History Essay

A HISTORY OF EUROPE IN THE MODERN WORLD

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd ipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd i 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd iipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd ii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

E L E V E N T H E D I T I O N

A HISTORY OF EUROPE IN THE MODERN WORLD

R.R. Palmer Joel Colton Lloyd Kramer

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd iiipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd iii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

A HISTORY OF EUROPE IN THE MODERN WORLD, ELEVENTH EDITION

Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121. Copyright © 2014 by McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Previous editions © 2007, 2002, and 1995. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education, including, but not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning.

Some ancillaries, including electronic and print components, may not be available to customers outside the United States.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 DOW/DOW 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

ISBN 978-0-07-338554-9 MHID 0-07-338554-9

Senior Vice President, Products & Markets: Kurt L. Strand Vice President, General Manager: Michael Ryan Vice President, Content Production & Technology Services: Kimberly Meriwether David Executive Director of Development: Lisa Pinto Managing Director: Gina Boedeker Editorial Coordinator: Adina Lonn Managing Development Editor: Penina Braffman Marketing Specialist: Alexandra Schultz Director, Content Production: Terri Schiesl Senior Project Manager: Lisa Brufl odt Buyer: Nicole Baumgartner Cover Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsca-00339] Compositor: Laserwords Private Limited Typeface: 10/12 Times LT Std Printer: R. R. Donnelley

All credits appearing on page or at the end of the book are considered to be an extension of the copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Palmer, R. R. (Robert Roswell), 1909-2002.

[History of the modern world] A history of Europe in the modern world / R.R. Palmer, Joel Colton, Lloyd Kramer. — Eleventh edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-07-338554-9 (acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-07-759960-7 (acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-07-759958-4 (acid-free paper) 1. History, Modern. 2. Europe—History—1492- I. Colton, Joel, 1918-2011. II. Kramer, Lloyd S. III. Title. D209.P26 2014 090.08—dc23 2013018526

The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website does not indicate an endorsement by the authors or McGraw-Hill Education, and McGraw-Hill Education does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites.

www.mhhe.com

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd ivpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd iv 8/14/13 5:23 PM8/14/13 5:23 PM

Final PDF to printer

v

R.R. PALMER was born in Chicago. After graduating from the University of Chicago he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1934. From 1936 to 1963 he taught at Princeton University, taking leave during World War II to work on historical projects in Washington, D.C. In 1963 he moved to Washington University in St. Louis to serve as dean of arts and sciences but in 1969 resumed his career in teaching and research, this time at Yale. After his retirement he lived in Princeton, where he was affi liated with the Institute for Advanced Study, and then in a retirement community in Newtown Pennsylvania. Of the numerous books he wrote, translated, and edited, three of the most important have been his Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (1939); Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (1941, 1989); and his two-volume Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959, 1964), the fi rst volume of which won the Bancroft Prize. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1970, received honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad, and was awarded the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for History in Rome in 1990. He was a long-time fellow of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 2002, widely recognized as one of the preeminent historians of his generation.

JOEL COLTON was born in New York City. A graduate of the City College of New York, he served as a military intelligence offi cer in Europe in World War II, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1950. He served on the faculty of Duke University for more than four decades, chairing the History Department from 1967 to1974 and chairing the university’s academic council from 1971 to 1973. On leave from Duke, he served from 1974 to 1981 with the Rockefeller Foundation in New York as director of its research and fellowship program in the humanities. In 1986 Duke voted him a Distinguished Teaching Award. He received Guggenheim, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies and Historical Abstracts, and was co-president of the International Commission on the History of Social Movements and Social Structures. In 1979 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writings include Compulsory Labor Arbitration in France, 1936–1939 (1951); Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics (1966, 1987), for which he received a Mayfl ower Award; Twentieth Century (1968,1980) in The Time-Life Great Ages of Man Series; and numerous contributions to journals, encyclopedias, and collaborative volumes. He died in 2011, having served as the distinguished co-author of A History of the Modern World for every revision after the fi rst edition.

LLOYD KRAMER was born in Maryville, Tennessee, and graduated from Maryville College. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1983. Before entering Cornell, he was a teacher in Hong Kong and he traveled widely in Asia. After completing his graduate studies, he taught at Stanford University and Northwestern University. Since 1986 he has been a member of the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he is currently a professor of History. He has served two terms as chair of his Department and received two awards for distinguished undergradu- ate teaching. His writings include Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848 (1988); Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (1996), which won the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French His- torical Studies and the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies; and Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775 (2011). He has also co-edited several books, including a collection of essays on historical edu- cation in America and A Companion to Western Historical Thought (2002). He has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center; and he served as president of the Society for French Historical Studies.

A b o u t t h e A u t h o r s

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd vpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd v 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

vi

List of Chapter Illustrations xiv

List of Chronologies, Historical Interpretations and Debates, Maps, Charts,

and Tables xxii

Preface xxv

Geography and History 1

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe 9 Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–1560 49 Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion,

1560–1648 99

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715 147 Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740 195 Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World 233 Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire 267 Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment 309 Chapter 9 The French Revolution 363 Chapter 10 Napoleonic Europe 411 Chapter 11 Industries, Ideas, and the Struggle for Reform, 1815–1848 449 Chapter 12 Revolutions and the Reimposition of Order, 1848–1870 501 Chapter 13 The Consolidation of Large Nation-States, 1859–1871 535 Chapter 14 European Civilization, 1871–1914: Economy and Politics 569 Chapter 15 European Civilization, 1871–1914: Society and Culture 611 Chapter 16 Europe’s World Supremacy, 1871–1914 643 Chapter 17 The First World War 689 Chapter 18 The Russian Revolution and the Emergence of the

Soviet Union 735

Chapter 19 Democracy, Anti-Imperialism, and the Economic Crisis after the First World War 779

Chapter 20 Democracy and Dictatorship in the 1930s 811 Chapter 21 The Second World War 843 Chapter 22 The Cold War and Reconstruction after the Second

World War 883

Chapter 23 Decolonization and the Breakup of the European Empires 925 Chapter 24 Coexistence, Confrontation, and the New European Economy 959

B r i e f C o n t e n t s

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd vipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd vi 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

viiBrief Contents

Chapter 25 The International Revolt against Soviet Communism 987 Chapter 26 Europe and the Changing Modern World 1019 Appendix Rulers and Regimes A1

Index I1 Suggestions for Further Reading Online at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd viipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd vii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

viii

List of Chapter Illustrations xiv

List of Chronologies, Historical Interpretations and Debates, Maps, Charts,

and Tables xxii

Preface xxv

Geography and History 1

Chapter 1 THE RISE OF EUROPE 9 1. Ancient Times: Greece, Rome, and Christianity 11 2. The Early Middle Ages: The Formation of Europe 19 3. The High Middle Ages: Secular Civilization 29 4. The High Middle Ages: The Church 38

Chapter 2 THE UPHEAVAL IN WESTERN CHRISTENDOM, 1300–1560 49 5. Disasters of the Fourteenth Century 50 6. The Renaissance in Italy 56 7. The Renaissance Outside Italy 70 8. The New Monarchies 74 9. The Protestant Reformation 77 10. Catholicism Reformed and Reorganized 93

Chapter 3 THE ATLANTIC WORLD, COMMERCE, AND WARS OF RELIGION, 1560–1648 99 11. The Opening of the Atlantic 100 12. The Commercial Revolution 108 13. Changing Social Structures 117 14. The Wars of Catholic Spain: The Netherlands and England 124 15. The Disintegration and Reconstruction of France 133 16. The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648: The Disintegration

of Germany 138

Chapter 4 THE GROWING POWER OF WESTERN EUROPE, 1640–1715 147 17. The Grand Monarque and the Balance of Power 148 18. The Dutch Republic 151

C o n t e n t s

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd viiipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd viii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

Contents ix

19. Britain: The Civil War 158 20. Britain: The Triumph of Parliament 165 21. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph

of Absolutism 173

22. The Wars of Louis XIV: The Peace of Utrecht, 1713 186

Chapter 5 THE TRANSFORMATION OF EASTERN EUROPE, 1648–1740 195 23. Three Aging Empires 196 24. The Formation of an Austrian Monarchy 206 25. The Formation of Prussia 210 26. The Transformation of Russia 218

Chapter 6 THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD 233 27. The Emergence of a Scientifi c Culture: Bacon and Descartes 234 28. The Road to Newton: The Law of Universal Gravitation 240 29. New Knowledge of Human Beings and Society 251 30. Political Theory: The School of Natural Law 260

Chapter 7 THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR WEALTH AND EMPIRE 267 31. Elite and Popular Cultures 268 32. The Global Economy of the Eighteenth Century 275 33. Western Europe after the Peace of Utrecht, 1713–1740 285 34. The Great War of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Peace

of Paris, 1763 294

Chapter 8 THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT 309 35. The Philosophes—and Others 310 36. Enlightened Despotism: France, Austria, Prussia 324 37. Enlightened Despotism: Russia 333 38. The Partitions of Poland 339 39. New Stirrings: The British Reform Movement 343 40. The American Revolution 352

Chapter 9 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 363 41. Social and Cultural Backgrounds 364 42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France 369

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd ixpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd ix 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

Contentsx

43. The Revolution and Europe: The War and the “Second” Revolution, 1792 385

44. The Emergency Republic, 1792–1795: The Terror 389 45. The Constitutional Republic: The Directory, 1795–1799 400 46. The Authoritarian Republic: The Consulate, 1799–1804 405

Chapter 10 NAPOLEONIC EUROPE 411 47. The Formation of the French Imperial System 412 48. The Grand Empire: Spread of the Revolution 420 49. The Continental System: Britain and Europe 425 50. The National Movements and New Nationalist Cultures 431 51. The Overthrow of Napoleon: The Congress of Vienna 437

Chapter 11 INDUSTRIES, IDEAS, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR REFORM, 1815–1848 449 52. The Industrial Revolution in Britain 451 53. The Advent of the “ISMS” 460 54. The Leaking Dam and the Flood: Domestic 475 55. The Leaking Dam and the Flood: International 479 56. The Breakthrough of Liberalism in the West:

Revolutions of 1830–1832 487

57. Triumph of the West European Bourgeoisie 495

Chapter 12 REVOLUTIONS AND THE REIMPOSITION OF ORDER, 1848–1870 501 58. Paris: The Specter of Social Revolution in the West 502 59. Vienna: The Nationalist Revolutions in Central Europe

and Italy 508

60. Frankfurt and Berlin: The Question of a Liberal Germany 515 61. The New European “ISMS”: Realism, Positivism,

Marxism 520

62. Bonapartism: The Second French Empire, 1852–1870 530

Chapter 13 THE CONSOLIDATION OF LARGE NATION-STATES, 1859–1871 535 63. Backgrounds: The Idea of the Nation-State 536 64. Cavour and the Italian War of 1859: The Unifi cation

of Italy 539

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd x 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

Contents xi

65. The Founding of a German Empire and the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary 544

66. Tsarist Russia: Social Change and the Limits of Political Reform 555

67. Nation-Building in the Wider Atlantic World: The United States and Canada 563

Chapter 14 EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION, 1871–1914: ECONOMY AND POLITICS 569 68. The Modern “Civilized World” 570 69. Basic Demography: The Increase of Europe’s Population 573 70. The World Economy of the Nineteenth Century 583 71. The Advance of Democracy: Third French Republic, United

Kingdom, German Empire 593

Chapter 15 EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION, 1871–1914: SOCIETY AND CULTURE 611 72. The Advance of Democracy: Socialism, Labor Unions, and

Feminism 612

73. Science, Philosophy, the Arts, and Religion 620 74. The Waning of Classical Liberalism 636

Chapter 16 EUROPE’S WORLD SUPREMACY, 1871–1914 643 75. Imperialism: Its Nature and Causes 645 76. The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire 653 77. The Partition of Africa 662 78. Imperialism in Asia: The Dutch, the British, and the Russians 671 79. Imperialism in Asia: China and Europe 678 80. The Russo-Japanese War and Its Consequences 685

Chapter 17 THE FIRST WORLD WAR 689 81. The International Anarchy 689 82. The Armed Stalemate 699 83. The Collapse of Russia and the Intervention

of the United States 709

84. The Collapse of the Austrian and German Empires 714 85. The Economic, Social, and Cultural Impact of the War 716 86. The Peace of Paris, 1919 724

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xi 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

Contentsxii

Chapter 18 THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOVIET UNION 735 87. Backgrounds 737 88. The Revolution of 1905 744 89. The Revolution of 1917 749 90. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 758 91. Stalin: The Five-Year Plans and the Purges 765 92. The International Impact of Communism, 1919–1939 774

Chapter 19 DEMOCRACY, ANTI-IMPERIALISM, AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR 779 93. The Advance of Democracy after 1919 779 94. The German Republic and the Spirit of Locarno 784 95. Anti-Imperialist Movements in Asia 790 96. The Great Depression: Collapse of the World Economy 802

Chapter 20 DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP IN THE 1930S 811 97. Trials and Adjustments of Democracy in Britain and France 812 98. Italian Fascism 821 99. Totalitarianism: Germany’s Third Reich 827

Chapter 21 THE SECOND WORLD WAR 843 100. The Weakness of the Democracies: Again to War 844 101. The Years of Axis Triumph 853 102. The Western-Soviet Victory 861 103. The Foundations of the Peace 876

Chapter 22 THE COLD WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR 883 104. The Cold War: The Opening Decade, 1945–1955 884 105. Western Europe: Economic Reconstruction 897 106. Western Europe: Political Reconstruction 901 107. Europe and the Global Economy 912 108. Communist Societies in the U.S.S.R.

and Eastern Europe 918

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xiipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

Contents xiii

Chapter 23 DECOLONIZATION AND THE BREAKUP OF THE EUROPEAN EMPIRES 925 109. The Emergence of Independent Nations in South Asia and

Southeast Asia 927

110. The African Revolution 936 111. Europe and the Modern Middle East 947

Chapter 24 COEXISTENCE, CONFRONTATION, AND THE NEW EUROPEAN ECONOMY 959 112. Confrontation and Détente, 1955–1975 960 113. Collapse and Recovery of the European and Global Economy:

The 1970s and 1980s 970

114. The Cold War Rekindled and Defused 981

Chapter 25 THE INTERNATIONAL REVOLT AGAINST SOVIET COMMUNISM 987 115. The Crisis in the Soviet Union 988 116. The Collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern

Europe 992

117. The Collapse of the Soviet Union 1000 118. After Communism 1005

Chapter 26 EUROPE AND THE CHANGING MODERN WORLD 1019 119. Western Europe after the Cold War 1020 120. Nation-States and Economies in the Age of Globalization 1024 121. Intellectual and Social Transitions in Modern Cultures 1036 122. Europe and International Confl icts in the Early Twenty-First

Century 1058

123. Social and Environmental Challenges in the Twenty-First Century 1067

Appendix RULERS AND REGIMES A1

Index I1

Suggestions for Further Reading Online at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xiiipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xiii 8/14/13 4:41 PM8/14/13 4:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

xiv

The Parthenon 12

Ruins of the Roman Forum 14

Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus 15

St. Augustine 18

Hagia Sophia 22

Medieval Spanish Monastery 27

Medieval Peasant 31

Symbol of Florentine Wool Guild 35

The Meeting of St. Anthony and St. Paul by Sassetta 43

Thomas Aquinas by Fra Bartelemo 44

European Crusaders at Antioch 47

Religious Procession of Medieval Flagellants 54

Renaissance Italian Bankers 57

Renaissance Italian Wool Merchants 58

Procession of the Three Kings to Bethlehem by Benozzo Gozzoli 59

Lorenzo de’ Medici Examining a Model of His Villa 60

Portrait of a Condottiere by Giovanni Bellini 62

Detail from Zacharias in the Temple by Domenico Ghirlandaio 64

Portrait of a Family by Lavinia Fontana 66

Florentine Council Debating on War with Pisa by Giorgio Vasari 68

Niccoló Machiavelli 69

Erasmus of Rotterdam by Hans Holbein, the Younger 73

Interrogation of the Jews 78

Martin Luther and His Wife Catherine by Lucas Cranach, the Elder 81

Siege of Munster, Germany, in 1534 83

John Calvin 87

Queen Elizabeth I 90

Pierre de Moucheron and Family 92

St. Ignatius Loyola by Peter Paul Rubens 96

Detail from An Episode in the Conquest of America by Jan Mostaert 103

European Meeting with an African Council in Guinea 106

Slaves Processing Diamonds in Brazil 106

The Aztec Language in the Latin Alphabet 109

The Silver Mines at Potosí 110

Jakob Fugger by Albrecht Dürer 111

Study of Two Black Heads by Rembrandt van Rijn 112

The Four Estates of Society: Work by Jean Bourdichon 114

L i s t o f C h a p t e r I l l u s t r a t i o n s

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xivpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xiv 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chapter Illustrations xv

The Dutch East India Company Headquarters 117

Old Woman Cooking Eggs by Diego Valázquez 120

Monk Teaching Students at the University of Salamanca 122

King Philip II of Spain by Titian 126

The Spanish Armada 130

St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre by François Dubois 136

“The Hanging Tree” [from] The Great Miseries of War by Jacques Callot 141

Masters of the Cloth Guild by Rembrandt Van Rijn 152

Portrait of the Artist with Isabelle Brandt by Peter Paul Rubens 153

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window by Jan Vermeer 154

The Geographer by Jan Vermeer 156

William Shakespeare 159

The Execution of King Charles I 164

Woman Speaking at a Quaker Meeting 165

Molière Performing in “The School for Wives” by François Delpech 175

Inspiration of the Epic Poet by Nicolas Poussin 177

Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud 180

The Building of Versailles by Adam François van der Mueleh 182

View of the Château of Versailles by Pierre Denis Martin 182

Persecution of the Huguenots 186

The Battle of Blenheim 190

Peasant Family in a Room by Louis Le Nain 191

Count Stanislas Potocki by Jacques-Louis David 201

Suleiman the Magnifi cent 204

Turkish Siege of Vienna in 1683 208

Frederick William, the Great Elector 213

Prussian Army Uniforms 219

Stephen Razin as Painted by Surikov 223

Peter the Great 225

The Construction of St. Petersburg 228

Execution for Witchcraft in the Seventeenth Century 236

René Descartes by Frans Hals 239

A Scholar Holding a Thesis on Botany by Willem Moreelse 241

The Copernican Conception of the Solar System 243

Galileo and His Telescope 244

Founding of the Academy of Sciences and the Observatory in 1666 by Henri Testelin 249

Isaac Newton 250

Ambassadors from Siam at Versailles 253

Seventeenth-Century Library 256

Baruch Spinoza by Samuel Van Hoogstraten 260

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xvpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xv 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chapter Illustrationsxvi

John Locke by John Greenhill 265

Gin Lane by William Hogarth 271

Café Frascati by Philibert-Louis Debucourt 271

A Carnival on the Feast Day of Saint George by Pieter Bruegel, the Younger 274

Women at Work in an Irish Cottage 276

Enslaved Workers on a Plantation in Barbados 282

The Duet by Arthur Devis 284

John Law, Wind Monopolist 289

M. Bachelier, Director of the Lyons Farms by Jean-Baptiste Oudry 292

Frederick the Great of Prussia as a Young Man 296

Maria Theresa and Her Family by Martin van Meytens 298

Schönbrunn Palace 300

The Battle of Quebec 304

A British Army Offi cer’s Wife in India 306

Reading at the Salon of Mme. de Geoffrin by Anicet-Charles-Gabriel Lemonnier 315

Voltaire by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour 316

Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Allan Ramsay 321

The Parlement of Paris 330

Catherine the Great by Alexander Roslin 336

Emelian Pugachev in an Iron Cage 337

The Hon. Mrs. Graham by Thomas Gainsborough 347

Edmund Burke 349

Mrs. Isaac Smith by John Singleton Copley 354

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense 357

Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull 360

Eighteenth-Century French Peasants Working in Fields 365

Meeting of the French Estates General 372

The Tennis Court Oath by Jacques-Louis David 374

The Capture of the Bastille 376

Olympe de Gouges 377

A Woman of the Revolution by Jacques-Louis David 378

Frenchmen Creating a New Constitution 380

French Paper Money, the “Assignats” 382

The Festival of the Federation, 1790 384

Parisians Pulling Down a Statue of Louis XIV 392

The Battle of Fleurus 397

The Execution of Robespierre 398

Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David 407

Toussaint L’Ouverture 413

Napoleon and Alexander I Meeting on the Niemen River 417

The Third of May 1808 by Francisco de Goya 419

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xvipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xvi 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chapter Illustrations xvii

Germaine de Staël by François Gérard 426

The Arch of Triumph in Paris 429

The Madeleine Church in Paris 430

Blowing Up the Corsican Bottle Conjurer 433

The French Army’s Retreat from Russia 440

The Congress of Vienna 443

English Cotton Mill 453

Early Train in Nineteenth-Century England 456

The British Houses of Parliament 464

Mary Wollstonecraft 467

Saint-Simonian Feminist by Malreuve 469

Caricature of George Sand by Alcide Lorentz 471

Coronation of Charles X in Reims 477

German Students at a Festival in 1817 479

The “Peterloo Massacre” by Cruikshank 480

Simón Bolívar 485

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix 490

Big Investments by Honoré Daumier 497

The London Police 500

Parisian Crowd in the Revolution of 1848 504

Crowds in the Streets of Vienna in 1848 510

Joseph Mazzini 515

The Frankfurt Assembly in 1848 519

A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet 524

Workers in Manchester during the 1840s 525

Karl Marx 528

Construction Workers and the Rebuilding of Paris 533

Florence Nightingale at a Military Hospital in Crimea 539

Giuseppe Garibaldi 544

Otto von Bismarck 547

Battle of Sedan in 1870 551

Proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles by Anton von Werner 553

The Arrival of the Bride by Miklos Barabas 555

Russian Peasants in the Late Nineteenth Century 561

Emancipated Ex-Slaves in the American South during the Civil War 564

Train in the Snow by Claude Monet 572

The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet 577

Victorian-Era English Family 578

Immigrant Family Arriving in New York 582

Steel Factory in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain 585

Classic Landscape by Charles Sheeler 587

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xviipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xvii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chapter Illustrationsxviii

Workers Transporting Tea in India 592

The Bon Marché Department Store in Paris 595

Supporters of the Paris Commune in 1871 597

Captain Alfred Dreyfus in the 1890s 598

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat 603

British Coal Miners in the Early Twentieth Century 604

Cartoon Portrayal of Kaiser William II’s Removal of Bismarck by John Tenniel 608

Illustration of British Miners Voting to Strike 614

Emmeline Pankhurst 619

Women Demanding Equal Voting Rights in Britain 619

Charles Darwin 621

Sigmund Freud 625

Albert Einstein 626

Ia Orana Maria by Paul Gauguin 628

Cathedral at Rouen by Claude Monet 629

Young Girl Boating by Berthe Morisot 630

The Boating Party by Mary Cassatt 631

Self-Portrait with Beret by Paul Cezanne 632

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso 633

Theodor Herzl 636

John Stuart Mill 637

Coal Miners in France 641

Railroad Locomotive Arriving in Central India 647

British Missionary and Africans Making Bread 649

British Offi cials with Indian Servants in India 652

Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II 657

British Ship in the Suez Canal 660

Workers in the Congo Harvesting Rubber for Export 665

Workers Building a Gold Mine in Southern Africa 668

British Soldiers in South Africa during the Boer War 671

The Sepoy Rebellion in India 674

Jawaharlal Nehru 675

The Boxer Uprising in China 684

Japanese Troops at Battle of Mukden in Russo-Japanese War of 1905 686

Kaiser William II in Morocco in 1905 694

Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria with Catholic Leaders in Sarajevo 697

