the utmost danger into one of security; but it was followed by no renewed attack. Proposals for a combination between Suvaroff and the Archduke Charles resulted only in mutual taunts and menaces. The co-operation of Russia in the war was at an end. The French remained masters of the whole of the Swiss territory that they had lost since the beginning of the campaign.

[British and Russian expedition against Holland Aug. 1799.]

In the summer months of 1799 the Czar had relieved his irritation against Austria by framing in concert with the British Cabinet the plan for a joint expedition against Holland. It was agreed that 25,000 English and 17,000 Russian troops, brought from the Baltic in British ships, should attack the French in the Batavian Republic, and raise an insurrection on behalf of the exiled Stadtholder. Throughout July the Kentish coast-towns were alive with the bustle of war; and on the 13th of August the first English division, numbering 12,000 men, set sail from Deal under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby. After tossing off the Dutch coast for a fortnight, the troops landed at the promontory of the Helder. A Dutch corps was defeated on the sand-hills, and the English captured the fort of the Helder, commanding the Texel anchorage. Immediately afterwards a movement in favour of the Stadtholder broke out among the officers of the Dutch fleet. The captains hoisted the Orange flag, and brought their ships over to the English.

This was the first and the last result of the expedition. The Russian contingent and a second English division reached Holland in the middle of September, and with them came the Duke of York, who now took the command out of the hands of Abercromby. On the other side reinforcements daily arrived from France, until the enemy's troops, led by General Brune, were equal in strength to the invaders. A battle fought at Alkmaar on the 19th of September gave the Allies some partial successes and no permanent advantage; and on the 3rd of October the Duke of York gained one of those so-called victories which result in the retreat of the conquerors. Never were there so many good reasons for a bad conclusion. The Russians moved too fast or too slow; the ditches set at nought the rules of strategy; it was discovered that the climate of Holland was unfavourable to health, and that the Dutch had not the slightest inclination to get back their Stadtholder. The result of a series of mischances, every one of which would have been foreseen by an average midshipman in Nelson's fleet, or an average sergeant in Massena's army, was that York had to purchase a retreat for the allied forces at a price equivalent to an unconditional surrender. He was allowed to re-embark on consideration that Great Britain restored to the French 8,000 French and Dutch prisoners, and handed over in perfect repair all the military works which our own soldiers had erected at the Helder. Bitter complaints were raised among the Russian officers against York's conduct of the expedition. He was accused of sacrificing the Russian regiments in battle, and of courting a general defeat in order not to expose his own men. The accusation was groundless. Where York was, treachery or bad faith was superfluous. York in command, the feeblest enemy became invincible. Incompetence among the hereditary chiefs of the English army had become part of the order of nature. The Ministry, when taxed with failure, obstinately shut their eyes to the true cause of the disaster. Parliament was reminded that defeat was the most probable conclusion of any military operations that we might undertake, and that England ought not to expect success when Prussia and Austria had so long met only with misfortune. Under the command of Nelson, English sailors were indeed manifesting that kind of superiority to the seamen of other nations which the hunter possesses over his prey; yet this gave no reason why foresight and daring should count for anything ashore. If the nation wished to see its soldiers undefeated, it must keep them at home to defend their country. Even among the Opposition no voice was raised to protest against the system which sacrificed English life and military honour to the dignity of the Royal Family. The collapse of the Anglo-Russian expedition was viewed with more equanimity in England than in Russia. The Czar dismissed his unfortunate generals. York returned home, to run horses at Newmarket, to job commissions with his mistress, and to earn his column at St. James's Park.

[Unpopularity of the Directory.]

[Plans of Siéyès 1799.]

