Page images
PDF
EPUB

Hohenzollerns. Herein is seen the fatal vice of absolutism, - it demands a constant succession of men of genius on the throne, and such a succession never has been and never will be seen. A Frederick the Great has generally been soon followed by a Frederick William the Fat; a Charlemagne by a Charles the Simple; a Charles V by a Philip II; an Elizabeth by a line of Stuarts; a Henry IV by a Louis XIII; a Napoleon I by a Napoleon III; a Joseph II by a Francis I; a Peter the Great by an Alexis; a Catherine by a Paul; a Nicholas I by a Nicholas II.

The new Prussian king, in essentials, was much like Louis XV of France, perhaps a better-hearted man, but, as a monarch, worse than worthless. Each of these two sovereigns received in early years the title of "well beloved," — the French king being called "Le BienAimé," and the Prussian "Der viel Geliebte." Both were. good-natured; both lazily wished their subjects well; both firmly believed that their subjects existed for them, and not they for their subjects; both were hopelessly licentious, and at the same time excessively orthodox; both were consequently brought to grief by the wiles of women and priests; each was very anxious, while pampering his body, to save his soul, and to save the souls of his people; each had an instinctive dread of the new philosophy, and both resorted to the same futile means of checking it.

Decay in Prussia, and indeed, throughout Germany, now became rapid. Most effective of all disintegrating influences were two, and both mainly from France: the influence of the old French corruption and of the new French freedom; it was like applying to granite, first fire. then water.

For the only time in its history, Prussia was now largely influenced by courtesans and favorites, after the Louis XV manner. Frederick I, seventy years before, had shown some tendency toward Bourbon methods, but his good sense, inherited from his father, the Great Elec

tor, prevented their becoming dominant; Frederick, William I had kept them out by brutality; Frederick the Great, by common sense; and if either of these committed sins, they were not flaunted before his people.

The internal administration of the new King, Frederick William II, soon became, in its essential features, like that which had impoverished France and almost all the lesser courts and governments of Germany. For favorites and mistresses he carved estates from the public domain, and lavished treasure, patents of nobility, and orders of chivalry. His example spread his own view of life, first through the court and Berlin society, then through the higher classes of the whole country. Corruption came. then extravagance, then debts and dishonesty. Wöllner, called into the cabinet, distinguished himself by edicts thoroughly in the interest of the old Protestant orthodoxy, though expressly allowing the clergy to disbelieve, if they would keep their disbelief to themselves. He strengthened the censorship of the press, instituted doctrinal test examinations, and gave special instructions to prevent any new views filtering down among the people. Kant, at Königsberg, the future glory of Prussia and of Germany, was, indeed, elaborating a new and better philosophy; his work in establishing new foundations for morality was perhaps the greatest single force in human thought during the nineteenth century; but he showed some tendency toward freedom of opinion, and this brought from Berlin stern reproofs; he was told to hold his peace, lest worse befall him.

The external policy of the new King differed no less widely from that of his predecessor. The great Frederick had concentrated his efforts upon the safety and welfare of his own country; but Frederick William the Fat scattered his forces in efforts, more or less vague, to accomplish something noteworthy in other countries. It was a policy of meddling and muddling which brought neither

strength nor glory. The Prussian army was sent into the Netherlands to aid one of the parties there, and gained some trifling victories; but the efforts of the Prussian Foreign Office to continue the work of Frederick the Great within the limits of Germany resulted mainly in a series of farces, the dupe being sometimes Prussia and sometimes Austria.1

While this was going on, the flood of French liberty, equality, and fraternity seemed about to break over all barriers raised by German officialism. Three years after the accession of Frederick William the Fat, the French Revolution burst forth, showing as yet little of its evil side, but warming and stirring all Europe by its enunciation of new truths. The resistance of the States-General to king and court, the establishment of the National Assembly in apparent harmony with the monarch, the renunciation of privileges by the nobility, the pamphlets of Sieyes, the speeches of Bailly and Mirabeau, leavened German thought.

