第 五十 章 · French Revolution

The Imperial Highnesses, the Royal Highnesses, their Graces the

Dukes, the Ministers Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, together with

the plain Excellencies and their army of secretaries, servants and

hangers-on, whose labours had been so rudely interrupted by the sudden

return of the terrible Corsican (now sweltering under the hot sun of

St. Helena) went back to their jobs. The victory was duly celebrated

with dinners, garden parties and balls at which the new and very

shocking “waltz” was danced to the great scandal of the ladies and

gentlemen who remembered the minuet of the old Régime.

For almost a generation they had lived in retirement. At last the

danger was over. They were very eloquent upon the subject of the

terrible hardships which they had suffered. And they expected to

be recompensed for every penny they had lost at the hands of the

unspeakable Jacobins who had dared to kill their anointed king, who had

abolished wigs and who had discarded the short trousers of the court of

Versailles for the ragged pantaloons of the Parisian slums.

You may think it absurd that I should mention such a detail. But, if

you please, the Congress of Vienna was one long succession of such

absurdities and for many months the question of “short trousers vs.

long trousers” interested the delegates more than the future settlement

of the Saxon or Spanish problems. His Majesty the King of Prussia went

so far as to order a pair of short ones, that he might give public

evidence of his contempt for everything revolutionary.

Another German potentate, not to be outdone in this noble hatred for

the revolution, decreed that all taxes which his subjects had paid to

the French usurper should be paid a second time to the legitimate ruler

who had loved his people from afar while they were at the mercy of the

Corsican ogre. And so on. From one blunder to another, until one gasps

and exclaims “but why in the name of High Heaven did not the people

object?” Why not indeed? Because the people were utterly exhausted,

were desperate, did not care what happened or how or where or by whom

they were ruled, provided there was peace. They were sick and tired of

war and revolution and reform.

In the eighties of the previous century they had all danced around the

tree of liberty. Princes had embraced their cooks and Duchesses had

danced the Carmagnole with their lackeys in the honest belief that the

Millennium of Equality and Fraternity had at last dawned upon this

wicked world. Instead of the Millennium they had been visited by the

Revolutionary commissary who had lodged a dozen dirty soldiers in their

parlor and had stolen the family plate when he returned to Paris to

report to his government upon the enthusiasm with which the “liberated

country” had received the Constitution, which the French people had

presented to their good neighbours.

When they had heard how the last outbreak of revolutionary disorder

in Paris had been suppressed by a young officer, called Bonaparte, or

Buonaparte, who had turned his guns upon the mob, they gave a sigh of

relief. A little less liberty, fraternity and equality seemed a very

desirable thing. But ere long, the young officer called Buonaparte or

Bonaparte became one of the three consuls of the French Republic,

then sole consul and finally Emperor. As he was much more efficient

than any ruler that had ever been seen before, his hand pressed heavily

upon his poor subjects. He showed them no mercy. He impressed their

sons into his armies, he married their daughters to his generals and

he took their pictures and their statues to enrich his own museums.

He turned the whole of Europe into an armed camp and killed almost an

entire generation of men.

[Illustration: OFF FOR TRAFALGAR]

Now he was gone, and the people (except a few professional military

men) had but one wish. They wanted to be let alone. For awhile they had

been allowed to rule themselves, to vote for mayors and aldermen and

judges. The system had been a terrible failure. The new rulers had been

inexperienced and extravagant. From sheer despair the people turned to

the representative men of the old Régime. “You rule us,” they said, “as

you used to do. Tell us what we owe you for taxes and leave us alone.

We are busy repairing the damage of the age of liberty.”

The men who stage-managed the famous congress certainly did their best

to satisfy this longing for rest and quiet. The Holy Alliance, the main

result of the Congress, made the policeman the most important dignitary

of the State and held out the most terrible punishment to those who

dared criticise a single official act.

Europe had peace, but it was the peace of the cemetery.

The three most important men at Vienna were the Emperor Alexander of

Russia, Metternich, who represented the interests of the Austrian house

of Habsburg, and Talleyrand, the erstwhile bishop of Autun, who had

managed to live through the different changes in the French government

by the sheer force of his cunning and his intelligence and who now

travelled to the Austrian capital to save for his country whatever

could be saved from the Napoleonic ruin. Like the gay young man of the

limerick, who never knew when he was slighted, this unbidden guest

came to the party and ate just as heartily as if he had been really

invited. Indeed, before long, he was sitting at the head of the

table entertaining everybody with his amusing stories and gaining the

company’s good will by the charm of his manner.

