Читать книгу Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815 - H. Morse Stephens - Страница 5

Denmark: Christian VII.

Sweden: Gustavus III.

The two northern kingdoms, Denmark and Sweden, had adhered to the Neutral League against England in 1780, but for generations a bitter animosity had existed between them. Denmark, which in 1789 included Norway, was in an extremely prosperous condition. The philanthropic ideas of the eighteenth century had made great way, and on 20th June 1788 a royal ordinance had destroyed the last vestige of serfdom. Efforts were made to improve the condition of the people by reorganising the state of the finances, law and education, and progress was made in every direction. These reforms were not the work of the King, Christian VII., who had fallen into a state of dotage, but of the Prince Royal, afterwards Frederick VI., and of his minister, Count Andrew Bernstorff, the nephew of the greatest Danish statesman of the eighteenth century. Sweden, which in 1789 included the greater part of Finland as well as Swedish Pomerania and the island of Rügen, was under the sway of one of the most enlightened rulers of the century, Gustavus III. That monarch had in 1772, by a coup d’état, overthrown the power of the Swedish Estates, with their division into the two parties of the Caps and the Hats, subsidised respectively by Russia and France. He had made use of his absolutism to carry out some of the benevolent ideas of the time. He had abolished torture, regulated taxation, encouraged commerce and industry, and diminished, where he did not destroy, the privileges of the nobility. Had he contented himself with these internal reforms he would have won the lasting gratitude of the Swedish people, but he insisted on playing a part in continental politics, which involved the maintenance of a large army and the consequent exhaustion of the people. Though he too had joined the League of the North in 1780, he afterwards assumed a strong anti-Russian attitude, and resolved to take advantage of the Russo-Turkish war in order to regain some of his lost provinces. Accordingly he invaded Russia in the summer of 1788, while his fleet threatened St. Petersburg.

The Empire.

The Diet.

College of Electors.

College of Princes.

College of Free Cities.

Hitherto a sketch has been given of states, which in 1789 possessed a certain unity, and were able to play a part as independent countries of more or less weight in European politics. It was otherwise with the Holy Roman Empire, which still remained in the same condition, and was ruled in the same manner, as had been arranged at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. True Germany, that is Germany to the west of the Oder, had been under this arrangement split up into a number of independent sovereignties, loosely bound together as the Holy Roman Empire. The number of these petty states caused the Empire to be, from a military point of view, utterly inefficient; the bond was too loose to allow of general internal reforms or of a consistent foreign policy; and the federal arrangements were too cumbrous and unwieldy to allow of Germany ranking as a great power. The Imperial Diet or Reichstag consisted of three colleges, and a majority was required in each of the upper colleges to agree to a resolution, which, when confirmed by the Emperor, became a conclusum of the Empire. The first of these colleges was that of the eight Electors, three ecclesiastical, the Elector-Archbishops of Mayence, Trèves, and Cologne, and five lay, the Electors of Bohemia, Brandenburg, and Hanover, who were also Kings of Hungary, Prussia, and England, the Elector of Saxony, and the Elector Palatine, who in 1789 was also Elector of Bavaria. The president of this college was the Elector-Archbishop of Mayence, as Chancellor of the Empire. The second college was that of the Princes, which consisted of one hundred voices, thirty-six ecclesiastical and sixty-four lay. In this college all the Electors had voices under different designations; Hanover possessed six for different principalities, Prussia six for the duchy of Guelders, the county of Mœurs, etc., Austria three, and so on, while the Kings of Denmark and Sweden also were represented as Dukes of Holstein and of Pomerania. Less important princes differing in power from the Landgraves of Hesse, the Margraves of Baden, and the Duke of Würtemburg to the petty princes of Salm and Anhalt, possessed single voices, and made up the number of temporal voters in the college to sixty. The ecclesiastical princes included thirty-four of the wealthiest bishops and abbots, many of whom ruled over considerable territories, and of whom the most important were the Archbishop of Salzburg, the Bishops of Bamberg, Augsburg, Würtzburg, Spires, Worms, Strasbourg, Basle, Constance, Paderborn, Hildesheim, and Münster, and the Abbots of Elwangen, Kempten, and Stablo. The other six voices were called collegiate, and representatives to hold them were elected by the petty lay and ecclesiastical sovereigns who abounded in Franconia, Swabia, and Westphalia, to the number of four lay and two ecclesiastical representatives. The presidency of this college was held alternately by the Archduke of Austria and the Archbishop of Salzburg. The third or inferior college was that of the free cities, and any opposition on its part could prevent a decision arrived at by the two upper or superior colleges being presented to the Emperor for his assent as a conclusum of the Empire. It consisted of the representatives of fifty-two imperial free cities, divided into two ‘benches,’ of which the Bench of Westphalia included Frankfort-on-the-Main, Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, and the Bench of Swabia included Nuremberg, Ratisbon, Ulm, and Augsburg. The presidency of this college belonged to the city of Ratisbon, in which the Diet held its sittings. By this elaborate federative system, all sense of German unity was lost; the electors, princes, and free cities were represented only by delegates; the smaller states felt themselves swamped and were obliged to look to a great power, Austria or France, Prussia or Hanover, to preserve their political independence.

