by Will Durant
The Society sent him a hundred pounds as an advance on the receipts of the proposed concert.
By March 16 the physicians agreed that Beethoven had not long to live. They and brother Johann asked his consent to summoning a priest. “I wish it,” he answered. His occasional bouts with God had been forgotten; his letter of March 14 shows him ready to accept whatever “God in His divine wisdom” might decree.52 On March 23 he received the last sacrament, apparently in a docile mood; his brother later reported that the dying man had said to him, “I thank you for this last service.”53 Soon after the ceremony Beethoven said to Schindler, “Comoedia finita est”—referring apparently not to the religious service but to life itself;54 the phrase was used in the classic Roman theater to announce the end of the play.
He died on March 26, 1827, after three months of suffering. A few moments before his death a flash of lightning illuminated the room, followed by a sharp clap of thunder. Aroused, Beethoven raised his right arm and shook his clenched fist, apparently at the storm. Soon thereafter his agony ended. We shall never know what that last gesture meant.
The post-mortem examination revealed the complex of internal disorders that had darkened his life and his temper. The liver was shrunken and diseased. The arteries of the ears were clogged with fatty particles, and the auditory nerves were degenerated. “The pains in the head, indigestion, colic, and jaundice, of which he frequently complained, and the deep depression which gives the key to so many of his letters, would all follow naturally from the chronic inflammation of the liver and the digestive derangements to which it would give rise.”55 Probably his love of walking and the open air had moderated these ailments, and had given him most of the painless hours in his life.
His funeral was attended by thirty thousand persons. Hummel the pianist and Kreutzer the violinist were among the pallbearers; Schubert, Czerny, and Grillparzer were among the torchbearers. The tombstone bore only the name BEETHOVEN and his dates of birth and death.
CHAPTER XXIX
Germany and Napoleon
1786–1811
I. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE: 1800
IN the opinion of the Prussian patriot but great historian Heinrich von Treitschke, “Never since the time of Luther had Germany occupied so shining a position in the European world as now [1800], when the greatest heroes and poets of their age belonged to our nation.”1 We might rank Frederick victorious below Napoleon shattered, but beyond doubt the light of Goethe and Schiller shone unrivaled in poetry and prose from Edinburgh to Rome; and the German philosophers, from Kant through Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel to Schopenhauer, overawed the European mind from London to St. Petersburg. It was Germany’s second Renaissance.
Like Italy in the sixteenth century, Germany was not a nation, if that means a people living under the same government and laws. Germany in 1800 was a loose concatenation of some 250 “states,” each with its own laws and taxes, many with their own army, coinage, religion, customs, and dress, and some speaking a dialect unintelligible to half the German world. However, their written language was the same, and gave their writers a third of the Continent for their potential audience.
We should note, in passing, that the relative independence of the individual states, as in Renaissance Italy, allowed an unstereotyped diversity, a stimulating rivalry, a freedom of character, experiment, and thought, which might have been overwhelmed, in the centralizing capital of a large state, by the weight of the compact mass. Would not the old cities of Germany, still so attractively unique, have lost vitality and character if they had been subject to Berlin, politically and culturally, as the cities of France were or are to Paris? And if all these parts of Germany had formed a united nation, would not this heartland of Europe, rich in materials and men, have overrun Europe irresistibly?
