Chapter IV: , VII (36)

The masterful Corsican, who handled these great matters with
the airs of a sovereign, may have known himself already to be
the coming master of France. For the inevitable submission
again of the many to one was growing plain to discerning eyes.
The frightful school-teaching of the Revolution had not
impressed practical lessons in politics on the mind of the
untrained democracy, so much as suspicions, distrusts, and
alarms. All the sobriety of temper, the confidence of feeling,
the constraining habit of public order, without which the
self-government of a people is impracticable, were yet to be
acquired. French democracy was not more prepared for
republican institutions in 1797 than it had been in 1789.
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There was no more temperance in its factions, no more balance
between parties, no more of a steadying potency in public
opinion. But it had been brought to a state of feeling that
would prefer the sinking of all factions under some vigorous
autocracy, rather than another appeal of their quarrels to the
guillotine. And events were moving fast to a point at which
that choice would require to be made. The summer of 1797 found
the members of the Directory in hopeless conflict with one
another and with the legislative councils. On the 4th of
September a "coup d' état," to which Bonaparte contributed
some help, purged both the Directory and the Councils of men
obnoxious to the violent faction, and exiled them to Guiana.
Perhaps the moment was favorable then for a soldier, with the
great prestige that Bonaparte had won, to mount to the seat of
power; but he did not so judge.

The Expedition to Egypt.

He planned, instead, an expedition to Egypt, directed against
the British power in the East,—an expedition that failed in
every object it could have, except the absence in which it
kept him from increasing political disorders at home. He was
able to maintain some appearance of success, by his
subjugation of Egypt and His invasion of Syria; but of harm
done to England, or of gain to France in the Mediterranean,
there was none; since Nelson, at the battle of the Nile,
destroyed the French fleet, and Turkey was added to the
Anglo-Austrian coalition. The blunder of the expedition, as
proved by its whole results, was not seen by the French people
so plainly, however, as they saw the growing hopelessness of
their own political state, and the alarming reverses which
their armies in Italy and on the Rhine had sustained since
Bonaparte went away.

French Aggressions.—The new Coalition.

Continued aggressions on the part of the French had provoked a
new European coalition, formed in 1798. In Switzerland they
had overthrown the ancient constitution of the confederacy,
organizing a new Helvetic Republic on the Gallic model, but
taking Geneva to themselves. In Italy they had set up a third
republic, the Roman, removing the Pope forcibly from his
sovereignty and from Rome. Every state within reach had then
taken fresh alarm, and even Russia, undisturbed in the
distance, was now enlisted against the troublesome democracy
of France.

The unwise King of Naples, entering rashly into the war before
his allies could support him, and hastening to restore the
Pope, had been driven (December, 1798) from his kingdom, which
underwent transformation into a fourth Italian republic, the
Parthenopeian. But this only stimulated the efforts of the
Coalition, and in the course of the following year the French
were expelled from all Italy, saving Genoa alone, and the
ephemeral republics they had set up were extinguished. On the
Rhine they had lost ground; but they had held their own in
Switzerland, after a fierce struggle with the Russian forces
of Suwarrow.

Napoleon in power.

When news of these disasters, and of the ripeness of the
situation at Paris for a new coup d' état, reached Bonaparte,
in Egypt, he deserted his army there, leaving it, under
Kléber, in a helpless situation, and made his way back to
France. He landed at Fréjus on the 9th of October. Precisely a
month later, by a combination with Sieyès, a veteran
revolutionist and maker of constitutions, he accomplished the
overthrow of the Directory. Before the year closed, a fresh
constitution was in force, which vested substantially
monarchical powers in an executive called the First Consul,
and the chosen First Consul was Napoleon Bonaparte. Two
associate Consuls, who sat with him, had no purpose but to
conceal for a short time the real absoluteness of his rule.

From that time, for fifteen years, the history of France—it
is almost possible to say the history of Europe—is the story
of the career of the extraordinary Corsican adventurer who
took possession of the French nation, with unparalleled
audacity, and who used it, with all that pertained to
it—lives, fortunes, talents, resources—in the most
prodigious and the most ruthless undertakings of personal
ambition that the modern world has ever seen. He was
selfishness incarnate; and he was the incarnation of genius in
all those modes of intellectual power which bear upon the
mastery of momentary circumstances and the mastery of men. But
of the higher genius that might have worthily employed such
vast powers,—that might have enlightened and inspired a
really great ambition in the man, to make himself an enduring
builder of civilization in the world, he had no spark. The
soul behind his genius was ignoble, the spirit was mean. And
even on the intellectual side, his genius had its narrowness.
His projects of selfishness were extraordinary, but never
sagacious, never far-sighted, thoughtfully studied, wisely
planned. There is no appearance in any part of his career of a
pondered policy, guiding him to a well-determined end in what
he did. The circumstances of any moment, whether on the
battle-field or in the political arena, he could handle with a
swift apprehension, a mastery and a power that may never have
been surpassed. But much commoner men have apprehended and
have commanded in a larger and more successful way the general
sweep of circumstances in their lives. It is that fact which
belittles Napoleon in the comparison often made between him
and Cæsar. He was probably Cæsar's equal in war. But who can
imagine Cæsar in Napoleon's place committing the blunders of
blind arrogance which ruined the latter in Germany and Spain,
or making his fatuous attempt to shut England, the great naval
power, out of continental Europe?

