The states of Europe at the commencement of the year 1789 were ranked diplomatically in two important groups, the one dominated by the connection between France, Austria, Spain, and Russia; the other by the alliance between England, Prussia, and Holland. The great transformation which had been effected by the treaty between France and Austria in 1756 in the relationship between the powers of Europe was the crowning diplomatic event of the eighteenth century. The arrangements then entered into and the alliances tested in the Seven Years’ War still subsisted in 1789. But the spirit which lay at the root of the Austro-French alliance was sensibly modified. The Treaty of 1756 had never been really popular in either country. In France, Marie Antoinette, whose marriage with Louis XVI. had set the seal on the Austrian alliance, was detested as the living symbol of the hated treaty, as l’Autrichienne, the Austrian woman, and the most accredited political thinkers and writers were always dwelling on the traditional policy of France, and on the system of Henri IV., Richelieu, and Louis XIV., which held the House of Hapsburg to be the hereditary and the inevitable enemy of the House of Bourbon and of the French nation. The dislike of the alliance was felt with equal intensity in Austria by the wealthy and the educated classes. The Austrian generals resented the inefficacy of the French intervention during the Seven Years’ War, and the Austrian people attributed its reverses in that war to it with as much acrimony as if France had acted as an enemy instead of as an ally. The same sentiment actuated even the Imperial House. ‘Our natural enemies, travestied as allies, who do more harm than if they were open enemies;’[1] such is the language in which Leopold of Tuscany, brother of Marie Antoinette, characterised the French in a letter written in December 1784 to his brother, the Emperor Joseph II. The Emperor Joseph was himself of the same opinion. He preferred his Russian ally, the Empress Catherine, to his brother-in-law, Louis XVI., King of France, and the tendency of his foreign policy was to strengthen his friendship with Russia, even at the expense of sacrificing his alliance with France. Russia, whose expansion under the great Empress had been enormous since the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, cared but little for either of the allies, and pursued independently its course of steady development. Catherine had, indeed, during most of the later years of Frederick the Great, remained in alliance with Prussia, and to some extent had been on friendly terms with England. But her natural tendency was to distrust England. In 1780 she had placed herself at the head of the ‘Armed Neutrality,’ which opposed the naval pretensions of England, and in 1788 she had formally proposed a close quadruple alliance between Russia, Austria, France, and Spain.

If the relations between France, Russia, and Austria were unsettled, the Triple Alliance between Prussia, Holland, and England was hardly on a more stable footing in 1789. Prussia, since the death of Frederick the Great, had become really decrepit, while apparently remaining a first-rate military power. Though still preserving the prestige of its famous King, who died in 1786, and recognising its alliance with England, Prussia in 1789 exhibited a decaying internal administration, and a vacillating foreign policy. England had received a heavy blow by the success of the colonists in North America, and by the Treaty of Versailles, and the powers of the Continent, while envying her wealth, held her military power of but small account. This opinion prevailed even at Berlin, and the new King of Prussia gave many evidences that the alliance of England was rather distasteful to him than otherwise. The third member of the alliance, Holland, was in the weakest condition of all, and it was only by invoking the armed interference of Prussia that England had maintained the authority of the Prince of Orange, as Stadtholder, in 1787. Though this interference had led to the formation of the famous Triple Alliance of 1788, in reality the English and Prussian statesmen profoundly distrusted each other, while the forcing of the yoke of the Stadtholder upon them caused the Dutch democratic party in Holland to abhor the allies and to look for help to France.

The rest of the European states were bound more or less firmly to the one or the other of the two coalitions. The smaller states of Germany, aggravated or intimidated by the measures of the Emperor Joseph II., had rallied to the side of Prussia. In the north, Denmark, whose reigning house was connected by family ties with the royal families of England and Prussia, was completely under Russian influence, while Sweden, under Gustavus III., was actually at war with Catherine II. Poland, torn by internal dissensions, and threatened with complete destruction by its neighbours, was awaiting its final partition. The southern states of Europe were almost entirely bound to the Franco-Austrian alliance. Spain had been united to France by the offensive and defensive treaty, known as the ‘Pacte de Famille,’ concluded by the French minister, Choiseul, in 1761, and tested in the war of American Independence. Portugal, though connected with England, commercially by the Methuen treaty, and politically by a long course of protection against Spanish pretensions, was striving by a series of royal marriages to become the ally of Spain. In Italy, Naples was ruled by a Spanish prince married to an Austrian princess; Sardinia was closely allied with France, and the remainder of the peninsula was mainly under Austrian influence. Turkey, now travelling towards decay, was looked upon by Russia and Austria as their legitimate prey, and met with encouragement in resistance, but not with active help, from England and France.

After thus roughly sketching the general attitude of the powers of Europe to each other in 1789, it will be well to examine each state separately before entering on the history of the exciting period which followed. Great and sweeping alterations were to be effected; many diplomatic variations were to take place. The most important result of the period of the French Revolution and of Napoleon was its influence upon the minds of men, as shown in the growth of certain political conceptions, which have moulded modern Europe. But great changes were also brought about in dynasties and in the geographical boundaries of states, which can only be understood by a knowledge of the condition of Europe in 1789.

