Part 74

"On the 12th of July, 1806, fourteen princes of the south and west of Germany united themselves into the confederation of the Rhine, and recognised Napoleon as their protector. On the 1st of August, they signified to the diet of Ratisbon their separation from the Germanic body. The Empire of Germany ceased to exist, and Francis II. abdicated the title by proclamation. By a convention signed at Vienna, on the 15th of December, Prussia exchanged the territories of Anspach, Cleves and Neufchâtel for the electorate of Hanover, Napoleon had all the west under his power. Absolute master of France and Italy, as emperor and king, he was also master of Spain, by the dependence of that court; of Naples and Holland, by his two brothers; of Switzerland, by the act of mediation; and in Germany he had at his disposal the kings of Bavaria and Wurtemberg, and the confederation of the Rhine against Austria and Prussia. … This encroaching progress gave rise to the fourth coalition. Prussia, neutral since the peace of Bâle, had, in the last campaign, been on the point of joining the Austro-Russian coalition. The rapidity of the emperor's victories had alone restrained her; but now, alarmed at the aggrandizement of the empire, and encouraged by the fine condition of her troops, she leagued with Russia to drive the French from Germany. … The campaign opened early in October. Napoleon, as usual, overwhelmed the coalition by the promptitude of his marches and the vigour of his measures. On the 14th of October, he destroyed at Jena the military monarchy of Prussia, by a decisive victory. … The campaign in Poland was less rapid, but as brilliant as that of Prussia. Russia, for the third time, measured its strength with France. Conquered at Zurich and Austerlitz, it was also defeated at Eylau and Friedland. After these memorable battles, the emperor Alexander entered into a negotiation, and concluded at Tilsit, on the 21st of June, 1807, an armistice which was followed by a definitive treaty on the 7th of July. The peace of Tilsit extended the French domination on the continent. Prussia was reduced to half its extent. In the south of Germany, Napoleon had instituted the two kingdoms of Bavaria and Wurtemberg against Austria; further to the north, he created the two feudatory kingdoms of Saxony and Westphalia against Prussia. … In order to obtain universal and uncontested supremacy, he made use of arms against the continent, and the cessation of commerce against England. But in forbidding to the continental states all communication with England, he was preparing new difficulties for himself, and soon added to the animosity of opinion excited by his despotism, and the hatred of states produced by his conquering domination, the exasperation of private interests and commercial suffering occasioned by the blockade. … The expedition of Portugal in 1807, and the invasion of Spain in 1808, began for him and for Europe a new order of events. … The reaction manifested itself in three countries, hitherto allies of France, and it brought on the fifth coalition. The court of Rome was dissatisfied; the peninsula was wounded in its national pride by having imposed upon it a foreign king; in its usages, by the suppression of convents, of the Inquisition, and of the grandees; Holland suffered in its commerce from the blockade, and Austria supported impatiently its losses and subordinate condition. England, watching for an opportunity to revive the struggle on the continent, excited the resistance of Rome, the peninsula, and the cabinet of Vienna. … Austria … made a powerful effort, and raised 550,000 men, comprising the Landwehr, and took the field in the spring of 1809. The Tyrol rose, and King Jerome was driven from his capital by the Westphalians: Italy wavered; and Prussia only waited till Napoleon met with a reverse, to take arms; but the emperor was still at the height of his power and prosperity. He hastened from Madrid in the beginning of February, and directed the members of the confederation to keep their contingents in readiness. On the 12th of April he left Paris, passed the Rhine, plunged into Germany, gained the victories of Eckmühl and Essling, occupied Vienna a second time on the 15th of May and overthrew this new coalition by the battle of Wagram, after a campaign of four mouths. … The peace of Vienna, of the 11th of October, 1809, deprived the house of Austria of several more provinces, and compelled it again to adopt the continental system. … Napoleon, who seemed to follow a rash but inflexible policy, deviated from his course about this time by a second marriage. He divorced Josephine that he might give an heir to the