CHAPTER XV.

The Beginnings of the Storm. The United States of America and France. The Thought-Currents Which Moved toward a Vortex. Execution of King and Queen. France a Ruin but Free. A Republic. First Coalition. Poland and its Partition. Austria Fighting Alone for the Empire. Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy. His Methods and Their Result. Treaty of Campo Formio. Three New Republics. Napoleon in Egypt. His Return. Second Coalition. Dominions of Ecclesiastical Rulers Given Away. Napoleon the Instrument of Fate.

CHAPTER XV.

The energies which were to transform the face of Europe had been gradually centering in France. They commenced when Voltaire and Rousseau made it the fashion to scoff at the Church. Then, as religion and morality are closely allied, virtue became also a subject of ridicule. The spirit animating this was supposed to be a reforming spirit. It was an effort to free the people from the fetters of ecclesiasticism. Naturally, this led to assaults upon other fetters, other prevailing abuses. The vices of the Court were held up to view--its extravagance and luxury; all of which people were reminded that they had to pay for.

Just at this time the Colonies in North America threw off the English yoke because of this very matter of taxation unjustly imposed, and France enthusiastically helped them to establish a free republic and to humiliate her rival!

Frenchmen returned from the United States and contrasted the fresh vigor and purity of its institutions with the decrepit corruptions in France. The current began to flow very swiftly now. A Richelieu or a Louis XIV. would have been powerless to arrest the mad forces which quickly developed. What could the feeble, well-intentioned Louis XVI. do! He was like a skiff caught in the rushing rapids of the Niagara River. It was only a question of how long he could hold on to passing twigs and branches before he should go over the precipice. In 1793 Europe read with shuddering horror of his execution, and nine months later Maria Theresa's daughter--the beautiful, the adored Marie Antoinette--sat in a cart with her arms pinioned behind her, as she was driven to the scaffold.

The men who had guided this storm in its beginnings had themselves been engulfed in it, and a French republic was proclaimed which had been erected upon a tragedy unparalleled in Europe.

It was a horrible avenging of centuries of wrong and oppression. But its purpose was thoroughly accomplished. No vestige of the old tyrannies remained. If France was again enslaved, the fetters would have to be forged anew!

The powers of Europe were not only filled with horror and indignation at the means by which this was accomplished, but they saw with alarm a pestilential republic, in imitation of that one across the sea, at their very doors.

They formed a combination, called the First Coalition, for its overthrow. If the states of Europe had really acted in concert, the life of the new republic would have been very brief. But Austria was jealous of Prussia, and Prussia was jealous of the close friendship forming between Austria and England, withdrew from the alliance, and made peace with the French republic.

Catherine, Empress of Russia, for reasons of her own also declined to join the coalition. While all Europe was thus engaged she thought it a good time to settle some scores with the Turks and to look after Poland, where a revolution was in progress. So, while the German Empire was engaged in suppressing republicanism in France, Frederick William II. of Prussia offered his services to Catherine to overthrow the independence of Poland.

Kosciusko vainly defended that unhappy country. With the fall of Warsaw, 1794, it ceased to exist as one in the family of nations.

So Austria had been left practically alone to put down the new republic, which was developing wonderful strength while these languid and inefficient efforts were being made against it; for even Austria was diverted by what was going on in Poland, and fearful that she was not going to get her share of the spoils.

Marie Antoinette's brother Leopold had died the year before his sister's execution and his son Francis II. was Emperor of Germany. The government of this new republic which had caused such a stir in Europe was a very simple affair. Five men who were called Directors were at its head, and an obscure young man of twenty-six, named Napoleon Bonaparte, had been given command of the army, with Italy as its field of operations.

No doubt Francis thought it would be an easy matter to deal with France after the more important matter of the partition of Poland was disposed of. Little did he suspect that the time was approaching when he would, at the bidding of that young man, take off his Imperial crown, and that Napoleon Bonaparte would rise to ascendency in Europe upon the ruins of the German Empire.

In 1796 the young Corsican led a ragged, unpaid army into Italy. Without supplies, and almost without ammunition, he had audaciously planned to make the invaded country pay the expenses of the war waged against it.

He pointed to the Italian cities, and said to his soldiers, "There is your reward. It is rich and ample; but you must conquer it." He knew the French character and how in words brief, concise, forcible to address them like another Caesar addressing his legions; to create incentives to glory, and to inspire enthusiasm as never man did before.

He also knew the infirmities of his adversaries, and how to play upon them as Caesar did upon the rivalries and jealousies of the Gauls, and so to make the characteristics of Frenchmen, of German, and of Italian all serve him. He knew how to confound the enemy with new and unexpected methods, which rendered unavailing all which military science and experience had before taught.

In a brief time central Italy lay open before him, and princes, trembling at his vengeance, were suing for peace and offering money and treasure to procure it. Even then he was planning to make of Paris another Rome, and to adorn her with the jewels which had been worn by the proud Italian cities. So he demanded rare collections of paintings as the price of safety. The Duke of Parma laid at his feet priceless treasures of art; and even the Pope purchased neutrality by the payment of twenty-one million francs, one hundred costly pictures, and two hundred rare manuscripts.

When the treaty of Campo Formio was signed in 1797, Napoleon had won fourteen battles, and had subjugated Italy. The German Empire had lost all of its Italian possessions, which were now grouped together into a Cisalpine Republic, under the protectorship of France. Another Helvetic Republic was set up in Switzerland under the same protectorate. And then Napoleon scornfully tossed Venice as an apple of discord into the lap of the Emperor, in exchange for the Netherlands. And another republic under a French protectorate was created in Holland.

As the left bank of the Rhine had already been ceded to France, that country, which had been only four years before in a state of political chaos, was at the head of Europe.

What would she not do at the bidding of the man who could accomplish such things? He dramatically conceived the idea of crippling England by threatening her Asiatic possessions, and led an army into Egypt. There every bulletin, every address to his army, added to the glamour of his name. Even the Pyramids were made to serve his consummate art and ambition!

Although his fleet was destroyed by Nelson and his army left in perilous position, he was needed at home, and returned with all the arrogance of a conqueror. He was appointed Generalissimo over the army by an enraptured France, and then swept aside the five Directors and appointed himself and two others Consuls.

A second coalition was now formed against France, consisting of England, Russia, and Austria, and there followed another campaign in which Napoleon made permanent the results of the previous ones in Italy. By the treaty of peace in 1801, the three republics created by him were formally recognized, and the princes of Germany, in compensation for their losses, had apportioned among them the dominions of the priestly rulers.

Thus at one blow were abolished one hundred states governed by archbishops, bishops, and other clerical dignitaries, and one of the foundation stones of the empire, laid by Charlemagne himself, was shattered.

This extraordinary man, dreaming of universal empire, superstitiously believed that Fate intended him to hold Europe in his hand. But we can see now that he was designed by that remorseless Fate for a very different purpose, and a very brief office. He was a terrible instrument, which she intended to use for one specific purpose, and then to cast him aside.

This work was the destruction of the Romano-Germanic Empire. That lifeless mass, whose oppressive weight had crushed the life and hope out of Central Europe for centuries, needed some tremendous force from without to break up its time-encrusted rivets. And that force was now in the hands of a workman who supposed he was engaged in rearing a great edifice for himself. Instead of which he was overturning, and plowing, and harrowing Germany, and preparing the ground for new forms of political life; and nothing more effectually pulverized the old tyrannies than this secularization of the priestly dominions. When, added to this, we see the extinction of a multitude of petty states and the abolition of the special privileges of nearly a thousand "Imperial" noble families, we realize how he was relieving Germany from the incubus which had paralyzed her for centuries.