The Birth of Yugoslavia. Henry Baerlein
AND BRITAIN OPPOSE HIM ON THE ADRIATIC
It was not to be thought that France would be left tranquil on the Adriatic. Russia did not incommode her very greatly. After Kotor (Cattaro) had been delivered to the Muscovites by an Italian, the Marquis Ghislieri (who had concealed until that moment his antagonism to the French for having been removed by them from his Bologna home), the Russians made themselves obnoxious to a small extent upon the islands. They summoned the people of Hvar to recognize the Tzar as their overlord, and when the people declined to do so, the Russians bombarded them. For Dubrovnik this conflict between Russia and France was embarrassing; she wrote to Sankovski, the Russian Commissary, that if he exceeded his powers she would have recourse to the Tzar, "her beloved protector." But when in the summer of that year, 1806, she was besieged for twenty days, the French were in occupation of the town, while the Russians with their Montenegrin friends were trying to dislodge them. It is said that before the garrison was relieved, by the arrival of another French force, there had been so much damage done to the Republic's ancient walls and palaces and other buildings that the loss, to mention only the pecuniary loss, amounted to eighteen million francs. After the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 the British undertook, and more effectively, those operations in the Adriatic which the Russians now abandoned. They tried to burn at Triest the Russian vessels which had been ceded to France, and for a few years they had command of the Adriatic, keeping sometimes as many as twenty-two ships in those waters, while the French are said to have had at no time more than seven frigates.
The old Republic was dissolved; but many other questions weighed upon Napoleon. It was the Austrian Emperor and not he whom many people in Dalmatia held to be their lawful monarch, for the Habsburg was the heir of the Croatian Kings. And so while England had the sea in her possession, Austria had the salt-lands of the isle of Pago, and the populace on the Quarnero Islands took the rudders off the boats which were to carry food to Zadar. The Austrians advanced on Split, with ordinary troops and volunteers. At Hvar the people kept Napoleon's birthday with apparent enthusiasm; on the next day they revolted and hoisted the Austrian flag. Then the peasants seized the town and for three days indulged in pillage, burning amongst other things the valuable libraries of those who favoured France.
ILLYRIA, NAPOLEON'S GREAT WORK FOR THE SOUTHERN SLAVS
With the Treaty of Schoenbrunn Napoleon secured possession of Carniola, the Austrian part of Istria, Croatia, the military frontiers from the Save to the sea, and also certain districts of Carinthia, Styria and Tirol. Now at last the Adriatic littoral, with large tracts of the interior, was united under one hand. We may note that Eugène Beauharnais in vain entreated that the frontier for the Slovenes should, on account of strategic necessities, be drawn to the east of the Isonzo, but Napoleon did not hesitate to make that river the boundary between the two countries, as it was between the two races. Mazzini in 1860 shared this opinion, which he had also maintained in 1831, in his book The Rights of Man, that Slavs and Italians should be divided by this river. And in 1860 Cavour expressed himself to the same effect in a letter to Laurent Valerio.
"Mes braves Croates," says Napoleon in his Memoirs; and for what he did in this Illyria, the forerunner of our Yugoslavia, they must be always thankful. Never had these people had such able administrators, such sympathetic governors. They governed it too much as if it were a part of France, but they were doing their utmost to understand the people and their customs. General Marmont acquired an excellent knowledge of the Serbo-Croat language; he intended to introduce the national tongue into all the public offices. But this naturally could not be carried through without an intervening period, and unluckily Marmont so far excelled his compatriots as a linguist, that when the newspaper Télégraphe officiel des Provinces Illyriennes appeared at Ljubljana, the capital (under the brilliant editorship of Charles Nodier, who came out from France for that purpose), and it was announced that there would be French, German, Italian and Slav articles, the latter do not appear to have been published. Illyria was under the influence of its neighbours, Italian, German and Hungarian, with regard to the spoken and still more with regard to the written language. A fundamental necessity was that the country should have one common language. Under French influence Joachim Stulli brought out his Vocabulario italiano-illyrico-latino in 1810, and at Triest in 1812 Starčević published his new Illyrian grammar. There was visible in these works an aspiration that some day the Yugoslavs would be united in one country and with various dialects, and the proviso that for public affairs and for schools and literature the so-called "Što" dialect, the most widely spread and the most perfect, should be given preference. If Napoleon had not fallen, his Illyria would no doubt have gradually attracted to herself the other Yugoslav provinces that still were under the Austrian, Hungarian or Turk; and in this way one of the great thorns would have been taken out of Europe's side. There was an official, Marcel de Serres, on Napoleon's staff, who was exclusively concerned with Yugoslav affairs; and it is probable that with a closer knowledge of the people there would have been less insistence on the radical reforms which were sometimes ill-adapted to the country and were often hated vehemently by the persons whom they shook out of their age-long comatose condition. Napoleon would have modified the methods of recruiting had he known how much resentment his conscription was arousing. Venice had obtained most faithful soldiers; this was one of the few trades that she permitted, but she had never said they were obliged to serve. Napoleon's system caused great numbers of desertions, while the men who stayed had little discipline and looked for opportunities to join the enemy. Perhaps in time the nobles would have been resigned to losing, if not all, at any rate a portion of their privileges; and the Catholic clergy would have moderated their strong views against the gaoler of Pius VII., the champion of liberal and emancipated France, the master of Dandolo, who wanted to reduce the number of bishoprics, oblige candidates for the priesthood to learn certain lay subjects and regulate the funds in the possession of the Orders, with the purpose of assisting the indigent clergy and benevolent institutions—much would have been forgiven by the clergy to the man who brought about national union.
NAPOLEON'S SCHEMES ARE ROUGHLY INTERRUPTED
The transactions of the British at Vis (Lissa) were such as to make the people of Illyria very discontented with Napoleon, not so much on account of his mischance at sea, as of the disagreeable effects thereof upon themselves. The British blockade had ruined the local merchant service, while the consequent state of a province which had necessarily to be revictualled by sea was compared with the flourishing fortunes of Vis. Before the British definitely occupied that island with its glorious harbour—2½ kilometres in length by 1 kilometre in breadth—they had to secure themselves by two naval engagements. In October 1810 the French-Italian attack was nearly successful, and in the following March came the great fight when Dubourdieu pitted himself against Commodore Hoste. Not counting a few smaller ships, the French had four frigates, each armed with 44 guns, and two corvettes of 32 guns. The British had the Amphion and the Cerberus, each armed with 60 guns, the Active with 44 and the Volage with 22. The Italians having slow ships, arrived late, but fought very well. What lost Dubourdieu his chances was the separation of his squadron, which allowed the British to engage them one after another. Dubourdieu on the Favorite, his captain and two lieutenants were killed; the captain of the Flore lost an arm; the captain of the Bellona had both legs amputated, and died on the next day; Pasqualijo, captain of the Corona, wished to surrender his sword to Hoste, but as he had fought so nobly Hoste refused to take it. Pasqualijo was removed to Malta, and after a few months set at liberty. On the British side the losses were also severe. Most of the crew of the Amphion were either killed or wounded, Hoste being among the latter. Of 254 on board the Cerberus only 26 were untouched. It is said that the French and Italians had about 200 killed and 500 wounded. Dubourdieu's fault was merely an excess of intrepidity; the French have called a cruiser after him. Their opinion at the time, according to their historians,[38] was that the British were superior in officers and men and ships—constant cruising on the Adriatic had brought them near perfection. Among the incidents recorded is that of one of the Amphion's cadets who was doing police work at the fort; in despair at being out of the battle he swam to his ship. A fusillade from the Favorite put some shot in his leg. On reaching the Amphion he was