Europe: A History (149 page)
One by one, and with painful delays, each of the members of the moribund Coalition began to revive. In 1808 parts of Italy joined Spain in rebelling against French rule. In 1809 Austria repudiated its agreement with Napoleon, only to be comprehensively crushed once more at Wagram (1809), within sight of Vienna. In 1810–12 Prussia started to stir, initially through secret, underground resistance. In the same period Russia grew tired of the French connection, fearful of Napoleon’s plans for Poland-Lithuania, and irked, like everyone else, by the strictures of the Continental System. Napoleon was approaching the peak of his power,
[VIOLETS]
In the twenty years from 1792 to 1812, the map of Europe, and the system of states, was widely remodelled. The French Revolutionary armies introduced territorial and political changes of three sorts.
VIOLETS
I
N
one year, 1810, Napoleon ordered 162 bottles of his favourite neroli-based cologne water from the parfumier Chardin. In a famous letter, he once begged Josephine not to bathe for two weeks before they met, so that he could enjoy all her natural aromas. When she died, he planted violets on her grave, and wore a locket made from them for the rest of his life.
1
He was an unabashed
odomane
.
Smell, ‘the mute sense’, ‘the olfactory dimension’, was present throughout history, though much ignored by historians.
2
According to one theory, the male sex drive is spurred by the female odour of ‘herring-brine’, and by the urge to swim back into the primordial ocean.
3
Natural perfumes, such as ambergris, castoreum, civet, and musk, formed one of the most expensive sectors of the luxury trade from ancient times. The Middle Ages were filled with perfumed rushes and with incense, by the 165 petals of the rosary, the Virgin’s flower. The French Revolution was pervaded by the whiff of the open sewers of Paris, the twentieth century by the stench of corpses in the trenches and the camps, the age of modernism by industrial pollution and by the arrival of the first artificial aldehyde, Chanel No. 5, in 1922.
First, and at various times, they vastly extended the territory of France itself, by directly annexing large parts of the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. By 1810 the 83 departments of the Republic had been increased to the 130 departments of the Empire, with a population of 44 million. To the series of Aisne, Allier, Aude … were added such novelties as ‘Bouches de l’Elbe’ (Hamburg), ‘Simplón’, and ‘Tibre’. The Frenchness of the French Empire was diminishing with every annexation. (See Map p. 1291.)
Secondly, a whole panoply of new states was erected, each closely tied to France and each possessing its own model constitution and French-style administration. These states included the Batavian Republic (1795–1804), transformed into the Kingdom of Holland (1804–10), the Kingdom of Etruria (1801–5), the Confederation of the Rhine (1806–13), the Grand Duchy of Berg (1806–13), the Kingdom of Westphalia (1807–13), the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (1806–13), five Italian republics, and the so-called Kingdom of (northern) Italy (1805–14).
[ILLYRIA]
Thirdly, after Napoleon’s later conquests, a number of old-established states were allowed to survive, but with severely modified frontiers and with tightly controlled internal arrangements. These included Austria, Prussia, Spain, Naples, and Portugal.
The only parts of Europe to escape the revolutionary remodelling of Napoleon’s enlightened despotism were the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Ottoman domains. With those exceptions, the whole of Europe was subject to radical changes that swept away the traditional order, giving its people, however briefly, a taste for something entirely different,
[BOUBOULINA]
The degree to which the local population either welcomed or initiated the changes is a matter of some complexity. In some places they obviously rejoiced. There were deep-rooted republican elements in Holland and in Switzerland, for example, who had sought French intervention in advance; and there were good reasons why certain cities such as Brussels, Milan, or Warsaw should have manifested great enthusiasm. Elsewhere, the reception of the French must be graded from mixed to hostile. Napoleon was strong on the rhetoric of liberation but weak on its practical application. The benefits of emancipation for the serfs, and of republican rule, had to be weighed against the burdens of increased taxation and of merciless conscription. In several countries, and in Spain in particular, the arrival of the French provoked vicious civil strife. Many people in Europe who supported the Revolution in theory found it to be immensely oppressive in practice.
The Napoleonic Netherlands led the way with France’s foreign experiments. The Batavian Republic (1794) gave way for a Kingdom of Holland (1806) under Louis Bonaparte, before the whole of the Netherlands were directly annexed to the French Empire. Revolutionary ideas about the rights of nations affected Walloons, Flemings, and Dutch alike. They were due to surface in subsequent decades.
