Chapter V (2)

No part of Bonaparte's diplomacy was more ably conceived or more likely to result in a permanent empire than that which affected the secondary States of Germany. The rivalry of Austria and Prussia, the dread of Austrian aggression felt in Bavaria, the grotesque ambition of the petty sovereigns of Baden and Würtemburg, were all understood and turned to account in the policy which from this time shaped the French protectorate beyond the Rhine. Bonaparte intended to give to Prussia such an increase of territory upon the Baltic as should counterbalance the power of Austria; and for this purpose he was willing to sacrifice Hanover or Mecklenburg: but he forbade Prussia's extension to the south. Austria, so far from gaining new territory in Bavaria, was to be deprived of its own outlying possessions in Western Germany, and excluded from all influence in this region. Bavaria, dependent upon French protection against Austria, was to be greatly strengthened. Baden and Würtemberg, enriched by the spoil of little sovereignties, of Bishoprics and Free Cities, were to look to France for further elevation and aggrandisement. Thus, while two rival Powers balanced one another upon the Baltic and the Lower Danube, the sovereigns of central and western Germany, owing everything to the Power that had humbled Austria, would find in submission to France the best security for their own gains, and the best protection against their more powerful neighbours.

[Treaty between France and Russia for joint action in Germany, Oct. 11, 1801.]

One condition alone could have frustrated a policy agreeable to so many interests, namely, the existence of a national sentiment among the Germans themselves. But the peoples of Germany cared as little about a Fatherland as their princes. To the Hessian and the Bavarian at the centre of the Empire, Germany was scarcely more than it was to the Swiss or the Dutch, who had left the Empire centuries before. The inhabitants of the Rhenish Provinces had murmured for a while at the extortionate rule of the Directory; but their severance from Germany and their incorporation with a foreign race touched no fibre of patriotic regret; and after the establishment of a better order of things under the Consulate the annexation to France appears to have become highly popular. [93] Among a race whose members could thus be actually conquered and annexed without doing violence to their feelings Bonaparte had no difficulty in finding willing allies. While the Diet dragged on its debates upon the settlement of the Empire, the minor States pursued their bargainings with the French Government; and on the 14th of August, 1801, Bavaria signed the first of those treaties which made the First Consul the patron of Western Germany. Two months later a secret treaty between France and Russia admitted the new Czar, Alexander, to a share in the reorganisation of the Empire. The Governments of Paris and St. Petersburg pledged themselves to united action for the purpose of maintaining an equilibrium between Austria and Prussia; and the Czar further stipulated for the advancement of his own relatives, the Sovereigns of Bavaria, Baden, and Würtemberg. The relationship of these petty princes to the Russian family enabled Bonaparte to present to the Czar, as a graceful concession, the very measure which most vitally advanced his own power in Germany. Alexander's intervention made resistance on the part of Austria hopeless. One after another the German Sovereigns settled with their patrons for a share in the spoil; and on the 3rd of June, 1802, a secret agreement between France and Russia embodied the whole of these arrangements, and disposed of almost all the Free Cities and the entire ecclesiastical territory of the Empire.

[Diet of Ratisbon accepts French Scheme.]

[End of German Ecclesiastical States and forty-five Free Cities, March, 1803.]

When everything had thus been settled by the foreigners, a Committee, to which the Diet of Ratisbon had referred the work of re-organisation, began its sessions, assisted by a French and a Russian representative. The Scheme which had been agreed upon between France and Russia was produced entire; and in spite of the anger and the threats of Austria it passed the Committee with no greater delay than was inseparable from everything connected with German affairs. The Committee presented the Scheme to the Diet: the Diet only agitated itself as to the means of passing the Scheme without violating those formalities which were the breath of its life. The proposed destruction of all the Ecclesiastical States, and of forty-five out of the fifty Free Cities, would extinguish a third part of the members of the Diet itself. If these unfortunate bodies were permitted to vote upon the measure, their votes might result in its rejection: if unsummoned, their absence would impair the validity of the resolution. By a masterpiece of conscientious pedantry it was agreed that the doomed prelates and cities should be duly called to vote in their turn, and that upon the mention each name the answer "absent" should be returned by an officer. Thus, faithful to its formalities, the Empire voted the destruction of its ancient Constitution; and the sovereignties of the Ecclesiastics and Free Cities, which had lasted for so many centuries, vanished from Europe (March, 1803). [94]

[Effect on Germany.]

