The battle of Leipsic is one of the most important in general history. Apparently it was only the offset to Austerlitz, as the Beresina had been to Friedland. In reality it was far more, because it gave the hegemony of continental Europe to Prussia. French imperialism in its death-throes wiped out the score of royal France against the Hapsburgs; Austria was not yet banished from central Europe to the lower courses of the Danube, but, what was much the same thing, Prussia was launched upon her career of military aggrandizement.
Three dynasties seemed in that battle to have celebrated a joint triumph; as a matter of fact, the free national spirit of Germany, having narrowly escaped being smothered by Napoleonic imperialism, had chosen a national dynasty as its refuge. The conflict is well designated by German historians as ‘the battle of the nations,’ but the language has a different sense from that which is generally attributed to it. The seeds of Italian unity had been sown, but they were not yet to germinate.
The battle of Leipsic seemed to check them, yet it was the process there begun under which they sprang up and bore fruit. France was destined to become for a time the sport of an antiquated dynastic system. The liberties which men of English blood had been painfully developing for a century she sought to seize in an instant; she was to see them still elude her grasp for 60 years, until her democratic life, having assumed consistency, should find expression in institutions essentially and peculiarly her own. Though the conquering monarchs believed that revolutionary liberalism had been quenched at Leipsic, its ultimate triumph was really assured, since it was consigned to its natural guardianship, that of national commonwealths. The imperial agglomeration of races and nationalities was altogether amorphous and had been found impossible; that form of union was not again attempted after Leipsic, while another—that, namely, of constitutional organic nationalities—was made operative.
The successive stages of advance are marked by 1813, 1848, and 1870. The Saxon campaigns display the completion of the process in which the great strategist, stifled by political anxieties, became the creature of circumstances both as general and statesman. The Russian campaign was nicely calculated, but its proportions and aim were those of the Oriental theocrat, not of the prosaic European soldier. With the aid of the railroad and the electric telegraph, they might possibly have been wrought into a workable problem, but that does not excuse the errors of premature and misplaced ambition. The Saxon campaigns, again, are marked by a boldness of design and a skill in combination characteristic of the best strategy; but again the proportions are monstrous, and, what is worse, the execution is intermittent and feeble.
As in Russia, the war organism was insufficient for the numbers and distances involved, while the subordinates of every grade, though supple instruments, seemed mercenary, self-seeking, and destitute of devotion. Bonaparte had ruled men’s hearts by his use of a cause, securing devotion to it and to himself by rude bonhomie, by success, and by sufficient rewards; Napoleon, on the other hand, quenched devotion by a lavishness which sated the greediest, and lost the affections of his associates by the demands of his gigantic plans. As the world-conqueror felt the foundations of his greatness quivering, he became less callous and more human.
Early in 1813 he said: “I have a sympathetic heart, like another, but since earliest childhood I have accustomed myself to keep that string silent, and now it is altogether dumb.” His judgment of himself was mistaken: throughout the entire season he was strangely and exceptionally moved by the horrors of war; his purse was ever open for the suffering; he released the King of Saxony from his entangling engagements; in spite of his hard-set expression on the retreat from Leipsic, he forbade his men to fire the suburbs of the city in order to retard the pursuit of their foes, and before he left Mainz for St. Cloud he showed the deepest concern, and put forth the strongest effort, in behalf of the dying soldiery.
The immediate effects of Leipsic were the full display of that national spirit which had been refined, if not created, in the fires of Napoleon’s imperious career. An Austrian army under Hiller drove Eugene over the Adige. The Italians, not unsusceptible to the power in the air, felt their humiliation, and, turning on their imperial King in bitter hate, determined, under the influence of feelings most powerfully expressed by Alfieri, that they would emulate northern Europe. But though they had for years been subject to the new influences, enjoying the equal administration of the Code Napoleon, and freed from the interference of petty local tyrants, they were neither united nor enlightened in sufficient degree.
After an outburst of hatred to France, they were crushed by their old despots, and the land relapsed into the direst confusion. The Confederation of the Rhine was, however, resolved into its elements: the Mecklenburgs reasserted their independence; King Jerome fled to France; Wurtemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Baden followed Bavaria’s example; Cassel, Brunswick, Hanover, and Oldenburg were craftily restored to their former rulers before Stein’s bureau could establish an administration. Holland recalled the Prince of Orange, Spain rose to support Wellington, and Soult was not merely driven over the Pyrenees—he was defeated on French soil, and shut up in Bayonne.
