 51 The American Revolution At the end of the 18th century Europe heard strange reports of something which had happened in the wilderness of the North American continent. The descendants of the men who had punished King Charles for his insistence upon his divine rights added a new chapter to the old story of the struggle for self-government. For the sake of convenience we ought to go back a few centuries and repeat the early history of the great struggle for colonial possessions. As soon as a number of European nations had been created upon the new basis of national or dynastic interests, that is to say, during and immediately after the Thirty Years' War, their rulers, backed up by the capital of their merchants and the ships of their trading companies, continued the fight for more territory in Asia, Africa, and America. The Spaniards and the Portuguese had been exploring the Indian Sea and the Pacific Ocean for more than a century ere Holland and England appeared upon the stage. This proved an advantage to the latter. The first rough work had already been done. What is more, the earliest navigators had so often made themselves unpopular with the Asiatic and American and African natives that both the English and the Dutch were welcomed as friends and deliverers. We cannot claim any superior virtues for either of these two races, but they were merchants before everything else. They never allowed religious considerations to interfere with their practical common sense. During their first relations with weaker races all European nations have behaved with shocking brutality. The English and the Dutch, however, knew better where to draw the line. Provided they got their spices and their gold and silver and their taxes, they were willing to let the native live as it best pleased him. It was not very difficult for them, therefore, to establish themselves in the richest parts of the world. But as soon as this had been accomplished they began to fight each other for still further possessions. Strangely enough the colonial wars were never settled in the colonies themselves. They were decided three thousand miles away by the navies of the contending countries. It is one of the most interesting principles of ancient and modern warfare, one of the few reliable laws of history that the nation which commands the sea is also the nation which commands the land. So far this law has never failed to work, but the modern airplane may have changed it. In the eighteenth century, however, there were no flying machines, and it was the British navy which gained for England her vast American and Indian and African colonies. The series of naval wars between England and Holland in the seventeenth century does not interest us here. It ended as all such encounters between hopelessly ill-matched powers will end. But the warfare between England and France, her other rival, is of greater importance to us, for while the superior British fleet in the end defeated the French navy, a great deal of the preliminary fighting was done on our own American continent. In this vast country both France and England claimed everything which had been discovered, and a lot more which the eye of no white man had ever seen. In 1497 Cabot had landed in the northern part of America, and twenty-seven years later Giovanni Verazzano had visited these coasts. Cabot had flown the English flag. Verazzano had sailed under the French flag. Hence both England and France proclaimed themselves the owners of the entire continent. During the seventeenth century some ten small English colonies had been founded between Maine and the Carolinas. They were usually a haven of refuge for some particular sect of English dissenters, such as the Puritans, who in the year 1620 went to New England, or the Quakers who settled in Pennsylvania in 1681. They were small frontier communities nestling close to the shores of the ocean where people had gathered to make a new home and to begin life among happier surroundings far away from royal supervision and interference. The French colonies, on the other hand, always remained a possession of the crown. No Huguenots or Protestants were allowed in these colonies for fear that they might contaminate the Indians with their dangerous Protestant doctrines, and would perhaps interfere with the missionary work of the Jesuit fathers. The English colonies, therefore, had been founded upon a much healthier basis than their French neighbours and rivals. They were an expression of the commercial energy of the English middle classes, while the French settlements were inhabited by people who had crossed the ocean as servants of the king, and who expected to return to Paris at the first possible chance. Politically, however, the position of the English colonies was far from satisfactory. The French had discovered the mouth of the St. Lawrence in the sixteenth century. From the region of the Great Lakes they had worked their way southward, had descended the Mississippi, and had built several fortifications along the Gulf of Mexico. After a century of exploration a line of sixty French forts cut off the English settlements along the Atlantic seaboard from the interior. The English land-grants made to the different colonial companies had given them all land from sea to sea. This sounded well on paper, but in practice British territory ended where the line of French fortifications began. To break through this barrier was possible, but it took both men and money, and caused a series of horrible border wars in which both sides murdered their white neighbours, with the help of the Indian tribes. As long as the stewards had ruled England there had been no danger of war with France. The stewards needed the Bourbons in their attempt to establish an autocratic form of government, and to break the power of parliament. But in 1689 the last of the stewards had disappeared from British soil, and Dutch William, the great enemy of Louis XIV, succeeded him. From that time on, until the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France and England fought for the possession of India and North America. During these wars, as I have said before, the English navies invariably beat the French. But off from her colonies France lost most of her possessions, and when peace was declared, the entire North American continent had fallen into British hands, and the great work of exploration of Cartier, Champlain, La Salle Marquette, and a score of others was lost to France. Only a very small part of this vast domain was inhabited. From Massachusetts in the north were the Pilgrims, a sect of Puritans who were very intolerant, and who therefore had found no happiness either in Anglican England or Calvinist Holland had landed in the year 1620 to the Carolinas and Virginia, the tobacco-raising provinces which had been founded entirely for the sake of profit, stretched a thin line of sparsely populated territory. But the men who lived in this new land of fresh air and high skies were very different from their brethren of the mother country. In the wilderness they had learned independence and self-reliance. They were the sons of hardy and energetic ancestors. Lazy and timorous people did not cross the ocean in those days. The American colonists hated the restraint and the lack of breathing space which had made their lives in the old country so very unhappy. They meant to be their own masters. This the ruling classes of England did not seem to understand. The government annoyed the colonists, and the colonists, who hated to be bothered in this way, began to annoy the British government. Bad feeling caused more bad feeling. It is not necessary to repeat here in detail what actually happened and what might have been avoided if the British king had been more intelligent than George III, or less given to drowsiness and indifference than his minister, Lord North. The British colonists, when they understood that peaceful arguments would not settle the difficulties, took to arms. From being loyal subjects they turned rebels, who exposed themselves to the punishment of death when they were captured by the German soldiers whom George hired to do his fighting, after the pleasant custom of that day, when Teutonic princes sold whole regiments to the highest bidder. The war between England and her American colonies lasted seven years. During most of that time the final success of the rebels seemed very doubtful. A great number of the people, especially in the cities, had remained loyal to their king. They were in favour of a compromise and would have been willing to sue for peace. But the great figure of Washington stood guard over the cause of the colonists. Ably assisted by a handful of brave men he used his steadfast but badly equipped armies to weaken the forces of the king. Time and again when defeat seemed unavoidable his strategy turned the tide of battle. Even his men were ill fed. During the winter they lacked shoes and coats and were forced to live in unhealthy dugouts. But their trust in their great leader was absolute and they stuck it out until the final hour of victory. But more interesting than the campaigns of Washington or the diplomatic triumphs of Benjamin Franklin, who was in Europe getting money from the French government and the Amsterdam bankers, was an event which occurred early in the revolution. The representatives of the different colonies had gathered in Philadelphia to discuss matters of common importance. It was the first year of the revolution. Most of the big towns of the sea coast were still in the hands of the British. Reinforcements from England were arriving by the ship-load. Only men who were deeply convinced of the righteousness of their cause would have found the courage to take the momentous decision of the months of June and July of the year 1776. In June Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a motion to the Consonant Congress that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved. The motion was seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts. It was carried on July the 2nd, and on July 4th it was followed by an official declaration of independence, which was the work of Thomas Jefferson, a serious and exceedingly capable student of both politics and government, and destined to be one of the most famous of our American presidents. When news of this event reached Europe, and was followed by the final victory of the colonists and the adoption of the famous Constitution of the year 1787, the first of all written constitutions, it caused great interest. The dynastic system of the highly centralized states which had been developed after the great religious wars of the 17th century had reached the height of its power. Everywhere the Palace of the King had grown to enormous proportions, while the cities of the royal realm were being surrounded by rapidly growing acres of slums. The inhabitants of those slums were showing signs of restlessness. They were quite helpless, but the higher classes, the nobles and the professional men, they too were beginning to have certain doubts about the economic and political conditions under which they lived. The success of the American colonists showed them that many things were possible, which had been held impossible only a short time before. According to the poet the shot which opened the Battle of Lexington was heard around the world. That was a bit of an exaggeration. The Chinese and the Japanese and the Russians, not to speak of the Australians, who had just been rediscovered by Captain Cook, whom they killed for his trouble, never heard of it at all. But it carried across the Atlantic Ocean. They landed in the powder house of European discontent, and in France it caused an explosion which rocked the entire continent, from Petrograd to Madrid, and buried the representatives of the old statecraft and the old diplomacy under several tons of democratic bricks. CHAPTER 52 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The