VIII
LUMEN
Enlightenment and Absolutism, c.1650–1789
THERE is an air of naïvety about the so-called ‘Age of Reason’. In restrospect it seems extraordinary that so many of Europe’s leading intellects should have given such weight to one human faculty—Reason—at the expense of all the others. Naïvety of such proportions, one might conclude, was heading for a fall; and a fall, in the shape of the terrible revolutionary years, is what the Age of Reason eventually encountered.
In the periods both before and after, the virtues of Reason were much less appreciated. On seeing his father’s ghost, Shakespeare’s Hamlet had told his doubting companion, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ In the nineteenth century, too, rationalism was out of fashion:
ENLIGHTENMENT … 2. Shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition, etc.; applied esp. to the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th C. 1865.1
On the other hand, when judging the period which followed the Reformations, one must remember what Europeans had been contending with for so long. The consensus between Reason and Faith, as promised by the Renaissance humanists, had not prevailed against the world of religious dogma, magic, and superstition. After the Wars of Religion, one can see that the exercise of ‘the Light of sweet Reason’ was a natural and necessary antidote. Indeed, even the full flood of the Enlightenment may only have washed over the surface of continuing bigotries.
Similar problems surround the label of the ‘Age of Absolutism’ which political historians apply to this same period. One might easily be led to imagine that most European rulers of the time either enjoyed absolute powers or at least sought to do so. Such, alas, was not the case. Europeans in the Age of Absolutism were no more uniform absolutists than they were uniform rationalists.
In the century and a half between the Peace of Westphalia and the French Revolution, the map of Europe underwent few radical changes. Each of the wars of the period ended with a certain amount of territorial trading. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713), in particular, caused a stir; and the first partition of Poland-Lithuania (1773) signalled the onset of an avalanche. The unification of the island of Great Britain (1707) confirmed the emergence of an important new unit. But most of the main blocs on the map remained essentially intact. France’s drive to the Rhine was only partly successful; Prussia had to be content with relatively modest gains; the Ottomans’ last great surge was contained and then reversed. Russia alone continued to grow dramatically. None of Europe’s invalids actually perished: Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania all ailed, but all survived.
The range of political systems was far greater than most textbooks allow (see Appendix III, p. 1265). In this ‘Age of Absolutism’, absolutist states actually formed a minority. Between the completely decentralized, constitutional, and republican confederation of Switzerland at one end of the scale and the extreme autocracies in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Papal States at the other, great variety flourished. Europe’s republics were represented by Venice, Poland-Lithuania, and the United Provinces; the constitutional monarchies at various times by England, Scotland, and Sweden; the absolutist monarchies by France, Spain, and Austria. The Holy Roman Empire, with monarch both elected and hereditary, fell somewhere between the republics and the constitutional monarchies; Prussia, which operated constitutional structures according to an authoritarian tradition, fell somewhere between constitutionalism and absolutism. Even greater variety can be found among Europe’s Kleinstaaterei—the hundreds of petty states which the younger Pitt would once call in exasperation ‘the swarm of gnats’. There were miniature city-republics like Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Genoa, or Geneva; there were miniature principalities like Courland; ecclesiastical states like Avignon, and curious hybrids like Andorra.
What is more, many European states continued to be conglomerates, where the ruler had to operate a different system within each of the constituent territories. The kings of Prussia had to conduct themselves in one way in Berlin, where they were imperial subjects, in another way in Königsberg, where they were completely independent, and in yet other ways in possessions such as Minden or Neuchâtel. The Habsburgs could be figureheads in the Empire, despots in Prague or Vienna, and constitutional monarchs after 1713 in Brussels. The British kings could be constitutional monarchs at home and autocrats in the colonies.
There were also important variations over time. England, for example, veered in the republican direction under Cromwell, in the monarchical direction after the restoration of the Stuarts, and back to its greatly admired centrist position after the ‘Bloodless Revolution’ of 1688–9. In the late seventeenth century both the Swedish and the Danish monarchies headed rapidly towards absolutism. In eighteenth-century Sweden the ‘Hats’ and ‘Caps’ moved headlong in the opposite direction. Under John Sobieski (r. 1674–96) Poland-Lithuania still functioned according to rules of the noble democracy. After 1717 it could only function as a Russian protectorate. In Russia the Tsars acted as unashamed autocrats; in Poland they posed as the champions of ‘Golden Freedom’. Appearances, and simple categories, deceive.
Absolutism, in particular, must be viewed with circumspection. It was something less than the autocracy of tsars and sultans, who faced no institutional obstacle to the exercise of their will. Yet it was something more than the authoritarian spirit which enabled certain monarchs to follow the Prussian example and to dragoon the institutions with which they were supposed to co-operate. It clearly had its roots in the late feudal period, where struggling monarchies had to combat the entrenched privileges both of the provinces and of the nobility, and in the Catholic world, where the Roman Church remained immune from direct political control. It did not usually fit the conditions of either the Protestant or the Orthodox world. At various stages France, Spain, Austria, and Portugal came definitely within its purview. For various reasons Britain, Prussia, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia did not.
Absolutism, one should stress, refers more to an ideal than to the practical realities of government. It was concerned with a set of political ideas and assumptions which came into existence as a corrective to the excessively decentralized institutions left over from the late medieval era. It often stood for little more than the ‘personal power’ of certain monarchs as opposed to the ‘limited powers’ of others whose authority was curtailed by Diets, autonomous provinces, municipal charters, exempted nobles, and clergy. It could not be easily defined, and was often justified more in the panegyrical tones of courtiers than in the detailed arguments of philosophers. It had many a Bossuet or a Boileau, but only one Hobbes. It was probably better illustrated in some of its minor examples, such as Tuscany, than in any of the major powers. Nowhere did it achieve complete success: nowhere did it bring a perfectly absolute state into existence. Yet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it certainly provided a radical force for change. In the eighteenth century, when its influence was becoming more diffuse, it was overtaken by new trends for democracy, liberty, and the general will. The age of the ‘enlightened despots’ was equally the era of British and American constitutionalism.
One must also be aware that shouts of ‘absolutism’ were frequently raised in a misleading way. When the English gentry complained about the absolutism of the Stuarts, they were less perturbed by the actual balance of power between King and Parliament than by fears of the imposition of French or Spanish practices. When the Polish nobles took to screaming about the ‘absolutism’ of their Saxon kings, whose position in Poland-Lithuania was more limited than that of any limited monarch, they were simply objecting to change.
The absolutism of France served as the main point of reference. Under Louis XTV (r. 1643–1715), whose reign was the longest in European history, France was far and away Europe’s greatest power; and her example excited numerous admirers. Yet the greatest of absolutists died disillusioned, convinced that the ideal lay out of reach.
In the end, therefore, absolutism proved a dismal failure. The Ancien Régime created by Louis XIV was to end in the disaster of a Revolution which, whilst turning France into the apostle of republicanism, brought French supremacy to a close. The ultimate triumph was to be enjoyed by Absolutism’s most doughty opponents. British constitutionalism inspired not only the leading power of the nineteenth century but also, via the constitution of Britain’s rebel colonies, the world’s leading superpower of the twentieth.
Europe’s colonies and overseas possessions continued to multiply after 1650, and in some cases reached independent viability. Spain and Portugal had their hands full exploiting their existing possessions. In North America, the Spaniards pressed inland from New Spain (Mexico) to California, Arizona, Colorado. In South America, aided by systematic Jesuit settlements, they concentrated their efforts on Venezuela, on New Granada (Bogotá), on Peru, Paraguay, and La Plata (Córdoba). They attempted to keep all trade to their own ships, until forced by the Asiento Treaty of 1713 to admit foreigners. The Portuguese survived a long campaign by the Dutch to take over the Brazilian coast. After the treaty of 1662, they moved south from São Paulo to the River Plate (1680) and westwards into the gold-rich interior at Minas Gerais (1693) and the Matto Grosso. Apart from the East Indies, the Dutch were left with colonies in Guyana and Curaçao. The Russians, who had discovered what was later to be named the Bering Strait in 1648, occupied Kamchatka (1679) and signed a border treaty with China on the Amur (1689). A century later, after the explorations of the Dane Vitus Bering (1680–1741), they established a fort on Kodiak Island (1783) and claimed Alaska (1791), whence they sent out an offshoot to Fort Ross in northern California (1812).
Most new colonial enterprises, however, were started by the French and the British. France launched the Compagnie des Indes in 1664, establishing stations on the east coast of India at Pondicherry and Karaikal, with staging-posts on the islands of Madagascar and Reunion. In 1682 Louisiana was founded on the Mississippi in honour of Louis XIV, with its capital at New Orleans (1718). England consolidated its American colonies with the foundation of Delaware (1682), of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania (1683), and of Georgia (1733). In India the East India Company, which now held Bombay and Calcutta as well as Madras, was hard-pressed by French competition. Commercial interests went hand in hand with maritime discovery. In 1766–8 the French admiral Bougainville circumnavigated the globe, as did the three expeditions of Captain James Cook RN between 1768 and 1780. In the circumstances, Franco-British colonial conflicts became almost inevitable. They were settled by superior British naval power. Great Britain took Newfoundland in 1713, French India in 1757, and French Canada in 1759–60, thereby confirming its status as the prime colonial power.
Colonialism was very much confined to those maritime states which first began it. The German states, Austria, and the Italian states did not take part. In this they lagged behind the Polish fief of Courland, whose Duke bought Tobago in 1645 and briefly maintained a trading-post in the Gambia; or Denmark, whose West India Company obtained both St Thomas and St John (1671) and St Croix (1733).
The impact of Europe’s growing contacts with distant continents and cultures cannot be exaggerated. Europe had long been shut in on itself. Knowledge of civilizations beyond Europe was meagre. Fantastic tales, like that of ‘El Dorado’, abounded. But now a steady stream of detailed accounts of India, China, or the American Frontier began to stimulate more serious reflection. Les Six Voyages (1676) of J. B. Tavernier (1605–89), who made great wealth in Persia, started a genre written in the same vein as the celebrated New Voyage round the World (1697) of the buccaneer William Dampier (1652–1715), the History of Japan (1727) by the German surgeon Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), or the later Travels in Arabia of the Swiss J. L. Burckhardt (1784–1817), the first European to visit Mecca. The Strange, Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), the world’s first popular novel, was written by the English satirist, Daniel Defoe (1659–1731), on the basis of the real experiences of a Scots sailor marooned on Juan Fernández Island off Valparaíso by Dampier. These works often gave European readers a comparative perspective on the religions, folklore, and culture of the world; and they handed the philosophers of the Enlightenment one of their most effective devices for questioning European or Christian assumptions. It hit Europeans hard to learn that the Siamese might be happier, the Brahmin more sagacious, or the Iroquois less bloodthirsty than they were themselves. It is a curious fact that Jesuit authors, who excelled in travelogues of the ethnological type, provided the very ammunition with which their own intellectual world was most effectively bombarded. Here one would mention the description of Amerindian life in Canada by Fr. J.-F. Lafitau (1670–1740) or the much-translated memoir of Persia by Fr. T. Krusiński SJ (1675–1756), published in 1733.
International relations were clearly affected by the colonial factor. Almost all the wars of the period had naval or colonial theatres which were fought over in parallel to the main military conflict on the Continent. The great land powers— France, Spain, Austria, and increasingly Prussia and Russia—had to take account of the wealthy maritime powers, especially the British and the Dutch, who, whilst possessing few troops of their own, could play a vital role as paymasters, quartermasters, and weavers of diplomatic coalitions.
Diplomacy was increasingly governed by the Balance of Power—a doctrine which viewed any change in one part of Europe as a potential threat to the whole. This was a sure sign that a ‘European system’ was coming into being. And colonial assets were an integral part of the equation. The system was of particular interest to the British, who instinctively opposed any preponderant Continental power and who made a fine art of maintaining the Balance at minimum cost to themselves. International relations of this sort entirely lacked the moral and religious fervour of previous times. They were often reduced almost to a form of ritual, where the current state of the Balance was tested in set-piece battles fought by small professional armies; where elegant officers of both sides belonged to the same international confraternity of arms; and where the result was nicely calculated in territory ceded or gained. Territorial possessions were viewed rather like casino chips that rulers lost or amassed according to the fortunes of war, with no thought for the interests of the inhabitants. Like Westphalia, all the great congresses of the subsequent era—Utrecht (1713), Vienna (1738), Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), and Paris (1763)—were conducted in the same spirit of cheerful cynicism.
Economic life, too, was greatly affected by the colonies. Europe was increasingly divided into countries which could benefit from colonial commerce and those which could not. Britain benefited most, especially after Utrecht, gaining a predominant hold on the Atlantic trade in sugar, tobacco, and slaves, from which Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol grew rich. Britain’s policy of enforcing a blockade on enemy ports in time of war led to constant trouble not only with France and Spain but also with the neutrals—Dutch, Danes, and Swedes—who had specialized in smuggling, raiding, and blockade-running. In Britain, in emulation of the Dutch, this period saw the growth of all the permanent institutions of public credit—the Bank of England (1694), the Royal Exchange, and the National Debt. The first steps of the Industrial Revolution were taken in the 1760s. [CAP-AG]
Britain produced John Law (1671–1729), a racy Scots financier, who invented the first experiment for harnessing colonial trade to popular capitalism. His grand ‘Scheme’ and Banque royale (1716–20) in Paris, which was patronized by the Regent, and which coincided with the similarly disastrous South Sea Company in London, created a veritable fever of speculation by selling paper shares in the future of Louisiana. The Bubble burst; thousands, if not millions, of investors were ruined, Law fled, and France was permanently inoculated against credit operations. Meanwhile, the commercial operations of Law’s company thrived; and the value of French overseas commerce quadrupled between 1716 and 1743.
In Central and Eastern Europe, few such developments occurred. Land remained the major source of wealth; serfdom reigned supreme; inland trade could not compare to its maritime counterpart. Germany’s recovery was slow, Bohemia’s somewhat faster; Poland-Lithuania after 1648 experienced an absolute economic regression from which it never recovered. Baltic trade passed increasingly to Russia, where the foundation of St Petersburg (1701) opened its ‘window to the West’.
Social life, despite the recurrence of violent outbursts, remained within its established channels until the opening of the floodgates in 1789. Extremes of wealth among the aristocracy and of misery among the peasants were normal. Differences between Western and Eastern Europe were growing, but not dramatic. Even in Britain, where commercial pressures were greatest, the landed aristocracy maintained its supremacy. Indeed since the English lords were not averse to commercial activities like canal-building or coalmining, their pre-eminence was prolonged. This was the age of the grandees and the magnates—the Medina Sidonia and Osuña in Spain, the Brahes and Bondes in Sweden, the Schwarzenbergs in Austria, the Esterhazy in Hungary, the Lobkowitz in Bohemia, the Radziwitt and the Zamoyski in Poland—each with a vast latifundium protected by entail, a princely life-style, and enormous patronial power, [SZLACHTA]
CAP-AG
IN volume 70 of the journal Past and Present (1976), an American historian advanced a hypothesis on ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe’. He was questioning the established view which attributed economic change to the pressures of rising population. Starting from contrasts between England and France, he argued that the key to England’s precocity and France’s retardation lay in their different class structures. Whereas the landlord class in England had created a flourishing system of agrarian capitalism, ‘the most complete freedom and property rights for the rural population [in France] meant poverty and a self-perpetuating cycle of backwardness’.1
An elaborate historians’ debate raged in the journal’s next seventeen issues. Volume 78 carried a symposium on ‘Population and Class Relations in Feudal Society’, a second joint critique of the hypothesis, and an exposition of ‘Peasant Organization and Class in East and West Germany’. Volume 79 carried two still more hostile pieces, one lamenting ‘the confused view of manorial development’ and another, from the star of French rural history, which pummelled the Brenner thesis with a comprehensive eighteen-point ‘Reply’. Volume 85 extended the debate to ‘Pre-industrial Bohemia’. At last, in volume 97, Professor Brenner’s long-awaited rejoinder stretched matters still further by expounding his views on ‘the agrarian roots of European Capitalism’.2
Debates of this sort are the chosen method for historical specialists to bridge the gaps in existing knowledge. They appear to have two weaknesses. They use tiny samples to make huge generalizations; and they are shamelessly inconclusive. If engineers were to approach their subject in the same spirit, no river would ever be bridged.
A solution of sorts, however, was to hand. In the same year that the Brenner debate was launched, another American scholar took the same subject of ‘capitalist agriculture’ and used it to explain ‘the origins of a world-economy’.3 By applying the techniques of systems theory, Immanuel Wallerstein was able to locate a ‘core’ of the European economy in the West and a dependent ‘periphery’ in the East. In his view, the core region, which consisted of England, the Netherlands, northern France, and western Germany, had possessed only a ‘slight edge’ in the fifteenth century. But they were able to exploit their advantage through favourable trading relations, and to set up the conditions which transformed the feudal nobilities of Eastern Europe into a capitalist landowning class. They also projected their growing economic power into the New World. As a result, they created the familiar framework where ‘coercive, cash-crop capitalism’ took hold both of colonial and of East European agriculture. Whilst the core countries flourished, the serfs of Prussia, Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary were reduced to the status of plantation blacks. Once established, the system could only magnify its imbalances. ‘The slight edge of the fifteenth century became the great disparity of the seventeenth and the monumental difference of the nineteenth.’
