A History of Modern Europe, 1792-1878 Part 8

Sieyes saw that Bonaparte, and no one else, was the man through whom he could overthrow the existing Const.i.tution. [82] So little sympathy existed, however, between Sieyes and the soldier to whom he now offered his support, that Bonaparte only accepted Sieyes' project after satisfying himself that neither Barras nor Bernadotte would help him to supreme power. Once convinced of this, Bonaparte closed with Sieyes' offers. It was agreed that Sieyes and his friend Ducos should resign their Directors.h.i.+ps, and that the three remaining Directors should be driven from office. The a.s.semblies, or any part of them favourable to the plot, were to appoint a Triumvirate composed of Bonaparte, Sieyes, and Ducos, for the purpose of drawing up a new Const.i.tution. In the new Const.i.tution it was understood, though without any definite arrangement, that Bonaparte and Sieyes were to be the leading figures. The Council of Ancients was in great part in league with the conspirators: the only obstacle likely to hinder the success of the plot was a rising of the Parisian populace. As a precaution against attack, it was determined to transfer the meeting of the Councils to St. Cloud.

Bonaparte had secured the support of almost all the generals and troops in Paris. His brother Lucien, now President of the Council of Five Hundred, hoped to paralyse the action of his own a.s.sembly, in which the conspirators were in the minority.

[Coup d'etat, 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9), 1799.]

Early on the morning of the 9th of November (18 Brumaire), a crowd of generals and officers met before Bonaparte's house. At the same moment a portion of the Council of Ancients a.s.sembled, and pa.s.sed a decree which adjourned the session to St. Cloud, and conferred on Bonaparte the command over all the troops in Paris. The decree was carried to Bonaparte's house and read to the military throng, who acknowledged it by brandis.h.i.+ng their swords. Bonaparte then ordered the troops to their posts, received the resignation of Barras, and arrested the two remaining Directors in the Luxembourg. During the night there was great agitation in Paris. The arrest of the two Directors and the display of military force revealed the true nature of the conspiracy, and excited men to resistance who had hitherto seen no great cause for alarm. The Councils met at St. Cloud at two on the next day. The Ancients were ready for what was coming; the Five Hundred refused to listen to Bonaparte's accomplices, and took the oath of fidelity to the Const.i.tution. Bonaparte himself entered the Council of Ancients, and in violent, confused language declared that he had come to save the Republic from unseen dangers. He then left the a.s.sembly, and entered the Chamber of the Five Hundred, escorted by armed grenadiers. A roar of indignation greeted the appearance of the bayonets. The members rushed in a ma.s.s upon Bonaparte, and drove him out of the hall. His brother now left the President's chair and joined the soldiers outside, whom he harangued in the character of President of the a.s.sembly. The soldiers, hitherto wavering, were a.s.sured by Lucien's civil authority and his treacherous eloquence. The drums beat; the word of command was given; and the last free representatives of France struggled through doorways and windows before the levelled and advancing bayonets.

[Sieyes' plan of Const.i.tution.]

The Const.i.tution which Sieyes hoped now to impose upon France had been elaborated by its author at the close of the Reign of Terror. Designed at that epoch, it bore the trace of all those apprehensions which gave shape to the Const.i.tution of 1795. The statutory outrages of 1793, the Royalist reaction shown in the events of Vendemiaire, were the perils from which both Sieyes and the legislators of 1795 endeavoured to guard the future of France. It had become clear that a popular election might at any moment return a royalist majority to the a.s.sembly: the Const.i.tution of 1795 averted this danger by prolonging the power of the Conventionalists; Sieyes overcame it by extinguis.h.i.+ng popular election altogether. He gave to the nation no right but that of selecting half a million persons who should be eligible to offices in the Communes, and who should themselves elect a smaller body of fifty thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the Executive. With the irrational mult.i.tude thus deprived of the power to bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and n.o.bles might safely do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Sieyes proposed that every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should be inscribed for ten years among the privileged five thousand.

