Theodor Mommsen - "Römische Geschichte Book 4"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing - "Fabeln und Erzaehlungen"

Louis Joseph Vance - "The Bronze Bell"

Sebastian Brandt - "The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 2"

Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4

W >> Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks >> Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4




The Swiss, with characteristic servility, testified the greatest zeal
on every occasion for the emperor Napoleon, celebrated his fete-day,
and boasted of his protection,[5] and of the freedom they were still
permitted to enjoy. Freedom of thought was expressly prohibited.
Sycophants, in the pay of the foreign ruler, as, for instance,
Zschokke, alone guided public opinion. In Zug, any person who ventured
to speak disparagingly of the Swiss in the service of France was
declared an enemy to his country and exposed to severe punishment.[6]
The Swiss shed their blood in each and all of Napoleon's campaigns,
and aided him to reduce their kindred nations to abject slavery.[7]

The Rhenish confederation shared the advantages of French influence to
the same degree in which it, in common with the old states on the left
bank of the Rhine, was subject to ecclesiastical corruption or to the
upstart vanity incidental to petty states. Wherever enlightenment and
liberty had formerly existed, as in Protestant and constitutional
Wuertemberg, the violation of the ancient rights of the people was
deeply felt, and the new aristocracy, modelled on that of France,
appeared as unbearable to the older inhabitants of Wuertemberg as did
the loss of their ancient independence to the mediatized princes and
lordlings. King Frederick, notwithstanding his refusal to send troops
into Spain, was compelled to furnish an enormous contingent for the
wars in eastern Europe; the conscription and taxes were heavily felt,
and the peasant was vexed by the great hunts, celebrated by
Matthisson, the court-poet, as festivals of Diana.[8] In Bavaria, the
administration of Maximilian Joseph and of his minister, Montgelas,
although arbitrary in its measures, promoted, like that of Frederick
II. and Joseph II., the advance of enlightenment and true liberty. The
monasteries were closed, the punishment of the rack was abolished,
unity was introduced in the administration of the state; the schools,
the police, and the roads were improved, toleration was established;
in a word, the dreams of the Illuminati, thirty years before this
period, were, in almost every respect, realized. But, on the other
hand, patriotism was here more unknown than in any other part of
Germany. Christopher von Aretin set himself up as an apparitor to the
French police, and, in 1810, published a work against the few German
patriots still remaining, whom he denounced, in the fourteenth number
of the Literary Gazette of Upper Germany, as "Preachers of Germanism,
criminals and traitors, by whom the Rhenish confederation was
polluted." The crown prince of Bavaria, who deeply lamented the rule
of France and the miseries of Germany, offers a contrary example. A
constitution, naturally a mere tool in the hand of the ministry, was
bestowed, in 1808, upon Bavaria.

The government of Charles von Dalberg, the prince primate and
grandduke of Frankfort, was one of the most despicable of those
composing the Rhenish confederation. Equally insensible to the duties
attached to his high name and station,[9] he flattered the foreign
tyrant to an extent unsurpassed by any of the other base sycophants at
that time abounding in the empire; with folded hands would he at all
times invoke the blessing of the Most High on the head of the almighty
ruler of the earth, and celebrate each of his victories with hymns of
gratitude and joy, while his ministers misruled and tyrannized over
the country,[10] whose freedom they loudly vaunted.[11]--In Wuerzburg,
the French ambassador reigned with the despotism of an Eastern
satrap.[12] Saxe-Coburg[13] and Anhalt-Gotha,[14] where the native
tyrant was sheltered beneath the wing of Napoleon, were in the most
lamentable state.--In Saxony, the government remained unaltered.
Frederick Augustus, filled with gratitude for the lenity with which he
had been treated after the war and for the grant of the royal dignity,
remained steadily faithful to Napoleon, but introduced no internal
innovations into the government. The adhesion of Saxe-Weimar to the
Rhenish confederation was of deplorable consequence to Germany, the
great poets assembled there by the deceased Duchess Amalia also
scattering incense around Napoleon.

