The treaty of Lunéville 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 her frontier to the Rhine and established dependencies across the Rhone and the Alps, Russia during the same period had annexed the bulk of Poland, and the two great German powers had enlarged themselves both to the east and the west. The Empire had practically ceased to be; but its ruin had given fresh extension and compactness to the states which had profited by it. The cessions of Prussia had been small beside her gains. The losses of Austria had been more than counterbalanced in Italy by her acquisition of Venice, and far more than counterbalanced by secularizations and annexations within Germany itself. [Illustration: EUROPE after the PEACE OF LUNÉVILLE, 1801] [Sidenote: France and Britain.]