Blood and Iron Part 11

-- The meeting took place July 6, 1807. Napoleon sent his coach, drawn by six white horses, to bring the Queen to the miller's house, where the interview was staged in an upper room. Louise had on her finest court robe, white crepe embroidered with silver, and wore her famous crown of pearls; her loveliness and her woman's wit were to be used in behalf of prostrate Prussia.

-- Napoleon rode up in great style, surrounded by his brilliant staff--Berthier, Murat and the others. Louise awaited him at the head of the rickety stairs. As he went up in the semi-darkness, he stumbled and fell.

The Queen apologized that she was forced to meet the Emperor in so mean a place; but he immediately replied that to see so lovely a woman was well worth a few minor obstacles.

-- Louise now began pleading with Napoleon for leniency toward Prussia.

What an interview that was!

How eloquently she set forth her people's sufferings in the great French wars; she pictured the sorrows of Prussia so vividly that at last Napoleon became mightily interested. Finally he said:

-- "Ah, your Majesty asks very much indeed, but I am dreaming!" By this he meant, "I do not hear a word you say; I am looking at your beautiful eyes."

-- The clever Louise saw that she was progressing with her arguments, and undoubtedly had the Emperor under the spell of her fatal beauty; to oblige a grand lady in distress, he would be willing to concede much indeed, in his famous role of lady-killer and protector of feminine loveliness.

But at that precise moment, who should enter the room but Fr: Wilhelm himself, the Queen's blundering husband!

-- Always in the way--mentally clumsy--he spoiled everything! The interview ended abruptly.

-- Louise, heartbroken, retired in utter despair. She had believed that the justice of her cause, her eloquence, her loyalty to her people would go far to soften Napoleon's wrath, but in all this she was cruelly disappointed. Next day the French tyrant announced his terms: Indemnity of 154,000,000 marks; one-third cash; one-third payable in lands; the final third "on time," in the interim he would garrison in five fortified towns 30,000 French troops and 10,000 French cavalry, whose support was at the expense of Prussia, till the debt was paid.

-- This great Queen, after life's fever, sleeps enshrined in her snowy marble tomb at Charlottenburg.

One day you will stand with uncovered head beside her royal grave, and recall her n.o.ble life. She deserves well of her country!

-- But mark this well: out of Prussia's humiliations came her ultimate strength; the vanquished, as is often the story of human life, was strengthened more than the victors. Prussia, chastened by her severe lessons, henceforth proceeded to build herself up slowly till at last she was ready, many, many years later, to strike for German Unity that final blow at the palace of the French kings at Versailles.

-- In the wearisome stretch of time till that distant day of German glory, Prussia henceforth becomes Germany--in spirit--in moody thoughtfulness--in stubborn determination--yes, under G.o.d, by blood and iron! There float before us many n.o.ble names, poets, prophets, soldiers who aid in stimulating "German national faith"--Fichte, Arndt, Kleist, Roon, Moltke, Scharnhorst, Humboldt--and in the historical twilight big with mutterings and rumblings of the New Time to come with all its glory, taking the place of the Prussian ruin between 1806 and 1813, is Queen Louise, her gentle spirit a veritable evening-star, luminous with hope.

-- By 1813, Fr: William III had been induced by the pressure of public opinion to join Russia to fight off the French. May 17, 1813, William's famous decree, "To My People!" called for help to expel invaders, thereby to recover Prussian independence; and Napoleon was totally defeated in the tremendous battle of Leipzig, October 16-19, or "Battle of the Nations," as the Germans call Prussia's return to power and glory.

-- It was this patriotic appeal "To My People," that made William's troubles; the Prussian Liberals felt that the Government owed the people a Liberal political Const.i.tution, in return for Leipzig.

-- His Majesty grabbed on it, twice, and was at his wit's end to know how to keep his crown and his declaration of friends.h.i.+p for the people.

In the meantime, twenty-three minor German states having adopted const.i.tutions, more or less liberal, the growing demands of the common people for a share in Prussian government could be no longer denied.

19

Kingcraft comes upon evil days--in the rising tide of liberal ideas, monarchies of old are all but swept away.

-- When the Napoleonic dynasty collapsed, after Waterloo, there were 39 petty princ.i.p.alities in the German-speaking area grouped about Rhein, the Main, Neckar, Elbe; these knights' holdings, ecclesiastical strongholds, and domains of various descriptions became merged by cross-fighting throughout the Napoleonic era.

-- The Congress of Vienna (1815) deeming it advisable to set up a loose confederacy of the mult.i.tude of petty powers, founded a German Confederation, but whether it was geographical, racial or political no human being could say.

The local German princes kept full sovereign powers, but gradually, as a matter of expediency, the various states grouped themselves around Prussia and Austria. As for the Nation, there was no German sovereign, no supreme court, no commercial or political relations.h.i.+p worthy of the name. Instead, on every hand was intense local hatred, aloofness and suspicion. This condition continued for very many years.