German Soldiers at the Berlin Railway Station in 1914 701

French Departure Trench on the Western Front 702

Soldiers on the Battlefi eld at Passchendaele in 1917 703

British Front in Flanders in 1917 704

T. E. Lawrence with Prince Faisal at Versailles 707

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xviiipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xviii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chapter Illustrations xix

American Soldiers in France in 1917 714

German Women Working in an Armaments Factory during the First World War 718

Austrian and French Wartime Propaganda Posters 720

Wilfred Owen 721

Leaders of the Allied Powers at the Versailles Peace Conference 729

Russian Peasants Harvesting Hay 740

Lenin Addressing a Crowd 743

Protest March in St. Petersburg in 1905 746

Tsar Nicholas II and His Family 750

Rasputin 750

Demonstration in St. Petersburg in 1917 752

Leon Trotsky 756

Red Army Artillery Battalion 757

Soviet Political Poster 759

Farmers in the Soviet Union Using New Tractors 768

Soviet Automobile Factory with Portrait of Stalin 772

Soviet Propaganda Poster of Stalin by Konstantin Ivanov 773

Lenin at Meeting of Third International in 1920 776

Poster Urging American Women to Use Their New Right to Vote 781

Outdoor Cafe and Park in Vienna 783

Crowd Burning Spartacist Publications in Berlin 786

German Merchants Calculating Daily Sales 789

Greek Muslim Refugees in Turkey in 1923 794

Mustapha Kemal Atatürk Dancing at His Daughter’s Wedding 796

Mohandas Gandhi and Other Indian Nationalists at a Protest March 799

Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on the “Long March” 802

Crowd at a London Cinema 804

British “Hunger March” in 1935 807

Autour d’Elle by Marc Chagall 809

British Marchers in General Strike of 1926 in London 813

British Army Troops in Dublin 817

French Workers at a Subway Construction Site 818

French Premier Léon Blum Addressing Supporters of the Popular Front 819

Fascists in “March on Rome” in October 1922 823

Benito Mussolini Speaking at an Italian Fascist Rally 824

Italian Woman at a Fascist Rally 826

Hitler with Supporters at the Time of the “Beer Hall Putsch ” 828

Nazi Military Parade in Nuremburg 830

Damage to Jewish Shops after Kristallnacht in Berlin 832

Nazi Image of the “New People” 838

Saluting Adolf Hitler at a Nazi Rally in Nuremberg 839

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xixpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xix 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chapter Illustrationsxx

Hitler Entering Vienna in 1938 after the Anschluss 846

Anti-Fascist Rally in Spain 848

Guernica by Pablo Picasso 849

Sudetens Welcoming Arrival of German Troops in 1938 851

German Troops Entering a Polish Village in 1939 854

German Soldiers Marching through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris 857

Russian Casualties on Eastern Front in Early 1942 860

British Women in the Auxiliary Territorial Service 863

Urban Desolation during the Battle of Stalingrad 865

Survivors Liberated from the Concentration Camp at Buchenwald 871

A Nazi Concentration Camp in 1945 874

Hiroshima, Devastation after the Atomic Bomb 875

Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta 879

The Survivor by George Grosz 880

Filipino Representative Pedro Lopez Addressing the United Nations 886

Churchill Giving a Speech Describing the New Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe 888

The Berlin Airlift 891

Children Near a Tank during the Korean War 896

Women at Work in a British Television Factory 900

French Kindergarten in 1950 904

Students and Police Clash in Paris in May 1968 907

Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer 910

High-Speed Train in Japan 913

The London Stock Exchange 917

Nikita Khrushchev with President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon 920

Protesters in Budapest Burn Pictures of Joseph Stalin in 1956 924

Presentation of Flag on India Independence Day 927

Refugees Fleeing from West Pakistan in 1947 930

British High Commissioner MacGillivray leaving Kuala Lumpur in 1957 932

Independence Day Parade in Kuala Lumpur 932

Indonesian President Sukarno at Bandung in 1955 934

French Soldiers after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 935

French Soldiers in the Streets of Oran, Algeria 940

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana 941

Refugees from Uganda Arriving in London in 1972 943

David Ben-Gurion, the First Prime Minister of Israel 949

Palestinians in a Refugee Camp in 1956 950

British Soldiers in Suez in 1956 952

Iranian Women Wielding Guns after the Iranian Revolution 956

Construction of the Berlin Wall 964

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xx 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chapter Illustrations xxi

Protest against the Vietnam War in Britain 966

Citizens of Prague Destroy a Soviet Tank 968

Protest by French Newspaper Workers 971

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher 973

French Workers Protesting Conditions at an Auto Factory 976

Helmut Kohl in Strasbourg 978

French Voter at the Time of the Referendum on Maastricht Treaty 980

German Protest against New Missile Deployments 985

Mikhail Gorbachev Meets with Potato Farmers Near Moscow 991

Supporters of the Solidarity Movement in Warsaw 995

Alexander Dubcek, Vaclav Havel, and Marta Kubisova 997

Destruction of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 998

Boris Yeltsin Waves to Supporters outside the Parliament Building in Moscow 1004

People Forced to Flee Violence in Chechen City of Grozny 1009

Muslims Mourning the Victims of “Ethnic Cleansing” in Sarajevo Cemetery 1014

People in Belgrade Demand the Resignation of President Slobodan Milosevic 1017

Multicultural School in Contemporary London 1022

Ségolène Royal and Angela Merkel 1026

Dutch Soccer Team at Euro Cup Competition in 2008 1032

President of European Commission Addressing European Parliament in Brussels 1033

Students at University Computer Center Working in “Virtual Library” 1035

French and Russian Astronauts 1041

Jean-Paul Sartre 1042

Fabulous Race-Track of Death by Matta 1045

Family Life by Jean Dubuffet 1046

Mother and Child by Henry Moore 1047

Pope John Paul II in Poland 1050

Mosque in Duisburg, Germany 1053

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones in Los Angeles 1054

Simone de Beauvoir 1056

Supporters of Same-Sex Marriage in Spain 1057

Wheel Man by Ernest Trova 1061

Barack Obama in Prague 1063

World Trade Center Towers after Crash of Second Aircraft 1064

German Soldiers in Afghanistan 1068

British Troops in Iraq 1069

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxi 8/14/13 4:41 PM8/14/13 4:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

xxii

Chronologies Notable Events, 500 B.C.E.–1300 C.E. 39

Notable Events, 1309–1555 84

Notable Events, 1492–1648 131

Notable Events, 1642–1713 172

Notable Events, 1640–1740 221

Notable Events, 1543–1697 258

Notable Events, 1619–1763 301

Notable Events, 1733–1795 350

Notable Events, 1789–1804 403

Notable Events, 1799–1815 436

Notable Events, 1780–1869 494

Notable Events, 1848–1857 521

Notable Events, 1854–1871 563

Notable Events, 1850–1914 605

Notable Events, 1859–1920 639

Notable Events, 1850–1906 682

Notable Events, 1879–1920 725

Notable Events, 1894–1937 770

Notable Events, 1911–1935 803

Notable Events, 1922–1938 837

Notable Events, 1935–1945 876

Notable Events, 1945–1962 919

Notable Events, 1946–1979 948

Notable Events, 1957–1995 979

Notable Events, 1980–2012 1011

Notable Events, 1949–2011 1060

Historical Interpretations and Debates Europe and the Americas 107

The Meaning of the English Revolution 169

Continuity and Discontinuity in the Scientifi c Revolution 246

Social Institutions and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment 322

The Political and Social Signifi cance of the French Revolution 399

Women and the Industrial Revolution 459

The Roots of Modern Nationalism 540

The Rationales and Paradoxes of Modern European Imperialism 654

L i s t o f C h r o n o l o g i e s , H i s t o r i c a l I n t e r p r e t a t i o n s a n d D e b a t e s , M a p s , C h a r t s , a n d T a b l e s

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxiipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chronologies, Historical Interpretations and Debates, Maps, Charts, and Tables xxiii

Cultural Responses to the First World War 722

Women in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany 834

The Nature and Legacy of the Cold War 982

Maps, Charts, and Tables Europe: Physical 4–5

The Mediterranean World about 400, 800, and 1250 C.E. 25

Crusading Activity, 1100–1259 45

Estimated Population of Europe, 1200–1550 51

Europe, 1526 79

State Religions in Europe about 1560 89

European Discoveries, 1450–1600 101

The Low Countries, 1648 129

Europe, 1648 144–145

The Expansion of France, 1661–1713 149

England in the Seventeenth Century 170

France from the Last Years of Louis XIV to the Revolution of 1789 184

The Atlantic World after the Peace of Utrecht, 1713 192

Central and Eastern Europe, 1660–1795 199

Aging Empires and New Powers 200

The Growth of the Austrian Monarchy, 1521–1772 209

The Growth of Prussia, 1415–1918 214–215

The Growth of Russia in the West 230–231

The Growth of Geographical Knowledge 255

The World in 1763 307

Europe, 1740 327

Poland since the Eighteenth Century 342

The French Republic and Its Satellites, 1798–1799 404

Napoleonic Europe, 1810 423

Napoleonic Germany 425

Europe, 1815 446

Britain before and after the Industrial Revolution 457

The Industrial Revolution in Britain (as Shown by Sources of Income) 462

Languages of Europe 473

European Revolutions, 1848 512

Nation-Building, 1859–1867 543

The German Question, 1815–1871 549

Europe, 1871 558–559

Estimated Population of the World by Continental Areas 574

Emigration from Europe, 1850–1940 579

Immigration into Various Countries, 1850–1940 580

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxiiipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxiii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

List of Chronologies, Historical Interpretations and Debates, Maps, Charts, and Tablesxxiv

Migration from Europe, 1850–1940 581

Export of European Capital to 1914 590

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, 1699–1914 661

Precolonial Africa: Sites and Peoples 667

Africa, 1914 670

Imperialism in Asia, 1840–1914 676–677

“The British Lake,” 1918 679

Northeast China and Adjoining Regions in the Era of Imperialism 683

Anglo-German Industrial Competition, 1898 and 1913 693

The Balkans, 1878 and 1914 698

The First World War 700

Europe, 1923 730–731

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1922–1991 762–763

Europe, 1942 864

The Second World War 868–869

The Holocaust 870

Deportation and Settlement, 1939–1950 892–893

Germany and Its Borders, 1919–1990 909

The Indian Subcontinent, 2000 931

Contemporary Africa 938

The Modern Arab World 946

Israel and Adjoining Regions after the Era of the British Mandate 954–955

The World about 1970 962–963

Vietnam and Its Neighbors after the Era of French Colonialism, Showing Boundaries in 1970 967

Russian Federation in 2000 1008

Nationalities in Central and Eastern Europe at the End of the Twentieth Century 1013

The Global Population Explosion 1070

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxivpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxiv 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

xxv

Dramatic events in the contemporary world—wars, revolutions, political upheavals, ter- rorist attacks, catastrophic natural disasters, economic crises, and the endless stream of daily news—often obscure the long-developing historical processes that have created the societies in which we live and the current problems with which we have to cope. The mass media pay little attention to the broader historical patterns and contexts that shape the deeper meaning of swiftly moving public events and private lives. This new edition of this book, which has been retitled A History of Europe in the Modern World, may therefore be seen as the newest version of an ongoing search for historical perspectives on the complex, often bewildering, events of our own era. The book’s new title, which adds the words “Europe in” to the concise phrase that has entitled every previous edition, acknowledges the fact that even a long book cannot adequately describe historical events in the entire “modern world.” At the same time, however, this slight change in a familiar title refl ects other revisions in a new edition that focuses more specifi cally on the history of Europe, while also emphasizing that modern European history has always evolved through interac- tions and exchanges with the wider world.

It is impossible to understand European history without placing it “in the modern world, ” just as it is impossible to understand the modern world without knowing the his- tory of Europe. This book thus carries the guiding assumption that events and ideas in modern European societies have often infl uenced people in every part of the world, but that Europeans have also been constantly infl uenced by their encounters with other peoples and cultures. More generally, the themes of this book build on the presupposition that con- temporary events and confl icts are deeply connected to the diverse cultures, institutions, social systems, economic exchanges, power struggles, empires, and ideas of earlier eras in human history. Nobody can truly understand present times, in short, without studying the past; and in modern times the history of Europe has often entered (for better or for worse) into the history of almost the whole world.

The multiple levels of human history and cross-cultural exchanges have created modern societies that both resemble and differ from the “modernity” that has evolved in Europe since about the fi fteenth century. This book thus describes the main features of this dynamic modern history by examining specifi c nations and landmark events, such as great revolutions, economic transitions, and changing cultural beliefs; but it also emphasizes broad historical and social trends that have developed beneath the most prominent events, gradually creating what we now call “the modern world.” Although the following narra- tive explores the rise of nation-states and the confl icts that have reshaped modern societies over the last several centuries, it links such public events to the wider historical infl uence of the global economy, the development of science, technology, and new forms of knowl- edge, the rise of industry, the signifi cance of religious and philosophical beliefs, the origin and diffusion of new political ideas, the changing mores of family and social life, the evolving views of human rights, and the complex relations between European cultures and other cultures around the world.

The term modern, as it is used in this book, refers to a phase of human history that began about fi ve or six centuries ago and steadily transformed both the material conditions

P r e f a c e

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxvpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxv 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

Prefacexxvi

of human societies and the meaning of individual identities or selfhood. “Modern” ways of life have developed in diverse historical contexts, and they are now evolving more rapidly and in more places than ever before. This book affi rms that every culture and historical era have made important contributions to the collective history of human beings, but it focuses primarily on developments in Europe, even as it traces the growing European involve- ments with other peoples, economies, and political systems far beyond the relatively small continent of Europe itself. The narrative stresses the infl uence of European societies on the emergence of “modern” institutions and social practices, yet it also notes the worldwide exchanges that have contributed to the increasingly global culture of the contemporary era. Europeans were never the only infl uential “actors” in the global creation of moder- nity, but they were often present wherever the transitions to modernity were taking place. These historical transitions generated violence and oppression and political confl icts as well as social, cultural, and economic progress; and it is the combined effects of these modern developments on all human lives (and the natural environment) that provide the essential rationale for historical studies and for this new edition of A History of Europe in the Modern World.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK: CHANGES AND CONTINUITIES As in the past, the book is organized in chapters that carry the narrative across specifi c chronological eras, moving steadily toward the present. Yet the clearly defi ned and num- bered sections within each chapter often deal with themes, events, or issues that do not develop in simple chronological order. Each chapter focuses on a specifi c time frame but also on themes and problems of continuing historical importance. The chronological organization gives readers a broad historical framework and provides opportunities for further analysis and discussion of specifi c historical themes or problems— discussions that can draw, for example, on the Suggestions for Further Reading and other materials that can be found on the companion Online Learning Center Web site ( www.mhhe.com/ palmerhistory11e ), which includes an Interactive Glossary.

Although the history of political systems, state power, revolutions, and international confl icts remains important, some details of national political history have been reduced in this new edition, and whole sections on China, Japan, Africa, and the Americas have been removed. These changes provide a sharper analytical focus on Europe, shorten the text, and align the book more closely with contemporary survey courses. This book goes beyond a “textbook summary” of information by providing analytical themes to engage both nonacademic readers and students who seek broad perspectives on more specifi c kinds of historical scholarship. The narrative therefore explains major events and also draws on the work of recent social, cultural, and intellectual historians who have con- tributed important new insights to modern historical studies. There are discussions of the evolving roles of women in various historical contexts; descriptions of cultural movements and intellectual debates from the early modern to the contemporary period; and new analy- sis of the political, economic, and cultural interactions that took place in European empires and in the anticolonial movements that ultimately brought about the dissolution of imperial systems. Chapters on the breakup of European empires, however, have been shortened and consolidated to emphasize the interactions between Europeans and other peoples around the world.

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxvipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxvi 8/14/13 4:41 PM8/14/13 4:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Preface xxvii

Another important new feature in this edition appears in a series of brief excerpts from the writings of historians who have helped to shape the modern interpretations of notable historical events. Historical knowledge is never simply fi xed or fi nal, because historians constantly fi nd new sources to analyze; or they develop new perspectives to explain long- known persons and confl icts; or they draw new comparisons between events and problems in different cultures and historical eras. This new edition thus includes an introduction to exemplary “Historical Interpretations and Debates,” thereby giving readers concise sum- maries and comparisons of diverse perspectives on past cultures and events. The excerpts that express key themes in these debates come from a wide range of works, including both “classic” historical studies and recent reinterpretations. The purpose of the excerpts is to introduce readers to infl uential debates about key issues and to show how historians develop or revise their analytical themes. Well-informed historical thinking requires both knowledge about past events and the critical evaluation of divergent historical interpreta- tions. The themes of the various debates therefore provide an additional “entry” into the multiple spheres of historical thought and into the constant expansion and revision of his- torical knowledge.

This book describes major events such as the religious wars of earlier centuries, the Scientifi c Revolution, the French and Russian Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, the development of European imperialism, the twentieth-century world wars and globaliz- ing economy, the spread of democracy and the challenges it has faced, the collapse of European-dominated empires, the continuing search for an international order, and the emergence of the European Union. All of these broad developments are analyzed with references to specifi c examples or people, and there are transnational comparisons in the discussion of every historical era.

The visual components have been revised to include new images and illustrations, especially in the later chapters on contemporary European history. Like other kinds of sources, the images and artwork from past cultures provide important historical informa- tion. Knowing how to “read” and critically evaluate illustrations, paintings, and photo- graphs is essential for analytical thought and for cross-cultural comparisons. The brief captions that accompany the illustrations thus connect the visual themes to the book’s historical narrative and interpretations. Other key features of the new edition include new, easier-to-read maps, which are presented in new colors. The maps and charts show the changing boundaries, populations, and economies of different regions or nations as they have changed across the centuries; and each chapter includes a chronological timeline that summarizes the most notable events. The revised entries in the comprehensive Sugges- tions for Further Reading, long a valued feature of this book, provide up-to-date listings of useful Web sites as well as the titles of signifi cant new scholarly publications on specifi c national histories and the themes of transnational historical research. For this edition, the Suggestions for Further Reading can be found on the Online Learning Center at www. mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e.

The changes in A History of Europe in the Modern World have been introduced to make this new edition more accessible and to tighten its analytical focus, but not to weaken the prose style, content, or analytical qualities that have long appealed to both teachers and students of European history. Readers will therefore fi nd that the book reaffi rms a strong belief in the value of historical knowledge and historical perspectives for anyone who wishes to live a well-informed and engaged life in the changing modern world. It achieves its purpose whenever it gives readers new insights into the meanings of European

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxviipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxvii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

Prefacexxviii

or modern history and whenever it helps readers gain new perspectives on their own lives, cultures, and social experiences.

SUPPLEMENTS FOR THE INSTRUCTOR Instructor’s Manual/Test Bank The fi rst half of this unique manual offers a chapter- by-chapter guide to some of the best documentaries, educational and feature fi lms, videos, and audio recordings to enhance classroom discussion. Brief overviews help instructors select the fi lms best suited to each course topic. The manual also provides instructors with chapter objectives and points for discussion for each chapter, followed by a test bank con- taining multiple-choice, essay, and identifi cation test questions.

Instructor Online Learning Center Web Site ( www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e ) At the home page for this text-specifi c Web site, instructors will fi nd a downloadable ver- sion of the Instructor’s Manual. Instructors can also create an interactive course syllabus using McGraw-Hill’s PageOut site. Suggestions for Further Reading are also included in the Online Learning Center for this edition.

PageOut ( www.mhhe.com/pageout ) On the PageOut Web site instructors can cre- ate their own course Web sites. PageOut requires no prior knowledge of HTML, no long hours of coding, and no design skills on the instructor’s part. Instructors need simply to plug the course information into a template and click on one of the 16 designs. The process takes little time and creates a professionally designed Web site. Powerful features include an interactive course syllabus that lets instructors post content and links, an online grade- book, lecture notes, bookmarks, and a discussion board where instructors and students can discuss course-related topics.

Videos A wide range of videos on classic and contemporary topics in history is available through the Films for the Humanities and Sciences collection. Instructors can illustrate and enhance lectures by selecting from a series of videos correlated to the course. Contact your local McGraw-Hill sales representative for further information.

SUPPLEMENTS FOR THE STUDENT Student Online Learning Center Web Site ( www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e ) At this text-specifi c Web site, students can link to an Interactive Glossary, an important learning tool for students that complements the terms and topics highlighted in the margins of the textbook. A number of other resources are also available, including Suggestions for Fur- ther Reading and useful Web sites.

PowerWeb PowerWeb for World History gives students password-protected, course- specifi c articles with assessments from current research journals and popular press articles, refereed and selected by World History instructors, and especially useful for materials that go beyond the scope of this book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is a pleasure to acknowledge the contributions and assistance of the many people who have worked on the production of this book. Special appreciation goes to the editors and staff of McGraw-Hill, Inc., which has published this book since its seventh edi- tion. Publishing expertise and essential support at McGraw-Hill have been provided by numerous talented people, including Penina Braffman, Erin Melloy, Lisa Brufl odt, Lisa

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxviiipal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxviii 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

Preface xxix

Pinto, Alexandra Schultz, Adina Lonn, and Matthew Busbridge. Erin Guendelsberger and Kala Ramachandran managed editorial details with effi ciency and wide-ranging skills; and Mickey Cox brought valuable insights to each phase of the planning for this revised edition. David Tietz helped to collect new illustrations, and Rachel Olsen and Diana Chase assisted in organizing manuscript materials. Equally important, Maximil- ian Owre, an historian of modern Europe and the associate director of the Program in the Humanities and Human Values at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, contributed his knowledge and careful research to the updated Suggestions for Further Reading and the summaries of useful Web sites, which appear for this edition in the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e.

This new edition has also benefi ted from the expert advice of reviewers who offered ideas for revisions and for new features to improve the book. Insightful comments came from Marc Baer, Hope College; Catherine Graney, Bergen Community College; Mary R. O’Neil, University of Washington; David J. Proctor, Tufts University; Leonard N. Rosenband, Utah State University; Barbara Syrrakos, The City College, City University of New York; and Brian Weiser, Metropolitan State University of Denver. None of these individuals are responsible for any of the book’s shortcomings, but all have added to its strengths. Other colleagues, teachers, and family members provided valuable assistance and advice in numerous discussions about the book; and a particular “thank you” goes to Gwynne Pomeroy for her exceptional role in facilitating the work on every aspect of this new edition.

Finally, I deeply regret that the revisions for the latest edition of this book have been developed without the insights of my two deceased colleagues and co-authors, R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton. The distinguished historical works of both Professor Palmer (who died in 2002) and Professor Colton (who died in 2011) have long attracted wide attention on both sides of the Atlantic, partly because of their remarkable knowledge of modern events and partly because of their exceptional ability to write clear, analytical prose about the diverse historical issues that they examined. Their long collaboration on this narrative, which until this edition was always entitled A History of the Modern World, became an outstanding example of how intellectual partnerships can enhance historical knowledge, expand historical perspectives, and connect the history of specifi c confl icts or people with the broadest historical developments of modern times. In revising this new edi- tion of a book that has often been known as simply Palmer-Colton, I have sought always to build on the high quality of their previous work, even as I changed the structure or content of various chapters and also introduced new perspectives, sources, and images. I learned from each of these historians about the nature of intellectual work, academic friendships, and human communities; and my many conversations with Joel Colton in recent years deeply enriched my personal life as well as my understanding of the past. This book thus continues to convey the far-reaching intellect and insights of Professors Palmer and Colton in a narrative that has been updated to include changing themes in modern historical schol- arship and changing perspectives on modern European history.