The loss was small indeed. The internal condition of the priest-ruled districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance reduced life to a gross and dismal inertia. Except in their patronage of music, the ecclesiastical princes had perhaps rendered no single service to Germany. The Free Cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and privileged families. For Germany, as a nation, the destruction of these petty sovereignties was not only an advantage but an absolute necessity. The order by which they were superseded was not devised in the interest of Germany itself; yet even in the arrangements imposed by the foreigner Germany gained centres from which the institutions of modern political life entered into regions where no public authority had yet been known beyond the court of the bishop or the feudal officers of the manor. [95] Through the suppression of the Ecclesiastical States a Protestant majority was produced in the Diet. The change bore witness to the decline of Austrian and of Catholic energy during the past century; it scarcely indicated the future supremacy of the Protestant rival of Austria; for the real interests of Germany were but faintly imaged in the Diet, and the leadership of the race was still open to the Power which should most sincerely identify itself with the German nation. The first result of the changed character of the Diet was the confiscation of all landed property held by religious or charitable bodies, even where these had never advanced the slightest claim to political independence. The Diet declared the whole of the land held in Germany by pious foundations to be at the disposal of the Governments for purposes of religion, of education, and of financial relief. The more needy courts immediately seized so welcome an opportunity of increasing their revenues. Germany lost nothing by the dissolution of some hundreds of monasteries; the suppression of hospitals and the impoverishment of Universities was a doubtful benefit. Through the destruction of the Ecclesiastical States and the confiscation of Church lands, the support of an army of priests was thrown upon the public revenues. The Elector of Cologne, who had been an indifferent civil ruler, became a very prosperous clergyman on £20,000 a year. All the members of the annexed or disendowed establishments, down to the acolytes and the sacristans, were credited with annuities equal in value to what they had lost. But in the confusion caused by war the means to satisfy these claims was not always forthcoming; and the ecclesiastical revolution, so beneficial on the whole to the public interest, was not effected without much severe and undeserved individual suffering.

[Governments in Germany become more absolute and more regular.]

[Bavaria. Reforms of Montgelas.]

[Suppression of the Knights.]

The movement of 1803 put an end to an order of things more curious as a survival of the mixed religious and political form of the Holy Roman Empire than important in the actual state of Europe. The temporal power now lost by the Church in Germany had been held in such sluggish hands that its effect was hardly visible except in a denser prejudice and an idler life than prevailed under other Governments. The first consequence of its downfall was that a great part of Germany which had hitherto had no political organisation at all gained the benefit of a regular system of taxation, of police, of civil and of criminal justice. If harsh and despotic, the Governments which rose to power at the expense of the Church were usually not wanting in the love of order and uniformity. Officers of the State administered a fixed law where custom and privilege had hitherto been the only rule. Appointments ceased to be bought or inherited; trades and professions were thrown open; the peasant was relieved of his heaviest feudal burdens. Among the newly consolidated States, Bavaria was the one where the reforming impulse of the time took the strongest form. A new dynasty, springing from the west of the Rhine, brought something of the spirit of French liberalism into a country hitherto unsurpassed in Western Europe for its ignorance and bigotry. [96] The Minister Montgelas, a politician of French enlightenment, entered upon the same crusade against feudal and ecclesiastical disorder which Joseph had inaugurated in Austria twenty years before. His measures for subjecting the clergy to the law, and for depriving the Church of its control over education, were almost identical with those which in 1790 had led to the revolt of Belgium; and the Bavarian landowners now unconsciously reproduced all the mediæval platitudes of the University of Louvain. Montgelas organised and levelled with a remorseless common sense. Among his victims there was a class which had escaped destruction in the recent changes. The Knights of the Empire, with their village jurisdictions, were still legally existent; but to Montgelas such a class appeared a mere absurdity, and he sent his soldiers to disperse their courts and to seize their tolls. Loud lamentation assailed the Emperor at Vienna. If the dethroned bishops had bewailed the approaching extinction of Christianity in Europe, the knights just as convincingly deplored the end of chivalry. Knightly honour, now being swept from the earth, was proved to be the true soul of German nationality, the invisible support of the Imperial throne. For a moment the intervention of the Emperor forced Montgelas to withdraw his grasp from the sacred rents and turnpikes; but the threatening storm passed over, and the example of Bavaria was gradually followed by the neighbouring Courts.

[Stein and the Duke of Nassau.]

[Stein's attack on the Minor Princes.]