The kingdom of Westphalia was doomed to taste to the dregs the bitter
cup of humiliation. The new king, Jerome, who declared, "Je veux qu'on
respecte la dignite de l'homme et du citoyen," bestowed, it is true,
many and great benefits upon his subjects; the system of flogging, so
degrading to the soldier, was abolished, the judicature was improved,
the administration simplified, and the German in authority,
notwithstanding his traditionary gruffness, became remarkable for
urbanity toward the citizens and peasants. But Napoleon's despotic
rule ever demanded fresh sacrifices of men and money and increased
severity on the part of the police, in order to quell the spirit of
revolt. Jerome, conscious of being merely his brother's
representative, consoled himself for his want of independence in his
gay court at Cassel.[15] He had received but a middling education, and
had, at one period, held a situation in the marine at Baltimore in
North America. While still extremely young, placed unexpectedly upon a
throne, more as a splendid puppet than as an independent sovereign, he
gave way to excesses, natural, and, under the circumstances, almost
excusable. It would be ungenerous to repeat the sarcasms showered upon
him on his expulsion. The execrations heaped, at a later period, upon
his head, ought with far greater justice to have fallen upon those of
the Germans themselves, and more particularly upon those of that
portion of the aristocracy that vied with the French in enriching the
chronique scandaleuse of Cassel, and upon those of the citizens who,
under Bongars, the head of the French police, acted the part of spies
upon and secret informers against their wretched countrymen.--The
farcical donation of a free constitution to the people put a climax to
their degradation. On the 2d of July, 1808, Jerome summoned the
Westphalian Estates to Cassel and opened the servile assembly, thus
arbitrarily convoked, with extreme pomp. The unfortunate deputies, who
had, on the conclusion of the lengthy ceremonial, received an
invitation _assister au repas_ at the palace and had repaired thither,
their imaginations, whetted by hunger, revelling in visions of
gastronomic delight, were sorely discomfited on discovering that they
were simply expected "to look on while the sovereign feasted." The
result of this assembly was, naturally, a unanimous tribute of
admiration and an invocation of blessings on the head of the foreign
ruler, the principal part in which was played by John Mueller, who
attempted to convince his fellow countrymen that by means of the
French usurpation they had first received the boon of true liberty.
This cheaply-bought apostate said, in his usual hyperbolical style,
"It is a marked peculiarity of the northern nations, more especially
of those of German descent, that, whenever God has, in His wisdom,
resolved to bestow upon them a new kind or a higher degree of
civilization, the impulse has ever been given from without. This
impulse was given to us by Napoleon, by him before whom the earth is
silent, God having given the whole world into his hand, nor can
Germany at the present period have a wish ungratified, Napoleon having
reorganized her as the nursery of European civilization. Too sublime
to condescend to every-day polity, he has given durability to Germany!
Happy nation! what an interminable vista of glory opens to thy view!"
Thus spoke John Mueller. Thousands of Germans had been converted into
abject slaves, but none other than he was there ever found, with
sentimental phrases to gild the chains of his countrymen, to vaunt
servility as liberty and dishonor as glory.[16] John Mueller's
unprincipled address formed, as it were, the turning-point of German
affairs. Self-degradation could go no further. The spirit of the sons
of Germany henceforward rose, and, with manly courage, they sought, by
their future actions, to wipe off the deep stain of their former guilt
and dishonor.


[Footnote 1: See accounts of this affair in the Recollections of a
Legionary, Hanover, 1826, and in Beamisch's History of the Legion.]

[Footnote 2: A graphic description of these times is to be met with in
Joanna Schopenhauer's Tour on the Lower Rhine. The kings of Bavaria,
Wurtemberg, Westphalia, Saxony, the prince primate, the hereditary
prince of Baden and of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the duke of Weimar, the
princes of Hobenzollern, Hesse-Rotenburg, and Hesse-Philippsthal, were
present. No one belonging to the house of Austria was there: of that
of Prussia there was Prince William, the king's brother. The
Allgemeine Zeitung of that day wrote: "The fact of Napoleon's sending
for the privy-councillor, Von Goethe, into his cabinet, and conversing
with him for upward of an hour, appears to us well worthy of mention.
What German would not rejoice that the great emperor should have
entered into such deep conversation with such a fitting representative
of our noblest, and now, alas, sole remaining national possession, our
art and learning, by whose preservation alone can our nationality be
saved from utter annihilation." Notwithstanding which the company of
actors belonging to the theatre at Weimar, which was close at hand and
had been under Goethe's instruction, was not once allowed to perform
on the Erfurt stage, which Napoleon had supplied with actors from
Paris. Wieland was also compelled to remain standing for an hour in
Napoleon's presence, and when, at length, unable, owing to the
weakness of old age, to continue in that position, he ventured to ask
permission to retire, Napoleon is said to have considered the request
an unwarrantable liberty. The literary heroes of Weimar took no
interest in the country from which they had received so deep a tribute
of admiration. Not a patriotic sentiment escaped their lips. At the
time when the deepest wound was inflicted on the Tyrol, Goethe gave to
the world his frivolous "Wahlverwandschaften," which was followed by a
poem in praise of Napoleon, of whom he says:

"Doubts, that have baffled thousands, _he_ has solved;
Ideas, o'er which centuries have brooded,
_His_ giant mind intuitively compassed."]

