A Short History of Germany Part 9

It is interesting to recall that it was Luther who gave the first impulse to this movement, by revealing to the people the riches of their own tongue. In his translation of the Bible, and in his hymns, so grandly simple, he created the modern German language.

The influence of Luther was felt in another art, too. The enthusiasm awakened by the singing of his hymns revolutionized the form of ecclesiastical music. In this Golden Age in Germany music, too, had become a great art, with such immortal names as Mozart, Gluck, Haydn, and Beethoven; and the period of great orchestration also had commenced.[1]

Although Frederick's tastes led him so strongly to letters and to music, these two arts had attained this rich development in Germany without any a.s.sistance from him. When he died in 1786 the monument he left was a Kingdom of Prussia; equal in rank with any of the Great Powers of Europe, enlarged in territory, rich in population, with a great army and an overflowing treasury.

As Frederick the Great had no son, this splendid inheritance pa.s.sed to his nephew Frederick William II.

With the new ascendency of Prussia in the German Empire, a process which had long been going on was accelerated. That empire had become a fiction, a form from which the substance had long ago departed; almost its only remaining relic being an Imperial Diet, where thirty solemn old men supposed they were holding the venerated structure together by weaving about it, and repairing, the thin, worn threads of tradition.

The German Empire had in its best time existed by grace of G.o.d and force of circ.u.mstances, more than by reason of a sound and perfect organism. It always struggled with fatal inherent defects. Its life currents never flowed freely and had been growing more and more sluggish for centuries. And now, they had ceased to flow at all.

There was no vital relation whatever between its various parts. Of national feeling there was absolutely none. Lessing, one of the greatest Germans of that time, said, "Of the love of country I have no conception!"

And what was there to inspire patriotism in this great empty sh.e.l.l of despotism! The shattered lifeless old structure was wrong at its very foundation. It was built upon feudal injustice; that injustice which compelled the people to bear the whole burden of taxation, from which it exempted the n.o.bility and the clergy. England had long ago redressed this grievous wrong. France was just preparing to free herself from it by a tremendous convulsion. Germany had been offered emanc.i.p.ation at the hands of her enlightened and gracious Emperor Joseph, but so spiritless and benumbed had she become that she could not understand his message.

He was attempting a vain task in trying to infuse new life into the empire. There were no living channels to convey the current. The only thing to be done with it was to sweep it away--and the man and the time for doing this were close at hand. The surface calm which existed while Leopold II. was repairing the disorder left by his reforming brother Joseph, was the calm which precedes the hurricane.

[1] See Chart of Civilization in Six Centuries, "Who, When, and What."

CHAPTER XV.

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

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

Frenchmen returned from the United States and contrasted the fresh vigor and purity of its inst.i.tutions with the decrepit corruptions in France. The current began to flow very swiftly now. A Richelieu or a Louis XIV. would have been powerless to arrest the mad forces which quickly developed. What could the feeble, well-intentioned Louis XVI.

do! He was like a skiff caught in the rushing rapids of the Niagara River. It was only a question of how long he could hold on to pa.s.sing twigs and branches before he should go over the precipice. In 1793 Europe read with shuddering horror of his execution, and nine months later Maria Theresa's daughter--the beautiful, the adored Marie Antoinette--sat in a cart with her arms pinioned behind her, as she was driven to the scaffold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1796 the young Corsican led a ragged, unpaid army into Italy.

Without supplies, and almost without ammunition, he had audaciously planned to make the invaded country pay the expenses of the war waged against it.

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

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

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

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

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

What would she not do at the bidding of the man who could accomplish such things? He dramatically conceived the idea of crippling England by threatening her Asiatic possessions, and led an army into Egypt.

There every bulletin, every address to his army, added to the glamour of his name. Even the Pyramids were made to serve his consummate art and ambition!

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

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

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

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

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

n.o.ble families, we realize how he was relieving Germany from the incubus which had paralyzed her for centuries.

CHAPTER XVI.

The eighteenth century closed upon a strangely altered Europe. France was the ruling power on the Continent. Prussia had hidden herself in a timid neutrality, and left Austria to fight with foreign allies for the life of the empire. That battle had been a losing one, and now Francis II. sat upon a trembling throne and bore a t.i.tle which had no longer any meaning.

But Napoleon was building his own edifice. In 1803 he had himself declared First Consul for life, and in 1804 he a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of Napoleon, Emperor of the French. His coronation took place at Paris, where he compelled the Pope to come and perform that ceremony.

Then, after changing the groups of Italian republics into a Kingdom of Italy, he crowned himself, after the fashion of the Emperors whose successor he meant to be, with the Iron Crown of Lombardy.

He had entered upon the most daring scheme ever attempted in Europe: to convert the whole Continent into one vast empire, with the kings and princes over the several nations all subject to him.

Then there was a third coalition from which Prussia still held aloof, and which was composed of England, Austria, Russia, and Sweden.

Alexander I. was now Emperor of Russia, and the timorous and unpatriotic policy of Prussia was guided by Frederick William III., who had succeeded his father Frederick William II.

The Prussian King, influenced by antagonism to Austria and by the hope of obtaining safety and reward for Prussia, stubbornly maintained his att.i.tude of neutrality, while the German Empire was receiving its death-blow at Austerlitz. That "battle of the three Emperors," as it is called, was a paralyzing defeat to the Allies.

Prussia ignominiously received Hanover as her reward, and seventeen German states, including Bavaria, Baden, Wurtemberg, and Hesse-Darmstadt, formally separated themselves from the German Empire and declared themselves subject to the French Emperor. This was known as the Rheinbund.

The German Empire was now reduced to three separate bodies: the Rheinbund, a federation of states giving willing allegiance to Napoleon; _Prussia_, practically in alliance with her destroyer; and _Austria_, helpless in that destroyer's grasp, while he, sitting in the Imperial Palace at Vienna, dictated terms of peace.