Such were the safeguards provided against a Bourbonist reaction. To guard against a recurrence of those evils which France had suffered from the precipitate votes of a single a.s.sembly, Sieyes broke up the legislature into as many chambers as there are stages in the pa.s.sing of a law. The first chamber, or Council of State, was to give shape to measures suggested by the Executive; a second chamber, known as the Tribunate, was to discuss the measures so framed, and ascertain the objections to which they were liable; the third chamber, known as the Legislative Body, was to decide in silence for or against the measures, after hearing an argument between representatives of the Council and of the Tribunate. As a last impregnable bulwark against Jacobins and Bourbonists alike, Sieyes created a Senate whose members should hold office for life, and be empowered to annul every law in which the Chambers might infringe upon the Const.i.tution.

It only remained to invent an Executive. In the other parts of his Const.i.tution, Sieyes had borrowed from Rome, from Greece, and from Venice; in his Executive he improved upon the political theories of Great Britain.

He proposed that the Government should consist of two Consuls and a Great Elector; the Elector, like an English king, appointing and dismissing the Consuls, but taking no active part in the administration himself. The Consuls were to be respectively restricted to the affairs of peace and of war. Grotesque under every aspect, the Const.i.tution of Sieyes was really calculated to effect in all points but one the end which he had in view.

His object was to terminate the convulsions of France by depriving every element in the State of the power to create sudden change. The members of his body politic, a Council that could only draft, a Tribunate that could only discuss, a Legislature that could only vote, Yes or No, were impotent for mischief; and the nation itself ceased to have a political existence as soon as it had selected its half-million notables.

[Sieyes and Bonaparte.]

So far, nothing could have better suited the views of Bonaparte; and up to this point Bonaparte quietly accepted Sieyes' plan. But the general had his own scheme for what was to follow. Sieyes might apportion the act of deliberation among debating societies and dumb juries to the full extent of his own ingenuity; but the moment that he applied his disintegrating method to the Executive, Bonaparte swept away the flimsy reasoner, and set in the midst of his edifice of shadows the reality of an absolute personal rule.

The phantom Elector, and the Consuls who were to be the Elector's tenants-at-will, corresponded very little to the power which France desired to see at its head. "Was there ever anything so ridiculous?" cried Bonaparte. "What man of spirit could accept such a post?" It was in vain that Sieyes had so nicely set the balance. His theories gave to France only the pageants which disguised the extinction of the nation beneath a single will: the frame of executive government which the country received in 1799 was that which Bonaparte deduced from the conception of an absolute central power. The First Consul summed up all executive authority in his own person. By his side there were set two colleagues whose only function was to advise. A Council of State placed the highest skill and experience in France at the disposal of the chief magistrate, without infringing upon his sovereignty. All offices, both in the Ministries of State and in the provinces, were filled by the nominees of the First Consul. No law could be proposed but at his desire.

[Contrast of the Inst.i.tutions of 1791 and 1799.]

[Centralisation of 1799.]

The inst.i.tutions given to France by the National a.s.sembly of 1789 and those given to it in the Consulate exhibited a direct contrast seldom found outside the region of abstract terms. Local customs, survivals of earlier law, such as soften the difference between England and the various democracies of the United States, had no place in the sharp-cut types in which the political order of France was recast in 1791 and 1799. The Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly had cleared the field before it began to reconstruct.

Its reconstruction was based upon the Rights of Man, identified with the principle of local self-government by popular election. It deduced a system of communal administration so completely independent that France was described by foreign critics as part.i.tioned into 40,000 republics; and the criticism was justified when, in 1793, it was found necessary to create a new central Government, and to send commissioners from the capital into the provinces. In the Const.i.tution of 1791, judges, bishops, officers of the National Guard, were all alike subjected to popular election; the Minister of War could scarcely move a regiment from one village to another without the leave of the mayor of the commune. In the Const.i.tution of 1799 all authority was derived from the head of the State. A system of centralisation came into force with which France under her kings had nothing to compare. All that had once served as a check upon monarchical power, the legal Parliaments, the Provincial Estates of Brittany and Languedoc, the rights of lay and ecclesiastical corporations, had vanished away. In the place of the motley of privileges that had tempered the Bourbon monarchy, in the place of the popular a.s.semblies of the Revolution, there sprang up a series of magistracies as regular and as absolute as the orders of military rank. [83] Where, under the Const.i.tution of 1791, a body of local representatives had met to conduct the business of the Department, there was now a Prefet, appointed by the First Consul, absolute, like the First Consul himself, and a.s.sisted only by the advice of a nominated council, which met for one fortnight in the year. In subordination to the Prefet, an officer and similar council transacted the local business of the Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt. Even the 40,000 Maires with their communal councils were all appointed directly or indirectly by the Chief of the State. There existed in France no authority that could repair a village bridge, or light the streets of a town, but such as owed its appointment to the central Government. Nor was the power of the First Consul limited to the administration. With the exception of the lowest and the highest members of the judicature, he nominated all judges, and transferred them at his pleasure to inferior or superior posts.

