Chapter XI (2)

[Austrians fall back towards Langres.]

Schwarzenberg was now slowly and unwillingly moving forwards along the Seine towards Troyes. Blücher was permitted to return to the Marne, and to advance upon Paris by an independent line of march. He crossed the country between the Aube and the Marne, and joined some divisions which he had left behind him on the latter river. But his dispositions were outrageously careless: his troops were scattered over a space of sixty miles from Châlons westward, as if he had no enemy to guard against except the weak divisions commanded by Mortier and Marmont, which had uniformly fallen back before his advance. Suddenly Napoleon himself appeared at the centre of the long Prussian line at Champaubert. He had hastened northwards in pursuit of Blücher with 30,000 men, as soon as Schwarzenberg entered Troyes; and on February 10th a weak Russian corps that lay in the centre of Blücher's column was overwhelmed before it was known the Emperor had left the Seine. Then, turning leftwards, Napoleon overthrew the Prussian vanguard at Montmirail, and two days later attacked and defeated Blücher himself, who was bringing up the remainder of his troops in total ignorance of the enemy with whom he had to deal. In four days Blücher's army, which numbered 70,000 men, had thrice been defeated in detail by a force of 30,000. Blücher was compelled to fall back upon Châlons; Napoleon instantly returned to the support of Oudinot's division, which he had left in front of Schwarzenberg. In order to relieve Blücher, the Austrians had pushed forward on the Seine beyond Montereau. Within three days after the battle with Blücher, Napoleon was back upon the Seine, and attacking the heads of the Austrian column. On the 18th of February he gained so decisive a victory at Montereau that Schwarzenberg abandoned the advance, and fell back upon Troyes, sending word to Blücher to come southwards again and help him to fight a great battle. Blücher moved off with admirable energy, and came into the neighbourhood of Troyes within a week after his defeats upon the Marne. But the design of fighting a great battle was given up. The disinclination of the Austrians to vigorous action was too strong to be overcome; and it was finally determined that Schwarzenberg should fall back almost to the plateau of Langres, leaving Blücher to unite with the troops of Bülow which had conquered Holland, and to operate on the enemy's flank and rear.

[Congress of Châtillon resumed, Feb. 17-March 15.]

The effect of Napoleon's sudden victories on the Marne was instantly seen in the councils of the allied sovereigns. Alexander, who had withdrawn his envoy from Châtillon, could no longer hold out against negotiations with Napoleon. He restored the powers of his envoy, and the Congress re-assembled. But Napoleon already saw himself in imagination driving the invaders beyond the Rhine, and sent orders to Caulaincourt to insist upon the terms proposed at Frankfort, which left to France both the Rhenish Provinces and Belgium. At the same time he attempted to open a private negotiation with his father-in-law the Emperor of Austria, and to detach him from the cause of the Allies. The attempt failed; the demands now made by Caulaincourt overcame even the peaceful inclinations of the Austrian Minister; and on the 1st of March the Allies signed a new treaty at Chaumont, pledging themselves to conclude no peace with Napoleon that did not restore the frontier of 1791, and to maintain a defensive alliance against France for a period of twenty years. [189] Caulaincourt continued for another fortnight at Châtillon, instructed by Napoleon to prolong the negotiations, but forbidden to accept the only conditions which the Allies were willing to grant.

[Napoleon follows Blücher to the north. Battle of Laon, March 10.]

Blücher was now on his way northwards to join the so-called army of Bernadotte upon the Aisne. Since the Battle of Leipzig, Bernadotte himself had taken no part in the movements of the army nominally under his command. The Netherlands had been conquered by Bülow and the Russian general Winzingerode, and these officers were now pushing southwards in order to take part with Blücher in a movement against Paris. Napoleon calculated that the fortress of Soissons would bar the way to the northern army, and enable him to attack and crush Blücher before he could effect a junction with his colleagues. He set out in pursuit of the Prussians, still hoping for a second series of victories like those he had won upon the Marne. But the cowardice of the commander of Soissons ruined his chances of success. The fortress surrendered to the Russians at the first summons. Blücher met the advanced guard of the northern army upon the Aisne on the 4th of March, and continued his march towards Laon for the purpose of uniting with its divisions which lay in the rear. The French followed, but the only advantage gained by Napoleon was a victory over a detached Russian corps at Craonne. Marmont was defeated with heavy loss by a sally of Blücher from his strong position on the hill of Laon (March 10); and the Emperor himself, unable to restore the fortune of the battle, fell back upon Soissons, and thence marched southward to throw himself again upon the line of the southern army.