What was done in Prussia to meet this tide? Worse than nothing. A few concessions as to military service were flung to the privileged classes; a few concessions of milder discipline to the army; a few shiftings of burdens from the upper classes, who made themselves heard, upon the lower classes, who were dumb; but the main mass of abuses in Prussia and in every other German state remained.

The political action of the Prussian Kingdom, both internal and external, at this period was profoundly immoral. In spite of pledges to protect the integrity of Poland, the partitioning of that wretched country went on. No doubt Poland had shown herself unfit to exist as a nation; no doubt her government had been the most preposterous in Christendom; her nobles anarchic; her laboring classes priest-ridden, and consequently ignorant

1 For a brief statement of some other differences between Frederick the Great and Frederick William the Fat, see Gneist: Denkschriften des Freiherrn von Stein, page 3.

and hopeless; no doubt the whole Polish people who came under the power of Austria, Prussia, and even Russia, were material gainers; but seizing and appro priating an independent nation in time of peace was setting a precedent which the partitioning powers had, and still have, reason to lament - bitterly.

Meantime, the French Revolution was passing into its more threatening phase, and Prussia made new blunders. The crowned heads of Europe took counsel together, among them, especially, the German Emperor Leopold and King Frederick William the Fat; and there was issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, which simply drew upon Germany the French fury of 1792. In one of his admirable essays, Von Sybel declares the idea that the allied monarchs made war against France a popular fallacy. This assertion seems unworthy of so great a historian. Technically speaking, the war was made by France; really, it was made by the powers allied against her; the French, indeed, declared war, but the declaration by the allied monarchs had made war inevitable; the Republicans at Paris had the wit to see this; the Royalists at Berlin and Vienna had not.

The armies of Prussia and Austria were now pushed against France, and at first the French troops gave way; in some cases panic seized them: they threw down their arms and fled for their lives, strikingly like the Union troops invading the South at the beginning of our own Civil War. Essentially, their great panic near Saint-Menehould was amazingly like our great panic at Bull Run. But soon all was changed. Prussians and Austrians wore out their strength in intrigues regarding their shares in the plunder of Poland, and in wretched squabbles for precedence; worst of all, they issued the famous Brunswick Manifesto, which, by its threats, infused into every Frenchman the courage of desperation. The Germans now began to be pushed back; better commanders arose among the

French, who beat the allies, first at Valmy and Jemappes, and later all along the Rhine, until at last, in 1795, Prussia escaped from the whole complication by making the Peace of Basle, thereby deserting her ally, Austria, allowing France to take all the left bank of the Rhine, including Belgium and Holland, and receiving, as a bribe, permission to Ideal with the lesser North German States as she chose, to annex and oppress them to her heart's content.

While Prussia was thus rapidly losing the strength and prestige given her by Frederick the Great, Frederick William, "the well beloved," went on with his pleasures. Our Gouverneur Morris, who was presented to him at court in 1797, wrote home that, robust as the King seemed to be, it was evident that his time was to be short. This prophecy of the shrewd American was realized even more rapidly than he expected, for Frederick William II died that same year, and there came to the throne his son, Frederick William III.

[ocr errors]

The new King seemed more unpromising than his father in every respect save in morals. He was diffident, awkward, undecided, slow. He had been wretchedly educated, partly under bigots, partly under debauchees; his spirit had been crushed by the favorites of his father; he was at first, to all appearance, the most forlorn and hopeless Hohenzollern who ever existed; and yet, deep in his heart and mind was a spark of that genius which has given to the Hohenzollerns the German Empire. At his accession this showed itself in some spasmodic attempts at reform; the Countess of Lichtenau, who, through his father, had ruled the court, he banished, and Wöllner he drove from the service; but soon, though he kept clean, and clear from his father's evil surroundings, he subsided into the hands of the old politicians of his father's time: tricksters like Haugwitz, Lucchesini, and the like. Meantime, history went on in France, also, and a very different history. The

French Revolution had raised vast armies and developed great generals, and among these, Bonaparte. France had thrown off her old shackles, distributed her church lands and the estates of refractory nobles, transformed her serfs into free citizens, and developed the courage of desperation.