The figure of most importance in the beginning of the year 1789 was that of the Emperor Joseph II., and his dominions were those in which an observer would have prophesied a great revolution. Joseph was at that date a man of forty-seven; he had been elected Emperor in the place of his father, Francis of Lorraine, in 1765, and succeeded to the hereditary dominions of the House of Austria on the death of his mother, Maria Theresa, in 1780. He was, perhaps, the best type of the class of benevolent despots. A singularly industrious, enlightened, and able ruler, his ideas were far in advance of those of his age,—so much in advance, indeed, that his efforts to impose them upon his subjects brought upon himself hatred instead of gratitude, and among the people turbulence and insurrection instead of peace and tranquillity. The history of the Emperor Joseph’s reforms, and of the disturbances which resulted from them, belongs to an earlier volume of this series. In 1789 the whole of the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg were in a state of ferment. The Emperor’s scheme of welding them into an Austrian nation, by insisting on the use of the German language, by simplifying the state of the law and the administration, and assimilating the various religious and educational institutions, had roused the fire of local patriotism. In Hungary and in the Tyrol, in Bohemia, and, above all, in the Austrian Netherlands, or Belgium, there was declared rebellion, fanned by local prejudices, religious fanaticism, and the spirit of caste. The first and second of these causes were chiefly responsible in the Austrian Netherlands, the third in Hungary. The Belgians, and more especially the BrabanÇons, were in arms for their local rights and ancient constitutions, which had been infringed by the Emperor’s decrees. The Belgian clergy, who looked upon Joseph as worse than an infidel for his treatment of the Pope and his suppression of religious houses, were inflamed at the establishment of an Imperial Seminary in Brussels as a rival to the Roman Catholic University of Louvain. But in Hungary it was the magnates of the country who had fought so gallantly for Maria Theresa and saved her throne, who were in an attitude of open disaffection. This was partly due to Joseph’s infringement of their Constitution and his removal of the Iron Crown to Vienna, but still more to his abolition of serfdom. As has been already stated, serfdom in Europe was practically extinct in the western part of the Continent, that is, in France, in Belgium, and on the Rhine, while it increased in intensity steadily towards the east, and was as bad in Prussia Proper, Poland, and Hungary, as in Russia. ‘Most merciful Emperor,’ ran a petition from an Hungarian peasant to Joseph, ‘four days’ forced labour for the seigneur; the fifth day, fishing for him; the sixth day, hunting with him; and the seventh belongs to God. Consider, most merciful Emperor, how can I pay dues and taxes?’[2] The iniquity of serfdom, with its practice of forced labour, was accentuated in Hungary by the constitutional custom which exempted the nobility from all taxation. The Emperor Joseph abolished serfdom in Hungary on 22nd August 1785, and inaugurated a system of removing feudal burdens, and converting forced labour, by means of a gradually diminishing tax. The condition of the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg was thus, in 1789, one of seething discontent where it was not open rebellion; Belgian burghers and Hungarian magnates were alike infuriated by the Emperor’s efforts at reform; and the poor serfs of Hungary and Bohemia and the working men of Belgium, whom he designed to benefit by direct legislation and financial measures, were too weak to render him any help. His hope of creating an Austrian state and an Austrian people out of his scattered dominions was fated to be thwarted; obstacles of distance, race, and language, cannot be overcome by legislation, however wise; and the Emperor’s well-intentioned endeavours nearly lost his House its ancient patrimony.

The foreign policy of the Emperor Joseph II. was dictated by the same leading principle as his internal reforms—the desire to form his various territories into a compact state. His schemes to exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria in order to unite his possessions in Swabia with the nucleus of the Hapsburg territories were frustrated by the policy of Frederick the Great. His attempt to make his authority as Emperor more than nominal, and to create a real German empire based on a German patriotic feeling, proved an utter failure. Foiled in these two projects, the creation of an Austrian compact state, which he deemed practicable, and the resurrection of a mighty Germany under his headship, which he acknowledged to be but a dream, Joseph II. turned his thoughts towards Russia. The ideal of his early manhood had been his mother’s foe, Frederick the Great of Prussia; the ideal of his later years was the Empress Catherine of Russia. Both were specimens of the enlightened despots of the age; both had extended the realms they ruled; both endeavoured to form their states into compact entities; both had succeeded in administration and in war; and both were cynical disciples of the eighteenth-century philosophers. They were successively his models. It is characteristic of the Emperor Joseph II. that the only picture in his private cabinet in the Hofburg at Vienna was a portrait of Frederick; the only picture in his bedroom one of Catherine. After the death of Frederick the Great, the Emperor Joseph II., despising his successor, expressed more loudly his admiration for Catherine. In 1787 he accompanied her in her famous progress to the Crimea. Fascinated by her personality and dazzled by her projects, the Emperor was persuaded to ally himself with Russia against the Turks, and hoped to partition Turkey with her, as his mother, Frederick, and Catherine had accomplished the first partition of Poland. In 1788 he accordingly declared war against the Sublime Porte. But he found that the Turks, in spite of the corruption of their government, were still no contemptible foes. His own army was demoralised by the misconduct of the aristocratic officers; disease decimated his troops; and the Emperor Joseph returned from the campaign of 1788 with the seeds of mortal illness in his system, but with his determination to pursue the war unabated.

Russia, the chosen ally of Joseph II., was in 1789 ruled by the Empress Catherine II. This great monarch, though by birth a princess of the petty German state of Anhalt-Zerbst, ranks with Peter the Great as a founder of the Russian Empire; more Russian than the Russians, she understood the importance of the development of her adopted country geographically towards the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the capacity of her people to support her in her enterprises. She was at this time sixty years of age, in full possession of her remarkable powers, and having ruled for twenty-seven years, she had fortified her authority by experience. Peter the Great had seen the absolute necessity that the Russian Empire should have access to the sea, and had built Saint Petersburg; Catherine had moved southward and extended her dominions to the Black Sea. She hoped to make the Baltic and the Black Sea Russian lakes, and on that account was the consistent and watchful enemy of Sweden and the Turks. Upon the western frontier of Russia lay Poland. The natural policy of Russia was to maintain and even to strengthen Poland as a buffer between Russia and the military powers of Austria and Prussia. But the extraordinary Constitution of Poland, which provided for the election of a powerless king, and recognised the right of civil war and the power of any nobleman to forbid any measure proposed at the Diet by the exercise of what was called the liberum veto, kept the unfortunate country in a state of anarchy, unable either to defend or to oppose. It might have been possible to reform the Constitution, and make the Poles an organised nation, but the neighbouring monarchs considered it easier to share the country amongst them, and had, under the guidance of Frederick the Great, carried out in 1772 the first partition, which excluded Poland from the sea, brought the borders of the three powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, nearer to each other, and caused Russia to become an European instead of essentially an Eastern monarchy. Catherine grasped the fact that in her present position Russia must intervene in European politics, owing to the condition of Poland, and decided to derive what benefit she could from this circumstance. In her internal government Catherine was one of the benevolent despots. The patroness of Diderot, she expressed her admiration for the new doctrines of the Rights of Man, and even summoned a convention to draw up a Russian constitution. But she knew that the new doctrines were not applicable to the Russian people, and would be absurdly inappropriate to the nomad Tartar tribes which wandered over the southern districts of the Russian Empire. She was fully aware that their village organisation protected the peasants from many of the evils which prevailed in seemingly more enlightened countries, and gave them a right and interest in the soil to which they were attached. Russia, in fact, had experienced no Reformation, no Renaissance, no awakening of the ideas of individual and political liberty, and therefore was eminently fitted for the rule of a benevolent despot.