[Napoleon marches to the rear of the Allies, March 23.]

[The Allies advance on Paris.]

Schwarzenberg had once more begun to move forward on the news of Blücher's victory at Laon. His troops were so widely dispersed that Napoleon might even now have cut the line in halves had he known Schwarzenberg's real position. But he made a détour in order to meet Oudinot's corps, and gave the Austrians time to concentrate at Arcis-sur-Aube. Here, on the 20th of March, Napoleon found himself in face of an army of 100,000 men. His own army was less than a third of that number; yet with unalterable contempt for the enemy he risked another battle. No decided issue was reached in the first day's fighting, and Napoleon remained in position, expecting that Schwarzenberg would retreat during the night. But on the morrow the Austrians were still fronting him. Schwarzenberg had at length learnt his own real superiority, and resolved to assist the enemy no longer by a wretched system of retreat. A single act of firmness on the part of the Austrian commander showed Napoleon that the war of battles was at an end. He abandoned all hope of resisting the invaders in front: it only remained for him to throw himself on to their rear, and, in company with the frontier-garrisons and the army of Lyons, to attack their communications with Germany. The plan was no unreasonable one, if Paris could either have sustained a siege or have fallen into the enemy's hands without terminating the war. But the Allies rightly judged that Napoleon's power would be extinct from the moment that Paris submitted. They received the intelligence of the Emperor's march to the east, and declined to follow him. The armies of Schwarzenberg and Blücher approached one another, and moved together on Paris. It was at Vitry, on March 27th, that Napoleon first discovered that the troops which had appeared to be following his eastward movement were but a detachment of cavalry, and that the allied armies were in full march upon the capital. He instantly called up every division within reach, and pushed forward by forced marches for the Seine, hoping to fall upon Schwarzenberg's rear before the allied vanguard could reach Paris. But at each hour of the march it became more evident that the enemy was far in advance. For two days Napoleon urged his men forward; at length, unable to bear the intolerable suspense, he quitted the army on the morning of the 30th, and drove forward at the utmost speed along the road through Fontainebleau to the capital. As day sank, he met reports of a battle already begun. When he reached the village of Fromenteau, fifteen miles from Paris, at ten o'clock at night, he heard that Paris had actually surrendered.

[Attack on Paris, March 30.]

[Capitulation of Marmont.]

[Allies enter Paris, March 31.]

The Allies had pressed forward without taking any notice of Napoleon's movements, and at early morning on the 30th they had opened the attack on the north-eastern heights of Paris. Marmont, with the fragments of a beaten army and some weak divisions of the National Guard, had but 35,000 men to oppose to three times that number of the enemy. The Government had taken no steps to arm the people, or to prolong resistance after the outside line of defence was lost, although the erection of barricades would have held the Allies in check until Napoleon arrived with his army. While Marmont fought in the outer suburbs, masses of the people were drawn up on Montmartre, expecting the Emperor's appearance, and the spectacle of a great and decisive battle. But the firing in the outskirts stopped soon after noon: it was announced that Marmont had capitulated. The report struck the people with stupor and fury. They had vainly been demanding arms since early morning; and even after the capitulation unsigned papers were handed about by men of the working classes, advocating further resistance. [190] But the people no longer knew how to follow leaders of its own. Napoleon had trained France to look only to himself: his absence left the masses, who were still eager to fight for France, helpless in the presence of the conqueror: there were enemies enough of the Government among the richer classes to make the entry of the foreigner into Paris a scene of actual joy and exultation. To such an extent had the spirit of caste and the malignant delight in Napoleon's ruin overpowered the love of France among the party of the old noblesse, that upon the entry of the allied forces into Paris on the 31st of March hundreds of aristocratic women kissed the hands, or the very boots and horses, of the leaders of the train, and cheered the Cossacks who escorted a band of French prisoners, bleeding and exhausted, through the streets.

[Napoleon dethroned, April 2.]