Lloyd Kramer

pal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxixpal85549_fm_i-xxx.indd xxix 8/13/13 1:47 PM8/13/13 1:47 PM

Final PDF to printer

This page intentionally left blank

1

History is  the experience of human beings in time, but that experience takes place also in geographic space. Geography describes and maps the earth, but geographers also study the cultural practices that shape human interactions with the environments in which they live.

The universe, of which our planet earth and our solar system form but a small part, is now thought to be at least 12 billion years old. Most scientists believe the earth is about 4.6 billion years old. Yet the entire history (and prehistory) of humankind goes back only 3.5 to 5 million years, or perhaps only 2 million years, depending on how humans are defi ned. What we call history—the recorded cultures and actions of human beings—began with the invention of early forms of writing only about 5,500 years ago.

Oceans and continents have moved about over time, changing in size, shape, and loca- tion. The continents as we know them took on their distinctive forms less than 100 million years ago. Dinosaurs, which became extinct some 60 million years before the fi rst humans even emerged, could walk from North America to Europe (as we now call these continents) on solid land in a warm climate. It is only a few thousand years since the end of the most recent glacial age. That Ice Age, which began about 2 million years ago and reached its coldest point only 20,000 years ago, was caused by a slight shift in the earth’s orbit around the sun. Water froze into ice 1–2 inches thick and covered the northern parts of the planet (in North America as far south as present-day Chicago and in Europe across large parts of the British Isles and the nearby mainland). The melting of this ice produced the coastlines, offshore islands, inland seas, straits, bays, and harbors that we know today, as well as some of the large river sys- tems and lakes. The process of change in the earth’s surface continues. Niagara Falls, on the border between the United States and Canada, has been receding because the ongoing cascade of water erodes the underlying rock. The ocean’s tides and human construction erode our shorelines as well, and most scientists believe current patterns of global warm- ing will gradually change the oceans and coasts in much of the world.

Oceans presently cover more than two-thirds of the earth’s surface, and many large land areas in the remaining third are poorly suited for habitation by human beings or most other animal and plant organisms. One-tenth of the land remains under ice, as in Antarctica and Greenland; much is tundra; much is desert, as in the Sahara; and much land lies along the windswept ridges of high mountains. Like the oceans, these regions have been important in human history, often acting as barriers to movement and settlement. Human history has therefore evolved in relatively small, scattered sections of the earth’s total surface.

Researchers have found persuasive material evidence to show that human beings originated in Africa. Humans belonging to the species Homo erectus, the Latin term used by anthropologists and others to denote the upright, walking predecessors of modern humans, seem to have migrated from Africa about 1.8 million years ago, perhaps because of environmental pressures or perhaps because of simple curiosity. Our own species Homo sapiens, the Latin term con- noting increased cognitive and judgmental abilities, emerged about 150,000 years ago. When humans went beyond merely utilitarian accomplishments and demonstrated aesthetic and artistic interests as well as advanced toolmaking (about 35,000 years ago), we refer to

Ice Age

Origins of human beings

G e o g r a p h y a n d H i s t o r y

pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 1pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 1 8/13/13 12:03 PM8/13/13 12:03 PM

Final PDF to printer

Geography and History2

them as the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. They were the remaining survivors of a very complex human family tree.

The great Ice Age lowered the seas by hundreds of feet and froze huge quantities of water. The English Channel became dry. Land bridges opened up between Siberia and North America over what we now call the Bering Strait. Hunters seeking game walked from one continent to the other. When the glaciers melted, forests sprang up, and many of the open areas in which humans had hunted disappeared, providing added motivation for movement.

Our human ancestors spread eventually to every continent except Antarctica. In doing so, human groups became isolated from each other for millennia, separated by oceans, deserts, or mountains. Wherever they wandered, they evolved slightly over time, develop-

ing superfi cial physical differences that modern cultures have defi ned as the characteristics of various racial groups. But “race” is a cultural idea rather than a mark of biologically signifi cant differences. All human beings belong to the Homo sapiens species, all derive from the same biological ancestry, and all are mutually fertile. Only a very few human genes are

responsible for physical differences such as skin pigmentation, in comparison to the vast number of genes that are shared by all members of the human species.

The basic anatomy and genetic makeup of modern humans has not changed over the last 100,000 years. Geographic separation accounts for the emergence over shorter time periods of distinctive cultures, which can be seen, for example, in the different historical and cultural development of the pre-Columbian Americas, Africa, China, India, the Middle East, and

Europe. On a still smaller time scale, geographic separation also explains differences in languages and dialects.

Geographic distances and diversity of climate have also produced differences in fl ora and fauna, and hence in the plants and animals upon which humans depend. Wheat became the most common cereal in the Middle East and Europe, millet and rice in East Asia, sor- ghum in tropical Africa, maize in pre-Columbian America. The horse, fi rst domesticated in north-central Asia about 4,500 years ago, was for centuries a mainstay of Europe and Asia for muscle power, transportation, and fi ghting. The somewhat less versatile camel was adopted later and more slowly in the Middle East, and the Americans long had no beasts of burden except the llama. Such differences did not begin to diminish until early modern travelers crossed the oceans, taking plants and animals with them and bringing others back to environments where they had never lived before.

Although much remains obscure about the origins of life, and new discoveries and calculations are always displacing older hypotheses, paleontologists studying plant and animal fossils (including human ones) have used techniques such as radiocarbon dating to transform our knowledge of the earth and of the earliest human beings. In geography, aerial and satellite photography and computer technology have enabled us to refi ne older conceptions of continents and oceans. And astrophysicists are now studying vast amounts of new data about the universe, which have been sent to them from powerful telescopes mounted on unmanned spaceships.

Cartography, the art and science of mapmaking, has evolved rapidly, but we tend to forget how our maps often remain conventional and even parochial. It was Europeans and descendants of Europeans who designed our most commonly used maps, which are oriented North-South and West-East from fi xed points in their horizons, and which therefore refl ect their own European cultural assumptions. Similar biases can be found in the maps of other

Race: a cultural concept

Geography and culture

pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 2pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 2 8/13/13 12:03 PM8/13/13 12:03 PM

Final PDF to printer

Geography and History 3

cultures too. The Chinese for centuries defi ned and visualized their country as the “Middle Kingdom.” In the early modern centuries maps drawn in India typically represented South Asia as forming the major part of the world. One such map depicted the European continent as a few marginal areas labeled England, France, and “other hat-wearing islands.”

Changing conceptualizations of the globe continue in our day. A map drawn and published in contemporary Australia, demonstrating the Australian perspective from “down under,” shows South Africa at the top of the map and Capetown at the very tip, the large expanse of contemporary African nations in the middle, and the various European countries crowded at the bottom, the latter appearing quite insignifi cant. The European- invented term “Middle East” has been called into question, and this region of the world is perhaps better designated as Western Asia. Even the traditional concept of Europe as one of the seven continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica) is now questioned. Why, for example, should the Indian peninsula be a “subcontinent” when it roughly matches the size and exceeds the population and diversity of the European “continent” (at least that part of the “continent” that lies west of the for- mer Soviet Union)? Europe itself is, of course, actually a peninsula, in a way that the other continents are not. Some geographers ask us to consider it more properly as part of Asia, the western part of a great “Eurasian landmass.” Defi ned in these terms, Europe becomes more of a cultural conception, arising out of perceived differences from Asia and Africa, than a continent in a strictly geographical sense.

Europe’s Infl uence on Modern History

However we defi ne its place on the globe, Europe has undoubtedly shaped much of mod- ern world history—partly because of its overseas expansion, partly because of what it borrowed from other parts of the world, and partly because of its deci- sive economic and cultural infl uence on the emergence of an increasingly global civilization. Europe is of course only one of many important cultural spheres in human history. Its economy, political systems, religious tradi- tions, and social institutions are not the sole historical path to modernity; indeed, people in other regions of the world have often challenged or rejected European forms of “modern- ization” as they have built their own modern societies. Yet even the critique or rejection of European institutions has usually required historical analysis of Europe’s development and role in the world. Much of the modern global economy, for example, emerged in the international trade that Europe’s imperial powers controlled and expanded after the sixteenth century. European political ideas, science, philosophy, cultural mores, and people also spread widely across the world, contributing to both the constructive and destructive patterns of modern political, social, and cultural life. Ideas and people have meanwhile fl owed constantly into Europe from other parts of the world, so that European societies remain a vital center for cross-cultural exchanges and confl icts.

It is possible to narrate a “history of the modern world” from widely diverging per- spectives and with an emphasis on quite different historical themes. This book, however, begins with the recognition that Europe developed and promoted many of the distinc- tive “modern” ideas and institutions that have now evolved in various forms throughout the contemporary world. Historical understanding of modernity must therefore include a comprehensive analysis of Europe—though an accurate history of the modern world must also insist that Europe represents only one of the diverse, complex cultures that continue to shape modern global history. The title of this book’s new edition has thus been changed

Europe and history

pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 3pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 3 8/13/13 12:03 PM8/13/13 12:03 PM

Final PDF to printer

Geography and History4

PYRENEES

C A R P

A T H I A

A L P

S

SPANISH

PLATEAU

CANTABRIAN MTS.

SIERRA MORENA

IBERIAN PENINSULA

P L

A I

N O

F F

R A

N C

E

MASSIF CENTRAL

CÉV ENN

ES

BRITTANY PENINSULA

SIERRA NEVA DA

IRISH

CENTRAL

PLAIN

SCOTTI SH

LOWLA NDS

GRA MPIAN

S

MIDLAND PLAIN

THE WASH

LAN D'S

END

PLAIN OF LOMBARDY

JU RA

MT S

VO SG

ES M

TS .

B LA

CK FO

RE ST

N O R T

H G E R M

A N P L A

I N

ARD ENN

ES

Mt. Vesuvius

ITALIAN PENINSULA

Mt. Etna

ISTRIA

DINARIC ALPS

BALKAN PENINSULA

PINDUS MTS.

MOREAN PENINSULA

BOHEMIAN FOREST

BOHEMIAN PLAIN

ERZ MTS. SUDETEN MTS.

HARTZ MTS.

SCANDINAVIAN PENINSULA

K JÖ

L E N

M O

U N

TA I N

S

JUTLAND PENINSULA

Helgoland

FR ISIA

N IS.

GUADARRAMAS

MIDDLE ATLA

S MO UN

TAI NS

GREAT ATLAS MOU NTAINS

LITL LE A

TLAS MOUNTAINS

SAH ARA

N AT LAS M

OUNTA INS

A L G E R I A N S A H A R A

PLAIN OF HUNGARY

IRON GATE X TRAN

B A L K

PEN N

IN E

C H

A IN

A P

E N

N

I N E S

SHETLAND IS.

ORKNEY IS.

FAROE IS.

BAL EAR

IC IS .

Corsica

Sardinia Iviza

Majorca

Minorca

Str ait

of Do

ve r

Bristol Channel

St. Ge

or ge

's

Ch an

ne l

Irish Sea

HEBRIDES

Elba

SICILY

MALTA

PANTELLERIA

D ALM

ATIAN IS.

IO N

IA N

IS.

SCILLY IS.

Ushant I.

ICELAND

Öland

Gotland

ALAND IS.

BRITISH ISLES

N o r w e g i a n S e a

ATLANTIC OCEAN N o r t h

S e a

English Chann el

B a y o f

B i s c a y

Tagus R.

Douro R. Ebro R.

Loire R

.

R h

ô n

e R

.

Po R.

Seine R.

A

d r i a t i c S e a

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Elbe R.

Sk ag

er ra

k

K atteg

at

G u

lf of

Bo th

ni a

Cape Finisterre

Strait of Gilbr

alta r

Cape Trafalgar

Guadiana R.

Gu

ada lquivir R.

Garonne R

.

R hine

R .

L. Geneva

L. Constance

Sc he

ld

t R.

M e

u sse

R .

Maas R.

Main R.

W eser

R.

Warta R.

N eisse

R .

Ijsselmeer

Arno R.

Ti b

e r

R .

Tyrrhenian Sea

Ionian Sea

Da nube

R.

Save R.

Drave R.

Bug R.

L. Vanern

L. Vattern

B a l t

i c

S e a

Thames R.

Tis za

R.

N iemen R.

Gu lf o

f Fin land

FIN L

RE

Gulf of Sidra

M E D I T E R R A N E A N S E A

Dal R.

Al di

ge R

. L. Balaton

Masurian Lakes

Vardar R

.

Strait of Messina

M orava

R.

Inn R.

MarneR. M os

ell e R

.

London

Dublin

Edinburgh

Amsterdam

Paris

Madrid

Lisbon

Gibraltar

Fez

Algiers

Tunis

Rome

Belgrade

Vienna

Budapest

Trieste

Tripoli

Riga

Helsinki

Oslo Stockholm

Copenhagen

Berlin

Prague

Warsaw

Danzig

Sofia

Athe

pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 4pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 4 8/13/13 12:03 PM8/13/13 12:03 PM

Final PDF to printer

Geography and History 5

0 100 200 300 miles

N S

U R

A L

M O

U N

T A

I N

S

C A U C A S U S M O U N T A I N S

N A

NSYLVA NIAN

ALPS

K A N M T S .

RHODOPE MTS.

T U R

A N

I A

N

P L

A I

N

K I R G H I Z S T E P P E

V O

LG A

H EIG

H TS

B

L A

C K

E A

R T

H

R E

G I

O N

DON ETS

HEIG HTS

ARMENIAN HIGHLANDS

M

ESOPOTAMIAN PLAINS

ELBURZ MTS

.

Z A G R O S M T S . S Y R I A N D E S E R T

N E F U D D E S E R T

TAURUS MOUNT AIN

ASIA MINOR (ANATOLIAN PENINSULA)

PLAIN O F

WALLA CHIA

PRIPET MARSHES

CEN TRA

L RU

SSIA N

HIGHLANDS

N O

R T

H R

U S

S I A

N P

L A

I N

CA SP

IA N

DE PR

ES SIO

N

SINAI PENINSULA

CRETE

CYPRUSRhodes

D

ODECANESE IS.

CRIMEA

Dardanelles

Da nub

e R.

Dniester R.Pruth R.

L. Ladoga

L. Onega

White Sea

N . Dvina R.

Dnieper R.

Don R.

B l a c k S e a

Sea of Azov

Bo sp

or us

NILE DELTA

Tigris R.

Euphrates R.

P e r s i a n G u l f

C a

s

p i

a n

S e

a

Aral Sea

Maritsa R.

Dvi na

R.

L. Peipus

d

NNISH LAKE EGION

Syr Darya

Ur al

R.

Ka ma

R .

Vo lga R.

O ka

R.

Donets R.

L. Urmia

L. Van

Dead Sea

Jo rd

an R

.

Sea of Marmara

Pripet R.

Volga R.

Ki zil

ir m

ak

R.

Suez Cana l

A

Bu g R.

Nile R

.

Gulf of Aqaba

Me an

der R.

Araxes R.

Amu Dar ya

A eg

ean Sea

Bucharest

Istanbul

St. Petersburg

Kiev

Moscow

Odessa

Ankara

Sinop

Cairo

Alexandria

Jerusalem

Baghdad

Tehran

a

ens

pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 5pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 5 8/13/13 12:03 PM8/13/13 12:03 PM

Final PDF to printer

Geography and History6

to convey the historical themes and limits of Europe’s role in the modern world. Europe has long developed distinctive cultural traditions and institutions, but its modern identity as a specifi c civilization has always evolved through interactions with people and cultures in other places around the globe.

Europe exemplifi es the perennial interactions between human activity and the natural environment, and the study of its historical evolution should begin with some attention to its geography. The accompanying topographical map shows the main physical features of Europe and its surrounding geographical space. This topography has remained virtually unchanged over historic time, despite the constant political and cultural transformations in European societies. Europe is not large. Even with European Russia, it contains hardly more than 6 percent of the earth’s land surface, occupying about the same area as the United States mainland plus Alaska. It is only a little larger than Australia. It is physically separated from Africa by the Mediterranean Sea, although the Mediterranean historically has been as much a passageway as a barrier. A truer barrier emerged when the Sahara Desert dried up only a few thousand years ago, which suggests why northern Africa has often been as con- nected to southern Europe, or culturally to the Middle East, as to sub-Saharan Africa. The physical separation of Europe from Asia is even less clear. The conventional boundary has been the Ural Mountains in Russia, but they are a low and wide chain that does not stretch far enough to make an adequate boundary. The Russians themselves do not recognize any offi cial distinction between European and Asian Russia.

Europe is indeed one of several peninsulas jutting off from Asia, like the Arabian and Indian peninsulas. But there are differences. For one thing, the Mediterranean Sea is unique among the world’s bodies of water. Closed in by the Strait of Gibraltar, which is only 8 miles wide, it is more shielded than other seas from the open ocean and is protected from the most violent

ocean storms. Though over 2,000 miles long, it is subdivided by islands and peninsulas into lesser seas with identities of their own, such as the Aegean and the Adriatic, and it provides access also to the Black Sea. Because it is possible to travel great distances with- out being far from land, navigation developed on the Mediterranean from early times, and one of the fi rst civilizations appeared on the island of Crete. It is possible also to cross between Europe and Asia at the Bosporus and between Europe and Africa at Gibraltar. Populations and cultures became mixed by migration, and various historic empires—the Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, Spanish, Venetian, and Ottoman—have effec- tively used the Mediterranean to govern their component parts. After the Suez Canal was built in the nineteenth century, the Mediterranean became an important segment in the “lifeline of empire” for the British Empire in its heyday.

In southern Europe, north of the Mediterranean and running for its whole length, is a series of mountains, produced over the geological ages by the pushing of the gigantic mass of Africa against the small Eurasian peninsula. The Pyrenees close off Spain from the north, as the Alps do

Italy; the Balkan Mountains are diffi cult to penetrate. The only place where one can travel at water level from the Mediterranean to the north is by the valley of the Rhone River, so that France is the only country that belongs both to the Mediterranean and northern Europe. North of the mountains is a great plain extending from western France all the way into Russia and on into Asia, passing south of the Urals. If one were to draw a straight line from Amsterdam east through what is called the Caspian Gate, north of the Caspian Sea, as far as western China, one would never in traveling these 3,500 miles be higher than 2,000 feet above sea level. This plain has at various times opened Europe to Mongol and other

The Mediterranean Sea

Mountains

pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 6pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 6 8/13/13 12:03 PM8/13/13 12:03 PM

Final PDF to printer

Geography and History 7

invasions, enabled the Russians to move east and create a huge empire, and made Poland a troubled battleground.

The European rivers are worth particular attention. Most are navigable, and they also give access to the sea. With their valleys, they provided areas where intensive local development could take place. Thus the most impor- tant older cities of Europe are on rivers—London on the Thames, Paris on the Seine, Vienna and Budapest on the Danube, Warsaw on the Vistula. In northern Europe it was often possible to move goods from one river to another, and then in the eighteenth century to connect them by canals. The importance of water is shown again by the location of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg on the Baltic and of Amsterdam and Lisbon, which grew rapidly after Europeans began traversing the Atlantic Ocean.

There are important geographical conditions such as climate that a topographical map cannot show. Climate depends on latitude, ocean cur- rents, and winds that bring or withhold rainfall. Europe lies as far north as the northern United States and southern Canada, but the parts of Europe near the sea have less extreme temperatures than the corresponding northerly regions of North America. The Mediterranean countries have more sunshine and less severe winters than either northern Europe or the northern United States. Everywhere the winters are cold enough to suppress infectious pathogens and pests and keep out certain diseases that affl ict warmer countries. The warm summers with their growing seasons have produced an annual cycle of agricul- ture, and rainfall has been adequate but not excessive. Europe is the only continent that has no actual desert. It is also for the most part a region of fertile soil. In short, since the end of the Ice Age, or since humans learned to survive winters, Europe has been one of the most favored places on the globe for human habitation.

If we say that climate and the environment not only set limits but also provide opportunities for what human beings can do, then there is no such thing as geographical determinism. Geography is not destiny. What hap- pens depends on the application of knowledge and abilities in any particular time and place and in any particular culture. What constitutes a natural resource varies with the state of technology and the possibilities of economic exchange. Even the disad- vantages of distance can be overcome by developing new means of transportation. The oceans that long divided human beings became a highway for the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and English, and later for others. Chinese and Arab sailors also used the oceans for trade across Asia and East Africa. For most of human history, however, neither persons, information, nor commands could travel much more than 30 miles a day. Local- ism prevailed, and large-scale commercial or governmental organizations were hard to create and maintain. Like most other regions of the world, therefore, Europe was long made up of small local units, pockets of territory each with its own customs, way of life, and manner of speech, largely unknown to or ignorant of others, and looking inward upon itself. A “foreigner” might come from a thousand miles away, or from only ten.

Agriculture, like commerce and industry, depends on human inven- tion and decision making. The state of agriculture obviously depends on natural conditions, but it has also depended historically on the invention of the plow, the planting of appropriate crops, the rotation of fi elds to prevent soil exhaus- tion, and the availability of livestock from which manure could be obtained as fertilizer. It benefi ts from stability and is affected by demographic changes. If population grows, new and less fertile or more distant areas must be brought under cultivation. Nor can agricul- ture be improved without the building of roads and a division of labor between town and

Rivers

Climate

Geographical determinism

Agriculture

pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 7pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 7 8/13/13 12:03 PM8/13/13 12:03 PM

Final PDF to printer

Geography and History8

country, in which agrarian workers produce surpluses for those not engaged in agriculture. And for agriculture, as for other productive enterprises, elementary security is essential. Farming cannot proceed, nor food be stored over the winter, unless the men and women who work the fi elds can be protected from attack.

The maps in the present volume cannot show in detail all of the waterways, moun- tains, and geographical barriers that have helped to shape the course of human history, but they do point to the role of geography in the evolution of political and economic power, or what has become known as geopolitics. Human beings have always developed their insti- tutions and cultures through a complex relation with the natural world, and maps remind us that all human activities take place in geographical space. Readers can also use their imaginations and the scale of maps to convert space into time, remembering that until the invention of the railroad both people and news traveled far more slowly than today. At a rate of 30 miles a day it would take three weeks to travel from London to Venice, and at least six weeks for an exchange of letters. Communication to places outside Europe took even longer. In our own day, when we travel at supersonic speeds and measure electronic communication in nanoseconds, or one-billionth of a second, the barriers of geographic space have virtually disappeared. Yet human beings remain profoundly dependent on their natural environments, and human history remains fi rmly embedded in the geography of the planet earth.

pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 8pal85549_Intro_001-008.indd 8 8/13/13 12:03 PM8/13/13 12:03 PM

Final PDF to printer

9

C h a p t e r 1 THE RISE OF EUROPE

It may seem  strange for a history of Europe in the modern world to begin with the European Middle Ages, for the Middle Ages were not modern. But much of what is now meant by “modern” made its fi rst appearance in Europe, and to understand both modern Europe and its role in the wider modern world it is necessary to reach fairly far back in time.