[Footnote 3: The great and dangerous robber bands of the notorious
Damian Hessel, and of Schinderhannes, afford abundant proof of the
demoralized condition of the people.]

[Footnote 4: On the 12th of January, 1807, a ship laden with four
hundred quintals of gunpowder blew up in the middle of the city of
Leyden, part of which was thereby reduced to ruins, and one hundred
and fifty persons, among others the celebrated professors Luzac and
Kleit, were killed.]

[Footnote 5: On the opening of the federal diet in 1806, the
Landammann lauded "the omnipotent benevolence of the gracious
mediator." In earlier times, the Swiss would, on the contrary, have
boasted of their affording protection to, not of receiving protection
from, France.]

[Footnote 6: In order to prove of what importance they considered the
benevolent protection of Napoleon the Great.--_Attgemeine Zeitung of
1810, No_. 90.]

[Footnote 7: Their general, Von der Wied, who was taken prisoner at
Talavera in Spain and died shortly afterward of a pestilential
disease, had done signal service to France, in 1798 in Switzerland, in
1792 in Italy, in 1805 in Austria, in 1806 in Prussia, and finally in
Spain.--_Allgemeine Zeitung of 1811, No_. 46.]

[Footnote 8: Personal freedom was restricted by innumerable decrees.
Freedom of speech, formerly great in Wuertemberg, was strictly
repressed; all social confidence was annihilated. A swarm of informers
ensnared those whom the secret police were unable to entrap. The
secrecy of letters was violated. Trials in criminal cases were no
longer allowed to be public. The sentence passed upon the accused was,
particularly in cases of the highest import, not delivered by the
judge as dictated by the law, but by the despot's caprice.--The
conscription was enforced with increased severity and tyranny.--The
natural right of emigration was abolished.--The people were disarmed,
and not even the inhabitants of solitary farms and hamlets were
allowed to possess arms in order to defend themselves against wolves
and robbers. A man was punished for killing a mad dog, because the gun
used for that purpose had been illegally secreted. Pass-tickets were
given to and returned by all desirous of passing the gates of the
pettiest town. The members of the higher aristocracy were compelled,
under pain of being deprived of the third of their income, to spend
three months in the year at court.--The citizen was oppressed by a
variety of fresh taxes, by the newly-created monopolies of tobacco,
salt, etc., and colonial imposts, by the tenfold rise of the excise
and custom-house dues, etc. Vide Zahn in the Wuertemberg Annual.
Zschokke, meanwhile, in his pamphlet already mentioned, "Will the
human race gain," etc., advocated republican equality and liberty
under a monarchical constitution.]

[Footnote 9: The Von Dalbergs of Franconia were the first hereditary
barons of the Holy Roman Empire, and one of their race was dubbed
knight at each imperial coronation. Hence the demand of the imperial
herald, "Is no Dalberg here?" And a Dalberg it was, who, in Napoleon's
name, declared to the German emperor that he no longer recognized an
emperor of Germany.--In 1797, Dalberg had, at the diet, and again in
1805, expressed himself with great zeal against France; on the present
occasion he was Napoleon's first satrap.]

[Footnote 10: They sold the demesnes of Hanau and Fulda and received
the sums produced by the sale in gift from the grandduke.--_Goerres's
Rhenish Mercury, A.D. 1814, No. 168._]

[Footnote 11: They were barefaced enough to bestow a constitution,
and, in 1810, to open a diet at Hanau, although all the newspapers
had, five days previously, been suppressed, and orders had been issued
that the editor of the only newspaper permitted for the future was to
be appointed by the police.--_Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 294._]

[Footnote 12: Count Montholon-Semonville sold justice and mercy. Vide
Brockhaus's Deutsche Blaetter, 1814, No. 101.]

[Footnote 13: The duke, Francis, allowed the country to be mercilessly
drained and impoverished by the minister, Von Kretschmann. He lived on
extremely bad terms with his uncle, Frederick Josias, duke of Coburg,
the celebrated Austrian general. Francis died in 1806. Ernest, his son
and successor, delivered the country, in 1809, from Kretschmann's
tyranny, and, in 1811, bestowed upon it a constitution, which was,
nevertheless, merely an imitation of that of Westphalia.]