Great French Revolution proclaims the principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality, and to all the people of the earth. Before we talk about a revolution, it is just as well that we explain just what this word means. In the terms of a great Russian writer, and Russians ought to know what they are talking about in this field, a revolution is a swift overthrow in a few years of institutions which have taken centuries to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and immovable that even the most ardent reformers hardly dare to attack them in their writings. It is the fall, the crumbling away in a brief period, of all that up to that time has composed the essence of social, religious, political, and economic life in a nation. Such a revolution took place in France in the eighteenth century, when the old civilization of the country had grown stale. The king in the days of Louis XIV had become everything, and was the state. The nobility, formerly the civil servant of the federal state, found itself without any duties and became a social ornament of the royal court. This French state of the eighteenth century, however, cost incredible sums of money. This money had to be produced in the form of taxes. Unfortunately, the kings of France had not been strong enough to enforce the nobility and the clergy to pay their share of these taxes, hence the taxes were paid entirely by the agricultural population. But the peasants living in dreary hovels no longer in intimate contact with their former landlords, but victims of cruel and incompetent land agents were going from bad to worse. Why should they work and exert themselves? Increased returns upon their land merely met more taxes, and nothing for themselves, and therefore they neglected their fields as much as they dared. Hence, we have a king who wanders an empty splendor through the vast halls of his palaces, habitually followed by hungry office seekers, all of whom live upon the revenue obtained from peasants, who are no better than the beasts of the fields. It is not a pleasant picture, but it is not exaggerated. There was, however, another side to the so-called enchantment regime, which we must keep in mind. A wealthy middle class, closely connected with the nobility, by the usual process of the rich banker's daughter marrying the poor barren son, and a court composed of all the most entertaining people of France, had brought the polite art of graceful living to its highest development. As the best brains of the country were not allowed to occupy themselves with questions of political economics, they spent their idle hours upon the discussion of abstract ideas. As fashions in modes of thought and personal behavior are quite as likely to run to extremes as fashion and dress, it was natural that the most artificial society of that day should take a tremendous interest in what they considered the simple life. The king and the queen, the absolute and unquestioned proprietors of France, and all its colonies and dependencies, together with their courtiers, went to live in funny little country houses, all dressed up as milkmaids and stableboys, and played at being shepherds in the happy veil of ancient Hellas. Upon them, their courtiers danced attendance, their court musicians composed lovely minuettes, their court barbers devised more and more elaborate and costly headgear, until from sheer boredom and lack of real jobs, this whole artificial world of Versailles, the great show place which Louis XIV had built far away from his noisy and restless city, talked of nothing but those subjects which were furthest removed from their own lives, just as a man who is starving will talk of nothing except food. When Voltaire, the courageous old philosopher, playwright, historian and novelist, and the great enemy of all religious and political tyranny, began to throw his bombs of criticism at everything connected with the established order of things, the whole French world applauded him and his theatrical pieces played to standing room only, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau waxed sentimental about primitive man and gave his contemporaries delightful descriptions of the happiness of the original inhabitants of this planet, about whom he knew as little as he did about the children upon whose education he was the recognized authority. All France read his social contract, and this society, in which the king and the state were one, wept bitter tears when they heard Rousseau's appeal for a return to the blessed days when the real sovereignty had lain in the hands of the people, and when the king had been merely the servant of his people. When Montesquieu published his Persian letters, in which two distinguished Persian travelers turned the whole existing society of France topsy-turvy, and poked fun at everything from the king down to the lowest of his six hundred pastry cooks, the book immediately went through four editions and assured the writer thousands of readers for his famous discussion of the spirit of the laws, in which the noble baron compared the excellent English system with the backward system of France, and advocated instead of an absolute monarchy the establishment of a state in which the executive, the legislative, and the judicial powers should be in separate hands and should work independently of each other. Wynne Le Breton, the Parisian bookseller, announced that Messieurs Diderot, de Lambert, Turcot, and a score of other distinguished writers were going to publish an encyclopedia which was to contain all the new ideas and the new science and the new knowledge, the response from the side of the public was most satisfactory, and when, after twenty-two years, the last of the twenty-eight volumes had been finished, the somewhat belated interference of the police could not repress the enthusiasm with which French society received this most important but very dangerous contribution to the discussions of the day. Here let me give you a little warning. When you read a novel about the French Revolution, or see a play or a movie, you will easily get the impression that the revolution was the work of the rabble from the Paris slums. It was nothing of the kind. The mob appears often upon the revolutionary stage, but invariably, at the instigation and under the leadership of those middle-class professional men who used the hungry multitude as an efficient ally in their warfare upon the king and his court. But the fundamental ideas which caused the revolution were invented by a few brilliant minds, and they were at first introduced into the charming drawing-rooms of the Ascian regime to provide amiable diversion for the much-bored ladies and gentlemen of his majesty's court. These pleasant but careless people played with the dangerous fireworks of social criticism until the sparks fell through the cracks of the floor, which was old and rotten just like the rest of the building. Those sparks, unfortunately, landed in the basement where age-old rubbish lay and great confusion. Then there was a cry of fire. But the owner of the house, who was interested in everything except the management of his property, did not know how to put the small blaze out. The flames spread rapidly and the entire edifice was consumed by the conflagration, which we call the Great French Revolution. For the sake of convenience we can divide the French Revolution into two parts. From 1789 to 1791 there was a more or less orderly attempt to introduce a constitutional monarchy. This failed, partly through lack of good faith and stupidity on the part of the monarch himself, partly through circumstances over which nobody had any control. From 1792 to 1799 there was a republic and a first effort to establish a democratic form of government, but the actual outbreak of violence had been preceded by many years of unrest and many sincere but ineffectual attempts at reform. When France had a debt of 4,000 million francs and the treasury was always empty and there was not a single thing upon which new taxes could be levied, even Good King Louis, who was an expert locksmith and a great hunter but a very poor statesman, felt vaguely that something ought to be done. Therefore he called for Turgot to be his minister of finance. Then Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de la Lune, a man in the early sixties, a splendid representative of the fast-disappearing class of landed gentry, had been a successful governor of a province and was an amateur political economist of great ability. He did his best. Unfortunately he could not perform miracles. As it was impossible to squeeze more taxes out of the ragged peasants it was necessary to get the necessary funds from the nobility and clergy who had never paid a sometime. This made Turgot the best-hated man at the court of Versailles. Furthermore he was obliged to face the enmity of Marie Antoinette, the queen, who was against everybody who dared to mention the word economy within her hearing. Soon Turgot was called an unpractical visionary and a theoretical professor, and then of course his position became untenable. In the years 1776 he was forced to resign. After the professor there came a man of practical business sense. He was an industrious Swiss by the name of Necker, who had made himself rich as a grain speculator and the partner in an international banking house. His ambitious wife had pushed him into the government service that she might establish a position for her daughter, who afterwards, as the wife of the Swedish minister in Paris, Laurent d'Estelle, had become a famous literary figure of the early 19th century. Necker set to work with the fine display of zeal, just as Turgot had done. In 1781 he published a careful review of the French finances. The king understood nothing of this comte rendue. He had just sent troops to America to help the colonists against their common enemies, the English. This expedition proved to be unexpectedly expensive, and Necker was asked to find the necessary funds. When, instead of producing revenue, he published more figures and made statistics and began to use the dreary warning about necessary economies, his days were numbered. In the year 1781 he was dismissed as an incompetent servant. After the professor and the practical businessman came the delightful type of financier who will guarantee everybody 100% per month on their money if only they will trust his own infallible system. He was Charles-Alexander Descalons, a pushing official who had made his career both by his industry and his complete lack of honesty and scruples. He found the country heavily indebted, but he was a clever man willing to oblige everybody, and he invented a quick remedy. He paid the old debts by contracting new ones. This method is not new. The result since time immemorial has been disastrous. In less than three years more than 800 million francs had been added to the French debt by this charming minister of finance who never worried and smilingly signed his name to every demand that was made by his majesty and by his lovely queen, who had learned the habit of spending during the days of her youth in Vienna. At last even the Parliament of Paris, a high court of justice and not a legislative body, although by no means lacking in loyalty to their sovereign, decided that something must be done. Calonne wanted to borrow another 80 million francs. It had been a bad year for the crops, and the misery and hunger in the country districts were terrible. Unless something sensible were done, France would go bankrupt. The king, as always, was unaware of the seriousness of the situation. Would it not be a good idea to consult the representatives of the people? Since 1614, no estates general had been called together. In view of the threatening panic, there was a demand that the estates be convened. Louis XIV, however, who never could take a decision, refused to go as far as that. Here's a picture of Louis