Over the centuries between roughly 1500 and 1900, Europe created the most powerful combina- tion of political, military, economic, technological, and scientifi c apparatus that the world had ever seen. In doing so, Europe radically transformed

itself, and also profoundly affected other societies and cultures in America, Africa, and Asia—sometimes destroying them, sometimes stimulating or enlivening them, and always presenting them with problems of resistance or adaptation. This European ascendancy became apparent about 300 years ago. It reached its zenith with the European colonial empires at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then, the position of Europe has relatively declined, partly because of confl icts within Europe itself, but mainly because the apparatus that had made Europe so dominant can now be found in other countries. Some, like the United States, are in many ways cultural and political offshoots of Europe. Others have very different and ancient backgrounds. But whatever their backgrounds, and will- ingly or not, all peoples in the contemporary world have been caught up in processes of “modernization” or “development,” which often means acquiring or adapting some of the technical skills and powers fi rst exhibited by Europeans.

There is thus in our time a kind of global modern civilization that overlies or pen- etrates the diverse, regional cultures of the world. This civilization is an interlocking global system, in that conditions on one side of the globe have repercussions on the other. Communications are almost instantaneous and news travels everywhere. If the air is pol- luted in one country, neighboring countries are affected; if oil ceases to fl ow from the Middle East, the life of Europe, North America, and Japan may become very diffi cult. The modern world depends on elaborate means of transportation; on science, industry, and

1. Ancient Times: Greece, Rome, and Christianity

2. The Early Middle Ages: The Formation of Europe

3. The High Middle Ages: Secular Civilization

4. The High Middle Ages: The Church

Chapter emblem: A medieval representation of Saint Augustine. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 9pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 9 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe10

machines; on new sources of energy to meet insatiable demands; on scientifi c medicine, public hygiene, and methods of raising food. States and nations fi ght wars by advanced methods, and negotiate or maintain peace by diplomacy. There is an earth-encompassing network of fi nance and trade, loans and debts, investments and bank accounts, with result- ing fl uctuations in monetary exchanges and balances of payments. More than 190 very unequal and disunited members compose the United Nations and represent every region of the world, but the very concept of the modern nation, as represented in that body, is derived largely from Europe.

In most modern countries there have been pressures for increased democracy, and all modern governments, democratic or not, seek to arouse the energies and support of their populations. In a modern society old customs loosen, and ancestral religions are often questioned or transformed. There are usually demands for individual liberation, and an expectation of a higher standard of living. Modern societies typically move toward more equality between sexes and races, between adherents of different religions, or between different parts of the same country; and most modern governments provide social and eco- nomic assistance for people with low incomes. Movements for social change may be slow and gradual, or revolutionary and catastrophic, but movement of some kind is universal.

Such are a few of the historical trends of modernity. New “modernizing” forms of technology, culture, or economic organization now emerge in many different regions of the world, but most of the early patterns of modernity appeared fi rst in Europe or in the extension of European societies (including the United States). The present book thus deals mainly with the historical growth of European societies and civilization, with increasing attention in later chapters to Europe’s colonizing expansion into other parts of the world. European encounters with diverse peoples and civilizations provoked a wide range of cross-cultural interactions, including movements that criticized or rejected many aspects of “modernity” itself. Such movements have also been part of modern world history, and when they have occurred in Asia or Africa they have often been called anti-European or anti-Western, as if to show that Europe and the “West” embody most of the key problems of modern history. Even those movements that most vigorously challenge Western social and cultural systems, however, must confront the institutions, ideas, and legacies of mod- ern European history.

If “modern” refers especially to a certain complicated way of living, it has also another sense, meaning merely what is recent or current. As a time span the word “mod- ern” is purely relative. It depends on what we are talking about. A modern kitchen may be as much as 5 years old, modern physics is more than 100 years old, modern science is now over 350 years old, and the modern European languages began to emerge about 1,000 years ago. Modern civilization, the current civilization in which we are living, and which is always changing, is in one sense a product of the last two or three centuries, but in other senses it is much older. Roughly speaking, it may be said that modern times began in Europe about 1500. Modern times were preceded by a period of 1,000 years called the Middle Ages, which set in about 500 c.e., and which were in turn preceded by about another 1,000 years of classical Greek and Roman civilization. Before that reached the long histories of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and, further east, of the Indus Valley and China. All times prior to the European Middle Ages are commonly called “ancient.” But the whole framework—ancient, medieval, and modern—is largely a matter of words and convention, whose meaning developed mainly with reference to Europe. We shall begin our history with a running start, and slow down the pace, surveying the scene more fully as the times grow more modern.

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 10pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 10 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

11

1. ANCIENT TIMES: GREECE, ROME, AND CHRISTIANITY Europeans were by no means the pioneers of human civilization. Half of recorded history had passed before anyone in Europe could read or write. The priests of Egypt began to keep written records between 4000 and 3000 b.c.e., but 2,000 years later the poems of Homer were still being circulated in the Greek city-states by word of mouth—a form of oral history that has sustained collective memories in many human cultures. Shortly after 3000 b.c.e., while the pharaohs were building the pyramids, Europeans were laboriously setting up the huge, unwrought stones called megaliths, of which Stonehenge is the best- known example. In a word, until after 2000 b.c.e., Europe was in the Neolithic or New Stone Age. This was in truth a great age in human history, the age in which human beings learned to make and use sharp tools, weave cloth, build living quarters, domesticate ani- mals, plant seeds, harvest crops, and sense the returning cycles of the months and years. But the Middle East—Egypt, the Euphrates and Tigris valley, the island of Crete, and the shores of the Aegean Sea (which belonged more to Asia than to Europe)—had reached its Neolithic Age 2,000 years before Europe. By about 4000 b.c.e. the Middle East was already moving into the Bronze Age.

After about 2000 b.c.e., in the dim, dark continent that Europe then was, great changes began that are now diffi cult to trace. Europeans, too, learned how to smelt and forge metals, with the Bronze Age setting in about 2000 b.c.e. and the Iron Age about 1000 b.c.e. There was also a steady infusion of new peoples into Europe. They spoke languages related to languages now spoken in India and Iran, to which similar peoples migrated at about the same time. All these languages (whose interconnection was not known until the nineteenth century) are now referred to as Indo-European, and the people who spoke them became the ancestors both of the classical Greeks and Romans and of the Europeans of modern times. All European languages today are Indo-European with the exceptions of Basque, which is thought to be a survival from before the Indo-European invasion, and of Finnish and Hungarian, which were brought into Europe from Asia some centuries later. It was these invading Indo-Europeans who diffused over Europe the kind of speech from which the Latin, Greek, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages were later derived.

The Greek World

The fi rst Indo-Europeans to emerge into the clear light of history, in what is now Europe, were the Greeks. They fi ltered down through the Balkan peninsula to the shores of the Aegean Sea about 1900 b.c.e., undermining the older Cretan civilization and occupying most of what has since been called Greece by 1300 b.c.e. Beginning about 1150 b.c.e., other Greek-speaking tribes invaded from the north in successive waves. The newcomers included many restless and warlike tribes, and their coming ushered in several centuries of chaos and unrest before a gradual stabilization and revival began in the ninth century. The Iliad and the Odyssey, written down about 800 b.c.e., but composed and recited much earlier, probably refer to wars between the Greeks and other centers of civilization, of which one was at Troy in Asia Minor. The siege of Troy is thought to have occurred about 1200 b.c.e.

The ancient Greeks proved to be an exceptionally gifted people, achieving supreme heights in thought and letters. They absorbed the knowledge of earlier east- ern cultures, the mathematical lore of the ancient Chaldeans, and the arts and crafts that they found in Asia Minor and on voyages to Egypt. They

Indo-Europeans

Greek cultural accomplishments

1. Ancient Times: Greece, Rome, and Christianity

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 11pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 11 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe12

added immediately to everything that they learned. It was the Greeks of the fi fth and fourth centuries b.c.e. who formulated what the Western world long meant by the beautiful, and who fi rst speculated on political freedom.

As they settled down, the Greeks formed tiny city-states, all independent and often at war with one another, each only a few miles across, and typically including a coastal city and its adjoining farmlands. Athens, Corinth, and Sparta were such city-states. Many were democratic, which meant that all male citizens could congregate in the marketplace to elect offi cials and discuss their public business. They were not democratic in a modern sense in that slaves, resident noncitizens (called “metics”), and women were excluded from political life.

Politics was turbulent in the small Greek states. Democracy alternated with aristoc- racy, oligarchy, despotism, and tyranny. From this rich fund of experience was born systematic political science as set forth in the unwritten speculations of Socrates and in the Republic of Plato and the Politics of Aristotle in the fourth century b.c.e. The Greeks also were the fi rst to write history as a subject distinct from myth and legend. Herodotus, “the Father of History,” traveled throughout the Greek world and far beyond, ferreting out all he could learn of the past; and Thucydides, in his account of the wars between Athens and Sparta, presented history as a guide to enlightened citizenship and construc- tive statecraft.

Perhaps because they were a restless and vehement people, the Greeks came to prize the “classical” virtues, which they were the fi rst to defi ne and which would have great infl uence in the subsequent history of European societies. For them, the ideal lay in moderation, or a golden mean. They

Classical Greek virtues

The Parthenon, constructed in ancient Athens during the fi fth century b.c.e. to honor the god- dess Athena, gave architectural form to the Greek respect for balance, order, and symmetry. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 12pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 12 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

13

valued order, balance, symmetry, clarity, and control. Their statues of idealized males revealed their conception of what humans ought to be—noble creatures, dignifi ed, poised, unterrifi ed by life or death, masters of themselves and their feelings. Their architecture, as in the Parthenon, made use of exactly measured angles and rows of columns. The classical “order,” or set of carefully wrought pillars placed in a straight line at specifi ed intervals, represented the fi rm impress of human reason on the brute materials of nature. The same sense of form and order was thrown over the torrent of human words. Written language became carefully planned and organized for effect. The epic poem, the lyric, the drama, the oration, along with history and the philosophical dialogue, each with its own rules and principles of composition, became the “forms” within which, in Western civilization, writ- ers long expressed their thoughts.

Refl ecting on the world about them, Greek philosophers concluded that something more enduring existed beyond the world of appearances, that true reality was not what met the eye. With other peoples, and with the Greeks themselves in earlier times, this same realization had led to the formation of myths, dealing with invisible but mighty beings known as gods and with faraway places on the tops of mountains, beneath the earth, or in a world that followed death. Greek thinkers set to criticizing the web of myth. They looked for rational or natural explanations behind the variety and confusion that they saw. Some, observing human sickness, said that disease was not a demonic possession, but a natural sequence of conditions in the body, which could be identifi ed, understood, and even treated in a natural way. Others, turning to physical nature, said that all matter was in reality com- posed of a very few things—made up of atoms or elements—which they usually desig- nated as fi re, water, earth, and air. Some said that change was a kind of illusion, all basic reality being uniform; some, that only change was real, and that the world was in fl ux. Some, like Pythagoras, found the enduring reality in “number,” or mathematics. The Greeks, in short, laid the foundations for science. Studying also the way in which the mind worked, or ought to work, if it was to reach truthful conclusions, they developed the sci- ence of logic. The great codifi er of Greek thought on almost all subjects in the classical period was Aristotle, who lived in Athens from 384 to 322 b.c.e.

Greek infl uence spread widely and rapidly. Hardly were some of the city-states founded when their people, crowded within their narrow bounds, sent off some of their number with equipment and provisions to establish colonies. In this way Greek cities were very early established in south Italy, in Sicily, and even in the western Mediterranean, where Marseilles was founded about 600 b.c.e. Later the Greek city-states, unable to unite, succumbed to con- quest by Philip of Macedon, who came from the relatively crude northern part of the Greek world, and whose son, Alexander the Great (356–323 b.c.e.), led a phenomenal, conquering march into Asia, across Persia, and on as far as India itself. Alexander’s empire did not hold together, but Greek civilization, after having penetrated the western Mediterranean, now began to infl uence the ancient peoples of Egypt and the Middle East. Greek thought, Greek art, and the Greek language spread far and wide, drawing at the same time on the knowledge and creativity of other ancient cultures. The most famous “Greeks” after the fourth century b.c.e. and on into the early centuries of the Christian era usually did not come from Greece but from the Hellenized Middle East, and especially from Alexandria in Egypt. Among these later Greeks were the great summarizers or writ- ers of encyclopedias in which ancient science was passed on to later generations—Strabo in geography, Galen in medicine, Ptolemy in astronomy. All three lived in the fi rst and second centuries c.e.

Spread of Greek civilization

1. Ancient Times: Greece, Rome, and Christianity

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 13pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 13 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe14

The Roman World

In 146 b.c.e. the Greeks who lived within Greece were conquered by the military forces of Rome, the expanding power that had already taken control of the western Mediterranean. The Romans kept their own Latin language but rapidly absorbed what they could of the intellectual and artistic culture of the Greeks. Over a period of two or three centuries they assembled an empire in which the whole world of ancient civilization (west of Persia) was included. Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria all became Roman provinces, but in them the Romans had hardly any deep infl uence except in a political sense. In the West—in what are now Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, France, Switzerland, Belgium, and England—the Romans, though ruthless in their methods of conquest, in the long run acted as civilizing agents, transmitting to these hitherto isolated countries the age-old achieve- ments of the East and the more recent culture of Greece and of Rome itself. So thorough was the Romanization that in the West Latin even became the commonly spoken language. It was later displaced by Arabic in Africa but survives to this day, transformed by time, in the Romance languages of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Romania.

In the Roman Empire, which lasted with many vicissitudes from about 31 b.c.e. to the latter part of the fi fth century c.e., virtually the entire civi- lized world of the ancient West was politically united and enjoyed genera- tions of internal peace. Rome was the center, around which in all directions

lay the “circle of lands,” the orbis terrarum, the known world—that is, as known in the West, for the Han Empire at the same time in China (202 b.c.e. to 220 c.e.) was also a

The Roman Empire

The Forum was the vital center of Roman public life and a symbol of imperial power. Rome’s sense of grandeur and social order can still be discerned in the Forum’s ruins, which are pic- tured here with the famous coliseum in the background. (Corbis)

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 14pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 14 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

15

highly organized cultural and political entity. The Roman Empire consisted essentially of the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, which provided the great artery of transport and com- munication, and from which no part of the empire, except northern Gaul (France), Britain, and the Rhineland, was more than a couple of hundred miles away. Civilization among the elites in this vast empire was remarkably uniform; there were no distinct nationalities, and the most signifi cant cultural difference was linguistic. East of Italy the predominant language was Greek, whereas in Italy and to the west the predominant language was Latin. Cities grew up everywhere, engaged in a busy commercial life, exchanged ideas with one another, and, like the cities in other ancient cultures, relied on the labor of slaves. There were always more cities in the East, where most of the manufacturing crafts and the dens- est population were still concentrated, but they sprang up now in the West—indeed, most of the older cities of France, Spain, England, and western and southern Germany boast of some kind of origin under the Romans.

The distinctive aptitude of the Romans lay in organization, administration, govern- ment, and law. Never before had armies been so systematically formed, maintained over such long periods, dispatched at a word of command over such distances, or maneuvered so effectively on the fi eld of battle. Never had so many peoples been governed from a sin- gle center. The Romans had at fi rst possessed self-governing and republican institutions, but they lost them in the process of conquest, and the governing talents that they displayed in the days of the empire were of an authoritarian character— talents, not for self-government, but for managing, coordinating, and ruling the manifold and scattered parts of one enormous system. Locally, cities and city-states enjoyed a good deal of autonomy. But above them all rose a pyramid of imperial offi cials and provincial governors, culminating in the emperor at the top. The empire kept peace, the pax Romana, and even provided a certain justice for its many peo- ples. Lawyers worked on the body of principles known ever afterward as Roman law.

The pax Romana

1. Ancient Times: Greece, Rome, and Christianity

Caesar Augustus became the fi rst emperor of the Roman Empire after a protracted struggle for power in the fi rst century b.c.e. He reor- ganized the earlier Roman republican govern- ment into a new imperial system during his long reign (31 b.c.e.–14 c.e.); and, as this statue suggests, Augustus was often portrayed as a powerful symbol of the pax Romana. (Paolo Gaetano Rocco/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 15pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 15 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe16

Roman judges had somehow to settle disputes between persons of different regions, or between persons with confl icting local customs, for example, two merchants of Spain and Egypt. The Roman law came therefore to hold that no custom is necessarily right, that there is a higher or universal law by which fair decisions may be made, and that this higher, universal, or “natural” law, or “law of nature,” will be understandable or accept- able to everyone, since it arises from human nature and reason. Here the lawyers drew on Greek philosophy for support. They held also that law derives its force from being enacted by a proper authority (not merely from custom, usage, or former legal cases); this authority to make law they called majestas, or sovereign power, and they attributed it to the emperor. Thus the Romans emancipated the idea of law from mere custom on the one hand and mere caprice on the other; they regarded it as something to be formed by enlightened intelligence, consistent with reason and the nature of things; and they associ- ated it with the solemn action of offi cial power. It must be added that Roman law favored the state, or the public interest as seen by the government, rather than the interests or liber- ties of individual persons, and it generally provided men with more legal privileges than women. These principles, together with more specifi c ideas on such matters as property, debt, marriage, and wills were in later centuries to have a great effect in Europe.

The Coming of Christianity

The thousand years during which Greco-Roman civilization arose and fl ourished were notable in another way even more momentous for all later human history. It was in this period that the great world religions came into being. Within the time bracket 800 b.c.e. to 700 c.e. the lives of Confucius and Buddha, of the major Jewish prophets, and of Muhammad are all included. At the very midpoint (probably about 4 b.c.e.), in Palestine in the Roman Empire, a man named Jesus was born, believed by his followers to be the Son of God. Jesus became a popular religious teacher who urged his disciples to assist the poor, alleviate suffering, and help all those in need, including strangers. A Roman gover- nor, fearing social disruption, ordered Jesus’s crucifi xion, but his followers affi rmed that Jesus arose from death and later appeared to some who had known him. The new Chris- tian religion thus began to develop in Palestine, and, like Jesus, the fi rst Christians were Jews. But under the impulse of its own doctrine, which held that all people were alike in spirit, and under the strong early leadership of Paul, a man of Jewish birth, Roman citizen- ship, and Greek culture, Christianity began to make converts. The new religion, as described in the canonical gospel writings of the Christian Bible and the commentaries of early Christian thinkers, gradually fused the monotheism of Judaism and its ethical teach- ings with various themes in Greek philosophy, creating a new synthesis of Judeo-Greek thought that would shape much of the later history of ideas in Western cultures. Christian- ity gained adherents across most of the Roman Empire, and there were certainly a few Christians in Rome by the middle of the fi rst century. Both Paul and the elder apostle, Peter, according to church tradition, died as martyrs at Rome in the time of Emperor Nero about 67 c.e.

The Christian teaching spread at fi rst among the poor, the people at the bottom of society, those whom Greek glories and Roman splendors had passed over or enslaved, and who had the least to delight in or to hope for in the existing world. Women were also drawn to the new religion, perhaps in

part because early Christianity offered them more autonomy and more opportunities for leadership than they found in the traditional patriarchal order of Roman law and families.

Emergence and spread of Christianity

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 16pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 16 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

17

Gradually Christian ideas reached the upper classes; a few classically educated and well- to-do people became Christians; in the second century Christian bishops and writers were at work publicly in various parts of the empire. In the third century the Roman government, with the empire falling into turmoil, and blaming the social troubles on the Christians, sub- jected them to wholesale persecution. In the fourth century (possibly in 312 c.e.) the Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity. By the fi fth century the entire Roman world was formally Christian; no other religion was offi cially tolerated; and the deepest thinkers were Christians who combined Christian beliefs with the now thousand-year-old tradition of Greco-Roman thought, philosophy, and social institutions.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the coming of Christianity. It brought with it, for one thing, an altogether new sense of human life. Where the Greeks had demonstrated the powers of the mind, the Christians explored the soul, and they taught that in the sight of God all souls were equal, that every human life was sacrosanct and inviolate, and that all worldly distinctions of greatness, beauty, and brilliancy were in the last analysis superfi cial. Where the Greeks had linked the beautiful with the good, thought ugliness to be bad, shrunk from disease as an imperfection, and viewed everything misshapen as horrible and repulsive, the Christians resolutely saw a spiritual beauty even in the plainest or most unpleasant exterior and sought out the diseased, the crippled, and the mutilated to give them help. Love, for the ancients, was never quite distinguished from Venus; for the Christians, who held that God was love, it took on deep overtones of sacrifi ce and compassion. Suffering itself was in a way divine, since God had also suffered on the Cross in human form. A new dignity was thus found for suffering that the world could not cure. At the same time the Christians worked to relieve suffering as none had worked before. They protested against the mas- sacre of prisoners of war, against the mistreatment and degradation of slaves, against the sending of gladiators to kill each other in the arena for another’s pleasure. In place of the Greek and pagan self-satisfaction with human accomplishments they taught humility in the face of an almighty Providence, and in place of proud distinctions between high and low, slave and free, civilized and barbarian, they held that all men and women were alike because all were children of the same God.

On an intellectual level Christianity also marked a revolution. It was Christianity, not rational philosophy, that dispelled the ancient beliefs in greater and lesser gods and god- desses; the blood sacrifi ces and self-immolation; or the frantic resort to magic, fortune- telling, and divination. The Christians taught that there was only one God. The pagan conception of local, tribal, or national gods disappeared. For all the world there was only one plan of Salvation and one Providence, and all human beings took their origin from one source. The idea of the world as one thing, a “universe,” was thus affi rmed with a new depth of meaning. The very intolerance of Christianity (which was new to the ancient world) came from this new sense of human unity, in which it was thought that all people should have, and deserved to have, the one true and saving religion.

The Christians were often denounced and persecuted for their political ideas. The Roman Empire was a world state, and the Romans accepted no rival to its power; no living human being except the emperor was sover- eign; no one anywhere on earth was his equal. Between gods and human beings, in the pagan view, there was moreover no clear distinction. Some gods behaved very humanly, and some human creatures were more like gods than others. The emperor was held to be veritably a god. A cult of Caesar was established, regarded as necessary to maintain the state, which was the world itself. All this the Christians fi rmly refused to

Christian beliefs

Persecution of Christians

1. Ancient Times: Greece, Rome, and Christianity

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 17pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 17 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe18

St. Augustine’s infl uence on Christian theology was honored throughout the Middle Ages; he appears here in a medi- eval illustration, dispensing truths from a celestial throne. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

accept. It was because they would not worship Caesar that the Roman offi cials regarded them as social incendiaries who must be persecuted and stamped out.

The Christian doctrine on this point went back to the saying gathered from Jesus, that one should render to Caesar the things that were Caesar’s, and to God those that were God’s. The same dualism was presented more systematically by St. Augustine about 420 c.e. in his City of God. Few books have been more infl uential in shaping the later development of Western civilization.

The “world,” the world of Caesar, in the time of St. Augustine, was going to ruin. Rome itself was plundered in 410 c.e. by heathen barbarians. Augustine wrote the City of God with this event obsessing his imagination.

St. Augustine

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 18pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 18 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

19

He wrote to show that though the material world could perish there was yet another world that was more enduring and more important.

There were, he said, really two “cities,” the earthly and the heavenly, the temporal and the eternal, the city of man and the City of God. The earthly city was the domain of state and empire, of political authority and political obedience. It was a good thing, as part of God’s providential scheme for human life, but it had no inherently divine character of its own. The emperor was human. The state was not absolute; it could be judged, criticized, or corrected from sources outside itself. It was, for all its majesty and splendor, really subor- dinate in some way to a higher and spiritual power. This power lay in the City of God. By the City of God Augustine meant many things, and readers found all sorts of meanings in later ages. The heavenly city might mean heaven itself, the abode of God and of blessed spirits enjoying life after death. It might mean certain elect spirits of this world, the good people as opposed to the bad. It might, more theoretically, be a system of ideal values or ideal justice, as opposed to the crude approximations of the actual world.

