oken largely through one of those small dynastic incidents which are
of such vast importance under an absolute despotism. One of Napoleon's
main objects was to establish a Napoleonic Dynasty and to be adopted
by marriage into one of the ruling families of Europe. The Corsican
parvenu passionately desired a matrimonial alliance with the House of
Romanov, and repeatedly applied for the hand of one of Alexander's
sisters; the dowager Tsarina, Alexander's mother, a daughter of the
King of Wuertemberg, as persistently refused. She had all the pride of
birth of a German Princess, and all the hatred of a reactionary
against the armed soldier of the Revolution. Foiled at the Court of
Petersburg, Napoleon was more successful at the Court of Vienna. A few
months after Napoleon's last overtures had been rejected by Russia,
the Habsburgs, who, after the Bourbons, were the most august, the most
ancient dynasty of Europe, eagerly accepted what the Romanovs had
refused. The war of 1812 with Russia was the result of that pro-German
policy of the Russian Court.

VIII.

During the reigns of Nicholas I. and Alexander II. the German-Austrian
influence reached its zenith at the Court of Petersburg. Nicholas I.
was the brother-in-law of the Prussian Hohenzollern. An able and an
honest man in his private relations, he was in his political capacity
a Prussian martinet, as even Treitschke is compelled to admit, and he
organized his Empire on the strictest Frederician principles. The
Court, the Army, and the bureaucracy were Prussianized as they had
never been before. A German bureaucrat, Nesselrode, who could not even
speak the Russian language, for forty years controlled as Foreign
Minister the policy of the Russian Empire. Even as his grandfather,
Peter III., even as his brother, Alexander I., had saved Prussia from
destruction, so Nicholas I. saved Austria from a similar fate. Francis
Joseph had ascended a throne shaken to its foundations. Hungary was in
open rebellion. The young Austrian Emperor appealed to Russia for
help. Nicholas I. sent an army to quell the revolution, and
established his cousin on the Hungarian throne. It is unnecessary to
add that Francis Joseph was as loyal and as grateful to Russia as
Frederick the Great had been!

Alexander I. had refused to accept Napoleon I. as a brother-in-law.
Even so did Nicholas I. refuse to recognize Napoleon III. as Emperor
of the French. It was a gratuitous insult inspired by Prussia;