Even the three monarchs, as they sedately moved across Germany with their exhausted and battered armies, were aware of nationality as a controlling force in the future. In a direct movement on Paris they could, as Ney said, “have marked out their days in advance,” but they halted at Frankfort for a parley. There were several reasons why they should pause. They had seen France rise in her might; they did not care to assist at the spectacle again. Moreover, the coalition had accomplished its task and earned its pay; not a Frenchman, except real or virtual prisoners, was left east of the Rhine. From that point the interests of the three monarchs were divergent. As Gentz, the Austrian statesman, said, “The war for the emancipation of states bids fair to become one for the emancipation of the people.”
Alexander, Frederick William, and Francis were each and all anxious for the future of absolutism, but otherwise there was mutual distrust. Austria was suspicious of Prussia, and desired immediate peace. In the restoration of Holland under English auspices, Russia saw the perpetuation of British maritime and commercial supremacy, to the disadvantage of her Oriental aspirations, and the old Russian party demanded peace. On the other hand, Alexander wished to avenge Napoleon’s march to Moscow by an advance to Paris; and though Frederick William distrusted what he called the Czar’s Jacobinism, his own soldiers, thirsting for further revenge, also desired to prosecute the war; even the most enlightened Prussian statesmen believed that nothing short of a complete cataclysm in France could shake Napoleon’s hold on that people and destroy his power. Offsetting these conflicting tendencies against one another, Metternich was able to secure military inaction for a time, while the coalition formulated a series of proposals calculated to woo the French people, and thus to bring Napoleon at once to terms.
Ostensibly the Frankfort proposals, adopted on November 9th, were only a slight advance on the ultimatum of Prague: Austria was to have enough Italian territory to secure her preponderance in that peninsula; France was to keep Savoy, with Nice; the rest of Italy was to be independent. Holland and Spain liberated, France was to have her ‘natural’ boundaries, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the ocean, and the Rhine. Napoleon was to retain a slight preponderance in Germany, and the hope was held out that in a congress to settle details for a general pacification, Great Britain, content with the ‘maritime rights’ which had caused the war, would hand back the captured French colonies. The various ministers present at Frankfort assented to these proposals for Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia respectively; but Alexander and Frederick William were dissatisfied with them, and when Castlereagh heard them, he was as furious as his cold blood would permit at the thought of France retaining control of the Netherlands, Antwerp being the commercial key to central Europe.
Such a humour in three of the high contracting parties makes it doubtful whether the Frankfort proposals had any reality, and this doubt is further increased by the circumstances of the so-called negotiation. St. Aignan, the French envoy to the Saxon duchies, had in violation of international law and courtesy been seized at Gotha and held as a prisoner. He was now set free and instructed to urge upon Napoleon the necessity of an immediate settlement. To his brother-in-law, the pacific Caulaincourt, who was soon to displace Maret as minister of foreign affairs, he was to hand a private and personal letter from Metternich. In the course of this epistle the writer expresses his conviction that any effort to conclude a peace would come to nothing. Not only, therefore, were the pretended negotiations entirely destitute of form, they were prejudged from the outset.
Still further, the allies refused what Napoleon had granted after Bautzen, an armistice, and insisted that hostilities were to proceed during negotiation. All possible doubt as to the sincerity of the proposals is turned into assurance by Metternich’s admission in his memoirs that they were intended to divorce Napoleon from the French nation, and in particular to work on the feelings of the army. He says that neither Alexander nor Frederick William would have assented to them had they not been convinced that Napoleon would “never in the world of his own accord” resolve to accept them. Yet the world has long believed that Napoleon, as he himself expressed it, lost his crown for Antwerp; that had he believed the honeyed words of the Austrian minister, and opened negotiations on an indefinite basis without delay, he might have kept France with its revolutionary boundaries intact for himself and his dynasty, and by the sacrifice of his imperial ambitions have retained for her, if not preponderance, at least importance in the councils of Europe.
Neither Napoleon nor the French nation was deceived; a peace made under such circumstances could result only in a dishonorable tutelage to the allied sovereigns. France abhorred the dynasties and all their works, believing that dynastic rule could never mean anything except absolutism and feudalism. The experiment of popular sovereignty wielded by a democracy had been a failure; but the liberal French, like men of the same intelligence throughout Europe, did not, for all that, lose faith in popular sovereignty; they knew there must be some channel for its exercise.