looking out over the streets of Paris from a balcony. It's titled Louis XIV. To pacify the popular clamor, he called together a meeting of the Notables in the year 1787. This merely meant a gathering of the best families who discussed what could and should be done without touching their futile and clerical privilege of tax exemption. It is unreasonable to expect that a certain class of society shall commit political and economic suicide for the benefit of another group of fellow citizens. The 127 Notables obstinately refused to surrender a single one of their ancient rights. The crowd in the street, being now exceedingly hungry, demanded that Necker, in whom they had confidence, be reappointed. The Notables said no. The crowd in the street began to smash windows and do other unseemly things. The Notables fled. Calon was dismissed. A new colorless minister of finance, the Cardinal Lomony de Vrien, was appointed, and Louis, driven by the violent threats of his starving subjects, agreed to call together the Old Estates General as soon as practicable. This vague promise, of course, satisfied no one. No such severe winter had been experienced for almost a century. The crops had been either destroyed by floods, or had been frozen to death in the fields. All the olive trees of Provence had been killed. Private charity tried to do something, but could accomplish little for eighteen million starving people. Everywhere bread riots occurred. A generation before, these would have been put down by the army. But the work of the new philosophical school had begun to bear fruit. People began to understand that a shotgun is no effective remedy for a hungry stomach, and even the soldiers who came from among the people were no longer to be depended upon. It was absolutely necessary that the king should do something definite to regain the popular goodwill. But again he hesitated. Here and there in the provinces, little independent republics were established by followers of the new school. They cry of no taxation without representation. The slogan of the American rebels, a quarter of a century before, was heard among the faithful middle classes. France was threatened with general anarchy. To appease the people and to increase the royal popularity, the government unexpectedly suspended the former very strict form of censorship of books. At once a flood of ink descended upon France. Everybody, high or low, criticized and was criticized. More than two thousand pamphlets were published. Lomigny de Vruyen was swept away by a storm of abuse. Necker was hastily called back to placate, as best he could, the nationwide unrest. Immediately the stock market went up thirty percent, and by common consent people suspended judgment for a little while longer. In May of 1789 the estates general were to assemble, and then the wisdom of the entire nation would speedily solve the difficult problem of recreating the kingdom of France into a healthy and happy state. This prevailing idea that the combined wisdom of the people would be able to solve all difficulties proved disastrous. It blamed all personal effort during many important months. Instead of keeping the government in his own hands at this critical moment, Necker allowed everything to drift. Hence there was a new outbreak of the acrimonious debate upon the best ways to reform the old kingdom. Everywhere the power of the police weakened. The people of the Paris suburbs, under the leadership of professional agitators, gradually began to discover their strength, and commenced to play the role which was to be theirs all through the years of the great unrest, when they acted as the brute force which was used by the actual leaders of the revolution to secure those things which could not be obtained in a legitimate fashion. As a stop to the peasants and the middle class, Necker decided that they should be allowed a double representation in the estates general. Upon this subject, the Abbe Cies then wrote a famous pamphlet to what does the third estate amount, in which he came to the conclusion that the third estate, a name given to the middle class, ought to amount to everything, that it had not amounted to anything in the past, and that it now desired to amount to something. He expressed the sentiment of the great majority of the people who had the best interests of the country at heart. Finally, the elections took place under the worst conditions imaginable. When they were over, 308 clergymen, 285 noblemen, and 621 representatives of the third estate packed their trunks to go to Versailles. The third estate was obliged to carry additional luggage. This consisted of voluminous reports called cahiers, in which the many complaints and grievances of their constituents had been written down. The stage was set for the great final act that was to save France. The estates general came together on May 5th, 1789. The king was in a bad humor. The clergy and the nobility let it be known that they were unwilling to give up a single one of their privileges. The king ordered the three groups of representatives to meet in different rooms and discuss their grievances separately. The third estate refused to obey the royal command. They took a solemn oath to that effect in a squashed court. Hastily put in order for the purpose of this illegal meeting on the 20th of June, 1789. They insisted that all three estates, nobility, clergy, and the third estate, should meet together and so informed his majesty. The king gave in. As the national assembly, the estates general began to discuss the state of the French kingdom. The king got angry. Then again he hesitated. He said that he would never surrender his absolute power. Then he went hunting, forgot all about the cares of the state, and when he returned from the chase he gave in. For it was the royal habit to do the right thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. When the people clamored for A, the king scolded them and gave them nothing. Then when the palace was surrounded by a howling multitude of poor people, the king surrendered and gave his subjects what they had asked for. By this time, however, the people wanted A plus B. The comedy was repeated. When the king signed his name to the royal decree, which granted his beloved subjects A and B, they were threatening to kill the entire royal family unless they received A plus B plus C, and so on through the whole alphabet and up to the scaffold. Unfortunately, the king was always just one letter behind. He never understood this. Even when he laid his head under the guillotine, he felt that he was a much-abused man who had received a most unwarrantable treatment at the hands of people whom he had loved to the best of his limited ability. Here you see a picture of a guillotine surrounded by people with staffs in the air. Historical ifs, as I have often warned you, are never of any value. It is very easy for us to say that the monarchy might have been saved if Louis had been a man of greater energy and less kindness of heart. But the king was not alone. Even if he had possessed the ruthless strength of Napoleon, his career during these difficult days might have been easily ruined by his wife, who was the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, and who possessed all the characteristic virtues and vices of a young girl who had been brought up at the most autocratic and medieval court of that age. She decided that some action must be taken, and planned a counter-revolution. Necker was suddenly dismissed, and loyal troops were called to Paris. The people, when they heard of this, stormed the fortress of the Bastille Prison, and on the 14th of July of the year 1789, they destroyed this familiar but much-hated symbol of autocratic power, which had long since ceased to be a political prison, and was now used as the city lock-up for pickpockets and second-story men. Many of the nobles took the hint and left the country. But the king, as usual, did nothing. He had been hunting on the day of the fall of the Bastille, and he had shot several deer, and felt very much pleased. Here you see a picture of the Bastille being stormed by hordes of angry Parisians. The National Assembly now set to work on the 4th of August, with the noise of the Parisian multitude in their ears. They abolished all privileges. This was followed on the 27th of August by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the famous preamble to the First French Constitution. So far so good, but the court had apparently not yet learned its lesson. There was widespread suspicion that the king was again trying to interfere with these reforms, and, as a result, on the 5th of October there was a second riot in Paris. It spread to Versailles, and the people were not pacified until they had brought the king back to his palace in Paris. They did not trust him in Versailles. They liked to have him where they could watch him, and control his correspondence with his relatives in Vienna and Madrid, and the other courts of Europe. In the Assembly, meanwhile, Mirobo, a nobleman who had become leader of the Third Estate, was beginning to put order into chaos. But before he could save the position of the king, he died on the 2nd of April of the year 1791. The king, who now began to fear for his own life, tried to escape on the 21st of June. He was recognized from his picture on a coin, was stopped near the village of Varene, by members of the National Guard, and was brought back to Paris. In September of 1791, the First Constitution of France was accepted, and the members of the National Assembly went home. On the 1st of October of 1791, the Legislative Assembly came together to continue the work of the National Assembly. In this new gathering of popular representatives, there were many extremely revolutionary elements. The boldest among these were known as the Jacobins, after the old Jacobin cloister in which they held their political meetings. These young men, most of them belonging to the professional classes, made very violent speeches. And, when the newspapers carried these orations to Berlin and Vienna, the king of Prussia and the emperor decided that they must do something to save their good brother and sister. They were very busy just then dividing the kingdom of Poland, where rival political factions had caused such a state of disorder that the country was at the mercy of anybody who wanted to take a couple of provinces. But they managed to send an army to invade France and deliver the king. Then a terrible panic of fear swept throughout the land of France. All the pent-up hatred of years of hunger and suffering came to a horrible climax. The mob of Paris stormed the palace of the Tuileries. The faithful Swiss bodyguards tried to defend their master, but Louis, unable to make up his mind, gave order to cease firing just when the crowd was retiring. The people, drunk with blood and noise and cheap wine, murdered the Swiss to the last man, then invaded the palace and went after Louis, who had escaped into the meeting hall of the assembly, where he was immediately suspended of his office, and from where he was taken as a prisoner to the old castle of the temple. But the armies of Austria and Prussia continued their advance, and the panic changed into hysteria and turned men and women into wild beasts. In the first week of September of the year 1792, the crowd broke into the jails and murdered all the prisoners. The government did not interfere. The Jacobins, headed by Danton, knew that this crisis meant either the success or the failure of the revolution, and that only the most brutal audacity could save them. The legislative assembly was closed, and on the 21st of September of the year 1792, a new national convention came together. It was a body composed almost entirely of extreme revolutionists. The king was formally accused of high treason, and was brought before the convention. He was found guilty, and by a vote of 361 to 360, the extra vote being that