-- The plain fact was that the various princes did not want German National unity; for the reason that it is not human nature for men to give up an advantage for an uncertainty. Also, at this time, neither Prussia nor Austria was strong enough to impose her hegemony upon Germany. Austria's policy was for delay; and in Prussia the general belief existed for many years that Austrian domination was really essential to put down the rising spirit of Democracy.

-- The authority of the Congress set up a Bond of Confederation, ruled by a Diet or Bundestag, sitting at Frankfort-on-the-Main.

-- In the hurly-burly, certain centres, such as Saxony, Bavaria and Wuertemberg, were raised in rank from duchies to kingdoms, while still others, such as Westphalia, Grand Duchy of Warsaw, were dissolved. The free cities were reduced to four; caste declined in political importance. The Confederation of the Rhine was set aside.

Thus the close of the Napoleonic period found German territory without political unity.

-- The last stand of kingly ultra-conservatism is the one great political feature of Europe, from the downfall of Napoleon, 1815, to the popular outbreaks of 1848. During this dark period the cause of const.i.tutional liberty in Prussia made little progress. Old forms as well as new were under suspicion. On the one side were ultra-conservative conceptions of Divine-right, upheld by Metternich, and on the other side was the idea that sovereignty came not from heaven but from earth, making the will of the people the voice of G.o.d.

-- Prussia and Austria, as the representatives of Divine-right, closely watched these revolutionary tendencies, suppressed uprisings, muzzled the press, in an attempt to check the surging tide of liberalism.

However much the kings had feared the wars of Napoleon, kingcraft was now confronted by an enemy more deadly. The babble of the bondsmen about to break their chains portended far greater disaster to dynasties than ever did bullets on the battlefield of Waterloo.

-- With might and main, the monarchs, resisting the demands of the people for const.i.tutional government, stamped out everything that looked like the first signs of National sentiment.

-- Nor was Germany alone in this reactionary att.i.tude. The kingly side of all Europe stood shoulder to shoulder against new political experiments.

In Italy, Greece, Spain, sovereigns applied the lash the harder, in an endeavor to suppress this new evil against kingcraft; nevertheless, among the common people there continued to grow consciousness of political rights.

-- "Napoleon in many of the lands he conquered," says Ffyfe, "set up many revolutionary ideas that sounded the death knell of the Feudal system. It was part of his administrative genius to take the lands from barons and their cla.s.s, and turn them over to peasants; it happened in France with the lands of the ecclesiastical barons of the church; it happened in North Germany, in 1810, when the decree of administrative following the annexation of the North German Coast swept away with a few strokes of the pen, thirty-six forms of Feudal privileges."

-- And these could never be restored, even after the Congress of Vienna spent seven or eight months, after Waterloo, dividing the loot among the old royal houses.

-- The system of monarchical Absolutism maintained itself in one way or another for years, but the old-line conception of the political legitimacy of despotic rulers had been rudely shattered.

-- In spite of a brave show of gold cloth, diamonds, laces, jewels, swords, silk stockings, lackeys, grooms, guards and crowns, kingcraft was now placed on the defensive. The cry of the people, "Liberty!"

filled many a market-place.

-- Forces of democracy were working everywhere, ill-directed to be sure, but never despairing of ultimate victory over kingcraft, which indeed had now come upon evil days. It is an undeniable fact that Bonaparte had purged the political ideas of French Revolution of many excesses, and had turned to practical account certain forms of liberty, for example, ridding captured lands, as Ffyfe tells us, of offensive special privileges, on part of irresponsible rulers of petty degree; but the danger was found in this: that a mere "desire" for political expediency, however surrounded by the halo of popular rights, avails nothing unless ultimately sustained by strong central authority; and it requires no profound knowledge of men's way to know that at no time in the history of the world has collective rulers.h.i.+p been other than a theory. The excesses of the French Revolution were not readily overlooked by the conservative elements in Germany.

20

German hope of National Union gleams like a star.

-- There gradually grew throughout Germany a spirit of intense longing for country, and many a n.o.ble spirit had in a vision seen from afar the common Fatherland. Especially in the universities, the feeling was strong.

The German universities were hotbeds of political excitement. For many years after Napoleon's downfall all manner of theories of government were strenuously debated, to the accompaniment of duels, beer-drinking, private feuds, and popular agitation, often ending in blood. The Burschenschaft, as the student brothers were called, finally formed themselves into a league comprising sixty schools; and held a famous meeting at Wartburg, 1817.

-- The patriots took Holy Communion, made impa.s.sioned speeches, built bonfires and cast into the flames hated books supporting Metternich's system of kingcraft. Also the patriots consigned to the fire an illiberal pamphlet by King Fr: Wilhelm III of Prussia.

-- Metternich became alarmed. Kotzebue, hated as a spy of Russia in Germany, was stabbed to the heart by Karl Sand. This gave to Metternich the desired opportunity, and he proceeded forthwith to impress on Fr: Wilhelm and the Czar the absurdity of toying longer with "Democratic ideas and paper const.i.tutions."