In only one way were the German states limited in their independence: they accepted membership in that “Holy Roman Empire” which had begun in 800 with the papal crowning of Charlemagne—known to the Germans as their own Frankish Karl der Grosse. In 1800 this Empire included a dazzling variety of German states. Outstanding were nine “electoral states” that elected the emperor: Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Brunswick-Lüneburg, Cologne, Mainz, Hanover, and Trier (Treves). Next were twenty-seven “spiritual lands,” ruled by Catholic prelates, as if recalling the episcopal rule of cities in the dying Roman Empire of the West a millennium before: the archbishopric of Salzburg (where Mozart fretted), and the bishoprics of Münster, Liège, Würzburg, Bamberg, Osnabrück, Paderborn, Augsburg, Hildesheim, Fulda, Speyer, Regensburg (Ratisbon), Constance, Worms, Lübeck… Lay princes ruled thirty-seven states, including Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Darmstadt, Holstein, Württemberg (with Stuttgart), Sachsen-(Saxe-) Weimar (with Goethe), Sachsen-Gotha (with its “enlightened despot” Duke Ernest II), Braunschweig-(Brunswick-) Wolfenbüttel, Baden (with Baden-Baden, Karlsruhe)… Fifty cities were Reichstädte, self-governed free “towns of the Empire”: Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt-am-Main, Bremen, Worms, Speyer, Nuremberg (Nürnberg), Ulm… From these and other parcels of Germany came electors, “Imperial Knights,” and other representatives to the Reichstag, or Imperial Diet, which met at Regensburg as summoned by their emperor. In 1792 the electors chose Francis II of Austria to head the Holy Roman Empire, and crowned him in a sumptuous ceremony that drew notables from all parts of Germany to Frankfurt-am-Main. He proved to be the last of the long line.
By 1800 this once impressive and generally beneficent institution had lost nearly all its efficiency and usefulness. It was a relic of feudalism; each segment had been ruled by a manorial lord, subject to a central power; that central power had been weakened by the growth of the member states in population, wealth, secularism, and military force. The religious unity of the “holy” Empire had been ended by the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63; north Germany, in 1800, was Protestant, south Germany was Catholic; and west Germany had lost some piety to the French Enlightenment and the Aufklärung of Lessing’s days. Nationalism, large or small, grew as religion declined, for some creed-political or social—must hold a society together against the centrifugal egoism of its constituent souls.
The polarization of Germany between the Protestant north, led by Prussia, and the Catholic south led by Austria had dire results in the failure of the two foci to unite against Napoleon at Austerlitz in 1805 or at Jena in 1806. Long before these blows, Austria itself had come to ignore the Imperial Diet, and other states followed Austria’s lead.2 In 1788 only fourteen princes out of an eligible hundred, only eight out of fifty eligible town chieftains, obeyed the summons to an Imperial Diet;3 decisions were impossible. In the Treaties of Campoformio (1797) and Lunéville (1801) Napoleon compelled Austria to recognize French rule of the left, or west, bank of the Rhine; so a rich section of the Holy Roman Empire—including the cities of Speyer, Mannheim, Worms, Mainz, Bingen, Trier, Coblenz, Aachen, Bonn, and Cologne—passed under French rule. By 1801 it was generally agreed that the Holy Roman Empire, as Voltaire had said, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire; that no important state recognized its authority, or the authority of the pope; that some new form of order and cooperation amid the chaos would have to be devised, accepted, or imposed. Napoleon accepted the challenge.
II. THE CONFEDERATION OF THE RHINE: 1806
The great river was a gallery of scenic wonders and historic memories sometimes architecturally enshrined. But it was also a living blessing to the economy, watering a responsive soil, binding each town with a dozen others rivaling its culture and trading for its goods. Feudalism here had lost its uses and its fangs as commerce and industry peopled the riverside. But within this fluent prosperity four problems festered: epicurean lassitude among the rulers, corruption in the bureaucracy, a disruptive concentration of wealth, and a military fragmentation inviting conquerors.
The road to a new organization of the Rhineland states was opened by the promise of both France and Austria to recompense with new properties those German not
ables who had lost their lands through Austria’s recognition of French sovereignty over the left bank of the Rhine. The clamor of the dispossessed for rehabilitation led to the summoning, by France and Austria, of the Congress of Rastatt (December 16, 1797). There some irreverent princes proposed that the ecclesiastic principalities should be “secularized”—i.e., in plain terms, transferred from the ruling bishops to the clamoring laity. Unable to agree, the Congress submitted the matter to the next Diet of the Holy Roman Empire. It remained in abeyance until Napoleon returned from Egypt, seized power in France, defeated Austria at Marengo, and came to an agreement with Austria, Prussia, and Russia, by which a deputation of the Imperial Diet issued, on February 25, 1803, a decree overwhelmingly entitled Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, summarily remaking the map and governance of western Germany. Nearly all the ruling bishops were dispossessed. Prussia accepted with equanimity the reduction of episcopal rule; Austria might have mourned, but she was powerless.
