English subsidies. But though she fought on, the resumption of the
war in the autumn failed to reverse the fortune of arms. The Austrians
were driven back on Vienna; and on the second of December Moreau crushed
their army on the Iser in the victory of Hohenlinden. But the aim of the
First Consul was only to wrest peace from his enemies by these triumphs;
while the expiration of her engagements with England left his opponent
free to lay down her arms. In February 1801 therefore the Continental
War was brought suddenly to an end by the Peace of Luneville.

CHAPTER V

ENGLAND AND NAPOLEON

1801-1815

[Sidenote: The New Europe.]

The treaty of Luneville was of far greater import than the treaties
which had ended the struggle of the first coalition. It was in effect
the close of the attack which revolutionary France had directed against
the Continental powers. With it expired the outer energy of the
Revolution, as its inner energy expired with the elevation of Buonaparte
to the First Consulate. The change that the French onset had wrought in
the aspect of Europe had no doubt been great. In the nine years which
had passed since the earlier league of the powers against her, France
had won all and more than all that the ambition of her older statesmen
had ever aimed at. She had absorbed the Netherlands. She was practically
mistress of Holland, Switzerland, and Piedmont, whose dependent
republics covered her frontier; while she had revived that union with
Spain which had fallen for a time with the Family Compact of the House
of Bourbon. But in spite of this growth the dread of French aggression
was far less keenly felt by her neighbour states than in the early years
of the war. What they had dreaded then was not so much the political
reconstruction of Europe as the revolutionary enthusiasm which would
have pushed this political reconstruction into a social revolution. But
at the opening of the nineteenth century the enthusiasm of France had
faded away. She was again Christian. She was again practically
monarchical. What her neighbours saw in her after all these years of
change was little more than the old France with a wider frontier; and
now that they could look upon those years as a whole, it was clear that
much of this widening of her borders was only a fair counterbalance for
the widened borders of the states around her. If France had grown great,
other powers had grown in greatness too. If France had pushed he