Part 355

As before said, it was the anxiety of George II. for his electorate of Hanover which caused an explosion of hostilities in Europe to occur, as consequence of the remote fighting of French and English colonists in America. For the strengthening of Hanover against attacks from France, he sought an alliance with Frederick of Prussia. This broke the long-standing anti-French alliance of England with Austria, and Austria joined fortunes with her ancient Bourbon enemy, in order to be helped to the revenge which Maria Theresa now promised herself the pleasure of executing upon the Prussian king. As the combination finally shaped itself on the French side, it embraced France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Poland, Saxony, and the Palatinate, and its inspiring purpose was to break Prussia down and partition her territories, rather than to support France against England. The agreements to this end were made in secret; but Frederick obtained knowledge of them, and learned that papers proving the conspiracy against him were in the archives of the Saxony government, at Dresden. His action was decided with that promptitude which so often disconcerted his enemies. He did not wait to be attacked by the tremendous league formed against him, nor waste time in efforts to dissolve it, but defiantly struck the first blow. He poured his army into Saxony (August, 1756), seized Dresden by surprise, captured the documents he desired, and published them to the world in vindication of his summary precipitation of war. Then, blockading the Saxon army in Pirna, he pressed rapidly into Bohemia, defeated the Austrians at Lowositz, and returned as rapidly, to receive the surrender of the Saxons and to enlist most of them in his own ranks. This was the European opening of the Seven Years War, which raged, first and last, in all quarters of the globe. In the second year of the war, Frederick gained an important victory at Prague and suffered a serious reverse at Kolin, which threw most of Silesia into the hands of the Austrians. Close following that defeat came crushing news from Hanover, where the incompetent Duke of Cumberland, commanding for his father, the English King George, had allowed the French to force him to an agreement which disbanded his army, and left Prussia alone in the terrific fight. Frederick's position seemed desperate; but his energy retrieved it. {1087} He fought and defeated the French at Rossbach, near Lützen, on the 5th of November, and the Austrians, at Leuthen, near Breslau, exactly one month later. In the campaigns of 1758, he encountered the Russians at Zorndorf, winning a bloody triumph, and he sustained a defeat at Hochkirk, in battle with the Austrians. But England had repudiated Cumberland's convention and recalled him; English and Hanoverian forces were again put into the field, under the capable command of Prince Frederick of Brunswick, who turned the tide in that quarter against the French, and the results of the year were generally favorable to Frederick. In 1759, the Hanoverian army, under Prince Ferdinand, improved the situation on that side; but the prospects of the King of Prussia were clouded by heavy disasters. Attempting to push a victory over the Russians too far, at Kunersdorf, he was terribly beaten. He lost Dresden, and a great part of Saxony. In the next year he recovered all but Dresden, which he wantonly and inhumanly bombarded. The war was now being carried on with great difficulty by all the combatants. Prussia, France and Austria were suffering almost equally from exhaustion; the misery among their people was too great to be ignored; the armies of each had dwindled. The opponents of Pitt's war policy in England overcame him, in October, 1761, whereupon he resigned, and the English subsidy to Frederick was withdrawn. But that was soon made up to him by the withdrawal of Russia from the war, at the beginning of 1762, when Peter of Holstein, who admired Frederick, became Czar. Sweden made peace a little later. The remainder of the worn and wearied fighters went on striking at each other until near the end of the year.

Meantime, on the colonial and East Indian side of it, this prodigious Seven Years War, as a great struggle for world-empire between England and France, had been adding conquest to conquest and triumph to triumph for the former. In 1759, Wolfe had taken Quebec and died on the Heights of Abraham in the moment of victory. Another twelve months saw the whole of Canada clear of Frenchmen in arms. In the East, to use the language of Macaulay, "conquests equalling in rapidity and far surpassing in magnitude those of Cortes and Pizarro, had been achieved." "In the space of three years the English had founded a mighty empire. The French had been defeated in every part of India. Chandernagore had yielded to Clive, Pondicherry to Coote. Throughout Bengal, Bahar, Orissa, and the Carnatic, the authority of the East India Company was more absolute than that of Acbar or Aurungzebe had ever been."

Treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg.