His domestic administration was beneficial to France in many
ways. He restored order, and maintained it, with a powerful
hand. He suppressed faction effectually, and eradicated for
the time all the political insanities of the Revolution. He
exploited the resources of the country with admirable success;
for his discernment in such matters was keen and his practical
judgment was generally sound. But he consumed the nation
faster than he gave it growth. His wars—the wars in which
Europe was almost unceasingly kept by the aggression of his
insolence and his greed—were the most murderous, the most
devouring, that any warrior among the civilized races of
mankind has ever been chargeable with.
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His blood-guiltiness in these wars is the one glaring fact
which ought to be foremost in every thought of them. But it is
not. There is a pitiable readiness in mankind to be dazzled
and cheated by red battle-lights, when it looks into history
for heroes; and few figures have been glorified more
illusively in the world's eye than the marvelous warrior, the
vulgar-minded adventurer, the prodigy of self-exalting genius,
Napoleon Bonaparte.

In the first year of his Consulate, Bonaparte recovered Italy,
by the extraordinary Marengo campaign, while Moreau won the
victory of Hohenlinden, and the Treaty of Luneville was
brought about. Austria obtained peace again by renewing the
concessions of Campo Formio, and by taking part in a
reconstruction of Germany, under Bonaparte's dictation, which
secularized the ecclesiastical states, extinguished the
freedom of most of the imperial cities, and aggrandized
Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden and Saxony, as protégés and
dependencies of France. England was left alone in the war,
with much hostile feeling raised against her in Europe and
America by the arrogant use she had made of her mastery of the
sea. The neutral powers had all been embittered by her
maritime pretensions, and Bonaparte now brought about the
organization among them of a Northern League of armed
neutrality. England broke it with a single blow, by Nelson's
bombardment of Copenhagen. Napoleon, however, had conceived
the plan of starving English industries and ruining British
trade by a "continental system" of blockade against them,
which involved the compulsory exclusion of British ships and
British goods from all European countries. This impossible
project committed him to a desperate struggle for the
subjugation of Europe. It was the fundamental cause of his
ruin.

The First Empire.

In 1802 the First Consul advanced his restoration of
absolutism in France a second step, by securing the Consulate
for life. A short interval of peace with England was arranged,
but war broke out anew the following year, and the English for
a time had no allies. The French occupied Hanover, and the
Germans were quiescent. But in 1804, Bonaparte shocked Europe
by the abduction and execution of the Bourbon prince, Duc
d'Enghien, and began to challenge again the interference of
the surrounding powers by a new series of aggressive measures.
His ambition had thrown off all disguises; he had transformed
the Republic of France into an Empire, so called, and himself,
by title, into an Emperor, with an imposing crown. The
Cisalpine or Italian Republic received soon afterwards the
constitution of a kingdom, and he took the crown to himself as
King of Italy. Genoa and surrounding territory (the Ligurian
Republic) were annexed, at nearly the same time, to France;
several duchies were declared to be dependencies, and an
Italian principality was given to Napoleon's elder sister. The
effect produced in Europe by such arbitrary and admonitory
proceedings as these enabled Pitt, the younger, now at the
head of the English government, to form an alliance (1805),
first with Russia, afterwards with Austria, Sweden and Naples,
and finally with Prussia, to break the yoke which the French
Emperor had put upon Italy, Holland, Switzerland and Hanover,
and to resist his further aggressions.

Austerlitz and Trafalgar.

The amazing energy and military genius of Napoleon never had
more astonishing proof than in the swift campaign which broke
this coalition at Ulm and Austerlitz. Austria was forced to
another humiliating treaty, which surrendered Venice and
Venetia to the conqueror's new Kingdom of Italy; gave up Tyrol
to Bavaria; yielded other territory to Würtemberg, and raised
both electors to the rank of kings, while making Baden a grand
duchy, territorially enlarged. Prussia was dragged by force
into alliance with France, and took Hanover as pay. But
England triumphed at the same time on her own element, and
Napoleon's dream of carrying his legions across the Channel,
as Cæsar did, was forever dispelled by Nelson's dying victory
at Trafalgar. That battle, which destroyed the combined navies
of France and Spain, ended hope of contending successfully
with the relentless Britons at sea.

End of the Holy Roman Empire.

France was never permitted to learn the seriousness of
Trafalgar, and it put no check on the vaulting ambition in
Napoleon which now began to o'erleap itself. He gave free rein
to his arrogance in all directions. The King of Naples was
expelled from his kingdom and the crown conferred on Joseph
Bonaparte. Louis Bonaparte was made King of Holland. Southern
Germany was suddenly reconstructed again. The little kingdoms
of Napoleon's creation and the small states surrounding them
were declared to be separated from the ancient Empire, and
were formed into a Confederation of the Rhine, under the
protection of France. Warned by this rude announcement of the
precarious tenure of his imperial title as the head of the
Holy Roman Empire, Francis II. resigned it, and took to
himself, instead, a title as meaningless as that which
Napoleon had assumed,—the title of Emperor of Austria. The
venerable fiction of the Holy Roman Empire disappeared from
history on the 6th of August, 1806.

Subjugation of Prussia.

But while Austria had become submissive to the offensive
measures of Napoleon, Prussia became now fired with
unexpected, sudden wrath, and declared war in October, 1800.
It was a rash explosion of national resentment, and the
rashness was dearly paid for. At Jena and Auerstadt, Prussia
sank under the feet of the merciless conqueror, as helplessly
subjugated as a nation could be. Russia, attempting her
rescue, was overcome at Eylau and Friedland; and both the
vanquished powers came to terms with the victor at Tilsit
(July, 1807). The King of Prussia gave up all his kingdom west
of the Elbe, and all that it had acquired in the second and
third partitions of Poland. A new German kingdom, of
Westphalia, was constructed for Napoleon's youngest brother,
Jerome. A free state of Danzig, dependent on France, and a
Grand Duchy of Warsaw, were created. The Russian Czar, bribed
by some pieces of Polish Prussia, and by prospective
acquisitions from Turkey and Sweden, became an ally of
Napoleon and an accomplice in his plans for the subjection of
Europe. He enlisted his empire in the "continental system"
against England, and agreed to the enforcement of the decree
which Napoleon issued from Berlin, declaring the British
islands in a state of blockade, and prohibiting trade with
them. The British government retorted by its "orders in
council," which blockaded in the like paper-fashion all ports
of France and of the allies and dependencies of France. And so
England and Napoleon fought one another for years in the
peaceful arena of commerce, to the exasperation of neutral
nations and the destruction of the legitimate trade of the
world.

