Secularized Germany and the Vatican [pp. 107-122]

I20 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VA VTICAN. [Oct.,
so altered as almost to become personal, and the whole media tized Diet to bear somewhat the same resemblance to the Diet of
the former empire as exists between chess-men when set out in
array and the same pieces when huddled together in a box. No
human power could now avert the final crash, which yet was hurried on by the acts of its own members. In I804 the emperor,
in a document wherein the crown of Charlemagne quotes as a
precedent the action of the crown of Napoleon, raised his own
archduchy to the imperial rank, violating thereby the fundamental rule of equality among the states; and two years afterwards he dissolved the Empire of Germany, laid down the title, and released all princes and people from their oath of allegiance, reserving only his new-created rank of Austrian emperor.
The sequel of those dissociated states was curious enough.
Out of the broken columns and fragments of the ecclesiastical
empire Napoleon reared up his Confederation of the Rhine, still
preserving the hierarchical form of a College of Kings and a College of Princes, and still retaining a survival of hierarchical connection in the presidency of the Archbishop of Ratisbon; but
the principle of election had wholly given way to the nomination of a dictator. That organization it doubtless was which
suggested to the mind of Napoleon the fatal idea of a general
confederation of European states, with the pope at their head,
under the hegemony of France, which dominated all the rest of
his career, and which resembled the image set up by the conqueror of another holy city, with its head of gold, and its body
of brass, and legs partly iron and partly clay. This idea it was
which led to his ill-fated marriage with a daughter of his Austrian enemy; which caused him to confer upon his little son the
title of King of the Romans, borrowed from the disrupted empire;
which led him, against his will, to lay sacrilegious hands upon
the holy pontiff, and finally to destroy his fortunes in the snows
of Russia in his frantic attempt to restore the monarchy of Poland. Thence came the curse of the excommunication, the thunderbolt of Moscow, the catastrophe of Fontainebleau. The huge
image was struck upon the feet by an invisible hand, and the
gold and the silver, the brass and the clay, were shattered into
a thousand fragments.
* From this point the history of the states of Germany passes
from the civil into the military form. After the exile of Napoleon, France, to use the exquisite formula of diplomacy, "reentered the limits of 1793," or, in the more brutal language of
the world, was forced to give up the foreign possessions she had