empire, and married, on the 1st of April, 1810, Marie-Louise, arch-duchess of Austria. This was a decided error. He quitted his position and his post as a parvenu and revolutionary monarch, opposing in France the ancient courts as the republic had opposed the ancient governments. He placed himself in a false situation with respect to Austria, which he ought either to have crushed after the victory of Wagram, or to have reinstated in its possessions after his marriage with the arch-duchess. … The birth, on the 20th of March, 1811, of a son, who received the title of king of Rome, seemed to consolidate the power of Napoleon, by securing to him a successor. The war in Spain was prosecuted with vigour during the years 1810 and 1811. … While the war was proceeding in the peninsula with advantage, but without any decided success, a new campaign was preparing in the north. Russia perceived the empire of Napoleon approaching its territories. … About the close of 1810, it increased its armies, renewed its commercial relations with Great Britain, and did not seem indisposed to a rupture. The year 1811 was spent in negotiations which led to nothing, and preparations for war were made on both sides. … On the 9th of March, Napoleon left Paris. … During several months he fixed his court at Dresden, where the emperor of Austria, the king of Prussia, and all the sovereigns of Germany, came to bow before his high fortune. {225} On the 22nd of June, war was declared against Russia. … Napoleon, who, according to his custom, wished to finish all in one campaign, advanced at once into the heart of Russia, instead of prudently organizing the Polish barrier against it. His army amounted to about 500,000 men. He passed the Niemen on the 24th of June; took Wilna, and Witepsk, defeated the Russians at Astrowno, Polotsk, Mohilow Smolensko, at the Moskowa, and on the 14th of September, made his entry into Moscow. … Moscow was burned by its governor. … The emperor ought to have seen that this war would not terminate as the others had done; yet, conqueror of the foe, and master of his capital, he conceived hopes of peace which the Russians skilfully encouraged. Winter was approaching, and Napoleon prolonged his stay at Moscow for six weeks. He delayed his movements on account of the deceptive negotiations of the Russians; and did not decide on a retreat till the 19th of October. This retreat was disastrous, and began the downfall of the empire. … The cabinet of Berlin began the defections. On the 1st of March, 1813, it joined Russia and England, which were forming the sixth coalition. Sweden acceded to it soon after; yet the emperor, whom the confederate power thought prostrated by the last disaster, opened the campaign with new victories. The battle of Lutzen, won by conscripts, on the 2nd of May, the occupation of Dresden; the victory of Bautzen, and the war carried to the Elbe, astonished the coalition. Austria, which, since 1810, had been on a footing of peace, was resuming arms, and already meditating a change of alliance. She now proposed herself as a mediatrix between the emperor and the confederates. Her meditation was accepted; an armistice was concluded at Plesswitz, on the 4th of June, and a congress assembled at Prague to negotiate peace. It was impossible to come to terms. … Austria joined the coalition, and war, the only means of settling this great contest, was resumed. The emperor had only 280,000 men against 520,000. …. Victory seemed, at first, to second him. At Dresden he defeated the combined forces; but the defeats of his lieutenants deranged his plans. … The princes of the confederation of the Rhine chose this moment to desert the cause of the empire. A vast engagement having taken place at Leipsic between the two armies, the Saxons and Wurtembergers passed over to the enemy on the field of battle. This defection to the strength of the coalesced powers, who had learned a more compact and skilful mode of warfare, obliged Napoleon to retreat, after a struggle of three days. … The empire was invaded in all directions. The Austrians entered Italy; the English, having made themselves masters of the peninsula during the last two years, had passed the Bidassoa, under General Wellington, and appeared on the Pyrenees. Three armies pressed on France to the east and north. … Napoleon was … obliged to submit to the conditions of the allied powers; their pretensions increased with their power. … On the 11th of April, 1814, he renounced for himself and children the thrones of France and Italy, and received in exchange for his vast sovereignty, the limits of which had extended from Cadiz to the Baltic Sea, the little island of Elba."