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The crime against Spain.

And now, having prostrated Germany, and captivated the Czar,
Napoleon turned toward another field, which had scarcely felt,
as yet, his intrusive hand. Spain had been in servile alliance
with France for ten years, while Portugal adhered steadily to
her friendship with Great Britain, and now refused to be
obedient to the Berlin Decree. Napoleon took prompt measures
for the punishment of so bold a defiance. A delusive treaty
with the Spanish court, for the partition of the small kingdom
of the Braganzas, won permission for an army under Junot to
enter Portugal, through Spain. No resistance to it was made.
The royal family of Portugal quitted Lisbon, setting sail for
Brazil, and Junot took possession of the kingdom. But this
accomplished only half of Napoleon's design. He meant to have
Spain, as well; and he found, in the miserable state of the
country, his opportunity to work out an ingenious,
unscrupulous scheme for its acquisition. His agents set on
foot a revolutionary movement, in favor of the worthless crown
prince, Ferdinand, against his equally worthless father, Charles
IV., and pretexts were obtained for an interference by French
troops. Charles was first coerced into an abdication; then
Ferdinand was lured to an interview with Napoleon, at Bayonne,
was made prisoner there, and compelled in his turn to
relinquish the crown. A vacancy on the Spanish throne having
been thus created, the Emperor gathered at Bayonne a small
assembly of Spanish notables, who offered the seat to Joseph
Bonaparte, already King of Naples. Joseph, obedient to his
imperial brother's wish, resigned the Neapolitan crown to
Murat, his sister's husband, accepted the crown of Spain, and
was established at Madrid with a French army at his back.

This was one of the two most ruinous of the political blunders
of Napoleon's life. He had cheated and insulted the whole
Spanish nation, in a way too contemptuous to be endured even
by a people long cast down. There was a revolt which did not
spring from any momentary passion, but which had an obstinacy
of deep feeling behind that made effective suppression of it
impossible. French armies could beat Spanish armies, and
disperse them, but they could not keep them dispersed; and
they could not break up the organization of a rebellion which
organized itself in every province, and which went on, when
necessary, without any organization at all. England sent
forces to the peninsula, under Wellington, for the support of
the insurgent Spaniards and Portuguese; and thenceforward, to
the end of his career, the most inextricable difficulties of
Napoleon were those in which he had entangled himself on the
southern side of the Pyrenees.

The chastening of Germany.

The other cardinal blunder in Napoleon's conduct, which proved
more destructive to him than the crime in Spain, was his
exasperating treatment of Germany. There was neither
magnanimity on the moral side of him nor real wisdom on the
intellectual side, to restrain him from using his victory with
immoderate insolence. He put as much shame as he could invent
into the humiliations of the German people. He had Prussia
under his heel, and he ground the heel upon her neck with the
whole weight of his power. The consequence was a pain and a
passion which wrought changes like a miracle in the temper and
character of the abused nation. There were springs of feeling
opened and currents of national life set in motion that might
never have been otherwise discovered. Enlightened men and
strong men from all parts of Germany found themselves called
to Prussia and to the front of its affairs, and their way made
easy for them in labors of restoration and reform. Stein and
Hardenburg remodeled the administration of the kingdom,
uprooted the remains of serfdom in it, and gave new freedom to
its energies. Scharnhorst organized the military system on
which rose in time the greatest of military powers. Humboldt
planned the school system which educated Prussia beyond all
her neighbors, in the succeeding generations. Even the
philosophers came out of their closets and took part, as
Fichte did, in the stirring and uplifting of the spirit of
their countrymen. So it was that the outrages of Napoleon in
Germany revenged themselves, by summoning into existence an
unsuspected energy that would be turned against him to destroy
him in the end.

But the time of destruction was not yet come. He had a few
years of triumph still before him,—of triumph everywhere
except in Portugal and Spain. Austria, resisting him once more
(1809), was once more crushed at Wagram, and to such
submissiveness that it gave a daughter of the imperial house
in marriage to the parvenu sovereign of France, next year,
when he divorced his wife Josephine. He was at the summit of
his renown that year, but already declining from the greatest
height of his power. In 1811 there was little to change the
situation.

The fall of Napoleon.

In 1812 the downfall of Napoleon was begun by his fatal
expedition to Russia. The next year Prussia, half regenerated
within the brief time since Jena and Tilsit, went into
alliance with Russia, and the War of Liberation was begun.
Austria soon joined the alliance; and at Leipzig (Oct. 18,
1813) the three nations shattered at last the yoke of
oppression that had bound Europe so long. At the same time,
the French armies in Spain were expelled, and Wellington
entered France through the Pyrenees, to meet the allies who
pursued Napoleon across the Rhine. Forced to abdicate and
retire to the little island of Elba (the sovereignty of which
was ceded to him), he remained there in quiet from May, 1814,
until March, 1815, when he escaped and reappeared in France.
Army and people welcomed him. The Bourbon monarchy, which had
been restored by the allies, fell at his approach. The king,
Louis XVIII., fled. Napoleon recovered his throne and occupied
it for it few weeks. But the alliance which had expelled him from
it refused to permit his recovery of power. The question was
settled finally at Waterloo, on the 18th of June, when a
British army under Wellington and a Prussian army under
Blücher won a victory which left no hope to the beaten
Emperor. He surrendered himself to the commander of a British
vessel of war, and was sent to confinement for the remainder
of his life on the remote island of St. Helena.