Napoleon's reign was indeed at an end. Since the rupture of the Congress of Châtillon on the 18th of March, the Allies had determined to make his dethronement a condition of peace. As the end approached, it was seen that no successor was possible but the chief of the House of Bourbon, although Austria would perhaps have consented to the establishment of a Regency under the Empress Marie Louise, and the Czar had for a time entertained the project of placing Bernadotte at the head of the French State. Immediately after the entry into Paris it was determined to raise the exile Louis XVIII. to the throne. The politicians of the Empire who followed Talleyrand were not unwilling to unite with the conquerors, and with the small party of Royalist noblesse, in recalling the Bourbon dynasty. Alexander, who was the real master of the situation, rightly judged Talleyrand to be the man most capable of enlisting the public opinion of France on the side of the new order. He took up his abode at Talleyrand's house, and employed this dexterous statesman as the advocate both of the policy of the Allies, and of the principles of constitutional liberty, which at this time Alexander himself sincerely befriended. A Provisional Government was appointed under Talleyrand's leadership. On the 2nd of April the Senate proclaimed the dethronement of Napoleon. On the 6th it published a Constitution, and recalled the House of Bourbon.

Louis XVIII. was still in England: his brother, the Count of Artois, had joined the invaders in France and assumed the title of Lieutenant of the Kingdom; but the influence of Alexander was necessary to force this obstinate and unteachable man into anything like a constitutional position. The Provisional Government invited the Count to take up the administration until the King's arrival, in virtue of a decree of the Senate. D'Artois declined to recognise the Senate's competency, and claimed the Lieutenancy of the Kingdom as his brother's representative. The Senate refusing to admit the Count's divine right, some unmeaning words were exchanged when d'Artois entered Paris; and the Provisional Government, disregarding the claims of the Royal Lieutenant, continued in the full exercise of its powers. At length the Czar insisted that d'Artois should give way. The decree of the Senate was accordingly accepted by him at the Tuileries on the 14th of April; the Provisional Government retired, and a Council of State was formed, in which Talleyrand still continued to exercise the real powers of government. In the address made by d'Artois on this occasion, he stated that although the King had not empowered him to accept the Constitution made by the Senate on the 6th of April, he entertained no doubt that the King would accept the principles embodied in that Constitution, which were those of Representative Government, of the freedom of the press, and of the responsibility of ministers. A week after d'Artois' declaration, Louis XVIII. arrived in France.

[Louis XVIII. and the Czar.]

[Louis XVIII. enters Paris, May 3.]

Louis XVIII., though capable of adapting himself in practice to a constitutional system, had never permitted himself to question the divine right of the House of Bourbon to sovereign power. The exiles who surrounded him were slow to understand the needs of the time. They recommended the King to reject the Constitution. Louis made an ambiguous answer when the Legislative Body met him at Compiègne and invited an expression of the royal policy. It was again necessary for the Czar to interfere, and to explain to the King that France could no longer be an absolute monarchy. Louis, however, was a better arguer than the Count of Artois. He reasoned as a man whom the sovereigns of Europe had felt it their duty to restore without any request from himself. If the Senate of Napoleon, he urged, had the right to give France a Constitution, he himself ought never to have been brought from his peaceful English home. He was willing to grant a free Constitution to his people in exercise of his own royal rights, but he could not recognise one created by the servants of an usurper. Alexander was but half satisfied with the liberal professions of Louis: he did not, however, insist on his acceptance of the Constitution drawn up by the Senate, but he informed him that until the promises made by d'Artois were confirmed by a royal proclamation, there would be no entry into Paris. The King at length signed a proclamation written by Talleyrand, and made his festal entry into the capital on the 3rd of May.

[Feeling of Paris.]

The promises of Louis himself, the unbroken courtesy and friendliness shown by the Allies to Paris since their victory a month before, had almost extinguished the popular feeling of hostility towards a dynasty which owed its recall to the overthrow of French armies. The foreign leaders themselves had begun to excite a certain admiration and interest. Alexander was considered, and with good reason, as a generous enemy; the simplicity of the King of Prussia, his misfortunes, his well-remembered gallantry at the Battle of Jena, gained him general sympathy. It needed but little on the part of the returning Bourbons to convert the interest and curiosity of Paris into affection. The cortège which entered the capital with Louis XVIII. brought back, in a singular motley of obsolete and of foreign costumes, the bearers of many unforgotten names. The look of the King himself, as he drove through Paris, pleased the people. The childless father of the murdered Duke of Enghien gained the pitying attention of those few who knew the face of a man twenty-five years an exile. But there was one among the members of the returning families whom every heart in Paris went out to meet. The daughter of Louis XVI., who had shared the captivity of her parents and of her brother, the sole survivor of her deeply-wronged house, now returned as Duchess of Angoulême. The uniquely mournful history of her girlhood, and her subsequent marriage with her cousin, the son of the Count of Artois, made her the natural object of a warmer sympathy than could attach to either of the brothers of Louis XVI. But adversity had imprinted its lines too deeply upon the features and the disposition of this joyless woman for a moment's light to return. Her voice and her aspect repelled the affection which thousands were eager to offer to her. Before the close of the first days of the restored monarchy, it was felt that the Bourbons had brought back no single person among them who was capable of winning the French nation's love.

