HE battle of Zürich had saved France for a time; it had not prevented the effects of repeated defeat. Russia, indeed, withdrew from the coalition, discontented with much that had lately happened; and a British army had suffered a reverse in Holland. But the Allies still contemplated the invasion of France; success was expected in London and in Vienna; the French army had lost its renown; the French Republic had ceased to control Italy; the foreign policy of the Directory, too, had long kept the league of the Allies together; it had been exasperating, ignoble, weak; it had given mortal offence to the old powers of Europe, by the Revolutionary propaganda it endeavoured to spread. And if the condition of affairs for France was ominous abroad, the condition of affairs at home was not less perilous. The Government of the Directory had never been liked; it did not fall in with the national sympathies; it was composed, with scarcely an exception, of inferior men. It had inherited, indeed, a most arduous task, to rule a country torn by wild passion and exhausted by its colossal efforts; but its domestic rule had been irritating, corrupt, and feeble. It had united against it the chiefs of the army, smarting under the sense of many defeats; it starved the military service, and did not understand how to employ the still great military power of France. It had tried to maintain itself by throwing its weight, alternately, into the scale of factions, by flattering Royalists and Jacobites as it served its turn; and it had become despised and detested by all parties. At the same time, it had violated the constitution over and over again; it had thus deprived itself of all moral influence; it had made itself, so to speak, illegitimate. It had been harsh and oppressive to the wealthier classes in France, and yet had not won over the humbler classes; it kept the sore of La Vendée open; it was odious to the Church, still powerful even after its fall. Its financial measures had been thoroughly unjust; its administration vacillating, paltry, impotent; the results were seen in the ruin of national credit, in widespread discontent, insecurity, and increasing poverty. If 1793-4 had witnessed the Reign of Terror, 1799 was the reign of humiliation and failure.* * Thiers ("Histoire de la Révolution Française," vols. viii., ix., x.) is still the best historian of the rule of the Directory. Lanfrey's "Napoleon" may be read with profit. The chapters in Napoleon's Commentaries on the subject are very fine, but not impartial. The lately published "Memoirs of Barras" contain some valuable information, but abound in impudent lies. In these circumstances another revolution was certain. France found the Dictator of whom she stood in need. Napoleon had returned to Egypt, after his defeat at Acre; he had routed the hordes of the Turk in a great battle fought near the sources of the Nile; his army, though completely severed from home, was for the present secure, nay, prosperous; the exertions of its chief, and French intelligence, had in some measure established the intended colony. An accident made Napoleon acquainted with the critical position of France at home and abroad; he set off from Egypt without a moment's delay, resolved it possible to restore his country's fortunes, and leaving the army in the hands of his best lieutenant, Kléber. It is puerile to charge him with a base desertion,* or even with coarse and vulgar ambition: he had probably always had powers from the Directory to return; the Directory had actually sent for him at the existing juncture.+ He escaped successfully the British cruisers; and, after a long and difficult voyage, he landed on the shores of Provence in October 1799. The outbreak of national joy that followed, if characteristic of enthusiastic French sentiment, was one of the most remarkable events in his extraordinary career. His journey to Paris was a long triumph: the towns illuminated on his way; the country broke out in passionate acclaim; he was welcomed as the hope of France by the excited capital. The Directory was reduced to nothingness; all parties rallied around Napoleon; the army and its chiefs, the moneyed classes, the moderate politicians of every kind, even the extreme Republicans and Jacobins, turned to the man they instinctively felt was a born ruler. The movement was general and spontaneous; it had the effect foreseen from the first moment. History justly condemns the sinister arts by which Napoleon seized the reins of power; the scenes at St. Cloud were not to his honour; his stratagems in the domain of politics are not to be as admired as his stratagems on a theatre of war. But France properly got rid of a bad government; she was right when she made Napoleon the head of the State; she found a deliverer on the 18th Brumaire. The fall of feudalism and the liberation of the soil-the best fruits of the Revolution-had really increased the wealth of France, despite the adverse influences of late years; she rose quickly, with characteristic vigour, when under the direction of a great ruler. The celebrated constitution of the year VIII. preserved only some of the forms of liberty; power was concentrated in the First Consul; Napoleon was a