made Napoleon? There is only one possible answer:
the Germans. This is the second act of our drama
of the degradation of England to the level of Germany.
And it has this very important development; that Germany
means by this time
all the Germans, just as
it does to-day. The savagery of Prussia and the
stupidity of Austria are now combined. Mercilessness
and muddleheadedness are met together; unrighteousness
and unreasonableness have kissed each other; and the
tempter and the tempted are agreed. The great
and good Maria Theresa was already old. She had
a son who was a philosopher of the school of Frederick;
also a daughter who was more fortunate, for she was
guillotined. It was natural, no doubt, that her
brother and relatives should disapprove of the incident;
but it occurred long after the whole Germanic power
had been hurled against the new Republic. Louis
XVI. himself was still alive and nominally ruling when
the first pressure came from Prussia and Austria, demanding
that the trend of the French emancipation should be
reversed. It is impossible to deny, therefore,
that what the united Germanics were resolved to destroy
was the reform and not even the Revolution. The
part which Joseph of Austria played in the matter
is symbolic. For he was what is called an enlightened
despot, which is the worst kind of despot. He
was as irreligious as Frederick the Great, but not
so disgusting or amusing. The old and kindly
Austrian family, of which Maria Theresa was the affectionate
mother, and Marie Antoinette the rather uneducated
daughter, was already superseded and summed up by a
rather dried-up young man self-schooled to a Prussian
efficiency. The needle is already veering northward.
Prussia is already beginning to be the captain of the
Germanics “in shining armour.” Austria
is already becoming a loyal
sekundant.
But there still remains one great difference between
Austria and Prussia which developed more and more
as the energy of the young Napoleon was driven like
a wedge between them. The difference can be most
shortly stated by saying that Austria did, in some
blundering and barbaric way, care for Europe; but
Prussia cared for nothing but Prussia. Austria
is not a nation; you cannot really find Austria on
the map. But Austria is a kind of Empire; a Holy
Roman Empire that never came, an expanding and contracting-dream.
It does feel itself, in a vague patriarchal way, the
leader, not of a nation, but of nations. It is
like some dying Emperor of Rome in the decline; who
should admit that the legions had been withdrawn from
Britain or from Parthia, but would feel it as fundamentally
natural that they should have been there, as in Sicily
or Southern Gaul. I would not assert that the
aged Francis Joseph imagines that he is Emperor of
Scotland or of Denmark; but I should guess that he
retains some notion that if he did rule both the Scots
and the Danes, it would not be more incongruous than
his ruling both the Hungarians and the Poles.
This cosmopolitanism of Austria has in it a kind of
shadow of responsibility for Christendom. And
it was this that made the difference between its proceedings
and those of the purely selfish adventurer from the
north, the wild dog of Pomerania.