Chương Chương 51 · Themselves As They See Fit

To undo the damage done by the great Napoleonic flood was almost

impossible. Age-old fences had been washed away. The palaces of two

score dynasties had been damaged to such an extent that they had

to be condemned as uninhabitable. Other royal residences had been

greatly enlarged at the expense of less fortunate neighbours. Strange

odds and ends of revolutionary doctrine had been left behind by the

receding waters and could not be dislodged without danger to the entire

community. But the political engineers of the Congress did the best

they could and this is what they accomplished.

France had disturbed the peace of the world for so many years that

people had come to fear that country almost instinctively. The

Bourbons, through the mouth of Talleyrand, had promised to be good,

but the Hundred Days had taught Europe what to expect should Napoleon

manage to escape for a second time. The Dutch Republic, therefore,

was changed into a Kingdom, and Belgium (which had not joined the

Dutch struggle for independence in the sixteenth century and since

then had been part of the Habsburg domains, first under Spanish rule

and thereafter under Austrian rule) was made part of this new kingdom

of the Netherlands. Nobody wanted this union either in the Protestant

North or in the Catholic South, but no questions were asked. It seemed

good for the peace of Europe and that was the main consideration.

Poland had hoped for great things because a Pole, Prince Adam

Czartoryski, was one of the most intimate friends of Tsar Alexander

and had been his constant advisor during the war and at the Congress

of Vienna. But Poland was made a semi-independent part of Russia with

Alexander as her king. This solution pleased no one and caused much

bitter feeling and three revolutions.

Denmark, which had remained a faithful ally of Napoleon until the end,

was severely punished. Seven years before, an English fleet had sailed

down the Kattegat and without a declaration of war or any warning had

bombarded Copenhagen and had taken away the Danish fleet, lest it be

of value to Napoleon. The Congress of Vienna went one step further.

It took Norway (which since the union of Calmar of the year 1397 had

been united with Denmark) away from Denmark and gave it to Charles XIV

of Sweden as a reward for his betrayal of Napoleon, who had set him

up in the king business. This Swedish king, curiously enough, was

a former French general by the name of Bernadotte, who had come to

Sweden as one of Napoleon’s adjutants, and had been invited to the

throne of that good country when the last of the rulers of the house

of Holstein-Gottorp had died without leaving either son or daughter.

From 1815 until 1844 he ruled his adopted country (the language of

which he never learned) with great ability. He was a clever man and

enjoyed the respect of both his Swedish and his Norwegian subjects, but

he did not succeed in joining two countries which nature and history

had put asunder. The dual Scandinavian state was never a success and

in 1905, Norway, in a most peaceful and orderly manner, set up as an

independent kingdom and the Swedes bade her “good speed” and very

wisely let her go her own way.

The Italians, who since the days of the Renaissance had been at the

mercy of a long series of invaders, also had put great hopes in General

Bonaparte. The Emperor Napoleon, however, had grievously disappointed

them. Instead of the United Italy which the people wanted, they had

been divided into a number of little principalities, duchies, republics

and the Papal State, which (next to Naples) was the worst governed

and most miserable region of the entire peninsula. The Congress of

Vienna abolished a few of the Napoleonic republics and in their place

resurrected several old principalities which were given to deserving

members, both male and female, of the Habsburg family.

The poor Spaniards, who had started the great nationalistic revolt

against Napoleon, and who had sacrificed the best blood of the country

for their king, were punished severely when the Congress allowed His

Majesty to return to his domains. This vicious creature, known as

Ferdinand VII, had spent the last four years of his life as a prisoner

of Napoleon. He had improved his days by knitting garments for the

statues of his favourite patron saints. He celebrated his return by

re-introducing the Inquisition and the torture-chamber, both of which

had been abolished by the Revolution. He was a disgusting person,

despised as much by his subjects as by his four wives, but the Holy

Alliance maintained him upon his legitimate throne and all efforts

of the decent Spaniards to get rid of this curse and make Spain a

constitutional kingdom ended in bloodshed and executions.

