Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/223

Rh 1807. NAPOLEON 211 Tilsit. in which they ruined their ally but not themselves ; as Austria at Pressburg, so Prussia at Tilsit signed a most humiliating treaty, while Kussia, as before, escaped, not this time by simply retiring from the scene, but by a treaty in which Napoleon admitted her to a share in the spoils of victory. Here was a second catastrophe far more surprising and disastrous than that which it followed so closely. The defeat of Austria in 1805 had been similar to her former defeats in 1800 and 1797 ; Ulm had been, similar to Hohenlinden, the treaty of Pressburg to that of Lune ville. But the double defeat of Jena and Auerstadt, in which the duke of Brunswick, the old general not only of 1792 but of the Seven Years War, found his death, dissolved for ever the army of the great Frederick; and it was followed by a general panic, surrender of fortresses, and submission on the part of civil officials, which seemed almost to amount to a dissolution of the Prussian state. The defence of Colberg by Gneisenau and the conduct of the Prussian troops under Lestocq at Eylau were almost the only re deeming achievements of the famous army which half a century before had withstood for seven years the attack of three great powers at once. This downfall was expressed Treatyof i n the treaty of Tilsit, which was vastly more disastrous to Prussia than that of Pressburg had been to Austria. Prussia was partitioned between Saxony, Russia, and a newly established Napoleonic kingdom of Westphalia. Her population was reduced by one-half, her army from 250,000 to 42,000 (the number fixed a little later by the treaty of September 1808), and Napoleon contrived also by a trick to saddle her for some time with the support of a French army of 150,000 men. She was in fact, and continued till 1813 to be, a conquered state. Russia on the other hand came off with more credit, as well as with less loss, than in the former campaign. At Eylau in January 1807 she in part atoned for Austerlitz. It was perhaps the most murderous battle that had been fought since the wars began, and it was not a victory for Napoleon. Friedland too was well-contested. In the two years between August 1805 and the treaty of Tilsit Napoleon had drifted far from his first plan of an invasion of England. But he seemed brought back to it now by another route. England had roused a Coalition against him, which he had not only dissolved, but seemed able now to make impossible for the future. Austria was humbled, Prussia beneath his feet. Why should Russia for the future side with England against him 1 From the outset her interference in the wars had been somewhat unnecessary ; she had had little real interest in the questions of Malta, Naples, or Sardinia. The Russians themselves felt this so much that after Friedland they forced Alexander to make peace. But as Paul, when he left the Second Coalition, had actually joined France, Napoleon now saw the means of making Alexander do the same. England s tyranny of the seas had been attacked by the great Catherine and again by Paul ; on this subject therefore Russian policy might co-operate with Napoleon, and, if a bribe were needed, he would countenance her in robbing her ally Prussia, and he could promise her freedom in her eastern enterprises. Such was the basis of the treaty of Tilsit, negotiated between Napoleon and Alexander on an island in the river Niemen, by which treaty the fate of Prussia was decided, and at the same time the foundation of the Napoleonic empire firmly laid. It was a coalition of France and Russia to humble England, chiefly by means of the Continental system. The invasion of England had failed, and England had destroyed at Trafalgar the allied fleets of France and Spain, a defeat which to the public eye had been lost in the splendid triumph of Ulm; but Napoleon now returns to the attack upon England at the head of a universal confederacy which he has organized against her. A pause occurs after Friedland during which Europe begins slowly to realize her position and to penetrate the character of Napoleon. It took some time to wear out his reputation of peace-maker ; at his breach with England in 1803 he had appealed to that jealousy of England s maritime power which was widely spread ; many thought the war was forced upon him, and as to the war of 1805 it could not be denied that Austria and Russia had attacked him. His absolute control over the French press enabled him almost to dictate public opinion. But the conquest of Germany, achieved in little more Napoleon time than had sufficed to Bonaparte ten years before for as k j n & the conquest of Italy, put him in a new light. He had km i&amp;gt; s - already passed through many phases : he had been the invincible champion of liberty, then the destroyer of Jacobinism and champion of order, then the new Con- stantine and restorer of the church, then the pacificator of the world, then the founder of a new monarchy in France. Now suddenly, in 1807, he stands forth in the new character of head of a great European confederacy. It has been usual to contrast the consulate with the empire, but the great transformation was made by the wars of 1805-7, and the true contrast is between the man of Brumaire and the man of Tilsit. The empire as founded in 1804 did not perhaps differ so much from the consulate after Marengo as both differed, alike in spirit and form, from the empire such as it began to appear after Press burg and was consolidated after Tilsit. Between 1800 and 1805 Napoleon, under whatever title, was absolute ruler of France, including Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine, Savoy, and Nice, and practically also ruler of Holland, Switzerland, and North Italy to the Adige, which states had a republican form. The title emperor meant in 1804 little more than military ruler. But now emperor has rather its mediaeval meaning of para mount over a confederacy of princes. Napoleon has become a king of kings. This system had been com menced in the consulate, when a kingdom of Etruria under the consul s protection was created for the benefit of his ally, the king of Spain ; it was carried a stage further on the eve of the war of 1805, when the kingdom of Italy was created, of which Napoleon himself assumed the sceptre, but committed the government to Eugene Beauharnais as viceroy. But now almost all Italy and a great part of Germany is subjected to this system. The Bonaparte family, which before had contended for the succession in France, so that Joseph actually refuses, as beneath him, the crown of Italy, now accept subordinate crowns. Joseph becomes king of Naples, the Bourbon dynasty having been expelled immediately after the peace of Pressburg ; Louis becomes king of Holland ; Jerome, the youngest brother, receives after Tilsit a kingdom in North Germany composed of territory taken from Prussia, of Hanover, and of the electorate of Hesse-Cassel, which had shared the fall of Prussia ; somewhat earlier Murat, husband of the most ambitious of the Bonaparte sisters, Caroline, had received the grand-duchy of Berg. By the side of these Bonaparte princes there are the German princes who now look up to France, as under the Holy Roman Empire they had looked up to Austria. These are formed into a Confederation in which the archbishop of Mainz (Dalberg) presides, as he had before presided in the empire. Two of the princes have now the title of kings, and, enriched as they are by the secularization of church lands, the mediatization of immediate nobles, and the subjugation of free cities, they have also the substantial power. A princess of Bavaria weds Eugene Beauharnais, a princess of Witrtemberg Jerome Bonaparte. At its