Array Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - The Collected Works of Napoleon Bonaparte

England alone remained outside the pale, England alone had not been brought to bend the knee to the great conqueror. Even she was breathing heavily, because the Continental System was inflicting terrible damage upon her. Factories were being forced to England shut down, multitudes of laborers were being thrown out shows signs of work or were receiving starvation wages, riots and other evidences of unrest and even desperation seemed to indicate that even she must soon come to terms.

But this vast and imposing fabric of power rested upon uncertain bases. Built up, story upon story, by this highly imaginative and able mind, the architect left out of reckoning or despised the strains and stresses to which it was increasingly subjected. The rapidity with which this colossal structure fell to pieces in a few years shows how poorly consolidated it was, how rickety and precarious its foundations. Even a slight analysis will reveal numerous and foreboding elements of weakness beneath all this pomp and pageantry of power. Erected by the genius of a single man, it depended solely upon his life and fortunes and fortune is notoriously fickle. Built up by war, by conquest, it was necessarily environed by the hatred of the conquered. With every advance, every annexation, it annexed additional sources of discontent. Based on force, it could only be maintained by force. There could be and there was in all this vast extent of empire no common loyalty to the Emperor. Despotism, and Napoleon's regime was one based on pitiless despotism, evoked no loyalty, only obedience based on fear.

Europe has always refused to be dominated by a single nation or by a single man. It has run the risk several times in its history of passing under such a yoke, but it always in the end succeeded in escaping it. Universal dominion is an anachronism. The secret of Great Britain's hold upon many of the component parts of her empire lies in the fact that she allows them liberty to develop their own life in their own way. But such a conception was utterly beyond Napoleon, contrary to all his instincts and convictions. His empire meant the negation of liberty in the various countries which he dominated, France included. Napoleon's conquests necessarily ranged against him this powerful and unconquerable spirit. The more conquests, the more enemies, only waiting intently for the moment of liberation, scanning the horizon everywhere for the first sign of weakness which to them would be the harbinger of hope. This they found in Spain, and in the Austrian campaign in 1809 in which the machinery of military conquest had creaked, had worked clumsily, had threatened at one moment to break down.

There was a force in the world which ran directly counter to Napoleon's projects, the principle of nationality. Napoleon despised this feeling, and in the end it was his undoing. He might have foreseen that it had been the strength of France a few years earlier, that now this spirit had passed beyond the natural nationality boundaries and was waking into a new life, was nerving to a new vigor, countries like Spain, even Austria and, most conspicuously, Prussia.

Prussia after Jena underwent the most serious humiliation a nation can be called to endure. For several years she was under the iron heel of Napoleon, who kept large armies quartered on her soil, who drained her resources, who interfered peremptorily in the management of her government, who forbade her to have more than 42,000 soldiers in her army. But out of the very depths of this national degradation came Prussia's salvation. Her noblest spirits were aroused to seek the causes of this unexpected and immeasurable national calamity and to try to remedy them. From 1808 to 1812 Prussians, under the very scrutiny of Napoleon, who had eyes but did not see, worked passionately upon the problem of national regeneration. The result surpassed belief. A tremendous national patriotism was aroused by the poets and thinkers, the philosophers and teachers, all bending their energies to the task of quickening among the youth the spirit of unselfish devotion to the fatherland. An electric current of enthusiasm, of idealism, swept through the educational centers and through large masses of the people. The University of Berlin, founded in 1809, in Prussia's darkest hour, was, from the beginning, a dynamic force. It and other universities became nurseries of patriotism.

Prussia underwent regeneration in other ways. Particularly memorable was the work of two statesmen, Stein and Hardenberg. Stein, in considering the causes of Prussia's unexampled woes, came to the conclusion that they lay in her defective or harmful social and legal institutions. The masses of Prussia were serfs, bound to the soil, their personal liberty gravely restricted, and, as Stein said, Prussia "patriots cannot be made out of serfs." He persuaded the King to issue an edict of emancipation, abolishing serfdom.

The Prussian King, he said, was no longer "the king of slaves, but of free men." Many other reforms were passed abolishing or reducing class distinctions and privileges. In all this Stein was largely imitating the French Revolutionists who by their epoch-making reforms had released the energies of the French so that their power had been vastly augmented. The army, too, was reorganized, opportunity was opened to talent, as in France, with what magical results we have seen. As Napoleon forbade that the Prussian army should number more than 42,000 men, the ingenious device was hit upon of having men serve with the colors only a brief time, long enough to learn the essentials of the soldier's life. Then they would pass into Army reserve and others would be put rapidly through the same training. By this method several times 42,000 men received a military training whose effectiveness was later to be proved. Thus Prussia's regeneration went on. The new national spirit, wonderfully invigorated, waited with impatience for its hour of probation. It should be noted, however, that these reforms, which resembled in many respects those accomplished in France by the Constituent Assembly and the Convention, and which were in fact suggested by them, rested however, on very different principles. There was in Prussia no assertion of the Rights of Man, no proclamation of the people as sovereign. In Prussia it was the king who made the reforms, not the people. The theory of the divine right of the monarch was not touched but was maintained as sacred as ever. There was reform in Prussia but no revolution. Prussia took no step toward democracy.

This distinction has colored the whole subsequent history of that kingdom and colors it today. " Every thing for the people, nothing by the people," was evidently the underlying principle in this work of national reorganization. Even these reforms were not carried out completely, owing to opposition from within the kingdom and from without. But, though incomplete, they were very vitalizing.

Napoleon's policies had created other enmities in abundance which were mining the ground beneath him. His treatment of the Pope, whom he held as a prisoner and whose temporal power he had abolished by incorporating his states, a part in the French Empire and a part in the Kingdom of Italy, made the Catholic clergy everywhere hostile, and offended the faithful. Rome, hitherto the papal capital, was declared the second city of the Empire and served as a title for Napoleon's son. All rights of the Pope were thus cavalierly ignored. The vast and subtle influence of the Church was of course now directed to the debasement of the man it had previously conspicuously favored and exalted. In addition to combatting the rising tide of nationality, Napoleon henceforth also had his quarrel with the Papacy.

Into these entanglements he had been brought by the necessities of his conflict with England, by the Continental Blockade. For it was that system that drove him on from one aggression to another, from annexation to annexation. That system, too, created profound discontent in all the countries of the continent, including France itself. By enormously raising the price of such necessaries as cotton and sugar and coffee and tea, products of Britain's colonies or of the tropical countries with which she traded, they introduced hardship and irritation into every home. The normal course of business was turned inside out and men suddenly found their livelihood gone and ruin threatening or already upon them. To get the commodities to which they were accustomed they smuggled on a large and desperate scale. This led to new and severe regulations and widespread harsher punishments, and thus the tyrannical interference in their private lives made multitudes in every country hate the tyranny and long for its overthrow. Widespread economic suffering was the inevitable result of the Continental System and did more to make Napoleon's rule unpopular throughout Europe than did anything else except the enormous waste of life occasioned by the incessant warfare. That system, too, was the chief cause of the rupture of the alliance between Russia and France, in 1812, a rupture which led to appalling disaster for Napoleon and was the beginning of the end. The whole stupendous superstructure of Napoleonic statecraft and diplomacy fell like a house of cards in the three years 1812, 1813, and 1814.