[Illustration: THE SPECTRE WHICH FRIGHTENED THE HOLY ALLIANCE]

Before he had been in Vienna twenty-four hours he knew that the allies

were divided into two hostile camps. On the one side were Russia,

who wanted to take Poland, and Prussia, who wanted to annex Saxony;

and on the other side were Austria and England, who were trying to

prevent this grab because it was against their own interest that either

Prussia or Russia should be able to dominate Europe. Talleyrand played

the two sides against each other with great skill and it was due to

his efforts that the French people were not made to suffer for the

ten years of oppression which Europe had endured at the hands of the

Imperial officials. He argued that the French people had been given no

choice in the matter. Napoleon had forced them to act at his bidding.

But Napoleon was gone and Louis XVIII was on the throne. “Give him a

chance,” Talleyrand pleaded. And the Allies, glad to see a legitimate

king upon the throne of a revolutionary country, obligingly yielded and

the Bourbons were given their chance, of which they made such use that

they were driven out after fifteen years.

The second man of the triumvirate of Vienna was Metternich, the

Austrian prime minister, the leader of the foreign policy of the house

of Habsburg. Wenzel Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg, was exactly

what the name suggests. He was a Grand Seigneur, a very handsome

gentleman with very fine manners, immensely rich, and very able, but

the product of a society which lived a thousand miles away from the

sweating multitudes who worked and slaved in the cities and on the

farms. As a young man, Metternich had been studying at the University

of Strassburg when the French Revolution broke out. Strassburg, the

city which gave birth to the Marseillaise, had been a centre of Jacobin

activities. Metternich remembered that his pleasant social life had

been sadly interrupted, that a lot of incompetent citizens had suddenly

been called forth to perform tasks for which they were not fit, that

the mob had celebrated the dawn of the new liberty by the murder of

perfectly innocent persons. He had failed to see the honest enthusiasm

of the masses, the ray of hope in the eyes of women and children

who carried bread and water to the ragged troops of the Convention,

marching through the city on their way to the front and a glorious

death for the French Fatherland.

The whole thing had filled the young Austrian with disgust. It was

uncivilised. If there were any fighting to be done it must be done

by dashing young men in lovely uniforms, charging across the green

fields on well-groomed horses. But to turn an entire country into an

evil-smelling armed camp where tramps were overnight promoted to be

generals, that was both wicked and senseless. “See what came of all

your fine ideas,” he would say to the French diplomats whom he met

at a quiet little dinner given by one of the innumerable Austrian

grand-dukes. “You wanted liberty, equality and fraternity and you got

Napoleon. How much better it would have been if you had been contented

with the existing order of things.” And he would explain his system of

“stability.” He would advocate a return to the normalcy of the good

old days before the war, when everybody was happy and nobody talked

nonsense about “everybody being as good as everybody else.” In this

attitude he was entirely sincere and as he was an able man of great

strength of will and a tremendous power of persuasion, he was one of

the most dangerous enemies of the Revolutionary ideas. He did not die

until the year 1859, and he therefore lived long enough to see the

complete failure of all his policies when they were swept aside by the

revolution of the year 1848. He then found himself the most hated man

of Europe and more than once ran the risk of being lynched by angry

crowds of outraged citizens. But until the very last, he remained

steadfast in his belief that he had done the right thing.

He had always been convinced that people preferred peace to liberty and

he had tried to give them what was best for them. And in all fairness,

it ought to be said that his efforts to establish universal peace were

fairly successful. The great powers did not fly at each other’s throat

for almost forty years, indeed not until the Crimean war between

Russia and England, France and Italy and Turkey, in the year 1854. That

means a record for the European continent.

[Illustration: THE REAL CONGRESS OF VIENNA]

The third hero of this waltzing congress was the Emperor Alexander.

He had been brought up at the court of his grand-mother, the famous

Catherine the Great. Between the lessons of this shrewd old woman, who

taught him to regard the glory of Russia as the most important thing in

life, and those of his private tutor, a Swiss admirer of Voltaire and

Rousseau, who filled his mind with a general love of humanity, the boy

grew up to be a strange mixture of a selfish tyrant and a sentimental

revolutionist. He had suffered great indignities during the life of his

crazy father, Paul I. He had been obliged to witness the wholesale

slaughter of the Napoleonic battle-fields. Then the tide had turned.