of his cousin the Duke of Orleans, he was condemned to death. On the 21st of January of the year 1793, he quietly, and with much dignity, suffered himself to be taken to the scaffold. He had never understood what all the shooting and the fuss had been about, and he had been too proud to ask questions. Then the Jacobins turned against the more moderate element in the convention, the Girondes, called after their southern district the Gironde. A special revolutionary tribunal was instituted, and 21 of the leading Girondes were condemned to death. The others committed suicide. They were capable and honest men, but too philosophical, and too moderate to survive during these frightful years. In October of the year 1793, the constitution was suspended by the Jacobins, until peace should have been declared. All power was placed in the hands of a small committee of public safety, with Danton and Robespierre as its leaders. The Christian religion and the old chronology were abolished, the age of reason, of which Thomas Paine had written so eloquently during the American Revolution, had come, and with it the terror for which more than a year killed good and bad and indifferent people at a rate of seventy or eighty a day. The autocratic rule of the king had been destroyed. It was succeeded by the tyranny of a few people who had such a passionate love for democratic virtue that they felt compelled to kill all those who disagreed with them. France was turned into a slaughterhouse. Everybody suspected everybody else. No one felt safe. Out of sheer fear, a few members of the old convention, who knew that they were the next candidates for the scaffold, finally turned against Robespierre, who had already decapitated most of his former colleagues. Robespierre, the only true and pure democrat, tried to kill himself but failed. His shattered jaw was hastily bandaged, and he was dragged to the guillotine. On the twenty-seventh of July of the year 1794, the night thermidor of the year II, according to the strange chronology of the revolution, the reign of terror came to an end, and all Paris danced with joy. The dangerous position of France, however, made it necessary that the government remain in the hands of a few strong men, until the many enemies of the revolution should have been driven from the soil of the French fatherland. While the half-clad and half-starved revolutionary armies fought their desperate battles of the Rhine, and Italy, and Belgium and Egypt, and defeated every one of the enemies of the Great Revolution, five directors were appointed, and they ruled France for four years. Then the power was vested in the hands of a successful general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became First Consul of France in the year 1799, and during the next fifteen years the old European continent became the laboratory of a number of political experiments, the like of which the world had never seen before. Here you see a picture of windmills in Holland, and at the French Revolution is invading. End of Chapter 52, recorded by Michel Crandall, Fremont, California, June 2009 Chapter 53 Napoleon was born in the year 1769, the third son of Carlo Maria Bonaparte, an honest notary public of the city of Ajaccio in the island of Corsica, and his good wife, La Tizia Ramolino. He therefore was not a Frenchman, but an Italian, whose native island, an old Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman colony in the Mediterranean sea, had for years been struggling to regain its independence, first of all from the Genoese, and after the middle of the eighteenth century from the French, who had kindly offered to help the Corsicans in their struggle for freedom, and had then occupied the island for their own benefit. During the first twenty years of his life, young Napoleon was a professional Corsican patriot, a Corsican shin-feiner, who hoped to deliver his beloved country from the yoke of the bitterly hated French enemy. But the French Revolution had unexpectedly recognized the claims of the Corsicans, and gradually Napoleon, who had received a good training at the Military School of Brienne, drifted into the service of his adopted country. Although he never learned to spell French correctly, or to speak it without a broad Italian accent, he became a Frenchman. In due time he came to stand as the highest expression of all French virtues. At present he is regarded as the symbol of the Golic genius. Napoleon was what is called a fast worker. His career does not cover more than twenty years. In that short span of time he fought more wars, and gained more victories, and marched more miles, and conquered more square kilometers, and killed more people, and brought about more reforms, and generally upset Europe to a greater extent than anybody, including Alexander the Great and Zengis Khan had ever managed to do. He was a little fellow, and during the first years of his life his health was not very good. He never impressed anybody by his good looks, and he remained to the end of his days very clumsy whenever he was obliged to appear at a social function. He did not enjoy a single advantage of breeding or birth or riches. For the greater part of his youth he was desperately poor, and often he had to go without a meal, or was obliged to make a few extra pennies in curious ways. He gave little promise as a literary genius. When he competed for a prize offered by the Academy of Lyon his essay was found to be next to the last, and he was number fifteen out of sixteen candidates. But he overcame all these difficulties through his absolute and unshakable belief in his own destiny, and in his own glorious future. Ambition was the mainspring of his life. The thought of self, the worship of that capital letter N with which he signed all his letters, and which recurred forever in the ornaments of his hastily constructed palaces, the absolute will to make the name Napoleon the most important thing in the world next to the name of God, these desires carried Napoleon to a pinnacle of fame which no other man has ever reached. When he was a half-pay lieutenant, young Bonaparte was very fond of the lives of famous men which Plutarch, the Roman historian, had written. But he never tried to live up to the high standard of character set by these heroes of the older days. Napoleon seems to have been devoid of all those considerate and thoughtful sentiments which make men different from the animals. It will be very difficult to decide with any degree of accuracy whether he ever loved anyone besides himself. He kept a civil tongue to his mother, but Letizia had the air and manners of a great lady, and after the fashion of Italian mothers she knew how to rule her brood of children and command their respect. For a few years he was fond of Josephine, his pretty Creole wife, who was the daughter of a French officer of Martinique, and the widow of the Vicente de Beauharnais, who had been executed by Robespierre when he lost a battle against the Prussians. But the emperor divorced her when she failed to give him a son and heir, and married the daughter of the Austrian emperor, because it seemed good policy. During the siege of Toulon, where he gained great fame as commander of a battery, Napoleon studied Machiavelli with industrious care. He followed the advice of the Florentine statesman, and never kept his word when it was to his advantage to break it. The word gratitude did not occur in his personal dictionary. Neither, to be quite fair, did he expect it from others. He was totally indifferent to human suffering. He executed prisoners of war in Egypt in 1798, who had been promised their lives, and he quietly allowed his wounded in Syria to be chloroformed when he found it impossible to transport them to his ships. He ordered the Duke of Angiène to be condemned to death by a prejudiced court-martial, and to be shot contrary to all law on the sole ground that the Bourbons needed a warning. He decreed that those German officers who were made prisoner while fighting for their country's independence should be shot against the nearest wall, and when Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese hero, fell into his hands after a most heroic resistance, he was executed like a common traitor. In short, when we study the character of the emperor, we begin to understand those anxious British mothers who used to drive their children to bed with the threat that Bonaparte, who ate little boys and girls for breakfast, would come and get them if they were not very good. And yet, having said these many unpleasant things about this strange tyrant, who looked after every other department of his army with the utmost care, but neglected the medical service, and who ruined his uniforms with Eau de Cologne because he could not stand the smell of his poor sweating soldiers, having said all these unpleasant things, and being fully prepared to add many more, I must confess to a certain lurking feeling of doubt. Here I am, sitting at a comfortable table loaded heavily with books, with one eye on my typewriter, and the other on liquorish the cat, who has a great fondness for carbon paper, and I am telling you that the Emperor Napoleon was a most contemptible person. But should I happen to look out of the window, down upon Seventh Avenue, and should the endless procession of trucks and carts come to a sudden halt, and should I hear the sound of the heavy drums, and see the little man on his white horse in his old and much worn green uniform, then I don't know, but I am afraid that I would leave my books, and the kitten, and my home, and everything else to follow him wherever he cared to lead. My own grandfather did this, and heaven knows he was not born to be a hero. Millions of other people's grandfathers did it. They received no reward, but they expected none. They cheerfully gave legs, and arms, and lives to serve this foreigner, who took them a thousand miles away from their homes, and marched them into a barrage of Russian, or English, or Spanish, or Italian, or Austrian canon, and stared quietly into space while they were rolling in the agony of death. If you ask me for an explanation, I must answer that I have none. I can only guess at one of the reasons. Napoleon was the greatest of actors, and the whole European continent was his stage. At all times and under all circumstances he knew the precise attitude that would impress the spectators most, and he understood what words would make the deepest impression. Whether he spoke in the Egyptian desert, before the backdrop of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, or addressed his shivering men on the dew-soaked plains of Italy made no difference. At all times he was master of the situation. Even at the end, an exile on a little rock in the middle of the Atlantic, a sick man at the mercy of a dull and intolerable British governor, he held the centre of the stage. After the defeat of Waterloo no one outside of a few trusted friends ever saw the great emperor. The people of Europe knew that he was living on the island of St. Helena. They knew that a British garrison guarded him day and night. They knew that the British fleet guarded the garrison which guarded the emperor on his farm at Longwood. But he was never out of the mind of either friend or enemy. When illness and despair had at last taken him away, his silent eyes continued to haunt the world. Even to-day he is as much of a force in the life of France as a hundred years ago when people fainted at the mere sight of this salo-faced man who stabled his horses in the holiest temples of the Russian Kremlin and who treated the Pope and the mighty ones of this earth as if they were his lackeys. To give you a mere outline of his life would demand a couple of volumes. To tell you of his great political reform of the French state, of his new codes of laws which were adopted in most European countries, of his activities in every field of public activity would take