_F. A. Mignet, History of the French Revolution, chapter 15._

See GERMANY: A. D. 1809 (JANUARY-JUNE), to 1813; RUSSIA: A. D. 1812; and FRANCE: A. D. 1810-1812 to 1814.

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1814. Restored rule in Northern Italy.

See ITALY: A. D. 1814-1815.

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1814-1815. Treaties of Paris and Congress of Vienna. Readjustment of French boundaries. Recovery of the Tyrol from Bavaria and Lombardy in Italy. Acquisition of the Venetian states.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1814 (APRIL-JUNE), and 1815 (JULY-NOVEMBER): also VIENNA, THE CONGRESS OF.

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1814-1820. Formation of the Germanic Confederation.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1814-1820.

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1815. The Holy Alliance.

See HOLY ALLIANCE.

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1815. Return of Napoleon from Elba. The Quadruple Alliance. The Waterloo Campaign and Its results.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1814-1815.

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1815-1835. Emperor Francis, Prince Metternich, and "the system."

"After the treaty of Vienna in 1809, and still more conspicuously after the pacification of Europe, the political wisdom of the rulers of Austria inclined them ever more and more to the maintenance of that state of things which was known to friends and foes as the System. But what was the System? It was the organisation of do-nothing. It cannot even be said to have been reactionary: it was simply reactionary. … 'Mark time in place' was the word of command in every government office. The bureaucracy was engaged from morning to night in making work, but nothing ever came of it. Not even were the liberal innovations which had lasted through the reign of Leopold got rid of. Everything went on in the confused, unfinished, and ineffective state in which the great war had found it. Such was the famous System which was venerated by the ultra-Tories of every land, and most venerated where it was least understood. Two men dominate the history of Austria during this unhappy time—men who, though utterly unlike in character and intellect, were nevertheless admirably fitted to work together, and whose names will be long united in an unenviable notoriety. These were the Emperor Francis and Prince Metternich. The first was the evil genius of internal politics; the second exercised a hardly less baneful influence over foreign affairs. … For the external policy of Prince Metternich, the first and most necessary condition was, that Austria should give to Europe the impression of fixed adherence to the most extreme Conservative views. So for many years they worked together, Prince Metternich always declaring that he was a mere tool in the hands of his master, but in reality far more absolute in the direction of his own department than the emperor was in his. … Prince Metternich had the power of making the most of all he knew, and constantly left upon persons of real merit the impression that he was a man of lofty aspirations and liberal views, who forced himself to repress such tendencies in others because he thought that their repression was a sine quâ non for Austria. The men of ability, who knew him intimately, thought less well of him. {226} To them he appeared vain and superficial, with much that recalled the French noblesse of the old régime in his way of looking at things, and emphatically wanting in every element of greatness. With the outbreak of the Greek insurrection in 1821, began a period of difficulty and complications for the statesmen of Austria. There were two things of which they were mortally afraid—Russia and the revolution. Now, if they assisted the Greeks, they would be playing into the hands of the second; and if they opposed the Greeks, they would be likely to embroil themselves with the first. The whole art of Prince Metternich was therefore exerted to keep things quiet in the Eastern Peninsula, and to postpone the intolerable 'question d'Orient.' Many were the shifts he tried, and sometimes, as just after the accession of Nicholas, his hopes rose very high. All was, however, in vain. England and Russia settled matters behind his back; and although the tone which the publicists in his pay adopted towards the Greeks became more favourable in 1826-7, the battle of Navarino was a sad surprise and mortification to the wily chancellor. Not less annoying was the commencement of hostilities on the Danube between Russia and the Porte. The reverses with which the great neighbour met in his first campaign cannot have been otherwise than pleasing at Vienna. But the unfortunate success which attended his arms in the second campaign soon turned ill-dissembled joy into ill-concealed sorrow, and the treaty of Adrianople at once lowered Austria's prestige in the East, and deposed Metternich from the commanding position which he had occupied in the councils of the Holy Allies. It became, indeed, ever more and more evident in the next few years that the age of Congress politics, during which he had been the observed of all observers, was past and gone, that the diplomatic period had vanished away, and that the military period had begun. The very form in which the highest international questions were debated was utterly changed. At Vienna, in 1814, the diplomatists had been really the primary, the sovereigns only secondary personages; while at the interview of Münchengratz, between Nicholas and the Emperor Francis, in 1833, the great autocrat appeared to look upon Prince Metternich as hardly more than a confidential clerk. The dull monotony of servitude which oppressed nearly the whole of the empire was varied by the agitations of one of its component parts. When the Hungarian Diet was dissolved in 1812, the emperor had solemnly promised that it should be called together again within three years. Up to 1815, accordingly, the nation went on giving extraordinary levies and supplies without much opposition. When, however, the appointed time was fulfilled, it began to murmur. … Year by year the agitation went on increasing, till at last the breaking out of the Greek revolution, and the threatening appearance of Eastern politics, induced Prince Metternich to join his entreaties to those of many other counsellors, who could not be suspected of the slightest leaning to constitutional views. At length the emperor yielded, and in 1825 Presburg was once more filled with the best blood and most active spirits of the land, assembled in parliament. Long and stormy were the debates which ensued. Bitter was, from time to time, the vexation of the emperor, and great was the excitement throughout Hungary. In the end, however, the court of Vienna triumphed. Hardly any grievances were redressed, while its demands were fully conceded. The Diet of 1825 was, however, not without fruit. The discussion which took place advanced the political education of the people, who were brought back to the point where they stood at the death of Joseph II.—that is, before the long wars with France had come to distract their attention from their own affairs. … The slumbers of Austria were not yet over. The System dragged its slow length along. Little or nothing was done for the improvement of the country. Klebelsberg administered the finances in an easy and careless manner. Conspiracies and risings in Italy were easily checked, and batches of prisoners sent off from time to time to Mantua or Spielberg. Austrian influence rose ever higher and higher in all the petty courts of the Peninsula. … In other regions Russia or England might be willing to thwart him, but in Italy Prince Metternich might proudly reflect that Austria was indeed a 'great power.' The French Revolution of 1830 was at first alarming; but when it resulted in the enthronement of a dynasty which called to its aid a 'cabinet of repression,' all fears were stilled. The Emperor Francis continued to say, when any change was proposed, 'We must sleep upon it,' and died in 1835 in 'the abundance of peace.'"