In February, 1763, two treaties of peace were concluded, one at Paris, on the 10th, between England, France and Spain (the latter Power having joined France in the war as late as January, 1762); the other at Hubertsburg, on the 15th, between Prussia and Austria. France gave up to England all her possessions in North America, except Louisiana (which passed to Spain,), and yielded Minorca, but recovered the Philippines. She surrendered, moreover, considerable interests in the West Indies and in Africa. The colonial aspirations of the French were cast down by a blow that was lasting in its effect. As between Prussia and Austria, the triumphs of the peace and the glories of the war were won entirely by the former. Frederick came out of it, "Frederick the Great," the most famous man of his century, as warrior and as statesman, both. He had defended his little kingdom for seven years against three great Powers, and yielded not one acre of its territory. He had raised Prussia to the place in Germany from which her subsequent advance became easy and almost inevitable. But the great fame he earned is spotted with many falsities and much cynical indifference to the commonest ethics of civilization. His greatness is of that character which requires to be looked at from selected standpoints.

Russia.

Another character, somewhat resembling that of Frederick, was now drawing attention on the eastern side of Europe. Since the death of Peter the Great, the interval in Russian history had been covered by six reigns, with a seventh just opening, and the four sovereigns who really exercised power were women. Peter's widow, Catherine I., had succeeded him (1725) for two years. His son, Alexis, he had put to death; but Alexis left a son, Peter, to whom Catherine bequeathed the crown. Peter II. died after a brief reign, in 1730; and the nearest heirs were two daughters of Peter the Great, Anne and Elizabeth. But they were set aside in favor of another Anne—Anne of Courland—daughter of Peter the Great's brother. Anne's reign of ten years was under the influence of German favorites and ministers, and nearly half of it was occupied with a Turkish War, in cooperation with Austria. For Austria the war had most humiliating results, costing her Belgrade, all of Servia, part of Bosnia and part of Wallachia. Russia won back Asov, with fortifications forbidden, and that was all. Anne willed her crown to an infant nephew, who appears in the Russian annals as Ivan VI.; but two regencies were overthrown by palace revolutions within little more than a year, and the second one carried to the throne that Princess Elizabeth, younger daughter of Peter the Great, who had been put aside eleven years before. Elizabeth, a woman openly licentious and intemperate, reigned for twenty-one years, during the whole important period of the War of the Austrian Succession, and almost to the end of the Seven Years War. She was bitterly hostile to Frederick the Great, whose sharp tongue had offended her, and she joined Maria Theresa with eagerness in the great effort of revenge, which failed. In the early part of her reign, war with Sweden had been more successful and had added South Finland to the Russian territories. It is claimed for her domestic government that the general prosperity of the country was advanced.

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Catherine II.

On the death of Elizabeth, near the end of the year 1761, the crown passed to her nephew, Peter of Holstein, son of her eldest sister, Anne, who had married the Duke of Holstein. This prince had been the recognized heir, living at the Russian court, during the whole of Elizabeth's reign. He was an ignorant boor, and he had become a besotted drunkard. Since 1744 he had been married to a young German princess, of the Anhalt Zerbst family, who took the baptismal name of Catherine when she entered the Greek Church. Catherine possessed a superior intellect and a strong character; but the vile court into which she came as a young girl, bound to a disgusting husband, had debauched her in morals and lowered her to its own vileness. She gained so great an ascendancy that the court was subservient to her, from the time that her incapable husband, Peter III., succeeded to the throne. He reigned by sufferance for a year and a half, and then (July, 1762) he was easily deposed and put to death. In the deposition, Catherine was the leading actor. Of the subsequent murder, some historians are disposed to acquit her. She did not scruple, at least, to accept the benefit of both deeds, which raised her, alone, to the throne of the Czars.

Partition of Poland.