[Napoleon sent to Elba.]

[Napoleon.]

The recall of the ancient line had been allowed to appear to the world as the work of France itself; Napoleon's fate could only be fixed by his conquerors. After the fall of Paris, Napoleon remained at Fontainebleau awaiting events. The soldiers and the younger officers of his army were still ready to fight for him; the marshals, however, were utterly weary, and determined that France should no longer suffer for the sake of a single man. They informed Napoleon that he must abdicate. Yielding to their pressure, Napoleon, on the 3rd of April, drew up an act of abdication in favour of his infant son, and sent it by Caulaincourt to the allied sovereigns at Paris. The document was rejected by the Allies; Caulaincourt returned with the intelligence that Napoleon must renounce the throne for himself and all his family. For a moment the Emperor thought of renewing the war; but the marshals refused their aid more resolutely than before, and, on the 6th of April, Napoleon signed an unconditional surrender of the throne for himself and his heirs. He was permitted by the Allies to retain the unmeaning title of Emperor, and to carry with him a body-guard and a considerable revenue to the island of Elba, henceforward to be his principality and his prison. The choice of this island, within easy reach of France and Italy, and too extensive to be guarded without a large fleet, was due to Alexander's ill-judged generosity towards Napoleon, and to a promise made to Marmont that the liberty of the Emperor should be respected. Alexander was not left without warning of the probable effects of his leniency. Sir Charles Stewart, military representative of Great Britain at the allied head-quarters, urged both his own and the allied Governments to substitute some more distant island for Elba, if they desired to save Europe from a renewed Napoleonic war, and France from the misery of a second invasion. The Allies, though not without misgivings, adhered to their original plan, and left it to time to justify the predictions of their adviser.

[Treaty of Paris, May 30.]

It was well known what would be the terms of peace, now that Napoleon was removed from the throne. The Allies had no intention of depriving France of any of the territory that it had held before 1792: the conclusion of a definitive Treaty was only postponed until the Constitution, which Alexander required King Louis XVIII. to grant, had been drawn up by a royal commission and approved by the King. On the 27th of May the draft of this Constitution, known as the Charta, was laid before the King, and sanctioned by him; on the 30th, the Treaty of Paris was signed by the representatives of France and of all the great Powers. [191] France, surrendering all its conquests, accepted the frontier of the 1st of January, 1792, with a slight addition of territory on the side of Savoy and at points on its northern and eastern border. It paid no indemnity. It was permitted to retain all the works of art accumulated by twenty years of rapine, except the trophies carried from the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin and the spoils of the Library of Vienna. It received back nearly all the colonies which had been taken from it by Great Britain. By the clauses of the Treaty disposing of the territory that had formed the Empire and the dependencies of Napoleon, Holland was restored to the House of Orange, with the provision that its territory should be largely increased; Switzerland was declared independent; it was stipulated that Italy, with the exception of the Austrian Provinces, should consist of independent States, and that Germany should remain distributed among a multitude of sovereigns, independent, but united by a Federal tie. The navigation of the Rhine was thrown open. By a special agreement with Great Britain the French Government undertook to unite its efforts to those of England in procuring the suppression of the Slave-trade by all the Powers, and pledged itself to abolish the Slave-trade among French subjects within five years at the latest. For the settlement of all European questions not included in the Treaty of Paris it was agreed that a Congress of the Powers should, within two months, assemble at Vienna. These were the public articles of the Treaty of Paris. Secret clauses provided that the Allies--that is, the Allies independently of France--should control the distributions of territory to be made at the Congress; that Austria should receive Venetia and all Northern Italy as far as the Ticino; that Genoa should be given to the King of Sardinia; and that the Southern Netherlands should be united into a single kingdom with Holland, and thus form a solid bulwark against France on the north. No mention was made of Naples, whose sovereign, Murat, had abandoned Napoleon and allied himself with Austria, but without fulfilling in good faith the engagements into which he had entered against his former master. A nominal friend of the Allies, he knew that he had played a double game, and that his sovereignty, though not yet threatened, was insecure. [192]

[Territorial arrangements of 1814.]