The Imperial Tribunal.

The Emperor.

The Aulic Council.

The Circles.

The other important institution of the Empire, the Imperial Tribunal or Reichskammergericht, which sat at Wetzlar and was intended to settle disputes between the German sovereigns, had also fallen into desuetude. Its venality and procrastination became proverbial, and it possessed no machinery to put its decrees into force. At the head of the Empire was the Emperor, who was elected and crowned with all the elaborate ceremonial of the Middle Ages. The office had been, with one exception, conferred on the head of House of Austria, since the Treaty of Westphalia, but it brought little actual authority on the holder. It was as ruler of the hereditary dominions of the House of Hapsburg that the Emperor exerted some influence, not as an Emperor. Joseph II., indeed, endeavoured to be Emperor in more than name, with the result that Frederick the Great was enabled to form the League of Princes against him. As the chief Catholic state, Austria, however, possessed a great influence in the Imperial Diet, for the ecclesiastical members of the Colleges of Electors and Princes naturally inclined to support her, and it was on their votes that she relied. She even went so far as to establish the Aulic Council at Vienna, which intervened in cases between sovereign princes, and usurped some of the prerogatives of the Imperial Tribunal of Wetzlar. The executive power of the Empire, when it had come to a decision, was entrusted to the circles. These circles each had their own Diet, and it was their duty, for instance, to raise money and troops when the Empire decided to go to war. Of the ten circles of the Empire, originally created, one, that of Burgundy, had been extinguished or nearly so by the conquests of Louis XIV., and those situated in the eastern portion were entirely controlled by the important states of Prussia, Saxony, and Austria. It was only in Western Germany, in the circles of Westphalia, Franconia, and Swabia that the organisation was fairly tried, and the result was signal failure, whenever those circles put their contingents in the field. It could hardly be otherwise, when, owing to minute subdivision and divided authority, a single company of soldiers might be raised from half a dozen different petty sovereigns, each of whom would try to throw the burden of their maintenance on his colleagues. The Holy Roman Empire, in short, like other mediæval institutions, had fallen into decay with the mediæval systems of warfare and religion; some of its component states, such as Austria and Prussia, or in a lesser degree Bavaria, might possess a real power; but, as a whole, it was utterly inefficient to defend itself, and formed a feeble barrier between France and the kingdoms of Eastern Europe.

The Princes of Germany.

Bavaria.

Baden.

Würtemburg.

Saxony.

Saxe-Weimar.