Portugal had been without a king since the year 1807 when the royal

family had fled to the colonies in Brazil. The country had been used

as a base of supply for the armies of Wellington during the Peninsula

war, which lasted from 1808 until 1814. After 1815 Portugal continued

to be a sort of British province until the house of Braganza returned

to the throne, leaving one of its members behind in Rio de Janeiro as

Emperor of Brazil, the only American Empire which lasted for more than

a few years, and which came to an end in 1889 when the country became a

republic.

In the east, nothing was done to improve the terrible conditions of

both the Slavs and the Greeks who were still subjects of the Sultan. In

the year 1804 Black George, a Servian swineherd, (the founder of the

Karageorgevich dynasty) had started a revolt against the Turks, but he

had been defeated by his enemies and had been murdered by one of his

supposed friends, the rival Servian leader, called Milosh Obrenovich,

(who became the founder of the Obrenovich dynasty) and the Turks had

continued to be the undisputed masters of the Balkans.

The Greeks, who since the loss of their independence, two thousand

years before, had been subjects of the Macedonians, the Romans,

the Venetians and the Turks, had hoped that their countryman, Capo

d’Istria, a native of Corfu, and together with Czartoryski, the most

intimate personal friend of Alexander, would do something for them. But

the Congress of Vienna was not interested in Greeks, but was very much

interested in keeping all “legitimate” monarchs, Christian, Moslem and

otherwise, upon their respective thrones. Therefore nothing was done.

The last, but perhaps the greatest blunder of the Congress was the

treatment of Germany. The Reformation and the Thirty Years War had

not only destroyed the prosperity of the country, but had turned it

into a hopeless political rubbish heap, consisting of a couple of

kingdoms, a few grand-duchies, a large number of duchies and hundreds

of margravates, principalities, baronies, electorates, free cities and

free villages, ruled by the strangest assortment of potentates that was

ever seen off the comic opera stage. Frederick the Great had changed

this when he created a strong Prussia, but this state had not survived

him by many years.

Napoleon had blue-penciled the demand for independence of most of these

little countries, and only fifty-two out of a total of more than three

hundred had survived the year 1806. During the years of the great

struggle for independence, many a young soldier had dreamed of a new

Fatherland that should be strong and united. But there can be no union

without a strong leadership, and who was to be this leader?

There were five kingdoms in the German speaking lands. The rulers of

two of these, Austria and Prussia, were kings by the Grace of God. The

rulers of three others, Bavaria, Saxony and Wurtemberg, were kings

by the Grace of Napoleon, and as they had been the faithful henchmen

of the Emperor, their patriotic credit with the other Germans was

therefore not very good.

The Congress had established a new German Confederation, a league of

thirty-eight sovereign states, under the chairmanship of the King of

Austria, who was now known as the Emperor of Austria. It was the sort

of make-shift arrangement which satisfied no one. It is true that a

German Diet, which met in the old coronation city of Frankfort, had

been created to discuss matters of “common policy and importance.” But

in this Diet, thirty-eight delegates represented thirty-eight different

interests and as no decision could be taken without a unanimous vote (a

parliamentary rule which had in previous centuries ruined the mighty

kingdom of Poland), the famous German Confederation became very soon

the laughing stock of Europe and the politics of the old Empire began

to resemble those of our Central American neighbours in the forties and

the fifties of the last century.

It was terribly humiliating to the people who had sacrificed everything

for a national ideal. But the Congress was not interested in the

private feelings of “subjects,” and the debate was closed.

Did anybody object? Most assuredly. As soon as the first feeling of

hatred against Napoleon had quieted down—as soon as the enthusiasm

of the great war had subsided—as soon as the people came to a full

realisation of the crime that had been committed in the name of “peace

and stability” they began to murmur. They even made threats of open

revolt. But what could they do? They were powerless. They were at the

mercy of the most pitiless and efficient police system the world had

ever seen.

