Thus feebly flickered out the light which had shed splendour on mediaeval Christendom.  Kindled in the basilica of St. Peter’s on Christmas Day of the year 800 in an almost mystical union of spiritual and earthly power, by the blessing of Pope Leo on Karl the Great, it was now trodden under foot by the chief of a more than Frankish State, who aspired to unquestioned sway over a dominion as great as that of the mediaeval hero.  For Napoleon, as Protector of the Rhenish Confederation, now controlled most of the German lands that acknowledged Charlemagne, while his hold on Italy was immeasurably stronger.  Further parallels between two ages and systems so unlike as those of Charlemagne and his imitator are of course superficial; and Napoleon’s attempt at impressing the imagination of the Germans seems to us to smack of unreality.  Yet we must remember that they were then the most impressionable and docile of nations, that his attempt was made with much skill, and that none of the appointed guardians of the old Empire raised a voice in protest while he imposed a constitution on the fifteen Princes of the new Confederation.

They included the rulers of South Germany, as well as Dalberg the Arch-Chancellor, who now took the title of Prince Primate, the Grand-Duke of Berg, the Landgrave, now Grand-Duke, of Hesse-Darmstadt, two Princes of the House of Nassau, and seven lesser potentates.  In some cases German laws were abolished in favour of the Code Napoleon.  A close offensive and defensive alliance was framed between France and these States, that were to furnish in all 63,000 troops at the bidding of the Protector.  Napoleon also gained some control over their fiscal and commercial codes—­an important advantage, in view of the Continental System, that was soon to take definite form.[85]

As a set-off to this surrender of all questions of foreign policy and many internal rights, what did these rulers receive?  As happened almost uniformly in Napoleon’s aggrandizements, he struck a bargain extremely serviceable to himself, less so to those whose support he sought, and in which the losses fell crushingly on the weak.  His statecraft in this respect was more cynical than that of the crowned robbers who had degraded eighteenth-century politics into a game of grab.  Their robberies were at least direct and straightforward.  It was reserved for Napoleon at the Treaty of Campo Formio to win huge gains mostly at the expense of a weak third party, namely, Venice.  He pursued the same profitable tactics in the Secularizations, when France and the greater German Powers gained enormously at the final cost of the Church lands and the little States; and now he ground up the German domains that were to cement his new Rhenish system.