History of the War in the Peninsula and the South of France from the Year 1807 to the Year 1814 (Complete)
9781465676344
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The hostility of the European aristocracy caused the enthusiasm of republican France to take a military direction, and forced that powerful nation into a course of policy which, however outrageous it might appear, was in reality one of necessity. Up to the treaty of Tilsit, the wars of France were essentially defensive; for the bloody contest that wasted the continent so many years was not a struggle for pre-eminence between ambitious powers, not a dispute for some accession of territory, nor for the political ascendancy of one or other nation, but a deadly conflict to determine whether aristocracy or democracy should predominate; whether equality or privilege should henceforth be the principle of European governments. The French revolution was pushed into existence before the hour of its natural birth. The power of the aristocratic principle was too vigorous and too much identified with that of the monarchical principle, to be successfully resisted by a virtuous democratic effort, much less could it be overthrown by a democracy rioting in innocent blood, and menacing destruction to political and religious establishments, the growth of centuries, somewhat decayed indeed, yet scarcely showing their grey hairs. The first military events of the revolution, the disaffection of Toulon and Lyons, the civil war of La Vendee, the feeble, although successful resistance made to the duke of Brunswick’s invasion, and the frequent and violent change of rulers whose fall none regretted, were all proofs that the French revolution, intrinsically too feeble to sustain the physical and moral force pressing it down, was fast sinking when the wonderful genius of Buonaparte, baffling all reasonable calculation, raised and fixed it on the basis of victory, the only one capable of supporting the crude production. Sensible, however, that the cause he upheld was not sufficiently in unison with the feelings of the age, Napoleon’s first care was to disarm or neutralize monarchical and sacerdotal enmity, by restoring a church establishment, and by becoming a monarch himself. Once a sovereign, his vigorous character, his pursuits, his talents, and the critical nature of the times, inevitably rendered him a despotic one; yet while he sacrificed political liberty, which to the great bulk of mankind has never been more than a pleasing sound, he cherished with the utmost care political equality, a sensible good, that produces increasing satisfaction as it descends in the scale of society; but this, the real principle of his government, the secret of his popularity, made him the people’s monarch, not the sovereign of the aristocracy; hence, Mr. Pitt called him, “the child and the champion of democracy,” a truth as evident as that Mr. Pitt and his successors were the children and the champions of aristocracy; hence also the privileged classes of Europe consistently transferred their natural and implacable hatred of the French revolution to his person, for they saw that in him innovation had found a protector; that he alone had given pre-eminence to a system so hateful to them, and that he really was what he called himself, “the State.” The treaty of Tilsit, therefore, although it placed Napoleon in a commanding situation with regard to the potentates of Europe, unmasked the real nature of the war, and brought him and England, the respective champions of equality and privilege, into more direct contact; peace could not be between them while both were strong, and all that the French emperor had hitherto gained only enabled him to choose his future field of battle.