The impotence of the Empire for offensive and defensive purposes did not, however, greatly affect the German people; the educated classes prided themselves on being superior to patriotic impulses, and on being cosmopolitan rather than German; the poorer classes thought more of the internal administration which affected them than of the attitude of the Empire to European politics. The tendency towards benevolent despotism, which distinguished the greater powers, showed itself also in the petty states of Germany in the diminution, if not the abolition, of the ancient Estates and in the restraints placed on the authority of the nobility. The increased power of the sovereign was generally, if not universally, used to foster the prosperity of his subjects, or at least to promote literature and art. A notice of a few of the principal rulers of Germany will justify this view. Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine, who in 1778 had succeeded to the Electorate of Bavaria, and united once more the territories of the House of Wittelsbach, was a most enlightened sovereign. In the Palatinate he had founded a brilliant University at Mannheim, and one of the most famous picture galleries in Europe at Düsseldorf; in Bavaria he suppressed some of the numerous convents, which stifled progress, in spite of his sincere Catholicism. He took as one of his ministers the celebrated American, Benjamin Thompson, whom he created Count Rumford, and that man of science and learning endeavoured to suppress mendacity, and made efforts to bring material comforts within reach of the very poorest. Nevertheless, in some points, the Elector Charles Theodore showed himself a bigot; he left education entirely in the hands of the Roman Catholic priesthood and ex-Jesuits, and he allowed the Protestants in his dominions to be persecuted. The Margrave Charles Frederick, who in 1771 reunited in his person the two margraviates of Baden-Baden and Baden-Durlach, was a more thoroughly enlightened prince. He was truly a benevolent despot; he was a student of political economy, on which he himself wrote a treatise, and applied its principles to his little state; he established a scheme of primary education; and on 23d July 1783 he abolished serfdom in his dominions, while maintaining the royal corvées and the prohibition for a subject to leave the country without obtaining his permission. The Duke Charles Eugène of Würtemburg formed a contrast to his neighbours. He established, like them, his own absolutism, but he used his power to impose heavy taxes and raise an army out of all proportion to the size of his duchy. He treated his subjects like slaves, and his administration was so cruel that the Aulic Council threatened to take measures against him. Nevertheless, he was a patron of literature and the arts. He built a theatre at Stuttgart and founded the Academy of Fine Arts there, and he defrayed the expense of the education of the poet Schiller, who, however, afterwards satirised him and fled to Weimar. Yet Charles Eugène of Würtemburg appears an enlightened monarch to such princes as Duke Charles of Deux-Ponts (Zweibrücken), whose successor, Maximilian Joseph, was to succeed the Elector Palatine, Charles Theodore, and to become the first King of Bavaria, for that prince sacrificed his people to his passion for the chase, and to William IX., Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects by the hundred to the English Government to carry on the war in America. Going further east, Saxony, which had ranked among the great states of Germany, was in a state of decline. The Electors Augustus II. and Augustus III. had been Kings of Poland, and had ruined their hereditary dominions to support their royal dignity and position. Fortunately Frederick Augustus, who was Elector in 1789, had not been elected to the Polish throne, and had been able to do something for the prosperity of his subjects. He formed a commission to draw up a code of laws, he abolished torture, encouraged industry and agriculture, and founded an Academy of Mines. But he did not go so far, for instance, as the Margrave of Baden, and made no attempt to suppress serfdom. The glory of Saxony was not, however, on the eve of the French Revolution its electoral house; its intellectual capital was not the beautiful city of Dresden. That place was taken by Weimar, where Duke Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar collected around him the great philosophers and men of letters who made the German name famous at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. To his Court resorted the most illustrious Germans of the time, Goethe and Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and Musæus; and the University of his state at Jena became the most famous in Germany. It is not necessary to particularise the other states; it is enough to say that those in the north were generally very backward, especially the duchies of Mecklenburg, and that Hanover was left to the rule of an aristocratic oligarchy, which allowed no reforms, although its University at Göttingen, founded by George II., took rank with the best.

Mayence.

Trèves.

Cologne.

