Читать книгу The Birth of Yugoslavia - Henry Baerlein - Страница 57

With the Treaty of Schoenbrunn Napoleon secured possession of Carniola, the Austrian part of Istria, Croatia, the military frontiers from the Save to the sea, and also certain districts of Carinthia, Styria and Tirol. Now at last the Adriatic littoral, with large tracts of the interior, was united under one hand. We may note that Eugène Beauharnais in vain entreated that the frontier for the Slovenes should, on account of strategic necessities, be drawn to the east of the Isonzo, but Napoleon did not hesitate to make that river the boundary between the two countries, as it was between the two races. Mazzini in 1860 shared this opinion, which he had also maintained in 1831, in his book The Rights of Man, that Slavs and Italians should be divided by this river. And in 1860 Cavour expressed himself to the same effect in a letter to Laurent Valerio.

"Mes braves Croates," says Napoleon in his Memoirs; and for what he did in this Illyria, the forerunner of our Yugoslavia, they must be always thankful. Never had these people had such able administrators, such sympathetic governors. They governed it too much as if it were a part of France, but they were doing their utmost to understand the people and their customs. General Marmont acquired an excellent knowledge of the Serbo-Croat language; he intended to introduce the national tongue into all the public offices. But this naturally could not be carried through without an intervening period, and unluckily Marmont so far excelled his compatriots as a linguist, that when the newspaper Télégraphe officiel des Provinces Illyriennes appeared at Ljubljana, the capital (under the brilliant editorship of Charles Nodier, who came out from France for that purpose), and it was announced that there would be French, German, Italian and Slav articles, the latter do not appear to have been published. Illyria was under the influence of its neighbours, Italian, German and Hungarian, with regard to the spoken and still more with regard to the written language. A fundamental necessity was that the country should have one common language. Under French influence Joachim Stulli brought out his Vocabulario italiano-illyrico-latino in 1810, and at Triest in 1812 Starčević published his new Illyrian grammar. There was visible in these works an aspiration that some day the Yugoslavs would be united in one country and with various dialects, and the proviso that for public affairs and for schools and literature the so-called "Što" dialect, the most widely spread and the most perfect, should be given preference. If Napoleon had not fallen, his Illyria would no doubt have gradually attracted to herself the other Yugoslav provinces that still were under the Austrian, Hungarian or Turk; and in this way one of the great thorns would have been taken out of Europe's side. There was an official, Marcel de Serres, on Napoleon's staff, who was exclusively concerned with Yugoslav affairs; and it is probable that with a closer knowledge of the people there would have been less insistence on the radical reforms which were sometimes ill-adapted to the country and were often hated vehemently by the persons whom they shook out of their age-long comatose condition. Napoleon would have modified the methods of recruiting had he known how much resentment his conscription was arousing. Venice had obtained most faithful soldiers; this was one of the few trades that she permitted, but she had never said they were obliged to serve. Napoleon's system caused great numbers of desertions, while the men who stayed had little discipline and looked for opportunities to join the enemy. Perhaps in time the nobles would have been resigned to losing, if not all, at any rate a portion of their privileges; and the Catholic clergy would have moderated their strong views against the gaoler of Pius VII., the champion of liberal and emancipated France, the master of Dandolo, who wanted to reduce the number of bishoprics, oblige candidates for the priesthood to learn certain lay subjects and regulate the funds in the possession of the Orders, with the purpose of assisting the indigent clergy and benevolent institutions—much would have been forgiven by the clergy to the man who brought about national union.