tions. Venice and Dalmatia acquired to the kingdom of Italy was a commencement. An army of English and Russians had invaded Naples. The French emperor now determined to occupy that country, and expel from thence its reigning house. This was effected by his mere command. He had made kings in Germany of the rulers of Bavaria and Wir temberg. This was merely trying his hand at monarch making: and at the same time Berthier and Murat were cre ated German princes. Now his chancellor and treasurer, Cambacérès and Lebrun, were created dukes; one of Parma, the other of Piacenza or Plaisance. And, among the lately acquired provinces of Venice, Dalmatia, Istria Friuli, Belluno, Feltre, Bassano, Vicenza, and Rovigo, were declared duchies, and assigned to the generals and statesmen of the imperial court. Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother of Napoleon was declared king of Naples; and Louis king of Holland: the latter was a mild domestic character: he had espoused Hortense Beauharnois, the daughter of Josephine. This princess had been a great favorite with Napoleon; so much so that calumny had attached criminality to their friendship. We believe this to be false. Hortense, whose character strikes us in a more interesting light, as having composed that well-known air and song, "Partant pour la Syrie," was attached to the brave Duroc, who, perhaps shaken by the calumnies which assailed her, desisted from following up the suit which he had at first paid. Napoleon, who was not adverse to this match, on its being broken off gave Hortense to his brother Louis, an event that made both unhappy. Such were the new king and queen of Holland. According to the received rules of romance writers, the present was the acmé of the hero's prosperity; naught was heard of but marriage and principality. Few of his relations were forgotten: in this respect none but his own views of grandeur were postponed. Already, indeed, he began to meditate divorce and an ambitious remarriage. The smallest want or flaw in the fabric of ambition renders him who rears it wretched. and although hereditary right had been decreed to belong to Napoleon, the clause was rendered null by nature. As to laws of morality or religion, we have seen that Bonaparte had been altogether without respect for them; but he was attached tc Josephine, and sincerely longed to render his schemes consistent with her happiness. When this became no longer possible, the latter was sacrificed: but this period had not yet arrived; although he could scarcely pardon himself for the crime of ignoble marriage, which he so severely reproached and visited upon his brothers Lucien and Jerome. These had no 1806. DEATH OF PITT. 201 share in the honors of the day. His sisters were now all elevated to rank. Caroline espoused Murat the duke of Berg; Eliza was given the sovereignty of Lucca; and Pauline, the youngest, widow of general Leclerc, brought Guastalla in dowry to the Roman prince Borghese: Eugene Beauharnois at the same time married the daughter of the king of Bavaria; Talleyrand became prince of Benevento, Bernadotte of Ponte-Corvo. In the great struggle of France for European supremacy if not for universal dominion, to which circumstances partly impelled, and ambition partly prompted Bonaparte, there is neither space nor interest to spare for the pettier details of internal administration, the preparation of codes, or the financial crisis which, at the epoch of Austerlitz, paralyzed the commerce, and nearly ruined the bank, of France. Diplomacy and war occupy the entire scene, and demand to possess it exclusively. In the commencement of 1806, some weeks after the battle of Austerlitz, Pitt breathed his last. On Fox's succeeding to him, there was some expectation of peace; and intercourse commenced by a letter of that statesman, warning the French emperor of an offer made to assassinate him. Negotiation followed, to which the great obstacle of success seemed to be, that the French insisted upon Sicily in addition to Naples. The most remarkable circumstance connected with these negotiations is the anxiety of Talleyrand to conclude a peace, and the sagacious and almost prophetic views on which were founded this anxiety. He saw clearly, and said, that without a peace with England, Napoleon should go on warring, fighting battle after battle; which, with every chance in his favor, was still continuing to gamble, and to stake his fortune upon a throw, instead of insuring and enjoying what he possessed.* After all, an agreement, however styled a peace, could have been but a truce. Napoleon had derived the great consequences of his late victories: but the petty corollaries were yet to follow; state after state must fall within the vortex of his power, or else resist it; and submission could have been the only temper in which England would support peace. She had not yet been reduced to that. Austria and Southern Germany were completely under the : *This testimony to the profound sagacity of Talleyrand is taken from the memoires of his enemy, the duc de Rovigo. The passage is somewhat un translatable "M. de Talleyrand poussait les conferences avec activité; rien ne lui eût coûte pour faire conclure la paix avec l'Angleterre. Il disait, à qui voulait l'éntendre, que, sans elle, tout était problême pour l'empereur ; qu'il n'y aurait qu'une suite de batailles heureuses qui le consoliderait, et que cela se reduisait à une série, dont premier terme était A, et dont le dernier pouvait être Y ou Zero ?” power and the ȧxtation of Napoleon. Italy was his, from the Alps to Tarentum: Spain was obsequious as a province. The only independent power bordering on France, for France now extended to the Elbe, was Prussia. She was to be the next; and, with sufficient fatuity, she did not see this until it was too late. She had acted altogether a most unworthy and imprudent part. We have spoken of the two treaties; one signed by Haugwitz with Napoleon, the other by Hardenberg with England, both in December, 1805. Perplexed by her bad faith, Prussia obtained the advantage of neither: she naturally hesitated to accept Hanover, and to shut her ports against England; but as Anspach and Cleves, ceded by Haugwitz, were already seized by the French, Prussia resolved to break with England rather than not get an equivalent; and her troops, accordingly, occupied Hanover. England raised an outcry. Fox declared the conduct of Prussia to be "every thing that was contemptible in servility, and all that was odious in rapacity.' Napoleon pursued his measures; he libelled Hardenberg in the Moniteur, accused him of selling his country, and at length procured his dismissal despite the support and interference of the queen. Prussia had dishonored herself for the sake of Hanover and the French alliance; what then was