It was at this moment, when the tide of military success was already turning in favour of the Republic, that the revolution took place which made Bonaparte absolute ruler of France. Since the attack of the Government upon the Royalists in Fructidor, 1797, the Directory and the factions had come no nearer to a system of mutual concession, or to a peaceful acquiescence in the will of a parliamentary majority. The Directory, assailed both by the extreme Jacobins and by the Constitutionalists, was still strong enough to crush each party in its turn. The elections of 1798, which strengthened the Jacobins, were annulled with as little scruple as the Royalist elections in the preceding year; it was only when defeat in Germany and Italy had brought the Government into universal discredit that the Constitutionalist party, fortified by the return of a large majority in the elections of 1799, dared to turn the attack upon the Directors themselves. The excitement of foreign conquest had hitherto shielded the abuses of Government from criticism; but when Italy was lost, when generals and soldiers found themselves without pay, without clothes, without reinforcements, one general outcry arose against the Directory, and the nation resolved to have done with a Government whose outrages and extortions had led to nothing but military ruin. The disasters of France in the spring of 1799, which resulted from the failure of the Government to raise the armies to their proper strength, were not in reality connected with the defects of the Constitution. They were caused in part by the shameless jobbery of individual members of the Administration, in part by the absence of any agency, like that of the Conventional Commissioners of 1793, to enforce the control of the central Government over the local authorities, left isolated and independent by the changes of 1789. Faults enough belonged, however, to the existing political order; and the Constitutionalists, who now for the second time found themselves with a majority in the Councils, were not disposed to prolong a system which from the first had turned their majorities into derision. A party grew up around the Abbé Siéyès intent upon some change which should give France a government really representing its best elements. What the change was to be few could say; but it was known that Siéyès, who had taken a leading part in 1789, and had condemned the Constitution of 1795 from the moment when it was sketched, had elaborated a scheme which he considered exempt from every error that had vitiated its predecessors. As the first step to reform, Siéyès himself was elected to a Directorship then falling vacant. Barras attached himself to Siéyès; the three remaining Directors, who were Jacobins and popular in Paris, were forced to surrender their seats. Siéyès now only needed a soldier to carry out his plans. His first thought had turned on Joubert, but Joubert was killed at Novi. Moreau scrupled to raise his hand against the law; Bernadotte, a general distinguished both in war and in administration, declined to play a secondary part. Nor in fact was the support of Siéyès indispensable to any popular and ambitious soldier who was prepared to attack the Government. Siéyès and his friends offered the alliance of a party weighty in character and antecedents; but there were other well-known names and powerful interests at the command of an enterprising leader, and all France awaited the downfall of a Government whose action had resulted only in disorder at home and defeat abroad.

[Bonaparte returns from Egypt, Oct., 1799.]

Such was the political situation when, in the summer of 1799, Bonaparte, baffled in an attack upon the Syrian fortress of St. Jean d'Acre, returned to Egypt, and received the first tidings from Europe which had reached him since the outbreak of the war. He saw that his opportunity had arrived. He determined to leave his army, whose ultimate failure was inevitable, and to offer to France in his own person that sovereignty of genius and strength for which the whole nation was longing. On the 7th of October a despatch from Bonaparte was read in the Council of Five Hundred, announcing a victory over the Turks at Aboukir. It brought the first news that had been received for many months from the army of Egypt; it excited an outburst of joyous enthusiasm for the general and the army whom a hated Government was believed to have sent into exile; it recalled that succession of victories which had been unchecked by a single defeat, and that Peace which had given France a dominion wider than any that her Kings had won. While every thought was turned upon Bonaparte, the French nation suddenly heard that Bonaparte himself had landed on the coast of Provence. "I was sitting that day," says Béranger in his autobiography, "in our reading-room with thirty or forty other persons. Suddenly the news was brought in that Bonaparte had returned from Egypt. At the words, every man in the room started to his feet and burst into one long shout of joy." The emotion portrayed by Béranger was that of the whole of France. Almost everything that now darkens the early fame of Bonaparte was then unknown. His falsities, his cold, unpitying heart were familiar only to accomplices and distant sufferers; even his most flagrant wrongs, such as the destruction of Venice, were excused by a political necessity, or disguised as acts of righteous chastisement. The hopes, the imagination of France saw in Bonaparte the young, unsullied, irresistible hero of the Republic. His fame had risen throughout a crisis which had destroyed all confidence in others. The stale placemen of the factions sank into insignificance by his side; even sincere Republicans, who feared the rule of a soldier, confessed that it is not always given to a nation to choose the mode of its own deliverance. From the moment that Bonaparte landed at Fréjus, he was master of France.