Such was the system which, based to a great extent upon the preferences of the French people, fixed even more deeply in the national character the willingness to depend upon an omnipresent, all-directing power. Through its rational order, its regularity, its command of the highest science and experience, this system of government could not fail to confer great and rapid benefits upon the country. It has usually been viewed by the French themselves as one of the finest creations of political wisdom. In comparison with the self-government which then and long afterwards existed in England, the centralisation of France had all the superiority of progress and intelligence over torpor and self-contradiction. Yet a heavy, an incalculable price is paid by every nation which for the sake of administrative efficiency abandons its local liberties, and all that is bound up with their enjoyment. No practice in the exercise of public right armed a later generation of Frenchmen against the audacity of a common usurper: no immortality of youth secured the inst.i.tutions framed by Napoleon against the weakness and corruption which at some period undermine all despotisms. The historian who has exhausted every term of praise upon the political system of the Consulate lived to declare, as Chief of the State himself, that the first need of France was the decentralisation of power. [84]

[State policy of Bonaparte.]

After ten years of disquiet, it was impossible that any Government could be more welcome to the French nation than one which proclaimed itself the representative, not of party or of opinion, but of France itself. No section of the nation had won a triumph in the establishment of the Consulate; no section had suffered a defeat. In his own elevation Bonaparte announced the close of civil conflict. A Government had arisen which summoned all to its service which would employ all, reward all, reconcile all. The earliest measures of the First Consul exhibited the policy of reconciliation by which he hoped to rally the whole of France to his side.

The law of hostages, under which hundreds of families were confined in retaliation for local Royalist disturbances, was repealed, and Bonaparte himself went to announce their liberty to the prisoners in the Temple.

Great numbers of names were struck off the list of the emigrants, and the road to pardon was subsequently opened to all who had not actually served against their country. In the selection of his officers of State, Bonaparte showed the same desire to win men of all parties. Cambaceres, a regicide, was made Second Consul; Lebrun, an old official of Louis XVI., became his colleague. In the Ministries, in the Senate, and in the Council of State the nation saw men of proved ability chosen from all callings in life and from all political ranks. No Government of France had counted among its members so many names eminent for capacity and experience. One quality alone was indispensable, a readiness to serve and to obey. In that intellectual greatness which made the combination of all the forces of France a familiar thought in Bonaparte's mind, there was none of the moral generosity which could pardon opposition to himself, or tolerate energy acting under other auspices than his own. He desired to see authority in the best hands; he sought talent and promoted it, but on the understanding that it took its direction from himself. Outside this limit ability was his enemy, not his friend; and what could not be caressed or promoted was treated with tyrannical injustice. While Bonaparte boasted of the career that he had thrown open to talent, he suppressed the whole of the independent journalism of Paris, and banished Mme. de Stael, whose guests continued to converse, when they might not write, about liberty. Equally partial, equally calculated, was Bonaparte's indulgence towards the ancient enemies of the Revolution, the Royalists and the priests. He felt nothing of the old hatred of Paris towards the Vendean n.o.ble and the superst.i.tious Breton; he offered his friends.h.i.+p to the stubborn Breton race, whose loyalty and piety he appreciated as good qualities in subjects; but failing their submission, he instructed his generals in the west of France to burn down their villages, and to set a price upon the heads of their chiefs.

Justice, tolerance, good faith, were things which had no being for Bonaparte outside the circle of his instruments and allies.

[France ceases to excite democracy abroad, but promotes equality under monarchical systems.]

[Effect of Bonaparte's autocracy outside France.]

