Austria sued for an armistice from Napoleon, enabled that superb organizer to emerge victorious from a most precarious situation. The hatred felt for him by Germans found expression in a daring attempt to murder him made by a well-bred youth named Staps on the 12th of October.
Two days later Napoleon, by means of unworthy artifices, hurried the Austrian plenipotentiaries into signing the treaty of peace at Schonbrunn. The House of Habsburg now ceded Salzburg and the Inn-Viertel to Napoleon (for his ally, the king of Bavaria); a great portion of the spoils which Austria had torn from Poland in 1795 went to the grand duchy of Warsaw, or Russia; and the cession of her provinces Carinthia, Carniola and Istria to the French empire cut her off from all access to the sea. After imposing these harsh terms on his enemy, the conqueror might naturally have shown clemency to the Tirolese leader, Andreas Hofer; but that brave mountaineer, when betrayed by a friend, was sentenced to death at Mantua owing to the arrival of a special message to that effect from Napoleon. In other quarters he achieved for the present a signal success. It was his habit to issue important decrees from the capitals of his enemies; and on the 17th of May 1809 he signed at Vienna an edict abolishing the temporal power of the pope and annexing the Papal States, which the French troops had occupied early in the previous year. On the 6th of July 1809 Pius VII. was arrested at Rome for presuming to excommunicate the successor of Charlemagne, and was deported to Grenoble and later on to Savona. The same year witnessed the downfall of Napoleon’s persistent enemy, Gustavus IV. of Sweden, who was dethroned by a military movement (29th of March 1809). His successor, Charles XIII., made peace with France on the 6th of January 1810, and agreed to adopt the provisions of the Continental System. The aim in all these changes, it will be observed, was to acquire control over the seaboard, or, failing that, the commerce of all European states.
As happened in the years 1802–1803, Napoleon extended his “System” as rapidly in time of peace as during war. The year 1810 saw the crown set to that edifice by the annexations of Holland and of the north-west coast of Germany. In both cases the operative cause was the same. Neither Louis Bonaparte nor German douaniers could be trusted to carry out in all their stringency the decrees for the entire exclusion of British commerce from those important regions. In the case of King Louis, family quarrels embittered the relations between the two brothers; but it is clear from Napoleon’s letters of November–December 1809 that he had even then resolved to annex Holland in order to gain complete control of its customs and of its naval resources. The negotiations which he allowed to go on with England in the spring of 1810, mainly respecting the independence of Holland, are now known to have been insincere. Fouché, for meddling in the negotiations through an agent of his own, was promptly disgraced; and, when neither England was moved by diplomatic cajolery nor Louis Bonaparte by threats, French troops were sent against the Dutch capital. Louis fled from his kingdom, and on the 9th of July 1810 Holland became part of the French empire. In the next months Napoleon promulgated a series of decrees for effecting the ruin of British commerce, and in December 1810 he decreed the annexation of the north-west coast of Germany, as also of Canton Valais, to the French empire. This now stretched from Lübeck to the Pyrenees, from Brest to Rome; while another arm (only nominally severed from the empire by the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy) extended down the eastern shore of the Adriatic to Ragusa and Cattaro, threatening the Turkish empire with schemes of partition always imminent but never achieved.
It is time now to notice two important events in the life of the emperor, namely his divorce of Josephine and his union with Marie Louise of Austria. The former 'of these had long been foreseen. The Bonapartes had intrigued for it with their usual persistence, and Napoleon was careful never to make it impossible. His triumph over Austria in 1809, and especially the attempt of Staps to murder him, clinched his determination to found a dynasty in his own direct line. From Josephine he could not expect to have an heir. Accordingly, on his return to Paris he caused the news to be broken to her that reasons of state of the most urgent kind compelled him to divorce her. An affecting scene took place between them on the 30th of November 1809; but Napoleon, though moved by her distress, remained firm; and though the clerics made a difficulty about dissolving the religious marriage of the 1st of December 1804, the formalities of which were complete save that the parish priest was absent, yet the emperor instituted a chancery for the archbishop of Paris, with the result that that body pronounced the divorce (January 1810). Josephine retired to her private abode, Malmaison, where her patience and serenity won the admiration of all who saw her.
Meanwhile the deliberations respecting the choice of her successor had already begun. Opinions were divided in the emperor’s circle between a Russian and an Austrian princess; but the marked coolness with which overtures for the hand of the tsar’s sister were received at St Petersburg, and the skill with which Count Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, let it be known that a union with the archduchess, Marie Louise, would be welcomed at Schonbrunn, helped to decide the matter. The reasons why the emperor Francis acquiesced in the marriage alliance are well known. Only so could his empire survive. A marriage between Napoleon and a Russian princess would have implied the permanent subjection of Austria. By the proposed step she would weaken the Franco-Russian alliance. But why did Napoleon fix his choice on Vienna rather than St Petersburg? Mainly, it would seem, because he desired hurriedly to screen the refusal, which might at any time be expected from the Russian court, under the appearance of a voluntary choice of an Austrian archduchess. Further, an alliance with the House of Habsburg might be expected to wean the Germans from all thought of gaining succour from that quarter. The wedding was celebrated first at Vienna by proxy, and at Notre Dame by the emperor in person on the 2nd of April. Though based on merely political grounds, the union was for the time a happy one. He advised his courtiers to marry Germans—“they are the best wives in the world, good, naïve and fresh as roses.” Metternich, on visiting Compiègne and Paris, found the emperor thoroughly devoted to his bride. Napoleon told him that he was now beginning to live, that he had always longed for a home and now at last had one. Metternich thereupon wrote to his master: “He (Napoleon) has possibly more weaknesses than many other men, and if the empress continues to play upon them, as she begins to realize the possibility of doing, she can render the greatest services to herself and all Europe.” The surmise was too hopeful. Napoleon, though he never again worked as he had done, soon freed himself from complete dependence on Marie Louise; and he never allowed her to intrude into political affairs, for which, indeed, she had not the least aptitude. His real concern for her was evinced shortly before the birth of their son, the king of Rome, when he gave orders that if the life of both mother and child could not be saved, that of the mother should be saved if possible (20th of March 1811).
This event seemed to place Napoleon’s fortunes on a sure basis; but already they were being undermined by events. The marriage negotiations of 1809–1810 had somewhat offended the emperor Alexander; his resentment increased when, at the close of 1810, Napoleon dethroned the duke of Oldenburg, brother-in-law of the tsar; and the breach in the Franco-Russian alliance widened when the French emperor refused to award fit compensation to the duke or to give to the Russian government an assurance that the kingdom of Poland would. never be reconstituted. The addition of large territories to the grand duchy of Warsaw after the war of 1809 aroused the fears of the tsar respecting the Poles; and he regarded all Napoleon’s actions as inspired by hostility to Russia. He, therefore, despite Napoleon’s repeated demands, refused to subject his empire to the hardships imposed by the Continental System; at the close of the year 1810 he virtually allowed the entry of colonial goods (all of which were really British borne) and little by little broke away from Napoleon’s system. These actions implied war between France and Russia, unless Napoleon allowed such modifications of his rules (e.g. under the license system) as would