thousands of pages. But I can explain in a few words why he was so successful during the first part of his career and why he failed during the last ten years. In the year 1789 until the year 1804 Napoleon was the great leader of the French Revolution. He was not merely fighting for the glory of his own name. He defeated Austria and Italy and England and Russia because he, himself, and his soldiers were the apostles of the new creed of liberty, fraternity, and equality, and were the enemies of the courts, while they were the friends of the people. But in the year 1804 Napoleon made himself hereditary emperor of the French and sent for Pope Pius VII to come and crown him, even as Leo III in the year 800 had crowned that other great king of the Franks, Charlemagne, whose example was constantly before Napoleon's eyes. Once upon the throne the old revolutionary chieftain became an unsuccessful imitation of a Hapsburg monarch. He forgot his spiritual mother, the political club of the Jacobins. He ceased to be the defender of the oppressed. He became the chief of all the oppressors and kept his shooting squads ready to execute those who dared to oppose his imperial will. No one had shed a tear when in the year 1806 the sad remains of the Holy Roman Empire were carted to the historical dustbin and when the last relic of ancient Roman glory was destroyed by the grandson of an Italian peasant. But when the Napoleonic armies had invaded Spain, had forced the Spaniards to recognize a king whom they detested, had massacred the poor Madrileens who remained faithful to their old rulers, then public opinion turned against the former hero of Marengo and Austerlitz and a hundred other revolutionary battles. Then and only then, when Napoleon was no longer the hero of the revolution but the personification of all the bad traits of the old regime, was it possible for England to give direction to the fast-spreading sentiment of hatred which was turning all honest men into enemies of the French emperor? The English people from the very beginning had felt deeply disgusted when their newspapers told them the gruesome details of the terror. They had staged their own great revolution during the reign of Charles I, a century before. It had been a very simple affair compared to the upheaval of Paris. In the eyes of the average Englishman a Jacobin was a monster to be shot at sight, and Napoleon was the chief devil. The British fleet had blockaded France ever since the year 1798. It had spoiled Napoleon's plan to invade India by way of Egypt, and had forced him to beat an ignominious retreat after his victories along the banks of the Nile. And finally, in the year 1805, England got the chance it had waited for so long. Near Cape Trafalgar, on the southwestern coast of Spain, Nelson annihilated the Napoleonic fleet beyond the possible chance of recovery. From that moment on the emperor was landlocked. Even so, he would have been able to maintain himself as the recognized ruler of the continent had he understood the signs of the times and accepted the honourable peace which the powers offered him. But Napoleon had been blinded by the blaze of his own glory. He would recognize no equals. He could tolerate no rivals. And his hatred turned against Russia, the mysterious land of the endless plains with its inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder. As long as Russia was ruled by Paul I, the half-witted son of Catherine the Great, had known how to deal with the situation. But Paul grew more and more irresponsible until his exasperated subjects were obliged to murder him, lest they all be sent to the Siberian lead mines, and the son of Paul, the emperor Alexander, did not share his father's affection for the usurper whom he regarded as the enemy of mankind, the eternal disturber of the peace. He was a pious man who believed that he had been chosen by God to deliver the world from the Corsican curse. He joined Prussia and England and Austria, and he was defeated. He tried five times, and five times he failed. In the year 1812 he once more taunted Napoleon until the French emperor, in a blind rage, vowed that he would dictate peace in Moscow. Then, from far and wide, from Spain and Germany and Holland and Italy and Portugal, unwilling regiments were driven northward, that the wounded pride of the Great Emperor might be duly avenged. The rest of the story is common knowledge. After a march of two months Napoleon reached the Russian capital and established his headquarters in the Holy Kremlin. On the night of September 15th of the year 1812 Moscow caught fire. The town burned four days. When the evening of the fifth day came Napoleon gave the order for the retreat. Two weeks later it began to snow. The army trudged through mud and sleet until November the 26th, when the river Baratina was reached. Then the Russian attacks began in all seriousness. The Cossacks swarmed around the Grand Army, which was no longer an army but a mob. In the middle of December the first of the survivors began to be seen in the German cities of the east. Then there were many rumors of an impending revolt. The time has come, the people of Europe said, to free ourselves from this insufferable yoke. And they began to look for old shotguns which had escaped the eye of the ever-present French spies. But ere they knew what had happened Napoleon was back with a new army. He had left his defeated soldiers, and in his little sleigh had rushed ahead to Paris making a final appeal for more troops that he might defend the sacred soil of France against foreign invasion. Children of 16 and 17 followed him when he moved eastward to meet the Allied powers. On October 16th, 18th, and 19th of the year 1813 the terrible Battle of Leipzig took place, where for three days boys in green and boys in blue fought each other until the Elbe ran red with blood. On the afternoon of the 17th of October the massed reserves of Russian infantry broke through the French lines, and Napoleon fled. Back to Paris he went. He abdicated, in favour of his small son, but the Allied powers insisted that Louis the 18th, the brother of the late King Louis the 16th, should occupy the French throne. And surrounded by Cossacks and Ulans the dull-eyed bourbon prince made his triumphal entry into Paris. As for Napoleon he was made the sovereign ruler of the little island of Elba in the Mediterranean where he organised his stable boys into a miniature army and fought battles on a chess board. But no sooner had he left France than the people began to realise what they had lost. The last twenty years, however costly, had been a period of great glory. Paris had been the capital of the world. The fat bourbon king, who had learned nothing and had forgotten nothing during the days of his exile, disgusted everybody by his indolence. On the first of March of the year 1815, when the representatives of the Allies were ready to begin the work of unscrambling the map of Europe, Napoleon suddenly landed near Cannes. In less than a week the French army had deserted the bourbons and had rushed southward to offer their swords and bayonets to the little corporal. Napoleon marched straight to Paris where he arrived on the twentieth of March. This time he was more cautious. He offered peace, but the Allies insisted upon war. The whole of Europe arose against the perfidious Corsican. Rapidly the Emperor marched northward that he might crush his enemies before they should be able to unite their forces, but Napoleon was no longer his old self. He felt sick. He got tired easily. He slept when he ought to have been up directing the attack of his advance guard. Besides, he missed many of his faithful old generals. They were dead. Early in June his armies entered Belgium. On the sixteenth of that month he defeated the Prussians under Blücher. But a subordinate commander failed to destroy the retreating army as he had been ordered to do. Two days later Napoleon met Wellington near Waterloo. He was the eighteenth of June, a Sunday. At two o'clock of the afternoon the battle seemed won for the French. At three a speck of dust appeared upon the eastern horizon. Napoleon believed that this meant the approach of his own cavalry, who would now turn the English defeat into a rout. At four o'clock he knew better. Cursing and swearing Old Blücher drove his deathly tired troops into the heart of the fray. The shock broke the ranks of the guards. Napoleon had no further reserves. He told his men to save themselves as best they could, and he fled. For a second time he abdicated in favour of his son. Just one hundred days after his escape from Elba he was making for the coast. He intended to go to America. In the year 1803, for a mere song, he had sold the French colony of Louisiana, which was in great danger of being captured by the English, to the young American Republic. The Americans, so he said, will be grateful and will give me a little bit of land and a house where I may spend the last days of my life in peace and quiet. But the English fleet was watching all French harbours. Caught between the armies of the Allies and the ships of the British, Napoleon had no choice. The Prussians intended to shoot him. The English might be more generous. At Roussefort he waited in the hope that something might turn up. One month after Waterloo he received orders from the new French government to leave French soil inside of twenty-four hours. Always the Tragedian he wrote a letter to the Prince Regent of England, George IV. The king was in an insane asylum. Informing his royal highness of his intention to throw himself upon the mercy of his enemies and like Themistocles to look for a welcome at the fireside of his foes. On the fifteenth of July he went on board the Bellarophone and surrendered his sword to Admiral Hotham. At Plymouth he was transferred to the Northumberland, which carried him to St. Helena. There he spent the last seven years of his life. He tried to write his memoirs, he quarreled with his keepers, and he dreamed of past times. Curiously enough he returned, at least in his imagination, to his original point of departure. He remembered the days when he had fought the battles of the Revolution. He tried to convince himself that he had always been the true friend of those great principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality which the ragged soldiers of the Convention had carried to the ends of the earth. He liked to dwell upon his career as commander-in-chief and consul. He rarely spoke of the Empire. Sometimes he thought of his son, the Duke of Reichstadt, the little eagle who lived in Vienna where he was treated as a poor relation by his young Hapsburg cousins, whose fathers had trembled at the very mention of the name of him. When the end came he was leading his troops to victory. He ordered Ney to attack with the guards. And he died. But if you want an explanation of this strange career, if you really wish to know how one man could possibly rule so many people for so many years by the sheer force of his will, do not read the books that have been written about him. Their authors either hated the Emperor or loved him. You will learn many facts, but it is more important to feel history than to know it. Don't read, but wait until you have a chance to hear a good artist sing the song called The Two Grenadiers. The words were written by Heine, the great German poet who lived through the Napoleonic era. The music was composed by Schumann, a German who saw the Emperor, the enemy of his country, whenever he came to visit his imperial father-in-law. The song, therefore, is the work of two men who had every reason to hate the tyrant. Go and hear it. Then you will understand what a thousand volumes could not possibly tell you. The Imperial Highnesses, the Royal Highnesses, their graces, the Dukes, the Ministers Extraordinary, and Plenipotentiary, together with the Plain Excellencies, and their Army of Secretaries of the Royal Highnesses, met