[Conspiracy of Siéyès and Bonaparte.]

Siéyès saw that Bonaparte, and no one else, was the man through whom he could overthrow the existing Constitution. [82] So little sympathy existed, however, between Siéyès and the soldier to whom he now offered his support, that Bonaparte only accepted Siéyès' project after satisfying himself that neither Barras nor Bernadotte would help him to supreme power. Once convinced of this, Bonaparte closed with Siéyès' offers. It was agreed that Siéyès and his friend Ducos should resign their Directorships, and that the three remaining Directors should be driven from office. The Assemblies, or any part of them favourable to the plot, were to appoint a Triumvirate composed of Bonaparte, Siéyès, and Ducos, for the purpose of drawing up a new Constitution. In the new Constitution it was understood, though without any definite arrangement, that Bonaparte and Siéyès were to be the leading figures. The Council of Ancients was in great part in league with the conspirators: the only obstacle likely to hinder the success of the plot was a rising of the Parisian populace. As a precaution against attack, it was determined to transfer the meeting of the Councils to St. Cloud. Bonaparte had secured the support of almost all the generals and troops in Paris. His brother Lucien, now President of the Council of Five Hundred, hoped to paralyse the action of his own Assembly, in which the conspirators were in the minority.

[Coup d'état, 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9), 1799.]

Early on the morning of the 9th of November (18 Brumaire), a crowd of generals and officers met before Bonaparte's house. At the same moment a portion of the Council of Ancients assembled, and passed a decree which adjourned the session to St. Cloud, and conferred on Bonaparte the command over all the troops in Paris. The decree was carried to Bonaparte's house and read to the military throng, who acknowledged it by brandishing their swords. Bonaparte then ordered the troops to their posts, received the resignation of Barras, and arrested the two remaining Directors in the Luxembourg. During the night there was great agitation in Paris. The arrest of the two Directors and the display of military force revealed the true nature of the conspiracy, and excited men to resistance who had hitherto seen no great cause for alarm. The Councils met at St. Cloud at two on the next day. The Ancients were ready for what was coming; the Five Hundred refused to listen to Bonaparte's accomplices, and took the oath of fidelity to the Constitution. Bonaparte himself entered the Council of Ancients, and in violent, confused language declared that he had come to save the Republic from unseen dangers. He then left the Assembly, and entered the Chamber of the Five Hundred, escorted by armed grenadiers. A roar of indignation greeted the appearance of the bayonets. The members rushed in a mass upon Bonaparte, and drove him out of the hall. His brother now left the President's chair and joined the soldiers outside, whom he harangued in the character of President of the Assembly. The soldiers, hitherto wavering, were assured by Lucien's civil authority and his treacherous eloquence. The drums beat; the word of command was given; and the last free representatives of France struggled through doorways and windows before the levelled and advancing bayonets.

[Siéyès' plan of Constitution.]

The Constitution which Siéyès hoped now to impose upon France had been elaborated by its author at the close of the Reign of Terror. Designed at that epoch, it bore the trace of all those apprehensions which gave shape to the Constitution of 1795. The statutory outrages of 1793, the Royalist reaction shown in the events of Vendémiaire, were the perils from which both Siéyès and the legislators of 1795 endeavoured to guard the future of France. It had become clear that a popular election might at any moment return a royalist majority to the Assembly: the Constitution of 1795 averted this danger by prolonging the power of the Conventionalists; Siéyès overcame it by extinguishing popular election altogether. He gave to the nation no right but that of selecting half a million persons who should be eligible to offices in the Communes, and who should themselves elect a smaller body of fifty thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Siéyès proposed that every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should be inscribed for ten years among the privileged five thousand.