In the foreign relations of France it was not possible for the most unscrupulous will to carry aggression farther than it had been already carried; yet the elevation of Bonaparte deeply affected the fortunes of all those States whose lot depended upon France. It was not only that a mind accustomed to regard all human things as objects for its own disposal now directed an irresistible military force, but from the day when France submitted to Bonaparte, the political changes accompanying the advance of the French armies took a different character. Belgium and Holland, the Rhine Provinces, the Cisalpine, the Roman, and the Parthenopean Republics, had all received, under whatever circ.u.mstances of wrong, at least the forms of popular sovereignty. The reality of power may have belonged to French generals and commissioners; but, however insincerely uttered, the call to freedom excited hopes and aspirations which were not insincere themselves.

The Italian festivals of emanc.i.p.ation, the trees of liberty, the rhetoric of patriotic a.s.semblies, had betrayed little enough of the instinct for self-government; but they marked a separation from the past; and the period between the years 1796 and 1799 was in fact the birth-time of those hopes which have since been realised in the freedom and the unity of Italy. So long as France had her own tumultuous a.s.semblies, her elections in the village and in the county-town, it was impossible for her to form republics beyond the Alps without introducing at least some germ of republican organisation and spirit. But when all power was concentrated in a single man, when the spoken and the written word became an offence against the State, when the commotion of the old munic.i.p.alities was succeeded by the silence and the discipline of a body of clerks working round their chief, then the advance of French influence ceased to mean the support of popular forces against the Governments. The form which Bonaparte had given to France was the form which he intended for the clients of France. Hence in those communities which directly received the impress of the Consulate, as in Bavaria and the minor German States, authority, instead of being overthrown, was greatly strengthened. Bonaparte carried beyond the Rhine that portion of the spirit of the Revolution which he accepted at home, the suppression of privilege, the extinction of feudal rights, the reduction of all ranks to equality before the law, and the admission of all to the public service. But this levelling of the social order in the client-states of France, and the establishment of system and unity in the place of obsolete privilege, cleared the way not for the supremacy of the people, but for the supremacy of the Crown. The power which was taken away from corporations, from knights, and from ecclesiastics, was given, not to a popular Representative, but to Cabinet Ministers and officials ranged after the model of the official hierarchy of France. What the French had in the first epoch of their Revolution endeavoured to impart to Europe--the spirit of liberty and self-government--they had now renounced themselves. The belief in popular right, which made the difference between the changes of 1789 and those attempted by the Emperor Joseph, sank in the storms of the Revolution.

[Bonaparte legislates in the spirit of the reforming monarchs of the 18th century.]

Yet the statesmans.h.i.+p of Bonaparte, if it repelled the liberal and disinterested sentiment of 1789, was no mere cunning of a Corsican soldier, or exploit of mediaeval genius born outside its age. Subject to the fullest gratification of his own most despotic or most malignant impulse, Bonaparte carried into his creations the ideas upon which the greatest European innovators before the French Revolution had based their work. What Frederick and Joseph had accomplished, or failed to accomplish, was realised in Western Germany when its Sovereigns became the clients of the First Consul. Bonaparte was no child of the French Revolution; he was the last and the greatest of the autocratic legislators who worked in an unfree age. Under his rule France lost what had seemed to be most its own; it most powerfully advanced the forms of progress common to itself and the rest of Europe. Bonaparte raised no population to liberty: in extinguis.h.i.+ng privilege and abolis.h.i.+ng the legal distinctions of birth, in levelling all personal and corporate authority beneath the single rule of the State, he prepared the way for a rational freedom, when, at a later day, the Government of the State should itself become the representative of the nation's will.

CHAPTER V.

Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and England--The War continues--Ma.s.sena besieged in Genoa--Moreau invades Southern Germany--Bonaparte crosses the St. Bernard, and descends in the rear of the Austrians--Battle of Marengo--Austrians retire behind the Mincio--Treaty between England and Austria--Austria continues the War--Battle of Hohenlinden--Peace of Luneville--War between England and the Northern Maritime League--Battle of Copenhagen--Murder of Paul--End of the Maritime War--English Army enters Egypt--French defeated at Alexandria--They capitulate at Cairo and Alexandria--Preliminaries of Peace between England and France signed at London, followed by Peace of Amiens--Pitt's Irish Policy and his retirement--Debates on the Peace--Aggressions of Bonaparte during the Continental Peace--Holland, Italy, Switzerland--Settlement of Germany under French and Russian influence--Suppression of Ecclesiastical States and Free Cities--Its effects--Stein--France under the Consulate--The Civil Code--The Concordat.

[Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and to England, 1799.]

The establishment of the Consulate gave France peace from the strife of parties. Peace from foreign warfare was not less desired by the nation; and although the First Consul himself was restlessly planning the next campaign, it belonged to his policy to represent himself as the mediator between France and Europe. Discarding the usual diplomatic forms, Bonaparte addressed letters in his own name to the Emperor Francis and to King George III., deploring the miseries inflicted by war upon nations naturally allied, and declaring his personal anxiety to enter upon negotiations for peace. The reply of Austria which was courteously worded, produced an offer on the part of Bonaparte to treat for peace upon the basis of the Treaty of Campo Formio. Such a proposal was the best evidence of Bonaparte's real intentions. Austria had re-conquered Lombardy, and driven the armies of the Republic from the Adige to within a few miles of Nice. To propose a peace which should merely restore the situation existing at the beginning of the war was pure irony. The Austrian Government accordingly declared itself unable to treat without the concurrence of its allies. The answer of England to the overtures of the First Consul was rough and defiant. It recounted the causes of war and distrust which precluded England from negotiating with a revolutionary Government; and, though not insisting on the restoration of the Bourbons as a condition of peace, it stated that no guarantee for the sincerity and good behaviour of France would be so acceptable to Great Britain as the recall of the ancient family. [85]

Few State papers have been distinguished by worse faults of judgment than this English manifesto. It was intended to recommend the Bourbons to France as a means of procuring peace: it enabled Bonaparte to represent England as violently interfering with the rights of the French people, and the Bourbons as seeking their restoration at the hand of the enemy of their country. The answer made to Pitt's Government from Paris was such as one high-spirited nation which had recently expelled its rulers might address to another that had expelled its rulers a century before. France, it was said, had as good a right to dismiss an incapable dynasty as Great Britain.

If Talleyrand's reply failed to convince King George that before restoring the Bourbons he ought to surrender his own throne to the Stuarts, it succeeded in transferring attention from the wrongs inflicted by France to the pretensions advanced by England. That it affected the actual course of events there is no reason to believe. The French Government was well acquainted with the real grounds of war possessed by England, in spite of the errors by which the British Cabinet weakened the statement of its cause. What the ma.s.s of the French people now thought, or did not think, had become a matter of very little importance.

[Situation of the Armies.]

[Moreau invades South Germany, April, 1800.]

The war continued. Winter and the early spring of 1800 pa.s.sed in France amidst vigorous but concealed preparations for the campaign which was to drive the Austrians from Italy. In Piedmont the Austrians spent months in inaction, which might have given them Genoa and completed the conquest of Italy before Bonaparte's army could take the field. It was not until the beginning of April that Melas, their general, a.s.sailed the French positions on the Genoese Apennines; a fortnight more was spent in mountain warfare before Ma.s.sena, who now held the French command, found himself shut up in Genoa and blockaded by land and sea. The army which Bonaparte was about to lead into Italy lay in between Dijon and Geneva, awaiting the arrival of the First Consul. On the Rhine, from Strasburg to Schaffhausen, a force of 100,000 men was ready to cross into Germany under the command of Moreau, who was charged with the task of pus.h.i.+ng the Austrians back from the Upper Danube, and so rendering any attack through Switzerland upon the communications of Bonaparte's Italian force impossible. Moreau's army was the first to move. An Austrian force, not inferior to Moreau's own, lay within the bend of the Rhine that covers Baden and Wurtemberg. Moreau crossed the Rhine at various points, and by a succession of ingenious manoeuvres led his adversary, Kray, to occupy all the roads through the Black Forest except those by which the northern divisions of the French were actually pa.s.sing. A series of engagements, conspicuous for the skill of the French general and the courage of the defeated Austrians, gave Moreau possession of the country south of the Danube as far as Ulm, where Kray took refuge in his entrenched camp. Beyond this point Moreau's instructions forbade him to advance. His task was fulfilled by the severance of the Austrian army from the roads into Italy.