at Vienna and tried to undo the many changes that had been brought about by the French Revolution. The Imperial Highnesses, the Royal Highnesses, their graces, the Dukes, the Ministers Extraordinary, and Plenipotentiary, together with the Plain Excellencies, and their Army of Secretaries, Servants and Hangers on, whose labours had been so rudely interrupted by the sudden return of the terrible Corsican, now sweltering under the hot sun of St. Helena, went back to their jobs. The victory was duly celebrated with dinners, garden parties, and balls, at which the new and very shocking waltz was danced to the great scandal of the ladies and gentlemen who remembered the minuet of the old regime. For almost a generation they had lived in retirement. At last the danger was over. They were very eloquent upon the subject of the terrible hardships which they had suffered, and they expected to be recompensed for every penny they had lost at the hands of the unspeakable Jacobins, who had dared to kill their anointed king, who had abolished wigs, and who had discarded the short trousers of the court of Versailles for the ragged pantaloons of the Parisian slums. You may think it absurd that I should mention such a detail, but, if you please, the Congress of Vienna was one long succession of such absurdities, and for many months the question of short trousers versus long trousers interested the delegates more than the future settlement of the Saxon or Spanish problems. His Majesty the King of Prussia went so far as to order a pair of short ones that he might give public evidence of his contempt for everything revolutionary. Another German potentate, not to be outdone in this noble hatred for the revolution, decreed that all taxes which his subjects had paid to the French usurper should be paid a second time to the legitimate ruler who had loved his people from afar while they were at the mercy of the Corsican ogre, and so on. From one blunder to another until one gasps and exclaims, but why in the name of High Heaven did not the people object? Why not indeed? Because the people were utterly exhausted, were desperate, did not care what happened or how, or where, or by whom they were ruled, provided there was peace. They were sick and tired of war and revolution and reform. In the eighties of the previous century they had all danced around the Tree of Liberty. Princes had embraced their cooks, and Duchesses had danced the Carmagnol with their lackeys in the honest belief that the millennium of equality and fraternity had at last dawned upon this wicked world. Instead of the millennium they had been visited by the revolutionary commissary, who had lodged a dozen dirty soldiers in their parlor, and had stolen the family plate when he returned to Paris to report to his government upon the enthusiasm with which the liberated country had received the Constitution, which the French people had presented to their good neighbors. When they had heard how the last outbreak of revolutionary disorder in Paris had been suppressed by a young officer called Bonaparte or Bonaparte, who had turned his guns upon the mob, they gave a sigh of relief. A little less liberty, fraternity, and equality seemed a very desirable thing. But, ere long, the young officer called Bonaparte or Bonaparte became one of the three consuls of the French Republic. Then, sole consul, and finally Emperor. As he was much more efficient than any ruler that had ever been seen before, his hand pressed heavily upon his poor subjects. He showed them no mercy. He impressed their sons into his armies. He married their daughters to his generals, and he took their pictures and their statues to enrich his own museums. He turned the whole of Europe into an armed camp, and killed almost an entire generation of men. Now he was gone, and the people, except a few professional military men, had but one wish. They wanted to be let alone. For a while they had been allowed to rule themselves, to vote for mayors and aldermen and judges. The system had been a terrible failure. The new rulers had been inexperienced and extravagant. From sheer despair the people turned to the representative men of the old regime. You rule us, they said, as you used to do. Tell us what we owe you for taxes and leave us alone. We are busy repairing the damage of the age of liberty. The men who stage-managed the famous Congress certainly did their best to satisfy this longing for rest and quiet. The Holy Alliance, the main result of the Congress, made the policemen the most important dignitary of the state and held out the most terrible punishment to those who dared criticize a single official act. Europe had peace, but it was the peace of the cemetery. The three most important men at Vienna were the Emperor Alexander of Russia, Metternich, who represented the interests of the Austrian House of Habsburg, and Talleyrand, the erstwhile Bishop of Vatun, who had managed to live through the different changes in the French government by the sheer force of his cunning and his intelligence, and who now travelled to the Austrian capital to save for his country whatever could be saved from the Napoleonic ruin. Like this gay young man of the Limerick, who never knew when he was slighted, this unbidden guest came to the party and ate just as heartily as if he had been really invited. Indeed, before long, he was sitting at the head of the table, entertaining everybody with his amusing stories and gaining the company's goodwill by the charm of his manner. Before he had been in Vienna 24 hours, he knew that the Allies were divided into two hostile camps. On the one side were Russia, who wanted to take Poland, and Prussia, who wanted to annex Saxony, and on the other side were Austria and England, who were trying to prevent this grab because it was against their own interests that either Prussia or Russia should be able to dominate Europe. Talleyrand played the two sides against each other with great skill, and it was due to his efforts that the French people were not made to suffer for the ten years of oppression which Europe had endured at the hands of the imperial officials. He argued that the French people had been given no choice in the matter. Napoleon had forced them to act at his bidding. But Napoleon was gone, and Louis XVIII was on the throne. Give him a chance, Talleyrand pleaded, and the Allies, glad to see a legitimate king upon the throne of a revolutionary country, obligingly yielded, and the Bourbons were given their chance, of which they made such use that they were driven out after fifteen years. The second man of the triumvirate of Vienna was Metternich, the Austrian Prime Minister, the leader of the foreign policy of the House of Habsburg. Wenzel Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Wienberg, was exactly what the name suggests. He was a grand signeur, a very handsome gentleman with very fine manners, immensely rich and very able, but the product of a society which lived a thousand miles away from his wedding multitudes, who worked and slaved in the cities and on the farms. As a young man, Metternich had been studying at the University of Strasbourg when the French Revolution broke out. Strasbourg, the city which gave birth to the Marseillais, had been a centre of Jacobin activities. Metternich remembered that his pleasant social life had been sadly interrupted, that a lot of incompetent citizens had suddenly been called forth to perform tasks for which they were forced to do so, that the mob had celebrated the dawn of the new liberty by the murder of perfectly innocent persons. He had failed to see the honest enthusiasm of the masses, the ray of hope in the eyes of women and children who carried bread and water to the ragged troops of the convention, marching through the city on their way to the front and a glorious death for the French fatherland. The whole thing had filled the young Austrian with disgust. It was uncivilized. If there were any fighting to be done by dashing young men in lovely uniforms, charging across the green fields on well-groomed horses, but to turn an entire country into an evil-smelling armed camp where tramps were overnight promoted to be generals, that was both wicked and senseless. See what came of all your fine ideas, he would say to the French diplomats whom he met at a quiet little dinner given by one of the innumerable Austrian grand-dukes. You wanted liberty, equality and fraternity, and you got Napoleon. How much better it would have been if you had been contented with the existing order of things. And he would explain his system of stability. He would advocate a return to the normalcy of the good old days before the war, when everybody was happy and nobody talked nonsense about everybody being as good as everybody else. In this attitude he was entirely sincere, and as he was an able man of great strength of will, and a tremendous power of persuasion, he was one of the many dangerous enemies of the revolutionary ideas. He did not die until the year 1859, and he therefore lived long enough to see the complete failure of all his policies when they were swept aside by the revolution of the year 1848. He then found himself the most hated man of Europe, and more than once ran the risk of being lynched by angry crowds of outraged citizens. But until the very last, he remained steadfast in his belief that he had done the right thing. Here you see a picture of a very large, three-masted ship, says Offer Trafalgar. He had always been convinced that people preferred peace to liberty, and he had tried to give them what was best for them. And in all fairness it ought to be said that his efforts to establish universal peace were fairly successful. The great powers did not fly at each other's throat for almost forty years. Indeed, not until the Crimean War between Russia and England, France and Italy and Turkey in the year 1854. That means a record for the European continent. Here you see a picture of a shadow standing above the clouds, and it says the specter which frightened the Holy Alliance. The third hero of this waltzing Congress was the Emperor Alexander. He had been brought up at the court of his grandmother, the famous Catherine the Great. Between the lessons of this shrewd old woman, who taught him to regard the glory of Russia as the most important thing in life, and those of his private tutor, a Swiss admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau, who filled his mind with the general love of humanity, the boy grew up to be a strange mixture of a selfish tyrant and a sentimental revolutionist. He had suffered great indignities during the life of his crazy father, Paul I. He had been obliged to witness the wholesale slaughter of the Napoleonic battlefields. Then the tide had turned. His armies had won the day for the Allies. Russia had become the saviour of Europe, and the Tsar of his mighty people was acclaimed as a half-god who would cure the world of its many ills. Here you see a very large, almost empty room that showing four men at a table that's titled The Real Congress of Vienna. But Alexander was not very clever. He did not know men and women as Tallyrand and Metternich knew them. He did not understand the strange game of diplomacy. He was vain, who would not be under the circumstances, and loved to hear the applause of the multitude, and soon he had become the main attraction of the Congress, while Metternich and Tallyrand and Castlebury, the very able British representative, sat around a table and drank a bottle of toque, and decided what was actually going to be done. They needed Russia, and therefore they were very polite to Alexander. But the less he had personally to do with the actual work of the Congress, the better they were pleased. They even encouraged his plans for a Holy Alliance, that he might be fully occupied while they were engaged upon the work at hand. Alexander was a sociable person, who liked to go to parties and meet people. Upon