[Footnote 14: The prince, Augustus Christian Frederick, contracted
debts to an enormous amount, completely drained his petty territory,
and even seized bail-money. Military amusements, drunkenness and other
gross excesses, the preservation of enormous herds of deer which
destroyed the fields of the peasantry, formed the pleasures of this
prince.--_Stenzel's History of Anhalt._]

[Footnote 15: Napoleon nicknamed him _roi de coulisses_, and gave him
a guardian in his ambassador, Reinhard, a person of celebrity during
the Revolution. Jerome's first ministers were friends of his youth;
the Creole, Le Camus, who was created Count Puerstenstein, and Malchus,
whose office it was to fill a bottomless treasury. Vide Hormayr,
Archive 5, 458, and the Secret History of the Court of Westphalia,
1814.]

[Footnote 16: Vide Strombeck's Life and the Allgemeine Zeitung of
September, 1808. Besides John Mueller and Aretin, mention may, with
equal justice, be made of Orome of Geissen and Zschokke, a native of
Magdeburg naturalized in Switzerland, who, in 1807, ventured to
declare in public that Napoleon had done more for Swiss independence
than William Tell five hundred years ago; who, paid by Napoleon,
defamed the noble-spirited Spaniards and Tyrolese in 1815, decried the
enthusiastic spirit animating Germany, and afterward whitewashed
himself by his liberal tirades. With these may also be associated
Murhard, the publisher of the _Moniteur Westphalien_, K.J. Schuetz, the
author of a work upon Napoleon, the Berlinese Jew, Saul Asher, the
author of a scandalous work, entitled "Germanomanie," and of a
slanderous article in Zschokke's Miscellanies against Prussia,
Kosegarten the poet, who, in 1809, delivered a speech in eulogy of
Napoleon, far surpassing all in bombast and mean adulation. Benturini,
at that time, also termed Napoleon the emanation of the universal
Spirit, a second incarnation of the Deity, a second savior of the
world. In Posselt's European Annals of 1807, a work by a certain W.
upon the political interests of Germany appeared, and concluded as
follows: "Let us raise to him (Napoleon) a national monument, worthy
of the first and only benefactor of the nations of Germany. Let his
name be engraved in gigantic letters of shining gold on Germany's
highest and steepest pinnacle, whence, lighted by the effulgent rays
of morn, it may be visible far over the plains on which he bestowed a
happier futurity!" This writer also drew a comparison between Napoleon
and Charlemagne, in which he designated the latter a barbarous despot
and the former the new savior of the world. He says, "Napoleon first
solved the enigma of equality and liberty--his chief aim was the
prevention of despotism--his chief desire, to eternalize the dominion
of virtue." In the course of 1808, it was said in the essay, "On the
Regeneration of Germany," that the Germans were still children whom it
was solely possible for the French to educate: "Our language is also
not logical like French--if we intend to attain unity, we must adhere
with heart and soul to him who has smoothed the path to it, to him,
our securest support, to him, whose name outshines that of
Charlemagne--foreign princes in German countries are no proof of
subjection, they, on the contrary, most surely warrant our continued
existence as a nation." In France sixty authors dedicated their works,
within the space of a year, to the emperor Napoleon--in Germany,
ninety.]



CCLVI. Resuscitation of Patriotism Throughout Germany--Austria's
Demonstration


The general slavery, although most severely felt in Eastern Germany,
bore there a less disgraceful character. Austria and Prussia had been
conquered, pillaged, reduced in strength and political importance,
while the Rhenish states, forgetful that it is ever less disgraceful
to yield to an overpowering enemy than voluntarily to lend him aid,
had shared in and profited by the triumph of the empire's foe. Austria
and Prussia suffered to a greater extent than the Rhenish
confederation, but they preserved a higher degree of independence.
Prussia, although almost annihilated by her late disasters,[1] still
dreamed of future liberation. Austria had, notwithstanding her
successive and numerous defeats, retained the greater share of
independence, but her subjection, although to a lesser degree, was the
more disgraceful on account of her former military glory and her
preponderance as a political power in Germany. With steady
perseverance and unfaltering courage she opposed the attacks of the
foreign tyrant against the empire, and, France's first and last
antagonist, the most faithful champion of the honor of Germany, she
rose, with redoubled vigor, after each successive defeat, to renew the
unequal struggle.

