From the Rhine to the Vistula the retreat of the French caused an outburst of joy. Nationalities and dynasties drew a mighty breath of relief. Peoples, as well as kings, had warred against French domination in 1813; and peoples, rather than kings, had been Napoleon’s ruin. Quickened into life by the French Revolution, Germany had partially thrown feudalism off; and, whereas in 1807 there had been no such political factor as a German people, in 1813 it was the all-powerful element of resistance to Napoleon. The German statesman outlined a people’s programme, the German pamphleteer and agitator propagated it, the German poet inspired it, the German pulpit consecrated it, the German secret society organized it. There was the weapon; Spain had shown what could be done with it; the kings had but to grasp and use it. Under its blows, Napoleon’s strength steadily sank.

Inspired by the German spirit, the allied armies rose after each defeat ready to fight again. Carried away by the current, Napoleon’s German allies left his ranks and turned their guns upon him. Intimidated by its power, his trusty officers lost heart, lost nerve, lost judgment. Buoyed by its confidence, the kings had no fears, and rejected all compromise. Napoleon was barely across the Rhine before his Rhenish confederation was a thing of the past, the kingdom of Westphalia a recollection, Jerome Bonaparte a fugitive without a crown, the Saxon monarch a prisoner, Holland a revolted province, Polish independence and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw a vanished dream.

The “Saviors of Europe” had saved it. Napoleon’s “cruel yoke” would vex Germany no more. To emphasize the fact, the “Saviors” levied upon the country a tribute of men and money, which just about doubled the weight of Napoleon’s cruel yoke.

Very heavy had been the hand of France during her ascendency. Very freely Napoleon had helped himself to such things in Germany as he needed. Very harshly had he put down all opposition to his will. And the French officers, imitating their chief, had plundered the land with insolent disregard of moderation or morality. From Jerome Bonaparte downward, Napoleon’s representatives in Germany had been, as a rule, a scandal, a burden, an intolerable offence to German pride, German patriotism, and German pockets. It was with a furious explosion of pent-up wrath that Germany at last arose and drove them out.

Who was there to warn the peoples of the European states that they were blindly beating back the pioneers of progress, blindly combating the cause of liberalism, blindly doing the work of absolutism and privilege? Who would have hearkened to such a warning, had there been those wise enough and brave enough to have spoken? Viewed upon the surface, the work Napoleon had done could not be separated from his mode of doing it. The methods were rough, sometimes brutal, always dictatorial. People could see this, feel it, and resent it—just as they saw, felt, and resented his exactions of men, money, and war material. They could not, or did not, make due allowance for the man’s ultimate purpose. They could not, or would not, realize how profoundly his code of laws and his system of administration worked for the final triumph of liberal principles. They could not, or would not, understand that there was then no way under heaven by which he could subdue the forces of feudalism, break the strength of aristocracy, and establish the equality of all men before the law, other than the method which he pursued.

So the peoples in their folly made common cause with the kings, who promised them constitutions, civil and political liberty, and representative government. In their haste and their zeal, they ran to arms and laid their treasures at the feet of the kings. In their ardor and devotion, they marched and fought, endured and persisted, with an unselfish constancy which no trials, sufferings, or defeats could vanquish.

They advanced to the attack with fierce shouts of joy; on the retreat they were not cast down; reverses did not dampen their hopes nor shake their resolution. When the truce of Pleiswitz was granted, they welcomed it only as it gave them time to recuperate. When the Congress of Prague convened, they regarded it with dread, fearing that peace might be made and Napoleon left part-master of Germany. When the beacon lights blazed along the heights at midnight of August 10, they were hailed as slaves might hail the signals of deliverance.

In his Memoirs, Metternich relates that when, after the battle of Leipsic, he entered the palace of the King of Saxony to notify him of the pleasure of the Allies, the Queen reproached him bitterly for having deserted Napoleon’s “sacred cause.” Metternich states that he informed her that he had not come there to argue the question with her.