The new governors realized that Austria would be unwilling, as well as unable, to give them military protection; nor could they (mostly Catholic) expect protection from Protestant Prussia. One after another the remade states turned to Napoleon, who was militarily supreme and officially Catholic. At Munich, on December 30, 1805, Karl Theodor von Dalberg, archbishop-elector of Mainz, meeting a Napoleon fresh from victory at Austerlitz, invited him to accept the leadership of the reorganized principalities. The busy Emperor took half a year to make up his mind. He realized that for a French nation to assume protectorate over a third of Germany was to invite the enmity of the rest, as well as resharpened hostility from England and Russia. On July 12, 1806, Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, Nassau, Berg, and many other states united in a “Rheinbund,” or Confederation of the Rhine; on August 1 Napoleon agreed to assume its protectorate. While the major constituents retained independence in internal affairs, they agreed to submit their foreign policy to his judgment, and to place substantial military forces at his command.4 They notified Francis II and the Imperial Diet that they were no longer members of the Reich. On August 6 Francis officially declared the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, and renounced the Imperial title, remaining emperor of Austria. The glory of the Hapsburgs faded, and a new Charlemagne, ruling from France, assumed authority over western Germany.
The Confederation conferred vital benefits and exacted fatal returns. It brought the Code Napoléon (with abolition of feudal dues and ecclesiastical tithes), freedom of religious worship, equality before the law, the French system of prefectural administration, centralized but competent, and a trained judiciary more than formerly difficult to bribe. The basic flaw in the structure was that it rested on foreign power, and could last only as long as this alien protection outweighed its domestic costs. When Napoleon took German sons to fight Austrians in 1809, the protectorate was strained; when he took thousands of German sons to fight Russia in 1812, and required heavy financial support for his campaign, the protectorate seemed a burden in gross topping its benefits in retail; when Confederation Germans were conscripted to fight Prussian Germans in 1813, the Confederation only awaited a substantial French reverse to bring the whole frail structure down upon the exhausted Corsican’s head.
Meanwhile it was a triumph for Napoleon that he had arranged a double security for France’s new frontier. The terrain west of the Rhine had been incorporated into France, and the rich lands on the east side, reaching even to the Elbe, were now allied with, and dependent upon, France. And though the Confederation disintegrated after Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig in 1813, it left a memory for Bismarck, even as Napoleon’s unification of Italy left an inspiration for Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour.
III. NAPOLEON’S GERMAN PROVINCES
North of Cologne were two regions which, though they became members of the Rheinbund, were completely Napoleon’s by the processes of war, and were governed by him or his relatives: the grand duchy of Berg by his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, and the kingdom of Westphalia, by his brother Jérôme. When Murat was promoted to Naples (1808), Napoleon governed the duchy through commissioners. Year by year he introduced French methods of administration, taxation, and law. Feudalism, already vestigial, was ended, industry and commerce were developed until the region became a thriving center of mining and metallurgy.
Westphalia was more varied and immense. Its western end was the duchy of Cleves (point of origin for Henry VIII’s fourth wife); thence it ranged eastward through Münster, Hildesheim, Brunswick, and Wolfenbüttel to Magdeburg; through Paderborn to Cassel (the capital), and across the Rivers Ruhr, Ems, and Lippe to the Saale and the Elbe.
Jérôme Bonaparte, made king in 1807, was then twenty-three years old, and was more interested in pleasure than in power. Napoleon, hoping that responsibilities would mature and settle him, sent him letters of excellent counsel, realistic yet humane, but this was countered by financial exactions, and Jérôme found it difficult to satisfy his brother’s demand for revenues and his own relish for a lavish court and style. Even so, he cooperated effectively in introducing the reforms that Napoleon usually brought with him in the creative period of his conquests. It was one of Bonaparte’s maxims that “men are powerless to determine the future; only institutions fix the destinies of nations.”5 So he gave Westphalia a code of laws, efficient and comparatively honest administration, religious freedom, a competent judiciary, the jury system, equality before the law, uniform taxation, and a system of periodic audit of all governmental operations. A national assembly was to be elected by a limited suffrage; fifteen of the hundred delegates were to be chosen from among merchants and manufacturers, fifteen from among savants and other persons who had earned distinction. The assembly was not empowered to initiate legislation, but it could criticize the measures submitted to it by the Council of State, and its advice was often accepted.
