to meet at Luneville for the purpose of concluding a definitive peace. But Austria was not prepared to abandon England and break its solemn word. So that the preliminary treaty signed by San Julien was disavowed, and Bonaparte put his armies in motion both in Bavaria and on the Adige.* Moreau commanded some 120,000 men, which were posted north of Munich between the Inn and the Iser. The Austrians had mustered an army scarcely inferior, but, instead of giving it to the Archduke Charles, they entrusted it to the young and inexperienced Archduke John. He proposed to pass the Inn, and turn Moreau's army so as to get into his rear, and in fact mimic Marengo. But the difficulty of the way stopped him. Stumbling in his progress on the left wing of Moreau, he drove it in. The momentary success emboldened the young commander, and he marched forthwith to the attack of the main body of the French. This was stationed in a clearing of woods, an open space around the village of Hohenlinden, surrounded by those thick pine forests without much underwood, through which infantry and especially skirmishers could penetrate, but where artillery and cavalry must pursue the straight and narrow roadway. To direct an attack along such a causeway resembled conducting it over a bridge. The French being marshalled opposite the outlet of the wood, every gun was of course directed towards it, and for a column to issue from it and deploy was next to impossible. Yet this was what the Archduke John endeavoured to do. In the attempt his several columns were foiled. And their retreat was cut off by two divisions of the French army, the chief one under Richepanse, which had deen ordered to seize the villages and the road behind the Austrians and cut off their retreat through the wood. The Archduke's lieutenants extri * Napoleon Memoirs and Correspondence. CHAP. XLIII. XLIII. It was CHAP. cated, as best they could, the soldiers from the trap, but left some 20,000 behind, slain or captured. a defeat more fatal than Marengo. Moreau crossed the Inn, and advanced up the valley of the Danube to Vienna. The Archduke John tried to make a stand at Saltzburg, but found it impossible. Moreau advanced as far as Steyer, and his cavalry occupied Ips, upon which the Baron de Meerveldt, sent by the Archduke John, arrived to demand a suspension of hostilities. This was granted on Christmas-day 1800, the truce extending to Italy, where Brune had forced the passage of the Adige, and where other French troops had occupied Tuscany and flung back the Neapolitans.* If the Austrian plenipotentiary at Luneville was ready to treat separately from England, but in secret, before Hohenlinden, after that catastrophe he consented to do so openly. Austria had not an ally, Russia turned its back on her misfortune, Bonaparte released the Russian prisoners, and adroitly made a present to the Czar Paul of the island of Malta, just as it was captured by the English. Although the French Consul had neither the right nor the power to cede Malta, and the chiefdom of the Order of St. John, to Russia, the Czar snatched greedily at the gift, demanded it of England, and was of course refused it. This was precisely what Bonaparte desired. Paul sent an envoy to Paris and became a decided enemy of England and of Austria. Bonaparte's views with respect to the latter power were to confine the Emperor to his hereditary dominions, and deprive him of all influence beyond them, either in Germany or in Italy. In pursuance of this he now insisted on excluding from the peninsula all princes connected with Austria, such as the Dukes of Tuscany and Modena. Austria, he said, must indemnify them in Germany. It had already been agreed with Prussia and *Napoleon, Dumas. accepted by Austria, that those German princes who were deprived of territories west of the Rhine by the French, in extending their empire to that river, should be indemnified in Germany, at the expense of the ecclesiastical electors. Their possessions not being hereditary, there was less injury and difficulty in dispossessing them. Bonaparte now proposed indemnifying the Duke of Tuscany in the same way, by giving him Salzburg. Austria was equally injured and mortified by this secularisation of the ecclesiastical electorates, which had escaped the Thirty Years' war, and which maintained Catholic preponderance even in the north. But Bonaparte struck this strong blow to Catholic sacerdotalism in Germany. He even promised the bishopric of Bamberg and Wurzburg to Prussia, if it would occupy Hanover. Cobentzel was no Melas, he fought to the last, but it was in vain; the treaty of Luneville was signed on the 9th of February 1811. France took the boundary of the Rhine, and even dismantled all the fortresses on the right bank. Mantua it equally insisted on. Tuscany was given to a prince of the Bourbon family of Spain, the Duke of Parma, afterwards King of Etruria.