His armies had won the day for the Allies. Russia had become the

saviour of Europe and the Tsar of this mighty people was acclaimed as a

half-god who would cure the world of its many ills.

But Alexander was not very clever. He did not know men and women

as Talleyrand and Metternich knew them. He did not understand the

strange game of diplomacy. He was vain (who would not be under the

circumstances?) and loved to hear the applause of the multitude

and soon he had become the main “attraction” of the Congress while

Metternich and Talleyrand and Castlereagh (the very able British

representative) sat around a table and drank a bottle of Tokay and

decided what was actually going to be done. They needed Russia and

therefore they were very polite to Alexander, but the less he had

personally to do with the actual work of the Congress, the better they

were pleased. They even encouraged his plans for a Holy Alliance that

he might be fully occupied while they were engaged upon the work at

hand.

Alexander was a sociable person who liked to go to parties and meet

people. Upon such occasions he was happy and gay but there was a very

different element in his character. He tried to forget something which

he could not forget. On the night of the 23rd of March of the year 1801

he had been sitting in a room of the St. Michael Palace in Petersburg,

waiting for the news of his father’s abdication. But Paul had refused

to sign the document which the drunken officers had placed before him

on the table, and in their rage they had put a scarf around his neck

and had strangled him to death. Then they had gone downstairs to tell

Alexander that he was Emperor of all the Russian lands.

The memory of this terrible night stayed with the Tsar who was a very

sensitive person. He had been educated in the school of the great

French philosophers who did not believe in God but in Human Reason.

But Reason alone could not satisfy the Emperor in his predicament. He

began to hear voices and see things. He tried to find a way by which

he could square himself with his conscience. He became very pious

and began to take an interest in mysticism, that strange love of the

mysterious and the unknown which is as old as the temples of Thebes and

Babylon.

The tremendous emotion of the great revolutionary era had influenced

the character of the people of that day in a strange way. Men and women

who had lived through twenty years of anxiety and fear were no longer

quite normal. They jumped whenever the door-bell rang. It might mean

the news of the “death on the field of honour” of an only son. The

phrases about “brotherly love” and “liberty” of the Revolution were

hollow words in the ears of sorely stricken peasants. They clung to

anything that might give them a new hold on the terrible problems of

life. In their grief and misery they were easily imposed upon by a

large number of impostors who posed as prophets and preached a strange

new doctrine which they dug out of the more obscure passages of the

Book of Revelations.

In the year 1814, Alexander, who had already consulted a large number

of wonder-doctors, heard of a new seeress who was foretelling the

coming doom of the world and was exhorting people to repent ere it

be too late. The Baroness von Krüdener, the lady in question, was a

Russian woman of uncertain age and similar reputation who had been the

wife of a Russian diplomat in the days of the Emperor Paul. She had

squandered her husband’s money and had disgraced him by her strange

love affairs. She had lived a very dissolute life until her nerves

had given way and for a while she was not in her right mind. Then

she had been converted by the sight of the sudden death of a friend.

Thereafter she despised all gaiety. She confessed her former sins to

her shoemaker, a pious Moravian brother, a follower of the old reformer

John Huss, who had been burned for his heresies by the Council of

Constance in the year 1415.

The next ten years the Baroness spent in Germany making a specialty

of the “conversion” of kings and princes. To convince Alexander, the

Saviour of Europe, of the error of his ways was the greatest ambition

of her life. And as Alexander, in his misery, was willing to listen

to anybody who brought him a ray of hope, the interview was easily

arranged. On the evening of the fourth of June of the year 1815, she

was admitted to the tent of the Emperor. She found him reading his

Bible. We do not know what she said to Alexander, but when she left him

three hours later, he was bathed in tears, and vowed that “at last his

soul had found peace.” From that day on the Baroness was his faithful

companion and his spiritual adviser. She followed him to Paris and then

to Vienna and the time which Alexander did not spend dancing he spent

at the Krüdener prayer-meetings.