Next to the Austro-Russian alliance, the Austro-French alliance, sealed by the Treaty of 1756, was of the greatest significance to the peace and welfare of Europe in 1789. As has been said, in neither country was the alliance popular; France and Austria were hereditary enemies; classical policy in both courts favoured a resumption of this enmity; the friendship was rather dynastic than national, the work of Kaunitz and Maria Theresa, the AbbÉ de Bernis, Madame de Pompadour, and Louis XV. France still appeared a very powerful nation. Its intervention in the American War of Independence had largely contributed to England’s loss of her American colonies, and the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 had involved a confession that England was beaten by her cession of the West India islands of St. Lucia and Tobago. But in spite of her seeming power, France was from political and economic causes really very weak. She had been unable in 1787 to effectually support the republican and French party in Holland, and had been forced to allow England and Prussia to reinstate the Stadtholder, the Prince of Orange. In spite of her alliance with Austria, she had been obliged in pursuance of a peace policy, made necessary by her financial condition, to draw near to England, and had made a commercial treaty with her in 1786. The weakness of France arose from internal circumstances. The State and the Court were financially identical. The Court was extravagant, and the result was a chronic national deficit. Efforts had been made to meet this deficit, but all expedients, even partial bankruptcy, had failed. It was evident that a systematic attempt must be made to rearrange the finances by introducing a regular scheme of taxation to take the place of the feudal arrangements for filling the royal treasury, which with some modifications still survived. But a regular scheme of taxation, which should abolish feudal privileges, and make the government responsible to the nation for its expenditure, could not be established without the consent of the people, and the educated classes, who were both numerous and prosperous, claimed a voice in its establishment. The feeling of political discontent went deeper. The French people had outgrown their system of government; the peasants and farmers resented the existence of the economic, social, and political privileges dating from the Middle Ages, which had survived the duties originally accompanying them; the bourgeois argued that they should have a share in regulating the affairs of the State; the educated classes sympathised with both. The day for benevolent despotism was over in France; Louis XVI. was benevolent in disposition, but too weak to reform the system under which he ruled; and it was the system, not the person of the monarch, which the French people disliked; it was the system as a whole which they had outgrown.

Much of the strength of France rested on its intimate alliance with Spain. The two great Bourbon houses had been closely united by the ‘Pacte de Famille’ concluded in 1761, which bound them in an offensive and defensive alliance. Spain had loyally fulfilled her part of the bargain, and had suffered much in the War of American Independence against England. Spain had had the good fortune to be ruled by one of the most enlightened of the benevolent despots, Charles III., whose minister, Aranda, was one of the greatest statesmen of his century. Aranda is best known from his persecution of the Jesuits, who had spread their influence over the minds of the Spanish people so far as to be the dictators of education and opinion. Their expulsion contributed to the power of the Crown, which undertook the direction of every form of national energy. Aranda was a great administrator; he spent vast sums on the improvement of communications and on public works, and he built up a powerful Spanish navy. The two evils which had depressed the fame of Spain, the personal lethargy of the people, due to the stamping out of liberty of thought by the Inquisition, and the poverty, caused by the influx of gold from the Spanish colonies, which prevented any encouragement of national industry, were however too great for any administrator to subdue, without a national uprising and the development of a national love for liberty. Aranda was ably helped by Campomanes, who founded a national system of education to take the place of the Jesuits’ schools and colleges, by Jovellanos, a great jurist and political economist, by Cabarrus, a skilful financier, who founded the bank of St. Charles, and developed a system of national credit, and by Florida Blanca, who superintended the department of foreign affairs, and succeeded Aranda in supreme power in 1774. Charles III. died on 12th December 1788, and his successor, Charles IV., whose weakness of character was manifested throughout the period from 1789 to 1815, commenced his reign by maintaining Florida Blanca at the head of Spanish affairs, with Cabarrus and other experienced ministers.

Portugal was the intimate ally of England as Spain was of France. The hereditary connection of Portugal and England dated back for many centuries, and had been strengthened by the Methuen Treaty in 1703, which had made Portugal largely dependent on England. The great Portuguese minister, Pombal, who had commenced the persecution of the Jesuits and had effected internal and administrative reforms, comparable to those of Aranda in Spain, had been disgraced in 1777, but the offices of State were filled by his pupils and managed on the principle, which he had initiated, of advancing the prosperity of the people. Pombal, while holding the strongest views on the importance of maintaining the royal absolutism, believed in the modern doctrines of reform; he had abolished slavery, encouraged education, and in the received ideas of political economy had encouraged by means of protection manufactures and agriculture. The essential weakness of Portugal rested, like that of Spain, on the exhaustion and consequent lethargy of its people; the Jesuits and the Inquisition had stamped out freedom of thought. Financially, also, its condition resembled that of Spain, for the sovereign derived such wealth from Brazil as to be independent of taxes, levied on the people. Politically the aim of the House of Braganza, during the latter part of the eighteenth century, had been to endeavour to free itself from dependence on England by uniting closely through inter-marriages with the reigning family in Spain. Queen Maria I., who had succeeded Joseph, the patron of Pombal, in 1777, was a fanatical lady of weak intellect, and in 1789 the royal power was in the hands of the heir-apparent, Prince John, who was recognised as Regent some years later, and eventually succeeded to the throne in 1816, as John VI.