And yet, if Metternich had any reply to make, then was the time to make it. The Queen’s side of the case was weaker then than it would ever be again; Metternich’s stronger. Perfect as may have been the Queen’s faith, it was beyond her power to pierce the curtain of the years, and see what lay in the future. Had the spirit of prophecy touched her lips, she would have been taken for a maniac, for this would have been her revelation:—

“The promises the kings have made to the people will be broken; the hope of the patriot will be dashed to the ground; counter-revolution will set in; and the shadow of absolutism will deepen over the world. The noble will again put on his boots and his spurs; the peasant will once more dread the frown of his lord. The king will follow no law but that of his pleasure; the priest will again avow that Jehovah is a Tory and a Jesuit. Reactionaries will drive out Napoleon’s Code, and the revolutionary principles of civil equality. The prisons will be gorged with liberals; on hundreds of gibbets democrats will rot. The Inquisition will come again, and the shrieks of the heretic will soothe the troubled conscience of the orthodox. Constitutions promised to peoples, and solemnly sworn to by kings, will be coldly set aside, and the heroes who demanded them will, by way of traitor’s deaths, become martyrs to liberty.

“MediÆvalism will return; statues of the Virgin will weep, or wink, or sweat; and miracles will refresh the faith of the righteous, bringing death to the scoffer who too boldly doubts. The press will be gagged, free speech denied, public assemblies made penal. The Jesuits will swarm as never before, monasteries and convents fill to overflowing, church wealth will multiply, and neither priest nor noble will pay tribute to the state. Clerical papers will demand the gallows for liberals, clericals will seize the schools, clericals will forbid all political writings.

“The time will come when the European doctrine will again be proclaimed that the sovereign has full power over the lives and the property of his subjects. The time will come when this same Emperor Francis will publicly admonish the Laybach professors that they are not to teach the youth of Germany too much:—‘I do not want learned men! I want obedient men!’

“The time will come when in Bourbon France the work of the Revolution will be set aside by the stroke of the pen, and absolute government decreed again. Even in England, free speech attempted at a public meeting will bring out the troops who will charge upon a mixed and unarmed multitude, wounding and slaying with a brutality born of bigoted royalism and class-tyranny. The cry for reform there will challenge such resistance that Wellington will hold his army ready to massacre English people.

“The time will come when these three kings—Alexander, Francis, and Frederick William—will form their Holy Alliance in the interest of aristocracy, hereditary privilege, clerical tyranny, and absolute royalty. By force of arms they will crush democracy wherever it appears; they will bring upon Europe a reign of terror; and the cause of human progress will seem to be lost forever.

“And as for you, Prince Metternich, the time will come when you will have been so identified with the oppressors of the people, so well known as their busy tool, their heartless advocate, their pitiless executioner, their polished liar, hypocrite, and comprehensive knave, that a minister of state will proclaim amid universal applause, ‘I sum up the infamy of the last decades in the name of Metternich!’”

All this might the Queen of Saxony have said to her insolent tormentor; for all this is literal truth. In the light of history the woman was right: Napoleon’s was the “sacred cause.”

When the Emperor reached Paris, his situation was as trying as any mortal was ever called upon to face. Not a legitimate king like Alexander, Frederick William, or Francis, his power could not rally from shocks which theirs had so easily survived. Great as had been his genius for construction, he could not give to his empire the solidity and sanctity which comes from age. He could create orders of nobility, and judicial, legislative, and executive systems; he could erect a throne, establish a dynasty, and surround it with a court; but he could not so consecrate it with the mysterious benediction of time that it would defy adversity, and stand of its own strength amid storms which levelled all around it.

The great Frederick and the small Frederick William remained the centre of Prussian hopes, Prussian loyalty, Prussian efforts even when Berlin was in the hands of the enemy, the army scattered in defeat, and the King almost a fugitive. Prussia, in all her battles, fought for the King; in her defeats, mourned with the King; in her resurrection from disaster, rallied round the King.

Austria had done the same. Her Emperor Francis had as little real manhood in him as any potentate that ever complacently repeated the formula of “God and I.” He was weak in war and in peace; in the head, empty; in the heart, waxy and cold; in the spirit, selfish, false, cowardly, and unscrupulous. Yet when this man’s unprovoked attacks upon Napoleon had brought Austria to her shame and sorrow,—cities burnt, fields wasted, armies destroyed, woe in every house for lives lost in battle,—Austria knew no rallying-point other than Francis; and when the poor creature came back to Vienna, after Napoleon had granted him peace, all classes met him with admiration, love, loyalty, and enthusiasm. Napoleon, returning to France victorious, was not more joyously acclaimed by the French than was this defeated and despoiled Francis applauded in Vienna.

The one was a legitimate king, the other was not. On the side of Francis and the Fredericks were time, training, habit, and system. Germans were born into the system, educated to it, practised in it, and died out of it—to be succeeded by generations who knew nothing but to follow in the footsteps of those that had gone before.