You may ask why I tell you this story in such great detail? Are not the

social changes of the nineteenth century of greater importance than the

career of an ill-balanced woman who had better be forgotten? Of course

they are, but there exist any number of books which will tell you of

these other things with great accuracy and in great detail. I want you

to learn something more from this history than a mere succession of

facts. I want you to approach all historical events in a frame of mind

that will take nothing for granted. Don’t be satisfied with the mere

statement that “such and such a thing happened then and there.” Try

to discover the hidden motives behind every action and then you will

understand the world around you much better and you will have a greater

chance to help others, which (when all is said and done) is the only

truly satisfactory way of living.

I do not want you to think of the Holy Alliance as a piece of paper

which was signed in the year 1815 and lies dead and forgotten somewhere

in the archives of state. It may be forgotten but it is by no means

dead. The Holy Alliance was directly responsible for the promulgation

of the Monroe Doctrine, and the Monroe Doctrine of America for the

Americans has a very distinct bearing upon your own life. That is the

reason why I want you to know exactly how this document happened to

come into existence and what the real motives were underlying this

outward manifestation of piety and Christian devotion to duty.

The Holy Alliance was the joint labour of an unfortunate man who had

suffered a terrible mental shock and who was trying to pacify his

much-disturbed soul, and of an ambitious woman who after a wasted life

had lost her beauty and her attraction and who satisfied her vanity

and her desire for notoriety by assuming the rôle of self-appointed

Messiah of a new and strange creed. I am not giving away any secrets

when I tell you these details. Such sober minded people as Castlereagh,

Metternich and Talleyrand fully understood the limited abilities of the

sentimental Baroness. It would have been easy for Metternich to send

her back to her German estates. A few lines to the almighty commander

of the imperial police and the thing was done.

But France and England and Austria depended upon the good-will of

Russia. They could not afford to offend Alexander. And they tolerated

the silly old Baroness because they had to. And while they regarded

the Holy Alliance as utter rubbish and not worth the paper upon which

it was written, they listened patiently to the Tsar when he read them

the first rough draft of this attempt to create the Brotherhood of

Men upon a basis of the Holy Scriptures. For this is what the Holy

Alliance tried to do, and the signers of the document solemnly declared

that they would “in the administration of their respective states

and in their political relations with every other government take

for their sole guide the precepts of that Holy Religion, namely the

precepts of Justice, Christian Charity and Peace, which far from being

applicable only to private concerns must have an immediate influence

on the councils of princes, and must guide all their steps as being

the only means of consolidating human institutions and remedying

their imperfections.” They then proceeded to promise each other that

they would remain united “by the bonds of a true and indissoluble

fraternity, and considering each other as fellow-countrymen, they

would on all occasions and in all places lend each other aid and

assistance.” And more words to the same effect.

Eventually the Holy Alliance was signed by the Emperor of Austria,

who did not understand a word of it. It was signed by the Bourbons

who needed the friendship of Napoleon’s old enemies. It was signed by

the King of Prussia, who hoped to gain Alexander for his plans for a

“greater Prussia,” and by all the little nations of Europe who were at

the mercy of Russia. England never signed, because Castlereagh thought

the whole thing buncombe. The Pope did not sign because he resented

this interference in his business by a Greek-Orthodox and a Protestant.

And the Sultan did not sign because he never heard of it.

The general mass of the European people, however, soon were forced to

take notice. Behind the hollow phrases of the Holy Alliance stood the

armies of the Quintuple Alliance which Metternich had created among the

great powers. These armies meant business. They let it be known that

the peace of Europe must not be disturbed by the so-called liberals

who were in reality nothing but disguised Jacobins, and hoped for a

return of the revolutionary days. The enthusiasm for the great wars

of liberation of the years 1812, 1813, 1814 and 1815 had begun to

wear off. It had been followed by a sincere belief in the coming of a

happier day. The soldiers who had borne the brunt of the battle wanted

peace and they said so.

But they did not want the sort of peace which the Holy Alliance and

the Council of the European powers had now bestowed upon them. They

cried that they had been betrayed. But they were careful lest they be

heard by a secret-police spy. The reaction was victorious. It was a

reaction caused by men who sincerely believed that their methods were

necessary for the good of humanity. But it was just as hard to bear

as if their intentions had been less kind. And it caused a great deal

of unnecessary suffering and greatly retarded the orderly progress of

political development.