William Sloane - The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4)

The states of Europe are sisters, children of the Holy Roman Empire. In the formation of strong nationalities with differences in language, religion, and institutions the relationship was almost forgotten, and in the intensity of later rivalry is not always even now remembered. It is, however, so close that at any epoch there is traceable a common movement which occupies them all. By the end of the fourteenth century they had secured their modern form in territorial and race unity with a government by monarchy more or less absolute. The fifteenth century saw with the strengthening of the monarchy the renascence of the fine arts, the great inventions, the awakening of enterprise in discovery, the mental quickening which began to call all authority to account. The sixteenth was the age of the Reformation, an event too often belittled by ecclesiastics who discern only its schismatic character, and not sufficiently emphasized by historians as the most pregnant political fact of any age with respect to the rise and growth of free institutions.

The seventeenth century saw in England the triumph of political ideas adapted to the new state of society which had arisen, but subversive of the tyrannical system which had done its work, a work great and good in the creation of peoples and the production of social order out of chaos. For a time it seemed as if the island state were to become the overshadowing influence in all the rest of Europe. By the middle of the century her example had fired the whole continent with notions of political reform. The long campaign which she and her allies waged with varying fortune against Louis XIV, commanding the conservative forces of the Latin blood, and the Roman religion ended unfavorably to the latter. At the close of the Seven Years' War there was not an Englishman in Europe or America or in the colonies at the antipodes whose pulse did not beat high as he saw his motherland triumphant in every quarter of the globe.

But these very successes, intensifying the bitterness of defeat and everything connected with it, prevented among numerous other causes the triumph of constitutional government anywhere in continental Europe. Switzerland was remote and inaccessible; her beacon of democracy burned bright, but its rays scarcely shone beyond the mountain valleys. The Dutch republic, enervated by commercial success and under a constitution which by its intricate system of checks was a satire on organized liberty, had become a warning rather than a model to other nations.

The other members of the great European state family presented a curious spectacle. On every hand there was a cheerful trust in the future. The present was as bad as possible, but belonged to the passing and not to the coming hour. Truth was abroad, felt the philosophers, and must prevail. Feudal privilege, oppression, vice and venality in government, the misery of the poor—all would slowly fade away. The human mind was never keener than in the eighteenth century; reasonableness, hope, and thoroughness characterized its activity. Natural science, metaphysics and historical studies made giant strides, while political theories of a dazzling splendor never equaled before nor since were rife on every side. Such was their power in a buoyant society, awaiting the millennium, that they supplanted entirely the results of observation and experience in the sphere of government.

But neither lever nor fulcrum was strong enough as yet to stir the inert mass of traditional forms. Monarchs still flattered themselves with notions of paternal government and divine right; the nobility still claimed and exercised baseless privileges which had descended from an age when their ancestors held not merely these but the land on which they rested; the burgesses still hugged, as something which had come from above, their dearly bought charter rights, now revealed as inborn liberties. They were thus hardened into a gross contentment dangerous for themselves, and into an indifference which was a menace to others. The great agricultural populations living in various degrees of serfdom still groaned under the artificial oppressions of a society which had passed away. Nominally the peasant might own certain portions of the soil, but he could not enjoy unmolested the airs which blew over it nor the streams which ran through it nor the wild things which trespassed or dwelt on it, while on every side some exasperating demand for the contribution of labor or goods or money confronted him.

In short, the civilized world was in one of those transitional epochs when institutions persist, after the beliefs and conditions which molded them have utterly disappeared. The inertia of such a rock-ribbed shell is terrible, and while sometimes the erosive power of agitation and discussion suffices to weaken and destroy it, more often the volcanic fires of social convulsion are alone strong enough. The first such shock came from within the English-speaking world itself, but not in Europe. The American colonies, appreciating and applying to their own conditions the principles of the English Revolution, began, and with French assistance completed, the movement which erected in another hemisphere the American republic. Weak and tottering in its infancy, but growing ever stronger and therefore milder, its example began at once to suggest the great and peaceful reforms of the English constitution which have since followed. Threatening absolutism in the strong contrasts its citizens presented to the subjects of other lands, it has been ever since the moral support of liberal movements the world around. England herself, instead of being weakened, was strengthened by the child grown to independent maturity, and a double example of prosperity under constitutional administration was now held up to the continent of Europe.

But it is the greatest proof of human weakness that there is no movement however beneficent, no doctrine however sound, no truth however absolute, but that it can be speciously so extended, so expanded, so emphasized as to lose its identity. Coincident with the political speculation of the eighteenth century appeared the storm and stress of romanticism and sentimentalism. The extremes of morbid personal emotion were thought serviceable for daily life, while the middle course of applying ideals to experience was utterly abandoned. The latest nihilism differs little from the conception of the perfect regeneration of mankind by discarding the old merely because it was old which triumphed in the latter half of the eighteenth century among philosophers and wits. To be sure, they had a substitute for whatever was abolished and a supplement for whatever was left incomplete.

Even the stable sense of the Americans was infected by the virus of mere theories. In obedience to the spirit of the age they introduced into their written constitution, which was in the main but a statement of their deep-seated political habits, a scheme like that of the electoral college founded on some high-sounding doctrine, or omitted from it in obedience to a prevalent and temporary extravagance of protest some fundamental truth like that of the Christian character of their government and laws. If there be anywhere a Christian Protestant state it is the United States; if any futile invention were ever incorporated in a written charter it was that of the electoral college. The addition of a vague theory or the omission of essential national qualities in the document of the constitution has affected our subsequent history little or not at all.

But such was not the case in a society still under feudal oppression. Fictions like the contract theory of government, exploded by the sound sense of Burke; political generalizations like certain paragraphs of the French Declaration of Rights, every item of which now and here reads like a platitude but was then and there a vivid revolutionary novelty; emotional yearnings for some vague Utopia—all fell into fruitful soil and produced a rank harvest, mostly of straw and stalks, although there was some sound grain. The thought of the time was a powerful factor in determining the course and the quality of events throughout all Europe. No nation was altogether unmoved. The center of agitation was in France, although the little Calvinistic state of Geneva brought forth the prophet and writer of the times.