In France the old order had been overthrown and the new had not so completely identified itself with Napoleon that he could exert the tremendous force which antiquity and custom lend to institutions.

Nevertheless, the truth seems to be that in his last struggles Napoleon had the masses with him. Had he made a direct appeal to the peasantry and to the workmen of the cities, there is every reason to believe that he could have enrolled a million men. The population in France was not at a standstill then as it is now. It was steadily on the increase; and it was fairly prosperous, and fairly contented. The Emperor had given special attention to agriculture and manufactures. In every possible way he had encouraged both, and his efforts had borne fruit. He had not increased the taxes, he had not burdened the State with loans, he had not issued paper money, he had not even changed the conscription laws. In some of his campaigns he had called for recruits before they were legally due; but, as the Senate had sanctioned the call, the nation had acquiesced. It is true that men and boys had dodged the enrolling officers, and that the numbers of those who defied and resisted the conscriptions had increased to many thousands; but the meaning of this was nothing more than that the people were tired of distant wars.

A pledge from the Emperor that soldiers should not be sent out of France would apparently have rallied to him the full military support of the nation. But Napoleon could not get his own consent to arm the peasants and the artisans. Both in 1814 and in 1815 that one chance of salvation was offered to him; in each year he rejected it.

The awful scenes of the Revolution which he had witnessed had left him the legacy of morbid dread of mobs. The soldier who could gaze stolidly upon the frightful rout at Leipsic, where men were perishing in the wild storm of battle by the tens of thousands, could never free himself from the recollection of the Parisian rabble which had slaughtered a few hundreds. At Moscow he refused to arm the serfs against their masters; in France he as deliberately rejected all proposals to appeal to the lower orders to support his throne.

The secret is revealed by his question, “Who can tell me what spirit will animate these men?” He feared for his dynasty, dreading a republic in which free elections would control the choice of the executive.

But while the mass of the French people remained loyal to Napoleon, the upper classes were divided. There had always been a leaven of royalism in the land, and Napoleon himself had immensely strengthened its influence. Bringing back the ÉmigrÉs, restoring hereditary estates, creating orders of nobility anew, and establishing royal forms, he had been educating the country up to monarchy as no one else could have done—had been “making up the bed for the Bourbons.” The ancient nobility, as a rule, had secretly scorned him as a Corsican parvenu, even while crowding his antechambers and loading themselves with his favors. Now that reverses had commenced, their eyes began to turn to their old masters, the Bourbons, and the hopes of a restoration and a counter-revolution began to take distinct shape in Paris itself.

To the royalists, also, went the support of a large number of the rich—men who resented the income tax of twenty-five per cent, which Napoleon at this time felt it necessary to impose upon them. Another grudge, they, the rich, had against him: he would not allow them to loot his treasury, as the rich were doing in England. Nor would he grant exemptions from any sort of public burden, special privilege being in his eyes a thing utterly abominable. Hence, such men as the great banker Laffitte were not his friends. There was another element of opposition which made itself felt at this crisis. There were various contractors, and other public employees, who had taken advantage of the decline of Napoleon’s power to plunder, embezzle, and cheat. The Emperor was on the track of numbers of these men, and in his wrath had sworn to bring them to judgment. “Never will I pardon those who squander public funds!” These men moved in upper circles, and had many social, political, and financial allies. Dreading punishment if Napoleon held his throne, they became active partisans of the Bourbon restoration. Even his old schoolmate, Bourrienne, his private secretary of many years, betrayed him shamelessly. The Emperor had detected the fact that Bourrienne had been using his official position for private gain, and had dismissed him; but on account of old association had softened the fall by appointing him Consul at Hamburg. At this place Bourrienne amassed a fortune by violating the Continental system, and he now hated the man he had betrayed, and from whom he feared punishment. This was but one case among hundreds.

Then, there was the Talleyrand, FouchÉ, RÉmusat, AbbÉ Louis, AbbÉ Montesquieu, Duc de Dalberg sort. Talleyrand had been enriched, ennobled, imperially pampered, but never trusted. Napoleon had borne with his venalities and treacheries until men marvelled at his forbearance. This minister of France was in the pay of Austria, of Russia, of England, of any foe of France who could pay the price. It was probably he who sold to England the secret of Tilsit. It was certainly he who conspired with the Czar against Napoleon, and took a bribe from Austria every time she needed mercy from France. It was he who extorted tribute from Napoleon’s allies at the same time that he sold state secrets to Napoleon’s foes. Denounced and dismissed, and then employed again, this man was ripe for a greater betrayal than he had yet made, and he now believed that the opportunity was close at hand.