In any case, this Christian dualism gave the later European and Western world a theoretical escape from what is called Caesaropapism, a political system in which one person holds the powers of ruler and of pontiff. Instead, the spiritual power and the political power were held to be sepa- rate and independent. In later times popes and kings often quarreled with each other; the clergy often struggled for political power, and governments often attempted to dictate what people should believe, or love, or hope for. But speaking in general of European history neither side has ever won out, and in the sharp distinction between the spiritual and the temporal has lain the germ of many liberties in later societies. At the same time the idea that no ruler, no government, and no institution is too mighty to rise above moral criticism eventually opened the way to dynamic and progressive changes in European social and political systems.

2. THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES: THE FORMATION OF EUROPE There was really no Europe in ancient times. In the Roman Empire we may see a Mediter- ranean world, or even a kind of early West and East in the Latin- and Greek-speaking por- tions. But the West included parts of Africa as well as of Europe, and Europe as we know it was divided by the Rhine-Danube frontier, south and west of which lay the civilized prov- inces of the empire, and north and east the “barbarians” of whom the Roman world knew almost nothing. To the Romans, “Africa” meant lands that are now called Tunisia and Algeria; “Asia” meant the Asia Minor peninsula; and the word “Europe,” since it meant little, was scarcely used by them at all. It was in the half-millennium from the fi fth to the tenth centuries that Europe as such for the fi rst time emerged with its peoples brought together in a life of their own, clearly set off from Asia or Africa and beginning to create a culture that would become “Western.”

The Disintegration of the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire began to fall apart, especially in the West, and the Christianizing of the empire did nothing to impede its decline. The Emperor Constantine, who in embracing Christianity undoubtedly hoped to strengthen the imperial system, also took one other signifi cant step. In 330 c.e. he founded a new capital at the old Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. (It is now Istanbul.) Thereafter the Roman Empire had two capitals, Rome and

Caesaropapism

Founding of Constantinople

2. The Early Middle Ages: The Formation of Europe

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 19pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 19 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe20

Constantinople, and was administered in two halves. Increasingly the center of gravity moved eastward, as if returning to the more ancient centers in the Middle East, as if the experiment of civilizing the West were to be given up as a failure.

Throughout its long life the empire had been surrounded on almost all sides by people whom the Romans called “barbarians”—wild Celts in Wales and Scotland, Germans in the heart of Europe, Persians or Parthians in the East (barbarian only in the ancient sense of speaking neither Greek nor Latin), and, in the southeast, the Arabs. These diverse peoples, with the exception of some Persians, had never been brought within the control of ancient Greek or Roman civilization. Somewhat like the Chinese, who about 200 b.c.e. built sev- eral walls to solve the same problem, the Romans simply drew a line beyond which they themselves rarely ventured and would not allow the barbarians to pass. Nevertheless out- siders fi ltered into the empire. As early as the third century c.e., emperors and generals recruited bands of them to serve in the Roman armies. Their service over, they would receive farmlands, settle down, marry, and mingle with the population. By the fourth and fi fth centuries a good many such individuals were even reaching high positions of state.

At the same time, in the West, for reasons that are not fully understood, the activity of the Roman cities began to falter, commerce began to decay, local governments became paralyzed, taxes became more ruinous, and free farmers were bound to the soil. The army seated and unseated emperors.

Rival generals fought with each other. Gradually the West fell into decrepitude, and the old line between the Roman provinces and the barbarian world made less and less difference.

After some centuries of relative stability, the barbarians themselves, pressed by more distant peoples from Asia, rather suddenly began to move. Sometimes they fi rst sought peaceable access to the empire, attracted by the warmer Mediterranean climate, or desiring to share in the advantages

of Roman civilization. More often, Germanic tribes moved swiftly and by force, plunder- ing, fi ghting, and killing as they went. In 476 a barbarian chieftain deposed the last Roman emperor in the West. Sometimes in the general upheaval peoples from Asia rapidly intermixed with other populations in the old Roman Empire. The most famous of these invaders were the Huns, who cut through central Europe and France about 450 under their leader Attila, the “scourge of God”—and then disappeared. There were also other invasions. Two centuries later new irruptions burst upon the Greco-Roman world from the southeast, where hitherto outlying peoples poured in from the Arabian deserts. The Arabs, mobilized by the new faith of Islam (Muhammad died in 632), fell as conquerors upon Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia; occupied Egypt about 640 and the old Roman Africa about 700; and in 711 they reached Spain.

Beneath these blows the old unity of the Greco-Roman or Mediterranean world was broken. The “circle of lands” divided into three segments. Three types of civilization now confronted each other across the inland sea.

The Byzantine World, the Arabic World, and the West about 700

The Eastern Roman, Later Roman, Greek, or Byzantine Empire (all names for the same empire) with its capital at Constantinople, and now including only the Asia Minor peninsula, the Balkan peninsula, and parts of Italy, made up one segment of the circle of lands. It represented the most direct

continuation of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. It was Christian in religion and Greek in culture and language. Its people viewed themselves as the truest heirs both of early Christianity and of earlier cultures in Greece. Art and architecture, trades and crafts,

Decline in the West

Barbarian invasions

Byzantine Empire

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 20pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 20 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

21

commerce and navigation, thought and writing, government and law, while not so creative or fl exible as in the classical age, were still carried on actively in the eastern empire, on much the same level as in the closing centuries of ancient times. For all Christians, and for heathen barbarians in Europe, the emperor of the East stood out as the world’s supreme ruler, and Constantinople as the world’s preeminent and most fabulous city.

The second segment of the Mediterranean world was the Arabic and Islamic. It became the most dynamic culture in the lands of the old Roman Empire, reaching from the neighborhood of the Pyrenees through Spain and all North Africa into Arabia, Syria, and the East. Arabic was its language; it became, and still remains, the common speech from Morocco to the Persian Gulf. Islam was its religion, and it looked to the prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632) and the Qur’an (or Koran) for its religious truths. Muhammad had spent his early adult years as a merchant in Mecca on the Arabian peninsula, but he began to have a series of intense religious rev- elations when he was about 40 years old. These revelations led Muhammad to a devout and uncompromising monotheism, which stressed the great power of God—or Allah in Arabic—and the human duty to adhere to God’s will. Muhammad saw himself as a prophet in the Jewish and Christian tradition, but he soon came to defi ne his revelations and teachings as the beginning of a new religion. The messages that came to Muhammad through revelation were written down in the sacred book of Islam, the Qur’an, which was organized into 114 chapters (called suras ). Emphasizing submission to God, the impor- tance of prayer, and an ethical obligation to help others, the Qur’an provided directions for the affairs of daily life as well as a powerful, poetic vision of the grandeur of God.

Muhammad’s revelations attracted little early support in Mecca. Indeed, the hostil- ity there forced him to move north in 622 to the city of Medina. This famous fl ight (the Hegira ) brought him to a more receptive community, where his teachings quickly gained numerous adherents and from where the fi rst Muslims set out to spread the new faith across all of Arabia, including Mecca. Muhammad died in 632, but the new religion continued to expand rapidly in all directions. Leadership passed to a series of caliphs who were initially relatives of Muhammad himself. As Muslims conquered new territories and won new converts throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the lands of Islam came under the control of these caliphs. All Muslims were included in the caliphate. The ruling caliph exercised both spiritual and political authority, and he was regarded as the true religious and military successor of Muhammad himself.

Confl icts and lasting divisions nevertheless developed during the era of the third Caliph, Uthman—one of the sons-in-law of Muhammad and a leader of the Umayyad family. Supporters of Ali, a rival leader and also a son-in-law of Muhammad, killed Uthman in 656, and Ali came to power as the fourth caliph. This violence did not resolve the confl ict, however, and Ali himself was soon murdered. Ali’s followers refused to accept the legitimacy of the Umayyad family, which now regained control of the caliphate. A minority faction, called Shiites, continued to honor Ali and to claim that all true lead- ers of Islam must descend from him. Although most Muslims supported the Umayyad caliphs, the Shiite minority remained a permanent presence within Islam, sustaining the memory of Ali and challenging the religious legitimacy of the dominant Sunnis (a term that emerged later). Meanwhile, the Umayyad dynasty set up its capital in Damascus, and some members of the family eventually extended their power as far west as Spain. Meeting at such places on the European continent and in other Mediterranean lands, Muslims and Christians began a long-developing pattern of exchanges and confl icts that would help to shape both of these religious cultures through all later centuries.

Arabic world

2. The Early Middle Ages: The Formation of Europe

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 21pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 21 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe22

The Arabic world, like the Byzantine, built upon the heritage of the Greco-Romans. In religion, the early Muslims regarded themselves as successors to the Jewish and Christian traditions. They considered the line of Jewish prophets since Abraham to be spokesmen of the true God, and they put Jesus in this line. But they added that Muhammad was the last and greatest of the prophets, that the Qur’an set forth a revelation replacing that of the Jewish Bible, that the Christian New Testament was mistaken because Christ was not divine, and that the Christian belief in a Trinity was erroneous because there was in the strictest sense only One True God. To the Muslim Arabs, therefore, all Christians were dangerous or misguided infi dels.

In mundane matters, the Arabs speedily took over the civilization of the lands they conquered. In the caliphate, as in the Byzantine Empire, the civilization of the ancient world went its way without serious interruption. Huge buildings and magnifi cent palaces were constructed; ships plied the Mediterranean; Arab merchants ventured over the des- erts and traversed the Indian Ocean; holy or learned men corresponded over thousands of miles. The government developed effi cient systems to collect taxes, enforce the laws, and keep the provinces in order. In the sciences the Arabs not only learned from but also went beyond the Greeks. They translated Greek scientifi c literature: we know some of it today only through these medieval Arabic versions. Arab geographers had a wider knowledge of the world than anyone had possessed up to their time. Arab mathematicians developed algebra so far beyond the Greeks as almost to be its creator (“algebra” is an Arabic word), and in introducing the “Arabic” numerals (through their contacts with India) they made arithmetic, which in Roman numerals had been formidably diffi cult into something that every schoolchild could be taught.

The sixth-century emperor Justinian built the great Hagia Sophia to display his commit- ment to the Christian religion and the power of his capi- tal city, Constantinople. The church became a mosque after the Byzantine Empire fell to Muslim invaders in the fi f- teenth century, but it remains the most famous achievement of Byzantine architecture. (David Madison/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 22pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 22 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

23

The third segment of the ancient Greco-Roman world was Latin Christendom, which about 700 c.e. did not look very promising. It was what was left over from the other two— what the Byzantines were unable to hold and the Arabs were unable to con- quer. It included only Italy (shared in part with the Byzantines), France, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Britain. Barbarian kings were doing their best to rule small kingdoms, but in truth all government had fallen to pieces. Usually the invading barbarians remained a minority, eventually to be absorbed. Only in England, and in the region immediately west of the Rhine, did the Germanic element supersede the older Celtic and Latin. But the presence of violent invaders amid peasants and city dwellers reduced to passivity by Roman rule, together with the disintegration of Roman institutions that had gone on even before the invasions, left this region in chaos.

The Western barbarians, as noted, were Germanic; and the Germanic infl uence became another distinctive contribution to the making of Europe. Some Germans were Christian by the fourth century, but most were still heathen when they burst into the Roman Empire. Their languages had not been written down, but they possessed an intricate folklore and religion in which fi ghting and heroic valor were much esteemed. Though now in a migratory phase, they were an agricultural people who knew how to work iron, and they had a rudimentary knowledge of the crafts of the Romans. They were organized in small tribes and had a strong sense of tribal kinship, which (as with many similar peoples) dominated their ideas of leadership and law. They enjoyed more freedom in their affairs than did the citizens of the Roman Empire. Many of the tribes were roughly self-governing in that all free men, those entitled to bear arms, met in open fi elds to hold council; and often the tribe itself elected its leader or king. They had a strong sense of loyalty to persons, of fealty to the acknowledged king or chief; but they had no sense of loyalty to large or general institutions. They had no sense of the state—of any distant, impersonal, and continuing source of law and rule. Law they regarded as the infl exible custom of each tribe. In the absence of abstract jurisprudence or trained judges, they settled disputes by rough and ready methods. In the ordeal, for example, a person who obstinately fl oated when thrown into water was adjudged guilty. In trial by battle, the winner of a kind of ritualistic duel was regarded as innocent. The gods, it was thought, would not allow wrong to prevail.

The Germans who overran the old Roman provinces found it diffi cult to maintain any political organization at more than a local level. Security and civil order all but disappeared. Peasant communities were at the mercy of wandering bands of habitual fi ghters. Fighters often captured peasant villages, took them under their protection, guarded them from fur- ther marauders, and lived off their produce. Sometimes the same great fi ghting man came to possess many such villages, moving with his retinue of horsemen from one village to another to support himself throughout the year. Thus originated a new distinction between lord and servant, noble and commoner, martial and menial class. Life became local and self-suffi cient. People ate, wore, used, and dwelled in only what they themselves and their neighbors could produce. In contrast to the economies of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, Western trade died down, the cities became depopulated, money went out of circulation, and almost nothing was bought or sold. The Roman roads fell into neglect; people often used them as quarries for ready-cut building blocks for their own crude purposes. Western Europe not only broke up into localized villages but also ceased to have habitual exchanges across the Mediterranean. It lost contact with the eastern centers from which its former civilization had always been drawn. From roughly 500 c.e. on, most of Europe fell into what some later historians would call the “Dark Ages.”

Latin Christendom

Germanic customs

2. The Early Middle Ages: The Formation of Europe

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 23pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 23 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe24

The Church and the Rise of the Papacy

Only one organized institution maintained a tie with ancient civilization. Only one institu- tion, reaching over the whole West, could receive news or dispatch its agents over the whole area. This institution was the Christian church. Its framework still stood; its network of bishoprics, as built up in late Roman times, remained intact except in places such as England, where the barbarian conquest was complete.

In addition, a new type of religious institution spread rapidly with the growth of monasteries. The serious and the sensitive, both men and women (though not together, to be sure), rejected the savagery about them and retired into communities of their own. Usually they were left unmolested

by rough neighbors who held them in religious awe. In a world of violence they formed islands of quiet, peace, and contemplation. Their prayers, it was believed, were of use to all the world, and their example might at the least arouse pangs of shame in more worldly people. The monastic houses generally adopted the rule of St. Benedict (c. 480–543) and were governed by an abbot. Dedicated to the same ideals, they formed unifying fi laments throughout the chaos of the Latin West.

Bishops, abbots, and monks looked with veneration to Rome as the spot where St. Peter, the fi rst apostle, had been martyred. The bishop of Rome corresponded with other bishops, sent out missionaries, gave advice on doctrine when he could, and attempted to oversee the situation throughout the Latin world as a whole. Moreover, with no emperor any longer in Rome, the bishop took over the government and public affairs of the city. Thus the bishop of Rome, while claiming a primacy over all Christians, was not dominated by any secular power. In the East the great church functionaries, the patriarchs, fell under the infl uence of the emperor who continued to rule at Constantinople. A tradition of Caesaropapism grew up in the East; but in the West the independence of the bishop of Rome now confi rmed in prac- tice a principle always maintained by the great churchmen of the West—the independence of the spiritual power from the political or temporal.

The growing authority of the popes was fortifi ed by various arguments. St. Peter, it was held, had imparted the spiritual authority given to him by Christ himself to the Roman bishops who were his successors. This doc- trine of the “Petrine supremacy” was based on two verses in the Bible (Mat-

thew xvi, 18–19), according to which Christ designated Peter as the head of the church, giving him the “power of the keys” to open and close the doors of eternal salvation. As for the pope’s temporal rule in Rome, it was affi rmed that the Emperor Constantine had endowed the bishop with the government of the city. This “Donation of Constantine” was accepted as historical fact from the eighth century to the fi fteenth, when it was proved to be a forgery.

Growth of monasteries

Papal authority

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD about 400, 800, and 1250 c.e. Greco-Roman civilization, centered about the Mediterranean, was offi cially Christian and politically unifi ed under the Roman Empire in 400 c.e., but it broke apart into three segments in the early Middle Ages. Each segment developed its own type of life. Each segment also expanded beyond the limits of the ancient Mediterranean culture. By 1250 Latin Christendom reached to the Baltic and beyond. Greek Christendom penetrated north of the Black Sea to include the Russians. The Muslim world spread into inner Asia and Africa. In 1250, and until 1492, the Muslims, or Moors, still held the southern tip of Spain. Jews lived in varying num- bers throughout the Mediterranean world, and Jewish communities were important within each of the religious spheres on these maps.

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 24pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 24 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

252. The Early Middle Ages: The Formation of Europe

About 800 C.E.

Latin Christians

Greek Christians

Muslims

About 1250 C.E.

Latin Christians

Greek Christians

Muslims

About 400 C.E.

The Roman Empire

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 25pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 25 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe26

It was the church that incorporated the barbarians into new forms of social life, and when such groups embraced a more settled, civilized way of living, it was the church that they entered. As early as about 340 c.e., the church sent out Ulfi las to convert the Goths; his translation of the Bible

represents the fi rst writing down of any Germanic language. About 496 the king of the Franks, Clovis, was converted to Christianity. A hundred years later, in 597, the king of Kent in southeast England yielded to the persuasions of Augustine of Canterbury, a mis- sionary dispatched from Rome, and the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons gradually followed. Missionaries from Ireland also, to which Christians of the Roman Empire had fl ed to escape the heathen barbarians, now returned to both Britain and the Continent to spread the gospel. By 700, after three centuries of turmoil, the borders of Christianity in the West were again roughly what they had been in late Roman times. Then in 711, as we have seen, the Arabs entered Spain. They crossed the Pyrenees and moved on toward cen- tral Europe, but were stopped by a Christian and Frankish army in 732 near Tours on the river Loire. Islam was turned back into Spain, thereby allowing the people of Western Europe to expand their emerging Latin Christian culture.

The Empire of Charlemagne, 800–814

Among the Franks, in what is now northern France and the German Rhineland, there had arisen a line of capable rulers of whom the greatest was Charlemagne. The Frankish kings made it their policy to cooperate with the pope. The pope needed a protector against dep- redations by his barbarian neighbors and against the political claims of the Byzantine Empire upon the city of Rome. The Frankish kings, in return for protection thus offered, won papal support to their side. This made it easier for them to control their own bishops, who were more often seen on horseback than in the episcopal chair; and the papal alliance helped the kings pacify their own domains and wage wars of conquest against the heathen. In the year 800, in Rome, the pope crowned Charlemagne as emperor of the West. Frankish king and Roman bishop both believed that if only the Roman Empire could be restored peace and order might once more reign. Church and empire, religion and the state, were to be as two mighty swords employed in the same holy cause.

Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees and won back the northeastern cor- ner of Spain to Christian rule. He overthrew and subordinated the barbarian kings who had set themselves up in northern Italy. He sent forces down the Danube, penetrated into Bohemia, and proceeded against some of the still

heathen Germans (the Saxons) who lived along the river Elbe, and whom he either massa- cred or converted to Christianity. All these regions he brought within his new empire. Except for England and Ireland, which remained outside, the borders of his empire were coextensive with those of the Latin Christian world.

Once more, to a degree, the peoples of Western Europe were united under an empire. But a momentous change had occurred. Its capital did not lie in the ancient world of the Mediterranean. Its capital was now in north- ern Europe at Aix-la-Chapelle, or Aachen, near the mouth of the Rhine. Its

ruler, Charlemagne, was a German of an ethnic group that had remained outside ancient civilization. Its people were Germans, French, and Italians, or, more precisely, the ances- tors from whom these nationalities would later emerge. In the Greco-Roman world the north had always been at best provincial. Now the north became a center in its own right. Charlemagne dispatched embassies to the Byzantine emperor at Constantinople and to

Conversion of the barbarians

Charlemagne

Revival of learning

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 26pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 26 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

27

Harun al-Rashid, the great Muslim caliph at Baghdad. In intellectual matters, too, the north now became a capital. Centuries of violence and confusion had virtually destroyed education and systematic learning, even for the most powerful families in Europe. Charlemagne himself, though he understood Latin, could barely read and never learned to write. He used his authority, however, to revive the all but forgotten ancient learning and to spread education at least among the clergy. To his palace school came scholars from Eng- land, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. They wrote and spoke in Latin, the only Western language in which complicated ideas could at the time be expressed. Disintegrating ancient manuscripts were copied and recopied to assure a more abundant supply for study—always by hand, but in a more rapid script than had before been used. This so-called Carolingian minuscule evolved into the small letters of the modern Western alphabet, only the capital letters being Roman. Meanwhile, Charlemagne sought to foster commerce by creating a new and more reliable coinage, which was based on silver, the gold coins of the Roman Empire having long since vanished.

Ninth-Century Invasions; Europe by 1000

In Charlemagne’s empire we fi rst see the shape of Europe as a unit of society and culture distinct from the Mediterranean world of antiquity. The empire did not last. New waves of invaders assailed Western Christendom in the ninth century. The Magyars (called in Latin “Hungarians”) terrifi ed various parts of Europe until they settled down on the middle Danube about the year 900. New Ger- manic tribes uprooted themselves, coming this time from Scandinavia, and variously known as Norse, Vikings, or Danes. Bursting out in all directions, they reached Kiev in Russia in

Second wave of invaders

This image of a monastery in a medieval Spanish manuscript shows how early Christian monks became known for their learning as well as their religious contemplation and disciplined labor. (Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY)

2. The Early Middle Ages: The Formation of Europe

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 27pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 27 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe28

864, discovered Iceland in 874, and even touched America in 1000. In the Christian world they assaulted the coasts and pushed up the rivers but settled in considerable numbers only in the Danelaw in England and in Normandy in France. Meanwhile the Arabs raided the shores of France and Italy and occupied Sicily. Nowhere was the power of government strong enough to ward off such attacks. Everywhere the harassed local population found its own means of defense or, that failing, was slaughtered, robbed, or carried off into slavery.

Gradually the second wave of invaders was incorporated as the fi rst had been, by the same process of conversion to Christianity. By the year 1000 this process was nearly com- plete. In 1001 the pope sent a golden crown to the Magyars to crown St. Stephen as their fi rst king, thus bringing Hungary within the orbit of the Latin West. Poland, Bohemia, and the Scandinavian homelands of the Norse were Christianized during the same era. In older Christian countries, such as France, the last remote and isolated rustics—the “heathen” who lived in the “heath”—were fi nally ferreted out by missionaries and brought within the Christian fold. In Christian countries Christianity now permeated every corner, and (despite the local differences that existed everywhere) the historic peoples of western Europe had come together within the spreading religious and cultural system of the Latin church.

Meanwhile East and West continued to drift apart. The refusal of Greek patriarchs at Constantinople to recognize the claims to primacy of the bishop of Rome, whom they regarded as a kind of Western barbarian, and the refusal of the Roman pontiff to acknowledge the political preten- sions of the Byzantine Empire, led to the Great Schism of East and West.

This schism, after developing for three centuries, became defi nite in 1054. It divided the Christian world into the Latin or Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches. It was from Constantinople that Christianity reached the peoples of Russia. The Russians, like the Balkan peoples, remained out of contact with most of Europe during the centuries when spiritual and intellectual contacts were carried through the clergy. They believed, indeed, that the Latin West was evil, heretical, and unholy. The Latin West, at the same time, by the schism, cut one more of its ties with antiquity and emerged more clearly as an indepen- dent center of its own civilization.