The economic reforms were basic. Feudalism was now ended. Free enterprise should open every field to every ambition. Roads and waterways were to be maintained and improved; internal tolls were abolished; weights and measures were made uniform throughout the kingdom. A decree of March 24, 1809, made every commune responsible for its poor, requiring it to provide them with employment or sustenance.6 The taxpayers complained.
Culturally Westphalia was the most progressive of the German states. It had nurtured intellectual life ever since—and before—Fulda’s monastic library fed the Renaissance with classical manucripts; Hildesheim had had Leibniz, and Wolfenbüttel had had Lessing. Now King Jérôme had as his librarian Jacob Grimm, whom we shall meet as the founder of Teutonic philology. In 1807, at Napoleon’s invitation, Johannes von Müller, the leading historian of the age, left his post as royal historiographer at Berlin to come to Westphalia as secretary of state and (1808–09) director-general of public education. Westphalia had then five universities, which under Jérôme were reorganized as three: Göttingen, Halle, and Marburg. Two of these were famous throughout Europe; we have seen Coleridge going straight from Nether Stowey to Göttingen, and returning to England a year later, dizzy with German ideas.
Against these boons two evils weighed heavily: taxation and conscription. Napoleon required from each of his dependencies a substantial contribution to his government, to his daily more lavish court, and to the expenses of his armies. His argument was simple: if Austria or some other reactionary power should defeat or otherwise unseat him, the blessings that he had brought with him would be taken away. For the same reason the states under his protection must share with France the obligation to provide sturdy sons for military training, and, if necessary, the sacrifice of life. Till 1813 Jérôme’s subjects bore this drain manfully; after all, in Napoleon’s armies the knout was unknown, promotion was by merit, any soldier might become an officer, even a marshal. But by 1813 Westphalia had sent 8,000 young men to serve Napoleon in Spain, 16,000 to serve him in Russia; from Spain only 800 returned, from Russia 2,000.
Northeast of Westphalia was the electorate of Hanover. In 1714 its elector ha
d become King George I of England, and Hanover had become an English dependency. The current elector was George III, who had made it a point of patriotism not to step out of Britain; so he left the great landowners of Hanover to rule the province “for the benefit of the most exclusive aristocracy in Germany. All valuable posts… were monopolized by the nobles,… who took care that none of the burdens of taxation should fall upon themselves,” and that “the burgher and peasant should contribute most.” Feudalism survived, softened by an almost family relation between master and man. Local government was honest beyond belief.7
In 1803, on the resumption of war with England, Napoleon ordered his troops and administrators to take control in Hanover, to guard against possible landings by British forces, and to exclude all British goods from entry. The French met little resistance. In 1807 Napoleon, busy with larger concerns, attached Hanover to Westphalia, and left it to the taxing devices of King Jérôme. The Hanoverians prayed for the return of England.
By contrast with Hanover, the Hanseatic cities—Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck—were havens of prosperity and pride. The League itself had long since ceased to exist, but the decline of Antwerp and Amsterdam under French control had transferred much of their commerce to Hamburg. Situated at the mouth of the Elbe, the city—boasting in 1800 a population of 115,000 souls—seemed designed for maritime trade, and for the expeditious reshipment of imported goods. It was governed by its leading merchants and financiers, but with a degree of skill and fairness that made their monopoly bearable. Napoleon itched to bring these mercantile cities under his rule, to enlist them in the embargo on British imports, and to help him, with their loans, to finance his wars. He sent Bourrienne and others to stop the flow of British goods into Hamburg; the avid ex-secretary grew rich by winking both eyes. Finally Napoleon brought the great city under his rule (1810), and so harassed the citizens that they formed secret societies to assassinate him, and daily plotted his fall.