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The Congress of Vienna.

But Europe, delivered from one tyrannical master, was now
given over to several of them, in a combination which
oppressed it for a generation. The sovereigns who had united
to dethrone Napoleon, with the two emperors, of Austria and
Russia, at their head, and with the Austrian minister,
Metternich, for their most trusted counselor, assumed first,
in the Congress of Vienna, a general work of political
rearrangement, to repair the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
disturbances, and then, subsequently, an authoritative
supervision of European politics which proved as meddlesome as
Napoleon's had been. Their first act, as before stated, was to
restore the Bourbon monarchy in France, indifferent to the
wishes of the people. In Spain, Ferdinand had already taken
the throne, when Joseph fled. In Italy, the King of Sardinia
was restored and Genoa transferred to him; Lombardy and
Venetia were given back to Austria; Tuscany, Modena and some
minor duchies received Hapsburg princes; the Pope recovered
his States, and the Bourbons returned to Naples and Sicily. In
Germany, the Prussian kingdom was enlarged again by several
absorptions, including part of Saxony, but some of its Polish
territory was given to the Czar; Hanover became a kingdom;
Austria resumed the provinces which Napoleon had conveyed to
his Rhenish proteges; and, finally, a Germanic Confederation
was formed, to take the place of the extinct Empire, and with
no more efficiency in its constitution. In the Netherlands, a
new kingdom was formed, to bear the Netherland name, and to
embrace Holland and Belgium in union, with the House of Orange
on the throne.

The Holy Alliance.

Between the Czar, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of
Prussia, there was a personal agreement that went with these
arrangements of the Congress of Vienna, and which was
prolonged for a number of years. In the public understanding,
this was associated, perhaps wrongly, with a written
declaration, known as the Holy Alliance, in which the three
sovereigns set forth their intention to regulate their foreign
and domestic policy by the precepts of Christianity, and
invited all princes to join their alliance for the maintenance
of peace and the promotion of brotherly love. Whether
identical as a fact with this Holy Alliance or secreted behind
it, there was, and long continued to be, an undoubted league
between these sovereigns and others, which had aims very
different from the promotion of brotherly love. It was wholly
reactionary, hostile to all political liberalism, and
repressive of all movements in the interest of the people.
Metternich was its skilful minister, and the deadly, soulless
system of beaureaucratic absolutism which he organized in
Austria was the model of government that it strove to
introduce.

In Italy, the governments generally were reduced to the
Austrian model, and the political state of the peninsula, for
forty years, was scarcely better, if at all, than it had been
under the Spanish rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.

Germany, as divided as ever, under a federal constitution
which federated nothing else so much as the big and little
courts and their reactionary ideas, was profoundly depressed
in political spirit, while prospering materially and showing
notable signs of intellectual life.

France was not slow in finding that the restored Bourbons and
the restored émigrés had forgotten nothing and learned
nothing, in the twenty-five years of their exile. They put all
their strength into the turning back of the clock, trying to
make it strike again the hours in which the Revolution and
Napoleon had been so busy. It was futile work; but it sickened
and angered the nation none the less. After all the stress and
struggle it had gone through, there was a strong nation yet to
resist the Bourbonism brought back to power. It recovered from
the exhaustion of its wars with a marvellous quickness. The
millions of peasant land-owners, who were the greatest
creation of the Revolution, dug wealth from its soil with
untiring free arms, and soon made it the most prosperous land
in Europe. Through country and city, the ideas of the
Revolution were in the brains of the common people, while its
energies were in their brawn, and Bourbonism needed more
wisdom than it ever possessed to reconcile them to its
restoration.

Revolutions of 1820-1821.

It was not in France, however, but in Spain, that the first
rising against the restored order of things occurred.
Ferdinand VII., when released from his French imprisonment in
1814, was warmly received in Spain, and took the crown with
quite general consent. He accepted the constitution under
which the country had been governed since 1812, and made large
lying promises of a liberal rule. But when seated on the
throne, he suppressed the constitution, restored the
Inquisition, revived the monasteries, called back the expelled
Jesuits, and opened a deadly persecution of the liberals in
Spanish politics. No effective resistance to him was organized
until 1820, when a revolutionary movement took form which
forced the king, in March, to reestablish the constitution and
call different men to his council. Portugal, at the same time,
adopted a similar constitution, and the exiled king, John VI.,
returning now from Brazil, accepted it.

The revolution in Spain set fire to the discontent that had
smouldered in Italy. The latter broke forth, in the summer of
1820, at Naples, where the Bourbon king made no resistance to
a sudden revolt of soldiers and citizens, but yielded the
constitution they demanded at once. Sardinia followed, in the
next spring, with a rising of the Piedmontese, requiring
constitutional government. The king, Victor Emmanuel I., who
was very old, resigned the crown to his brother, Charles
Felix. The latter refused the demands of the
constitutionalists and called upon Austria for help.