Outside of France, as in it, the most enlightened opinion of the time regarded Napoleon as the savior of society. The Queen of Saxony bitterly reproached Metternich for having deserted Napoleon’s ‘sacred cause.’ This was because the Emperor of the French seemed to have used the people’s power for the people’s good. His giant arm alone could wield the popular majesty. It is said that the great mass of the French nation, on hearing of the Frankfort proposals, groaned and laughed by turns. Being profoundly, devotedly imperialist and therefore idealistic, they were outraged at the thought of Hapsburgs, Romanoffs, or Hohenzollerns, the very incarnations of German feudality, as leaders of the new Europe. It seemed the irony of fate that civil and political rights on the basis, not of privilege, but of manhood, the prize for which the world had been turned upside down, should be intrusted to such keepers. Welded into a homogeneous nationality themselves, the French could not understand that the inchoate nationalities in other states had as yet nothing but dynastic forms of expression, or foresee that during a century to come the old dynasties would find safety only in adapting royalty to national needs.
Napoleon seems to have been fully aware of French sentiment. In addition, he understood that not merely for this sufficient reason could he never be king of France in name or fact, but also that, having elsewhere harried and humiliated both peoples and dynasties in the name of revolutionary ideals, the masses had found him out, and were as much embittered as their rulers, believing him to be a charlatan using dazzling principles as a cloak for personal ambition.
In May, 1813, the Emperor Francis, anxious to salve the lacerated pride of the Hapsburgs, produced a bundle of papers purporting to prove that the Bonapartes had once been ruling princes at Treviso. “My nobility,” was Napoleon’s stinging reply, “dates only from Marengo.” He well knew that when the battle should be fought that would undo Marengo, his nobility would end. In other words, without solid French support he was nothing, and that support he was fully aware he could never have as king of France. If the influence of what France improperly believed to be solely the French Revolution were to be confined to her boundaries, revolutionary or otherwise, not only was Napoleon’s prestige destroyed, but along with it would go French leadership in Europe. An imperial throne there must be, exerting French influence far abroad. What happened at Paris, therefore, may be regarded as a counter-feint to Metternich’s effort at securing an advantageous peace from the French nation when it should have renounced Napoleon. It was merely an attempt to collect the remaining national strength, not now for aggressive warfare, but for the expulsion of hated invaders.
Having received no formulated proposition for acceptance or rejection, and desiring to force one, the Emperor of the French virtually disregarded the letter of Metternich’s communication, and sent a carefully considered message to the allies. Making no mention in this of the terms brought by St. Aignan, he suggested Caulaincourt as plenipotentiary to an international congress, which should meet somewhere on the Rhine, say at Mannheim. Further, he declared that his object had always been the independence of all the nations, “from the continental as well as from the maritime point of view.”
This communication reached Frankfort on November 16th, and, whether wilfully or not, was misinterpreted to mean that the writer would persist in questioning England’s maritime rights. Thereupon Metternich replied by accepting Mannheim as the place for the proposed conference, and promised to communicate the language of Napoleon’s letter to his co-allies. How far these co-allies were from a sincere desire for peace is proven by their next step, taken almost on the date of Metternich’s reply. A proclamation was widely posted in the cities of France, which stated, in a cant borrowed from Napoleon’s own practice, that the allies desired France ‘to be great, strong, and prosperous’; they were making war, it was asserted, not “on France, but on that preponderance which Napoleon had too long exercised, to the misfortune of Europe and of France herself, to which they guaranteed in advance an extent of territory such as she never had under her kings.” Napoleon’s riposte was to despatch a swarm of trusty emissaries throughout France in order to compose all quarrels of the people with the government, to strengthen popular devotion in every possible way—in short, to counteract the possible effects of this call.
The messengers found public opinion thoroughly imperial, but profoundly embittered against Maret as the supposed instigator of disastrous wars. Maret was transferred to the department of state, and the pacific Caulaincourt was made minister of foreign affairs.
On December 2nd, at the earliest possible moment, the new minister addressed a note to Metternich, accepting the terms of the “general and summary basis.” This, said the despatch, would involve great sacrifices; but Napoleon would feel no regret if only by a similar abnegation England would provide the means for a general, honourable peace. Metternich replied that nothing now stood in the way of convening a congress, and that he would notify England to send a plenipotentiary. There, however, the matter ended, and Metternich’s record of those Frankfort days scarcely notices the subject, so interested is he in the squabbles of the sovereigns over the opening of a new campaign. It was the end of the year when they reached an agreement.
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