Italy, in the eighteenth century, was composed of a number of small states. The idea of Italian unity lived only in the minds of the great Italian writers and thinkers; it met with no support from the powers of Europe. Italy was still the home of music and the arts, which were fostered by the numerous small Courts; but politically, owing to its subdivision, it hardly counted as a power, and its diplomacy had little weight in the European State system. It was entirely under the influence of France and Austria, and showed the tendencies of the century in the good government of most of the petty rulers. The most important of the Italian states was the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which comprised the southern part of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The kingdom had been granted to Ferdinand IV., when his father, the celebrated Don Carlos, succeeded as Charles III. to the throne of Spain in 1759. It was in Naples that Charles III. had commenced his career as a reforming monarch, and the great Neapolitan minister, Tanucci, continued to administer the affairs of the kingdom in a most enlightened fashion during the early years of the new monarch’s reign. His policy was to check the feudal instincts of the Neapolitan barons, whom he deprived of the lucrative right of administering justice, and thus to strengthen the influence of the Crown; and he also opposed the pretensions of the Pope, and concurred in the suppression of the Jesuits. The power thus acquired for the Crown was wisely used; the financial system was revised, education was encouraged, and an attempt was made to procure a general reform of the laws. The young publicist, Filangieri, whose Science of Legislation contained the most enlightened views on political economy and government, and who ranks next to Montesquieu as a typical political thinker of the eighteenth century, was a Neapolitan, and his speculations largely influenced the current of Italian thought. Sicily, however, remained to a great extent untouched by the influence of the great Neapolitan minister owing to its insular jealousy and the maintenance of its mediÆval parliament. Ferdinand IV., in 1768, married Maria Carolina, the ablest daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, who at once assumed the most entire sway over her ill-educated and indolent husband. She secured the dismissal of Tanucci, whom she disliked on much the same grounds that her sister, Marie Antoinette, disliked the reforming French ministers, Turgot and Necker, in 1776, and after an interval replaced him by Acton, a native of France of Irish descent, who, owing to the temper of his patroness, was not able to continue efficiently the work of Tanucci. The States of the Church, including the Legations of Bologna and Ferrara and the principalities of Benevento and Ponte Corvo, were also governed in accordance with the enlightened ideas of the eighteenth century. The Papacy had much fallen in influence, and had been forced to comply with the demands of Pombal, Choiseul, Aranda, and Tanucci for the suppression of its spiritual mainstay, the order of the Jesuits; but it nevertheless maintained its temporal sovereignty in Italy. Giovanni Angelo Braschi, who had been elected Pope in 1775, and taken the title of Pius VI., was a man of singular ability and courtly manners. But he had to assent to vast reforms in Tuscany, which seriously affected the wealth of the Church in that part of the country, and had been unable, in spite of a personal visit to Vienna, to persuade Joseph II. to alter his policy towards the Papacy. His most notable internal measures in the Papal States were the draining of the Pontine marshes, and his reconstitution of the Clementine Museum at Rome, which he placed under the charge of the eminent antiquary, Ennius Quirinus Visconti. Tuscany flourished under the rule of the Grand Duke Leopold, brother and eventual successor of Joseph II., the ablest administrator of all the benevolent despots. His reforms extended in every direction; with the help of Scipio de Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia, he reduced the number of bishoprics and monasteries; he drained many of the marshes, and so benefited agriculture; he reorganised education and encouraged the Universities of Pisa and Siena. But his greatest reforms were legal and economic. Tuscany having originated from a number of mediÆval republics, had been hitherto administered as a collection of semi-independent cities and districts, with their own laws and local finances. Leopold was one of the first monarchs to project a uniform code of laws for his state, which he intrusted to the great jurist, Lampredi, to compile, and he abolished all personal privileges before the law, torture, the right of asylum for malefactors, confiscation of the property of condemned malefactors, and secret denunciations. In economics he was the pupil of the French physiocrats, and the friend of the Marquis de Mirabeau, the ‘Ami des hommes,’ and in consonance with their doctrines he swept away all the internal customs duties and other restrictions on industry and commerce. Lastly, Leopold, seeing that his state was not strong enough to carry on a real war, abolished the Tuscan army, to the great advantage of his finances. Next to Tuscany, the best-governed state in Italy was Parma. Ferdinand, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, was the only son of Don Philip, the second son of Philip V. of Spain and Elizabeth Farnese, by Elizabeth of France, daughter of Louis XV. He was educated by the celebrated French philosopher, Condillac, and early in his reign showed the influence of the best eighteenth century ideas. He had succeeded his father in 1765, and continued his minister, a Frenchman, Du Tillot, Marquis of Felino, in office. Du Tillot, though working in a smaller sphere, was as great a reformer as Pombal and Tanucci. He brought about the suppression of the Inquisition in Parma, improved the internal administration, and encouraged education so greatly that the University of Parma, under the management of the learned scholar, Paciaudi, became one of the most famous in Europe. In 1769 Duke Ferdinand married Maria Amelia, daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, who two years later secured the dismissal of Du Tillot from office. This dismissal was not, however, followed by a reaction, though it put a close to the progress of reform, and Parma, under the administration, first of a Spaniard, Llanos, and then of a Frenchman, Mauprat, retained its reputation as a well governed state. It was otherwise with Modena, where the last Duke of the House of Este, Hercules III., reigned. This prince had succeeded to the duchies of Modena, Reggio, and Mirandola in 1780, when already a man of fifty-three, and had added to them by marriage the principalities of Massa and Carrara. His only daughter and heiress, Maria Beatrice, was married to the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, younger brother of the Emperor Joseph, and Governor-General of Lombardy. Duke Hercules was a superstitious and avaricious ruler, whose chief care was to amass money, and, politically, he followed out the wishes of Austria. While the House of Austria, by its scions or by marriages, ruled the greater part of Italy indirectly, it possessed the direct sovereignty of Lombardy, or, more accurately, of the Milanese and Mantua. This province profited by the salutary policy of Joseph II., and was administered, under the governor-generalship of the Archduke Ferdinand, by a great statesman, Count Firmian, who understood and carried out the most important reforms. His patronage of the arts and of education was especially remarkable; he laboured ardently to restore the efficiency of the Universities of Milan and Pavia, and appointed Beccaria, the celebrated philanthropist, Professor of Political Economy at the former, and Volta, the equally celebrated man of science, Professor of Physics at the latter. The only other monarchy of Italy, that of Sardinia, was more closely related to France than to Austria. Its king, Victor Amadeus III., had married a Spanish princess, and two of his daughters were married to the two brothers of Louis XVI. of France—Monsieur, the Comte de Provence, and the Comte d’Artois. His dominions comprised the island of Sardinia, Piedmont, Savoy, and Nice, and it was a great subject of complaint to his Piedmontese subjects that he unduly favoured his French-speaking province of Savoy. He, too, was influenced by the spirit of his century; he encouraged agriculture and commerce; he patronised literature and science; he built the Observatory at Turin, and founded academies of science and fine arts; and he undertook great public works, of which the most important was the improvement of the harbour of Nice. But in one matter he pursued an opposite policy to the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, for he increased and reorganised his army, and constructed fortifications of the most modern description at Tortona and Alessandria. Lastly must be noticed three Italian republics, survivals of the Middle Ages. Of these the smallest was the Republic of Lucca, which was entirely surrounded by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Its trade suffered from the encouragement given by the Grand Duke Leopold to Leghorn; but, on the whole, it was well governed and prosperous. It was otherwise with the two great aristocratic republics, in which the long continuance of oligarchical government had stamped out all vestiges of political liberty. The Republic of Genoa, of which Raphael di Ferrari was Doge in 1789, was in utter decay. Its people were poverty-stricken; its trade had gone to Leghorn and Nice; and its laws and customs were unreformed. It was so weak that it had been unable to subdue the rebels in Corsica, who had risen under Paoli for the right of self-government, and it had ended by ceding the island to France in 1768. The Republic of Venice, of which the Doge in 1789 was Paul Renier, had not fallen so low in the eyes of Europe. Its possessions on the mainland, which extended from Verona to the Tyrol and along the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, and included the Ionian Islands, were administered for the benefit of the Venetian oligarchy, and supplied it with wealth. From Dalmatia was raised a considerable army, but the administration was wholly selfish, and did not keep pace in enlightenment with that of Lombardy, Parma, Tuscany, and Naples. On the whole, where monarchy existed in Italy, it tended in the eighteenth century to benevolent despotism; and such rule was far more beneficial to the people than that of the antiquated republics. Politically, the whole country might be reckoned as a factor in the Franco-Austrian alliance.