The hypothesis soon came under fire from the specialists, not least from Brenner. Wallerstein was accused of oversimplification, of overemphasis on trade, even of ‘neo-Smithianism’.5 It turns out that the ‘Polish model’, which was central to his argument, did not hold good even for the whole of Poland, and was largely invented. The Hungarian beef trade, it seems, was not run by nobles or capitalist middlemen, but by free, wage-earning peasants. The Russian and the Ottoman elements in European trade had been ignored. Instead of a micro-theory which could not sustain generalizations, here was a macro-theory, which could not bear the specifics.
In the end, the most interesting aspect of Wallerstein’s work was the light which it shed on the relations of Eastern and Western Europe. Though the postulate of a core and a dependent periphery had not been proved, the interdependence of all parts of Europe had been amply demonstrated.
In many countries the nobility was now mobilized for the service of the state. In France and in Russia, this was achieved in a formal, systematic way. Louis XIV introduced a hierarchy of ranks and titles, each supported by suitable pensions, starting with the enfants de France (royal family) and the pairs (princes of the blood, together with 50 dukes and 7 bishops) and ending with the cadres of the noblesse d’épée (the old military families) and the noblesse de robe (civilian courtiers). Peter the Great introduced a service nobility divided into 14 ranks and even more strictly dependent on state employment. In Prussia the alliance between the Crown and the Junkers was more informal but no less effective. The petty nobility, which was particularly numerous in Spain and in Poland, was squeezed into the retinues of the magnates, into military service, or into foreign employment. In England, in the absence of serfdom, the Enclosure movement could capitalize on landholding most effectively. A prosperous stratum of yeomen and gentleman farmers developed at the expense of peasants driven from the land.
In all the great cities of Europe there was a wealthy commercial and professional class, alongside the artisanate, the urban poor, and, in two or three localities, the beginnings of an industrial work-force. Generally speaking, however, the old institutions of the social Estates remained intact. The nobles kept their Diets, the cities their charters and their guilds, the peasantry their corvées and their famines. Social changes were undoubtedly taking place, but within the established framework. When the shell finally cracked, as it did in France in 1789, the social explosion was to be unprecedented, [PUGACHEV]
SZLACHTA
ACCORDING to an inventory of 1739, Stanislaw Lubomirski (1719–83) had inherited latifundium of 1,071 landed estates. They stretched right across the nine southern palatinates of Poland, from the family seat at Wisnicz near Cracow to Tetiev near Kiev in Ukraine, and were worked by close to a million serfs. Grand Marshal of the Crown from 1766, Lubomirski could have laid claim to be Europe’s largest private landowner. Allied by marriage and politics to the related clans of the Czartoryski, Poniatowski, and Zamoyski, he certainly belonged to the most powerful circle of magnates in the land. Each of them possessed vast estates, a private army, and an income larger than the king’s. They stood at the pinnacle of a social system whose noble estate—the szlachta—was the most numerous in Europe.
The magnates, however, were highly untypical of the nobility as a whole. By the mid-eighteenth century an absolute majority of Polish nobles had become landless. They survived by renting properties, by serving the magnates, or even by working the land like peasants. Yet no amount of economic degradation could deprive them of what they prized most—their noble blood, their herb or ‘coat of arms’, their legal status, and their right to bequeath it to their children, [CRUX]
Poland’s drobna szlachta or ‘petty nobility’ was absolutely inimitable. In certain provinces, such as Mazovia, they made up a quarter of the population. In some districts, where they built walled villages to separate themselves from the peasantry, the zaścianki or ‘nobles-behind-the-wall’ constituted the whole population. They preserved their way of life with fierce determination, addressing each other as Pan or Pani, ‘Lord and Lady’, and the peasants as Ty, ‘Thou’. They regarded all nobles as brothers, and everyone else as inferiors. They reserved the severest penalties for anyone falsely masquerading as a noble, and jealously guarded the procedures of ennoblement. They engaged in no trade, except for soldiering and land management. They always rode into town, if only on a nag; and they wore carmine capes and weapons, if only symbolic wooden swords. Their houses may have been hovels; but they had to have a porch on which to display the family shield. Above all, they insisted that Prince Lubomirski and his like were their equals.
The most prominent feature of the szlachta, therefore, was the tremendous contrast between their economic stratification and their legal, cultural, and political solidarity. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, they admitted no native titles. There were no Polish barons, marquises, or counts. The most they would do was to confirm the personal titles which some of their number had gained in Lithuania before the union of 1569 or which, like the Lubomirskis, had been granted by pope or emperor.
In legal terms, Poland’s noble estate came to an end when the laws governing its status were abolished by the Partitions. Some, like the Lubomirskis, managed to confirm their nobility in Austria or in Prussia. A few did so in Russia, though 80 per cent of them there lost their status, forming a déclassé reservoir of anti-Russian discontent that raged throughout the nineteenth century. In 1921, when the Polish Republic was restored, a democratic Polish Sejm formally confirmed the abolition of noble privilege.Yet the szlachta’s consciousness of their special identity survived all manner of catastrophes. As late as the 1950s, sociologists found collective farmers in Mazovia who shunned their ‘peasant’ neighbours, dressed differently, spoke differently, and observed complex betrothal customs to prevent intermarriage. In 1990, when Poland’s Communist regime collapsed, there were still young Poles who would wear a signet ring with a coat of arms, just to show who they were. By then, everyone in Poland addressed each other as Pan and Pani. The ‘noble culture’ had become a major ingredient of the culture of the whole nation.
Nobility played a central part in social and political life all over early modern Europe. But the only place where the Polish model was matched, even in part, was in Spain, where the grandees and hidalgos of the West resembled the magnates and petty gentry of the East.1
Cultural life burgeoned under royal, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic patronage. The European arts entered the era of Classicism, where, in reaction to the Baroque, rules, rigour, and restraint were the order of the day. Architecture saw a return to the Greek and Roman styles of the Renaissance, with a touch of gaudy or rococo ornamentation. The outstanding buildings were palaces and public offices. Urban planning, formal, geometric gardens, and landscape design gained prominence. The obsession was to reduce the chaos of the natural world to order and harmony. The show cities, after Paris, were Dresden, Vienna, and St Petersburg.
Painting had passed its precocious peak. In France the classical landscapes and mythological scenes of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Claude Lorrain (1600–82), and Charles Le Brun (1619–90) were succeeded by the idyllic frivolities painted by J. A. Watteau (1684–1721) and J.-H. Fragonard (1732–1806). The English school of social portraiture, which began with Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), culminated in the superlative work of Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88). The two Canalettos (1697–1768, 1724–80) left realistic panoramas of Venice, London, and Warsaw. Except for occasional figures of stature, such as G. B. Tiepolo (1693–1770) in Venice, religious painting was in decline. Interior decoration, and furniture in particular, responded to aristocratic demand. The cabinet-makers of Paris, led by A. C. Boulle (1642–1732), took advantage of exotic imports such as ebony, mahogany, and satinwood; Boulle specialized in marquetry and inlaid ebony. Their creations, now instantly recognizable as ‘Louis XIV”, ‘Louis XV’, or ‘Louis XVI’, eventually found their match in the work of Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721) and Thomas Chippendale (d. 1779). Fine porcelain owed much to imports from China. The royal factory at Saint Cloud (1696) and later Sèvres (1756) had counterparts at Meissen (1710) in Saxony, at St Petersburg (1744), at Worcester (1751), and at the ‘Etruria’ factory (1769) of Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95). Silk, silver, and sumptuous sundries saturated the salons.
PUGACHEV
SINCE peasants formed by far the largest social class in modern Europe and the Russian empire by far the largest state, it is not surprising to find that the greatest peasant revolts took place in the heartland of Russia. There were four—those of Bolotnikov, 1606–7, of Sten’ka Razin, 1670–1, of Bulavin, 1707–8, and of Pugachev, 1773–4. Equally, the civil war in Soviet Russia, 1917–211 contained a major element of peasant unrest.
Emelyan Ivanovich Pugachev (1726–75) was a small Cossack landowner and veteran officer. He had spent years wandering among the monasteries of the Old Believers, storing up his sense of resentment. In 1773 he raised the standard of revolt at Yaitsk on the Ural River, on the very frontier of Europe, declaring himself to be the Emperor Peter III and promising the emancipation of the serfs. Hundreds of thousands joined his cause throughout the Volga provinces. He was acclaimed by peasants, by Cossacks, even by the nomadic Bashkirs and Kazakhs. Lacking coordination his supporters deteriorated into rampaging bands.
At first the Empress made light of ‘L’affaire du Marquis de Pugachev’, setting a modest price of 500 roubles on his head. But the price soon rose to 28,000. At one point, all the Volga forts were in his hands. Pugachev reduced Kazan to ashes, slaughtering all resisters. He maintained a satirical court, mimicking the entourage of Catherine’s murdered husband. The end came after two years of mayhem, when Pugachev’s main force was cornered at Tsaritsyn. Pugachev was brought to Moscow, and quartered.2
At any time until the mid-twentieth century the numerical preponderance of the peasantry was not reflected in historiography. Peasants only found their way into textbooks when their periodic revolts disturbed the political scene. Events such as England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 or Germany’s Peasants’ War in 1524–5, were favoured by Marxist history-writing because they were taken to demonstrate the revolutionary potential of the masses.3 In fact, no peasant rising ever succeeded. Peasants have been shown the most conservative of social forces, deeply attached to religion, to the land, to the family, and to an immemorial way of life. Their periodic fureurs were outbursts of desperation. Their revolving cycle of fortune and misfortune was far more important to them than any thought of social revolution.4
Peasant studies is one of several flourishing new academic fields. It offers great opportunity to examine the interrelations of social, economic, anthropological, and cultural themes. It was specially suited to comparative analysis—both between European regions and between continents. A Journal of Peasant Studies (1973– ) grew out of a seminar centred at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Its editorial statement stressed the sheer size of the world’s peasantry and their problems:
Of the underprivileged majority of mankind, [the peasants] are the most underprivileged … No social class has a longer history of struggle against such conditions … Hitherto, scholarly periodicals have treated peasants in a peripheral way. We offer this journal as one where the peasantry will be central…6
France, like Russia, has drawn historians to the study of its very substantial peasantry. A multivolume Economic and Social History of France was to inspire the second generation of the Annales team. The key volume was written by Le Roi Ladurie, whose analysis combines the thematic factors of territory, demography, and economy with chronological peri-odization over four centuries. The ‘Rural Renaissance’ of the late fifteenth century followed the earlier ‘Destruction of the Full World’ and preceded the ‘Trauma of Civil Wars’ and the ‘Drift, Reconstruction and Crisis’ of a seventeenth-century Ecosystem which would survive the Revolution.6
Numerous studies have been made of revolts in the French countryside—the ‘tithe strikes’ of the sixteenth century, the revolt of the Pitauts against the salt-tax in Guyenne (1548), the Croquants and Nouveaux Croquants in the Limousin-Perigord (1594, 1636–7),7 the Gautiers and Nu-pieds in Normandy (1594,1639), the ‘Enigma of the Rural Fronde’ (1648–9), and the repeated insurrections in Provence (1596–1715). Attempts have been made to link the rhythms of peasant unrest in France to those in Russia, and even China.8
The historian of insurrections in Provence demonstrates that peasant revolts were interlaced with other forms of social unrest. He proposes a typology of five categories of revolt:
1. factional struggles within the nobility or bourgeoisie,
2. struggles between the menu peuple and the well-to-do,
3. popular action by the peasants against one of the political factions,
4. struggles between different peasant action groups,
5. united struggle of the whole community against outside agencies.
Anthropological studies are specially fruitful. They reveal the universal, immemorial qualities of peasant life. Sicilian reapers sing as peasants sang for centuries from Galway to Galicia:
Fly, fly sharp sickle
The countryside is all full,
All full with goods
For the joy of the landlords [bis]
How sweet is the good life!
Tutrutrü, Tutrutrü,
The pig was four scudi [bis]
Rich and poor, we are all cuckolds.
European literature entered the phase when the vernacular languages took an irreversible lead over Latin. Drama, in the hands of the French court playwrights—Pierre Corneille (1606–84), Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière, 1622–73) and Jean Racine (1639–99)—adopted forms of language and structure that served as the international model for the next century. The tradition of social and moralizing comedy was extended in England by the Restoration comedians and by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816); in France by Pierre Augustin Beaumarchais (1732–99); in Italy by Carlo Goldoni (1707–93).
Poetry was particularly susceptible to the drive for rigorous style and form. In English it is dominated by the triad of John Milton (1608–74), John Dryden (1631–1700), and Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Pope’s intellectual discourses, written in the heroic couplets of the Essay on Criticism(1711) and the Essay on Man (1733), are infinitely expressive of his generation’s temper and interests:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo of the sense.
All nature is but art, unknown to Thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.2
Later, lyrical poetry reasserted itself to redress the balance—in the Scots poems of Robert Burns (1759–96), the German of Christian von Kleist (1715–59), F. G. Klopstock (1724–1803), and the young Goethe, and the French of Jean Roucher (1745–94) and André Chénier (1762–94). Prose-writing, though heavily dependent on the non-fictional genres, witnessed the growth of true fiction. Here, the pioneers appeared in England. Apart from Robinson Crusoe, the leading titles included Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Henry Fielding’sTom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767). In France, both Voltaire and Rousseau, among their other talents, were accomplished novelists (see below).
Although French, English, and German authors predominated, the reading public was by no means confined to their countries of origin. Almost all educated people in Europe read French at this time; and local translations of important titles were widespread. In Poland, for example, which many might mistake for a cultural backwater, the catalogue of translations into Polish included Robinson Krusoe (1769), Manon Lesko (1769), Kandyd (1780), Gulliwer (1784), Awantury Amelii (1788), Historia Tom-Dźona (1793). Some Polish authors, such as Jan Potocki (1761–1825), the orientalist, wrote in French for both a local and an international readership.
European musicians, from J. S. Bach (1685–1750) to W. A. Mozart (1756–91) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), consolidated the foundations of the classical repertoire. They worked in each of its main divisions: instrumental, chamber, orchestral, and choral; and they developed a style, which, though often confused with the preceding Baroque, was marked by a very particular rhythmic energy that has given it lasting appeal, [SONATA] They also preserved a balance between the sacred and the profane. This may be illustrated from Bach’s cantatas, Mozart’s Requiem(1791) and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis (1823), and from Bach’s concertos, Mozart’s forty-one and Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Austro-German composers enjoyed a growing preponderance. In addition to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, their first rank included Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), G. P. Telemann (1681–1767), G. F. Handel (1685–1759), and Josef Haydn (1732–1809). Yet music remained essentially international in character. In their day, the Italians J.-B. Lully (1632–87), Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1751), and Antonio Vivaldi (1675–1741) were just as influential as the Germans. So, too, were the Dane Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707), the Frenchmen François Couperin (1668–1733) and J.-P. Rameau (1683–1764), or the organist of Westminster Abbey, Henry Purcell (c.1659–95), in London. The violin, the prime instrument of European music, was perfected by Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) of Cremona. The pianoforte was invented in 1709 by B. Cristofori of Padua. Opera developed from the early stage of dialogue-with-music to the full-scale musical dramas of W. C. Gluck (1714–87).[CANTATA] [MOUSIKE] [OPERA] [STRAD]
Formal religion stayed set in the earlier mould. The religious map of Europe did not change significantly. Established Churches continued to operate according to rigorous state laws of toleration and non-toleration. Members of the official religion gained preferment, having sworn oaths and passed strict tests of conformity, non-members and non-jurors, when not actively persecuted, lingered in legal limbo. In Catholic countries, Protestants were generally deprived of civil rights. In Protestant countries, Catholics suffered the same fate. In Great Britain, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland formally barred both Roman Catholics and their respective Protestant dissenters. In Sweden, Denmark and Holland similar proscriptions applied. In Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed sole recognition; there were no Jews legally resident. In Poland-Lithuania, where the greatest degree of religious heterodoxy persisted, restrictions none the less increased. The Socinians were expelled in 1658 for alleged collaboration with the Swedes. In 1718 all non-Catholics were barred from the Diet. In 1764 the Jews lost their Parliament, but not their kahals or local communes. Russian propaganda began to bemoan the plight of Poland’s Orthodox, whose position was considerably easier than that of Catholics in Russia. Prussian propaganda inflated the alleged persecution of Lutherans.
SONATA
IN origin, sonata referred to music that was ‘sounded’, not ‘sung’. But in the eighteenth century it was applied to a particular form of composition that came to dominate almost all instrumental music. Sonata form occupies a central place in the work of the classical composers from Haydn to Mahler. It is to be contrasted with the polyphonic style of the preceding era; and it embodied the conventions against which later ‘modern’ styles were to react. It has two aspects—the division of compositions into a formal sequence of movements and the elaboration of homophonic harmony,[TONE]
Sonata form had no single starting-point. An early manifestation was Gabrieli’s Sonata pian e forte (1597) for violin, cornett, and six trombones. But its codification into four set movements did not occur until the work of Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) of Bologna. It was developed in the keyboard compositions of C. P. E. Bach (1714–88), and was brought to perfection by Haydn and Mozart. Its theoretical foundations were foreshadowed in J.-P. Rameau’s Traité d’harmonie (1722), but were not fully expounded until Carl Czerny’s School of Practical Composition (1848), twenty years after the death of its greatest exponent—Beethoven.
Conventional sonata form divides the musical work into four contrasting movements. The opening Allegro, in fast tempo, has parallels with the operatic overture. The slow second movement grew out of the Baroque aria da capo. The third movement, usually minuet and trio, was based on the dance suite. The finale returns to a key and tempo reminiscent of the opening. Each of the four movements follows a standard pattern consisting of the exposition of melodic subjects, their harmonic development, and, at the end, their recapitulation, sometimes with a related coda or ‘afterthought’.