Peter III., in his short reign, had made one important change in Russian policy, by withdrawing from the league against Frederick of Prussia, whom he greatly admired. Catherine found reasons, quite aside from those of personal admiration, for cultivating the friendship of the King of Prussia, and a close understanding with that astute monarch was one of the earliest objects of her endeavor. She had determined to put an end to the independence of Poland. As she first entertained the design, there was probably no thought of the partitioning afterwards contrived. But her purpose was to keep the Polish kingdom in disorder and weakness, and to make Russian influence supreme in it, with views, no doubt, that looked ultimately to something more. On the death of the Saxon king of Poland, Augustus III., in 1763, Catherine put forward a native candidate for the vacant throne, in the person of Stanislaus Poniatowsky, a Russianized Pole and a former lover of her own. The King of Prussia supported her candidate, and Poniatowsky was duly elected, with 10,000 Russian troops in Warsaw to see that it was properly done. The Poles were submissive to the invasion of their political independence; but when Catherine, who sought to create a Russian party in Poland by protecting the members of the Greek Church and the Protestants, against the intolerance of the Polish Catholics, forced a concession of civil equality to the former (1768), there was a wide-spread Catholic revolt. In the fierce war which followed, a band of Poles was pursued across the Turkish border, and a Turkish town was burned by the Russian pursuers. The Sultan, who professed sympathy with the Poles, then declared war against Russia. The Russo-Turkish war, in turn, excited Austria, which feared Russian conquests from the Turks, and another wide disturbance of the peace of Europe seemed threatening. In the midst of the excitement there came a whispered suggestion, to the ear of the courts of Vienna and St. Petersburg, that they severally satisfy their territorial cravings and mutually assuage each other's jealousy, at the expense of the crumbling kingdom of Poland. The whisper may have come from Frederick II. of Prussia, or it may not. There are two opinions on the point. From whatever source it came, it found favorable consideration at Vienna and St. Petersburg, and between February and August, 1772, the details of the partition were worked out.

Poland was not yet extinguished. The kingdom was only shorn of some 160,000 square miles of territory, more than half of which went to Russia, a third to Austria, and the remainder, less than 10,000 square miles, to Prussia. This last mentioned annexation was the old district of West Prussia which the Polish king, Casimir IV., had wrested from the Teutonic Knights in 1466, before Brandenburg had aught to do with Prussian lands or name. After three centuries, Frederick reclaimed it.

The diminished kingdom of Poland showed more signs of a true national life, of an earnest national feeling, of a sobered and rational patriotism, than had appeared in its former history. The fatal powers monopolized by the nobles, the deadly "liberum veto," the corrupting elective kingship, were looked at in their true light, and in May, 1791, a new constitution was adopted which reformed those evils. But a few nobles opposed the reformation and appealed to Russia, supplying a pretext to Catherine on which she filled Poland with her troops. It was in vain that the patriot Kosciusko led the best of his countrymen in a brave struggle with the invader. They were overborne (1793-1794); the unhappy nation was put in fetters, while Catherine and a new King of Prussia, Frederick William II., arranged the terms of a second partition. This gave to Prussia an additional thousand square miles, including the important towns of Danzig and Thorn, while Russia took four times as much. A year later, the small remainder of Polish territory was dismembered and divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and thus Poland disappeared from the map of Europe as a state.

Russia as left by Catherine II.

Meantime, in her conflicts with the Turks, Catherine was extending her vast empire to the Dneister and the Caucasus, and opening a passage for her fleets from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. By treaty in 1774 she placed the Tartars of the Crimea in independence of the Turks, and so isolated them for easy conquest. In 1783 the conquest was made complete. By the same treaty she secured a right of remonstrance on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Sultan, in the Danubian principalities and in the Greek Church at Constantinople, which opened many pretexts for future interference and for war at Russian convenience. The aggressions of the strong-willed and powerful Czarina, and their dazzling success, filled her subjects with pride, and effaced all remembrance of her foreign origin and her want of right to the seat which she filled. She was ambitious to improve the empire, as well as to expand it; for her liberal mind took in the large ideas of that speculative age and was much moved by them. She attempted many reforms; but most things that she tried to do for the bettering of civilization and the lifting of the people were done imperiously, and spoiled by the autocratic method of the doing. In her later years, her inclination towards liberal ideas was checked, and the French Revolution put an end to it.

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State of France in the Eighteenth Century.

In tracing the destruction of Poland and the aggrandizement of Russia, we have passed the date of that great catastrophe in France which ended the old modern order of things, and introduced a new one, not for France only, but for Europe at large. It was a catastrophe toward which the abused French people had been slowly slipping for generations, pushed unrelentingly to it by blind rulers and a besotted aristocracy. By nature a people ardent and lively in temper, hopeful and brave in spirit, full of intelligence, they had been held down in dumb repression: silenced in voice, even for the uttering of their complaints; the national meeting of their representative States suppressed for nearly two centuries; taxes wrung from them on no measure save the will of a wanton-minded and ignorant king; their beliefs prescribed, their laws ordained, their courts of justice commanded, their industries directed, their trade hedged round, their rights and permissions in all particulars meted out to them by the same blundering and irresponsible autocracy. How long would they bear it? and would their deliverance come by the easing of their yoke, or by the breaking of it?—were the only questions.