* The royal family of Naples were left unpunished for its late attacks, Russia strongly interceding for it and for the King of Piedmont. Rome too was respected. Bonaparte, however, cutting down the high prelates in Germany, determined to respect the Pope in Rome, and already looked to make the Church and its head at least the spiritual allies and supporters of his future sovereignty.† The main thought of the First Consul was England, and how to overcome its resistance. It was impossible indeed to reconcile any minister of that country to the terrible and now accomplished fact of France remaining For a personal account of this idiot prince, see the Memoirs of Madm. D'Abrantès. † Martens, Reuss Deutsche Staatskanzlei, Gagern. CHAP. CHAP. mistress of the whole of the western continent. XLIII. Not merely the glory but the very existence of England was threatened by it. All the diplomatic logic of Bonaparte, the un-English sophisms of the British opposition, were idle froth slavered vainly on that fact. England, however, was still supreme on its own element, the sca, and the efforts of Bonaparte to dispute its naval power were as ill-imagined and unsuccessful as English attempts to raise and uphold continental resistance to France. Pitt's repeated efforts to galvanise by subsidies the old governments of Europe to take the field proved futile against French armies and commanders, both sprung from a people animated by the energy which the revolution had given, and the genius which it had called forth. From one mistake of this kind to another the English government floundered, until chance or a more provident cause than chance led the French ruler into the blunder of attacking not merely a court but a people. In trying to crush the Spaniards they turned against him, and proved as indomitable as the French. In his struggle to combat his foes by sea, Bonaparte was not so fortunate. In 1801 his object was to unite all the countries with ports and navies against England. He had a vague idea that the revenue and power of the latter state depended on its trade with the Continent. To exclude English vessels from the Baltic, from the Elbe, from the Tagus, from the Spanish and Italian ports, became thus his great aim. For this he flattered the court of Madrid, by giving Tuscany to a Spanish Bourbon, and with the same view he compelled the Spanish court to invade Portugal. A most important ally and aid in these designs was the Emperor Paul, who in spite to England for being refused Malta, and for other reasons, laid an embargo on British vessels, and in conjunction with France obliged the small powers of the Baltic-Sweden, Denmark, and also Prussia-to join in reasserting the old pretensions of XLIII. neutral powers to carry on trade with belligerents without CHAP. being searched or stopped. This was the quondam league of Catharine the Second called the Armed Neutrality. A power of equal importance with Russia was the United States, and with them Bonaparte had made a treaty which denied provisions and marine stores to be contraband of war, and which claimed the right of importing into France any commodity, save guns, powder, swords, and bullets. Paul and his allies adopted the same view of what was contraband of war, and England was thus threatened with being deprived of the means of making any serious or effective use of its power of blockade. The rights and claims of neutrals, and the grave events connected with them, belong more particularly to the history of England than to that of France. They produced the invasion of Portugal by a Spanish army under the Prince of the Peace, at the dictation of Bonaparte, as well as the attack upon Copenhagen by the British fleet, ending in the destruction of many of the Danish vessels, and the submission of the Danish government. The assassins of the Emperor Paul about the same period (April, 1801) came to defeat the scheme of armed neutrality; and as it caused France and England to despair each of them, of the power to inflict any mortal wound upon the other, the event led to peace. The foreseen conclusion of the struggle in Egypt offered the way for overtures from both sides. In January, 1800, Kleber, who had succeeded to the command in Egypt, and who was no little disgusted with it, concluded with the Turkish vizier at El Arisch, under the suggestion of Sir Sidney Smith, a treaty, by which the French troops were to evacuate Egypt, and be transferred to Europe; such a stipulation was against the express orders of the English government, which, however anxious to expel the French army from Egypt, * Bignon, Thibaudeau. |