The chief power of the Triple Alliance, which balanced the loosely-defined league of Russia, France, and Austria, was England. The severe blow which had been struck by the revolt of her American colonies had made Great Britain appear weaker than she really was to the powers of the Continent. The Treaty of Versailles, by which she had been obliged to make cessions to France, seemed to have set the seal on her humiliation. But in reality her finances were more affected than her fighting strength, and the English navy, which, from her insular position, must always constitute the principal element of her force, was as excellent as ever. The policy of the younger Pitt, who had come into office in 1783, was one of peace and retrenchment. The country had lasted well through the financial strain of the American War, and the chief aim of the minister was to allow its vast commercial and industrial resources to expand. As a pupil of Adam Smith, Pitt understood the great principles of political economy, and the most significant part of his foreign policy was his conclusion of the Commercial Treaty with France. A fiscal system, far in advance of that in any continental country, enabled the English Government to draw on the wealth of the nation more effectively than any other government, if the money was needed for patriotic purposes. In spite of his love of peace, Pitt was induced by his first Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds, to take an active part in European politics, and was eventually led by the state of affairs in Holland to enter into the Triple Alliance. At home, England was unaffected by the intellectual movement which led to the French Revolution. She had in the previous century got rid of the relics of feudalism, which pressed so heavily on the continental farmer and peasant, and had won the boons of individual and commercial liberty, and of equality before the law; while politically, though her government was an oligarchy, supported by the class of wealthy merchants and traders, an opportunity was afforded through the existence of a free press and of the system of election, however hampered by antiquated franchises, for public opinion to make itself felt.

Prussia, the other principal member of the Triple Alliance, contrasted in every way with England. Seemingly, owing to the prestige of Frederick the Great’s victories and that able monarch’s careful organisation of his army, Prussia was the first military state in Europe; in reality, her reputation was greater than her actual power. Prussia was weak where England was strong. Prussia had no financial system worthy of the name, no industrial wealth, and no national bank; her only resources for war were a certain quantity of specie stored up in Berlin. The Prussian Government was an absolutism, in which the monarch’s will was supreme; its administration was based on feudalism, of which England had entirely and France had practically got rid, with all its mediÆval incidents of serfdom, privilege of the nobility, and social and commercial inequalities. The Prussian army was not national; the soldiers were treated as slaves, and the officers, who were all of noble birth, were tyrants in the maintenance of military discipline.

Frederick the Great was one of the finest types of the benevolent despot of the eighteenth century, but in him the belief in the importance of his despotic power outweighed his benevolence. While wishing for the prosperity of the people, he deliberately maintained the authority of the nobility, and discouraged any desire for change on the part of the agriculturists or citizens. The former were left at the disposal of their lords, the latter trammelled by antiquated civic constitutions. The weakness of Prussia was not only inherent in its government, but was also due to geographical causes. Its component parts were scattered; its Rhenish duchies and East Friesland were separated from its main territories by many German states; its central districts, the Marks of Brandenburg, were sparsely populated, and cut off from the sea; its largest provinces, Prussia Proper, Pomerania, Silesia, and Prussian Poland were, in spite of German and French Huguenot colonies, mainly Slavonic, and as backward in civilisation as other Slavonic races in the eighteenth century. In Russia, however, the Slavonic population in its barbarism yet retained sufficient local organisation to make its lot fairly endurable; in eastern Prussia, and especially in Prussian Poland, the people had been brought into contact with the mediÆval and Latin civilisation, and were consequently treated as absolute serfs without the relief afforded by local institutions. The policy of Prussia, as laid down by Frederick the Great, had both Prussian and German aspirations, and in both was utterly selfish. The example set by the cynical monarch in the Silesian wars had left a deep impress on the minds of Prussian statesmen, and the maxims of justice and international law were subordinated by them to expediency. The Prussian policy of Frederick the Great culminated in the first partition of Poland, which he had suggested, by means of which Prussia united her eastern province of Prussia Proper to Brandenburg, and cut off Poland from the sea, and the aim of his successors was to pursue this path of aggrandisement, and, by further annexations, to connect Silesia directly with Prussia Proper. The German policy of Prussia was to assume the leadership of the Empire by pretending the greatest zeal for the rights of the Princes of the Empire, and posing as their protector, and it was on this ground that Frederick the Great formed the League of the Princes. The hereditary enemy of Prussia was Austria, which, though distinctly injured by the conquest of Silesia, still retained the chief influence over the Empire, and also showed a tendency to check the designs on Poland. It was Frederick the Great of Prussia who had thwarted the Emperor’s scheme of exchanging the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, and he intrigued against Austria at the Courts both of Russia and France. It was as a counterblow to the Franco-Austro-Russian alliance that Prussia intervened in Holland, at the request of England, and formed the Triple Alliance with England and Holland in 1788. King Frederick William II. of Prussia, who succeeded his famous uncle in 1786, was a man of feeble intellect and undecided nature, but he had thoroughly imbibed the classic ideas of Prussian policy, and regarded Austria as the inevitable foe of Prussia, to be duped and taken advantage of on every possible occasion. His chief minister, Hertzberg, was a consistent enemy of Austria, but owing to the curious character of the king, the real power of the State rested not with the minister but with the royal favourites, of whom the chief at the end of 1788 were Bischofswerder and Lucchesini.