It was to the weak and unpatriotic princes who were enriched by the French that the knights fell victims. Among the knights thus despoiled by the Duke of Nassau was the Ritter vom Stein, a nobleman who had entered the Prussian service in the reign of Frederick the Great, and who had lately been placed in high office in the newly-acquired province of Münster. Stein was thoroughly familiar with the advantages of systematic government; the loss of his native parochial jurisdiction was not a serious one to a man who had become a power in Prussia; and although domestic pride had its share in Stein's resentment, the protest now published by him against the aggressions of the Duke of Nassau sounded a different note from that of his order generally. That a score of farmers should pay their dues and take off their hats to the officer of the Duke of Nassau instead of to the bailiff of the Ritter vom Stein was not a matter to excite deep feeling in Europe; but that the consolidation of Germany should be worked out in the interest of French hirelings instead of in the interests of the German people was justly treated by Stein as a subject for patriotic anger. In his letter [97] to the Duke of Nassau, Stein reproached his own despoiler and the whole tribe of petty princes with that treason to German interests which had won them the protection of the foreigner. He argued that the knights were a far less important obstacle to German unity than those very princes to whom the knights were sacrificed; and he invoked that distant day which should give to Germany a real national unity, over knights and princes alike, under the leadership of a single patriotic sovereign. Stein's appeal found little response among his contemporaries. Like a sober man among drunkards, he seemed to be scarcely rational. The simple conception of a nation sacrificing its internal rivalries in order to avert foreign rule was folly to the politicians who had all their lives long been outwitting one another at Vienna or Berlin, or who had just become persons of consequence in Europe through the patronage of Bonaparte. Yet, if years of intolerable suffering were necessary before any large party in Germany rose to the idea of German union, the ground had now at least been broken. In the changes that followed the Peace of Lunéville the fixity and routine of Germany received its death-blow. In all but name the Empire had ceased to exist. Change and re-constitution in one form or another had become familiar to all men's minds; and one real statesman at the least was already beginning to learn the lesson which later events were to teach to the rest of the German race.

[France, 1801-1804.]

[Civil Code.]

Four years of peace separated the Treaty of Lunéville from the next outbreak of war between France and any Continental Power. They were years of extension of French influence in every neighbouring State; in France itself, years of the consolidation of Bonaparte's power, and of the decline of everything that checked his personal rule. The legislative bodies sank into the insignificance for which they had been designed; everything that was suffered to wear the appearance of strength owed its vigour to the personal support of the First Consul. Among the institutions which date from this period, two, equally associated with the name of Napoleon, have taken a prominent place in history, the Civil Code and the Concordat. Since the middle of the eighteenth century the codification of law had been pursued with more or less success by almost every Government in Europe. In France the Constituent Assembly of 1789 had ordered the statutes, by which it superseded the old variety of local customs, to be thus cast into a systematic form. A Committee of the Convention had completed the draft of a Civil Code. The Directory had in its turn appointed a Commission; but the project still remained unfulfilled when the Directory was driven from power. Bonaparte instinctively threw himself into a task so congenial to his own systematising spirit, and stimulated the efforts of the best jurists in France by his personal interest and pride in the work of legislation. A Commission of lawyers, appointed by the First Consul, presented the successive chapters of a Civil Code to the Council of State. In the discussions in the Council of State Bonaparte himself took an active, though not always a beneficial, part. The draft of each chapter, as it left the Council of State, was submitted, as a project of Law, to the Tribunate and to the Legislative Body. For a moment the free expression of opinion in the Tribunate caused Bonaparte to suspend his work in impatient jealousy. The Tribunate, however, was soon brought to silence; and in March, 1804, France received the Code which has formed from that time to the present the basis of its civil rights.

[Napoleon as a legislator.]

When Napoleon declared that he desired his fame to rest upon the Civil Code, he showed his appreciation of the power which names exercise over mankind. It is probable that a majority of the inhabitants of Western Europe believe that Napoleon actually invented the laws which bear his name. As a matter of fact, the substance of these laws was fixed by the successive Assemblies of the Revolution; and, in the final revision which produced the Civil Code, Napoleon appears to have originated neither more nor less than several of the members of his Council whose names have long been forgotten. He is unquestionably entitled to the honour of a great legislator, not, however, as one who, like Solon or like Mahomet, himself created a new body of law, but as one who most vigorously pursued the work of consolidating and popularising law by the help of all the skilled and scientific minds whose resources were at his command. Though faulty in parts, the Civil Code, through its conciseness, its simplicity, and its justice, enabled Napoleon to carry a new and incomparably better social order into every country that became part of his Empire. Four other Codes, appearing at intervals from the year 1804 to the year 1810, embodied, in a corresponding form, the Law of Commerce, the Criminal Law, and the Rules of Civil and of Criminal Process. [98] The whole remains a monument of the legal energy of the period which began in 1789, and of the sagacity with which Napoleon associated with his own rule all the science and the reforming zeal of the jurists of his day.

[The Concordat.]

[The Concordat destroys the Free Church.]