Prussia had been overcome, because, instead of uniting with the other
states of Germany, she had first abandoned them to be afterward
deserted by them in her turn, and because, instead of arming her
warlike people against every foreign foe, she had habituated her
citizens to unarmed effeminacy and had rested her sole support on a
mercenary army, an artificial and spiritless automaton, separated from
and unsympathizing with the people. The idea that the salvation of
Prussia could now alone be found in her reconciliation with the
neighboring powers of Germany, in a general confederation, in the
patriotism of her armed citizens, had already arisen. But, in order to
inspire the citizen with enthusiasm, he must first, by the secure and
free possession of his rights and by his participation in the public
weal, be deeply imbued with a consciousness of freedom. The slave has
no country; the freeman alone will lay down his life in its defence.
In those times of Germany's deepest degradation and suffering, men for
the first time again heard speak of a great and common fatherland, of
national fame and honor; and liberty, that glorious name, was uttered
not only by those who groaned beneath the rule of the despotic
foreigner, but even by those who deplored the loss of the internal
liberty of their country, the gradual subjection of the proud and
free-spirited German to native tyranny. The king of Prussia, not
content with morally reorganizing his army, also bestowed wise laws,
which restored the citizen and the peasant to their rights, to their
dignity as men, of which they had for so long been deprived by the
nobility, the monopolizers of every privilege. The emancipation of the
peasant essentially consisted in the abolition of feudal servitude and
forced labor; that of the citizen, in the donation of a free municipal
constitution, of self-administration, and freedom of election. The
nobility were, at the same time, despoiled of the exclusive
appointment to the higher civil and military posts and of the
exclusive possession of landed property. Each citizen possessed the
right, hitherto strictly prohibited, of purchasing baronial estates,
and the nobility were, on their part, permitted to exercise trades,
which a miserable prejudice had hitherto deemed incompatible with
noble birth. These new institutions date from 1808 and are due to the
energy of the minister, Stein.

This noble-spirited German was the founder of a secret society, the
_Tugendbund_, by which a general insurrection against Napoleon was
silently prepared throughout Germany. Among its members were numerous
statesmen, officers, and literati. Among the latter, Arndt gained
great note by his popular style, Jahn by his influence over the rising
generation. Jahn reintroduced gymnastics, so long neglected, into
education, as a means of heightening moral courage by the increase of
physical strength.[2] Scharnhorst, meanwhile, although restricted to
the prescribed number of troops, created a new army by continually
exchanging trained soldiers for raw recruits, and secretly purchased
an immense quantity of arms, so that a considerable force could, in
case of necessity, be speedily assembled. He also had all the brass
battery guns secretly converted into field-pieces and replaced by iron
guns. Napoleon's spies, however, came upon the trace of the
_Tugendbund_. Stein, exposed by an intercepted letter, was outlawed[3]
by Napoleon and compelled to quit Prussia. He was succeeded by
Hardenberg, by whom the treaty of Basel had formerly been concluded
and whose nomination was publicly approved of by Napoleon. Scharnhorst
and Julius Gruner, the head of the Berlin police, were also deprived
of their offices. The Berlin university, nevertheless, continued to
give evidence of a better spirit. Enlightenment and learning, on their
decrease at Frankfort on the Oder, here found their headquarters.
Halle had become Westphalian, and the universities of Rinteln and
Helmstaedt had, from a similar cause, been closed.

Austria also felt her humiliation too deeply not to be inspired, like
Prussia, with an instinct of self-preservation. The imperial dignity
and catholicism were here closely associated with the memory of the
Middle Ages, whose magnificence and grandeur were once more disclosed
to the people in the masterly productions of the writers of the day.
Hence the unison created by Frederick Schlegel between the romantic
poets and antiquarians of Germany and Viennese policy. The
predilection for ancient German art and poetry had, in the literary
world, been merely produced by the reaction of German intelligence
against foreign imitation; this literary reaction, however, happened
coincidently with and aided that in the political world. The
Nibelungen, the Minnesingers, the ancient chronicles, became a popular
study. The same enthusiasm inspired the liberal-spirited poets, Tieck,
Arnim, and Brentano; Fouque charmed the rising generation and the
multitude with his extravagant descriptions of the age of chivalry;
the learned researches of Grimm, Hagen, Busching, Graeter, etc., into
German antiquity, at that time, excited general interest, but the
glowing colors in which Joseph Gorres, himself a former Jacobin, and
amid the half Gallicized inhabitants of Coblentz, revived, as if by
magic, the Middle Age on the ruin-strewed banks of the Rhine caused
the deepest delight. Two men, Stein, now a refugee in Austria, and
Count Munster, first of all Hanoverian minister and afterward English
ambassador at Petersburg, who kept up a constant correspondence with
Stein and conducted the secret negotiations in the name of Great
Britain, were unwearied in their endeavors to forge arms against
Napoleon. In Austria, Count John Philip von Stadion, who had, since
the December of 1805, been placed at the head of the ministry, had
both the power and the will to repair the blunders committed by Thugut
and Cobenzl.

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