Napoleonic Italy took form over several years in the course of complicated swings of fortune. Bonaparte’s initial arrangements of 1797 were overthrown by the Second Coalition, but were reinstated and extended in subsequent campaigns. Five local republics formed in 1797–9—the Cisalpine in Lombardy, the Ligurian in Genoa, the Parthenopaean in Naples, and the Republics of Lucca and Rome— were flagships of the revolutionary order. They were joined by other transient entities such as the Principality of Piombino and the Kingdom of Etruria, until merged after 1805 either into the French Empire or into the Kingdom of Naples or into the Kingdom of (northern) Italy created for Napoleon’s stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais. The abolition of the Papal States, and the maltreatment of the Popes, was specially shocking to contemporary opinion, particularly in Catholic countries. Pius VI (1775–99), who condemned the Rights of Man, was deprived of his temporal powers, and died in French custody at Valence. Pius VII (1800–23), who had once declared that Christianity was not incompatible with democracy, ended up for five years under French arrest for excommunicating all (unnamed) ‘robbers of Peter’s patrimony’. The Napoleonic experience greatly enhanced national sentiments in Italy, whilst preparing a sharp confrontation between frightened conservatives and a new generation of liberals.
ILLYRIA
L
IKE
many of the ephemeral creations of the Napoleonic Era, the lllyrian . Provinces of 1809–13 continued to exert their spell long after their formal disbandment. Attached to the French-run Kingdom of Italy, they included a long section of the Adriatic coast from Trieste to Dubrovnik as well as important parts of Carinthia, Carniola, Istria, Slovenia, Slavonia, and Kraina. Their French governor resided in the capital city of Ljubljana (Laibach). The brief interval of freedom from Habsburg rule was sufficient to fire both a long-lasting ‘lllyrist’ movement among the Slovenes and Croats, and a long-running Italian irredentist campaign for the return of Trieste and Fiume (Rijeka). (See Appendix III, p. 1231)
After 1815, the special character of the region was underlined when Habsburg rule was restored within a separate ‘Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia’. This experiment came to an end in its turn amidst the troubles of 1848–9, when the Ban of Croatia, General Jelacic, took his army into battle against the forces of the Hungarian National Rising. With some delay Croatia was rewarded with extensive autonomy within the Habsburgs’ Kingdom of Hungary.
‘Illyrism’ first gained momentum in the 1830s as a movement to protect all South Slavs in the Habsburg dominions from the mounting effects of foreign cultural domination.
1
It was strengthened by an attempt to impose Magyar as the official language of Croatia-Slavonia. From the mid-19th century, however, the national revival of the Slovenes based on Ljubljana, steadily diverged from that of the Croats based on Zagreb (Agram). The Slovenes, who found themselves after 1867 in the Austrian sector of the Dual Monarchy, cultivated and systematized their own distinct Slovenian language, which had possessed a fixed literary form since the Reformation.
2
The Croat leaders, in contrast, chose to join a group of Serbian cultural activists, and with them to create a common literary language known as ‘Serbo-Croat’. They based it on the so-called ‘shtokavsky’ dialect, which uses
sto
as opposed to
ca
or
kaj
as the word for ‘what’. At the same time, they fortified their separate national identity by emphasizing their attachment to Roman Catholicism (as opposed to Serbian Orthodoxy) and by writing Serbo-Croat in the Latin alphabet.
3
By 1918, both Slovenes and Croats had emerged as discrete but allied nationalities within the South Slav Movement. They both played a prominent role in the formation of the Yugoslav state
4
(see p. 979).
[CRAVATE] [MAKEDON] [SARAJEVO]
After 1945, though the reconstructed Federation of Yugoslavia was completely subordinated to Tito’s communists, Slovenia and Croatia aspired to autonomous status within the Federation alongside Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Macedonia. Slovenia, the smallest and wealthiest component, possessed a per capita GNP similar to that of Austria. In 1992, it led the field in gaining its independence. Croatia was less fortunate. Despite the support of the European Union, its declaration of sovereignty precipitated first a war with the Serbian-led rump of the Yugoslav Federation and then the violent fragmentation of Bosnia (see p. 1124). Only time will tell whether the fledgeling republics of Slovenia and Croatia will prove any less ephemeral than the long-forgotten lllyrian Provinces to which they had once belonged.
