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military colleagues from the crowning event of his time. 'One cause above all has raised France to this pinnacle of greatness,' he wrote after Jena.

gave to every What infinite In the breast

"The Revolution awakened all her powers and individual a suitable field for his activity. aptitudes slumber in the bosom of a nation! of thousands resides real genius. Why do not the Courts take steps to open up a career to it wherever it is found, to encourage talents and virtues whatever the rank? Why did they not seize this opportunity to multiply their powers a thousandfold, and to open to the simple bourgeois the Arc de Triomphe through which only the noble can now pass? The new era requires more than old names, titles and parchments. The Revolution has set the whole strength of a nation in motion, and by the equalisation of the different classes and the equal taxation of property converted the living strength of men and the dead strength of resources into a productive capital, and thereby upset the old relations of States and the old equilibrium. If other States desire to restore this equilibrium, they must employ the same instruments. They must appropriate the results of the Revolution, and then they will reap the double advantage of being able to mobilise their whole national strength against another Power, and of escaping the danger of an upheaval which threatens them so long as they refuse to obviate a violent change by a voluntary transformation.'

Here are the same ideas and almost the same phrases as those we have met on the lips of Stein and Hardenberg. Their programme was never carried out in its entirety; but the partial application of 'French ideas ’ produced the desired result in the Wars of Liberation and enabled Prussia to cast off the yoke of the tyrant with the passion of a resolute and united people.

While Prussia suffered more poignantly at the hands of France than any other German State, and looked back with loathing on the mighty Emperor, the west and south of Germany received a far more direct and permanent impress from the ideas and institutions imported by the Revolution. The three ecclesiastical Electorates, which ought to have been the bulwark of the Empire, collapsed at the first assault; and what was known as the Pfaffengasse or Parsons' Lane was ruled by France

for twenty years. The Republic of Mainz, established by Custine in the autumn of 1792, only lived till the recapture of the city in the following summer; but the experiment created extraordinary interest, and the fate of Georg Forster and Adam Lux, its deputies to Paris has thrown round it something of the halo of romance When the French armies again reached the Rhine in 1794, the Left Bank entered on a period of rapid change The invaders were never popular, for instead of liberty and fraternity they brought crushing burdens and military rule, administrative corruption and anti-clerica intolerance. Their watchword War on the palaces peace to the cottages' was a parrot's cry, and was dropped when it had done its work. The only disinterested friend of German liberty among the soldiers and statesmen of the era of the Directory was Hoche whose premature death left the Rhineland a prey to the vultures. In burning words Görres denounced

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'the heartless and mindless men who are sent to govern us, adventurers who are the scum of France. Many of us believed that the French had been transformed by the Revolution into angels; but the arrogance of the conquerors waxed day by day, and there was no end to their extortions and exactions. Everything combined to create an universal detestation of the French. The cause was soon identified with its representatives; and hatred was felt not only for republicans but for republicanism and liberty. In my belief the century for the introduction of democracy has not yet dawned and will not dawn in a hurry. We say with Vergniaud, We have deceived ourselves not in liberty but in the hour. We believed we were in Rome, but we found ourselves in Paris.'

A mission to the capital, shortly before Brumaire, convinced the high-souled idealist that the agents of the Republic were no worse than those who had sent them. He bitterly compared the Revolution to a balloon which had soared majestically into the air and then exploded and sunk to the earth in flames. His anger, if not his disappointment, was shared by his fellow-victims on the Left Bank. Conscription was the first and the most detested of the penalties of conquest. The importation of English goods was prohibited; and the loss of the German market was but partially balanced by the

commercial current directed towards France. The army of occupation lived on the country; and the burden of taxes and requisitions was increased by the dishonesty of unpaid and rapacious officials. The shock to religious sentiment was particularly resented. The clergy lost their endowments without receiving an indemnity from the State. Pilgrimages and processions were forbidden, while the republican Calendar, with its three Decades a month, virtually suppressed Sunday. Under the fanatical Commissioner Lakanal the yoke became almost intolerable. Churches were closed, houses were searched, and incautious critics found themselves in prison.

Though the decade of republican rule inflicted grievous

hardships on the Rhineland, there were nevertheless substantial entries on the credit side of the balance-sheet. On the outbreak of war the Left Bank had been ruled by nine Archbishops and Bishops, two religious Orders, seventy-six Princes and Counts, four Free Cities and a host of Imperial Knights. Every one of these rulers and systems of government had been swept away by the broom of the war-god; and the nobility, with few exceptions, had fled across the Rhine. Feudal dues and tithes, privileges and exemption from taxation were abolished. The sequestration of the lands of the dispossessed pointed to their sale in the near future. The liberty of industry was secured by the suppression of the gilds with their harassing rules and limitations; and French weights and measures and the decimal system gave a further impetus to trade. An efficient police guaranteed tolerable public security; a uniform legal procedure took the place of the innumerable tribunals of spiritual and temporal lords; and the mild criminal code of 1795 was applied. The gates of the ghetto at Bonn were thrown open; and the Protestants of Aachen and Cologne built their first churches.