such occasions he was happy and gay, but there was a very different element in his character. He tried to forget something which he could not forget. On the night of the 23rd of March of the year 1801, he had been sitting in a room of the St. Michael Palace in Petersburg, waiting for the news of his father's abdication. But Paul had refused to sign the document which the drunken officers had placed before him on the table, and in their rage they had put a scarf around his neck and had strangled him to death. Then they had gone downstairs to tell Alexander that he was emperor of all the Russian lands. The memory of this terrible night stayed with the Tsar, who was a very sensitive person. He had been educated in the school of the great French philosophers who did not believe in God, but in human reason. But reason alone could not satisfy the emperor in his predicament. He began to hear voices and see things. He tried to find a way by which he could square himself with his conscience. He became very pious and began to take an interest in mysticism, that strange love of the mysterious and the unknown, which is as old as the temples of Thebes and Babylon. The tremendous emotion of the great revolutionary era had influenced the character of the people of that day in a strange way. Men and women who had lived through twenty years of anxiety and fear were no longer quite normal. They jumped whenever the doorbell rang. It might mean the news of the death on the field of honour of an only son. The phrases about brotherly love and liberty of the revolution were hollow words in the ears of sorely stricken peasants. They clung to anything that might give them a new hold on the terrible problems of life. In their grief and misery, they were easily imposed upon by a large number of imposters who posed as prophets and preached a strange new doctrine which they dug out of the more obscure passages of the book of revelations. In the year eighteen fourteen, Alexander, who had already consulted a large number of wonder doctors, heard of a new CRS who was fortune telling the coming doom of the world and was exhorting people to repent too late. The Baroness von Krudner, the lady in question, was a Russian woman of uncertain age and similar reputation who had been the wife of a Russian diplomat in the days of the Emperor Paul. She had squandered her husband's money and had disgraced him by her strange love affairs. She had lived a very disillute life until her nerves had given way and, for a while, she was not in her right mind. Then she had been converted by the sight of the sudden death of a friend. Thereafter she despised all gaiety. She confessed her former sins to her shoemaker, a pious Moravian brother, a follower of the old reformer John Hus, who had been burned for his heresies by the Council of Constance in the year fourteen-fifteen. The next ten years the Baroness spent in Germany making a specialty of the conversion of kings and princes. To convince Alexander the saviour of Europe of the error of his ways of conversion of her life. And, as Alexander in his misery was willing to listen to anybody who brought him array of hope, the interview was easily arranged. On the evening of the fourth of June in the year eighteen-fifteen she was admitted to the tent of the Emperor. She found him reading his Bible. We do not know what she said to Alexander, but when she left him three hours later he was bathed in tears and vowed that at last his soul had found peace. On that day on the Baroness was his faithful companion and his spiritual advisor. She followed him to Paris and then to Vienna, and the time which Alexander did not spend dancing he spent at the Crudner prayer meetings. You may ask why I tell you this story in such great detail. Are not the social changes of the nineteenth century of greater importance than the career of an ill-balanced woman who had better be forgotten? Of course there are, but there exist any number of books of these other things with great accuracy and in great detail. I want you to learn something more from this history than a mere succession of facts. I want you to approach all historical events in a frame of mind that will take nothing for granted. Don't be satisfied with the mere statement that such and such a thing happened than in there. Try to discover the hidden motives behind every action and then you will understand the world around you much better and you will have a greater chance to help others and such, when all is said and done, is the only truly satisfactory way of living. I do not want you to think of the Holy Alliance as a piece of paper which was signed in the year 1815 and lies dead and forgotten somewhere in the archives of state. It may be forgotten, but it is by no means dead. The Holy Alliance was directly responsible for the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine and the Monroe Doctrine of America for the Americans has a very distinct background in life. That is the reason why I want you to know exactly how this document happened to come into existence and what the real motives were underlying this outward manifestation of piety and Christian devotion to duty. The Holy Alliance was the joint labor of an unfortunate man who had suffered a terrible mental shock and who was trying to pacify his much disturbed soul and of an ambitious woman who after a wasted life had lost her beauty and her attraction, and who satisfied her vanity and her desire for notoriety by assuming the role of self-appointed messiah of a new and strange creed. I am not giving away any secrets when I tell you these details. Such sober-minded people as Castle Ra, Metternich and Talleyrand fully understood the limited abilities of the sentimental baroness. It would have been easy for Metternich to send her back to her German estates. A few lines to the almighty commander of the imperial police and the thing was done. But France and England and Austria depended upon the good will of Russia. They could not afford to offend Alexander. And they tolerated the silly old baroness because they had to. And while they regarded the Holy Alliance as utter rubbish and not worth the paper upon which it was written, they listened patiently to the Tsar when he read them the first rough draft of his attempt to create the brotherhood of men upon a basis of the Holy Scriptures. For this is what the Holy Alliance tried to do. And the signers of the document solemnly declared that they would, in the administration of their respective states and in their political relations with every other government, take for their sole guide the precepts of that holy religion, namely the precepts of justice, Christian charity and peace, which far from being applicable only to private concerns, must have an immediate influence on the Councils of Princes and must guide all their steps in the only means of consolidating human institutions and remedying their imperfections. They then proceeded to promise each other that they would remain united by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity and considering each other as fellow countrymen, they would on all occasions and in all places lend each other aid and assistance and more words to the same effect. Eventually the Holy Alliance was signed by the Emperor of Austria who did not understand a word of it. It was signed by the Bourbons who needed the friendship of Napoleon's old enemies. It was signed by the King of Prussia who hoped to gain Alexander for his plans for a greater Prussia and by all the little nations of Europe who were at the mercy of Russia. England never signed because Kasparov thought the whole thing bunk him. The Pope did not sign because he resented this interference in his business by a Greek Orthodox and a Protestant and the Sultan did not sign because he never heard of it. The general mass of the European people, however, soon were forced to take notice. Behind the hollow phrases of the Holy Alliance stood the armies of the quintuple alliance which Metternich had created among the great powers. These armies meant business. They let it be known that the peace of Europe must not be disturbed by the so-called liberals who were in reality nothing but disguised Jacobins and hoped for a return of the revolutionary days. The enthusiasm for the great wars of liberation of the years 1812, 1813, 1814 and 1815 had begun to wear off. It had been followed by a sincere belief in the coming of a happier day. The soldiers who had borne the brunt of the battle wanted peace and they said so. But they did not want the sort of peace which the Holy Alliance and the Council of the European Powers had now bestowed upon them. They cried that they had been betrayed but they were careful lest they be heard by a secret police spy. The reaction was victorious. It was a reaction caused by men who sincerely believed that their methods were necessary for the good of humanity. But it was just as hard to bear as if their intentions had been less kind and it caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering and greatly retarded the orderly progress of political development. End of Chapter 54 Recorded by Michelle Crandall Fremont, California June 2009 Chapter 55 of The Story of Mankind This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Story of Mankind by Hendrik von Lohn Chapter 55 The Great Reaction They tried to assure the world an era of undisturbed peace by suppressing all new ideas. They made the police spy the highest functionary in the state and soon the prisons of all countries were filled with those who claimed that people have the right to govern themselves as they see fit. To undo the damage done by the great Napoleonic flood was almost impossible. Age old fences had been washed away. The palaces of two score dynasties had been damaged to such an extent that they had to be condemned as uninhabitable. Other royal residences had been greatly enlarged at the expense of less fortunate neighbors. Strange odds and ends of revolutionary doctrine had been left behind by the receding waters and could not be dislodged without danger to the entire community. But the political engineers of the Congress did the best they could and this is what they accomplished. France had disturbed the peace of the world for so many years that people had come to fear that country almost instinctively. The Bourbons, through the mouth of Talleyrand, had promised to be good but the hundred days had taught Europe what to expect should Napoleon manage to escape for a second time. The Dutch Republic, therefore, was changed into a kingdom and Belgium, which had not joined the Dutch struggle for independence in the 16th century and since then had been part of the Habsburg domains first under Spanish rule and thereafter under Austrian rule was made part of this new kingdom of the Netherlands. Nobody wanted this union, either in the Protestant north or in the Catholic south but no questions were asked. It seemed good for the peace of Europe and that was the main consideration. Poland had hoped for great things because a pole, Prince Adam Tsartoriski was one of the most intimate friends of Tsar Alexander and had been his constant advisor during the war and at the Congress of Vienna but Poland was made a semi-independent part of Russia with Alexander as her king. This solution pleased no one and caused much bitter feeling and three revolutions. Denmark, which had remained a faithful ally of Napoleon until the end was severely punished. Seven years before an English fleet had sailed down the Kattegat and without a declaration of war or any warning had bombarded Copenhagen and had taken away the Danish fleet, lest it be of value to Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna went one step further. It took Norway which since the union of Kalimar of the year 1397 had been united with Denmark away from Denmark and gave it to Charles IV of Sweden as a reward for his betrayal of Napoleon who had