THE EMPIRE OF NAPOLEON.
Napoleon, hurled into sudden power by the whirlwind of revolution on the wings of his military genius, aimed at the double glory of a second Caesar and a second Charlemagne, and constructed, by arbitrary force, a huge military empire on the basis of France, with the pope as an obedient paid servant at Paris, but it collapsed on the battle fields of Leipzig and Water loo, without the hope of a resurrection. " I have not succeeded Louis Quatorze," he said, " but Charlemagne." He dismissed his wife and married a daughter of the last German and first Austrian emperor ; he assumed the Lombard crown at Milan ; he made his ill-fated son "King of Rome" in imitation of the German " King of the Romans." He revoked " the donations which my predecessors, the French emperors have made," and appropriated them to France. " Your holiness," he wrote to Pius VII., who had once addressed him as his " very dear Son in Christ," " is sovereign of Rome, but I am the emperor thereof." "You are right," he wrote to Cardinal Fesch, his uncle, " that I am Charlemagne, and I ought to be treated as the emperor of the papal court. I shall inform the pope of my intentions in a few words, and if he declines to acquiesce, I shall reduce him to the same condition in which he was before Charle magne." l It is reported that he proposed to the pope to reside
1 In another letter to Fesch (Correspond, de P empereur Napol. I"", Tom. li.
262 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
in Paris with a large salary, and rule the conscience of Europe under the military supremacy of the emperor, that the pope listened first to his persuasion with the single remark : " Come dian," and then to his threats with the reply : " Tragedian," and turned him his back. The papacy utilized the empire of the uncle and the nephew, as well as it could, and survived them. But the first Napoleon swept away the effete institutions of feudalism, and by his ruthless and scornful treatment of con quered nationalities provoked a powerful revival of these very nationalities which overthrew and buried his own artificial em pire. The deepest humiliation of the German nation, and espe cially of Prussia, was the beginning of its uprising in the war of liberation.
THE GERMAN CONFEDERATION.
The Congress of Vienna tweeted a temporary substitute for the old empire in the German " Bund " at Frankfort. It was no federal state, but a loose confederacy of 38 sovereign states, or princes rather, without any popular representation ; it was a rope of sand, a sham unity, under the leadership of Austria ; and Austria shrewdly and selfishly used the petty rivalries and jealousies of the smaller principalities as a means to check the progress of Prussia and to suppress all liberal movements.
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
In the meantime the popular desire for national union, awakened by the war of liberation and a great national litera ture, made steady progress, and found at last its embodiment in a new German empire with a liberal constitution and a national parliament. But this great result was brought about by great events and achievements under the leadership of Prussia against foreign aggression. The first step was the brilliant victory of Prussia over Austria at Koniggratz, which resulted in the for-
528), he writes, "Pour le papeje suis Charlemagne, parce que comme Charlemagne je reunis la couronne de France d, celle des Lombards et que mon empire confine avec I Orient." Quoted by Bryce.
$ 58. SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE. 263
mation of the North German Confederation (I860). The second step was the still more remarkable triumph of united Germany in a war of self-defence against the empire of Napoleon III., which ended in the proclamation of \Yilliam I. as German emperor by the united wishes of the German princes and peoples in the palace of Louis XIV. at Versailles (1870).
Thus the long dream of the German nation was fulfilled through a series of the most brilliant military and diplomatic victories recorded in modern history, by the combined genius of Bismarck, Moltke, and William, and the valor, discipline, and intelligence of the German army.
Simultaneously with this German movement, Italy under the lead of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, achieved her national unity, with Rome as the political capital.
But the new German empire is not a continuation or revival of the old. It differs from it in several essential particulars. It is the result of popular national aspiration and of a war of selfdefence, not of conquest; it is based on the predominance of Prussia and North Germany, not of Austria and South Ger many j it is hereditary, not elective ; it is controlled by modern ideas of liberty and progress, not by medieval notions and insti tutions ; it is essentially Protestant, and not Roman Catholic; it is a German, not a Roman empire. Its rise is indirectly con nected with the simultaneous downfall of the temporal power of the pope, who is the hereditary and unchangeable enemy both of German and Italian unity and freedom. The new empire is independent of the church, and has officially no connection with religion, resembling in this respect the government of the United States ; but its Protestant animus appears not only in the hereditary religion of the first emperor, but also in the expulsion of the Jesuits (1872), and the "Culturkampf" against the poli tico-hierarchical aspirations of the ultramontane papacy. When Pius IX., in a letter to William I. (1873), claimed a sort of jurisdiction over all baptized Christians, the emperor courteously informed the infallible pope that he, with all Protestants, recog-