Holland was the link which bound England and Prussia together. Its military power was of no account, but the wealth of its inhabitants, derived from their vast commercial expansion in Asia and aptitude for banking, made the Republic of the United Provinces of the greatest importance. The Seven Provinces preserved the most complete autonomy; only the veriest semblance of federation held them together. Practically, the only bond of union was in the power of the Stadtholder, which had been restored in 1747. In the more wealthy provinces, such as Holland, the commercial aristocracy, which filled the ranks of the local governments, resented the position of the Stadtholder, who held the command-in-chief of the army and navy; but in the poorer and agricultural provinces, such as Friesland and Groningen, the landed aristocracy generally supported the Stadtholderate. In 1780 the United Provinces had joined in the Neutral League of the North, invented by Catherine of Russia to break the commercial supremacy of England, and in the war which followed they had suffered severe losses, and had been compelled to cede Negapatam in India to England in 1783 on the conclusion of peace. The Stadtholder, William V., Prince of Orange, in whose family the office had been declared hereditary, was vehemently accused of favouring England during this war, and when peace was declared a movement was set on foot, headed by the authorities of the Province of Holland, to oust him from his position, and to draw up a new constitution for the Dutch Netherlands on the same lines as that of the United States of America. This movement grew to its height in 1786; a French Legion, commanded by the Comte de Maillebois, was raised; the Stadtholder had to fly from the Hague, and the armed intervention of France was requested. But, as has been said, France, in spite of her seeming power, was too weak to intervene, and the Dutch patriots were abandoned to their fate. On the other side, that of the Stadtholder, England, through its able ambassador at the Hague, Sir James Harris, afterwards Lord Malmesbury, induced Prussia to act. England and Prussia had dynastic and political reasons for this conduct. The Stadtholder was, through his mother, a first cousin of George III., and had married a sister of Frederick William II., while politically, the acquisition of Holland to the Franco-Austrian alliance, through the expulsion of the Stadtholder, would bring nearly the whole of Europe into that system, and would practically enclose the Austrian Netherlands or Belgium. In September 1787, therefore, a Prussian army, under the Duke of Brunswick, had occupied Amsterdam, and placed the Stadtholder firmly in power; the Dutch patriots fled to France; the Legion of Maillebois was disbanded; and in 1788 the work was consummated by the signature of the Triple Alliance.

The two northern kingdoms, Denmark and Sweden, had adhered to the Neutral League against England in 1780, but for generations a bitter animosity had existed between them. Denmark, which in 1789 included Norway, was in an extremely prosperous condition. The philanthropic ideas of the eighteenth century had made great way, and on 20th June 1788 a royal ordinance had destroyed the last vestige of serfdom. Efforts were made to improve the condition of the people by reorganising the state of the finances, law and education, and progress was made in every direction. These reforms were not the work of the King, Christian VII., who had fallen into a state of dotage, but of the Prince Royal, afterwards Frederick VI., and of his minister, Count Andrew Bernstorff, the nephew of the greatest Danish statesman of the eighteenth century. Sweden, which in 1789 included the greater part of Finland as well as Swedish Pomerania and the island of RÜgen, was under the sway of one of the most enlightened rulers of the century, Gustavus III. That monarch had in 1772, by a coup d’État, overthrown the power of the Swedish Estates, with their division into the two parties of the Caps and the Hats, subsidised respectively by Russia and France. He had made use of his absolutism to carry out some of the benevolent ideas of the time. He had abolished torture, regulated taxation, encouraged commerce and industry, and diminished, where he did not destroy, the privileges of the nobility. Had he contented himself with these internal reforms he would have won the lasting gratitude of the Swedish people, but he insisted on playing a part in continental politics, which involved the maintenance of a large army and the consequent exhaustion of the people. Though he too had joined the League of the North in 1780, he afterwards assumed a strong anti-Russian attitude, and resolved to take advantage of the Russo-Turkish war in order to regain some of his lost provinces. Accordingly he invaded Russia in the summer of 1788, while his fleet threatened St. Petersburg.

Hitherto a sketch has been given of states, which in 1789 possessed a certain unity, and were able to play a part as independent countries of more or less weight in European politics. It was otherwise with the Holy Roman Empire, which still remained in the same condition, and was ruled in the same manner, as had been arranged at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. True Germany, that is Germany to the west of the Oder, had been under this arrangement split up into a number of independent sovereignties, loosely bound together as the Holy Roman Empire. The number of these petty states caused the Empire to be, from a military point of view, utterly inefficient; the bond was too loose to allow of general internal reforms or of a consistent foreign policy; and the federal arrangements were too cumbrous and unwieldy to allow of Germany ranking as a great power. The Imperial Diet or Reichstag consisted of three colleges, and a majority was required in each of the upper colleges to agree to a resolution, which, when confirmed by the Emperor, became a conclusum of the Empire. The first of these colleges was that of the eight Electors, three ecclesiastical, the Elector-Archbishops of Mayence, TrÈves, and Cologne, and five lay, the Electors of Bohemia, Brandenburg, and Hanover, who were also Kings of Hungary, Prussia, and England, the Elector of Saxony, and the Elector Palatine, who in 1789 was also Elector of Bavaria. The president of this college was the Elector-Archbishop of Mayence, as Chancellor of the Empire. The second college was that of the Princes, which consisted of one hundred voices, thirty-six ecclesiastical and sixty-four lay. In this college all the Electors had voices under different designations; Hanover possessed six for different principalities, Prussia six for the duchy of Guelders, the county of Moeurs, etc., Austria three, and so on, while the Kings of Denmark and Sweden also were represented as Dukes of Holstein and of Pomerania. Less important princes differing in power from the Landgraves of Hesse, the Margraves of Baden, and the Duke of WÜrtemburg to the petty princes of Salm and Anhalt, possessed single voices, and made up the number of temporal voters in the college to sixty. The ecclesiastical princes included thirty-four of the wealthiest bishops and abbots, many of whom ruled over considerable territories, and of whom the most important were the Archbishop of Salzburg, the Bishops of Bamberg, Augsburg, WÜrtzburg, Spires, Worms, Strasbourg, Basle, Constance, Paderborn, Hildesheim, and MÜnster, and the Abbots of Elwangen, Kempten, and Stablo. The other six voices were called collegiate, and representatives to hold them were elected by the petty lay and ecclesiastical sovereigns who abounded in Franconia, Swabia, and Westphalia, to the number of four lay and two ecclesiastical representatives. The presidency of this college was held alternately by the Archduke of Austria and the Archbishop of Salzburg. The third or inferior college was that of the free cities, and any opposition on its part could prevent a decision arrived at by the two upper or superior colleges being presented to the Emperor for his assent as a conclusum of the Empire. It consisted of the representatives of fifty-two imperial free cities, divided into two ‘benches,’ of which the Bench of Westphalia included Frankfort-on-the-Main, Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, Hamburg, Bremen, and LÜbeck, and the Bench of Swabia included Nuremberg, Ratisbon, Ulm, and Augsburg. The presidency of this college belonged to the city of Ratisbon, in which the Diet held its sittings. By this elaborate federative system, all sense of German unity was lost; the electors, princes, and free cities were represented only by delegates; the smaller states felt themselves swamped and were obliged to look to a great power, Austria or France, Prussia or Hanover, to preserve their political independence.