[Bonaparte crosses the Alps, May, 1800.]

Bonaparte's own army was now in motion. Its destination was still secret; its very existence was doubted by the Austrian generals. On the 8th of May the First Consul himself arrived at Geneva, and a.s.sumed the command. The campaign upon which this army was now entering was designed by Bonaparte to surpa.s.s everything that Europe had hitherto seen most striking in war. The feats of Ma.s.sena and Suvaroff in the Alps had filled his imagination with mountain warfare. A victory over nature more imposing than theirs might, in the present position of the Austrian forces in Lombardy, be made the prelude to a victory in the field without a parallel in its effects upon the enemy. Instead of relieving Genoa by an advance along the coast-road, Bonaparte intended to march across the Alps and to descend in the rear of the Austrians. A single defeat would then cut the Austrians off from their communications with Mantua, and result either in the capitulation of their army or in the evacuation of the whole of the country that they had won, Bonaparte led his army into the mountains. The pa.s.s of the Great St.

Bernard, though not a carriage-road, offered little difficulty to a commander supplied with every resource of engineering material and skill; and by this road the army crossed the Alps. The cannons were taken from their carriages and dragged up the mountain in hollowed trees; thousands of mules transported the ammunition and supplies; workshops for repairs were established on either slope of the mountain; and in the Monastery of St.

Bernard there were stores collected sufficient to feed the soldiers as they reached the summit during six successive days (May 15-20). The pa.s.sage of the St. Bernard was a triumph of organisation, foresight, and good management; as a military exploit it involved none of the danger, none of the suffering, none of the hazard, which gave such interest to the campaign of Ma.s.sena and Suvaroff.

[Bonaparte cuts off the Austrian army from Eastern Lombardy.]

Bonaparte had rightly calculated upon the unreadiness of his enemy. The advanced guard of the French army poured down the valley of the Dora-Baltea upon the scanty Austrian detachments at Ivrea and Chiusella, before Melas, who had in vain been warned of the departure of the French from Geneva, arrived with a few thousand men at Turin to dispute the entrance into Italy. Melas himself, on the opening of the campaign, had followed a French division to Nice, leaving General Ott in charge of the army investing Genoa. On reaching Turin he discovered the full extent of his peril, and sent orders to Ott to raise the siege of Genoa and to join him with every regiment that he could collect. Ott, however, was unwilling to abandon the prey at this moment falling into his grasp. He remained stationary till the 5th of June, when Ma.s.sena, reduced to the most cruel extremities by famine, was forced to surrender Genoa to the besiegers. But his obstinate endurance had the full effect of a battle won. Ott's delay rendered Melas powerless to hinder the movements of Bonaparte, when, instead of marching upon Genoa, as both French and Austrians expected him to do, he turned eastward, and thrust his army between the Austrians and their own fortresses. Bonaparte himself entered Milan (June 2); Lannes and Murat were sent to seize the bridges over the Po and the Adda. The Austrian detachment guarding Piacenza was overpowered; the communications of Melas with the country north of the Powere completely severed. Nothing remained for the Austrian commander but to break through the French or to make his escape to Genoa.

[Battle of Marengo, June 14, 1800.]

[Conditions of Armistice.]