Homophony is the opposite of polyphony. It is characterized by music based, like hymn tunes, on a progression of chords, whose constituent notes do not possess either melodic or rhythmic independence. Classical harmony, therefore, is the opposite of polyphonic counterpoint. The scene of J. S. Bach composing his ‘Art of Fugue’ (1750) in an empty church in Leipzig symbolizes the passing of the polyphonic era. The scene of Beethoven, weary but sublimated, struggling to complete his five last quartets, may be taken as the summit of homophony.
Beethoven considered his Quartet in C sharp minor, Opus 131 (1826), to be his finest work. In it, he expounds each of the elements from which sonata form had grown—an opening fugue; a single-theme scherzo; a central aria with variations; and a ‘sonata within a sonata’ on the inverted fugue. It has been called ‘a cycle of human experience’, and ‘a microcosm of European music’.1
In that span from 1750 to 1827, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven composed between them over 150 symphonies, over 100 piano sonatas, over 50 string quartets, and numerous concertos—all in sonata form. These works form the core of the classical repertoire.
STRAD
LE MESSIE, ‘The Messiah’, bears the most prestigious of all labels: Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno 1716. It was one of ten violins still in the workshop of Antonio Stradivari (c.1644–1737) almost forty years after his death, and was sold by his sons to Count Cozio di Salabue in 1775. Apart from a dozen years in the possession of the French music teacher Delphin Alard (1815–88), ‘II Salabue’ belonged exclusively to dealers—Tarisio, Vuillaume, and W. E. Hills. Tarisio was always promising to show it to his friends, but never actually did so. ‘It’s like the Messiah,’ one of them said; ‘always promised, never produced.’
The instrument, rarely played, sits in virtually mint condition in its humidified case in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. It is nothing remarkable to look at. Unlike the ‘Long Strads’ of earlier date, it has the standard body length of 356 mm. It has a straight-grained belly, angular corners, plain purfling, slanting f-holes, and a two-panelled back in flamed walnut. Its pedigree is only revealed by the orange-brown glow of Stradivari’s unique varnish. Joachim, who played it once, said that it ‘combined sweetness and grandeur’.2 The key to a string instrument’s tonal quality was often thought to lie in its varnish. Too hard a varnish produces an ugly metallic sound; too soft a varnish dampens the resonance. Stradivari, a master in all departments of his trade, found a varnish whose great elasticity was also durable. His reputation is unequalled.
The violin emerged in late Renaissance Italy. It was descended from the family of six-stringed viols, and more particularly from the rebec and the lira da braccio. It was extremely versatile. Its fine melodic quality suited it for solo purposes, whilst it was the natural leader of the string group of violin, viola, cello, and double bass. As the common ‘fiddle’, it was easily adopted for dance music. Small, portable, and relatively inexpensive, it soon became the universal workhorse both of Europe’s popular and of its ‘classical’ music. With the exception of Jacob Stainer (1617–78) in Tyrol, all the master violin-makers, from Maggini of Brescia to Amati and Stradivari of Cremona and Guarneri of Venice, were Italian.
The art of violin-playing was greatly advanced by the development of systematic teaching methods, including those of Leopold Mozart and of G. B. Viotti. The Paris Conservatoire, from 1795, was the predecessor of similar institutions in Prague (1811), Brussels (1813), Vienna (1817), Warsaw (1822), London (1822), St Petersburg (1862), and Berlin (1869).
A striking feature of violin-playing from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries was the marked predominance of East Europeans. The phenomenon may possibly reflect the traditions of fiddle-playing among Jews and gypsies, and more probably the special status of music-making in politically repressed cultures. At all events, Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) was for a long time the first and last of the ‘greats’ who was not either East European or Jewish or both. Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) of Vienna and Henryk Wieniawski (1835–80), a Pole from Lublin who helped launch the St Petersburg school, were founders of the magnificent line which ran through Kreisler, Ysaye, and Szigeti to Heifitz, Milstein, Oistrakh, Szeryng, and Isaac Stern. All played their ‘Strads’. The ‘Messiah’ is one of the very few Stradivaris which, sadly, was destined to be seen but not heard. Modern craftsmen pay special attention to the choice of timber, variations in thickness and curvature, and effect of ageing.
The Roman Catholic Church settled into a routine that no longer sought to recover the Protestant lands. Much of its energies were directed abroad, especially to the Jesuit missions in South America, South India, Japan to 1715, China, and North America. The chain of twenty-one beautiful Franciscan missions in California, which were started by Fr. Junípero Serra (1713–84) and which ran from San Diego to San Francisco, have remained a spiritual solace in the surrounding wilderness to this day. In Europe the Vatican could not cope with the growing centrifugal tendencies of the Church provinces. One Pope, Innocent XI (1676–89), was driven in 1688 to excommunicate Louis XIV in secret for occupying Avignon in the regalia dispute. Another, Clement IX (1700–21), was pushed against his better judgement to issue the Bull Unigenitus Dei filius (1713) condemning Jansenism. The Bull, which was specifically directed against the Refléxions morales of Pasquier Quesnel, an Oratorian sympathetic to the Jan-senists, caused a storm of protest dividing French opinion for decades. In the Netherlands in 1724 it led to schism within the Catholic ranks and the creation by the Archbishop of Utrecht of the Old Catholic Church of Holland. In Germany a movement started in 1763 by a tract of J. N. von Hontheim (Febronius) aimed to reconcile Catholics and Protestants by radically curtailing the centralizing powers of Rome. In Poland the Vatican lost effective control through political domination of the Church hierarchy by Russia.
In all these disputes the Jesuits, who showed themselves more papist than the Popes, became a growing embarrassment. Benedict XTV (1740–58), whose moderation won him the unusual accolade of praise from Voltaire, initiated an inquiry into their affairs. They were accused of running large-scale money-making operations, also of adopting native cults to win converts at any price. In 1759 they were banished from Portugal, in 1764 from France, and in 1767 from Spain and Naples. Clement XIII (1758–69) stood by the Society with the words Sint ut sunt, aut non sint (may they be as they are, or cease to be). But Clement XIV (1769–74), who was elected under the shadow of a formal demand by the Catholic powers for abolition, finally acquiesced. The brief Dominus ac Redemptor noster of 16 August 1773 abolished the Society of Jesus, on the grounds that it was no longer pursuing its founder’s objectives. It took effect in all European countries except for the Russian Empire. It threw Catholic educational and missionary activities into chaos, opening major opportunities especially for secular schools and universities.
The horror of the age occurred in 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and all of France’s Huguenots were driven into exile (see below). But in general the pace of persecution was slackening. In many countries the laws of non-toleration were observed in the breach. Wherever nonconformists had survived, they now came into the open. In England a new label was coined— Latitudinarianism—to describe the strong body of opinion which favoured toleration for all Protestants. The Congregationalists or ‘Independents’ surfaced in 1662, initially on condition that their chapels were located at least five miles from any parish church. Following the remarkable career of George Fox (1624–91), the Society of Friends or ‘Quakers’ suffered numerous martyrdoms until gaining the right to worship, like other dissenters, from the Toleration Act of 1689. The General Body of Dissenters—Independents, Presbyterians, and Baptists—was organized in London in 1727. The Moravian Church re-emerged in Holland, in England, and in the experimental community of Herrnhut (1722) in Saxony. Eighteenth-century manners, as opposed to many eighteenth-century laws, favoured toleration. The climate was right for deists, for dissenters, even for religious jokers. ‘They say’, wrote Voltaire, ‘that God is always on the side of the big battalions.’ [MASON]
Various religious counter-currents appeared, in reaction to the growing inertia of the established Churches. In the Catholic world the Quietism of Miguel de Molinos (c.1640–97) caused real disquiet. Its founder, who taught that sin can only be avoided in a state of complete spiritual passivity, died in prison in Rome; and his book, the Spiritual Guide (1675), was condemned by the Jesuits as heretical. In the Lutheran world, the Pietism of P. J. Spener (1635–1705) caused similar ructions. Its founder, who proclaimed the universal priesthood of the faithful, instituted the practice of devotional circles for Bible-reading; and his book, Pia Desideria (1675), became the keystone of a long-lasting movement. The University of Halle was its centre.
In the Anglican world, the Methodism of John Wesley (1703–91) threatened to tear the Church of England apart. Wesley had created a spiritual Method for his ‘Holy Club’ of students at Oxford, and had visited Herrnhut. His lifetime of evangelism, touring the remotest parts of the British Isles, fired the neglected masses with enthusiasm. His rejection of episcopacy, however, was bound to cause a schism, and the first Methodist Conference assembled in London in 1785. His brother Charles Wesley (1707–88) was an Anglican hymn-writer of genius, whose magnificent cadences well expressed the changing tone of the times.
Methodism took particularly powerful root in Wales, where it is widely believed to have inspired not just a religious but a national revival.3 The first Welsh Methodist Association, which met in January 1743, preceded the first equivalent meeting in England. Its Calvinistic theology was to lead in a direction more akin to Presbyterianism. At the same time, the Circulating Schools organized by the Revd Griffith Jones, Rector of Llanddowror; the magnificent Welsh hymns of William Williams (1717–91), ‘Williams Pant y Celyn’; and an elevated preaching tradition started by Daniel Rowland (1713–90) of Llangeitho, the ‘Jerusalem of Wales’, forged the instruments which would ensure the survival of Welsh language and culture into modern times. No one who has heard a Welsh choir soaring in full harmony to the strains of Llanfair, Cwm Rhondda, or Blaenwerncan fail to appreciate what national pride and spiritual uplift mean. Needless to say, the hwyl or fervour of the Welsh Methodists was diametrically opposed to the temper of the Enlightenment, which by then was the dominant trend in the leading intellectual circles of Europe.
In the Jewish world, the Hasidism of Baal Shem Tov (1700–60), the Besht of Miedzybóż in Podolia, undermined the Polish rabbis much as Wesley was undermining the Anglican bishops. The Hasidim or ‘Pious Ones’ rejected the desiccated formalism of the synagogues, and set themselves apart in clannish communities ruled by hereditary zaddiks or ‘holy men’. They were very distant in space and culture from Christian Methodism, but were close in temper. They rigorously adhered to orthodox Judaic laws of dress and diet, but, once again, the movement was marked by the fervour of the masses, by joyful music, by the revival of spirituality.
Equally prominent was a decided shift in Europe’s social manners. People reacted against the strictures of the preceding age not so much by changing the laws as by ignoring the norms of taste and conduct which the religious authorities had once been able to impose. In sharp contrast to the Calvinist and Jesuit puritanism which still predominated c.1660, the following century saw both a sharp rise in artistic sensitivity and a sharp decline in moral restraints. The ‘Age of Elegance’ went hand in hand with an age of easy scruples. On the one hand the upper classes and their imitators took to the arts of graceful living as never before: luxury and refinement were seen everywhere in their dress, their palaces, their furniture, their music, their collections. At the same time, in all classes, there was a marked relaxation of social, and especially sexual, mores. With time, sexual licence became not just tolerated but ostentatious. After the long interval of the Reformations, everyone was free, if they wanted, to behave once again with abandon. For those whose health and pockets could afford it, excess in dressing, carousing, gourmandizing, and philandering was routine. People took pride in the perruque and the puffed petticoat, in the landscaped park, in painted porcelain and the powdered pudendum. This was the social climate which no doubt helped promote the religious revivals. But it also enlarged the margin of intellectual tolerance which the philosophesOf the Enlightenment were able to exploit. [EROS]
EROS
IT has been stated that ‘he left no stern unturned’. Friedrich Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, is said to be the father of some 300 children, including Maurice de Saxe, Marshal of France (1696–1750). His wonderful amours attested both to his catholic taste and his phenomenal stamina.1 Apart from his wife, Eberdine of Bayreuth, he cultivated the favours of a covey of concubines—official, confidential, and top-secret. Maurice de Saxe was the son of the Swedish Countess Aurora of Konigsmarck; his half-brother, Count Rotowski, was the child of Fatima, a Turkish girl captured at Buda; his half-sister, Countess Orzelska, of Henriette Duval, daughter of a Warsaw wine-merchant. On the official list, the Countess d’Esterle was followed by Mme Teschen, Mme Hoym, Mme Cosel, Maria, Countess Denhoff, but not, exceptionally, by the ex-mistress of the British ambassador in Dresden. Friedrich Augustus would have been a great king if only his political ventures had been half as well-aimed as his spermatozoa.2 (Spoil-sports estimate his progeny at eight.)
The Enlightenment, according to Kant, was the period in the development of European civilization when ‘Mankind grew out of its self-inflicted immaturity’. More simply, one might say that Europeans reached ‘the age of discretion’. The metaphor is a powerful one, with medieval Christendom seen as the parent and Europe’s secular culture as a growing child conceived in the Renaissance. Childhood had been encumbered by the baggage of parental and religious tradition and by family quarrels. The key attainment came with ‘the autonomy of reason’, the ability to think and act for oneself. But the child continued to possess a number of strong family traits.
Perhaps the Enlightenment is best understood, however, by reference to the darkness which this ‘light of reason’ was trying to illuminate. The darkness was provided, not by religion as such, which was taken by the philosophes to be filling a basic human need, but by all the unthinking, irrational, dogmatic attitudes with which European Christianity had become encrusted. These attitudes, including bigotry, intolerance, superstition, monkishness, and fanaticism, were summed up in the most pejorative word of the age, ‘enthusiasm’. The Lumières, as the French called the movement, were to be beamed on to a wide range of subjects: philosophy, science and natural religion, economics, politics, history, and education.
The particular intellectual habitat which fostered the growth of rationalism was not to be found everywhere. It required on the one hand the presence of both Catholics and Protestants, whose rival dogmas set up a suitable clash of ideas, and on the other hand a measure of toleration within which a rational dialogue could be started. In the seventeenth century it was only found in three or four locations. Such conditions existed in Poland-Lithuania—where Jesuits mingled with Orthodox, Jews, and a number of radical sects. They existed to some extent in Switzerland, where an interchange of ideas was always possible between the Catholic and Protestant cantons. They existed in Scotland, and in England, where the broad Anglican tradition protected contrary points of view. But they existed above all in the Netherlands, where the native resources were supplemented by a long line of intellectual refugees, from J. J. Scaliger and René Descartes to Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Le Clerc, and Bayle. Leyden, the ‘Athens of Batavia’, Amsterdam, the ‘Cosmopolis’ of Europe, and The Hague were the main laboratories of the Enlightenment. Although Frenchmen were prominent from the start, and French was adopted as the lingua franca, France itself did not become the principal scene of activity until the mid-eighteenth century, when local conditions relaxed. Voltaire, one of the central figures, was forced to settle in Switzerland, or on the Swiss border.
The key concept—the lumen naturale or ‘natural light of reason’—has been traced to one of Melanchthon’s works, De lege naturae (1559), and via Melanchthon to Cicero and the Stoic philosophers. For this reason the translation of the text of the Stoics by Joost Lips (Lipsius, 1547–1606) at Leyden is seen as a landmark. Together with the fruits of the Scientific Revolution and the rational method of Descartes, it formed the core of an ideology which held centre-stage from the 1670s to the 1770s. It led to the conviction that reason could uncover the rules that underlay the apparent chaos of both the human and material world, and hence of natural religion, of natural morality, of natural law. In the arts, too, it led to the notion that strict rules and symmetrical patterns could alone give expression to the natural order with which all Beauty should be associated. Beauty was order; and order was beautiful. Here was the true spirit of Classicism.
The philosophy of the Enlightenment was primarily concerned with epistemology, that is, the theory of knowledge—or how we know what we know. Here, the basis for debate was supplied by three Britons: the Englishman John Locke (1632–1704), the Irishman Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), and the Scotsman David Hume (1711–76), sometime secretary of the British Embassy in Paris. As empiricists, they all accepted that the scientific method of observation and deduction should be applied to human affairs, and hence the precept of their contemporary, Alexander Pope:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.4
Locke’s famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) advanced the proposition that the human mind is blank at birth—a tabula rasa. All we know, therefore, is the fruit of experience, either through the senses, which process data from the external world, or through the faculty of reflection, which processes data from the mind’s internal workings. Locke’s proposition was developed in France by the Abbé Condillac (1715–80), whose Traité des Sensations (1754) used the analogy of an inanimate statue brought to life by the acquisition of its senses, and by Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–51), whose thoroughgoing materialism in L’Homme machine (1748) denied the existence of the spiritual altogether. Bishop Berkeley went to the other extreme, arguing that only minds and mental events can exist. Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) pursues a rational inquiry into understanding, passions, and morals, ends up by denying the possibility of rational belief. Eighteenth-century rationalism concluded after all that irrationality may not be entirely unreasonable.
In the realm of moral philosophy, several strands of religious and intellectual thought led towards the ultimate destination of utilitarianism. Rationalists tended to judge moral principles by their utility in improving man’s condition. The tendency is already present in Locke. Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), in some ways the most radical of the philosophes, advocated a hedonistic morality where virtue is that which causes the greatest pleasure. Later, happiness was viewed more as a communal than as an individual virtue. Social harmony became the goal, not just private well-being. In 1776 a young Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) formulated the guiding principle: ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’
The Enlightenment was not sympathetic to European Jewry. The Jews were regarded as a religious community, and their religion as unreasonable and obscurantist. Dryden, for one, did not spare the sarcasm:
‘The Jews, a headstrong, moody, murmuring race,
God’s pampered people, whom, debauched with ease,
No King could govern, nor no god could please.’