Such were the safeguards provided against a Bourbonist reaction. To guard against a recurrence of those evils which France had suffered from the precipitate votes of a single Assembly, Siéyès broke up the legislature into as many chambers as there are stages in the passing of a law. The first chamber, or Council of State, was to give shape to measures suggested by the Executive; a second chamber, known as the Tribunate, was to discuss the measures so framed, and ascertain the objections to which they were liable; the third chamber, known as the Legislative Body, was to decide in silence for or against the measures, after hearing an argument between representatives of the Council and of the Tribunate. As a last impregnable bulwark against Jacobins and Bourbonists alike, Siéyès created a Senate whose members should hold office for life, and be empowered to annul every law in which the Chambers might infringe upon the Constitution.

It only remained to invent an Executive. In the other parts of his Constitution, Siéyès had borrowed from Rome, from Greece, and from Venice; in his Executive he improved upon the political theories of Great Britain. He proposed that the Government should consist of two Consuls and a Great Elector; the Elector, like an English king, appointing and dismissing the Consuls, but taking no active part in the administration himself. The Consuls were to be respectively restricted to the affairs of peace and of war. Grotesque under every aspect, the Constitution of Siéyès was really calculated to effect in all points but one the end which he had in view. His object was to terminate the convulsions of France by depriving every element in the State of the power to create sudden change. The members of his body politic, a Council that could only draft, a Tribunate that could only discuss, a Legislature that could only vote, Yes or No, were impotent for mischief; and the nation itself ceased to have a political existence as soon as it had selected its half-million notables.

[Siéyès and Bonaparte.]

So far, nothing could have better suited the views of Bonaparte; and up to this point Bonaparte quietly accepted Siéyès' plan. But the general had his own scheme for what was to follow. Siéyès might apportion the act of deliberation among debating societies and dumb juries to the full extent of his own ingenuity; but the moment that he applied his disintegrating method to the Executive, Bonaparte swept away the flimsy reasoner, and set in the midst of his edifice of shadows the reality of an absolute personal rule. The phantom Elector, and the Consuls who were to be the Elector's tenants-at-will, corresponded very little to the power which France desired to see at its head. "Was there ever anything so ridiculous?" cried Bonaparte. "What man of spirit could accept such a post?" It was in vain that Siéyès had so nicely set the balance. His theories gave to France only the pageants which disguised the extinction of the nation beneath a single will: the frame of executive government which the country received in 1799 was that which Bonaparte deduced from the conception of an absolute central power. The First Consul summed up all executive authority in his own person. By his side there were set two colleagues whose only function was to advise. A Council of State placed the highest skill and experience in France at the disposal of the chief magistrate, without infringing upon his sovereignty. All offices, both in the Ministries of State and in the provinces, were filled by the nominees of the First Consul. No law could be proposed but at his desire.

[Contrast of the Institutions of 1791 and 1799.]

[Centralisation of 1799.]

The institutions given to France by the National Assembly of 1789 and those given to it in the Consulate exhibited a direct contrast seldom found outside the region of abstract terms. Local customs, survivals of earlier law, such as soften the difference between England and the various democracies of the United States, had no place in the sharp-cut types in which the political order of France was recast in 1791 and 1799. The Constituent Assembly had cleared the field before it began to reconstruct. Its reconstruction was based upon the Rights of Man, identified with the principle of local self-government by popular election. It deduced a system of communal administration so completely independent that France was described by foreign critics as partitioned into 40,000 republics; and the criticism was justified when, in 1793, it was found necessary to create a new central Government, and to send commissioners from the capital into the provinces. In the Constitution of 1791, judges, bishops, officers of the National Guard, were all alike subjected to popular election; the Minister of War could scarcely move a regiment from one village to another without the leave of the mayor of the commune. In the Constitution of 1799 all authority was derived from the head of the State. A system of centralisation came into force with which France under her kings had nothing to compare. All that had once served as a check upon monarchical power, the legal Parliaments, the Provincial Estates of Brittany and Languedoc, the rights of lay and ecclesiastical corporations, had vanished away. In the place of the motley of privileges that had tempered the Bourbon monarchy, in the place of the popular Assemblies of the Revolution, there sprang up a series of magistracies as regular and as absolute as the orders of military rank. [83] Where, under the Constitution of 1791, a body of local representatives had met to conduct the business of the Department, there was now a Préfet, appointed by the First Consul, absolute, like the First Consul himself, and assisted only by the advice of a nominated council, which met for one fortnight in the year. In subordination to the Préfet, an officer and similar council transacted the local business of the Arrondissement. Even the 40,000 Maires with their communal councils were all appointed directly or indirectly by the Chief of the State. There existed in France no authority that could repair a village bridge, or light the streets of a town, but such as owed its appointment to the central Government. Nor was the power of the First Consul limited to the administration. With the exception of the lowest and the highest members of the judicature, he nominated all judges, and transferred them at his pleasure to inferior or superior posts.