[ocr errors]

Germany and Prussia clung to the old system; even the people refused to accept reforms; Joseph II of Austria, for his efforts to better his country, had gained from the people, apparently, nothing but curses, and died of a broken heart. The game of the French, especially after Bonaparte had arrived as "the man on horseback," the natural result of liberty gone mad, — was easy; they played the continental governments against one another, bribing some, crushing others; and to prevent the larger states from becoming too powerful, they grouped the smaller states and tied them, by their ambitions, to France, thus, in due time, creating the kingdoms of Bavaria, Würtemberg, Westphalia, the Confederation of the Rhine, and various petty satrapies, in which hopes of gain from France were substituted for loyalty to Germany. In 1803 large parts of Germany, outside of these greater divisions, were divided up to make bribes, for such use among German rulers as the conqueror might think best; fifty thousand square miles, with three millions of inhabitants, were thus appropriated, and in this process over two hundred small German states were deprived of their sovereignty and extinguished. As in the time of Bismarck, sixty years later, princes who had steadily refused to make any concessions to patriotism or right reason were crushed and ground out of existence by men of "blood and iron."

Austria, not being supported by Prussia, was stripped by successive conquests, humiliated at Ulm by one of the most ignominious capitulations in history, and finally, in 1805, crushed at the battle

of Austerlitz, and forced to submit to the terrible Peace of Pressburg, which deprived her of her most important outlying territories on all sides.

[ocr errors]

Now began a new series of humiliations for Prussia. Had she joined heartily with Austria and Russia against Napoleon, the result might have been widely different; but she dallied and delayed until the treaty of Pressburg had ruined her natural allies, apparently forever. As usual in the early days of Frederick William III, before he had been schooled by disaster, he delayed until too late. Before the battle of Austerlitz he had sent Haugwitz to meet Napoleon, with an ultimatum threatening war; but the interview was put off until the battle had been fought, and that changed everything; Napoleon having utterly crushed Austria and driven off Russia, Haugwitz was obliged to put the ultimatum in his pocket and pretend that he had been sent to propose mediation for the benefit of Europe and to congratulate the conqueror on his victory. Napoleon knew that Haugwitz was lying, and Haugwitz knew that Napoleon knew that he was lying; but they now made the Treaty of Schönbrunn, a private letter from the Prussian King allowing Haugwitz to take the responsibility

-

a treaty apparently most favorable to Prussia, but really the greatest humiliation in her history.1 For Napoleon, knowing the Prussian need of peace, promised that if Prussia would separate herself

1 For a scathing summary of Haugwitz's evil deeds and qualities, see Pertz: Leben Stein's, vol. i, pp. 137, 138; but the bitter diatribes of German and English historians against the man who played such an important part in Prussia's early struggle against Napoleon should be read in the light of the statement made by Thiers's Le Consulat et l'Empire, Livre 23, that the proposal to take Hanover was first made by Napoleon and not by Haugwitz. For the good and evil in Haugwitz see Von Sybel's Life of him in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. For a brief statement of the real responsibility of Frederick William in the light of documents recently discovered, see Henderson: Short History of Germany, vol. ii, pp. 255, 256.

wholly from the allies, he would give her Hanover. This was a master stroke of rascality. If any new territory was coveted by Prussia, it was Hanover; but Hanover belonged to the ruling house of Great Britain; for Prussia to take it was to make Great Britain her bitter enemy, and to make all right-thinking Europeans despise her.

The Prussian government was very reluctant to make itself an accomplice in Napoleon's system of robbery; but as he grew stronger every day, and showed decided signs of offering less favorable terms, the treaty was at last ratified. Napoleon seemed to delight in making it as humiliating as possible, utterly refusing to grant what the King of Prussia tried to claim as essential, and, while giving Hanover, insisting on taking, in return, so much other territory that the advantage given Prussia by this dishonor was, after all, next to nothing.

But this was merely a beginning. Napoleon's genius in scoundrelism was as wonderful as his genius in war; having made the Prussian King his accomplice, he treated him like a lackey, forced him to send away his capable and patriotic foreign minister, Hardenberg, to take back Haugwitz, and to allow Prussian territory to be treated as virtually French.