In time, certain Jewish leaders grew similarly critical of themselves. They longed to escape from the constrictions of traditional Judaism. The end result was the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, which sought to reform the Jewish community from within (see p. 843).
Scientific knowledge, in the meantime, made great strides. The central giant of the period was Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), President of the Royal Society, who published his Principia in 1687. His Laws of Motion and Gravity provided the basis of physics, and hence of the working of the universe, for over 200 years. He invented differential calculus, which he called ‘fluxions’. Appropriately enough for a father of the Enlightenment, he had conducted his first experiments in 1666 into the nature of Light, placing a glass prism behind a hole in the blind of his window in Trinity College, Cambridge:
‘And I saw… that the light, tending to [one] end of the Image, did suver a Refraction considerably greater than the light tending to the other. And so the true cause of the length of that Image was detected to be no other, than that Light consists of Rays differently refrangible which… were, according to their degrees of refrangibility, transmitted towards divers parts of the wall.’
It was a nice irony that the properties of light eventually gave Einstein the clues which eventually overthrew .the Newtonian system, [e = mc2] Newton, as a Unitarian, was debarred from many formal honours, but he did not miss out on fame and fortune. He even dabbled in alchemy. He described himself charmingly as ‘a boy playing on the sea-shore … while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’.7 Pope wrote an epitaph intended for Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
The exploitation of Newton’s principles was assisted both by improvements in technology and by parallel advances in other sciences. The Royal Observatory (1675) at Greenwich developed superior telescopes; the British Admiralty, by offering a prize of £20,000, was given the chronometer. In mathematics the Leipziger Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) may well have discovered calculus independently before Newton did. In biology and, more specifically, in botany, the Swede Carl von Linne (Linnaeus, 1707–78), brought order from chaos in his system for classifying plants expounded in the Systema naturae (1735) and Fundamenta botanica (1736). In chemistry, fundamental steps were taken by Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who explored the compound nature of air, by Henry Cavendish (1731–1810), who demonstrated the compound nature of water, and above all by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94), who finally discovered the workings of chemical reactions, [ELDLUFT] [EULER]
The interest in the theory of knowledge, when added to the growing corpus of information, had a natural corollary in a mania for encyclopedias. Compendia of universal knowledge had been common enough in the Middle Ages; but they had fallen out of fashion. Early attempts to revive the genre included those of J. H. Alsted, published in Holland in 1630, and of Louis Moreri, published at Lyons in 1674. The father of the modern medium, however, is generally taken to be Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). The first folio of his Dictionnaire historique et critique appeared in Rotterdam in 1697. In England the genre was represented by the Lexicon technicum (1704) of John Harris FRS, and by the Cyclopaedia (1728) of Ephraim Chambers; in Germany by J. Hübner’s Reales Staats Zeitungs- und Conversations- Lexicon (Leipzig, 1704) and by J. T. Jablonski’s Allgemeines Lexicon(Leipzig, 1721); in Italy by G. Pivati’s Dizionario universale (Venice, 1744); and in Poland by B. Chmielowski’s NoweAteny (1745–6). A vast illustrated Universal Lexicon in 64 volumes and 4 supplements was published in Leipzig by J. H. Zedler between 1732 and 1754. In France, the great project of the Encyclopédie or Dictionnaire raisonné des arts, des sciences, et des métiers, undertaken by Denis Diderot (1713–84) and Jean d’Alembert (1717–83), was originally inspired by a French translation of Chambers. It appeared in Paris in 17 volumes of 16,288 pages between 1751 and 1765, with further supplements, illustrations, and indexes appearing up to 1782. It was programmatic, opinionated, anticlerical, and highly critical of the regime; and its editors were regularly harassed by officialdom. Yet it was a monument to the age. It aimed at nothing less than a summary of the whole of human knowledge. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, less distinguished but longer-lived, appeared in Edinburgh in 1768. In the meantime, Hübner’s Lexicon had run into many editions and translations. Its copyright would eventually be bought in 1808 by the publisher F. A. Brockhaus (1772–1823), who used it as the basis for the most celebrated of all German encyclopedias.
EULER
IN 1765 the Russian ambassador at Berlin was authorized to invite a one- eyed man to St Petersburg and not to spare the cost. Leonhard Euler (1707–83) accepted on condition that he receive the directorship of the Russian Imperial Academy, a vast salary of 3,000 roubles, a pension for his wife, and high appointments for his four sons. His conditions were met without demur. Five years earlier, when the Russian army had vandalized his farm at Charlottenburg, the Tsar had compensated him richly. For Euler was the supreme mathematical wizard of the age. By common accord, his only peer in the history of mathematics was C. F. Gauss (1777–1855), who was born in Brunswick ten years after Euler left Berlin.
It was said that ‘Euler calculated as other men breathe, or eagles soar’. Son of a Swiss pastor and educated at Basle, he possessed a phenomenal memory. He could recite the whole of Virgil’s Aeneid including the numbers of the lines and pages. He first went to Russia as a young man in the company of the Bernouilli brothers, before being ‘head-hunted’ by the agents of Frederick the Great. His output was as prolific as it was original. He wrote 886 scientific works and c.4,000 letters, at an average rate of two printed pages per day over five decades. The Russian journalCommentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae was still publishing the backlog of his articles forty-five years after his death. He discovered any number of theorems, invented the calculation of sines, completed the search for the numerical evaluation of pi, and posited the existence of transcendental numbers. ‘Euler’s Theorem’ demonstrated the connection between exponential and trigonometric functions:
eix = cosx +i sinx
Euler’s prestige brought the Russian Academy into the mainstream of European science. The brilliant school of mathematics at St Petersburg long outlasted him. But he was reluctant to talk about it. When pressed on the matter at Potsdam by Frederick the Great’s mother, he replied, ‘Madam, in that country they hang those who talk.’ Such however was Euler’s authority that the symbols employed in his textbook Introductio in analysis infinitorum (1748) were to provide the basis for standard mathematical notation. He was instrumental in promoting for mathematicians a universal medium of communication of a type which, for the purpose of everyday life, Europeans never developed. (See Appendix III, p. 1243.)
Religious thought was profoundly influenced by rationalism—especially in the sphere of biblical scholarship. The initial problem was how to distinguish between the rival claims of Catholics and Protestants, both of whom gave scriptural backing to their dogmas. An early start had been made inThe Religion of Protestants (1637) by William Chillingworth, an Oxford Fellow who had studied with the Jesuits at Douai and who, typically, was falsely accused of being a Socinian. The biggest advance was made by the French Oratorian Richard Simon (1638–1712), who applied the classical rules of French literary criticism to his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). Simon’s book was attacked by Bossuet and placed on the Index, and all copies of the first edition destroyed. But the method survived.
In due course, reasoning about religion gave rise to an intellectual fashion for Deism. This was religious belief reduced to its minimal core: belief in a ‘Supreme Being’, in God the Creator, or in Providence. Its early manifestations surfaced in England in various shaky credos, notably the De Veritate (Paris, 1624) of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) and J. J. Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). It reached its peak in the 1730s, when Voltaire was in England, but was much diminished after the publication of The Analogy of Religion (1736) by Bishop Joseph Butler—of whose lasting influence Queen Caroline was once told: ‘No Madam, he is not dead, but he is buried.’ Deistic positions were reached in France in attempts to find the middle ground between traditional Christianity and the more extreme free-thinkers, such as Baron d’Holbach (1723–89) and Claude Helvetius (1715–71), who had begun to express openly Atheist opinions. Diderot, for example, writing the entries for his Encyclopédie on ‘Christianity’, ‘Faith’, and ‘Providence’, took a Deist stance. Voltaire, whose attacks on established religion were unrelenting, none the less sprang to defend the existence of God against the attacks of d’Holbach’s Système de la nature (1770). Reflecting on the sky at night, he wrote: ‘One would have to be blind not to be dazzled by this sight; one would have to be stupid not to recognise its author; one would have to be mad not to worship him.’ ‘Si Dieu n’existait pas,’ he quipped, ‘il faudrait l’inventer.’ (If God did not exist, He would have to be invented.)
The struggle of the philosophes against the authorities of Church and State inevitably created the impression that Catholicism and absolute monarchy were united in their blind opposition to all reason and change. Diderot has been credited with the uncharitable comment about Salvation arriving when ‘the last King was strangled with the entrails of the last priest’. He was only one step away from the simplified revolutionary vision of the universal war between progress and reaction. In due course the Catholic publicist Joseph de Maistre (1754–1821) accepted the same extreme position but from the opposite point of view, maintaining in his Considérations sur la France (1796) that rebellion and impiety are synonymous.
Rational economics stood high on the Enlightenment’s list of priorities. The general notion of progress found expression in the particular idea of economic improvement. At the micro-level, gentlemen were absorbed by the rising science of estate management, convinced that their properties could not simply be put in order but could be transformed into thriving businesses. Land reclamation by the Dutch or on the Dutch model changed the face of several low-lying regions, from the fenlands of East Anglia to the delta of the Vistula. The enclosure movement gained speed, especially in England, threatening the peasantry but promising larger agrarian units suitable for commercial cultivation. Systematic stock-breeding, plant selection, soil nutrition, crop rotation, and drainage, as practised by ‘Farmer George’ at Windsor in the 1770s or by Thomas Coke of Holkham in Norfolk, was rewarded by dramatically improved yields. In those countries where serfdom prevailed, some enlightened landowners convinced themselves that their serfs would work more efficiently if freed from their obligations. Instances of voluntary emancipation can be found from France to Poland.
At the macro-level, mercantilism of the autocratic variety long held sway. Its great exponent was Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), minister to Louis XIV. State manufactories were started. Colonies were planted, taxation rationalized, ports, roads, and canals constructed, transport improved. The great Canal du Languedoc (1681) had its counterparts right across Europe, from the canalized Guadalquivir in Spain to the Eskilstuna Canal in Sweden, the Augustów Canal in Lithuania, and the great Neva-Volga complex in Russia.
Yet the conviction grew that economic life could not expand beyond a certain point unless shorn of artificial curbs and restrictions. This trend found early expression in the work of the Irish banker Richard Cantillon (d. 1734), who was quoted by Mirabeau senior in the highly popular workL’Ami des hommes (1756). But it gained currency with the economists or ‘Physiocrats’ associated with the Encyclopédie—Francois Quesnay (1694–1774), Jean de Gournay (1712–59), and J. P. Dupont de Nemours (1739–1817). The celebrated slogan ‘Pauvres paysans, pauvre royaume’ encapsulated the revolutionary notion that national prosperity could only be assured through the personal prosperity and liberty of all. Quesnay’s disciple Jacques Turgot (1727–81) failed in the attempt to apply the movement’s principles to practical government. But the Scots professor Adam Smith (1723–90), residing in Paris in 1765–6, made the close acquaintance of Quesnay’s circle. It was a formative experience for the founder of modern economics, [MARKET]
Rationalist political theory was long associated with support for absolute monarchy, which accorded well with the classical spirit of order and harmony. It was seeking for the most efficient means of cutting through the maze of local and feudal privilege. Hobbes’s conclusions, if not his argumentation, were not all that different from those of French divines such as the great J. B. Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux (1627–1704), chief advocate of the divine right of kings. In the eighteenth century, however, the arguments changed. Locke’s two Treatises on Government (1690) proposed that government should be subject to natural law, and opposed the hereditary principle. He demanded some form of neutral authority for settling disputes between ruler and ruled. Most importantly, whilst underlining the rights of property, he developed the idea of government through a social contract, and hence the principle of consent, the corner-stone of liberalism. Though he had little to say about the judiciary, he advocated the separation of powers, and the need for checks and balances between the executive and the legislative. These two last principles were most clearly formulated in L’Esprit des lois (Geneva, 1748) of Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), who drew his inspiration partly from Greek and Roman republicanism and partly from the English constitutional settlement of 1689:
In each state, there are three sorts of powers: the legislative power, the executive power over things dependent on the rights of the people, and the executive power relating to the civil law… All would be lost if the same man… were to exercise all three of these powers: the power of making laws, the power of putting public resolutions into effect, and the power of judging crimes.9
The theories of Locke and Montesquieu were widely disseminated by the Encyclopédie, especially in entries such as ‘Political Authority’ and ‘Natural Liberty’. They encouraged democratic tendencies and, some would say, revolution.
Rationalist history-writing came to the fore. History moved from the mere relation of events in chronicles or diaries, and from the advocacy of the ruling church or monarch, to become the science of causation and change. Bossuet’s so-called Histoire universelle (1681) or the Earl of Clarendon’sHistory of the Great Rebellion (1704) still belonged to the old tradition, as did numerous Catholic and Protestant accounts of the religious wars. But in the eighteenth century several people turned their hand to history of the new sort. Bayle’s Dictionnaire (1702) consisted of alphabetical entries on all the great names of history and literature, and examined with implacable scepticism the certainties and uncertainties in the received information about each of them. It showed that no historical fact could be accepted without evidence. Vico’s Scienza nuova (1725) introduced the theory of history moving in cycles. Montesquieu’s Considérations (1734) on the ancient world introduced the idea of environmental determinants, whilst Voltaire’s studies of Charles XII or of Louis XIV introduced the factors of chance and of great personalities. Hume’s treatise on The Natural History of Religion(1757) broke the sacred sod of religious history. All rejected the role of providence as an explanation for past events, and in so doing were returning to habits of thought not exercised since Machiavelli and Guicciardini. They were all susceptible to the newfangled notion of progress, whose classic exposition was made at the Sorbonne by the young Turgot, in a long Latin discourse read in two parts on 3 July and 11 December 1750:
MARKET
DR ADAM SMITH (1723–90) was the ultimate absent-minded professor. He once brewed an infusion of bread and butter and pronounced it a very bad cup of tea. He became one of the sights of Edinburgh, where he was given to rambling the streets in a trance, half-dressed and twitching all over, heatedly debating with himself in a peculiar affected voice and careering along with his inimitable ‘worm-like’ gait. He once walked straight into a tanning pit in full discourse. Virtually unmarriageable, he always lived with his mother. It is nice to think that this charmingly chaotic character should have set about putting intellectual order into the workings of everyday life.1
Together with his friend David Hume, Smith was one of the stars of the Scottish Enlightenment in an era when English academic life slumbered. He was in close touch with Johnson, Voltaire, Franklin, Quesnay, Burke. When the elderly professor was received by the King’s ministers, they all rose to their feet. ‘We all stand, Mr Smith,’ said William Pitt, ‘because we are all your scholars.’
Smith’s career started at the age of 28 with the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, where he published his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). It was an enquiry into the origins of approval and disapproval. He entered the realm of economics by asking himself about the implications of human greed, and how self-interest could work for the common good. The 900 pages of The Wealth of Nations (1776) were essentially an extended essay in pursuit of that quest. It shattered the protectionist philosophy of mercantilism, which had reigned supreme in economic thought for 200 years. Smith’s speculations led him to postulate the existence of ‘society’, in whose mechanisms all people participate, and to formulate the laws of ‘the market’. He outlined the workings of production, of competition, of supply and demand, and of prices. He paid special attention to the organization of labour. This is shown in his famous description of a pin factory. Rationalized tasks and specialized skills enabled the workforce to produce 48,000 pins a day, where each of the workers might individually produce only two or three. He also stressed the self-regulating nature of the market, which, if unhindered, would foster social harmony. He identified two basic market laws—the Law of Accumulation and the Law of Population. ‘The demand for men’, he wrote rather shockingly, ‘necessarily regulates the production of men.’ His watchword was: ‘Let the Market Alone.’
The science of economics has been exploring the issues raised by Smith ever since. The trail leads from Ricardo, Malthus, and Marx, via Hobson, Bastiat, and Marshall, to Veblen, Schumpeter, and Keynes. In Smith’s hands it was a branch of speculative philosophy; and its greatest practitioners have recognized the fragility of their conclusions. In the popular mind, however, economics has greater pretensions. It has moved into the void left by the decline of religion and the moral consensus; and it is increasingly seen as the main preoccupation of public policy, a panacea for social ills, the source even of private contentment. From being a technical subject, explaining human society in the way that medicine explains the human body, it threatens to become an end in itself, laying down goals, motives, incentives. Smith, the moralist, would have been appalled.
Nature has given all men the right of being happy… All the generations are linked to one another by a series of causes and effects which join the present condition of the world with all those that have preceded it… and the whole human species, looked at from its origins, appears to the philosopher as an immense whole, which, like an individual, has its infancy and its progress … The totality of humanity, fluctuating between calm and agitation, between good times and bad, moves steadily though slowly towards a greater perfection.10
Historians increasingly applied the social, economic, and cultural concerns of their own day to the analysis of the past. The doings of kings and courts no longer sufficed. Two great monuments of the age were William Robertson’s History of America (1777) and Edward Gibbon’s incomparableDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788). Only one volume of the History of the Polish Nation (1780– ) by Bishop Adam Naruszewicz saw the light of day, since the Empress Catherine’s ambassador objected to a description of early Slav history in which the Poles were more prominent than the Russians.
On reflection, one has to doubt whether the sages of the Enlightenment were any more objective than the court and clerical historians whom they so mercilessly ridiculed. Gibbon’s attacks on, say, monasticism, or Voltaire’s ill-informed swipes at Poland, which he used as a whipping-boy to enliven his views on religious bigotry, replaced one form of bias by another. But in the process both the scope and reputation of historiography was greatly increased. In reality, the Enlightenment was full of contradictions. Its leading practitioners held a measure of agreement on aims and methods, but reached no consensus of views and opinions. The two most influential figures, Voltaire and Rousseau, were as different as chalk and cheese.