_M. E. Grant Duff, Studies in European Politics, pages 140-149._

See, also, GERMANY: A. D. 1819-1847.

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1815-1846. Gains of the Hapsburg monarchy. Its aggressive absolutism. Death of Francis I. Accession of Ferdinand I. Suppression of revolt in Galicia. Extinction and annexation of the Republic of Cracow.

"In the new partition of Europe, arranged in the Congress of Vienna [see VIENNA. THE CONGRESS OF], Austria received Lombardy and Venice under the title of a Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, the Illyrian provinces also as a kingdom, Venetian Dalmatia, the Tirol, Vorarlberg, Salzburg, the Innviertel and Hausrucksviertel, and the part of Galicia ceded by her at an earlier period. Thus, after three and twenty years of war, the monarchy had gained a considerable accession of strength, having obtained, in lieu of its remote and unprofitable possessions in the Netherlands, territories which consolidated its power in Italy, and made it as great in extent as it had been in the days of Charles VI., and far more compact and defensible. The grand duchies of Modena, Parma, and Placentia, were moreover restored to the collateral branches of the house of Hapsburg. … After the last fall of Napoleon … the great powers of the continent … constituted themselves the champions of the principle of absolute monarchy. The maintenance of that principle ultimately became the chief object of the so-called Holy Alliance established in 1816 between Russia, Austria and Prussia, and was pursued with remarkable steadfastness by the Emperor Francis and his minister, Prince Metternich [see HOLY ALLIANCE]. … Thenceforth it became the avowed policy of the chief sovereigns of Germany to maintain the rights of dynasties in an adverse sense to those of their subjects. The people, on the other hand, deeply resented the breach of those promises which had been so lavishly made to them on the general summons to the war of liberation. {227} Disaffection took the place of that enthusiastic loyalty with which they had bled and suffered for their native princes; the secret societies, formed with the concurrence of their rulers, for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of the foreigner, became ready instruments of sedition. … In the winter of 1819, a German federative congress assembled at Vienna. In May of the following year it published an act containing closer definitions of the Federative Act, having for their essential objects the exclusion of the various provincial Diets from all positive interference in the general affairs of Germany, and an increase of the power of the princes over their respective Diets, by a guarantee of aid on the part of the confederates" (see GERMANY: A. D. 1814-1820). During the next three years, the powers of the Holy Alliance, under the lead of Austria, and acting under a concert established at the successive congresses of Troppau, Laybach and Verona (see VERONA, CONGRESS OF), interfered to put down popular risings against the tyranny of government in Italy and Spain, while they discouraged the revolt of the Greeks.

See ITALY: A. D. 1820-1821; and SPAIN: A. D. 1814-1827.