Their state was probably at its worst in the later years of Louis XIV. That seems to be the conclusion which the deepest study has now reached, and the picture formerly drawn by historians, of a society continually sinking into lower miseries, is mostly put aside. The worst state, seemingly, was passed, or nearly so, when Louis XIV. died. It began to mend under his despicable successor, Louis XV. (1715-1774),— perhaps even during the regency of the profligate Orleans (1715-1723). Why it mended, no historian has clearly explained. The cause was not in better government; for the government grew worse. It did not come from any rise in character of the privileged classes; for the privileged classes abused their privileges with increasing selfishness. But general influences were at work in the world at large, stimulating activities of all kinds,—industry, trade, speculation, combination, invention, experiment, science, philosophy,—and whatever improvement occurred in the material condition and social state of the common people of France may find its explanation in these. There was an augmentation of life in the air of the eighteenth century, and France took some invigoration from it, despite the many maladies in its social system and the oppressions of government under which it bent.

But the difference between the France of Louis XIV. and the France of Louis XVI. was more in the people than in their state. If their misery was a little less, their patience was less, and by not a little. The stimulations of the age, which may have given more effectiveness to labor and more energy to trade, had likewise set thinking astir, on the same practical lines. Men whose minds in former centuries would have labored on riddles dialectical, metaphysical and theological, were now bent on the pressing problems of daily life. The mysteries of economic science began to challenge them. Every aspect of surrounding society thrust questions upon them, concerning its origin, its history, its inequalities, its laws and their principles, its government and the source of authority in it. The so-called "philosophers" of the age, Rousseau, Voltaire and the encyclopædists—were not the only questioners of the social world, nor did the questioning all come from what they taught. It was the intellectual epidemic of the time, carried into all countries, penetrating all classes, and nowhere with more diffusion than in France.

After the successful revolt of the English colonies in America, and the conspicuous blazoning of the doctrines of political equality and popular self-government in their declaration of independence and their republican constitution, the ferment of social free-thinking in France was naturally increased. The French had helped the colonists, fought side by side with them, watched their struggle with intense interest, and all the issues involved in the American revolution were discussed among them, with partiality to the republican side. Franklin, most republican representative of the young republic, came among them and captivated every class. He recommended to them the ideas for which he stood, perhaps more than we suspect.

Louis XVI. and his reign.

And thus, by many influences, the French people of all classes except the privileged nobility, and even in that class to some small extent, were made increasingly impatient of their misgovernment and of the wrongs and miseries going with it. Louis XVI., who came to the throne in 1774, was the best in character of the Bourbon kings. He had no noxious vices and no baleful ambitions. If he had found right conditions prevailing in his kingdom he would have made the best of them. But he had no capacity for reforming the evils that he inherited, and no strength of will to sustain those who had. He accepted an earnest reforming minister with more than willingness, and approved the wise measures of economy, of equitable taxation, and of emancipation for manufactures and trade, which Turgot proposed. But when protected interests, and the privileged order which fattened on existing abuses, raised a storm of opposition, he weakly gave way to it, and dismissed the man (1776) who might possibly have made the inevitable revolution a peaceful one. Another minister, the Genevan banker, Necker, who aimed at less reform, but demanded economy, suffered the same overthrow (1781). The waste, the profligate expenditure, the jobbery, the leeching of the treasury by high-born pensioners and sinecure office-holders, went on, scarcely checked, until the beginnings of actual bankruptcy had appeared.

The States-General.

Then a cry, not much heeded before, for the convocation of the States-general of the kingdom—the ancient great legislature of France, extinct since the year 1614—became loud and general. The king yielded (1788). The States-general was called to meet on the 1st of May, 1789, and the royal summons decreed that the deputies chosen to it from the third estate—the common people—should be equal in number to the deputies of the nobility and the clergy together. So the dumb lips of France as a nation were opened, its tongue unloosed, its common public opinion, and public feeling made articulate, for the first time in one hundred and seventy-five years. And the word that it spoke was the mandate of Revolution.

The States-general assembled at Versailles on the 5th of May, and a conflict between the third estate and the nobles occurred at once on the question between three assemblies and one. Should the three orders deliberate and vote together as one body, or sit and act separately and apart. The commons demanded the single assembly. The nobles and most of the clergy refused the union, in which their votes would be overpowered.

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The National Assembly.