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These outbreaks of the revolutionary spirit were alarming to
the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance and excited them to a
vigorous activity. They convened a Congress, first at Troppau,
in October, 1820, afterwards at Laybach, and finally at
Verona, to plan concerted action for the suppressing of the
popular movements of the time. As the result of these
conferences, the congenial duty of restoring absolutism in the
Two Sicilies, and of helping the King of Sardinia against his
subjects, was imposed upon Austria and willingly performed;
while the Bourbon court of France was solicited to put an end
to the bad example of constitutional government in Spain. Both
commissions were executed with fidelity and zeal. Italy was
flung down and fettered again; French troops occupied Spain
from 1823 until 1827. England, alone, protested against this
flagrant policing of Europe by the Holy Alliance. Canning, its
spirited minister, "called in the New World," as he described
his policy, "to redress the balance of the old," by
recognizing the independence of the Spanish colonies in
America, which, Cuba excepted, were now separated forever from
the crown of Spain. Brazil in like manner was cut loose from
the Portuguese crown, and assumed the constitution of an
empire, under Dom Pedro, the eldest son of John VI.

Greek War of Independence.

These stifled revolutions in western Europe failed to
discourage a more obstinate insurrection which began in the
East, among the Christian subjects of the Turks, in 1821. The
Ottoman government had been growing weaker and more vicious
for many years. The corrupted and turbulent Janissaries were
the masters of the empire, and a sultan who attempted, as
Selim III. (1789-1807) had done, to introduce reforms, was
put to death. Russia, under Alexander I., had been continuing
to gain ground at the expense of the Turks, and assuming more
and more of a patronage of the Christian subjects of the
Porte. There seems to be little doubt that the rising begun in
1821, which had its start in Moldavia, and its first leader in a
Greek, Ypsilanti, who had been an officer in the Russian
service, received encouragement from the Czar. But Alexander
turned his back on it when the Greeks sprang to arms and
seriously appealed to Europe for help in a war of national
independence. The Congress of Verona condemned the Greek
rising, in common with that of Spain. Again, England alone
showed sympathy, but did nothing as a government, and left the
struggling Greeks to such help as they might win from
individual friends. Lord Byron, with others, went to Greece,
carrying money and arms; and, generally, these volunteers lost
much of their ardor in the Greek cause when they came into
close contact with its native supporters. But the Greeks,
however lacking in high qualities, made an obstinate fight,
and held their ground against the Turks, until the feeling of
sympathy with them had grown too strong in England and in
France for the governments of those countries to be heedless
of it. Moreover, in Russia, Alexander I. had been succeeded
(1825) by the aggressive Nicholas, who had not patience to
wait for the slow crumbling of the Ottoman power, but was
determined to break it as summarily as he could. He joined
France and England, therefore, in an alliance and in a naval
demonstration against the Turks (1827), which had its result
in the battle of Navarino. The allies of Nicholas went no
farther; but he pursued the undertaking, in a war which lasted
until the autumn of 1829. Turkey at the end of it conceded the
independence of Greece, and practically that of Wallachia and
Moldavia. In 1830, a conference at London established the
Greek kingdom, and in 1833 a Bavarian prince, Otho I., was
settled on the throne.

Revolutions of 1830.

Before this result was reached, revolution in western Europe,
arrested in 1821-23, had broken out afresh. Bourbonism had
become unendurable to France. Charles X., who succeeded his
brother Louis XVIII; in 1824, showed not only a more arbitrary
temper, but a disposition more deferential to the Church than
his predecessor. He was fond of the Jesuits, whom his subjects
very commonly distrusted and disliked. He attempted to put
shackles on the press, and when elections to the chamber of
deputies went repeatedly against the government, he undertook
practically to alter the suffrage by ordinances of his own. A
revolution seemed then to be the only remedy that was open to
the nation, and it was adopted in July, 1830, the veteran
Lafayette taking the lead. Charles X. was driven to
abdication, and left France for England. The crown was
transferred to Louis Philippe, of the Orleans branch of the
Bourbon family,—son of the Philip Égalité who joined the
Jacobins in the Revolution.

The July Revolution in France proved a signal for more
outbreaks in other parts of Europe than had followed the
Spanish rising of ten years before.

Belgium broke away from the union with Holland, which had
never satisfied its people, and, after some struggle, won
recognized independence, as a new kingdom, with Leopold of
Saxe Coburg raised to the throne.

Russian Poland, bearing the name of a constitutional kingdom
since 1815, but having the Czar for its king and the Czar's
brother for viceroy, found no lighter oppression than before,
and made a hopeless, brave attempt to escape from its bonds.
The revolt was put down with unmerciful severity, and
thousands of the hapless patriots went to exile in Siberia.

In Germany, there were numerous demonstrations in the smaller
states, which succeeded more or less in extorting
constitutional concessions; but there was no revolutionary
movement on a larger scale.

Italy remained quiet in both the north and the south, where
disturbances had arisen before; but commotions occurred in the
Papal states, and in Modena and Parma, which required the arms
of Austria to suppress.

In England, the agitations of the continent hastened forward a
revolution which went far beyond all other popular movements
of the time in the lasting importance of its effects, and
which exhibited in their first great triumph the peaceful
forces of the Platform and the Press.

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England under the last two Georges.

But we have given little attention to affairs in Great Britain
during the past half century or more, and need to glance
backward.

Under the third of the Georges, there was distinctly a check
given to the political progress which England had been making
since the Revolution of 1688. The wilfulness of the king
fairly broke down, for a considerable period, the system of
responsible cabinet government which had been taking shape and
root under the two earlier Hanoverians, and ministers became
again, for a time, mere mouthpieces of the royal will. The
rupture with the American colonies, and the unsuccessful war
which ended in their independence, brought in another
influence, adverse, for the time being, to popular claims in
government. For it was not King George, alone, nor Lord North,
nor any small Tory faction, that prosecuted and upheld the
attempt to make the colonists in America submissive to
"taxation without representation." The English nation at large
approved the war; English national sentiment was hostile to
the Americans in their independent attitude, and the
Whigs—the liberals then in English politics—were a
discredited and weakened party for many years because of their
leaning to the American side of the questions in dispute.
Following close upon the American war, came the French
Revolution, which frightened into Toryism great numbers of
people who did not by nature belong there. In England, as
everywhere else, the reaction lasted long, and government was
more arbitrary and repressive than it could possibly have
continued to be under different circumstances.