Germany, like Italy, was built and unbuilt several times during the revolutionary wars. In the 1790s major changes were afoot owing to Prussian gains from the last two Partitions of Poland. Under Frederick-William II (r. 1786–97), Prussia had even risked an alliance with Poland-Lithuania. But the logic of Russian power soon brought him back into line. By 1795, Berlin had acquired both Danzig and Warsaw, and found itself ruling over a population that was 40 per cent Slav and Catholic, with a very large number of Jews. One-fifth of Prussia’s population were of immigrant origin. The brief reign in Warsaw of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), did not pass without trace. The author of the
Phantasiestücke
(1814) or ‘Fantastic Tales’, as chief administrator of New South Prussia, was personally responsible for inventing the frequently fantastic German surnames for Europe’s largest Jewish community. Had Prussia been allowed to develop without interruption, it is hard to imagine what course German history might have taken. As it was, old Prussia was overwhelmed by Napoleon, and the new Prussia, which reappeared in 1815 on a reconstructed territorial basis was a very different beast.
Napoleonic Germany emerged in consequence of determined French efforts to break up the Holy Roman Empire in the period after the Second Coalition. The process began in 1803, with the secularization of the ecclesiastical states, and the reallocation of 112 other imperial cities and principalities to the benefit of Baden, Prussia, Württemberg, and Bavaria. In 1804 350 imperial knights lost their independent status, whilst several of the more important princes upgraded their titles. Francis of Habsburg assumed the rank of Emperor of Austria, whilst his colleagues of Bavaria and Württemberg declared themselves kings. In 1806 sixteen princes of southern and western Germany formed a Confederation of the Rhine which was duty-bound to provide Napoleon with military assistance. Their leader, the
Fürstenprimas
, was Karl Theodor, Freiherr von Dalberg (1744–1817), Archbishop of Mainz and Grand Duke of Frankfurt. Since all these developments contravened the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, the Empire’s standing was damaged beyond repair. Napoleon found no difficulty in arranging its final liquidation in August 1806. In that same year, following Jena, Prussia collapsed, the King retiring to Königsberg. Saxony joined the Confederation of the Rhine. In 1807, after the Peace of Tilsit, a Kingdom of Westphalia was carved out of Prussia’s western possessions for Napoleon’s brother Jérôme; and Danzig was turned into a Free City. The rest of Prussia, including Berlin, remained under French occupation. Apart from the Nuremberg bookseller J. W. Palm, shot by the French for his pamphlet ‘On Germany’s Deepest Humiliation’, and the Prussian major of hussars, Ferdinand von Schill, who led his regiment in a premature revolt in 1809, there were few martyrs.
BOUBOULINA
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N
1801 a young widow from the island of Hydra near Athens married I Demetrios Bouboulis, a shipowner from the neighbouring island of Spetses. Her father had been arrested by the Ottomans after the Russian-backed rebellion of Count Orlov, and she herself was to be connected with the secret
Philiki Etaireia
or ‘Company of Friends’ based in the Greek suburb of Phanari in Istanbul. She came from a group of islands where Albanian was spoken, but where the Orthodox Church gave a sense of Greek identity. When Bouboulis was murdered by pirates, Laskarina Bouboulina (1771–1825) became a wealthy businesswoman in her own right, and a prominent patron of the Greek national movement.
1
During the war of independence, Bouboulina plunged into the fray in person. She built a battleship, the
Agamemnon
, which took part in many actions. Dubbed ‘the Captain’, she fearlessly rode her white horse onto the battlefields, dispensing bullets, food, and encouragement. At the siege of Naphlion, she led the force which blockaded the castle and massacred the Ottoman garrison. But she has not escaped criticism. Unsympathetic historians have suggested that this idol of bourgeois nationalism ordered Turkish and Jewish women to be slaughtered for their jewellery, and that she melted down the cannons of Naphplion for profit.
Greece’s national struggle produced many stories of women’s patriotism. The village of Souli in Epirus is specially venerated. After their menfolk were taken prisoner by the Ottomans in 1801, the women and children of the village gathered on the edge of a cliff to perform the dance of Zallongos. Each of the women led the swirling circle in turn, before leaping over the cliff to her death, till none were left. Modern Greek schoolgirls re-enact the dance, leaping off the stage onto a pile of mattresses, and singing the Zallongos song:
Fish can’t live on land,
And flowers can’t blossom on sand;
The women of Souli can’t understand
Life without freedom.
National heroines like Bouboulina have many counterparts. Her Polish contemporary, Emilia Plater (1806–31), a noblewoman, died fighting the Russians disguised as a man. Such figures are now seen as a diversion from the main feminist concerns.
Bouboulina did not live to see Greek Independence. She was killed, not by Turks, but by an irate neighbour, who pushed a musket through his window during a row and shot her through the heart.