A brighter day dawned in 1802 after the definite cession of the Left Bank by the Treaty of Lunéville. The office of Commissioner was abolished, and the

Country

was

of France. The local assemblies and municipal councils were mere shadows, and there was as little liberty in the Rhineland as in the rest of Napoleon's dominions; but the reconciliation with the Church was welcomed

henceforward governed as an integral part

by pious inhabitants, and striking material progress quickly recorded. The property of the secular and e siastical princes, the émigrés, the Corporations and Communes was now opened to purchase by the peas and burghers, who, in working for their own pr rendered the soil more productive. The last trace serfdom disappeared; education was extended systematised; and the navigation of the Rhine improved. The Code substituted uniform procedure modern ideas for a chaos of outworn practices. were constructed, fruit-trees planted, agriculture stock-breeding encouraged. Under prefects such as An Jeanbon Saint-André and Lezay-Marnésia, the 1 Bank experienced a period of tranquil advance afte decade of war, billetings, exploitations and assignats. In the relatively short period of twenty yea writes Sagnac, the latest French historian of the Rhi land, in a passage of eloquent pride,

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'the French accomplished an immense work of which Germans would never have dared to dream. The coun was divided up into ninety-seven little States, jealous of another and incapable of self-defence. It had remain feudal, and, being occupied by the petty interests of cas was incapable of any comprehensive activity. It was call not immediately but little by little and at the request o large part of the inhabitants, to enter into a modern a centralised State, rich and powerful, and vivified by econo liberty. To these weak and disunited peoples France gɛ what they needed most-protection and security. Havi gone to war to liberate the peoples, not to enslave them, s brought all the free institutions which she had won in t years of terrible strife. She abolished feudalism, liberat the soil, and transformed the peasant serfs into free p prietors. She sold to the burghers and the peasants t possessions of the late rulers and the lands of the Chur and even a portion of the communal property, in order multiply small freeholders and insure them a competen She established civil liberty and equality. In these German lands, so unfamiliar with equality of rights and with libert so respectful of ecclesiastical and noble castes, it was veritable revolution. No more distinction between citizen no more religious intolerance. Protestants and Jews four themselves on the same footing as the Catholics, who f centuries had governed the country in their own interes

The unity of laws was established. The Civil Code facilitated transactions from end to end of the Rhineland, and gave to the Rhinelanders the profound sentiment of the unity of their country and of their intimate union with France, who brought law and liberty in the folds of the tricolour.'

This is history seen through the invaders' spectacles; it overlooks not only the burdens imposed by an Emperor perpetually at war but the ineradicable dislike of civilised Europeans for alien rule. The dominant feeling of the Rhineland was in favour of a return in due course to German rule, combined with the retention of the reforms introduced by the conquerors. No one ever dreamed of the restoration of the sway of the crozier and of the feudal order which had been swept into the dustbin by the revolutionary blast; but absolutism had been unknown in the ecclesiastical Electorates, and the ancien régime had left no such bitter memories of oppression and humiliation as in France. Moreover, attachment to the Church had continued unbroken, and had been strengthened by the attacks upon its practices and ordinances. In a word, the Rhineland as a whole was neither Jacobin nor reactionary, neither nationalist nor anti-national; and for this reason, though not immune from the fell visitation of war, it was spared the horrors of revolution and counter-revolution. When peace returned to the world in 1815, the Left Bank reverted to German allegiance without regret and without enthusiasm. The reforms which had been introduced into the mushroom principalities of Westphalia, Berg and Frankfurt were for the most part swept away on the fall of their creator; but in the Rhineland, divided though it was between Prussia, Hesse-Darmstadt and Bavaria, twenty years of French occupation and assimilation left abiding traces. Friendly memories of the tricolour and legends of the Petit Caporal lingered on till they were swallowed up in the pride and glory of the German Empire; and the Civil Code remained as link with the past till it was superseded by the Imperial Code in the closing year of the 19th century.

While the western fringe of the Empire was linked to France before the Revolution by many ties, and almost completely detached from the intellectual currents beyond the Rhine, Bavaria had deliberately cut herself off from

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