Worse still, Prussia was openly made a dupe. While carving out of the states on the western side of Germany the Confederation of the Rhine and allying it, with its sixteen millions of Germans, to France, Napoleon soothed Prussia by graciously giving her permission to create a federation of North German States, and to put herself at its head; but when Prussia attempted this she soon found delays, objections, resistance on all sides, and ere long discovered that Napoleon, while allowing her to establish a federation, had virtually forbidden the German states to enter it. But a dupery even more vile followed. Prussia had accepted Hanover, thus breaking with her natural ally, England, and uniting with her

natural enemy, Napoleon. She had done so with shame. Judge of the abyss of disgust into which every thinking Prussian was plunged, when, after the treaty was fully made, -after England had punished Prussia severely for it on the high seas; after Napoleon, on account of it, had demanded from Prussia great concessions of territory and enormous sacrifices of national respect, it was discovered that Napoleon was secretly treating with England, and offering, on sundry conditions, to restore Hanover to her. Clearly there was no longer honor among thieves.

[ocr errors]

To cap the climax of degradation, Napoleon, in time of peace, contemptuously marched his troops through Prussian territory, utterly disregarding the simplest principles of international law, and allowed his generals to talk of an approaching war with Prussia.

There was also talk, loud and loose, on the Prussian side. It was reported that a high official at Berlin had openly declared that the King had several generals each as good as "M. de Buonaparte." Prussia now entered secretly into arrangements with Russia against France, and finally, in the autumn of 1806, the Prussian army was set in motion; in a few weeks Napoleon had met it, had beaten it utterly and easily at Jena, at Auerstadt, at Saalfeld, and the edifice erected by ages of care and sacrifice from the old Electors of Brandenburg to the death of Frederick the Great was beneath the conqueror's feet.

[ocr errors]

Napoleon now rises from glory to glory; enters Berlin amid the applause of its citizens, and from the old palace of the Prussian King dictates the hardest of conditions; then presses on toward Russia, holds his own at the fearful struggle of Eylau, wins the great victory of Friedland, and, having thus triumphed completely over Russia and Prussia, meets the Russian Emperor in the summer of 1807 on the Niemen raft and makes the renowned Treaty of Tilsit. By this the two emperors became acVOL. 101 NO. 5

complices in a scheme, more or less definite, for subjugating Great Britain and the European continent, thus depriving Prussia of her former devoted ally, the Russian Emperor, and leaving Napoleon free to deal with her as he would, — to reduce her one-half in territory and population, to take away her most necessary fortresses, to quarter a vast army upon her, and to use her army, her territory, her finances, as his own. Frederick William III now became a sort of discredited hermit prince in the remote northeast corner of his kingdom, a kingdom reduced from five thousand German square miles to a little over two thousand, and from about ten millions of inhabitants to about six millions, and with prospects of even more serious reductions.

[ocr errors]

Worse than these reductions was the manner of them. Poland was taken from the conquered kingdom, thus making Prussia defenseless on the east; everything between the Elbe and the Rhine was taken from her, and thus she became defenseless on the west; the most important fortresses upon her other frontiers were filled with French troops, so that finally she was left defenseless on all sides. Thus the Prussian realm lay shattered, impoverished, open at any time to the armies of any neighboring states that Napoleon might choose to set upon it; indemnities to enormous amounts were levied upon the Prussian people, and enforced by every sort of extortion. There were also petty frauds especially exasperating. Typical is the fact that the French authorities at Berlin, within a year after their arrival, had struck counterfeit coin to the amount of nearly three millions of Prussian dollars.1

Hard upon all this spoliation followed galling insults. galling insults. The great triumphal chariot, with its horses and Winged Victory of bronze, the main ornament of Berlin, was taken from the Brandenburg Gate and sent to Paris. The ingenuity of Napoleon in degrading the Prussian 1 See Pertz: Leben Stein's, vol. ii, p. 110.

« PreviousContinue »