In truth, the German universities were the leaders of the national reaction against the Emperor of the West.  Fichte’s pleading for a truly national education had taken effect.  Elementary instruction was now being organized in Prussia; and the divorce of thought from action, which had so long sterilized German life, was ended by the foundation of the University of Berlin by Humboldt.  Thus, in 1810, the year of Prussia’s deepest woe, when her brave Queen died of a stricken heart, when French soldiers and douaniers were seizing and burning colonial wares, her thinkers came into closer touch with her men of action, with mutually helpful results.  Thinkers ceased to be mere dreamers, and Prussian officials gained a wider outlook on life.  The life of beneficent activity, to which Napoleon might have summoned the great majority of Germans, dawned on them from Berlin, not from Paris.

His influence was more and more oppressive.  The final results of his commercial decrees on the trade of Hamburg were thus described by Perthes, a well-known writer and bookseller of that town:  “Of the 422 sugar-boiling houses, few now stood open:  the printing of cottons had ceased entirely:  the tobacco-dressers were driven away by the Government.  The imposition of innumerable taxes, door and window, capitation and land taxes, drove the inhabitants to despair.”  But the same sagacious thinker was able to point the moral of it all, and prove to his friends that their present trials were due to the selfish particularism of the German States:  “It was a necessity that some great power should arise in the midst of the degenerate selfishness of the times and also prove victorious, for there was nothing vigorous to oppose it.  Napoleon is an historical necessity."[238]

Thus, both in the abodes of learning and in the centres of industry men were groping after a higher unity and a firmer political organization, which, after the Napoleonic deluge had swept by, was to lay the foundation of a New Germany.

To all appearances, however, Napoleon’s power seemed to be more firmly established than ever in the ensuing year.  On March 20th, 1811, a son was born to him.  At the crisis of this event, he revealed the warmth of his family instincts.  On hearing that the life of mother or infant might have to be sacrificed, he exclaimed at once, “Save the mother."[239] When the danger was past, he very considerately informed Josephine, stating, “he has my chest, my mouth and my eyes.  I trust that he will fulfil his destiny.”  That destiny was mapped out in the title conferred on the child, “King of Rome,” which was designed to recall the title “King of the Romans,” used in the Holy Roman Empire.

Napoleon resolved that the old elective dignity should now be renewed in a strictly hereditary Empire, vaster than that of Charlemagne.  Paris was to be its capital, Rome its second city, and the future Emperors were always to be crowned a second time at Rome.  Furthermore, lest the mediaeval dispute as to the supremacy of Emperor or Pope in Rome should again vex mankind, the Papacy was virtually annexed:  the status of the pontiff was defined in the most Erastian sense, imperial funds were assigned for his support, and he was bidden to maintain two palaces, “the one necessarily at Paris, the other at Rome.”