her mortification on learning, through the English papers, that Napoleon had offered to restore Hanover to Great Britain as the price of peace! Nothing was more evident, than that the French emperor was merely making a tool of Prussia; and that he was prepared to crush her, to slight her, and to seize the first pretext for both. The accomplishment of a new scheme of Napoleon was still more alarming to Prussia. This was the confederation of the Rhine, by which the smaller German states, which hitherto had met or sent their envoys to a diet, presided over by the emperor of Germany, were incorporated into a new federation, of which France was the head. These states were bound in alliance, defensive and offensive, with the French emperor; the quantity of their contingents fixed; so that, in fact, Napoleon became suzerain of the greater part of Germany. Austria could make no resistance to a measure, which she had almost proposed, in declaring her emperor's title hereditary. That sovereign now abdicated the ancient authority over Germany, which his ancestors, for so many centuries, had possessed. With his declaration, in 1806, may be considered to terminate the reign of the modern Cæsars. The confederation of the Rhine, though drawn up, agreed on, and signed in July, was still kept secret for some time, and its ratification delayed. Negotiations were going on with 1806. WAR WITH PRUSSIA. 203 England and with Russia; and had they succeeded, at least had that with England succeeded, the new scheme of usurpation would have been kept back and in reserve, until a favorable opportunity occurred for declaring it. Peace with England, however, failing to be accomplished, and the war-party getting the uppermost in Russia, Bonaparte ratified and pablicly announced the confederation of the Rhine; flinging it, like a bold defiance, in the face of the powers that still resisted him. Prussia was instantly in a state of mistrust and alarm, increased by learning that Napoleon had offered to restore Hanover to England. The French, indeed, made offers; invited Frederic to form, on his side, a similar confederacy in the north, and to assume the imperial title also. But the court of Berlin, though flattered by the proposal, received on all sides too many proofs of the bad faith, and slighting, if not hostile, intentions of France, to put trust in her offers. The breaking off of negotiations between Great Britain, Russia, and France, took place in July, 1806, as did the ratification of the confederacy of the Rhine. In August, Prussia sounded the trump of war, by increasing her army, and calling forth its reserves. Cause she might have for this act; yet not more cause than the last ten years might have afforded. Had Prussia united with Austria in the second or third coalition, before that power had received a final and stunning blow, France might, in all probability, not have succeeded in establishing a tyrannic supremacy over Europe. But selfish timidity kept her arms tied then; and now, when the French emperor was in his might, in the pride of victory, when Austria was humbled, Prussia steps forth, like a David before the great Go liah, but without either meriting or possessing that divine protection which enabled the young Israelite to triumph. If it was imprudence in Prussia to have decided upon war, it was madness not to have sought and awaited the aid of Russia and Great Britain. Yet when Lord Morpeth, the envoy of the latter country, spoke of Hanover, he was answered, that its fate depended upon a battle: in other words, if Prussia won, she kept it; if she lost, Napoleon would take it for himself. As little eagerness was shown by Frederic to avail himself of the aid of Alexander. His army, which, indeed, it was difficult to restrain, pushed forward into Saxony, for the purpose of forcing the elector to join his troops to those of Prussia: and Hesse was equally summoned to take up the cause of North Germany against France. For the sake of forcing these alliances, the Prussian army was advanced south to Weimar, far from its own territory. and from Russian ail The blunder of Mack at Ulm was repeated. The French force was already collecting. Bonaparte left Paris in the latter end of September. He came by Mayence to Wurtzburg; and was at Bamberg, the rendezvous of his irmy, on the 6th of October. Here was the war preluded by summonses and proclamations on both sides. The king of Prussia bade the French quit Germany, whose soil they had no right to tread. Napoleon returned the bravado most ungenerously, by making not Frederic, but his queen, the object of his attack. A French bulletin says, "The queen of Prus sia is at the army, clothed as an Amazon, wearing the uniform of her regiment of dragoons, and penning twenty letters a-day, in order to kindle flames on every side. One might believe her to be Armida out of her senses, setting fire to her own palace. Near her is the young prince Louis, overflowing with valor, and expecting. vast renown from the vicissitudes of war. Echoing these two illustrious personages, the entire court cries 'To war! But when war shall have come, with all its horrors, it is then that each will vainly endeavor to excuse himself from the guilt of having drawn down its thunders upon the peaceful countries of the north." The Prussian army, commanded by the old duke of Brunswick and its king in person, was scattered along the high road from Eisenach to Weimar. As it had advanced so far, it should have taken the offensive, and pushed further on. But Brunswick was not capable of forming and persisting in a plan; the march made by a corps one day, it countermarched the next. Not so Napoleon; the French army came from the south. The road by which the Prussians had come, by which they must retreat, and along which were their magazines, ran from Weimar, where they were, in a north-eastern direction to Leipzig, and by consequence obliquely to the French. Bonaparte resolved to march upon it, rather than upon Weimar, and thus cut off the Prussians from their home and their magazines. This was effected; the only resistance being made at Saalfield by prince Louis. But the Prussians, unsupported, were driven in, and prince Louis himself slain by a serjeant, who in vain called to him to surrender. The French now occupied the course of the Saale, their backs to Germany; whilst the Prussians were obliged to turn theirs to France, in facing the enemy that had intercepted them. The main force of the French under Napoleon crossed the Saale at Jena; whilst two divisions, under Davoust and Bernadotte, more to the northward, had occupied Nuremberg, also on the Saale, and on the high road from Weimar, where the Prussians were, to Leipzig and Berlin. To dislodge these, and restore the intercepted communications, was now the chief |