Much yet remained to be settled by the Congress at Vienna, but in the Treaty of Paris two at least of the great Powers saw the objects attained for which they had straggled so persistently through all the earlier years of the war, and which at a later time had appeared to pass almost out of the range of possibility. England saw the Netherlands once more converted into a barrier against France, and Antwerp held by friendly hands. Austria reaped the full reward of its cool and well-balanced diplomacy during the crisis of 1813, in the annexation of an Italian territory that made it the real mistress of the Peninsula. Castlereagh and every other English politician felt that Europe had done itself small honour in handing Venice back to the Hapsburg; but this had been the condition exacted by Metternich at Prague before he consented to throw the sword of Austria into the trembling scale; [193] and the Republican traditions both of Venice and of Genoa counted for little among the statesmen of 1814, in comparison with the divine right of a Duke of Modena or a Prince of Hesse Cassel. [194] France itself, though stripped of the dominion won by twenty years of warfare, was permitted to retain, for the benefit of a restored line of kings, the whole of its ancient territory, and the spoil of all the galleries and museums of Western Europe. It would have been no unnatural wrong if the conquerors of 1814 had dealt with the soil of France as France had dealt with other lands; it would have been an act of bare justice to restore to its rightful owners the pillage that had been brought to Paris, and to recover from the French treasury a part of the enormous sums which Napoleon had extorted from conquered States. But the Courts were too well satisfied with their victory to enter into a strict account upon secondary matters; and a prudent regard on the part of the Allies to the prospects of the House of Bourbon saved France from experiencing what it had inflicted upon others.

[All the Powers except France gained territory by the war, 1792-1814.]

The policy which now restored to France the frontier of 1792 was viewed with a very different feeling in France and in all other countries. Europe looked with a kind of wonder upon its own generosity; France forgot the unparalleled provocations which it had offered to mankind, and only remembered that Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces had formed part of the Republic and the Empire for nearly twenty years. These early conquests of the Republic, which no one had attempted to wrest from France since 1795, had undoubtedly been the equivalent for which, in the days of the Directory, Austria had been permitted to extend itself in Italy, and Prussia in Germany. In the opinion of men who sincerely condemned Napoleon's distant conquests, the territory between France and the Rhine was no more than France might legitimately demand, as a counterpoise to the vast accessions falling to one or other of the Continental Powers out of the territory of Poland, Venice, and the body of suppressed States in Germany. Poland, excluding the districts taken from it before 1792, contained a population twice as great as that of Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces together: Venice carried with it, in addition to a commanding province on the Italian mainland, the Eastern Adriatic Coast as far as Ragusa. If it were true that the proportionate increase of power formed the only solid principle of European policy, France sustained a grievous injury in receiving back the limits of 1791, when every other State on the Continent was permitted to retain the territory, or an equivalent for the territory, which it had gained in the great changes that took place between 1791 and 1814. But in fact there had never been a time during the last hundred and fifty years when France, under an energetic Government, had not possessed a force threatening to all its neighbours. France, reduced to its ancient limits, was still the equal, and far more than the equal, of any of the Continental Powers, with all that they had gained during the Revolutionary War. It remained the first of European nations, though no longer, as in the eighteenth century, the one great nation of the western continent. Its efforts after universal empire had aroused other nations into life. Had the course of French conquest ceased before Napoleon grasped power, France would have retained its frontier of the Rhine, and long have exercised an unbounded influence over both Germany and Italy, through the incomparably juster and brighter social life which the Revolution, combined with all that France had inherited from the past, enabled it to display to those countries. Napoleon, in the attempt to impose his rule upon all Europe, created a power in Germany whose military future was to be not less solid than that of France itself, and left to Europe, in the accord of his enemies, a firmer security against French attack than any that the efforts of statesmen had ever framed.

[Permanent effect on Europe of period 1792-1814.]

[National sense excited in Germany and Italy.]