By the year 1000, or soon thereafter, the entity that we call Europe had come into existence. From the turbulence that followed the collapse of the Greco-Roman civilization

had issued the peoples and the countries that would evolve into modern Europe. A kingdom of France had emerged, adjoining the great ill-defi ned bulk of Germany to the east. There were small Christian kingdoms in north- ern Spain and a number of city-states in the Italian peninsula. In the north

there were now a kingdom of England and a kingdom of Scotland; Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had also taken form. In the east rose the three great kingdoms of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, the fi rst two predominantly Slavic, Hungary predominantly Magyar, but all were Latin and Catholic in culture and religion, and Western in orientation. The east Slavs, or Russians, and the Slavs and other peoples of the Balkan peninsula also formed king- doms of their own. Their languages and religion were diverging from the cultures of western Europe. Christianized by Byzantine missionaries, they were Greek and Orthodox in culture and religion, and oriented toward Constantinople.

The civilization of western Europeans in the year 1000 was still unimpressive in com- parison to the more polished circles of Byzantium or Baghdad. It might still seem that the West would suffer more than the East from their separation. But the West began at this time to experience new social and economic activity, ushering in the European civilization of the High Middle Ages.

“Great Schism of East and West”

Emerging Europe

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 28pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 28 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

29

3. THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES: SECULAR CIVILIZATION

Agriculture and the Feudal System after 1000

Some historical periods are so dynamic that a person who lives to a mature age can remem- ber sweeping changes that have come in one’s own lifetime. Such a time began in Europe in the eleventh century. People could see new towns rise and grow before their eyes. They could observe new undertakings in commerce or government. Most of the cities that Europe was to know before the modern industrial era sprang up between about 1050 and 1200. The population of western Europe, which had been sparse even in Roman days, and which was even sparser after 500, suddenly began to grow denser about the year 1000, and it expanded steadily for two or three hundred years. The people of the High Middle Ages did not develop a new conception of progress because their minds were set upon timeless values and personal salvation in another world, but the period was nevertheless one of rapid progress in nonreligious or “secular” matters. Much was created that remained fundamental for European cultures far into modern times.

The new era was made possible by a growth in population that went along with agricultural changes. After the Norse and Magyar inroads had stopped, Europe was spared the assaults of other invaders. There came to be more security of life and limb. Farmers could plant with more confi dence that they would reap, and people could build houses with the expectation of passing them on to their children. Hence there was more planting and building. Sometime before the year 1000 a heavier plow was invented, which cut a deeper furrow. Better methods of harnessing horses had been found than the ancients had ever known. The Romans had con- tinued simply to throw a yoke over a horse’s neck, so that the animal in pulling a weight easily choked. Europeans, before the year 1000, began to use a horse collar that rested on the animal’s shoulders. The single horse could pull a greater load, or several horses could now for the fi rst time be hitched in tandem. The amount of available animal power was thus multiplied, at a time when animals were the main source of power other than human muscle. Windmills, unknown to the ancients, were developed in the Low Countries about this time. They too offered a new source of power. Thus at the very beginning of a specifi cally “European” history, one may detect characteristics of subsequent European civilization—a search for technological invention, a quest for new sources of energy.

With such labor-saving devices people continued to work very hard, but they obtained more results by their efforts. Probably the use of such inventions, together with the infl u- ence of the Christian clergy, accounts for the gradual disappearance of slavery from Europe and its replacement by the less-abject and less-degrading status of serfdom. It is true that medieval Christians, when they could, continued to enslave whites as they were later to do with blacks. Usually such slaves were captives in war, taken from tribes not yet converted to Christianity, and sometimes exported as a form of merchandise to the Byzantine and Muslim worlds. As the successive European peoples became Christianized, the supply of non-Christian slaves dried up. Medieval Christians did not enslave each other, nor was slavery essential to any important form of production.

Not only did population increase, and work become more productive, but also groups of people became less isolated from one another. Communications improved. The roads remained poor or nonexistent, but bridges were built across European rivers, and settlers fi lled in the wildernesses that had formerly separated the inhabited areas. Trees were felled, land was cleared, and the rural population clustered in village communities. The “nucleated”

Agriculture and population growth

3. The High Middle Ages: Secular Civilization

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 29pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 29 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe30

village gave more security, more contact between families, and readier access to the black- smith or the priest. It also made possible a communally organized agriculture.

Better ways of using land were introduced in the “three-fi eld” system, which spread to almost every region where cereal crops were the staple. In this system the peasant village divided its arable fi elds into three parts. The fi rst part was then sown with one crop, such as wheat; a second part with

another, such as barley; and the third was left to lie fallow. The three parts were rotated from year to year. Thus soil exhaustion was avoided at a time when fertilizers were unknown. Formerly, half or less of the available fi elds had been cultivated at any one time. With the three-fi eld system two-thirds of the land came into annual use. This change, rein- forced by better plowing and more effective employment of animals, led to a huge increase in the supply of food.

The peace and personal security necessary to agriculture were also advanced, in the absence of effective public authority, by the growth of institutions that we know as “feudalism.” Feudalism was intricate and diverse, but in essence it was a means of carrying on some kind of govern-

ment on a local basis where no organized state existed. After the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire the real authority fell into the hands of persons who were most often called “counts.” The count was the most important man of a region covering a few hundred square miles. To build up his own position, and strengthen himself for war against other counts, he tried to keep the peace and maintain control over the lesser lords in his county, those whose pos- sessions extended over a few hundred or a few thousand acres. These lesser lords accepted or were forced to accept his protection. They became his vassals, and he became their “lord.” The lord and vassal relation was one of reciprocal duties. The lord protected the vassal and assured him justice and fi rm tenure of his land. If two vassals of the same lord disputed the possession of the same village, the lord decided the case, sitting in council (or “court”) with all his vassals assembled and judging according to the common memory or customary law of the district. If a vassal died young, leaving only small children, the lord took the family under his “wardship” or guardianship, guaranteeing that the rightful heirs would inherit in due time. Correspondingly the vassal agreed to serve the lord as a fi ghting man for a certain number of days in the year. The vassal also had to advise and serve the lord in other ways, including service in his court for the judging of disputes. Usually he owed no money or material payment; but if the lord had to be ransomed from captivity, or when the lord’s children married, the vassal paid a fee. The vassal also paid a fee on inher- iting an estate, and the income of estates under wardship went to the lord. Thus the lord collected sporadic revenues with which to fi nance his somewhat primitive government.

This feudal scheme gradually spread across northern Europe. Lords at the level of counts became in turn the vassals of dukes. In the year 987 the great lords of France chose Hugh Capet as their king and became his vas- sals. The kings of France enjoyed little real power for another 200 years,

but the descendants of Hugh occupied their throne for eight centuries, until the French Revolution. Similarly the magnates of Germany elected a king in 911; in 962 the German king was crowned emperor, as Charlemagne had been before him; thus originated the Holy Roman Empire, of which much will be heard in the following chapters.

England in these formative centuries did not choose a king by election. England was conquered in 1066 by the Duke of Normandy, William. The Normans (the Norse reshaped by a century of Christian and French infl u- ences) imposed upon England a centralized and effi cient type of feudalism

Three-fi eld system

Feudalism

Capetian kings

The Normans in England

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 30pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 30 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

31

that they had developed in Normandy. In England, from an early date, the king and his offi cials therefore had considerable power, which led to more civil peace and personal security than on the Continent. Within the framework of a strong monarchy self-governing institutions could eventually develop with a minimum of disorder.

The notable feature of feudalism was its mutual or reciprocal character. In this it dif- fered from the old Roman imperial principle, by which the emperor had been a majestic and all-powerful sovereign. Under feudalism no one was sovereign. King and people, lord and vassal, were joined in a kind of contract. Each owed something to the other. If one defaulted, the obligation ceased. If a vassal refused his due services, the king had the right to enforce compliance. If the king violated the rights of the vassal, the vassals could join together against him. The king was supposed to act with the advice of the vassals, who formed his council or court. If the vassals believed the king to be exceeding his lawful powers, they could impose terms upon him. Although feudalism was always a hierarchical system of lords and vassals, its mutual or contractual character contributed to later European ideas of constitutional government.

Feudalism applied in the strict sense only to the military or noble class. Below the feudal world lay the vast mass of the peasantry. In the village, the lowliest vassal of a higher noble was lord over his own subjects. The village, with its people and surrounding farmlands, constituted a “manor,” the estate of a lord. In the eleventh century most people of the manor were serfs. They were “bound to the soil” in that they could not leave the manor without the lord’s permission. Few wanted to leave anyway, at a time when the world beyond the village was unknown and dangerous,

The manor and serfs

Most people in the Middle Ages worked in the fi elds, coping like the peasant in this late medieval illustration with the seasons, soil, seeds, and animals that shaped agricultural life. (British Library Board/The Bridgeman Art Library)

3. The High Middle Ages: Secular Civilization

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 31pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 31 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe32

when food supplies were precarious, and when other lands were fi lled at best only with other similar manors. The lord, for his part, could not expropriate the villagers or drive them away. He owed them protection and the administration of justice. They in turn worked his fi elds and gave him part of the produce of their own. No money changed hands, because there was virtually no money in circulation. The manorial system was the agricultural base on which a ruling class was supported. It supported also the clergy, for the church held much land in the form of manors. It gave the protection from physical violence and the framework of com- munal living without which the peasants could not grow crops or tend livestock.

With the rise of agricultural productivity, lords and even a few peasants began to produce a surplus, which they might sell if only they could fi nd a market. The country was thus able to produce enough food to support a town population. And since population grew with the increase of the food supply, a surplus rural population also began to exist. Restless spirits among the peasants now wanted to get away from the manor. And many went off to the new towns.

The Rise of Towns and Commerce

We have seen how the ancient cities had decayed. In the ninth and tenth centuries, with few exceptions, there were none left in western Europe. Here and there one would fi nd a cluster of population around the headquarters of a bishop, a great count, or a king. But there were no commercial centers. There was no merchant class. The simple crafts— weaving, metalworking, harness making—were carried on locally on the manors. Rarely, an itinerant trader might appear with such semiprecious goods as he could carry for long distances on donkeys—Eastern silks, or a few spices for the wealthy. Among these early traders Jews were often important, because Judaism, part of the Byzantine and Arabic worlds as well as the Western, offered one of the few channels of communication among the different Mediterranean cultures; and many Jewish traders were connected through long-distance commercial networks.

Long-distance trading was in fact the fi rst economic activity to revive and develop. The city of Venice was founded about 570 when refugees fl ed from invaders and settled in its islands. The Venetians, as time went on, brought Eastern goods up the Adriatic and sold them to traders com-

ing down from central Europe. In Flanders in the north, in what is now Belgium, manu- facturers of woolen cloth emerged. Flemish woolens were of a unique quality, owing to peculiarities of the atmosphere and the skill of the weavers. They could not be duplicated elsewhere. Nor could Eastern goods be procured except through the Venetians—or the Genoese or Pisans. Such goods could not possibly be produced locally, yet they were in demand wherever they became known. Merchants traveled in increasing numbers to sell them. Money came back into more general circulation; where it came from is not quite clear, since there was little mining of gold or silver until the end of the Middle Ages. Merchants began to establish permanent headquarters, settling within the deserted walls of ghostly Roman towns or near the seat of a lord or ecclesiastic, whose numerous retainers might become customers. Craftsmen moved from the overpopulated manors to these same growing centers, where they might produce wares that the lords or merchants would wish to buy. The process, once started, tended to snowball: the more people settled in such an agglomeration, the more they needed food brought to them from the country; and the more craftsmen left the villages, the more the country people, lords and serfs had to obtain cloth- ing and simple tools and utensils from the towns. Hence a busy local trade developed also.

Long-distance trade

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 32pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 32 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

33

By 1100, or not long thereafter, such centers existed all over Europe, from the Baltic to Italy, from England as far east as Bohemia. Usually there was one about every 20 or 30 miles. The smallest towns had only a few hundred inhabitants; the larger ones had two or three thousand, or sometimes more. Each carried on a local exchange with its immediate countryside and purveyed goods of more dis- tant origin to local consumers. But their importance was by no means merely economic. What made them “towns” in the full sense of the word was their acquisi- tion of political rights.

The merchants and craftsmen who lived in the towns did not wish to remain, like the country people, subject to neighboring feudal lords. At worst, the feudal lords regarded merchants as a convenient source of ready money; they might hold them up on the road, plunder their mule trains, collect tolls at river crossings, or extort cash by offering “protec- tion.” At best, the most well-meaning feudal lord could not supervise the affairs of mer- chants, for the feudal and customary law knew nothing of commercial problems. The traders in the course of their business developed a “law merchant” of their own, having to do with money and moneychanging, debt and bankruptcy, contracts, invoices, and bills of lading. They wished to have their own means of apprehending thieves, runaway debtors, or sellers of fraudulent goods. They strove, therefore, to get recognition for their own law, their own courts, their own judges and magistrates. They wished, too, to govern their towns themselves and to avoid payment of fees or taxes to nearby nobles.

Everywhere in Latin Christendom, along about 1100, the new towns struggled to free themselves from the encircling feudalism and to set themselves up as self-governing little republics. Where the towns were largest and closest together—along the highly urban- ized arteries of the trade routes, in north Italy, on the upper Danube and Rhine rivers, in Flanders, or on the Baltic coast—they emancipated themselves the most fully. Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Milan became virtually independent city-states, each governing a substantial tract of its surrounding country. In Flanders also, towns like Bruges and Ghent dominated their localities. Along the upper Danube, the Rhine, the North Sea, the Baltic, many towns became imperial free cities within the Holy Roman Empire, each a kind of small republic owing allegiance to no one except the dis- tant and usually ineffectual emperor. Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Augsburg, Strasbourg, Hamburg, and Lübeck were free cities of this kind. In France and England, where the towns in the twelfth century were somewhat less powerful, they obtained less independence but received charters of liberties from the king. By these charters they were assured the right to have their own town governments and offi cials, their own courts and law, and to pay their own kind of taxes to the king in lieu of ordinary feudal obligations.

Often towns formed leagues or urban federations, joining forces to repress banditry or piracy or to deal with ambitious monarchs or predatory nobles. The most famous such league was the Hanse; it was formed mainly of German towns, fought wars under its own banner, and dominated the commerce of the North Sea and the Baltic until after 1300. Similar tendencies of the towns to form political leagues, or to act independently in war and diplomacy, were suppressed by the kings in England, France, and Spain.

The fact that Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands were commercially more advanced than the Atlantic countries in the Middle Ages, and so had a more intensive town life, was to be one cause (out of many) preventing political unifi cation in the early modern era. Not until 1860 or 1870 were nationwide states created in this region. In the west, where more of a balance was kept between town and country, the towns were absorbed into larger

Growth of towns

Town charters

3. The High Middle Ages: Secular Civilization

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 33pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 33 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe34

territorial governments that were arising under the kings. This early difference between central and western Europe would later shape much of Europe’s history in modern times.

The liberties won by the towns were corporate liberties. Each town was a collective entity. The people in towns did not possess individual rights, but only the rights that followed from being a resident of a particular town. Among these were personal liberty; no townsman could be a serf, and fugi-

tive serfs who lived over a year in a town were generally deemed to be free. But townspeo- ple did not seek individual liberty in the modern sense. The world was still too unsettled for the individual to act alone. Townspeople wanted to join together in a compact body and to protect themselves by all sorts of regulations and controls. The most obvious evidence of this communal solidarity was the wall within which most towns were enclosed. The citizens in time of trouble looked to their own defense. As the towns grew, they built new walls farther out. In many European cities today one may still see remains of walls that were in use from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.

Economic solidarity was of more day-to-day importance. The towns required neigh- boring peasants to sell foodstuffs only in the town marketplace. They thus protected their food supply against competition from other towns. Or they forbade the practice of certain trades in the country; this was to oblige peasants to make purchases in town and to protect the jobs and livelihood of the town craftsmen. They put up tariffs and tolls on the goods of other towns brought within their own walls. Or they levied special fees on merchants from outside who did business in the town. In Italy and Germany they often coined their own money; and the typical town fi xed the rates at which various moneys should be exchanged. The medieval towns, in short, at the time of their greatest liberty, followed in a local way the same policies of protectionism and exclusiveness that national governments were often to follow in modern times.

Within each town merchants and craftsmen formed associations called “guilds,” whose “masters” supervised the affairs of a specifi c trade or craft. Merchants formed a merchant guild. Stonemasons, carpenters, barbers, dyers, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, weavers, hatters, tailors, shoemakers,

grocers, and apothecaries formed craft guilds of their own. The guilds served a public purpose. They provided that work should be done by reliable and experienced persons, thereby protecting people from the pitfalls of shoddy garments, clumsy barbers, poison- ous drugs, or defective and poorly built houses. They also provided a means of vocational education and marked out a career for young men. Women also worked in many trades and could belong to guilds; they were particularly numerous in certain guilds of the cloth- ing trades. Women were nevertheless excluded from some of the guilds’ social activities, and they were not granted the political privileges that men received as they moved up through the ranks of the guild hierarchy. Typically a boy became an apprentice to some master, learned the trade, and lived with and was supported by the master’s family for a term of years, such as seven. Then he became a journeyman, a qualifi ed and recognized worker, who might work for any master at a stated wage. Most workers remained journey- men throughout their lives, especially in the later Middle Ages. The guild system enabled some workers to improve their social position, however; and a lucky young man might eventually become a master, open his own shop, hire journeymen, and take apprentices. So long as the towns were growing, a boy had some chance to become a master; but as early as 1300 many guilds were becoming frozen, and the masters were increasingly chary of admitting new persons to their own status. Although widows often continued to work in the trades or artisanal crafts of their husbands, women almost never became masters.

Corporate liberties

Guilds

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 34pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 34 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

35

From the beginning, in any case, it was an important function of the guilds to protect their own members. The masters, assembled together, preserved their reputation by regulating the quality of their product. They divided work among themselves and fi xed the terms of apprenticeship, the wages to be paid to journeymen, and the prices at which their goods must be sold. Or they took collective steps to meet or keep out the competition of the same trade in nearby towns.

Whether among individuals within the town itself, or as between town and country, or between town and town, the spirit of the medieval economy was to prevent competition. Risk, adventure, and speculation were not wanted. Almost no one thought it proper to work for monetary profi t. The few who did, big merchants trading over large areas, met with suspicion and disapproval wherever they went.

The towns tried in many ways to subject the peasants’ interests to their own but nevertheless had an emancipating infl uence on the country. Some peasants were able to escape from serfdom by settling in a town. But the town infl uence was more widespread and far out of proportion to the rela- tively small number of people who could become town dwellers. The growth of towns increased the demand for food. Lords began to clear new lands, and western Europeans set about developing a kind of internal frontier. Formerly villages had been separated by dark tracts of roadless woods, in which wolves roamed freely, shadowed by the gnomes, elves, and fairies of popular folklore. Now pioneers with axes cleared farmlands and built vil- lages. The lords who usually supervised such operations (since their serfs were not slaves, and could not be moved at will) offered freer terms to entice peasants to settle on the new lands. It was less easy for the lord of an old village to hold his people in serfdom when in an adjacent village, within a few hours’ walk, the people were free.

The peasants, moreover, were now able to obtain a little money by selling produce in town. The lords wanted money because the towns were producing more articles that money could buy. It became common for peasants to obtain personal freedom, holding their own lands, in return for an annual money payment to the lord for an indefi nite period into the future. As early as the twelfth century serfdom began to disappear in northern France and southern England, and by the fi fteenth century it had disappeared from most

Towns and the decline of serfdom

The crafts and trade in medieval towns were dominated by the guilds, whose symbols conveyed the nature of their work. The sheep on this emblem represents the wool guild in Florence. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

3. The High Middle Ages: Secular Civilization

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 35pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 35 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe36

of western Europe. The peasant could now, in law, move freely about. But the manorial organization remained; the peasant owed dues and fees to the lord and was still under his legal jurisdiction.

The Growth of Monarchies and Government Institutions

Meanwhile the kings were busy, each trying to build his kingdom into an organized monarchy that would outlast his life. Monarchy became heredi- tary; the king inherited his position like any other feudal lord or possessor of an estate. Inheritance of the crown made for peace and order, for elec-

tions under conditions of the time were usually turbulent and disputed, and where the older Germanic principle of elective monarchy remained alive, as in the Holy Roman Empire, there was periodic commotion. The kings sent out executive offi cers to supervise their interests throughout their kingdoms. The kings of England, adopting an old Anglo-Saxon practice, had a sheriff in each of the 40 shires; the kings of France created similar offi cers who were called bailiffs. The kings likewise instituted royal courts, under royal justices, to decide property disputes and repress crime. This assertion of legal jurisdiction, together with the military might necessary to enforce judgments upon obstinate nobles, became a main pillar of the royal power. In England especially, and in lesser degree elsewhere, the kings required local inhabitants to assist royal judges in the discovery of relevant facts in particular cases. They put them on oath to declare what they knew of events in their own neighborhood. It is from this enforced association of private persons with royal offi cers that the court jury developed.

The kings needed money to pay for their governmental machinery or to carry on war with other kings. Taxation, as known in the Roman Empire, was quite unknown to the Germanic and feudal tradition. In the feudal

scheme each person was responsible only for the customary fees that arose on stated occa- sions. The king, like other lords, was supposed to live on his own income—on the revenue of manors that he owned himself, the proceeds of estates temporarily under his wardship, or the occasional fees paid to him by his vassals. No king, even for the best of reasons, could simply decree a new tax and collect it. At the same time, as the use of money became more common, the kings had to assure themselves of a money income. As the towns grew up, with a new kind of wealth and a new source of money income, they agreed to make stipulated payments in return for their royal charters.

The royal demands for money and the claims to exercise legal jurisdiction were regarded as innovations. They were constantly growing and sometimes were a source of abuse. They met with frequent resistance in all countries. A famous case historically (though somewhat commonplace in its own day) was that of Magna Carta in England in 1215, when a group of English lords and high churchmen, joined by representatives of the city of London, required King John to confi rm and guarantee their historic liberties.

The king, as has been said, like any lord, was supposed to act in council or court with his vassals. The royal council became the egg out of which departments of government were hatched—such as the royal judiciary, exchequer, and military command. From it also was hatched the

institution of parliaments. The kings had always, in a way, held great parleys or “talks” (the Latin parliamentum meant simply a “talking”) with their chief retainers. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the growth of towns added a new element to European life. To the lords and bishops was now added a burgher class, which, if of far inferior dignity, was too

Changes in monarchical rule

Taxation

Origins of parliaments

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 36pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 36 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

37

stubborn, free-spirited, and well furnished with money to be overlooked. When representa- tives of the towns began to be summoned to the king’s great talks, along with lords and clergy, parliaments may be said to have come into being.

Parliaments, in this sense, sprouted all over Europe in the thirteenth century. Nothing shows better the similarity of institutions in Latin Christendom, or the inadequacy of trac- ing the history of any one country by itself. The new assemblies were called cortes in Spain, diets in Germany, Estates General or provincial estates in France, parliaments in the British Isles. Usually they are referred to generically as “estates,” the word “parliament” being reserved for Britain, but in origin they were all essentially the same.