Such was the system which, based to a great extent upon the preferences of the French people, fixed even more deeply in the national character the willingness to depend upon an omnipresent, all-directing power. Through its rational order, its regularity, its command of the highest science and experience, this system of government could not fail to confer great and rapid benefits upon the country. It has usually been viewed by the French themselves as one of the finest creations of political wisdom. In comparison with the self-government which then and long afterwards existed in England, the centralisation of France had all the superiority of progress and intelligence over torpor and self-contradiction. Yet a heavy, an incalculable price is paid by every nation which for the sake of administrative efficiency abandons its local liberties, and all that is bound up with their enjoyment. No practice in the exercise of public right armed a later generation of Frenchmen against the audacity of a common usurper: no immortality of youth secured the institutions framed by Napoleon against the weakness and corruption which at some period undermine all despotisms. The historian who has exhausted every term of praise upon the political system of the Consulate lived to declare, as Chief of the State himself, that the first need of France was the decentralisation of power. [84]

[State policy of Bonaparte.]

After ten years of disquiet, it was impossible that any Government could be more welcome to the French nation than one which proclaimed itself the representative, not of party or of opinion, but of France itself. No section of the nation had won a triumph in the establishment of the Consulate; no section had suffered a defeat. In his own elevation Bonaparte announced the close of civil conflict. A Government had arisen which summoned all to its service which would employ all, reward all, reconcile all. The earliest measures of the First Consul exhibited the policy of reconciliation by which he hoped to rally the whole of France to his side. The law of hostages, under which hundreds of families were confined in retaliation for local Royalist disturbances, was repealed, and Bonaparte himself went to announce their liberty to the prisoners in the Temple. Great numbers of names were struck off the list of the emigrants, and the road to pardon was subsequently opened to all who had not actually served against their country. In the selection of his officers of State, Bonaparte showed the same desire to win men of all parties. Cambacérès, a regicide, was made Second Consul; Lebrun, an old official of Louis XVI., became his colleague. In the Ministries, in the Senate, and in the Council of State the nation saw men of proved ability chosen from all callings in life and from all political ranks. No Government of France had counted among its members so many names eminent for capacity and experience. One quality alone was indispensable, a readiness to serve and to obey. In that intellectual greatness which made the combination of all the forces of France a familiar thought in Bonaparte's mind, there was none of the moral generosity which could pardon opposition to himself, or tolerate energy acting under other auspices than his own. He desired to see authority in the best hands; he sought talent and promoted it, but on the understanding that it took its direction from himself. Outside this limit ability was his enemy, not his friend; and what could not be caressed or promoted was treated with tyrannical injustice. While Bonaparte boasted of the career that he had thrown open to talent, he suppressed the whole of the independent journalism of Paris, and banished Mme. de Stael, whose guests continued to converse, when they might not write, about liberty. Equally partial, equally calculated, was Bonaparte's indulgence towards the ancient enemies of the Revolution, the Royalists and the priests. He felt nothing of the old hatred of Paris towards the Vendean noble and the superstitious Breton; he offered his friendship to the stubborn Breton race, whose loyalty and piety he appreciated as good qualities in subjects; but failing their submission, he instructed his generals in the west of France to burn down their villages, and to set a price upon the heads of their chiefs. Justice, tolerance, good faith, were things which had no being for Bonaparte outside the circle of his instruments and allies.