Meantime extraordinary social changes had taken place, which
tended to mark more strongly the petrifying of things in the
political world. The great age of mechanical invention had
been fully opened. Machines had begun to do the work of human
hands in every industry, and steam had begun to move the
machines. The organization of labor, too, had assumed a new
phase. The factory system had arisen; and with it had appeared
a new growth of cities and towns. Production was accelerated;
wealth was accumulating more rapidly, and the distribution of
wealth was following different lines. The English middle class
was rising fast as a money-power and was gathering the
increased energies of the kingdom into its hands.

Parliamentary Reform in England.

But while the tendency of social changes had been to increase
vastly the importance of this powerful middle class, the
political conditions had actually diminished its weight in
public affairs. In Parliament, it had no adequate
representation. The old boroughs, which sent members to the
House of Commons as they had sent them for generations before,
no longer contained a respectable fraction of the "commons of
England," supposed to be represented in the House, and those
who voted in the boroughs were not at all the better class of
the new England of the nineteenth century. Great numbers of
the boroughs were mere private estates, and the few votes
polled in them were cast by tenants who elected their
landlords' nominees. On the other hand, the large cities and
the numerous towns of recent growth had either no
representation in Parliament, or they had equal representation
with the "rotten boroughs" which cast two or three or
half-a-dozen votes.

That the commons of England, with all the gain of substantial
strength they had been making in the last half of the
eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth,
endured this travesty of popular representation so long as
until 1832, is proof of the potency of the conservatism which
the French Revolution induced. The subject of parliamentary
reform had been now and then discussed since Chatham's time;
but Toryism had always been able to thrust it aside and bring
the discussion to naught. At last there came the day when the
question would no longer be put down. The agitations of 1830,
combined with a very serious depression of industry and trade,
produced a state of feeling which could not be defied. King and
Parliament yielded to the public demand, and the First Reform
Bill was passed. It widened the suffrage and amended very
considerably the inequities of the parliamentary
representation; but both reforms have been carried much
farther since, by two later bills.

Repeal of the English Corn Laws.

The reform of Parliament soon brought a broader spirit into
legislation. Its finest fruits began to ripen about 1838, when
an agitation for the repeal of the foolish and wicked English
"corn-laws" was opened by Cobden and Bright. In the day of the
"rotten boroughs," when the landlords controlled Parliament,
they imagined that they had "protected" the farming interest,
and secured higher rents to themselves, by laying heavy duties
on the importation of foreign bread-stuffs. A famous "sliding
scale" of such duties had been invented, which raised the
duties when prices in the home market dropped, and lowered
them proportionately when home prices rose. Thus the consumers
were always deprived, as much as possible, of any cheapening
of their bread which bountiful Nature might offer, and paid a
heavy tax to increase the gains of the owners and cultivators
of land.

Now that other "interests" besides the agricultural had a
voice in Parliament, and had become very strong, they began to
cry out against this iniquity, and demand that the "corn laws"
be done away with. The famous "anti-corn-law league,"
organized mainly by the exertions of Richard Cobden, conducted
an agitation of the question which brought about the repeal of
the laws in 1846.

But the effect of the agitation did not end there. So thorough
and prolonged a discussion of the matter had enlightened the
English people upon the whole question between "protection"
and free trade. The manufacturers and mechanics, who had led
the movement against protective duties on food-stuffs, were
brought to see that they were handicapped more than protected
by duties on imports in their own departments of production.
So Cobden and his party continued their attacks on the theory
of "protection" until every vestige of it was cleared from the
English statute books.

The Revolutions of 1848.

Another year of revolutions throughout Europe came in 1848,
and the starting point of excitement was not, this time, at
Paris, but, strangely enough, in the Vatican, at Rome. Pius
IX. had been elected to the papal chair in 1846, and had
immediately rejoiced the hearts and raised the hopes of the
patriots in misgoverned Italy by his liberal measures of
reform and his promising words. The attitude of the Pope gave
encouragement to popular demonstrations in various Italian
states during the later part of 1847; and in January 1848 a
formidable rising occurred in Sicily, followed in February by
another in Naples. King Ferdinand II. was compelled to change
his ministers and to concede a constitution, which he did not
long respect.

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Lombardy was slow this time in being kindled; but when the
flame of revolution burst out it was very fierce. The
Austrians were driven first from Milan (March, 1848), and then
from city after city, until they seemed to be abandoning their
Italian possessions altogether. Venice asserted its republican
independence under the presidency of Daniel Manin. Charles
Albert, King of Sardinia, thought the time favorable for
recovering Lombardy to himself, and declared war against
Austria. The expulsion of the Austrians became the demand of
the entire peninsula, and even the Pope, the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, and the King of Naples were forced to join the
patriotic movement in appearance, though not with sincerity.
But the King of Sardinia brought ruin on the whole
undertaking, by sustaining a fatal defeat in battle at
Custozza, in July, 1848.