set him up in the king business. This Swedish king, curiously enough, was a former French general by the name of Bernadotte who had come to Sweden as one of Napoleon's agitants and had been invited to the throne of that good country when the last of the rulers of the house of Holstein Gotorp had died without leaving either son or daughter. From 1815 until 1844 he ruled his adopted country the language of which he never learned with great ability. He was a clever man and enjoyed the respect of both his Swedish and his Norwegian subjects but he did not succeed in joining two countries which nature and history had put asunder. The dual Scandinavian state was never a success and in 1905 Norway, in a most peaceful and orderly manner set up as an independent kingdom and the Swedes bad her good speed and very wisely let her go her own way. The Italians, who since the days of the Renaissance had been at the mercy of a long series of invaders also had put great hopes in general Bonaparte. The Emperor Napoleon, however, had grievously disappointed them. Instead of the united Italy which the people wanted, they had been divided into a number of little principalities Dutchies, republics and the Papal State which, next to Naples, was the worst governed and most miserable region of the Empire Peninsula. The Congress of Vienna abolished a few of the Napoleonic republics and in their place resurrected several old principalities which were given to deserving members, both male and female, of the Hapsburg family. The poor Spaniards who had started the great nationalistic revolt against Napoleon and who had sacrificed the best blood of the country for their king were punished severely when the Congress allowed his Majesty to his domains. This vicious creature known as Ferdinand VII had spent the last four years of his life as a prisoner of Napoleon. He had improved his days by knitting garments for the statues of his favorite patron saints. He celebrated his return by reintroducing the Inquisition and the Torture Chamber both of which had been abolished by the Revolution. He was a disgusting person, despised as much by his subjects and despised as much by his four wives, but the Holy Alliance maintained him upon his legitimate throne and all efforts of the decent Spaniards to get rid of this curse and make Spain a constitutional kingdom ended in bloodshed and executions. Portugal had been without a king since the year 1807 when the royal family had fled to the colonies in Brazil. The country had been used as a base of supply for the armies of Wellington during the Peninsula War from 1808 until 1814. After 1815 Portugal continued to be a sort of British province until the house of Braganza returned to the throne, leaving one of its members behind in Rio de Janeiro as Emperor of Brazil, the only American empire which lasted for more than a few years and which came to an end in 1889 when the country became a Republic. In the East nothing was done to improve the terrible conditions of both the Slavs and the Greeks who were still subjects of the Sultan. In the year 1804 Black George, a Servian Swine-herd, the founder of the Kara Georgievich dynasty had started a revolt against the Turks but he had been defeated by his enemies and had been murdered by one of his supposed friends, the rival Servian leader called Miloš Obranovich who became the founder of the Obranovich dynasty and the Turks had continued to be the undisputed masters of the Balkans. The Greeks, who since the loss of their independence 2000 years before had been the subjects of the Macedonians, the Romans, the Venetians and the Turks had hoped that their countrymen Kapo de Istria, a native of Corfu, and together with Tsar Tsaryski, the most intimate personal friends of Alexander would do something for them but the Congress of Vienna was not in Greece but was very much interested in keeping all legitimate monarchs Christian, Muslim and otherwise upon their respective thrones therefore nothing was done. The last but perhaps the greatest blunder of the Congress was the treatment of Germany. The Reformation and the Thirty Years' War had not only destroyed the prosperity of the country but had turned it into a hopeless political rubbish heap consisting of a couple of kingdoms, grand duchies, a large number of duchies and hundreds of margravates, principalities, baronies, electorates, free cities and free villages ruled by the strangest assortment of potentates that was ever seen off the comic opera stage. Frederick the Great had changed this when he created a strong Prussia but this state had not survived him by many years. Napoleon had blue penciled the demand for independence of most of these little countries and only 52 out of a total of more than 300 had survived the year 1806. During the years of the great struggle for independence many a young soldier had dreamed of a new fatherland that should be strong and united but there can be no union without a strong leadership and who was to be this leader? There were five kingdoms in the German-speaking lands. The rulers of two of these, Austria and Prussia, were kings by the grace of God. The rulers of three others, Bavaria, Saxony and Wurttemberg were kings by the grace of Napoleon and as they had been the faithful henchmen of the Emperor their patriotic credit with the other Germans was therefore not very good. The Congress had established a new German Confederation, a league of 38 sovereign states under the chairmanship of the King of Austria who was now known as the Emperor of Austria. It was the sort of makeshift arrangement which satisfied no one. It is true that a German diet which met in the old coronation city of Frankfurt had been created to discuss matters of common policy and importance. But in this diet, 38 delegates represented 38 different interests and as no decision could be taken without a unanimous vote a parliamentary rule which had in previous centuries ruined Poland, the famous German Confederation became very soon the laughing stock of Europe and the politics of the old Empire began to resemble those of our Central American neighbors in the 40s and the 50s of the last century. It was terribly humiliating to the people who had sacrificed everything for a national ideal but the Congress was not interested in the private feelings of subjects and the debate was closed. Did anybody object? Most assuredly as soon as the first feeling of hatred against Napoleon had quieted down as soon as the enthusiasm of the Great War had subsided as soon as the people came to a full realization of the crime that had been committed in the name of peace and stability they began to murmur. They even made threats of open revolt but what could they do? They were powerless. They were at the mercy of the most pitiless and efficient police system the members of the Congress of Vienna honestly and sincerely believed that the revolutionary principle had led to the criminal usurpation of the throne by the former Emperor Napoleon. They felt that they were called upon to eradicate the adherence of the so-called French ideas just as Philip II had only followed the voice of his conscience when he burned Protestants or hanged Moors. In the beginning of the 16th century a man who did not believe in the divine right of the Pope to rule his subjects as he saw fit was a heretic and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to kill him. In the beginning of the 19th century on the continent of Europe a man who did not believe in the divine right of his king to rule him as he or his prime minister saw fit was a heretic and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to denounce him to the nearest policeman and see that he got punished. But the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in the school of Napoleon and they performed their task much better than it had been done in the year 1517. The period between the year 1815 and the year 1860 was the great era of the political spy. Spies were everywhere. They lived in palaces and they were to be found in the lowest gin shops. They peeped through the key holes of the ministerial cabinet and they listened to the conversations of the people who were taking the air on the benches of the municipal park. They guarded the frontier so that no one might leave without a duly vis-a-de passport and they inspected all packages that no books with dangerous French ideas should enter the realm of their royal masters. They sat among the students in the lecture hall and woe to the professor for a word against the existing order of things. They followed little boys and girls on their way to church lest they play hooky. In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy. The church had suffered greatly during the days of the revolution. The church property had been confiscated. Several priests had been killed and the generation that had learned its catechism from Voltaire and Rousseau and the other French philosophers had danced around the altar of reason when the Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of God in October of the year 1793. The priests had followed the emigres into their long exile. Now they returned in the wake of the Allied armies and they set to work with a vengeance. Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their former labours of educating the young. Their order had been a little too successful in its fight against the enemies of the church. It had established provinces in every part of the world to teach the natives the blessings of Christianity but soon had developed into a regular trading company which was forever interfering with the civil authorities. During the reign of the Marquis de Pombol the great reforming minister of Portugal they had been driven out of the Portuguese lands and in the year 1773 at the request of most of the Catholic powers the order had been suppressed by Pope Clement IX. Now they were back on the job and preached the principles of obedience and love for the legitimate dynasty to children whose parents had hired shop windows that they might laugh at Marie Antoinette driving to the scaffold which was to end her misery. But in the Protestant countries like Prussia things were not a hit better. The great patriotic leaders of the year 1812 the poets and the writers who had preached a holy war upon the usurper were now branded as dangerous demagogues. Their houses were searched their letters were read they were obliged to report to the police at regular intervals and give an account of themselves. The Prussian drill master was let loose in all his fury upon the younger generation. When a party of students celebrated the tersentenary of the Reformation with noisy but harmless festivities on the old Vartburg the Prussian bureaucrats had visions of an imminent revolution. When a theological student more honest than intelligent killed a Russian government spy who was operating in Germany the universities were placed under police supervision and professors were jailed or dismissed without any form of trial. Russia of course was even more absurd in these anti-revolutionary activities. Alexander had recovered from his attack of piety he was gradually drifting toward melancholia. He well knew his own limited abilities and understood how at Vienna he had been the victim both of Metternich and the Krudner woman. More and more he turned his back upon the West and became a truly Russian ruler whose interests lay in Constantinople the old holy city that had been the first teacher of the Slavs. The older he grew the less he was able to accomplish. And while he sat in his study his ministers turned the whole of Russia into a land of military barracks. It is not a pretty picture. Perhaps I might have shortened this description of the great reaction but it is just as well that you should have a thorough knowledge of this era. It was not the first time that an attempt had been made to set the clock of history back. The result was the usual one.