Far more distinctively the work of Napoleon's own mind was the reconciliation with the Church of Rome effected by the Concordat. It was a restoration of religion similar to that restoration of political order which made the public service the engine of a single will. The bishops and priests, whose appointment the Concordat transferred from their congregations to the Government, were as much instruments of the First Consul as his prefects and his gendarmes. The spiritual wants of the public, the craving of the poor for religious consolation, were made the pretext for introducing the new theological police. But the situation of the Catholic Church was in reality no worse in France at the commencement of the Consulate than its present situation in Ireland. The Republic had indeed subjected the non-juring priests to the heaviest penalties, but the exercise of Christian worship, which, even in the Reign of Terror, had only been interrupted by local and individual fanaticism, had long recovered the protection of the law, services in the open air being alone prohibited. [99] Since 1795 the local authorities had been compelled to admit the religious societies of their district to the use of church-buildings. Though the coup d'état of Fructidor, 1797, renewed the persecution of non-juring priests, it in no way checked the activity of the Constitutional Church, now free from all connection with the Civil Government. While the non-juring priests, exiled as political offenders, or theatrically adoring the sacred elements in the woods, pretended that the age of the martyrs had returned to France, a Constitutional Church, ministering in 4,000 parishes, unprivileged but unharassed by the State, supplied the nation with an earnest and respectable body of clergy. [100] But in the eyes of the First Consul everything left to voluntary association was so much lost to the central power. In the order of nature, peasants must obey priests, priests must obey bishops, and bishops must obey the First Consul. An alliance with the Pope offered to Bonaparte the means of supplanting the popular organisation of the Constitutional Church by an imposing hierarchy, rigid in its orthodoxy and unquestioning in its devotion to himself. In return for the consecration of his own rule, Bonaparte did not shrink from inviting the Pope to an exercise of authority such as the Holy See had never even claimed in France. The whole of the existing French Bishops, both the exiled non-jurors and those of the Constitutional Church, were summoned to resign their Sees into the hands of the Pope; against all who refused to do so sentence of deposition was pronounced by the Pontiff, without a word heard in defence, or the shadow of a fault alleged. The Sees were re-organised, and filled up by nominees of the First Consul. The position of the great body of the clergy was substantially altered in its relation to the Bishops. Episcopal power was made despotic, like all other power in France: thousands of the clergy, hitherto secure in their livings, were placed at the disposal of their bishop, and rendered liable to be transferred at the pleasure of their superior from place to place. The Constitutional Church vanished, but religion appeared to be honoured by becoming part of the State.

[Results in Ultramontanism.]

In its immediate action, the Napoleonic Church served the purpose for which it was intended. For some few years the clergy unflaggingly preached, prayed, and catechised to the glory of their restorer. In the greater cycle of religious change, the Concordat of Bonaparte appears in another light. However little appreciated at the time, it was the greatest, the most critical, victory which the Roman See has ever gained over the more enlightened and the more national elements in the Catholic Church. It converted the Catholicism of France from a faith already far more independent than that of Fénélon and Bossuet into the Catholicism which in our own day has outstripped the bigotry of Spain and Austria in welcoming the dogma of Papal infallibility. The lower clergy, condemned by the State to an intolerable subjection, soon found their only hope in an appeal to Rome, and instinctively worked as the emissaries of the Roman See. The Bishops, who owed their office to an unprecedented exercise of Papal power and to the destruction of religious independence in France, were not the men who could maintain a struggle with the Papacy for the ancient Gallican liberties. In the resistance to the Papacy which had been maintained by the Continental Churches in a greater or less degree during the eighteenth century, France had on the whole taken the most effective part; but, from the time when the Concordat dissolved both the ancient and the revolutionary Church system of France, the Gallican tradition of the past became as powerless among the French clergy as the philosophical liberalism of the Revolution.

[So do the German changes.]

In Germany the destruction of the temporal power of the Church tended equally to Ultramontanism. An archbishop of Cologne who governed half a million subjects was less likely to prostrate himself before the Papal Chair than an archbishop of Cologne who was only one among a regiment of churchmen. The spiritual Electors and Princes who lost their dominions in 1801 had understood by the interests of their order something more tangible than a body of doctrines. When not hostile to the Papacy, they had usually treated it with indifference. The conception of a Catholic society exposed to persecution at the hands of the State on account of its devotion to Rome was one which had never entered the mind of German ecclesiastics in the eighteenth century. Without the changes effected in Germany by the Treaty of Lunéville, without the Concordat of Bonaparte, Catholic orthodoxy would never have become identical with Ultramontanism. In this respect the opening years of the present century mark a turning-point in the relation of the Church to modern life. Already, in place of the old monarchical Governments, friendly on the whole to the Catholic Church, events were preparing the way for that changed order with which the century seems destined to close--an emancipated France, a free Italy, a secular, state-disciplined Germany, and the Church in conspiracy against them all.