[France ceases to excite democracy abroad, but promotes equality under monarchical systems.]

[Effect of Bonaparte's autocracy outside France.]

In the foreign relations of France it was not possible for the most unscrupulous will to carry aggression farther than it had been already carried; yet the elevation of Bonaparte deeply affected the fortunes of all those States whose lot depended upon France. It was not only that a mind accustomed to regard all human things as objects for its own disposal now directed an irresistible military force, but from the day when France submitted to Bonaparte, the political changes accompanying the advance of the French armies took a different character. Belgium and Holland, the Rhine Provinces, the Cisalpine, the Roman, and the Parthenopean Republics, had all received, under whatever circumstances of wrong, at least the forms of popular sovereignty. The reality of power may have belonged to French generals and commissioners; but, however insincerely uttered, the call to freedom excited hopes and aspirations which were not insincere themselves. The Italian festivals of emancipation, the trees of liberty, the rhetoric of patriotic assemblies, had betrayed little enough of the instinct for self-government; but they marked a separation from the past; and the period between the years 1796 and 1799 was in fact the birth-time of those hopes which have since been realised in the freedom and the unity of Italy. So long as France had her own tumultuous assemblies, her elections in the village and in the county-town, it was impossible for her to form republics beyond the Alps without introducing at least some germ of republican organisation and spirit. But when all power was concentrated in a single man, when the spoken and the written word became an offence against the State, when the commotion of the old municipalities was succeeded by the silence and the discipline of a body of clerks working round their chief, then the advance of French influence ceased to mean the support of popular forces against the Governments. The form which Bonaparte had given to France was the form which he intended for the clients of France. Hence in those communities which directly received the impress of the Consulate, as in Bavaria and the minor German States, authority, instead of being overthrown, was greatly strengthened. Bonaparte carried beyond the Rhine that portion of the spirit of the Revolution which he accepted at home, the suppression of privilege, the extinction of feudal rights, the reduction of all ranks to equality before the law, and the admission of all to the public service. But this levelling of the social order in the client-states of France, and the establishment of system and unity in the place of obsolete privilege, cleared the way not for the supremacy of the people, but for the supremacy of the Crown. The power which was taken away from corporations, from knights, and from ecclesiastics, was given, not to a popular Representative, but to Cabinet Ministers and officials ranged after the model of the official hierarchy of France. What the French had in the first epoch of their Revolution endeavoured to impart to Europe--the spirit of liberty and self-government--they had now renounced themselves. The belief in popular right, which made the difference between the changes of 1789 and those attempted by the Emperor Joseph, sank in the storms of the Revolution.

[Bonaparte legislates in the spirit of the reforming monarchs of the 18th century.]

Yet the statesmanship of Bonaparte, if it repelled the liberal and disinterested sentiment of 1789, was no mere cunning of a Corsican soldier, or exploit of mediæval genius born outside its age. Subject to the fullest gratification of his own most despotic or most malignant impulse, Bonaparte carried into his creations the ideas upon which the greatest European innovators before the French Revolution had based their work. What Frederick and Joseph had accomplished, or failed to accomplish, was realised in Western Germany when its Sovereigns became the clients of the First Consul. Bonaparte was no child of the French Revolution; he was the last and the greatest of the autocratic legislators who worked in an unfree age. Under his rule France lost what had seemed to be most its own; it most powerfully advanced the forms of progress common to itself and the rest of Europe. Bonaparte raised no population to liberty: in extinguishing privilege and abolishing the legal distinctions of birth, in levelling all personal and corporate authority beneath the single rule of the State, he prepared the way for a rational freedom, when, at a later day, the Government of the State should itself become the representative of the nation's will.