François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who had assumed the pen-name of Voltaire during a spell of imprisonment in the Bastille, was poet, dramatist, novelist, historian, philosopher, pamphleteer, correspondent of kings, and, above all, a militant wit. Born and educated in Paris, he spent much of his long life in various sorts of exile. His books, printers, and publishers were repeatedly condemned. He hovered on the outer fringes of political and social respectability, and eventually settled, symbolically, on the furthest frontier of France at Ferney, near Geneva. He left Paris in disgrace at 32 and, apart from three uneasy years as historiographer royal at Versailles in 1744–7, he did not return until the age of 84. He spent six seminal years in England, three at the welcoming court of Stanislaw Leszczyński at Lunéville in Lorraine, and three in Prussia with an admiring Frederick the Great. He was chased from Switzerland for comments about Calvin. At Ferney, 1760–78, where he held court to a constant crush of visitors, ‘Europe’s Inn-keeper’ was hailed as ‘Le Roi Voltaire’; and ‘le seigneur du village’ put his theories into practice: draining the marsh, running a model farm, building a church, a theatre, a silk factory, and a watch works. ‘The refuge of forty savages has been turned into an opulent little town of 1,200 useful persons,’ he noted with pride.
Voltaire’s published works, which fill over 100 volumes, are addressed to the goals of tolerance in religion, peace and liberty in politics, enterprise in economics, intellectual leadership in the arts. The Lettres anglaises (1734), which talk admiringly about everything from the Quakers, Parliament, and the commercial spirit to Bacon, Locke, and Shakespeare, gave new food for thought to conventional Catholic circles on the Continent. The Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) gave the French a rich but critical view of their recent past. The philosophical novel Candide ou l’optimisme(1759) was written in response to Rousseau. It tells the story of the eager young Candide and his enlightened tutor, Pangloss, whose motto is ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. They set out into the world from the Castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh only to meet with every known form of disaster: war, massacre, disease, arrest, torture, treachery, earthquake, shipwreck, inquisition, and slavery. In the end they conclude, since the evils of the world are overwhelming, that all one can do is to put one’s own affairs into order. Candide’s closing words are ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ (we have to cultivate our own garden). The Traité sur la tolérance (1763), inspired by the appalling Calas affair in Toulouse, where a Calvinist father was broken on the wheel for allegedly opposing his son’s conversion to Catholicism, was a cry from the heart. TheDictionnaire philosophique portatif(i764), a pocket-sized rival to the great Encyclopédie, is a tour de force of irony and satire. In addition there are a score of tragedies, a vast collection of polemical pamphlets, some 15,000 letters. He died in Paris, having seen his bust crowned on the stage of his latest play. ‘They would come in the same numbers to see my execution,’ he said. And he was still writing verse:
Nous naissons, nous vivons, bergère,
Nous mourons sans savoir comment;
Chacun est parti du néant;
Où va-t-il?… Dieu le sait, ma chère.
(We are born, we live, my shepherdess | How or why we die, it isn’t clear; | Each one took off from nothingness; | Where to?… God knows, my dear.)
‘I die adoring God,’ he proclaimed, ‘loving my friends, not hating my enemies, but detesting superstition.’
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), born in Protestant Geneva, was still more of a wanderer than Voltaire. He possessed almost the same range of talents, as musician, novelist, and philosopher, and acquired a similarly formidable reputation. A runaway boy, who spent almost a decade on the open roads of Savoy and Switzerland, he was taken in, at the price of his conversion, by a Catholic lady living at Annecy. Largely self-educated, he made his way in the world as a tutor, composer, ballet-master, as a valet in Paris, as secretary of the French embassy in Venice. His liaison with a simple and uneducated girl, Thérèse Levasseur, and the fate of their five children, who were given in care to the Enfants Trouvés (Foundlings), was the source of much stress, of intellectual speculation, and possibly of his recurrent mental illness. He gained sudden celebrity in middle age by winning a prize from the Academy of Dijon for his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750), and by producing a popular opera, Le Devin du village (1752). Befriended by Diderot, he became by turns star and victim of the Parisian salons until he took once more to the road. Obsessed with a non-existent conspiracy against him, he was driven from refuge to refuge by fears of Voltaire’s partisans and by his own inner insecurities: to Geneva, to Motiers in Prussian Neuchâtel, to an island in the Lac de Bienne, to England, to Bourgoin and Montquin in Dauphiné. His last years in Paris were spent editing his memoirs and the Rêveries dupromeneur solitaire (1782). He died in the castle of Ermenonville.
Rousseau’s contrary character used the methods of the Enlightenment to denounce the Enlightenment’s achievements. The Discourse which made him famous argued that civilization was corrupting human nature. His second Discours sur l’inégalité (1755) painted an idyllic vision of primitive man and blamed prosperity for all the ills of political and social relations. It united both the radicals and the conservatives against him. The novel Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a love story set amid Rousseau’s native Alps, forged an unprecedented link between passion, moral sentiment, and untamed nature. Êmile ou l’éducation (1762), another prodigious success, outlines the upbringing of a child who is to avoid the artificial decadence of civilization. This child of nature was to learn from God-given experience, not from man-made books; to be happy, he must be skilled and free.
Du contrat social (1762) was truly revolutionary. Its opening sentence railed at the iniquity of the reigning order: ‘L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers’ (man is born free, and everywhere he is shackled). Its dominant ideas—the general will, the sovereign nation, and the Contract itself—pointed to solutions which would only be effectively defined, not by any ideal ruler, but by the interests of the governed. Whilst Voltaire appealed to the enlightened élite, here was Rousseau appealing to the masses.
Rousseau’s Confessions (published 1782–9) analysed the author’s extremely uncharming personality with great charm and candour. He makes an exhibition of his guilt and doubt. ‘He beats his breast vigorously’, wrote one critic, ‘in the knowledge that the reader will forgive him.’ This preoccupation with the contortions of his own psychology was reminiscent of a later age. Rousseau despised his fellow philosophers, especially Voltaire. He was all set to tell the Supreme Being on Judgement Day: ‘Je fus meilleur que eet homme-là!’ (I was better than that man over there!).13
Education was the sphere to which the ideas of the Enlightenment were most readily applicable. The Church held a virtual monopoly in the curricula of schools and universities. The influence of Renaissance humanism was long since diluted. In the Catholic world, Jesuit and Piarist schools for boys, and Ursuline schools for girls, were set in their ways. In France, pedagogy had ossified following the closure of both Huguenot and Jansenist schools. In the Protestant world, too, if Gibbon’s memoirs of Oxford are to be believed, lethargy prevailed. ‘The five years spent at Magdalen College’, he recalled, ‘were the five most idle and unprofitable years of my whole life.’ Scotland’s schools and universities were in much better shape, as were those in Prussia. The foundations of August Hermann Francke (1664–1727) at Halle and the Realschule in Berlin were laying the foundations both of vernacular and of technical schooling. None the less, the Enlightenment was pitted almost everywhere against a strongly entrenched religious tradition in education. D’Alembert’s article in the Encyclopédie under ‘College’ raised an uproar:
All this means, is that a young man… leaves the college after ten years, with an imperfect knowledge of a dead language, with precepts of rhetoric and philosophy which he should endeavour to forget: often with impaired health … and more frequently with such a superficial knowledge of religion that he succumbs to the first blasphemous conversation …14
In the long run, under the influence of the Enlightenment religious teaching was separated from general education; modern subjects were introduced to supplement the classics; and, as in Bentham’s long campaign for the University of London, higher education was divorced from ecclesiastical patronage, [COMENIUS]
Nothing, however, could rival the impact of Êmile. Rousseau was not impressed by the methods of his fellow philosophes. ‘Locke’s great maxim was to reason with children, and that is the current vogue,’ he wrote; ‘but… I see no more stupid children than those who have been reasoned with’ (Êmile, bk. 11). Instead, he advocated ‘natural education’ from birth to maturity, with book learning forbidden before adolescence. He exploded current assumptions about child development. The first educational manual in the Rousseauian spirit, J. B. Basedow’s Elementarwerk, appeared in 1770–2; his first school, the Phil-anthropinium at Dessau, opened its doors two years later.
One of the boldest educational projects of the day, however, took place in Poland, where in 1772–3 very special circumstances gave rise to the National Education Commission, Europe’s earliest ministry of state education. It coincided both with the political crisis of the First Partition, which provided the motivation, and with the dissolution of the Jesuits, who supplied much of the brain-power. Some years earlier the Polish reformers, desperate to escape from the Russian stranglehold on Poland, had approached Rousseau for his views; and his sympathetic Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (1769) contained an all-important chapter on education. Rousseau recommended the creation of a single unified educational system in place of all existing institutions. He was taken at his word; and the last King of Poland, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, put it forward as the condition for submitting to the Partition. Poland’s political prospects were sinking; but its cultural survival could still be won. Over the next twenty years the National Education Commission created some 200 secular schools, many of which were to outlast the destruction of the Republic. New teachers were trained. Textbooks in Polish language and literature, scientific subjects, and modern languages were written by ex-Jesuits. ‘If in 200 years from now’, the King wrote in his diary, ‘there are still people who call themselves Poles, my work will not have been in vain.’ Poland was indeed destroyed (see pp. 661–4,719, 721–2), but its culture was not. The National Educational Commission was closed down; but its ideals were carried over into the educational board of what became the western region of the Russian Empire. Under the enlightened management of Prince Czartoryski it survived until 1825, and educated the brightest generation of Polish patriots and literati that ever learned poetry or pushed pen.15
COMENIUS
WHEN Jan Amos Komensky died in Amsterdam on 15 November 1670, he was generally thought to have been the chief crank of a totally lost cause. He was the last bishop of the sect of Czech Brethren; he had been an exile for nearly fifty years; and his grande œuvre, setting forth a pansophic vision of universal peace and culture, remained unfinished. His prophecies regarding the overthrow of the pope, or the end of the world in 1672, had only excited ridicule.
Born in Moravia in 1592, Komenský had spent a lifetime fighting the tide. Widely travelled, and educated at Heidelberg, he had hoped to remain headmaster of the Brethren’s school at Fulnek. But the Habsburg triumph in Bohemia drove him in 1621 to Poland; and the persecution of pro-Swedish Protestants in Poland in 1657–8 drove him on to the Netherlands. He spent much of his energies publicizing the fate of Bohemia, writing on pedagogics, or acting as an itinerant educational consultant. In this latter capacity, he paid extended visits to England, Sweden, and Transylvania.1 He was even invited to be president of Harvard.
Yet Komenský’s views were rather more coherent than his critics allowed. His passion for reforming education grew straight from the principles of the Czech Brethren, who nourished the Hussite tradition of reading the Bible in the vernacular. The need for language-teaching was obvious to someone from a multilingual province like Moravia, who had lived in a dozen countries. The obsession with a pacifist utopia was the natural product of a life hounded by war and religious conflict.
As a polyglot author, Comenius (as he was best known) established an international reputation. His early Labyrinth ofthe World and Paradise of the Heart, a sort of spiritual pilgrimage, was written in Czech. His Janua Linguarum or ‘Gate of Languages’, which started asa trilingual textbook in Latin, Czech, and German, ran to hundreds of versions, including Persian and Turkish. His Orbis sensualium pictus (1658) or ‘World in Pictures’, which pioneered the subject of visual learning, was equally popular. His collected pedagogical works, Opera didáctica omnia (also 1658) far outweighed his ephemeral political publications. Komenský’s legacy grew in stature with time, and attracted four distinct categories of admirer.
In religious matters, his name was honoured by those in the following century who revived the old sect of the Czech Brethren in the new form of the ‘Moravian Church’ (see p. 594 above).
In the era of the Czech revival, he was raised to the status of national saint. Palacký compiled his biography; Count Lützow popularized The Labyrinth round the world; and T. G. Masaryk saw him as the key figure in the history of Czech democracy and humanism. The first part of Masaryk’s memoirs was entitled ‘The Testament of Komenský’.2
Modern educational theorists have seen Comenius as one of the founding fathers of their discipline. His pupil-friendly textbooks inspired the progressive methods of child-centred learning developed by Froebel, Pestalozzi, or Montessori [BAMBINI]. Advocates of universal education have quoted his texts as models before their time:
Not the children of the rich and powerful only, but boys and girls alike, rich and poor, in all cities and … villages should be sent to school…. If any ask, ‘What will be the result if artisans, rustics, porters, and even women become lettered? I answer: none of these will lack the material for thinking, choosing, following and doing good things Nor is it an obstacle that some seem to be naturally dull and stupid … The slower and weaker the disposition of any man, the more he needs assistance… .3
Every child who reads a comic, consults an illustrated textbook, or watches a lesson on television, film, or video should hail Komenský as his mentor.
From this one can see that the ideas of the Enlightenment were being used for different purposes in different countries. In the Netherlands and in Britain, they formed part of the repertoire of the liberal wing of the Establishment. They found expression in the British Parliament in the speeches of C. J. Fox and Edmund Burke. In the American colonies they were invoked by ‘rebels’ who defied that British Establishment. In France, and to a lesser extent in Spain and Italy, they inspired the intellectual circles who were opposing the Ancien Régime without having the legal means to do so. In many parts of central and eastern Europe, they were selectively adopted by the ‘enlightened despots’ who sought to improve their empires much as private gentlemen sought to improve their serf-run estates. Frederick II of Prussia or the Empress Catherine II in Russia certainly thought of themselves as rational and enlightened, as did Charles III of Spain or Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, or his brother, Joseph II of Austria. But their relations with their philosophe consultants was often that of absolute master and deferential cliënt. In this regard, Voltaire’s sycophancy was no less developed than his wit. He rarely said what he must have thought about Frederick’s warmongering or Catherine’s persecutions. Only Rousseau spoke his mind to Frederick, [GOOSE-STEP]
One can also see that the ideals of the Enlightenment survived the upheavals of the revolutionary crisis. Enlightened reformers of the pre-revolutionary era— such as the Baron von Stein (1757–1831) in Prussia, the Jewish convert Baron J. von Sonnenfels (1732–1817) in Austria, Stanistaw Staszic (1755–1828) in Poland, or the Count von Montgelas (1759–1838) in Bavaria—were still active in 1815. Yet few of the revolutionaries who made their mark after 1789—Mirabeau, Danton, Condorcet, Robespierre, Saint-Just—had gained much prominence earlier. In this, Tom Paine was an exception, as in most things (see Chapter IX).
None the less, by 1778, when both Voltaire and Rousseau died, the Enlightenment was starting to run out of breath. Its influence was to be strong for many decades. Indeed, it had assured itself a place as a permanent pillar of modern European thought. Yet the rationalism which originally inspired it was losing its force of persuasion. Pure reason was felt to be inadequate to the task of understanding the world and of reading the auguries of upheaval.
Romanticism is a label which covers a multitude of sins. For the theoreticians of culture, the problem is so complex that some maintain there was not one Romanticism but several. But it refers to the titanic cultural movement which set in during the late eighteenth century in reaction to the waning Enlightenment. It was not associated in any way with formal religion. Indeed, it contained many features which may be considered at the very least non-Christian, if not actively anti-Christian. Yet its prime concerns were often directed to those spiritual and supernatural spheres of human experience which Religion also addressed and which the Enlightenment had neglected. In this sense, it is sometimes regarded as a reaction against the Enlightenment’s overreaction against the preoccupations of the preceding Reformation and Counter-Reformation period. It may perhaps be better seen as the continuation and extension of certain strands of fashion and thought which, though always present, had little in common with the Enlightenment’s ideals. These strands are often brought together under the headings of the ‘Anti-Enlightenment’ and of ‘Pre-Romanticism’.
Discussions about the Anti-Enlightenment centre on philosophical themes leading from the Neapolitan G. B. Vico (1668–1744) to the three East Prussians Hamann, Kant, and Herder. Apart from its cyclical theory of history Vico’s Scienza nuova (1725) paid great attention to mythology, and to the symbolic forms of expression used by primitive societies. These were subjects which most of the philosophes would have rejected as simply untutored. Both Vico and Herder grappled with the problem of how the human mind sifts and interprets the colossal mass of data which is required for establishing our knowledge of the past and present world. Both stressed the role of historical perspective. Both ‘perceived … that the task of synthesising such heterogeneous material into a coherent picture demands gifts very different from those required for rational methods of investigation… above all, the gift… of a creative imagination’.16
GOOSE-STEP
THE Paradeschritt or ‘Parade March’ of the Prussian Army was one of the most unnatural and expressive movements ever invented for the human body. Its foreign critics called it the goose-step. The lines of jack-booted soldiers were trained to point their toes on every upward beat, raising their legs to a high horizontal position. In order to keep their balance, they had to lean forward, swinging their arms like cantilevers, and holding their chins in a characteristic jutting posture. Since every step required enormous effort, the musical tempo had to be moderate to slow; and the march was performed with a grim, deliberate air of latent menace. Fierce facial expressions were an essential adjunct to the soldiers’ exertions.
