[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Page 123
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
represented the decision-compelling spirit, the second the spirit of risking
little to gain a little’."
And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the Marseillaise
and fighting for la France, manifestly never quite clear in their minds
whether they were looting or liberating the countries into which they poured,
the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending itself in a far less glorious
fashion. The revolution was now under the sway of a fanatical leader,
Robespierre. This man is difficult to judge; he was a man of poor physique,
naturally timid, and a prig. But he had that most necessary gift for power,
faith. He set himself to save the Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined
it could be saved by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to
save the Republic. The living spirit of the Republic, it seemed, had sprung
from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king. There were
insurrections; one in the west, in the district of La Vendée, where the people
rose against the conscription and against the dispossession of the orthodox
clergy, and were led by noblemen and priests; one in the south, where Lyons
and Marseilles had risen and the royalists of Toulon had admitted an English
and Spanish garrison. To which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go
on killing royalists.
The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering began. The
invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood. The queen was
guillotined, most of Robespierre's antagonists were guillotined, atheists who
argued that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined; day by day, week by
week, this infernal new machine chopped off heads and more heads and more. The
reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood; and needed more and more, as
an opium-taker needs more and more opium.
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was overthrown and
guillotined. He was succeeded by a Directory of five men which carried on the
war of defence abroad and held France together at home for five years. Their
reign formed a curious interlude in this history of violent changes. They took
things as they found them. The propagandist zeal of the revolution carried the
French armies into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, south Germany and north
Italy. Everywhere kings were expelled and republics set up. But such
propagandist zeal as animated the Directorate did not prevent the looting of
the treasures of the liberated peoples to relieve the financial embarrassment
of the French Government. Their wars became less and less the holy wars of
freedom, and more and more like the aggressive wars of the ancient regime. The
last feature of Grand Monarchy that France was disposed to discard was her
tradition of foreign policy. One discovers it still as vigorous under the
Directorate as if there had been no revolution.
Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied in its intensest
form this national egotism of the French. He gave that country ten years of
glory and the humiliation of a final defeat. This was that same Napoleon
Bonaparte who had led the armies of the Directory to victory in Italy.
Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been scheming and working
for self-advancement. Gradually he clambered to supreme power. He was a man of
severely limited understanding but of ruthless directness and great energy. He
had begun life as an extremist of the school of Robespierre; he owed his first
promotion to that side; but he had no real grasp of the new forces that were
working in Europe. His utmost political imagination carried him to a belated
and tawdry attempt to restore the Western Empire. He tried to destroy the
remains of the old Holy Roman Empire, intending to replace it by a new one
centring upon Paris. The Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman Emperor
and became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his French wife in
order to marry an Austrian princess.
Page 124
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
He became practically monarch of France as First Consul in 1799, and he made
himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct imitation of Charlemagne. He was
crowned by the Pope in Paris, taking the crown from the Pope and putting it
upon his own head himself as Charlemagne had directed. His son was crowned
King of Rome.
For some years Napoleon's reign was a career of victory. He conquered most of
Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria, and dominated all Europe west
of Russia. But he never won the command of the sea from the British and his
fleets sustained a conclusive defeat inflicted by the British Admiral Nelson
at Trafalgar (1805). Spain rose against him in 1808 and a British army under
Wellington thrust the French armies slowly northward out of the peninsula. In
1811 Napoleon came into conflict with the Tsar Alexander I, and in 1812 he
invaded Russia with a great conglomerate army of 600,000 men, that was
defeated and largely destroyed by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]