The kings called these assemblies as a means of publicizing and strengthening the royal rule. They found it more convenient to explain their policies, or to ask for money, to a large gathering brought together for that purpose than to have a hundred offi cials make local explanations and strike local bargains in a hundred different places. The kings did not recognize, nor did the assemblies claim, any right of the parliament to dictate to the king and his government. But usually the king invited the parliament to state grievances; his action upon them was the beginning of parliamentary legislation.

The parliaments represented neither the “nation” nor the “people” nor yet the individual citizen, but they embodied the “estates of the realm,” the great collective interests of the country. The fi rst and highest estate was the clergy; the second was the landed or noble class; to these older ruling groups were added, as a “third estate,” the burghers of the chartered towns. Quite com- monly these three types of people sat separately as three distinct chambers. But the pattern varied from country to country. In England, Poland, and Hungary the clergy as a whole ceased to be represented; only the bishops came, sitting with lay magnates in an upper house. Eventually the burghers dropped out in Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, leaving the landed aristocracy in triumph in eastern Europe. In Castile and Württemberg, on the other hand, the noble estate eventually refused to attend parliament, leaving the townspeople and clergy in the assemblies. In some countries—in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and in the French Estates General—even peasants were allowed to have delegates.

In England the Parliament developed eventually in a distinctive way. After a long period of uncertainty there came to be two houses, known as the Lords and the Commons. The Lords, as in Hungary or Poland, included both great prelates and lay magnates. The House of Commons developed features not found on the Continent. Lesser landholders, the people who elsewhere counted as small nobles, sat in the same House of Commons with representatives of the towns. This mingling of classes in England, the willingness of townsmen to follow the leadership of the gentry, and of the gentry to respect the interests of townsmen, helped to root represen- tative institutions in England more deeply than in other countries during the medieval era. Moreover, England was a small country in the Middle Ages. There were no provincial or local parliamentary bodies (as in France, the Holy Roman Empire, or Poland) which might jealously cut into the powers of the central body or with which the king could make local arrangements without violating the principle of representative government. And fi nally, as a reason for the growing strength of Parliament in England, the elected members of the House of Commons very early obtained the power to commit their constituents. If they voted a tax, those who elected them had to pay it. The king, in order to get matters decided, insisted that the votes be binding. Constituents were not allowed to repudiate the vote of their deputies, nor to punish or harass them when they came home, as often happened in other countries. Parliament thus exercised power as well as rights.

The three estates

England’s Parliament

3. The High Middle Ages: Secular Civilization

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 37pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 37 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe38

In summary, the three centuries of the High Middle Ages laid foundations both for order and for freedom. Slavery was defunct and serfdom was expiring. Politically, the multitude of free chartered towns, the growth of juries in some places, and the rise of parliaments everywhere provided means by which peoples could take some part in their governments. The ancient civilizations had never created a free political unit larger than the city-state. The Greeks had never carried democracy beyond the confi nes within which people could meet in person, nor had the Romans devised means by which, in a large state, the governed could share any responsibilities with an offi cial bureaucracy. The ancients had never developed the idea of representative government, or of government by duly elected and authorized representatives acting at a distance from home. The idea is by no means as obvious or simple as it looks. It fi rst appeared in the realms of medieval European monarchies, and, after much subsequent development, it would become a funda- mental principle for political systems in most of the modern world.

4. THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES: THE CHURCH So far in our account of the High Middle Ages we have told the story of Hamlet without speaking of the Prince of Denmark, for we have left aside the church, except, indeed, when some mention of it could not be avoided. In the real life of the time the church was omni- present. Religion permeated every sphere of political, social, and cultural life. In feudalism the mutual duties of lord and vassal were confi rmed by religious oaths, and bishops and abbots, as holders of lands, became feudal personages themselves. In the monarchies, the king was crowned by the chief churchman of his kingdom, adjured to rule with justice and piety, and anointed with holy oils. In the towns, guilds served as lay religious brother- hoods; each guild chose a patron saint and marched in the streets on holy days. For amuse- ment the townspeople watched religious dramas, the morality and miracle plays in which religious themes were enacted. The rising town, if it harbored a bishop, took special care to erect a new cathedral. Years of effort and of religious fervor produced the Gothic cathe- drals that still stand as the best-known memorials of medieval civilization. Intellectual life was also closely tied to the church, so that religious thinkers shaped the main philosophical debates of the era, and the most infl uential writers were clergymen.

The Development of the Medieval Church and Papacy

If, however, we turn back to the tenth century, the troubled years before 1000, we fi nd the church in as dubious a condition as everything else. It was fragmented and localized. Every bishop went his own way. Though the clergy was the only literate class, many of the clergy themselves could

not read and write. Christian belief was mixed with the old pagan magic and superstition, and most Christians knew nothing about the theology that had shaped the traditions of the Catholic church. The monasteries were in decay. Priests often lived in a concubinage that was generally condoned. It was customary for them to marry, so that they had recognized children, to whom they intrigued to pass on their churchly position. Powerful laymen often dominated their ecclesiastical neighbors, with the big lords appointing the bishops and the little ones appointing the parish priests. When people thought about Rome at all, they could barely imagine a place that was legendary and far away; but the bishop of Rome, or pope, had no infl uence and was treated in unseemly fashion by nobles in his own city.

The church in crisis

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 38pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 38 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

39

The Roman Catholic church is in fact unrecognizable in the jumble of the tenth cen- tury. So far at least as human effort was concerned, it was virtually created in the eleventh century along with the other institutions of the High Middle Ages.

The impulse to reform came from many quarters. Sometimes a secular ruler undertook to correct conditions in his own domains. For this purpose he asserted a strict control over his clergy. In 962 the Holy Roman Empire was proclaimed. This empire, like the Carolingian and Roman empires that it was sup- posed to continue, was in theory coterminous with Latin Christendom itself and endowed with a special mission to preserve and extend the Christian faith. Neither in France nor in England (nor, when they became Christian states, in Spain, Hungary, Poland, or Scandi- navia) was this claim of the Holy Roman Empire ever acknowledged. But the empire did for a time embrace Italy as well as Germany. The fi rst emperors, in the tenth and elev- enth centuries, denouncing the conditions of the church in Rome, strove to make the pope their appointee.

At the same time a reform movement arose from spiritual sources. Serious Christians took matters into their own hands. They founded a new monastery at Cluny in France, which soon had many affi liated houses. It was their purpose to purify monastic life and to set a higher Christian ideal to which all clergy and laity might aspire. To rid them- selves of immediate local pressures, the greed, narrowness, ignorance, family ambition,

Reform efforts

500–300 B.C.E. Creative era of Classical Greek Civilization: Plato, Aristotle

46 B.C.E. Roman Republic conquers Greece

45–31 B.C.E. Roman Republic evolves into the Roman Empire

c. 26–29 C.E. Jesus is active in Palestine; beginnings of Christianity

306–337 Roman Emperor Constantine: toleration of Christianity

c. 420 St. Augustine writes City of God

476 End of Roman Empire in the West

450–750 Roman Catholic Church gains converts and infl uence in Western Europe

610–632 Prophet Muhammad teaches the new religion of Islam

635–750 Islam spreads across Middle East, North Africa, and Spain

800 Coronation of Emperor Charlemagne; the Carolingian Empire

1000–1200 Improvements in European agriculture and rise of towns

1054 Schism of Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Eastern Church

1095–1099 First Christian Crusade in Palestine

1100–1200 Arabic and Greek science enters European Culture

1147–1221 Second-Fifth Christian Crusades

1198–1216 Pope Innocent III: height of Medieval Papacy

1100–1300 Development of Universities and Scholasticism

1267–1273 Thomas Aquinas writes the Summa Theologica

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 500 B.C.E.–1300 C.E.

4. The High Middle Ages: The Church

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 39pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 39 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe40

and self-satisfi ed inertia that were the main causes of corruption, the Cluniacs refused to recognize any authority except that of Rome itself. Thus, at the very time when conditions in Rome were at their worst, Christians throughout Europe built up the prestige of Rome, of the idea of Rome, as a means to raise all Latin Christendom from its depths.

As for the popes in Rome, those who preserved any independence of judgment or respect for their own offi ce, it was their general plan to free themselves from the Roman mobs and aristocrats without falling into dependence upon the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1059 Pope Nicholas II issued a decree providing that future popes should be elected by the cardinals, who at that time, were the priests of churches in the city of Rome or bishops of neighboring dioceses. By entrusting the choice of future popes to them, Pope Nicholas hoped to exclude all infl uence from outside the clergy itself. Popes have been elected by cardinals ever since, though not always without infl uence from outside.

One of the fi rst popes so elected was Gregory VII, known also as Hildebrand, a dynamic and strong-willed man who was pope from 1073 to 1085. He had been in touch with the Cluniac reformers, and dreamed of a reformed and reinvigorated Europe under the universal guidance of the

Roman pontiff. Gregory believed that the church should stand apart from worldly society, that it should judge and guide all human actions, and that a pope had the supreme power to judge and punish kings and emperors if he deemed them sinful. His ideal was a world church offi cered by a single-minded and disciplined clergy, centralized under a single authority. He began by insisting that the clergy free itself of worldly involvements. He required married priests to put aside their wives and families. Celibacy of the clergy, never generally established in the Greek Orthodox church, and later rejected by Protes- tants in the West, became the rule for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Gregory insisted also that no ecclesiastic might receive offi ce through appointment by a layman. In his view only clergy might institute or infl uence clergy, for the clergy must be independent and self-contained.

Gregory soon faced a battle with that other aspirant to universal suprem- acy and a sacred mission, the Holy Roman Emperor, who at this time was Henry IV. In Germany the bishops and abbots possessed a great deal of the land, which they held and governed under the emperor as feudal magnates

in their own right. To the emperor it was vitally important to have his own men, as reliable vassals, in these great positions. Hence in Germany “lay investiture” had become very common. Lay investiture meant the practice by which a layman, the emperor, conferred upon the new bishop the signs of his spiritual authority, the ring and the staff. Gregory pro- hibited lay investiture. He supported the German bishops and nobles when they rebelled against Henry, but the emperor remained obstinate. Gregory then excommunicated him, that is, outlawed him from Christian society by forbidding any priest to give him the sac- raments. Henry, baffl ed, sought out the pope at Canossa in Italy to do penance. “To go to Canossa” in later times became a byword for submission to the will of Rome.

In 1122, after both original contenders had died, a compromise on the matter of lay investiture was effected by which bishops recognized the emperor as their feudal head but looked to Rome for spiritual authority. But the struggle between popes and emperors went on unabated. The magnates of Germany, lay lords as well as bishops, often allied with the pope to preserve their own feudal liberties from the emperor. The emperor in Germany was never able to consolidate his domains as did the kings in England and France. The unwillingness of lords and churchmen (and of towns also, as we have seen) to let the emperors build up an effective government left its mark permanently upon Europe in two

Gregory VII

Lay investiture

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 40pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 40 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

41

ways. It contributed to the centralization of Latin Christendom under Rome, while it blocked the development of a more unifi ed monarchical state in central Europe.

The height of the medieval papacy came with Innocent III, whose pontifi cate lasted from 1198 to 1216. Innocent virtually realized Gregory’s dream of a unifi ed Christian world. He intervened in politics everywhere. He was recognized as a supreme arbiter. At his word, a king of France took a wife, a king of England accepted an unwanted archbishop, a king of León put aside the cousin whom he had married, and a claimant to the crown of Hungary deferred to his rival. The kings of England, Aragon, and Portugal acknowledged him as feudal overlord within their realms. Huge revenues now fl owed to Rome from all over Latin Christendom, and an enormous bureaucracy worked there to dispatch the voluminous business of the papal court. As kings struggled to repress civil rebellion, so Innocent and his successors struggled to repress her- esy, which, defi ned as doctrine at variance with that of the church at large, was becoming alarmingly common among the Albigensians of southern France.

In 1215 Innocent called a great church council, the greatest since antiquity, attended by 500 bishops and even by the patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem. The council labored at the perplexing task of keeping the clergy from worldly temptations. By forbid- ding priests to offi ciate at ordeals or trials by battle, it virtually ended these survivals of pre-Christian judgments and punishments. It attempted to regularize belief in the super- natural by controlling the superstitious traffi c in relics. It declared the sacraments to be the channel of God’s saving grace and defi ned them authoritatively. 1 In the chief sacrament, the Eucharist or Mass, it promulgated the dogma of transubstantiation, which held that, in the Mass, the priest converts the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s body and blood. Except for heretics, who were suppressed, the reforms and doctrines of Innocent’s council were accepted with satisfaction throughout Latin Europe.

Intellectual Life: The Universities, Scholasticism

Under the auspices of the church, as rising governments gave more civil security, and as the economy of town and country became able to support people devoted to a life of thought, the intellectual horizon of Europeans began to open. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the founding of the fi rst universities. These originated in the natural and spontaneous coming together of teachers and students that had never wholly disappeared even in the most chaotic era of the early Middle Ages. By 1200 there was a center of medical studies at Salerno in south Italy, of legal studies at Bologna in north Italy, of theological studies at Paris. Oxford was founded about 1200 by a secession of disgruntled students and profes- sors from Paris; Cambridge, shortly thereafter. By 1300 there were a dozen such universi- ties in Latin Europe; by 1500 there were almost a hundred.

As the early agglomerations of traders developed into organized towns and guilds, so the informal concourses of students and teachers developed into organized institutions of learning, receiving the sharp corporate stamp that was characteristic of the High Middle

Innocent III

The founding of universities

1 A sacrament is understood to be the outward sign of an inward grace. In Catholic doctrine the sacraments were and are seven in number: baptism, confi rmation, penance, the Eucharist, extreme unction, marriage, and holy orders. Except for baptism, a sacrament may be administered only by a priest. A dogma is the common belief of the church, in which all the faithful share and must share so long as they are members of the church. Dogmas are regarded as implicitly the same in all ages; they cannot be invented or developed, but may from time to time be clarifi ed, defi ned, promulgated, or proclaimed.

4. The High Middle Ages: The Church

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 41pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 41 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe42

Ages. It was in having this corporate identity that medieval universities resembled our own and differed from the schools of Athens or Alexandria in ancient times. A university, the University of Paris, for example, was a body of individuals, young and old, interested in learning and endowed by law with a communal name and existence. It possessed defi nite liberties under some kind of charter, regulated its own affairs through its own offi cials, and kept its own order among its often boisterous population. It gave, and even advertised, courses and lectures, and it decided collectively which professors were the best qualifi ed to teach. It might consist of distinct schools or “faculties”—the combination of theology, law, and medicine, as at Paris, was the most usual. It held examinations and awarded degrees, whose meaning and value were recognized throughout the Latin West. The degree, which originated as a license to teach, admitted its holder to certain honors or privileges in the same way that members of other guilds were authorized to practice a spe- cifi c craft. With such degrees, professors might readily move from one university to another. Students moved easily also because all universities used the Latin language and offered a similar curriculum. The university, moreover, though typically beginning in pov- erty, was a corporate body capable of holding property; and the benefactions of pious donors often built up substantial endowments in lands and manors. So organized, free from outside control, and enjoying an income from property, the university lived on as a perma- nent institution, through good times and bad.

The queen of the sciences was theology, the intellectual study of reli- gion. Many in Europe, by the eleventh century, were beginning to refl ect upon their beliefs. They continued to believe in God but could no longer believe with unthinking acceptance. It was accepted as a fact, for example,

that the Son of God had been incarnated as a man in Jesus Christ. But in the eleventh cen- tury an Italian named Anselm, who became archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a treatise called Cur Deus Homo? —“Why Did God Become Man?”—giving reasoned explanations to show why God had taken human form to save sinful human beings. Anselm argued that reason strongly supported the Christian faith in God. Soon afterward Abelard, who taught at Paris, wrote his Sic et Non —“Yes and No” or “Pro and Con”—a collection of inconsis- tent statements made by St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church. Abelard’s purpose was to apply logic to the inherited mass of patristic writings, show wherein the truth of Christian doctrine really lay, and so make the faith consistent with reason and refl ection.

Meanwhile, in the twelfth century a great stream of new knowledge poured into Europe, bringing about a veritable intellectual revolution. It was derived from the Arabs, with whom Christians were in contact in Sicily and Spain. The Arabs, as has been seen, had taken over the ancient Greek science, translated Greek writings into Arabic, and in many ways added

further refi nements of their own. Bilingual Christians (assisted by numerous learned Jews who traveled readily between the Christian and Muslim worlds) translated these works into Latin. Above all, they translated Aristotle, the great codifi er of Greek knowledge who had lived and written in the fourth century b.c.e. The Europeans, drawing on the com- mentaries of Muslim scholars such as Averroës (1126–1198), were overwhelmed by this sudden disclosure of an undreamed universe of knowledge. Aristotle became The Philoso- pher, the unparalleled authority on all branches of knowledge other than religious.

The great problem for Europeans was how to digest the gigantic bulk of Aristotle, or, in more general terms, how to assimilate or reconcile the body of Greek and Arabic learning to the Christian faith. The universities, with their “scholastic” philosophers or “schoolmen,” performed this function. Most eminent of scholastics was Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Angelic Doctor, known also to his own contemporaries as the Dumb Ox

Theology

Arabic and Greek learning

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 42pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 42 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

43

THE MEETING OF ST. ANTHONY AND ST. PAUL by Sassetta (Italian, 1392–1450)

This picture conveys the abstractness of medieval thought in which “realism” meant a belief in the reality of permanent ideas (a belief that might now be called “idealism”). There is no attempt to portray the fi gures as unique individuals; they are typical saints with the halos designating sacred persons. St. Anthony appears in three places—walking alone, converting a centaur, and embracing St. Paul. The forest and hills represent the general idea of trees or mounds of earth, but there is no physical specifi city in these representations of nature. ( National Gallery of Art)

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 43pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 43 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe44

THOMAS AQUINAS by Fra Bartelemo (Italian, 1472–1517)

Thomas Aquinas combined Aristotelian knowledge with Christian faith in his scholastic theology, thus gaining perma- nent respect (and sainthood) from the Catholic Church and artistic recognition from painters such as Fra Bartelemo. (Nicolo Orsi Battaglini/Art Resource, NY)

from the slow deliberation of his speech. His chief work, appropriately called the Summa Theologica, was a survey of all knowledge.

The chief accomplishment of Thomas Aquinas was his demonstration that faith and reason could not be in confl ict. By reason he meant a severely logical method, with exact defi nition of words and concepts, deducing step by step what follows and must follow if certain premises are accepted. His

philosophy is classifi ed as a form of moderate “realism,” a term whose medieval meaning differed from its common usage today. For medieval philosophers realism meant that the general idea or abstraction is more “real” than the particular—that “man” or “woman” is more real than this or that man or woman, that “law” as such is more real and binding than this or that particular law. He derived his philosophy from what he took to be the enduring, transcendent nature of God, of law, of reason, of human life, and of beings in general. Thomas taught a hierarchic view of the universe and of society, of which God was the apex. All things and all people were subordinated to God in a descending order, each bound to fulfi ll the role set by its own place and nature. It was the emphasis on the superior reality of abstractions that enabled people in the Middle Ages to believe steadfastly in the church while freely attacking individual churchmen, to have faith in the papacy while denouncing the popes as scoundrels—or to accept without diffi culty the mystery of tran- substantiation, which declared that what admittedly looked and tasted like bread and wine was, in real inner substance, the body of Christ.

The scholastic philosophy, as perfected by Thomas Aquinas, was not very favorable to the growth of natural science, because its emphasis on an inner reality drew attention away from the actual details and behavior of

Thomas Aquinas

Scholasticism

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 44pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 44 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

45

concrete things. On the other hand, the scholastic philosophy laid foundations on which later European thought was to be reared. It habituated Europeans to great exactness, to care- ful distinctions, even to the splitting of hairs. It called for disciplined thinking. And it made the world safe for reason. If any historical generalization may be made safely, it may be said that any society that believes reason to threaten its foundations will suppress reason. In Thomas’s time, there were some who said that Aristotle and the Arabs were infi dels, dan- gerous infl uences that must be silenced. Any reasoning about the faith, they warned, was a form of weakness. Thomas’s doctrine that faith could not be endangered by reason gave a freedom to thinkers to go on thinking.

The Crusades; New Invasions; Europe by 1300

Meanwhile, the West was beginning to expand. Europe in the eleventh century launched a military offensive against Islam, and most of Latin Christendom went on the Crusades. War itself was subordinated to the purposes of religion.

CRUSADING ACTIVITY, 1100–1250 Medieval Christendom expanded geographically until about 1250. Darker regions are those christianized shortly before and after 1000. Arrows indicate organized military-religious expe- ditions, which by 1250 had ended the Muslim control in most of Spain but had failed to do so in the Holy Land. Dates are rounded and very rough.

BA LT

IC SE

A

0 200 400 miles

Regions Christianized after about 900 C.E.

Muslims in Granada, North Africa, and the Holy Land

M E D I T E R R A N E A N S E A

CASTILLE AND LEÓN

GRANADA

VALENCIA

ARAGON

NAVARRE

HOLY LAND

Ea ste

rn Li

m it

of La

ti n

C h

ri st

ia n

it y

LIVONIA

PRUSSIA POMERANIA

PORTUGAL

SPAIN

ALBIGENSIANS

Finns Converted by Swedes c. 1150

c. 1250

1000–125

1070– 1100

1000– 1250

c. 1250

Teuton ic K

nig ht

s 1

10 0–

12 5

Paris

Byzantium (Constantinople)

London

Rome

Venice

Antioch

Jerusalem

Tripoli Tyre

Acre Jaffa

Damascus

4. The High Middle Ages: The Church

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 45pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 45 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe46

The most ambitious, best remembered, and least successful of such expeditions were the Crusades to win back the Holy Land. The First Crusade was preached in 1095 by Pope

Urban II, who hoped thereby to advance the peace of God by draining off bellicose nobles to fi ght the infi dels and to build up the pope’s leadership in Europe. Crusades to the Holy Land, with varying success, and sometimes departing woefully from their religious aims, went on intermittently for 200 years. It was the growth of Italian shipping in the Mediterranean, the

rise of more orderly feudal monarchies, and the increasing sense of a Europe-wide com- mon purpose that made possible the assembly and transport of considerable forces over a great distance. But the motivation for such Crusades, especially in the beginning, came mostly from a wave of religious fervor that brought nobles and commoners alike into the Crusader armies. This fervor contributed to brutal, deadly attacks on Jewish communities within Europe as well as to the extraordinary violence against entire Muslim populations in cities such as Antioch and Jerusalem. At the same time, however, the Crusades gave Europeans a new awareness of the world beyond their own local realms of religion and small-town economies. Historians have argued that the Crusaders’ contacts with Arab societies in the Middle East stimulated subsequent European economic development and a new cultural identity among “Western” peoples. Although this argument points to impor- tant consequences of the Crusades, it is also true that the campaigns against Islam grew out of Europe’s own growing political and military strength. For a century the Latin Christians occupied parts of Palestine and Syria. But military defeats forced them to withdraw in the thirteenth century, and the Muslims remained in possession.

Other crusades (for such they were) had more lasting results. A party of Normans won Sicily from the Arabs about 1100. Iberian Christians, descending from the mountains of northern Spain, carried on a recon- quista of two centuries against the Moors. By 1250 they had staked out

the Christian kingdoms of Portugal, León, Castile, Aragon, and Valencia, leaving the Muslims only Granada in the extreme south, which was conquered much later, in 1492. In southern France, a crusade against the Albigensians in the thirteenth century put down the heretics, those born in the Christian faith but erring from the church’s reigning inter- pretations of it. The Albigensians, for example, believed that the moral corruption of the clergy betrayed the spiritual essence of Christianity—a claim that church offi cials could never accept. Crusading expeditions were also launched against a few remaining “heathen” populations in northeastern Europe. The Teutonic Order, a military-religious society of knights founded originally to fi ght in the Holy Land, transferred its operations to the north. Christianity was thus brought by the sword to eastern Prussia and the east Baltic regions.