The body language of the goose-step transmitted a clear set of messages. To Prussia’s generals, it said that the discipline and athleticism of their men would withstand all orders, no matter how painful or ludicrous. To Prussia’s civilians, it said that all insubordination would be ruthlessly crushed. To Prussia’s enemies, it said that the Prussian Army was not made up just of lads in uniform, but of regimented supermen. To the world at large, it announced that Prussia was not just strong, but arrogant. Here, quite literally, was the embodiment of Prussian militarism.1
The ethos of the goose-step contrasted very sharply with the parade-ground traditions of other armies. The French Army, for example, took great pride in the highly accelerated marching tempo of its light infantry, which, with bugles blaring, exuded the spirit of élan or ‘dash’ that was so much cultivated. The headlong charge of the Polish cavalry, who used to stop one foot short of the commander’s saluting base, demonstrates an exhilarating mixture of horsemanship and showmanship. In London, the magnificently slow Slow March of the royal Foot Guards, with its instant of frozen motion in the middle of each stride, exuded a temper of serenity, confidence, and self-control that was quintessential^ British.
The career of the goose-step has been a long one. It was recorded in the seventeenth century, and was still alive at the end of the twentieth. It was a standard feature of all military parades in Prussia and Germany until 1945. It was exported to all the armies of the world which were trained by Prussian officers, or which admired the Prussian model. In Europe, it was adopted by the Russian Army, later by the Red Army and by all the Soviet satellites. It was rejected by West Germany’s Bundeswehr, but was kept in being by the army of the German Democratic Republic until one month before the DDR’s collapse in November 1990. In 1994 it was still being performed in Moscow by the special squads of KGB troops who had been high-stepping in slow motion round Lenin’s mausoleum for the past 70 years.
J. G. Hamann (1730–88), who spent his life in Königsberg and Riga, is often dismissed as an obscure, lightweight philosopher, writing dense, disjointed (and untranslated) German prose in a scatter of minor pamphlets. But his critique of the Enlightenment, which developed Hume’s line on irrationality, was well known to contemporaries and is highly rated by specialists. It is even claimed that Hamann ‘lit a fuse which set off the great romantic revolt’:
Hamann speaks for those who hear the cry of the toad beneath the harrow, even when it might be right to plough over him; since, if men do not hear this cry, if the toad is written off because he has been ‘condemned by history’… then such victories will prove their own undoing.17
Of course, ideas do not permeate the cultural scene instantaneously. Several figures who were already active and mature in the 1770s and 1780s did not exercise any great influence until later. This is particularly true of Kant and Herder (see Chapter IX).
Many commentators, however, would insist on Rousseau’s inclusion in this company, since Rousseau is often seen as the first Romantic rather than the last of the philosophes. (There is no good reason why he should not have been both.) Rousseau’s view of nature as something benign certainly contradicted most of his contemporaries, who viewed it with hostility as something to be tamed and corrected. Rousseau’s appeal to sensibilité, the cult of emotion, initiated yet another shift in European manners:
Having the tastes of a tramp, he found the restraints of Parisian society irksome. From him, the Romantics learnt a contempt for the trammels of convention—first in dress and manners … and at last over the whole sphere of traditional morals.18
Rousseau’s love for his native Swiss Alps initiated a change in attitudes to the environment which until then was generally shunned in horror. Rousseau’s cult of the common people, though accompanied by a sincere devotion to democracy, is sometimes seen as one of the roots of totalitarianism.
Discussions about Pre-Romanticism usually centre on literary themes connected with the School of Sturm una; Drang—so-called after F. M. Klinger’s play of the same name staged in 1777—and with the Theory of Symbols. Amidst that ‘Storm and Stress’ of the 1770s, Germany, long passive, was asserting itself against French rationalism, and European culture was passing into a new era. A major impact was made by Goethe’s first novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther (i774)> whose moody adolescent hero commits suicide. In writing the book, Goethe said that he had decided ‘to surrender to his inner self’. It was a very unclassical decision.
Yet no one had a greater impact than a Scots schoolteacher from Kingussie called James Macpherson (1736–96), who pulled off one of the great literary forgeries of all time. He presented his Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), Fingal (1761), and Temora (1763) as the translated works of the legendary Gaelic bard, Ossian. As Dr Johnson realized, they were nothing of the sort. But their melancholic recital of Highland lore was immensely popular, not least in Germany, where Herder was a leading admirer. An Italian translation was said to be Napoleon’s favourite reading.
Classical conventions came under attack in art also. In 1771, at the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in London, the court painter Benjamin West (1738–1820) displayed a picture celebrating The Death of General Wolfe, who had been killed at Quebec twelve years earlier. To the scandal of the viewers, the scene was painted in contemporary dress. The dying general was shown in his regulation red army tunic. Joshua Reynolds, the senior artist of the day, took West on one side and lectured him on the convention of clothing all historic and moralistic scenes in the togas and laurels of antiquity. Paintings that defied the convention would lack the timeless, neutral setting which alone could ensure the transmission of their message. But it was to no avail: Realism had arrived. Whether or not Romanticism had arrived with it is a matter for conjecture.19
The French supremacy in Europe lasted for the greater part of 200 years. It began with the personal rule of the young Louis XIV in 1661 and lasted until the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Indeed, notwithstanding her defeat during the Napoleonic Wars, France was not definitively replaced as the single most powerful state of Continental Europe until her submission to Bismarck’s Germany in 1871. For most of that time Paris was the unrivalled capital of European politics, culture, and fashion, [CRAVATE]
France’s lengthy pre-eminence can be explained in part by the natural advantages of her large territory and population, and by the systematic nurture of her economic and military resources. It must be explained in part also by the disarray of major rivals: by the decay of Spain, by the ruin of Germany, by the divisions of Italy, by Austria’s preoccupation with the Ottomans. It was certainly assisted by the extraordinary longevity of the ruling Bourbon kings—Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), Louis XV (r. 1715–74), and Louis XVI (r. 1774–92)—who supplied a focus for unity and stability. In the end it was undermined by the growing tensions within French society, and by the appearance of new powers—notably Great Britain, the kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, none of which had even existed at Louis XIV’s accession.
Like all great political organisms, France of the Ancien Régime passed through three distinct phases of growth, maturity, and decline. The first dynamic phase coincided with the central decades of Louis XIV in his magnificent prime, from 1661 to the end of the seventeenth century. The second phase saw France contained by the coalitions raised against her. It stretched from the last disillusioned years of Louis XIV to the death of Louis XV. The final phase coincided with the reign of Louis XVI. It saw the King and his ministers lose control of the mounting problems which led in 1789 to the outbreak of the greatest revolution that Europe had ever seen. For the French themselves, this was the era of la gloire.
CRAVATE
THE French word cravate, ‘necktie’, has been taken into almost every European language. In German, it is krawatte, in Spanish, corbata, in Greek, gravata, in Romanian, cravata, in standard Polish, krawat, in Cracow, eccentrically, krawatka. In English, it acquired the special meaning of ‘a linen or silk handkerchief passed once or twice round the neck outside the shirt collar’.1 In the standard French Littré, it is given two alternative meanings: ‘/. Cheval de Croatie. 2. Piece d’étoffe légère que les hommes et quelquefois les dames mettent autour du cou.’ All sources agree that it derives from an old form of the adjective for ‘Croat’ or, as a Croat would say, hrvati.
Exactly how an East European adjective became permanently attached to one of the commonest items of European clothing is a matter for conjecture. One theory holds that Napoleon admired the scarves worn by captured Habsburg soldiers.3 This is clearly a misattribution, since Littré cites Voltaire using the word long before Napoleon was born: ‘Vous figurez-vous ce diable habillé d’écarlate? … Un serpent lui sert de cravate’ (Do you see this devil dressed in scarlet? … He’s wearing a snake in place of a cravate).4
Louis XIV is perhaps nearer the mark. Croat mercenaries in the French service at Versailles are the likeliest source of the fashion which spread all over the world. At all events, people who deny the influence of Europe’s ‘smaller nations’ should remember that the Croats have the rest of us by the throat.
In Croatia, as it happens, men can choose to adorn their necks either with the native masna, or with the re-imported kravata.5
‘S’agrandir’, wrote Louis XIV to the Marquis de Villars on 8 January 1688, ‘est la plus digne et la plus agréable occupation des souverains.’ (Self-aggrandisement is the most worthy and agreeable of sovereigns’ occupations.)
Louis XIV, more than any other European monarch, has been taken as the supreme symbol of his age. Reigning for seventy-two years over Europe’s most powerful nation, this Roi Soleil, this Sun King, was the object of a cult which coloured the opinions both of his courtiers and of later historians. Ruling over France from his magnificent palace at Versailles, as Philip of Spain had once ruled the world from the Escorial, he was credited with almost superhuman powers. He was, supposedly, the embodiment of the purest monarchy, the most perfect form of absolutism; the architect and inspiration of a model and uniform system of government; the moving spirit of economic and colonial enterprise, the dictator of artistic and intellectual taste, the ‘Most Christian King’ of a Catholic nation that brooked no religious deviation, the doyen of European diplomacy, the commander of the Continent’s most formidable armies. The myth is not without substance. ‘Le Grand Roi’ was undoubtedly the monarch whom lesser princes loved to emulate. He stamped his personality on his surroundings, and his achievements were not inconsiderable. Yet no man could ever match up to so exaggerated an image. Whilst conceding the grandeur of the experiment, one must also try to see the man behind the royal mask, the suffering land of France beyond the glittering façade of Versailles.
The personality of Louis XIV cannot easily be separated from the theatrical performance which he felt to be an essential part of his trade. He grew up among the horrors of the Fronde, when the foundations of the modern French monarchy had been shaken to the core; and he felt instinctively that he was leader of a nation which longed for order and strong government. Hence the court of Versailles, which he designed and built, was not merely a piece of ostentation. It tied the nobles to the service of king and state. The spectacular royal balls, ballets, concerts, plays and hunts, the fêtes and the fireworks in the Grand Pare, all served to cement the subservience of his leading subjects, and to create a sense of national community. From the day in 1661 when, on Mazarin’s death, he personally assumed the reins of government, he was playing out a role with a purpose. It was not for mere amusement that he appeared as the leading actor in the first great open-air fête of his reign, Les Plaisirs de l’Îïle Enchanté (see Plate 47). Louis inherited from his Spanish mother the love of etiquette; and he learned from Mazarin the art of secrecy and dissimulation. Possessed of a handsome and powerful physique, he combined remarkable energies and appetites with a temperament that swung from the gallant and generous to the mean and rancorous. As a horseman, huntsman, trencherman, and sexual athlete, he outclassed his enthusiastic entourage. Yet whilst wining and womanizing with gusto, he could be plotting the ruin of his companions or, as with the great Nicolas Fouquet in 1661, the arbitrary arrest of his leading minister. ‘Le Grand Roi’ was not above pettiness.
As the pupil of Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis had a firm grasp of the instruments that could increase his power. He inherited a huge, servile bureaucracy, a large standing army, a vast central treasury, and a subdued nobility. He further extended his control over a Gallican Church that was already subservient, destroyed the ‘state-within-the-state’ of the Huguenots, subordinated the provinces to his Intendants, and ruled without any form of central legislature. But his greatest talent was for publicity. Versailles was the symbol of an ideal which for outshone the facts of French reality. For Frenchmen and foreign visitors alike, the splendours of its ceremonies undoubtedly created the illusion that the Roi Soleil stood at the centre of a system of perfect authority. When Louis allegedly walked into the Palais de Justice and interrupted a judge with the comment, ‘L’État, c’est moi’, he may or may not have believed his witticism; but he certainly acted as if he did. Through his long series of flamboyant liaisons, from Louise de la Vallière to Mme de Maintenon, he flouted the moral code of the old cabale de dévots, creating a climate where the King’s pleasure was law. Yet behind the façade the grand experiment of absolutism was fraught with failures. Versailles was not France; the King’s will was widely defied. In a huge country, the means of avoidance were greater than the means of enforcement. The drive for uniformity, powerful though it was, could not iron out all the wrinkles. The Parlement and the provinces persistently jibbed. Louis’s foreign wars brought more debt and humiliation than solid gains.
The government of France, therefore, cannot be understood through any formal analysis of its institutions. The long campaign to re-assert royal authority from the centre was not accompanied by the wholesale abolition of regional and municipal particularities. The great provinces of France remained divided between the pays d’élection, where royal officials exercised a large measure of direct control, and the pays d’état, which enjoyed a great degree of autonomy. Customary law operated in the north, codified Roman law in the south. Within each of the provinces, a mass of locallibertés, parlements, franchises, and privileges survived; and the nobles retained many of their traditional powers of jurisdiction in their own domains. It was essential, of course, that the central Assembly, or Estates General, should only survive in a condition of permanent suspension, and that the central Parlement in Paris should be schooled to register royal decrees without discussion. The vast army of some 50,000 royal officials, riddled with venality and corruption, pressed like a dead weight on the whole country, as slow to react to royal instructions as to the needs of their local subjects.
The King’s main advantage lay in the absence of any major institution round which alternative centres of authority might have coalesced. Secure from concerted opposition, he was able to construct a small but extremely powerful complex of central organizations run by himself, together with a new network in the provinces which could override local objections. At the pinnacle, the King convened the Conseil en Haut (Supreme Council), where he discussed high policy two or three times every week with a small coterie of advisers. Louis made good an early boast to be his own chief minister. In the formative decade after 1661 he worked closely with the favoured triad of Le Tellier, Lionne, and Colbert. The formulation of advice and the execution of policy was entrusted to the Secretariats— initially Étranger, Guerre, Marine, and Maison du Roi—and to a series of secondary committees—the Conseil Royal for finance, the Conseil Privé for judicial decrees, the Conseil de Conscience for Religion, the Conseil de Justice for codifying the law.
For the enforcement of his decisions the King relied in the early days on special commissions, which would be sent out to regulate specific matters. But increasingly he relied on his Intendants, who were soon turned from mere inspectors of inquiry into permanent viceroys, each overseeing the financial and judicial affairs of their généralités or areas of competence. In the last resort he relied on the military reforms, which abolished the old noble levy and created a huge standing army entirely subordinated to royal command. This army was an instrument of internal as well as external policy.
The realities of French society bore little relation to the structures enshrined in the three traditional Estates. In theory, the Estates should have been autonomous, self-regulating communities. In practice, they were highly fragmented; they were deprived of any serious autonomy, and all were increasingly subordinated to royal control. The clergy (the First Estate) was alone in retaining its own organization, the quinquennial assemblies. But it was deprived of any corporate initiative by the King’s patronage of over 600 leading abbatial and episcopal appointments, and by the glaring chasm of interest and outlook between high and low clergy.
The nobility (the Second Estate) had been tamed by Richelieu and disgraced by the failure of the Fronde. It was equally divided against itself. The grandees were turned into royal pensioners, boasting more titles than influence. Most of the old noble families depended increasingly on royal service, either in the noblesse de robe, through legal or administrative positions, or in the noblesse d’épée, through army commissions. Their influence was greatly diluted by the influx of a mass of upstarts and promotees—the bourgeois gentilhommes of whom Molière made such fun. Trouble-makers such as the petty nobles and robber lords of the remoter districts like the Auvergne found themselves brought violently to heel by hanging commissions.
As for the Third Estate, which contained everyone not included in the other two, it had no chance whatsoever of developing a sense of common purpose. The best hope of social advancement lay in buying a royal office or a patent of nobility. Least concern was shown for the peasants—the absolute majority of the population—who remained triple-taxed serfs, oppressed by their lord, their priest, and the royal officials. They lived on the verge of starvation. The academician La Bruyère called them ‘animaux farouches’. They repeatedly described their own condition in terms of ‘la Peur’, the primordial fear of extinction. Their frequent, desperate, and ineffectual revolts were part of the rural landscape.
Economic policy constituted an important part of the Great Experiment. Under Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), the original ‘homme de marbre’ and a bourgeois gentilhomme par excellence, a systematic plan was conceived to put the finances, taxes, and commerce of the country onto a sound footing. This Colbertisme represented a specially dirigiste form of mercantilism, and is often considered a failure, especially in the later period. But it was the engine which made all the other projects of Louis XIV possible; and it can only be judged against the colossal demands made by the King’s truly insatiable financial appetite.
In the financial sector, Colbert created the Controle Général (1665) through which all other subordinate institutions were supervised—the Trésor de Vépargne (Treasury), the Conseil Royal, the Êtat de Prévoyance and the Êtat au Vrai (the annual forward estimates and balance-sheet), and theGrand Livre (the ledger of state accounts). From 1666 the Mint struck the handsome louis d’or and the silver écu, which maintained a stable value for nearly 30 years.
In the fiscal sector, the Caisse des Emprunts (1674) was created to raise money from state loans. The Ferme Générale (1680) was created to co-ordinate the collection of all taxes except for the notorious Taille or land-tax (which was left to the Intendants). After Colbert’s death the budgetary deficit mounted, and a variety of expedients were tried, including the capitation or poll-tax in 1695, the billets de monnaie or paper money of 1701, and the dixième or state tithe of 1710.
In the commercial sector, Colbert introduced a régime which attempted to lock all private activity into state regulations, and to give priority to state enterprise, especially in manufactures and foreign trade. The Code de la Draperie (1669) or ‘Textile Code’ was an example of his mania for detailed regulation. The great Vanrobais textile factory at Abbeville, or the state Gobelin factory brought to Paris from Brussels, were monuments to his penchant for manufacturing. The various state trading companies—des Indes Orientales (1664), des Indes Occidentales (1664), du Nord(1669),du Levant (1670)—were monuments to his belief that the country’s total wealth could only be increased by what was brought in from abroad. Colbert’s enthusiasm for the navy, and for the construction of naval ports and state arsenals, derived from the common mercantilist dogma that foreign trade involved an international struggle over finite resources. Successful competition required military force. Significantly, France’s principal industry— agriculture—received little attention, except as the object of regulated prices and the source of cheap food.