The French centre was now at Stradella, half-way between Piacenza and Alessandria. Melas was at length joined by Ott at Alessandria, but so scattered were the Austrian forces, that out of 80,000 men Melas had not more than 33,000 at his command. Bonaparte's forces were equal in number; his only fear was that Melas might use his last line of retreat, and escape to Genoa without an engagement. The Austrian general, however, who had shared with Suvaroff the triumph over Joubert at Novi, resolved to stake everything upon a pitched battle. He awaited Bonaparte's approach at Alessandria. On the 12th of June Bonaparte advanced westward from Stradella. His anxiety lest Melas might be escaping from his hands increased with every hour of the march that brought him no tidings of the enemy; and on the 13th, when his advanced guard had come almost up to the walls of Alessandria without seeing an enemy, he could bear the suspense no longer, and ordered Desaix to march southward towards Novi and hold the road to Genoa. Desaix led off his division. Early the next morning the whole army of Melas issued from Alessandria, and threw itself upon the weakened line of the French at Marengo. The attack carried everything before it: at the end of seven hours' fighting, Melas, exhausted by his personal exertions, returned into Alessandria, and sent out tidings of a complete victory. It was at this moment that Desaix, who had turned at the sound of the cannon, appeared on the field, and declared that, although one battle had been lost, another might be won. A sudden cavalry-charge struck panic into the Austrians, who believed the battle ended and the foe overthrown. Whole brigades threw down their arms and fled; and ere the day closed a ma.s.s of fugitives, cavalry and infantry, thronging over the marshes of the Bormida, was all that remained of the victorious Austrian centre. The suddenness of the disaster, the desperate position of the army, cut off from its communications, overthrew the mind of Melas, and he agreed to an armistice more fatal than an unconditional surrender. The Austrians retired behind the Mincio, and abandoned to the French every fortress in Northern Italy that lay west of that river. A single battle had produced the result of a campaign of victories and sieges. Marengo was the most brilliant in conception of all Bonaparte's triumphs. If in its execution the genius of the great commander had for a moment failed him, no mention of the long hours of peril and confusion was allowed to obscure the splendour of Bonaparte's victory. Every doc.u.ment was altered or suppressed which contained a report of the real facts of the battle. The descriptions given to the French nation claimed only new homage to the First Consul's invincible genius and power. [86]

[Austria continues the war.]

At Vienna the military situation was viewed more calmly than in Melas'

camp. The conditions of the armistice were generally condemned, and any sudden change in the policy of Austria was prevented by a treaty with England, binding Austria, in return for British subsidies, and for a secret promise of part of Piedmont, to make no separate peace with France before the end of February, 1801. This treaty was signed a few hours before the arrival of the news of Marengo. It was the work of Thugut, who still maintained his influence over the Emperor, in spite of growing unpopularity and almost universal opposition. Public opinion, however, forced the Emperor at least to take steps for ascertaining the French terms of peace.

An envoy was sent to Paris; and, as there could be no peace without the consent of England, conferences were held with the object of establis.h.i.+ng a naval armistice between England and France. England, however, refused the concessions demanded by the First Consul; and the negotiations were broken off in September. But this interval of three months had weakened the authority of the Minister and stimulated the intrigues which at every great crisis paralysed the action of Austria. At length, while Thugut was receiving the subsidies of Great Britain and arranging for the most vigorous prosecution of the war, the Emperor, concealing the transaction from his Minister, purchased a new armistice by the surrender of the fortresses of Ulm and Ingolstadt to Moreau's army. [87]

[Battle of Hohenlinden, Dec. 3, 1800.]

A letter written by Thugut after a council held on the 25th of September gives some indication of the stormy scene which then pa.s.sed in the Emperor's presence. Thugut tendered his resignation, which was accepted; and Lehrbach, the author of the new armistice, was placed in office. But the reproaches of the British amba.s.sador forced the weak Emperor to rescind this appointment on the day after it had been published to the world. There was no one in Vienna capable of filling the vacant post; and after a short interval the old Minister resumed the duties of his office, without, however, openly resuming the t.i.tle. The remainder of the armistice was employed in strengthening the force opposed to Moreau, who now received orders to advance upon Vienna. The Archduke John, a royal strategist of eighteen, was furnished with a plan for surrounding the French army and cutting it off from its communications. Moreau lay upon the Isar; the Austrians held the line of the Inn. On the termination of the armistice the Austrians advanced and made some devious marches in pursuance of the Archduke's enterprise, until a general confusion, attributed to the weather, caused them to abandon their manoeuvres and move straight against the enemy. On the 3rd of December the Austrians plunged into the snow-blocked roads of the Forest of Hohenlinden, believing that they had nothing near them but the rear-guard of a retiring French division. Moreau waited until they had reached the heart of the forest, and then fell upon them with his whole force in front, in flank, and in the rear. The defeat of the Austrians was overwhelming. What remained of the war was rather a chase than a struggle. Moreau successively crossed the Inn, the Salza, and the Traun; and on December 25th the Emperor, seeing that no effort of Pitt could keep Moreau out of Vienna, accepted an armistice at Steyer, and agreed to treat for peace without reference to Great Britain.

[Peace of Luneville, Feb. 9, 1801.]