The league of the older monarchies had proved stronger in the end than the genius and the ambition of a single man. But if, in the service of Napoleon, France had exhausted its wealth, sunk its fleets, and sacrificed a million lives, only that it might lose all its earlier conquests, and resume limits which it had outgrown before Napoleon held his first command, it was not thus with the work which, for or against itself, France had effected in Europe during the movements of the last twenty years. In the course of the epoch now ending the whole of the Continent up to the frontiers of Austria and Russia had gained the two fruitful ideas of nationality and political freedom. There were now two nations in Europe where before there had been but aggregates of artificial States. Germany and Italy were no longer mere geographical expressions: in both countries, though in a very unequal degree, the newly-aroused sense of nationality had brought with it the claim for unity and independence. In Germany, Prussia had set a great example, and was hereafter to reap its reward; in Italy there had been no State and no statesman to take the lead either in throwing off Napoleon's rule, or in forcing him, as the price of support, to give to his Italian kingdom a really national government. Failing to act for itself, the population of all Italy, except Naples, was parcelled out between Austria and the ancient dynasties; but the old days of passive submission to the foreigner were gone for ever, and time was to show whether those were the dreamers who thought of a united Italy, or those who thought that Metternich's statesmanship had for ever settled the fate of Venice and of Milan.

[Desire for political liberty.]

The second legacy of the Revolutionary epoch, the idea of constitutional freedom, which in 1789 had been as much wanting in Spain, where national spirit was the strongest, as in those German States where it was the weakest, had been excited in Italy by the events of 1796 and 1798, in Spain by the disappearance of the Bourbon king and the self-directed struggle of the nation against the invader; in Prussia it had been introduced by the Government itself when Stein was at the head of the State. "It is impossible," wrote Lord Castlereagh in the spring of 1814, "not to perceive a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation." [195] There was in fact scarcely a Court in Europe which was not now declaring its intention to frame a Constitution. The professions might be lightly made; the desire and the capacity for self-government might still be limited to a narrower class than the friends of liberty imagined; but the seed was sown, and a movement had begun which was to gather strength during the next thirty years of European history, while one revolution after another proved that Governments could no longer with safety disregard the rights of their subjects.

[Social changes.]

Lastly, in all the territory that had formed Napoleon's Empire and dependencies, and also in Prussia, legal changes had been made in the rights and relations of the different classes of society, so important as almost to create a new type of social life. Within the Empire itself the Code Napoléon, conferring upon the subjects of France the benefits which the French had already won for themselves, had superseded a society resting on class-privilege, on feudal service, and on the despotism of custom, by a society resting on equality before the law, on freedom of contract, and on the unshackled ownership and enjoyment of land, whether the holder possessed an acre or a league. The principles of the French Code, if not the Code itself, had been introduced into Napoleon's kingdom of Italy, into Naples, and into almost all the German dependencies of France. In Prussia the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg had been directed, though less boldly, towards the same end; and when, after 1814, the Rhenish Provinces were annexed to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna, the Government was wise enough and liberal enough to leave these districts in the enjoyment of the laws which France had given them, and not to risk a comparison between even the best Prussian legislation and the Code Napoleon. In other territory now severed from France and restored to German or Italian princes, attempts were not wanting to obliterate the new order and to re-introduce the burdens and confusions of the old regime. But these reactions, even where unopposed for a time, were too much in conflict with the spirit of the age to gain more than a temporary and precarious success. The people had begun to know good and evil: examples of a free social order were too close at hand to render it possible for any part of the western continent to relapse for any very long period into the condition of the eighteenth century.

[Limits.]

It was indeed within a distinct limit that the Revolutionary epoch effected its work of political and social change. Neither England nor Austria received the slightest impulse to progress. England, on the contrary, suspended almost all internal improvement during the course of the war; the domestic policy of the Austrian Court, so energetic in the reign immediately preceding the Revolution, became for the next twenty years, except where it was a policy of repression, a policy of pure vacancy and inaction. But in all other States of Western Europe the period which reached its close with Napoleon's fall left deep and lasting traces behind it. Like other great epochs of change, it bore its own peculiar character. It was not, like the Renaissance and the Reformation, a time when new worlds of faith and knowledge transformed the whole scope and conception of human life; it was not, like our own age, a time when scientific discovery and increased means of communication silently altered the physical conditions of existence; it was a time of changes directly political in their nature, and directly effected by the political agencies of legislation and of war. In the perspective of history the Napoleonic age will take its true place among other, and perhaps greater, epochs. Its elements of mere violence and disturbance will fill less space in the eyes of mankind; its permanent creations, more. As an epoch of purely political energy, concentrating the work of generations within the compass of twenty five years, it will perhaps scarcely find a parallel.