FouchÉ, also, had been Napoleon’s minister, Napoleon’s Duke of Otranto. Dabbling in conspiracies of all sorts, and venturing upon a direct intrigue with England, Napoleon had disgraced him, instead of having him shot. Needing him again, the Emperor had reËmployed him, thereby affording another rancorous foe his chance to strike when the time should come.

In the army there was the same grand division of sentiment,—the rank and file being devoted to Napoleon, the officers divided.

The marshals were tired of war, there being nothing further in it for them. They had been lifted as high as they could go; they had been enriched to satiety; their fame was established. Why should they continue to fight? Were they never to be left in peace? What was the good of having wealth if they were never to enjoy it?

The marshals were human; their grumblings and growlings most natural. They honestly believed that peace depended upon the Emperor alone, that he only had to stretch forth his hand to get it.

He himself knew better; but it almost maddened him to realize that so few understood this as he did.

“Peace! peace!” he cried impatiently, to Berthier the goose. “You miserable——! Don’t you know that I want peace more than any one? How am I to get it? The more I concede, the more they demand!” This brings us squarely to the question: Did the Allies, in good faith, offer Napoleon peace, and did he recklessly refuse it?

Then and afterward he contended that he had done everything in his power to secure honorable terms. Almost with his dying breath he repeated this statement at St. Helena. What is the truth about it?

Let any one who wishes to know, study the Memoirs of the period; let him further study the despatches and treaties of the Allies; let him give due weight to the influence upon these Allies of the Bourbons, the ancient nobility, the higher priests of the Catholic Church, the dynastic prejudices of the allied kings, and the intense personal hatreds of such powerful counsellors of kings as Pozzo di Borgo, Stein, Bernadotte, Castlereagh, and Talleyrand. In addition to this, let such a student consider how the Allies violated the armistice of Pleiswitz, the capitulations of Dantzic and Dresden, the treaties they made with Napoleon in 1812, and that which they made with him at his abdication in 1814.

Let such a student furthermore consider that these Allies not only broke the treaty they made with Napoleon in 1814, but likewise violated the pledges which they had made to their own peoples in drawing them into the war.

If, after the study of these evidences of the bad faith of the Allies, there still remains doubt, the Memoirs of Metternich will remove it—if it be removable.

The world knows that the only avowed purpose of the Allies was to liberate Europe by driving Napoleon back beyond the Rhine, and that this end had now been attained. Hence, if the real objects the Allies had in view were those which had been made public, why should not the war have ceased? Europe was free, Napoleon’s empire shattered, nothing remained to him but France—why should the Allies follow him there? It was necessary to hoodwink the world upon this point, and it was Metternich’s task to do it;—for the allied kings were determined to invade France and put an end to Napoleon’s political existence. Metternich avows this himself; yet he persuaded them to make to Napoleon the celebrated Frankfort Proposals. All the world knows that the allied kings, with an apparent excess of magnanimity, offered even then to come to such terms with Napoleon as would have left him in possession of the France of 1792, a larger realm than the greatest of Bourbon kings had ever ruled. What the world did not know was that these Frankfort Proposals were not sincere, and were made for effect only. It was necessary to the Allies to cover their own designs, to justify their departure from the declarations of 1813, to create the impression that they themselves favored peace while Napoleon persisted in war. Succeeding in this, they would cut the ground from under his feet, divide the French, and deprive him of enthusiastic and united national support. With profound policy and duplicity, they sought to create in France itself the impression that Napoleon was the only obstacle to peace, and that their efforts were aimed at him, and not at France, her institutions, her principles, or her glory. Not for a moment was France given cause to suspect that the Bourbons were to be forced upon her, and the great work of the Revolution partially undone. Not for a moment was she allowed to realize that offers of peace to Napoleon were deceptive—intended only to embarrass him and to divide his people. Yet Metternich himself admits that the Frankfort Proposals were made for effect—not only admits it, but takes credit for it. He states that he was compelled to exert all his influence with the allied sovereigns to secure their consent to these proposals, and that he overcame their resistance, as he had overcome Alexander’s in 1813, by assuring them that the offers would come to nothing.