The other important institution of the Empire, the Imperial Tribunal or Reichskammergericht, which sat at Wetzlar and was intended to settle disputes between the German sovereigns, had also fallen into desuetude. Its venality and procrastination became proverbial, and it possessed no machinery to put its decrees into force. At the head of the Empire was the Emperor, who was elected and crowned with all the elaborate ceremonial of the Middle Ages. The office had been, with one exception, conferred on the head of House of Austria, since the Treaty of Westphalia, but it brought little actual authority on the holder. It was as ruler of the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg that the Emperor exerted some influence, not as an Emperor. Joseph II., indeed, endeavoured to be Emperor in more than name, with the result that Frederick the Great was enabled to form the League of Princes against him. As the chief Catholic state, Austria, however, possessed a great influence in the Imperial Diet, for the ecclesiastical members of the Colleges of Electors and Princes naturally inclined to support her, and it was on their votes that she relied. She even went so far as to establish the Aulic Council at Vienna, which intervened in cases between sovereign princes, and usurped some of the prerogatives of the Imperial Tribunal of Wetzlar. The executive power of the Empire, when it had come to a decision, was entrusted to the circles. These circles each had their own Diet, and it was their duty, for instance, to raise money and troops when the Empire decided to go to war. Of the ten circles of the Empire, originally created, one, that of Burgundy, had been extinguished or nearly so by the conquests of Louis XIV., and those situated in the eastern portion were entirely controlled by the important states of Prussia, Saxony, and Austria. It was only in Western Germany, in the circles of Westphalia, Franconia, and Swabia that the organisation was fairly tried, and the result was signal failure, whenever those circles put their contingents in the field. It could hardly be otherwise, when, owing to minute subdivision and divided authority, a single company of soldiers might be raised from half a dozen different petty sovereigns, each of whom would try to throw the burden of their maintenance on his colleagues. The Holy Roman Empire, in short, like other mediÆval institutions, had fallen into decay with the mediÆval systems of warfare and religion; some of its component states, such as Austria and Prussia, or in a lesser degree Bavaria, might possess a real power; but, as a whole, it was utterly inefficient to defend itself, and formed a feeble barrier between France and the kingdoms of Eastern Europe.

The impotence of the Empire for offensive and defensive purposes did not, however, greatly affect the German people; the educated classes prided themselves on being superior to patriotic impulses, and on being cosmopolitan rather than German; the poorer classes thought more of the internal administration which affected them than of the attitude of the Empire to European politics. The tendency towards benevolent despotism, which distinguished the greater powers, showed itself also in the petty states of Germany in the diminution, if not the abolition, of the ancient Estates and in the restraints placed on the authority of the nobility. The increased power of the sovereign was generally, if not universally, used to foster the prosperity of his subjects, or at least to promote literature and art. A notice of a few of the principal rulers of Germany will justify this view. Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine, who in 1778 had succeeded to the Electorate of Bavaria, and united once more the territories of the House of Wittelsbach, was a most enlightened sovereign. In the Palatinate he had founded a brilliant University at Mannheim, and one of the most famous picture galleries in Europe at DÜsseldorf; in Bavaria he suppressed some of the numerous convents, which stifled progress, in spite of his sincere Catholicism. He took as one of his ministers the celebrated American, Benjamin Thompson, whom he created Count Rumford, and that man of science and learning endeavoured to suppress mendacity, and made efforts to bring material comforts within reach of the very poorest. Nevertheless, in some points, the Elector Charles Theodore showed himself a bigot; he left education entirely in the hands of the Roman Catholic priesthood and ex-Jesuits, and he allowed the Protestants in his dominions to be persecuted. The Margrave Charles Frederick, who in 1771 reunited in his person the two margraviates of Baden-Baden and Baden-Durlach, was a more thoroughly enlightened prince. He was truly a benevolent despot; he was a student of political economy, on which he himself wrote a treatise, and applied its principles to his little state; he established a scheme of primary education; and on 23d July 1783 he abolished serfdom in his dominions, while maintaining the royal corvÉes and the prohibition for a subject to leave the country without obtaining his permission. The Duke Charles EugÈne of WÜrtemburg formed a contrast to his neighbours. He established, like them, his own absolutism, but he used his power to impose heavy taxes and raise an army out of all proportion to the size of his duchy. He treated his subjects like slaves, and his administration was so cruel that the Aulic Council threatened to take measures against him. Nevertheless, he was a patron of literature and the arts. He built a theatre at Stuttgart and founded the Academy of Fine Arts there, and he defrayed the expense of the education of the poet Schiller, who, however, afterwards satirised him and fled to Weimar. Yet Charles EugÈne of WÜrtemburg appears an enlightened monarch to such princes as Duke Charles of Deux-Ponts (ZweibrÜcken), whose successor, Maximilian Joseph, was to succeed the Elector Palatine, Charles Theodore, and to become the first King of Bavaria, for that prince sacrificed his people to his passion for the chase, and to William IX., Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects by the hundred to the English Government to carry on the war in America. Going further east, Saxony, which had ranked among the great states of Germany, was in a state of decline. The Electors Augustus II. and Augustus III. had been Kings of Poland, and had ruined their hereditary dominions to support their royal dignity and position. Fortunately Frederick Augustus, who was Elector in 1789, had not been elected to the Polish throne, and had been able to do something for the prosperity of his subjects. He formed a commission to draw up a code of laws, he abolished torture, encouraged industry and agriculture, and founded an Academy of Mines. But he did not go so far, for instance, as the Margrave of Baden, and made no attempt to suppress serfdom. The glory of Saxony was not, however, on the eve of the French Revolution its electoral house; its intellectual capital was not the beautiful city of Dresden. That place was taken by Weimar, where Duke Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar collected around him the great philosophers and men of letters who made the German name famous at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. To his Court resorted the most illustrious Germans of the time, Goethe and Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and MusÆus; and the University of his state at Jena became the most famous in Germany. It is not necessary to particularise the other states; it is enough to say that those in the north were generally very backward, especially the duchies of Mecklenburg, and that Hanover was left to the rule of an aristocratic oligarchy, which allowed no reforms, although its University at GÖttingen, founded by George II., took rank with the best.