The mobilization of France’s military resources required a sustained effort over several decades. Colbert himself laid great emphasis on the formation of a navy that could hold its own against the Dutch and the English. Apart from the traditional chiourmes or convict gangs which manned the galleys based at Toulon, he created a register of all the sailors and ships in the land, all liable to conscription. In twenty years he increased the ships of the line from 30 to 107, of which the four-masted Royal-Louis, armed with 118 cannons, was the pride and joy. He founded the naval base of Rochefort, fortified the northern ports of Brest, Le Havre, Calais, and Dunkerque, and opened naval dockyards and naval academies.
For obvious reasons, however, France looked more to its land borders than to the sea. Louis XIV set foot aboard one of his warships on only one occasion. Under the Bureau de guerre of Colbert’s chief rival, the ruthless war minister Francois Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois (1641–91), the main effort was devoted to the army. Louvois’s bureaucrats took control of every detail. The old noble levy was abandoned and regimental structures revolutionized. New formations of grenadiers (1667), fusiliers (1667), and bombardiers (1684) were created. The traditional supremacy of the cavalry was handed to the infantry. Subjected to rigorous drill and training, armed with flintlock and bayonet, and dressed in fine uniforms, the new formations foreshadowed the practices of the eighteenth century. The artillery and the corps of engineers, once contracted out to civilians, were integrated into the overall command. Professional officers, trained in military academies and promoted on merit, were led by commanders of renown— first the old Turenne, then the young Condé and the dashing Maréchal du Villars. Massive barracks and arsenals were built in all the major cities. On the initiative of the celebrated siege-master, ingénieur du roi and commissaire-général des fortifications, Marshal Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), a magnificent chain of 160 fortresses was constructed along the northern and eastern frontiers. The likes of Saarlouis, Landau, Neubreisach, and Strasbourg cost France even more than Versailles. The net result was a military machine that could only be stopped by the concerted strength of all France’s neighbours. Its motto was Nee pluribus impar (a match for many), [ELSASS]
Religion stood necessarily near the centre of affairs. Louis XIV displayed little more than conventional Catholic piety, but he was guided by the tradition which demanded that le Roi Très Chrétien should be master in his own house, and that religious dissidence posed a threat to national unity. After his secret second marriage to Mme de Maintenon in 1685, he was strongly influenced by the advice of Jesuits. The overall result was one of considerable inconsistency and, as in other spheres, of striking contrast between the King’s early and declining years. In 1669, when Molière’s long-delayed anticlerical satire Tartuffe was finally performed, it received the royal applause; in 1680 it was banned.
For thirty years Louis was a true Gallican—packing the French bishoprics with the relatives of his ministers, authorizing the Declaration of the Four Articles (1682), and provoking in 1687–8 an open rupture with the Papacy. The Four Articles, the purest formulation of Gallican doctrine, were ordered to be taught in all the seminaries and faculties of France:
1. The authority of the Holy See is limited to spiritual matters.
2. The decisions of Church Councils are superior to those of the Pope.
3. Gallican customs are independent of Rome.
4. The Pope is not infallible, except by consent of the universal Church.
But then, distressed by his isolation from the Catholic powers, Louis turned tail. In 1693 he retracted the Four Articles, and for the rest of his life gave unstinting support to the ultramontane faction. His decree of 1695, handing the episcopate full control over the livings and property of the parish clergy, earned him the lasting opposition of the radicals. In the quarrel over Quietism, his decision to favour the bombastic Bishop Bossuet, ‘the Eagle of Meaux’, against the Quietists’ champion, Bishop Fénelon, ‘the Swan of Cambrai’, offended both the aristocratic and the more spiritual elements. After all, it was Bossuet who had once enjoined Louis ‘to be a god for his people’.
In his policy towards the Protestants, Louis passed from passive discrimination through petty harassment to violent persecution. At first, under Mazarin’s tutelage, the King felt disinclined to disrupt a community that had demonstrated its loyalty throughout the wars of the Fronde. From the weavers of Abbeville to the great Turenne himself, the Huguenots were hard-working and influential. Unfortunately, breaches of the Edict of Nantes and the supposedly preferential treatment of the ‘RPR’ (religion prétendue réformée or ‘so-called reformed religion’) were the two issues which united all wings of Catholic opinion. Hence from 1666 all Huguenot activities not specifically approved by the Edict were regarded as illegal. The first chapels were razed; a caisse des conversions or ‘conversion fund’ was created to reward the NCs (nouveaux convertís) at six livres per head. From 1679 a series of legal and military measures sought to extirpate Protestantism by. force. In the vicious dragonnades of Poitou, Beam, and Languedoc, where soldiers were billeted on all families refusing conversion, unspeakable atrocities were committed. Finally in October 1685, pressed by Louvois (Le Tellier), and the depraved Archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvallon, the King revoked the edict of toleration. Bishop Bossuet awarded him the epithet of the ‘New Constantine’. Up to a million of France’s most worthy citizens were forced to submit or to flee amidst a veritable reign of terror. Resistance in the Dauphiné and the Cévennes persisted for thirty years.
Similarly, in its treatment of the Jansenists, royal policy wavered between compromise and repression. Jansen’s ideas were eagerly received by one wing of the French Church, and were widely disseminated through the works of the Abbé de St Cyran (1581–1643), of Antoine Arnauld I (1612–94), and, above all, of Blaise Pascal. Jansenist activities centred on the Cistercian convent of Port-Royal in Paris and on the ubiquitous Arnauld clan, who had strong connections at Court—with the King’s cousin, Mme de Longueville, with the King’s foreign minister, Simon Arnauld, Marquis de Pomponne (1616–99), with Racine, a former pupil of Port-Royal’s school, even with Bossuet. But from the 1650s, when the ‘Five Propositions’ taken from Jansen’s Augustinus were officially judged heretical, the Jansenists were treated as subversives. Pascal and others were forced to publish in secret. In 1661 a Formulation of Obedience denouncing the Propositions caused an open breach; and the sisters of Port-Royal, ‘pure as angels, proud as demons’, were rusticated to a new location at Port-Royal-les-Champs near Versailles. This first round of persecution ended in the strange Paix de l’Église (1668), which enabled the Jansenists to sign the Formulation whilst upholding their conscientious objections ‘in respectful silence’. But further attacks were launched in concert with the campaign against the Huguenots. Arnauld le Grand was driven into exile at Brussels in 1679.
The decisive round followed the publication in 1693 of the Reflexions of the Oratorian Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719). When the ensuing furore became entangled with the other feud between Bishops Bossuet and Fénelon over Quietism, the King resolved to act. In 1705 the Pope was persuaded to retract the compromise regarding ‘respectful silence’, and in 1713 the Bull Unigenitus comprehensively condemned the Jansenists and all their works. In the process the convent of Port-Royal was closed, its church destroyed, its cemetery razed. The remains of Pascal and Racine had to be rescued from their tombs by night. At a stroke, Louis turned a doctrinal squabble into a lasting confrontation between the reigning Establishment of Church and State and its intellectual critics. Here lay the true beginning of the French Enlightenment.
Nothing has been more schematized in the history books than the policy of Louis XIV to the arts. This ‘Intellectual Absolutism’ is sometimes described as a model where royal taste and patronage could determine the entire cultural life of an age. ‘Classicism is made to appear as an official doctrine corresponding on the literary plane to the doctrines of monarchical order and religious unity which prevailed in the political and spiritual spheres.’ In the words of Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711), the principal literary critic of the day, ‘Un Auguste aisément peut faire des Virgües’ (an Augustus can easily create Virgils).
ELSASS
ONE day in 1670 the French army seized the Rhine bridge at Strassburg, and burned it. This was the signal that the French were not content with the part of Elsass acquired by the Treaty of Westphalia, and would not rest until Strassburg itself was theirs. At the time. Strassburg was the second city of the Holy Roman Empire, entirely German in character, its language the same Alemannic dialect spoken on the other side of the Rhine. But Louis XIV was implacable. Thanks to the dubious stratagem of the Réunions, Strassburg, or Strasbourg, would soon be absorbed, together with the whole of ‘Alsace’. Though the local dialect would survive, the province would become the touchstone of French unity.1 German restorations, in 1870–1918 and 1940–5, would not last.
On the other, eastern flank of the Empire, in Silesia, the great city of Breslau was ruled on behalf of the Austrian Habsburgs by the last prince of the Silesian Piasts. Silesia’s origins were no more Austrian than Alsace was French. Silesia’s first connections were Polish and. until 1526, Bohemian. Just as the native language and culture of Alsace were to resist every attempt to Frenchify them completely, so the Silesian Slavs would hold out against the waves of Bohemian Germans, Austrians, and Prussians who came to dominate their province over the centuries.2
On the other, eastern flank of Poland, in the province of Red Ruthenia, the great city of Lwów had been ruled by Poland for over 300 years. It was far more Polish than Strasburg was French or Breslau Austrian. Its Jewish community, too, had enjoyed great continuity. Yet the origins of Lwów or L’viv were not Polish but Ruthenian. In 1670, its career as a premier centre of Uniate, Ukrainian culture was in its infancy.3 [ÄYCZAKÓW]
On the other, eastern flank of Ruthenia, the great city of Kiev on the Dnieper had just been conquered by Moscow (see p. 556). The Russian Orthodox Church was establishing its supremacy over central Ukraine, and launching the myth that Kiev was the cradle of Russian civilization.
Strassburg, Breslau, Lwów, .and Kiev had more in common than they knew. All were cosmopolitan capitals of multinational provinces or countries, for whom exclusive national claims would prove particularly destructive. By 1945, each had been re-laundered many times. Alsace had changed hands between France and Germany four times over. Silesia (alias Śląsk or Schlesien) had been fought over regularly by Austria, Prussia, Germany, and Poland. Red Ruthenia (alias East Galicia, Western Ukraine, or eastern Małopolska) had been disputed by Austrians, Poles, and Ukrainians at least six times. Central Ukraine had been torn apart by Russians and Germans, Ukrainians and Poles, Reds and Whites, Nazis and Soviets, at least twenty times.
When Strasbourg was made capital of the Council of Europe in 1949, the Iron Curtain shut out the city’s eastern counterparts. Indeed, since the German population of Breslau had been forced to leave, since Breslau had just become Wrocław through the mass influx of Polish refugees from Lwów, and since L’viv was swamped by an influx of Russians, resentments were running high. The internal frontiers of the Soviet bloc were every bit as impermeable as the Iron Curtain. The process of reconciliation, which started in the West, could not reach the whole of Europe for almost fifty years.
It is true, of course, that lavish royal patronage did provide a powerful stimulus in the direction of institutionalized uniformity. The Académie Française (1635), whose great Dictionary appeared in 1694, acted as the official guardian of the French language. The Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, later the Beaux-Arts, put enormous powers into the hands of the King’s painter, Charles Le Brun (1619–90). The Académie des Sciences (1666) pursued similar activities to those of the Royal Society in London. The Académie de Musique (1669) offered a similar platform for the talents of the King’s musician, Jean-Baptiste Lully (1633–87), who wrote a score of operas. At the Beaux-Arts, which linked the artistic dictatorship of Le Brun with the organizational genius of Colbert, architects, decorators, engravers were mobilized into projects where harmony and order were the ruling passions. Above all, the royal Court commanded a concentration of cultural creativity with few parallels. In literature, ‘the King’s Four Friends’—Boileau, Molière, Racine, and La Fontaine—exercised an influence in their heyday which few writers have ever enjoyed. The Comédie-Française (1680) joined several existing troupes into one united, theatrical operation.
Yet on examination it becomes clear that the classical monopoly was more illusory than real. For one thing, the King’s own taste was more eclectic than is often supposed. The classical mania for formulating artistic rules was certainly present, but the rules were not necessarily observed by everyone. For another, the ‘Classical Parnassus’ which reigned for perhaps twenty years was gradually undermined. From 1687 onwards French cultural Ufe was absorbed by the furious quarrel of the Anciens and the Modernes. The façade of unity was cracked wide open, to expose a cultural landscape of variety and heterodoxy from which the parade of the giants has all too often diverted attention.
The foreign policy of Louis XTV was the best measure of his power and prestige. It rested on the most complete diplomatic service which Europe had ever seen—personally run by the King at Versailles—and on military forces which were only deployed in full after a long period of preparation. It led the continent of Europe into conflict. As a result, Louis XIV has been seen in some quarters as the first of a line of tyrants who have tried to conquer Europe by force, the precursor of Napoleon or Hitler. The coalitions ranged against him can be made to appear as the ancestors of the ‘Allied Powers’ of later centuries.
In reality, Louis’s vision was rather limited. Despite later comment, he does not seem to have had any clear plan for attaining France’s ‘natural frontiers’, let alone for overrunning the Continent. Though the caution of his early years was abandoned, his aims remained essentially dynastic and consolidatory. Having been linked by Mazarin to a Spanish Infanta, María Teresa, whom he married at Saint Jean-de-Luz in 1660 as part of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, he could not have avoided the problems presented by Spain’s crumbling succession. His constant involvement in the Netherlands and on the Rhine was justified by a genuine fear of encirclement. His thirst for war and expansion can hardly be compared to that of his brother monarchs in, say, Sweden or Russia. His love for la gloire might have seemed entirely conventional had it not been backed by such threatening logistics. Of Louis’s four major wars, the first two were confined to the Netherlands; the third was provoked by the réunions—Louis’s campaign to acquire German territory by judicial subterfuge. The fourth arose directly from the failure of the ruling Spanish dynasty. Behind them all lay international rivalry over colonies and trade, [GROTEMARKT]
The War of Devolution (1667–8) derived from Louis’s exploitation of a dynastic claim to Brabant. It began with a French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands; inspired a ‘Triple Alliance’ of England, Holland, and Sweden; and ended at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle with Louis in possession of twelve Belgian fortresses.
The Franco-Dutch War (1672–9) derived from Louis’s determination to punish the Dutch for their interference in his previous campaign. It was thoroughly prepared diplomatically, with Holland’s maritime rivals, England and Sweden, persuaded to switch their allegiance, and with Poland added to the French camp. It turned William III of Orange, Stadtholder of the United Provinces, into coordinator of the opposition. It began, as before, with a French advance into the Spanish Netherlands; but Condé’s crossing of the Rhine roused the Empire; and Louis did not miss the chance to disrupt Spain’s hold on the Franche-Comté. The Congress of Nijmegen (1678–9) saw Louis’s diplomats holding the ring—appeasing the Dutch with commercial advantages, forcing the Spaniards to cede territory, imposing a settlement on the lesser powers.
By the policy of réunions, Louis suspended open warfare in favour of annexations arranged through elaborate but dubious legal process. Courts were established to try royal petitions laying claim to scores of cities and jurisdictions on the eastern border. Every favourable verdict led to immediate occupation of the district concerned. No less than 160 annexations were organized in this way in the 1680s, notably Strassburg (1681) and Luxemburg (1684). With the Empire preoccupied by the Turkish advance on Vienna, Louis had timed the operation well.
The Nine Years War (1689–97) occurred as the result of Louis’s defiance of the League of Augsburg (1686), formed at the instigation of William of Orange to halt further French adventures. The French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands and of the Palatinate, where Heidelberg was devastated, initiated an exhausting series of sieges and naval battles. By the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) Louis was obliged to abandon most of his réunions, but not Strasbourg, [ELSASS] [GROTEMARKT]
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13) has some claim to be called ‘the first world war’. It was fought in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in Spain, in the colonies, and on the high seas. It was brewing from the day in 1700 when Charles II of Spain died childless, and when Louis XIV decided to honour the late King’s will and to neglect his own undertakings. It was unavoidable once Louis had presented the court with his youthful grandson, Philippe d’Anjou, with the words ‘Voici le Roi d’Espagne’. It brought together the most extensive and powerful of anti-French coalitions, which was managed on the military front by the triumvirate of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Duke of Marlborough, and the Grand Pensioner Heinsius. The fighting began when Louis took the precaution of reoccupying the Dutch-held ‘barrier fortresses’ in the Spanish Netherlands. It carried on through siege and countersiege, on land and sea, until all parties were thoroughly drained. In 1709, after the ‘very murdering’ but indecisive battle of Malplaquet, which saved France from invasion, Marshal du Villars was said to have told his sovereign, ‘One more victory like that for your enemies, Sire, and they will all be finished.’
The final outcome of the French wars, as enshrined in the twin treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714), did not match the expectations of any of the principal combatants. France’s ambitions were trimmed but not reversed. She kept many important gains, including Lille, Franche-Comté, and Alsace; and Philippe d’Anjou remained on the Spanish throne. The Dutch, like the French, were exhausted, but survived with the control of the barrier fortresses. Spain, which had lost out when allied to the anti-French coalitions, lost out again when allied to the French. The Spaniards’ main purpose was to preserve the unity of their empire. They found that they provoked the very catastrophe which they had sought to avoid. The Austrians, who had sought to prevent the Spanish inheritance from falling to France, settled instead for a major share of the pickings, including the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples, and Sardinia. It was the peripheral powers who proved the most obvious beneficiaries. Both the Hohenzollerns in Prussia and the House of Savoy were confirmed in their royal status. The former took Upper Gelderland on the Rhine and, with some delay, Swedish Pomerania; the latter took Sicily. The new United Kingdom of Great Britain (see below) gained immensely in status, confirmed in her control of Gibraltar and Minorca, of Newfoundland and other American lands, and of the Spanish colonial trade. The United Kingdom—no longer just England—now emerged as the foremost maritime power, as the leading diplomatic broker, and as the principal opponent of French supremacy.