dictator in all but the name. His internal administration, in this part of his career, deserves almost unqualified praise; the finances recovered in the able hands of Gaudin; La Vendée was, in a few months, pacified; the leaders of factions found they had a master; security, order, confidence, were largely restored. Meanwhile Napoleon had made preparations for war, with the organising skill in which he excelled. England and Austria had rejected his overtures; the position of the Austrian army on the verge of Provence afforded him a grand opportunity to strike a deadly, almost a decisive stroke. Concealing his purpose with masterly craft, he assembled an army, which, it was believed, France had not the means of creating; and then, turning to account the immense advantage which the possession of Switzerland gave a great strategist, he crossed the Alps, and made by forced marches to Milan; where, having received a contingent from Moreau-that general had been employed in holding Kray in check-he seized the communications, and fell on the rear of Mélas, who had been dreaming Jung, one of the last of Napoleon's libellers, has described him as a traitor, like Bazaine, for leaving Egypt. Napoleon ("Comment." iii. 127) positively states that he always had carte blanche to return. of conquests in France. campaigns; his attack Marengo closed one of the most dazzling of Napoleon's may be censured as too hazardous; but Italy was regained by a march and a battle, and Europe looked at the result as a kind of portent. The tenacity of Austria is matter of history; but Marengo compelled her to incline to peace. An armistice had been made on the field of battle; but Austria ultimately refused to treat except in conjunction with Great Britain, though Moreau was pressing her hard on the Danube. Negotiations followed for some months, the great aim of Napoleon being to separate Austria and her cause from England, and, in any event, to secure the means of sending aid to the French army in Egypt, naturally an object of his peculiar concern. His attempts in this last direction had hitherto failed: Bruix, after his fruitless expedition in 1799, lay at Brest with the main French and Spanish fleets, and was kept imprisoned within the port; England was again supreme in the Mediterranean; Malta, the first prize of the Egyptian venture, had been closely invested, and was about to fall. Napoleon endeavoured in vain to obtain an armistice to enable him to despatch reinforcements to Egypt; England made him feel the weight of her power at sea; and Austria had to pay the penalty by ceding fortresses, as the condition of prolonging a truce with her. The First Consul was before long successful in detaching Austria from her ally. Hostilities were resumed between the Inn and the Isar; the Archduke John rashly attacked the French; he was routed by Moreau in a decisive battle, fought in the great forest of Hohenlinden. Austria was compelled to make a separate peace; by the treaty of Lunéville her influence in the Empire was greatly reduced she lost Tuscany, in Italy, in addition to what she had lost at Campo Formio; and French ascendency in the Peninsula was restored. The coalition of 1799 was thus completely broken up; and England, as had happened a few years before, was left to herself to contend against France. The genius of Napoleon, in war and in peace, had blotted out the disasters that had befallen the French arms in Italy and on the Rhine, and had given France an orderly and strong government. France had become dominant on the Continent again; her prosperity and influence were largely increasing; her resources were being quickly developed. But England had become more than ever the ruler of the seas; through her maritime power she had made great conquests; she had done immense injury to a rival victorious elsewhere; she was infinitely superior at sea to France and her allies. Her empire in India was now secure: Tippoo Sahib had perished at Seringapatam; she had succeeded to the heritage of the Moguls; the French flag had vanished from the Indian Ocean. France, too, and Holland dragged in her wake, had lost nearly all their best colonies; the commerce of both countries at sea had been almost destroyed; the resources of Spain-depending in the main on the silver and gold of her American mines— had been, year after year, cut off by the activity and vigilance of British cruisers. The experience of the war, besides, had conclusively shown that the fleets of France, though supported by Spain and Holland, were unable to cope with the British navy. The First of June, St. Vincent and Camperdown had been followed by the triumph of the Nile-not a victory, as Nelson said, but a conquest; in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the narrow seas, the supremacy of England was scarcely challenged; her enemies, in fact, were shut up in their harbours. And, at this conjuncture, a calamity was threatening France, the consequences of which it was difficult to foresee. Her army in Egypt was still intact; it had even defeated the Turks in a great battle fought near the ancient City of the Sun; but Kléber had perished by an assassin's hand; his successor was an incapable man; the position |