The Ecclesiastical States followed also the movement of the century. The ecclesiastical rulers were often enlightened men, but they were to a great extent the slaves of their chapters. These chapters were generally filled by younger sons of the smaller princes, who insisted on the newly-elected prelates entering into the closest bonds with them to make no changes in the feudal system in the bishoprics. The prince-bishops and abbots at the close of the eighteenth century were, therefore, generally scions of noble houses, such as, for instance, Francis Joseph, Baron of Roggenbach, Bishop of Basle, Baron Francis Louis of Erthal, Bishop of Bamberg and WÜrtzburg, the Baron of RÖdt, Bishop of Constance, the Count of Hoensbroeck, Bishop of LiÉge, Count Augustus of Limburg, Bishop of Spires, Count Jerome Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg, and the Baron of Plettenberg, Abbot of MÜnster. One curious point deserves notice, that in some instances, Protestant princes had the right to present to Catholic prince-bishoprics, and in 1789 the Duke of York was Prince-Bishop of OsnabrÜck, and Prince Peter Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, Prince-Bishop of LÜbeck. Of higher rank and more independent of their chapters were the three archbishop-electors, who were therefore more able to rule their states in consonance with the ideas of the century. The chief of these was Baron Frederick Charles of Erthal, Archbishop-Elector of Mayence, and Prince-Bishop of Worms, the Chancellor of the Empire ex officio. This great prelate busied himself mostly with his pleasures, but his rank caused his countenance to be sought by all parties, and his adhesion to Frederick the Great’s League of Princes was the greatest gain the King of Prussia made in his anti-Austrian policy. In 1789 he had completely abandoned the cares of internal and external politics to his coadjutor Charles, Baron de Dalberg, who was to play a leading part in the history of Germany during the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The Archbishop-Elector of TrÈves in 1789 was Clement Wenceslas, a Saxon prince, and an excellent ruler, who, in 1783, even issued an edict of tolerance, allowing men of any religion to settle in his state, and exercise any trade or profession there. The last Elector-Archbishop was the Archduke Maximilian, the youngest brother of the Emperor Joseph, Archbishop of Cologne, who shared his brother’s liberal opinions, and patronised his predecessor’s creation, the University of Bonn, which had been founded in opposition to the ultramontane University of Cologne, for the encouragement of the modern developments of science. The tendency of all these governments, lay and clerical, was to promote the prosperity of the people; Joseph II. was but the type of the German princes of his time; all wished to do good for the people, but not by them; their characters differed widely, from the enlightened Margrave of Baden to the hunting Duke of Deux-Ponts; but in their different ways and in different degrees they generally meant well. But, while the more important princes showed the tendency of the century, their poorer contemporaries were unable to do so. They were mostly in debt, owing to their efforts to rival the wealthy princes, and in order to raise money resorted to all the devices of mediÆval feudalism. The few villages over which they ruled suffered from this tyranny, and it was always possible to know when a traveller crossed the frontier into one of these ‘duodecimo duchies.’ Beneath the petty princes were the Ritters or Knights of the Empire, who abounded in Franconia and Swabia. These knights had no representation in the Imperial Diet, and were consequently dependent directly on the Emperor. Their poverty made them take service with the wealthy princes; and to quote but two instances, Stein, the great Prussian minister, and WÜrmser, the celebrated Austrian general, were both Knights of the Empire. The result of this minute subdivision of Germany was to destroy the sense of national patriotism; which was not to rise again until after Germany had passed through the mould of Napoleon’s domination.

The other European confederation, Switzerland, presented the same symptoms of internal decay as the Holy Roman Empire, but it was preserved from the same political degradation by the consciousness of its nationality and the persistence of its local governments. The eighteenth century was marked in Switzerland by struggles between canton and canton, Catholics and Protestants, nobles and bourgeois. In some cantons, such as Berne, an oligarchical system was maintained in the hands of a few noble families; in others, such as Uri, a purely democratic form of government was preserved, which allowed every peasant a voice in the local administration. Where feudalism had been established, the peasants were in no better condition than in the rest of Europe, but in the mountain cantons such a rÉgime was impossible, and individual and political freedom still existed. It must be remembered that the Switzerland of the eighteenth century was not identical with that of the nineteenth. The Grisons formed no part of the confederation, NeufchÂtel belonged to Prussia, and Geneva was an independent republic. The part the latter had played in the intellectual movement of the century was most conspicuous. Rousseau was born in Geneva, and Voltaire retired and spent his last years in its neighbourhood. But Geneva had just before 1789 been the scene of a revolution resembling that in Holland. A struggle broke out between the bourgeois families, which monopolised the magistracy, and the mass of the people, which had ended in the victory of the former. The Genevese democrats were expelled, and many of them, notably ClaviÈre, exercised a considerable influence on the course of the Revolution in France.

The state of Europe in 1789 showed everywhere a sense of awakening to new ideas. The bonds of feudalism were ready to break asunder; the benevolent despots had recognised the rights of individual and commercial freedom; the French Revolution was able to sow in ripe ground the two new principles of the sovereignty of the people and the sentiment of nationality.