France had been for some time well prepared for revolt, and
was quick to be moved by the first whisper of it from Italy.
The short-lived popularity of Louis Philippe was a thing of
the past. There was widespread discontent with many things,
and especially with the limited suffrage. The French people
had the desire and the need of something like that grand
measure of electoral reform which England secured so
peacefully in 1832; but they could not reach it in the
peaceful way. The aptitude and the habit of handling and
directing the great forces of public opinion effectively in
such a situation were alike wanting among them. There was a
mixture, moreover, of social theories and dreams in their
political undertaking, which heated the movement and made it
more certainly explosive. The Parisian mob took arms and built
barricades on the 23d of February. The next day Louis Philippe
signed an abdication, and a week later he was an exile in
England. For the remainder of the year France was strangely
ruled: first by a self-constituted provisional government,
Lamartine at its head, which opened national workshops, and
attempted to give employment and pay to 125,000 enrolled
citizens in need; afterwards by a Constituent National
Assembly, and an Executive Commission, which found the
national workshops a devouring monster, difficult to control
and hard to destroy. Paris got rid of the shops in June, at
the cost of a battle which lasted four days, and in which more
than 8,000 people were wounded or slain. In November a
republican constitution, framed by the Assembly, was adopted,
and on the 10th of December Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, son of
Louis Bonaparte, once King of Holland, and of Hortense
Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Josephine, was elected
President of the Republic by an enormous popular vote.

The revolutionary shock of 1848 was felt in Germany soon after
the fall of the monarchy in France. In March there was rioting
in Berlin and a collision with the troops, which alarmed the
king so seriously that he yielded promises to almost every
demand. Similar risings in other capitals had about the same
success. At Vienna, the outbreak was more violent and drove
both Metternich and the Emperor from the city. In the first
flush of these popular triumphs there came about a most
hopeful-looking election of a Germanic National Assembly,
representative of all Germany, and gathered at Frankfort, on
the invitation of the Diet, for a revision of the constitution
of the Confederation. But the Assembly contained more learned
scholars than practical statesmen, and its constitutional work
was wasted labor. A Constituent Assembly elected in Prussia
accomplished no more, and was dispersed in the end without
resistance; but the king granted a constitution of his own
framing. The revolutionary movement in Germany left its
effects, in a general loosening of the bonds of harsh
government, a general broadening of political ideas, a final
breaking of the Metternich influence, even in Austria; but it
passed over the existing institutions of the much-divided
country with a very light touch.

In Hungary the revolution, stimulated by the eloquence of
Kossuth, was carried to the pitch of serious war. The
Hungarians had resolved to be an independent nation, and in
the struggle which ensued they approached very near the
attainment of their desire; but Russia came to the help of the
Hapsburgs, and the armies of the two despotisms combined were
more than the Hungarians could resist. Their revolt was
abandoned in August, 1849, and Kossuth, with other leaders,
escaped through Turkish territory to other lands.

The suppression of the Hungarian revolt was followed by a
complete restoration of the despotism and domination of the
Austrians in Italy. Charles Albert, of Sardinia, had taken
courage from the struggle in Hungary and had renewed
hostilities in March, 1849. But, again, he was crushingly
defeated, at Novara, and resigned, in despair, the crown to
his son, Victor Emmanuel II. Venice, which had resisted a long
siege with heroic constancy, capitulated in August of the same
year. The whole of Lombardy and Venetia was bowed once more
under the merciless tyranny of the Austrians, and savage
revenges were taken upon the patriots who failed to escape.
Rome, whence the Pope—no longer a patron of liberal
politics—had fled, and where a republic had been once more
set up, with Garibaldi and Mazzini in its constituent
assembly, was besieged and taken, and the republic overturned,
by troops sent from republican France. The Neapolitan king
restored his atrocious absolutism without help, by measures of
the greatest brutality.

A civil war in Switzerland, which occurred simultaneously with
the political collisions in surrounding countries, is hardly
to be classed with them. It was rather a religious conflict,
between the Roman Catholics and their opponents. The Catholic
cantons, united in a League, called the Sonderbund, were
defeated in the war; the Jesuits were expelled from
Switzerland in consequence, and, in September, 1848, a new
constitution for the confederacy was adopted.

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The Second Empire in France.

The election of Louis Napoleon to the Presidency of the French
Republic was ominous of a disposition among the people to
bring back a Napoleonic regime, with all the falsities that it
might imply. He so construed the vote which elected him, and
does not seem to have been mistaken. Having surrounded himself
with unprincipled adventurers, and employed three years of his
presidency in preparations for the attempt, he executed a coup
d' état on the 2d of December, dispersing the National
Assembly, arresting influential republicans, and submitting to
popular vote a new constitution which prolonged his presidency
to ten years. This was but the first step. A year later he
secured a "plébiscite" which made him hereditary Emperor of
the French. The new Empire—the Second Empire in France—was
more vulgar, more false, more fraudulent, more swarmingly a
nest of self-seeking and dishonest adventurers, than the First
had been, and with nothing of the saving genius that was in
the First. It rotted for eighteen years, and then it fell,
France with it.

The Crimean War.

A certain respectability was lent to this second Napoleonic
Empire by the alliance of England with it in 1854, against
Russia. The Czar, Nicholas, had determined to defy resistance
in Europe to his designs against the Turks. He first
endeavored to persuade England to join him in dividing the
possessions of "the sick man," as he described the Ottoman,
and, that proposal being declined, he opened on his own
account a quarrel with the Porte. France and England joined
forces in assisting the Turks, and the little kingdom of
Sardinia, from motives of far-seeing policy, came into the
alliance. The principal campaign of the war was fought in the
Crimea, and its notable incident was the long siege of
Sebastopol, which the Russians defended until September, 1855.
An armistice was concluded the following January, and the
terms of peace were settled at a general conference of powers
in Paris the next March. The results of the war were a check
to Russia, but an improvement of the condition of the Sultan's
Christian subjects. Moldavia and Wallachia were soon
afterwards united under the name of Roumania, paying tribute
to the Porte, but otherwise independent.