The Ecclesiastical States followed also the movement of the century. The ecclesiastical rulers were often enlightened men, but they were to a great extent the slaves of their chapters. These chapters were generally filled by younger sons of the smaller princes, who insisted on the newly-elected prelates entering into the closest bonds with them to make no changes in the feudal system in the bishoprics. The prince-bishops and abbots at the close of the eighteenth century were, therefore, generally scions of noble houses, such as, for instance, Francis Joseph, Baron of Roggenbach, Bishop of Basle, Baron Francis Louis of Erthal, Bishop of Bamberg and Würtzburg, the Baron of Rödt, Bishop of Constance, the Count of Hoensbroeck, Bishop of Liége, Count Augustus of Limburg, Bishop of Spires, Count Jerome Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg, and the Baron of Plettenberg, Abbot of Münster. One curious point deserves notice, that in some instances, Protestant princes had the right to present to Catholic prince-bishoprics, and in 1789 the Duke of York was Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück, and Prince Peter Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, Prince-Bishop of Lübeck. Of higher rank and more independent of their chapters were the three archbishop-electors, who were therefore more able to rule their states in consonance with the ideas of the century. The chief of these was Baron Frederick Charles of Erthal, Archbishop-Elector of Mayence, and Prince-Bishop of Worms, the Chancellor of the Empire ex officio. This great prelate busied himself mostly with his pleasures, but his rank caused his countenance to be sought by all parties, and his adhesion to Frederick the Great’s League of Princes was the greatest gain the King of Prussia made in his anti-Austrian policy. In 1789 he had completely abandoned the cares of internal and external politics to his coadjutor Charles, Baron de Dalberg, who was to play a leading part in the history of Germany during the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The Archbishop-Elector of Trèves in 1789 was Clement Wenceslas, a Saxon prince, and an excellent ruler, who, in 1783, even issued an edict of tolerance, allowing men of any religion to settle in his state, and exercise any trade or profession there. The last Elector-Archbishop was the Archduke Maximilian, the youngest brother of the Emperor Joseph, Archbishop of Cologne, who shared his brother’s liberal opinions, and patronised his predecessor’s creation, the University of Bonn, which had been founded in opposition to the ultramontane University of Cologne, for the encouragement of the modern developments of science. The tendency of all these governments, lay and clerical, was to promote the prosperity of the people; Joseph II. was but the type of the German princes of his time; all wished to do good for the people, but not by them; their characters differed widely, from the enlightened Margrave of Baden to the hunting Duke of Deux-Ponts; but in their different ways and in different degrees they generally meant well. But, while the more important princes showed the tendency of the century, their poorer contemporaries were unable to do so. They were mostly in debt, owing to their efforts to rival the wealthy princes, and in order to raise money resorted to all the devices of mediæval feudalism. The few villages over which they ruled suffered from this tyranny, and it was always possible to know when a traveller crossed the frontier into one of these ‘duodecimo duchies.’ Beneath the petty princes were the Ritters or Knights of the Empire, who abounded in Franconia and Swabia. These knights had no representation in the Imperial Diet, and were consequently dependent directly on the Emperor. Their poverty made them take service with the wealthy princes; and to quote but two instances, Stein, the great Prussian minister, and Würmser, the celebrated Austrian general, were both Knights of the Empire. The result of this minute subdivision of Germany was to destroy the sense of national patriotism; which was not to rise again until after Germany had passed through the mould of Napoleon’s domination.

Switzerland.

Geneva.

The other European confederation, Switzerland, presented the same symptoms of internal decay as the Holy Roman Empire, but it was preserved from the same political degradation by the consciousness of its nationality and the persistence of its local governments. The eighteenth century was marked in Switzerland by struggles between canton and canton, Catholics and Protestants, nobles and bourgeois. In some cantons, such as Berne, an oligarchical system was maintained in the hands of a few noble families; in others, such as Uri, a purely democratic form of government was preserved, which allowed every peasant a voice in the local administration. Where feudalism had been established, the peasants were in no better condition than in the rest of Europe, but in the mountain cantons such a régime was impossible, and individual and political freedom still existed. It must be remembered that the Switzerland of the eighteenth century was not identical with that of the nineteenth. The Grisons formed no part of the confederation, Neufchâtel belonged to Prussia, and Geneva was an independent republic. The part the latter had played in the intellectual movement of the century was most conspicuous. Rousseau was born in Geneva, and Voltaire retired and spent his last years in its neighbourhood. But Geneva had just before 1789 been the scene of a revolution resembling that in Holland. A struggle broke out between the bourgeois families, which monopolised the magistracy, and the mass of the people, which had ended in the victory of the former. The Genevese democrats were expelled, and many of them, notably Clavière, exercised a considerable influence on the course of the Revolution in France.

The state of Europe in 1789 showed everywhere a sense of awakening to new ideas. The bonds of feudalism were ready to break asunder; the benevolent despots had recognised the rights of individual and commercial freedom; the French Revolution was able to sow in ripe ground the two new principles of the sovereignty of the people and the sentiment of nationality.