constructed, by arbitrary force, a huge military empire on the basis of France, with the pope as an
obedient paid servant at Paris, but it collapsed on the battle fields of Leipzig and Waterloo, without
the hope of a resurrection. "I have not succeeded Louis Quatorze," he said, "but Charlemagne." He
dismissed his wife and married a daughter of the last German and first Austrian emperor; he assumed
the Lombard crown at Milan; he made his ill-fated son "King of Rome" in imitation of the German
"King of the Romans." He revoked "the donations which my predecessors, the French emperors
have made," and appropriated them to France. "Your holiness," he wrote to Pius VII., who had
once addressed him as his "very dear Son in Christ," "is sovereign of Rome, but I am the emperor
thereof." "You are right," he wrote to Cardinal Fesch, his uncle, "that I am Charlemagne, and I
ought to be treated as the emperor of the papal court. I shall inform the pope of my intentions in a
few words, and if he declines to acquiesce, I shall reduce him to the same condition in which he
was before Charlemagne."^262 It is reported that he proposed to the pope to reside in Paris with a
large salary, and rule the conscience of Europe under the military, supremacy of the emperor, that
the pope listened first to his persuasion with the single remark: "Comedian," and then to his threats
with the reply: "Tragedian," and turned him his back. The papacy utilized the empire of the uncle
and the nephew, as well as it could, and survived them. But the first Napoleon swept away the
effete institutions of feudalism, and by his ruthless and scornful treatment of conquered nationalities
provoked a powerful revival of these very nationalities which overthrew and buried his own artificial
empire. The deepest humiliation of the German nation, and especially of Prussia, was the beginning
of its uprising in the war of liberation.
The German Confederation.
The Congress of Vienna erected a temporary substitute for the old empire in the German
"Bund" at Frankfort. It was no federal state, but a loose confederacy of 38 sovereign states, or
princes rather, without any popular representation; it was a rope of sand, a sham unity, under the
leadership of Austria; and Austria shrewdly and selfishly used the petty rivalries and jealousies of
the smaller principalities as a means to check the progress of Prussia and to suppress all liberal
movements.
The New German Empire.
In the meantime the popular desire for national union, awakened by the war of liberation
and a great national literature, made steady progress, and found at last its embodiment in a new
German empire with a liberal constitution and a national parliament. But this great result was
brought about by great events and achievements under the leadership of Prussia against foreign
aggression. The first step was the brilliant victory of Prussia over Austria at Königgrätz, which
resulted in the formation of the North German Confederation (1866). The second step was the still
more remarkable triumph of united Germany in a war of self-defence against the empire of Napoleon
III., which ended in the proclamation of William I. as German emperor by the united wishes of the
German princes and peoples in the palace of Louis XIV. at Versailles (1870).
Thus the long dream of the German nation was fulfilled through a series of the most brilliant
military and diplomatic victories recorded in modern history, by the combined genius of Bismarck,
Moltke, and William, and the valor, discipline, and intelligence of the German army.
(^2622) In another letter to Fesch (Correspond. de l’ empereur Napol. Ier, Tom. xi. 528), he writes, "Pour le pape je suis
Charemagne. parce que comme Charlemagne je réunis la couronne de Prance à celle du Lombards et que mon empire confine
avec l’ Orient." Quoted by Bryce.