Liberation and Unification of Italy.

The part taken by Sardinia in the Crimean War gave that
kingdom a standing in European politics which had never been
recognized before. It was a measure of sagacious policy due to
the able statesman, Count Cavour, who had become the trusted
minister of Victor Emmanuel, the Sardinian king. The king and
his minister were agreed in one aim—the unification of Italy
under the headship of the House of Savoy. By her participation
in the war with Russia, Sardinia won a position which enabled
her to claim and secure admission to the Congress of Paris,
among the greater powers. At that conference, Count Cavour
found an opportunity to direct attention to the deplorable
state of affairs in Italy, under the Austrian rule and
influence. No action by the Congress was taken; but the
Italian question was raised in importance at once by the
discussion of it, and Italy was rallied to the side of
Sardinia as the necessary head of any practicable movement
toward liberation. More than that: France was moved to
sympathy with the Italian cause, and Louis Napoleon was led to
believe that his throne would be strengthened by espousing it.
He encouraged Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, therefore, in an
attitude toward Austria which resulted in war (1859), and when
the Sardinians were attacked he went to their assistance with
a powerful force. At Magenta and Solferino the Austrians were
decisively beaten, and the French emperor then abruptly closed
the war, making a treaty which ceded Lombardy alone to
Sardinia, leaving Venetia still under the oppressor, and the
remainder of Italy unchanged in its state. For payment of the
service he had rendered, Louis Napoleon exacted Savoy and
Nice, and Victor Emmanuel was compelled to part with the
original seat of his House.

There was bitter disappointment among the Italian patriots
over the meagerness of the fruit yielded by the splendid
victories of Magenta and Solferino. Despite the treaty of
Villafranca, they were determined to have more, and they did.
Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna demanded annexation to
Sardinia, and, after a plébiscite, they were received (March,
1860) into the kingdom and represented in its parliament. In
the Two Sicilies there was an intense longing for deliverance
from the brutalities of the Neapolitan Bourbons. Victor
Emmanuel could not venture an attack upon the rotten kingdom,
for fear of resentments in France and elsewhere. But the
adventurous soldier, Garibaldi, now took on himself the task
of completing the liberation of Italy. With an army of
volunteers, he first swept the Neapolitans out of Sicily, and
then took Naples itself, within the space of four months,
between May and September, 1860. The whole dominion was
annexed to what now became the Kingdom of Italy, and which
embraced the entire peninsula except Rome, garrisoned for the
Pope by French troops, and Venetia, still held in the clutches
of Austria. In 1862, Garibaldi raised volunteers for an attack
on Rome; but the unwise movement was suppressed by Victor
Emmanuel. Two years later, the King of Italy brought about an
agreement with the French emperor to withdraw his garrison
from Rome, and, after that had been done, the annexation of
Rome to the Italian kingdom was a mere question of time. It
came about in 1870, after the fall of Louis Napoleon, and
Victor Emmanuel transferred his capital to the Eternal City.
The Pope's domain was then limited to the precincts of the
Vatican.

The Austro-Prussian War.

The unification of Italy was the first of a remarkable series
of nationalizing movements which have been the most
significant feature of the history of the last half of the
nineteenth century. The next of these movements to begin was
in Germany—the much divided country of one peculiarly
homogeneous and identical race. Influences tending toward
unification had been acting on the Germans since Prussia rose
to superiority in the north. By the middle of the century, the
educated, military Prussia that was founded after 1806 had
become a power capable of great things in capable hands; and
the capable hands received it. In 1861, William I. succeeded
his brother as king; in 1862, Otto von Bismarck became his
prime minister. It was a remarkable combination of qualities
and talents, and remarkable results came from it.

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In 1864, Prussia and Austria acted together in taking
Schleswig and Holstein, as German states, from Denmark. The
next year they quarreled over the administration of the
duchies. In 1866, they fought, and Austria was entirely
vanquished in a "seven weeks war." The superiority of Prussia,
organized by her great military administrator and soldier,
Moltke, was overpowering. Her rival was left completely at her
mercy. But Bismarck and his king were wisely magnanimous. They
refrained from inflicting on the Austrians a humiliation that
would rankle and keep enmities alive. They foresaw the need of
future friendship between the two powers of central Europe, as
against Russia on the one side and France on the other, and
they shaped their policy to secure it. It sufficed them to
have put Austria out of the German circle, forever; to have
ended the false relation in which the Hapsburgs—rulers of an
essentially Slavonic and Magyar dominion—had stood towards
Germany so long.

Prussia now dominated the surrounding German states so
commandingly that the mode and the time of their unification
may be said to have been within her own control. Hanover,
Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Schleswig-Holstein, and Frankfort were
incorporated in the Prussian kingdom at once. Saxony and the
other states of the north were enveloped in a North German
Confederation, with the King of Prussia for its hereditary
president and commander of its forces. The states of southern
Germany were left unfederated for the time being, but bound
themselves by treaty to put their armies at the disposal of
Prussia. Thus Germany as a whole was already made practically
one power, under the control of King William and his great
minister.

Final Expulsion of Austria from Italy.

The same war which unified Germany carried forward the
nationalization of Italy another step. Victor Emmanuel had
shrewdly entered into an alliance with Prussia before the war
began, and attacked Austria in Venetia simultaneously with the
German attack on the Bohemian side. The Italians were beaten
at Custozza, and their navy was defeated in the Adriatic; but
the victorious Prussians exacted Venetia for them in the
settlement of peace, and Austria had no more footing in the
peninsula.

Austria-Hungary.