The members of the Congress of Vienna honestly and sincerely believed

that “the Revolutionary Principle had led to the criminal usurpation of

the throne by the former emperor Napoleon.” They felt that they were

called upon to eradicate the adherents of the so-called “French ideas”

just as Philip II had only followed the voice of his conscience when he

burned Protestants or hanged Moors. In the beginning of the sixteenth

century a man who did not believe in the divine right of the Pope to

rule his subjects as he saw fit was a “heretic” and it was the duty

of all loyal citizens to kill him. In the beginning of the nineteenth

century, on the continent of Europe, a man who did not believe in the

divine right of his king to rule him as he or his Prime Minister saw

fit, was a “heretic,” and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to

denounce him to the nearest policeman and see that he got punished.

But the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in the school

of Napoleon and they performed their task much better than it had

been done in the year 1517. The period between the year 1815 and

the year 1860 was the great era of the political spy. Spies were

everywhere. They lived in palaces and they were to be found in the

lowest gin-shops. They peeped through the key-holes of the ministerial

cabinet and they listened to the conversations of the people who were

taking the air on the benches of the Municipal Park. They guarded the

frontier so that no one might leave without a duly viséd passport and

they inspected all packages, that no books with dangerous “French

ideas” should enter the realm of their Royal masters. They sat among

the students in the lecture hall and woe to the Professor who uttered

a word against the existing order of things. They followed the little

boys and girls on their way to church lest they play hookey.

In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy. The church

had suffered greatly during the days of the revolution. The church

property had been confiscated. Several priests had been killed and the

generation that had learned its cathechism from Voltaire and Rousseau

and the other French philosophers had danced around the Altar of Reason

when the Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of God in

October of the year 1798. The priests had followed the “émigrés” into

their long exile. Now they returned in the wake of the allied armies

and they set to work with a vengeance.

Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their former labours

of educating the young. Their order had been a little too successful

in its fight against the enemies of the church. It had established

“provinces” in every part of the world, to teach the natives the

blessings of Christianity, but soon it had developed into a regular

trading company which was for ever interfering with the civil

authorities. During the reign of the Marquis de Pombal, the great

reforming minister of Portugal, they had been driven out of the

Portuguese lands and in the year 1773 at the request of most of the

Catholic powers of Europe, the order had been suppressed by Pope

Clement XIV. Now they were back on the job, and preached the principles

of “obedience” and “love for the legitimate dynasty” to children

whose parents had hired shop windows that they might laugh at Marie

Antoinette driving to the scaffold which was to end her misery.

But in the Protestant countries like Prussia, things were not a whit

better. The great patriotic leaders of the year 1812, the poets and

the writers who had preached a holy war upon the usurper, were now

branded as dangerous “demagogues.” Their houses were searched. Their

letters were read. They were obliged to report to the police at regular

intervals and give an account of themselves. The Prussian drill master

was let loose in all his fury upon the younger generation. When a

party of students celebrated the tercentenary of the Reformation with

noisy but harmless festivities on the old Wartburg, the Prussian

bureaucrats had visions of an imminent revolution. When a theological

student, more honest than intelligent, killed a Russian government

spy who was operating in Germany, the universities were placed under

police-supervision and professors were jailed or dismissed without any

form of trial.

Russia, of course, was even more absurd in these anti-revolutionary

activities. Alexander had recovered from his attack of piety. He was

gradually drifting toward melancholia. He well knew his own limited

abilities and understood how at Vienna he had been the victim both of

Metternich and the Krüdener woman. More and more he turned his back

upon the west and became a truly Russian ruler whose interests lay in

Constantinople, the old holy city that had been the first teacher of

the Slavs. The older he grew, the harder he worked and the less he was

able to accomplish. And while he sat in his study, his ministers turned

the whole of Russia into a land of military barracks.

It is not a pretty picture. Perhaps I might have shortened this

description of the Great Reaction. But it is just as well that you

should have a thorough knowledge of this era. It was not the first time

that an attempt had been made to set the clock of history back. The

result was the usual one.