From its high point early in the 1680s, therefore, Louis XIV’s Great Experiment produced ever diminishing returns. The wars, the religious persecutions, the deaths of all the great personalities, were accompanied by failures of a more deep-seated nature. Both the French state and French society were showing signs of a long wasting disease. The state’s finances, for example, passed into grave disarray. By 1715 the Government’s net income stood at 69 million livres, and expenditure at 132 million; the public debt was variously computed at between 830 to 2,800 million.22 More seriously, the mass of the French population was gaining little benefit from a life of increasing deprivation: the scandalous exemptions of the nobility continued; the middle classes, sorely wounded by the departure of the Huguenots, were struggling to ease the burdens of state regulation; the peasants toiled on the verge of starvation and without hope of relief. In the years of famine, contemporary reports of their dire distress—of barefoot starvelings eking out a subsistence on a diet of bark, berries, and beet—are supported by modern statistical studies of mortality and food prices. The long procession of provinces in open and bloody revolt continued—Béarn (1664), the Vivarais (1670), Bordeaux (1674), Brittany (1675), Languedoc (1703–9), Cahors (1709). Rural riots and outbreaks of château-burning were mercilessly punished with military repressions and mass hangings. The façade still glittered, but the foundations were starting to shake. When Louis XIV finally died, on 1 September 1715, the curtain fell to the ringing words which began the funeral oration: ‘Dieu seul, mes frères,’ intoned Bishop Massillon, ‘Dieu seul est grand’ (my brothers, God alone is great).
GROTE MARKT
IN 1695 the Grote Markt or Grand’Place of Brussels was reduced to cinders when one of France’s more inept marshals, the Duke of Villeroi, bombarded the city with red-hot shot. In that one engagement, when the armies of Louis XIV advanced into the Spanish Netherlands, they destroyed sixteen churches, 4,000 houses, and a civic square which has been described as ‘a perfect image in stone of our European political culture at its finest’.1
Laid out in the decades after 1312, when Brussels was granted its charter, the expanse of the Grote Markt had seen the jousting tournaments of the Dukes of Brabant and of Burgundy. On the south side, the Gothic City Hall supported a slender, soaring belfry 160 ft high, surmounted by a gilded statue of St Michael. Opposite, the Renaissance Maison du Roi had housed many dukes but never a king. On either flank rose the tall guild houses of the ‘nine nations’, among them the ‘Bakers’ Dome’ of Le Roi d’Espagne, the statued façade of the Archers’ House, La Louve, and the poop-shaped upper storey of the ‘Boat-Builders’. In front of them, the cobbled pavement had witnessed the hanging of Egmont and Horn. In 1795 it would resound to Dumouriez’s declaration of the French Republic, and in 1830 to skirmishes with Dutch troops. Nowadays, it is the setting for the annual Ommegang procession, headed by actors playing out ‘the court of Charles V’. Otherwise it has been taken over by flower-sellers, the Sunday bird market and, until recently, by parking lots.
Brussels was handsomely restored under Austrian rule after 1713, and extensively renovated when it became capital of the Kingdom of Belgium in 1830. In the nineteenth century, linked by a ‘pentagon’ of boulevards, the new districts spread over the nearby hills. The Coudenberg received the royal, palace, the government ministries, and the Parliament. The Koekelberg, in imitation of Montmartre, received the grandiose domed basilica of the Sacré-Cœur, completed only in 1970. The gleaming metallic molecule of the Atomium recalls the Universal Exhibition of 1958. The modern Cité deBerlaymont (1967) houses the headquarters of the European Commission, Zaventem the headquarters of NATO. Since 1971, Brussels-Bruxelles has formed a bi-lingual region within Belgium’s three linguistic cantons—equal in legal status to its Flemish-speaking, French-speaking, and German-speaking counterparts. Originally a predominantly Flemish city, it now displays the most complicated linguistic patterns, including French, Turkish, and even English sectors..
Sentimental observers have seen Brussels as a fitting capital for the future Europe because it has supposedly overcome its own and its neighbours’ nationalism. It has been described as the mouth of a ‘tunnel of history’, reaching back under the dark mountain of modern nationalism to ‘the wonderful model’ of ‘multicultural’, ‘polyphonic Burgundy’.2 It may be so. But extravagant intellectual pretensions do not fit the local style. From his pedestal on a street corner just off the Grote Markt, the statue of the Manneken Pis, the jovial ‘Little Piddle Boy’ (1619), who survived Villeroi’s bombardment, expresses the healthiest of opinions on all such conceits.
France of the eighteenth century was entirely the child of Louis XTV’s great but flawed experiment. The intellectual ferment of the French Enlightenment was a natural reaction against the political and social immobility of the Ancien Régime which Louis had created. Both external and internal policy were devoted to the maintenance of the status quo in all spheres. The innate conservatism of the system was bolstered by the initial shock of John Law’s risky projects, which seemed to discredit the very notion of change and reform. It was solidified by the minority (1715–23) of Louis XV, when the reins of government were held by a polished but debauched Regent, the Due d’Orléans, and by the young king’s long subordination to his elderly tutor André, Cardinal de Fleury (1653–1743). The Regent rashly restored the Parlement’s right of remonstration against royal decrees—a classic recipe for endless mischief without responsibility. The Cardinal supervised an era of competent stability, marked only by diplomatic crises and a violent resurgence of the controversy over Jansenism. The personal reign of Louis XV (1723–74), who paid more attention to hunting women and stags than to governing the country, was one of debilitating stagnation. The perpetual financial crisis, fuelled by recurrent wars, turned the clashes between court and Parlement into ? routine spectacle. The religious feuds between the ultramontanes, Gallicans, and Jansenists, which culminated in 1764 with the expulsion of the Jesuits, degenerated into a ritual round of spite and obscurantism. The chasm between court and people yawned ever wider. The most memorable personality of the age must surely be that of Jeanne Poisson, Mme de Pompadour (1721–64)—intelligent, influential, and totally helpless. She did what she could to relieve the King’s unspeakable boredom, and is credited with that most telling of remarks, ‘Après nous le déluge’, [CORSICA] [DESSEIN]
Louis XVI no doubt looked forward to a reign as long and as boring as that of his grandfather. He even saw the need for reform. But he was the first prisoner of the Ancien Régime. On the day that the Deluge broke, on 14 July 1789, his diary contained the entry which his grandfather had always used on days when there was no hunting—’Rien’ (nothing).
In the British Isles the capital event of the period, the founding of the United Kingdom (1707), occurred as the culmination of complicated religious, dynastic, constitutional, and international conflicts. The Restoration of the Stuarts after the Civil War had ushered in an uneasy stand-off, and the reign of Charles II (d. 1685) survived two Dutch wars, the fraudulent Popish Plot of 1679, and two rebellions of Scottish Covenanters. Like his father, the King submitted unwillingly to government through Parliaments and did his best to circumvent them. His religious policy steered a middle course between the extreme Protestant and Catholic factions. The return of the Anglican supremacy put limits on toleration. It was characterized in England by the Clarendon Code and Test Acts and in Ireland and Scotland by the reimposition of episcopacy. In foreign policy there was great dissension over fighting the Dutch on commercial grounds or supporting them on religious and strategic grounds. [LLOYD’S]
CORSICA
IT is a moot point whether Napoleon Bonaparte was born a subject of the King of France. His elder brother, Joseph, was certainly not. The island of Corsica was sold to Louis XV by the Republic of Genoa in a deal that was not confirmed by the island’s assembly until September 1770, when Napoleon was one year old. Napoleon’s father had served as secretary to Pasquale Paoli, who had led the revolt against Genoa and who would lead another against the rule of the Jacobin Convention, before dying in England.
Corsica had a long history of self-government, the terra di commune, going back to the eleventh century. It survived under Pisan, Genoan, and French royal suzerainty, until suppressed by the French Republic.
Since 1793, Corse has been incorporated into metropolitan France as Département 90; but its individual character is very marked, and local separatism has always been present. The regional law of 1982 returned a measure of autonomy, but not enough to eliminate anti-French terrorism. The illegal Corsican National Liberation Front can be compared to the ETA of the Basque provinces in Spain or to the IRA in Northern Ireland.1 Despite a widespread stereotype, terrorist-style nationalism is not confined to Eastern Europe or the Balkans.
All these issues came to a head after 1685, when Charles was succeeded by his brother, James II (r. 1685–8 (1701))—a militant Catholic, an absolutist, and a client of Louis XTV. His accession was marked by two more unsuccessful rebellions—by the Duke of Argyll in Scotland and by the Duke of Monmouth in England. When the King tried to widen the toleration acts to include Catholics, the dominant Protestant and Parliamentary party in England—henceforth known as ‘Whigs’—forced a showdown on their royalist opponents—henceforth known as ‘Tories’. The spectre of civil and religious strife beckoned, though trimmers of every hue, like the Anglo-Irish Vicar of Bray, were ready to keep their positions at any cost:
When royal James possessed the throne
And Popery came in fashion,
The Penal Laws I hooted down
And signed the Declaration.
The Church of Rome I found did fit
Full well my constitution;
And I had been a Jesuit
But for the Revolution.
And this is Law that I’ll maintain,
Until my dying day, Sir!
That whatsoever King may reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!23
James put his faith in mobilizing French support, and succeeded in fleeing abroad at the second attempt.
The Protestant victory was secured by the firm action of the Dutch Stadholder, William of Orange, the husband of James’s daughter Mary, who was determined to stop England from falling into Louis’s net. Landing at Torbay on 5 November 1688 with a powerful army of mercenaries, he cleared London of English troops without resistance, and estabUshed a position of unassailable strength. Only then did he summon the Convention Parliament which was to carry out the ‘glorious’ and ‘bloodless’ revolution and to offer him the English throne jointly with his wife.24 Here was a resolution which suited all the main participants. The States General of the United Provinces, who paid for the operation, were content to see their Stadholder in a stronger position abroad than in the Netherlands. William was content to have greatly increased his resources for fighting the French. The English ‘Whigs’ were content to have a foreign king whom they could control more easily than the Stuarts.
In England, the ‘Revolution’ was confirmed by the Declaration and the Bill of Rights and by another Toleration Act (which admitted Protestant dissenters but not Catholics). It was closely allied to new constitutional arrangements which shifted the balance away from the Crown and towards Parliament. In Ireland, it was achieved by bloody conquest and the triumph of ‘King Billy’ and his ‘Orangemen’ at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 (11) July 1690.*It perpetuated the Protestant supremacy in a largely Catholic country. In Scotland, it was sealed by the treacherous Massacre of Glencoe (1692)—where the murder of the Catholic Clan Macdonald by the English-backed Campbells marked the onset of a war to the death between Lowlands and Highlands. Internationally, it was accompanied by the engagement of England and Scotland in the League of Augsburg, and in all subsequent coalitions against Louis XIV.
LLOYD’S
ON18 February 1688 the London Gazette mentioned a coffee-house run by Edward Lloyd in Tower Street. Shortly afterwards Lloyd launched a weekly bulletin, the precursor of Lloyd’s List, providing news about commerce and shipping. By so doing, he supplied both a meeting-place and an information service for all interested in the insurance business. Lloyd’s would grow into the world’s largest insurance association. Transferred to the Royal Exchange, it issued its first standardized policy in 1774. It was reorganized in 1811 [TABARD], its privileges confirmed by statute in 1888. It provides the point of contact between the syndicates of ‘names’, who subscribe the capital, and the firms of ‘underwriters’, who share out the cover on every policy issued.
The insurance business sells security. Its roots can be traced to the trading cities of medieval Italy, where the principle of ‘mutuality’, or risk-sharing, was clearly understood. It was one of the preconditions for the growth of commerce. Its acceleration in the eighteenth century reflects the wider growth of security in many other spheres.
Initially, the culture of insurance was the preserve of a tiny mercantile élite, [MERCANTE] But it steadily extended its frontiers—first into new areas of risk, such as fire, life, accident, and health; secondly into new social constituencies; and thirdly into new, less commercialized regions of Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century, governments were beginning to ponder the benefits of universal insurance schemes; and in 1888 the German government introduced a health and pension scheme for all state employees. By the late twentieth century the concept of ‘social security’, accessible to everyone by right, was a widely accepted ideal.
Insurance had far-reaching implications in the realm of social psychology. If chronic insecurity had encouraged traditional beliefs in religion and [MAGIC], the advance of material security was bound to have its effect on popular responses to the great imponderables of luck and death. In 1693 the Royal Society commissioned Edmund Halley to prepare a statistical report on ‘The Degrees of Mortality of Mankind’. It was worried by a recent financial disaster resulting from annuities sold without reference to age. Halley found that the only suitable data came from Breslau (now Wrocław) in Austrian Silesia, where the registration of deaths included the age of the deceased. By analysing 6,193 births and 5,869 deaths in Breslau for the years 1687–91, he was able to draw up a table, showing the age cohorts of the population, the estimated population totals in each cohort, and the annual number of deaths at each age. From this he demonstrated the principle of life expectancy and the varying probabilities of death. Halley’s ‘Breslau Table’ was the pioneer of all actuarial calculations. It robbed Providence of its monopoly on human mortality.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9, therefore, was not specially glorious nor revolutionary. It set out to save the political and religious Establishment from James’s radical proposals; and it was brought to fruition through the only successful invasion of England since 1066. Yet in subsequent generations it would spawn a powerful myth. It lay at the root of a constitutional doctrine which came to be known as ‘the English ideology’, and which postulates the absolute sovereignty of Parliament. This doctrine holds that ‘absolute despotic power’, as the jurist Blackstone put it, had been transferred from the monarch to the elected Parliament. In theory at least, it gives Parliament the power to rule with all the lofty authoritarianism that was previously enjoyed by England’s kings. In this it differs fundamentally from the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which most other European countries were to acquire from the example either of the USA or of revolutionary France, and which operates through a formal constitution governing all branches of the polity. It inevitably became the flagship not only of Protestant but also of English supremacy within Great Britain, since English MPs could always engineer a majority over the non-English members. It was destined to survive all the changes of subsequent centuries; 300 years later, it would still be offering one of the principal obstacles to Britain’s entry into a united European Community.25
Dynastic complications rendered the ultimate outcome uncertain for 25 years. From 1701, Louis XIV formally recognized the claims of James Edward Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’ or ‘James III’ (1688–1766), whilst the deaths of Mary (1694), of William III (1702), and of all 17 children of Queen Anne (r. 1702–14) rendered the Protestant Stuarts heirless. In the middle of the War of the Spanish Succession, no one needed to be reminded of the mischief which heirlessness could wreak; and the Act of Union (1707) between England and Scotland largely came about as a result of common frustration in London and Edinburgh at the welter of dynastic settlements being floated. As the price of its disbandment, the Scots Parliament was able to secure English acceptance of free trade between the two countries, English cash for settling Scotland’s huge debts, English agreement to the separate existence of Scots law and the Presbyterian Kirk, and the unwritten promise of English armed force against the rebellious Highlands (see Appendix III, p. 1285).
Henceforth, the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’ was to be ruled by a joint Parliament at Westminster; and a new ‘British’ nationality was to be superimposed on the older nations of the islands. Modern British identity derives from this time. English traditions were to be revered. Memories of Scotland’s separate history were to be subverted. Britain entered the era of its greatest assertiveness, free from insular divisions. The choice of the Hanoverians as successors to the Stuarts, though hotly contested, was carried through. Thereafter, a monarchy which was neither English nor Scottish became a pillar of Britishness.26 [GOTHA] [MASON]
The Jacobite cause, which persisted for much of the eighteenth century, encompassed all that was lost in the events of 1688–1714. Apart from the personal fortunes of the Old Pretender and his son, Charles Edward Stuart, variously known as the ‘Young Pretender’, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, and ‘Charles III’ (1720–88), it united all the wounded feelings connected with the defeated order. It mourned the demise of the old monarchies, of English Catholicism and its European connections, of the rights of the Scots and the Irish to control their own destinies. In England it commanded the sympathy of many High Tories, and of all who wept for the fugitives and exiles. It inspired two great risings—’the Fifteen’ (1715), which saw the Jacobite armies march as far south as Lancashire, and the ‘Forty-Five’ (1745), which saw them reach Derby.
This latter occasion inspired the ultimate campaign to destroy the civilization of the Scottish Highlands. After the terrible disaster of Culloden Moor, on 16 April 1746, when the last great charge of the clansmen was cut down by the volleys of redcoat English and Lowland Scots, the life of the clans was suppressed forever. Their Gaelic language was proscribed, their native dress forbidden, their organizations banned, their leaders banished. The terrible Clearances, which allowed loyalist landowners to expel the inhabitants in favour of sheep, left more Gaels in North America than in Scotland. They gave the Highlands that haunting emptiness which unknowing tourists have admired ever since, [PHILIBEG]
Combined with the enclosure movement, which had been driving smallholders from the land in England for two centuries or more, the Clearances completed a purging process which was to give British society some of its most abiding characteristics. These purges deprived Great Britain of the peasants who formed the backbone of most other nations in Europe. They took away the social solidarity, the primitive democracy, and the sort of national consciousness which grows naturally from a peasant-based community. They meant that a sense of British nationality could only be projected downwards from the institutions of the state, especially from Crown and Empire, and could not grow upwards from the peasant family’s traditional attachment to the soil. Henceforth the soil was largely the property of a narrow class of farmers and landowners. British society was divided into a well-endowed loyalist minority and a dispossessed majority, who would carry the half-remembered resentments of their disinheritance into the very bowels of the British class system.