In the main, this policy of giving panem et circenses was successful in France; at least, it kept her quiet.  The national feeling ran strongly in favour of commercial prohibition.  In 1787 Arthur Young found the cotton-workers of the north furious at the recent inroads of Lancashire cottons, while the wine-growers of the Garonne were equally favourable to the enlightened Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786.  It was Napoleon’s lot to win the favour of the rigid protectionists, while not alienating that of the men of the Gironde, who saw in him the champion of agrarian liberty against the feudal nobles.  Moreover, the nation still cherished the pathetic belief that the war was due to Albion’s perfidy respecting Malta, and burned with a desire to chastise the recreant islanders.  For these reasons, Frenchmen endured the drain of men and money with but little show of grumbling.

They were tired of the wars. We have had enough glory, they said, even in the capital itself, and an acute German observer describes the feeling there as curiously mixed.  Parisian gaiety often found vent in lampoons against the Emperor; and much satire at his expense might with safety be indulged in among a crowd, provided it were seasoned with wit.  The people seemed not to fear Napoleon, as he was feared in Germany:  the old revolutionary party was still active and might easily become far more dangerous than the royalist coteries of the Boulevard St. Germain.  For the rest, they were all so accustomed to political change that they looked on his government as provisional, and put up with him only as long as the army triumphed abroad and he could make his power felt at home.  Such was the impression of Paris gained by Varnhagen von Ense.  Public opinion in the provinces seems to have been more favourable to Napoleon; and, on the whole, pride in the army and in the vigorous administration which that nation loves, above all, hatred of England and the hope of wresting from her the world’s empire, led the French silently to endure rigorous press laws, increased taxes, war prices, licences, and chicory.

For Germans the hardships were much greater and the alleviations far less.  They had no deep interest in Malta or in the dominion of the seas; and political economy was then only beginning to dawn on the Teutonic mind.  The general trend of German thought had inclined towards the Everlasting Nay, until Napoleon flashed across its ken.  For a time he won the admiration of the chief thinkers of Germany by brushing away the feudal cobwebs from her fair face.  He seemed about to call her sons to a life of public activity; and in the famous soliloquy of Faust, in which he feels his way from word to thought, from thought to might, and from might to action, we may discern the literary projection of the influence exerted by the new Charlemagne on that nation of dreamers.[237] But the promise was fulfilled only in the most harshly practical way, namely, by cutting off all supplies of tobacco and coffee; and when Teufelsdroeckh himself, admirer though he was of the French Revolution, found that the summons for his favourite beverage—­the “dear melancholy coffee, that begets fancies,” of Lessing—­produced only a muddy decoction of acorns, there was the risk of his tendencies earthwards taking a very practically revolutionary turn.