About the year 1250 there developed a new threat of invasion from Asia. As the Huns had burst out of Asia in the fi fth century, and the Magyars in the ninth, so now the Tartars appeared in the thirteenth century, to be followed in the fourteenth by the Ottoman Turks. We shall see how the Turks long continued to press upon central Europe. But, on the whole, by the thirteenth century, Europe was capable of resistance. Always until then it had been vulnerable as an outlying, backward, thinly populated protuberance from the Eurasian land mass. It had lain open in the remote past to wandering Indo-Europeans, then to Roman imperial conquerors, to Germanic barbarians, to Huns, Magyars, and, in part, the Arabs. All these were gradually assimilated by the Roman church, the Latin language, the common institutions of feudalism, monarchy, a free town life, parliamentary assemblies, and scho- lastic learning. An increasingly connected and coherent culture ran from England to Sicily and from Portugal to Poland.

Crusades to the Holy Land

Other crusades

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 46pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 46 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

47

By 1300 the “rise of Europe” was an accomplished fact. The third of the three seg- ments into which the Greco-Roman world had divided, the one that in 700 c.e. had been the most isolated and fragmented, now some 600 years later had a civiliza- tion of its own. It was still only one among the several great cultures of the world, such as the Islamic, Byzantine, Indian, and Chinese. It enjoyed no preeminence. The Chinese Empire, for example, in the thirteenth century, had cities whose population reached into millions. It had an affl uent merchant class, great textile manufacturers, and an iron industry that produced over 100,000 tons a year. The arts and sciences were assiduously pursued. Government was centralized and complex; it issued paper money and employed a civil service recruited by competitive examinations. Books on religious, technical, and agricultural subjects, including whole multivolume encyclopedias, were printed in enormous numbers, even though the lack of an alphabet and the thousands of Chinese characters made it diffi cult for literacy to become widespread. The Venetian Marco Polo was dazzled by the China that he lived in from 1275 to 1292.

Many have asked why China did not generate, as Europe did in these centuries, the main forces that ultimately led to the modern scientifi c and industrial world. One answer is suggested by the fact that it was Europeans such as Marco Polo who went to China, not

The “rise of Europe”

Europeans took pride in their crusading armies, represented here in a medieval image of the conquest of Antioch in 1098 during the First Crusade. (Bibliotheque Municipale, Lyon, France/Art Resource, NY)

4. The High Middle Ages: The Church

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 47pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 47 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 1 The Rise of Europe48

Chinese who went to Europe. In the fi fteenth century, over the years 1405 to 1433, a Ming emperor launched a large-scale series of long-range naval expeditions, seven in all, headed by his admiral Zheng He (also known in English as Cheng Ho). The expeditions sailed to ports in Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa, exchanging gifts in trans- actions that recognized the emperor’s power and prestige. But the emperor and his advis- ers ultimately terminated the entire venture. China turned away from distant overseas commercial opportunities in this period, and the Chinese government turned inward to the protection and expansion of its land frontiers. It was the Europeans who later pursued the development of trade in India and also crossed the Atlantic to discover America. Europe- ans gradually became more interested in exploring other lands and developing new kinds of trade, perhaps because in Europe there was no all-embracing empire as in China, but kings, lords, and towns that competed with each other. With religion and the church kept distinct from the state, the search for what one should do with one’s life became less dependent on the power of a unifying imperial or religious system. Europe was disorderly and full of confl ict—rivalries and wars between kings, quarrels between kings and their barons, disputes between church and state, clashes between lords and their peasant work- ers. Much of this confl ict was destructive, yet there was also a kind of opportunity or free- dom in such disorder and a dynamism that promoted change.

European civilization in 1300 was by no means a modern society, yet the ancient and medieval cultures on European lands had created institu- tions and traditions that have remained infl uential even in the most recent eras of modern world history. By 1300 people in Europe had developed

separate (at times contending) institutions of church and state to control a growing popula- tion, economic institutions to promote urban commerce and long-distance trade, judicial and parliamentary councils to codify or revise the law, and universities to teach or rede- fi ne their intellectual traditions. These traditions included a pervasive faith in Christianity, but the ancient Christian beliefs were challenged, revised, and extended by other ancient traditions of rhetoric, philosophy, and rational inquiry—all of which contributed to the emergence of what is now called early modern history.

European civilization in 1300

For suggested further readings and useful Web sites, interactive exercises, glossary, chronologies, and more, go to the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e.

pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 48pal85549_ch01_009-048.indd 48 06/08/13 6:33 PM06/08/13 6:33 PM

Final PDF to printer

49

C h a p t e r 2 THE UPHEAVAL IN WESTERN CHRISTENDOM, 1300–1560

In the transition   from traditional to more mod- ern forms of society, people in all the old civiliza- tions have reexamined their religious base. Today we can observe this process at work everywhere: the Chinese reconsider the age-old teachings of Confucius, the Muslims enter into wider activities than those known to the Qur’an, and the peoples of India are rapidly expanding an economy in which historic Hindu practices no longer form the domi- nant pattern. People in modern societies do not nec- essarily reject their ancestral religion. In fact, they may strongly reaffi rm it, but they usually try also to adapt it to modern economic and political condi- tions and to make room for new and non religious

interests. The process of developing various activities outside the sphere of religion is called “secularization.”

Latin Christendom was the fi rst of the world’s major religious cultures to become “secularized.” In the very long run it was those aspects of European civilization that were least associated with Christianity, such as natural science and industrial technology, or military and economic power, that the non-European world proved to be most willing to adopt. If in our own time there has come to be such a thing as a global civilization, it is because all the world’s great traditional cultures have been increasingly secularized. This secularization of human cultures, although often challenged by popular religious move- ments in the contemporary world, remains one of the decisive trends in modern world his- tory, and it is a trend that began to appear in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.

The Europe that had become both expansive and more prosperous by the thirteenth century soon entered upon a series of disasters. The Mongols after about 1240 held Russia in subjugation for 200 years. The Ottoman Turks, who had originated in central Asia, penetrated the Byzantine Empire, crushed the medieval Serbian kingdom at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, and spread over the Balkans. They took Constantinople itself in 1453.

5. Disasters of the Fourteenth Century

6. The Renaissance in Italy

7. The Renaissance outside Italy

8. The New Monarchies

9. The Protestant Reformation

10. Catholicism Reformed and Reorganized

Chapter emblem: Detail from A Portrait of a Family by Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 49pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 49 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156050

Eastern Christianity continued to exist, but under alien political domination. Latin Christianity, reaching from Poland and Hungary to the Atlantic, remained independent but was beset with troubles. The authority of the papacy and of the Roman Catholic church was called into question. Eventually the Protestant churches emerged, and the religious unity of medieval civilization disappeared. Yet new forces also asserted themselves alongside or outside the religious tradition. Government, law, philosophy, science, the arts, material and economic activities were pursued with less regard for Christian values. Power, order, beauty, wealth, knowledge, and control of nature were regarded as desirable in themselves.

In this mixture of decline and revival, of religious revolution and secularization, medieval Christendom evolved into the social, political, and cultural world of early mod- ern Europe.

5. DISASTERS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY The Black Death and Its Consequences

During the fourteenth century, and quite abruptly, about a third of the population of Europe was wiped out. Although it is impossible to know exactly how many people lived in medi- eval Europe, modern demographic historians have estimated that the total population fell

from more than 80 million in the early 1300s to roughly 60 million in 1400; and Europe’s population did not return to pre-plague levels until the six- teenth century (see the graph on p. 51). Some died in sporadic local famines that began to appear after 1300. The great killer, however, was the plague,

or Black Death, which fi rst struck Europe in 1348. The precise medical cause of the plague is still debated. Most modern historians believe that the disease was carried by rats, but this theory may not explain how the contagion moved so quickly across Europe or why so many humans became vulnerable to a bacillus that normally lives in rodents. Despite the uncertainty about its physiological origins, historians agree that the plague had decisive effects on European social life. Since the plague returned at irregular and unpredictable intervals, and killed off the young as well as the old, it disrupted marriage and family life and made it impossible for many years for Europe to regain the former level of population. In some places whole villages disappeared. Cultivated fi elds were abandoned for want of able-bodied men and women to work them. The towns were especially vulnerable, because the contagion spread quickly through populations crowded within town walls. Trade and exchange were obstructed; prices, wages, and incomes moved erratically; famine made its victims more susceptible to disease; and deaths from the plague contributed to famine. The living were preoccupied with the burial of the dead and with fears for their own future.

There were immediate social and political repercussions. In some cases, survivors benefi ted because the scarcity of labor led to higher wages. On the other hand, in the gen- eral disorganization, and with landowners and urban employers decimated also, many of the poor could fi nd no work or took to vagabondage and begging. The upper classes, acting

through governments, attempted to control wages and prices. Rebellions of workers broke out in various towns, especially in Flanders, and there were massive insurrections of peasants in many parts of Europe. In France these were called “jacqueries” (from “Jacques,” a nickname for a peas-

ant), of which the fi rst was in 1358. In England a similar large-scale uprising in 1381 came to be known as Wat Tyler’s rebellion. Sometimes the spokesmen for these movements went beyond their immediate grievances to raise broader social questions about why some

The Black Death

Revolts and repression

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 50pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 50 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

515. Disasters of the Fourteenth Century

should be rich and others poor. Governments and the upper classes replied to this menace with ferocious repression. The peasants generally returned to their usual labors. Yet some- thing was gained for the rural workers, at least in the long run, as underlying economic and demographic forces continued to assert themselves. The landowners, or feudal class, in order to get the work done on their manors and assure their own incomes, had to offer more favorable terms. These included, for example, the giving of lifetime tenures to peas- ant families, in return for fi xed payment of sums of money. Over the years many of these peasant holdings became hereditary and the value of money decreased, so that payment of a shilling, for example, which in 1400 represented a signifi cant amount, became much less burdensome for the rural worker by 1600. In effect, a class of small peasant property owners began to emerge in much of Europe.

The kings also, who had been building up their position against the church and the feudal lords since the eleventh century, found their problems complicated by the disasters of the fourteenth. They still had their governments to maintain, and their ambitions to sat- isfy, even if death removed large fractions of their subjects. They even had to increase their incomes, as it became usual for kings to employ royal armies of foot soldiers against the recurring possibility of feudal resistance. Various means of increasing the royal spending power were devised. Currency was debased; that is, the king ordered a given weight of gold or silver to represent a larger number of monetary units. Thus he temporarily had more money, but the result was infl ation and higher prices, that is, the declining value of money already mentioned. New taxes were introduced. About 1300 the kings of both England and France undertook to tax the landowning clergy of their respective kingdoms. The kings made increasing demands as well on great noble landholders and urban merchants. These demands were resisted, or made subject to bargains by the representative bodies whose origin was described in the last chapter, so that the fourteenth century, and still more the fi fteenth, has been called the “golden age” of the medieval parliaments.

This graph shows the growth of Europe’s population after 1200, the far-reaching demographic impact of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and the gradual revival of the European population during the fi fteenth century. Source: Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population, 5th ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012).

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

110 Estimated Population of Europe, 1200–1600

1200 1340 1400 1500 1600

M ill

io n

s o

f p

er so

n s

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 51pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 51 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156052

In 1337 the Hundred Years’ War began between England and France. The battles all took place in France, which was internally divided, some parts, like Aquitaine, having long belonged to the English crown. France was ravaged by marauding bands of English sol-

diers and their French adherents, until French forces began to achieve mili- tary victories under the inspired leadership of Joan of Arc, the young woman whom the English burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431 after she was convicted by the church of heresy and witchcraft. The war eventually ended in 1453, when the English lost a fi nal, decisive battle and gave up

their long campaign for territories on the continent, but the French suffered the greatest human and material losses during the many decades of fi ghting and social disruption. The costly century of warfare also had important consequences in England, however, and a kind of early patriotism arose among the English as their soldiers used longbows to defeat the mounted French knights at places such as Agincourt. Parliament widened its powers as the kings needed money for their campaigns. But the great English barons also became more unruly, and internal disorders fractured England throughout the fi fteenth century. Dukes and earls and their followers formed private armies and fought with each other; they defi ed the royal law courts and intimidated juries, used Parliament and government for their own purposes, and exploited their peasants. From about 1450 until 1485 England was beset by upper-class turmoil that came to be called the Wars of the Roses, because the opposing noble factions adopted red and white roses as their symbols.

Troubles of the Medieval Church

Meanwhile similar calamities affl icted the church. In 1300, the church of the High Middle Ages, centralized in the papacy, stood at its zenith. But the church was weakened by its very successes. It faced the danger that besets every successful institution—a form of gov- ernment or a university, to choose modern examples—the danger of believing that the institution exists for the benefi t of those who conduct its affairs. The papacy, being at the top, was the most liable to this danger. It became “corrupt,” set in its ways, out of touch with public opinion, and controlled by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. It was unable to reform itself, and unwilling to let anyone else reform it.

Both Edward I of England and Philip the Fair of France, in the 1290s, assessed taxes on the landed estates belonging to the great abbeys, bishoprics, and other components of the church. The pope, Boniface VIII, prohibited the taxation of clergy by the civil ruler. In the ensuing altercation, in 1302, he issued the famous bull, Unam Sanctam, the most extreme

of all assertions of papal supremacy, which declared that outside the Roman church there was no salvation, and that “every human creature” was “subject to the Roman pontiff.” 1 The French king sent soldiers to arrest Boniface, who soon died. French infl uence in the College of Cardinals brought about the election of a pope who was expected to be subservient to King Philip,

and who took up his residence, with his court and offi cials, at Avignon on the lower Rhone River, on what were then the borders of France. Thus began the “Babylonian Captivity” of the church. The rest of Europe regarded the popes at Avignon throughout the century as tools of the French monarchy, and the papacy lost much of its prestige as a universal institution.

The Hundred Years’ War

The “Babylonian Captivity”

1 Bulls, so-called from the Latin word for their seal, are known by their fi rst one or two Latin words, which in this case mean “one holy (church)”; a “bull,” while the most solemn form of papal edict, does not as such embody a dogma; and it is not Catholic practice today to affi rm this policy of Boniface VIII.

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 52pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 52 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

53

Attempts to correct the situation made matters worse. In 1378 the College of Cardinals, torn by French and anti-French factions within it, elected two popes. Both were equally legitimate, being chosen by cardinals, but one lived at Rome, one at Avignon, and neither would resign. The French and their supporters recognized the Avignon pope; England and most of Germany, the Roman. For forty years both lines were perpetuated. There were now two papacies, estranged by the Great Schism of the West.

Never had the papacy been so externally magnifi cent as in the days of the Captivity and the Schism. The papal court at Avignon surpassed the courts of kings in splendor. The papal offi cialdom grew in numbers, ignor- ing the deeper problems while busily transacting each day’s business. Papal revenues mounted, and new papal taxes were devised. In the continuing movement of funds from all over Europe to the papal court, from the thirteenth century on, a new class of international bankers rose and prospered.

But the papacy, never so sumptuous, had never since the tenth century rested on such shaky foundations. People pay willingly for institutions in which they believe, and admire magnifi cence in leaders whom they respect. But before 1378, with the pope submissive to France, and after 1378, with two popes and two papacies to support, there was growing complaint at the extravagance and worldliness of papal rule. It must be remembered that all this happened in a Europe traumatized by the plague, and with a declining number of people expected to bear increasing fi nancial burdens. The most pious Christians were the most shocked. They recognized the vital necessity of obtaining God’s grace, but with two churches under two popes, each claiming to hold the keys of Peter, how could they be cer- tain that their church gave true salvation? In a society that was still primarily a religious community, this sense of religious insecurity was a source of uneasiness and dread.

The old moorings were weakened, the wrath of God seemed to be raining upon the earth, and no one had the slightest notion of how to escape from the crisis. Symptoms of mass neurosis appeared. Some people sought refuge in a hectic merriment or luxury and self-indulgence. Others became preoccupied with grisly sub- jects. Some frantically performed the Dance of Death in the cemeteries, while others furtively celebrated the Black Mass, parodying religion in a mad desire to appease the devil. The Order of Flagellants grew up; its members went through the streets, two by two, beating each other with chains and whips. Religious anxi- eties and fearful religious rumors contributed also to waves of anti-Jewish violence, mur- der, and expulsion that spread across parts of France and Germany in the fourteenth century. And it was at this time that people fi rst became obsessed with the fear of witches, a delusion that would ultimately cause thousands of persons (often older women) to be tortured and executed over the following three centuries.

Disaffection with the church, or the thought that it might not be the true or the only way to salvation, spread in all ranks of society. It was not only kings who disputed the claims of the clergy but also obscure parish priests, close to the distress of ordinary people, who began to doubt the powers of their ecclesiastical superiors. One of these humble clerics was William Langland, who in his Piers Plowman, in the 1360s, contrasted the sufferings of the honest poor with the hypocrisy and corruption in high places. Such unsettling ideas spread very widely; in England those who held them were known as Lollards. Since the actual poor left no records, it is hard to say exactly what they thought, but some of their ideas were probably expressed by John Wyclif, who taught at Oxford. About 1380, Wyclif was saying that the true church could do without elaborate possessions, and even that an organized church

The Great Schism

Responses to crisis

Lollards and Hussites

5. Disasters of the Fourteenth Century

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 53pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 53 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156054

might not be necessary for salvation, since ordinary, devout persons could do without priests and obtain salvation by reading the Bible, which he translated into English. Similar ideas appeared in Bohemia in central Europe, with John Huss as their spokesman. Here they became a national movement, for the Hussites were both a religious party and at the same time a Slavic or Czech party protesting against the supremacy of the Germans who lived in Bohemia. The Hussite wars ravaged central Europe for decades in the fi fteenth century. The ideas of the Lollards and of Huss and Wyclif were branded as heresy, or unacceptable deviations from the true doctrine of the church.

Infl uential and established persons did not yet turn to heresy, and still less to witch- craft or fl agellation. Their answer to the needs of the day was to assemble a great Europe- wide or general council of the church, in which reforms could be pressed by the whole body of Christians upon the reluctant and rival popes.

The Conciliar Movement

In 1409 such a church council met at Pisa. All parts of the Latin West were represented. The council declared both reigning popes deposed and obtained the due election of another, but since the fi rst two refused to resign there were now three. In 1414 an even greater and more fully attended council met at Constance. Its aims were three: to end the now threefold

Extreme expressions of religious anxiety appeared in the later Middle Ages among the fl agellants who wandered through towns beating themselves to appease the wrath of God. They are portrayed here in a later sixteenth-century engraving of their processions. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 54pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 54 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

55

schism, to extirpate heresy, and to reform the church “in head and members,” or from top to bottom. Not much was accomplished in reform. To discourage heresy, John Huss was interrogated, condemned, and burned at the stake. The schism was ended. All three popes were at last persuaded or compelled to withdraw, and another, Martin V, was elected. The unity of the church, under the papacy, was at last restored.

The majority of the Council of Constance wished to make general councils part of the permanent apparatus of the church. Martin V, however, soon reaffi rmed the prerogatives of the papal offi ce, dissolved the Council of Constance, and repudiated its decrees. The next 30 years saw a continu- ing contest of wills between successive popes and successive councils.

In this battle for jurisdiction few reforms could be adopted, and fewer still could be enforced. Increasingly the life of the church was corrupted by money. No one believed in bribery, but everyone knew that many high churchmen (like many high civil offi cials of the day) could be bribed. To buy or sell a church offi ce was a crime in the canon law known as “simony,” but it was a crime that in the fi fteenth century could not be suppressed. For churchmen to live with mistresses was considered understandable, if unseemly; the standards of laymen in such matters were not high; but for a bishop or other ecclesiastic to give lucrative church positions to his own children (or other relatives) was the abuse known as nepotism, and it, too, could not be eradicated. To sell divine grace for money, all agreed, was not only wrong but also impossible. But in 1300 Boniface VIII had given encouragement to the practice of “indulgences.” A person, if properly confessed, absolved, and truly repen- tant, might, by obtaining an indulgence, be spared certain of the temporal punishments of purgatory. One usually obtained such an indulgence in return for a donation of money. The practice proved to be a fatally easy method of fundraising, despite complaints against the sale of indulgences simply for money.

Gradually the popes prevailed over the councils. The conciliar movement was greatly weakened for Christendom as a whole when the powerful French element secured its aims by a local national arrangement. In the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, in 1438, the Gallican (or French) church affi rmed the supremacy of councils over popes, declared its administra- tive independence from the Holy See, suppressed the payment of some church taxes to Rome, and forbade papal intervention in the appointment of French prelates. The papacy thus lost infl uence in France, but the popes remained preeminent in Europe as a whole. In 1449, with the dissolution of the Council of Basel, the conciliar movement came to an end. In 1450 a great Jubilee was held to celebrate the papal triumph.

The papacy, its prestige and freedom of action thus secured, now passed into the hands of a series of cultivated gentlemen, men of the world, men of “modern” outlook in tune with their times—the famous popes of the Renaissance. Some, like Nicholas V (1447–1455) or Pius II (1458–1464), were accomplished scholars and con- noisseurs of books. Some were like Innocent VIII (1484–1492), a pleas- ant man who was the fi rst pope to dine in public with ladies. Alexander VI (1492–1503), of the Spanish Borgia family, exploited his offi ce for the benefi t of his relatives, trying to make his son Cesare Borgia the ruler of all Italy, while his daughter, Lucretia Borgia, became duchess of Ferrara and gathered liter- ary men and artists at her famous Renaissance court. Alexander VI’s successor, Julius II (1503–1513), was a capable general, and Leo X (1513–1521) was a superb patron of archi- tects and painters. But we must now describe the Italian Renaissance, in which worthies of this kind were elevated to the Holy See.

General councils

Church corruption and indulgences

The Renaissance popes

5. Disasters of the Fourteenth Century

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 55pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 55 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156056

6. THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY In Italy in the fi fteenth century, and especially at Florence, we observe not merely a decay of medieval certainties but the appearance of a new and invigorating attitude toward the world. The Renaissance, a French word meaning “rebirth,” fi rst received its name from those who thought of the Middle Ages as a dark time from which the human spirit had to be awakened. It was called a re birth in the belief that people now, after a long interruption, had taken up and resumed a civilization like that of the Greco-Romans. Medieval people had thought of the times of Aristotle or Cicero as not sharply distinct from their own. In the Renaissance, with a new historical sense, arose the conception of “modern” and “ancient” times, separated by a long period with a different lifestyle and appropriately called the Middle Ages.

The basic institutions of Europe, the distinctive languages and national cultures, the great frameworks of collective action in law, government, and economic production—all originated in the Middle Ages. But the Renaissance marked a new era in thought and feeling, by which Europe and its institutions were in the long run to be transformed. The origins of modern natural science can be traced more to the medieval universities than to the Renaissance thinkers. But it was in the Italy of the Quattrocento (as Italians call the

fi fteenth century) that other fi elds of thought and expression were fi rst cul- tivated. The Italian infl uence in other countries, in these respects, remained very strong for at least 200 years. It pertained to high culture, and hence to a limited number of persons, but extended over the whole area represented

by literature and the arts—literature meaning all kinds of writing and the arts including all products of human skill. The effects of the Italian Renaissance, though much modi- fi ed with the passage of time, were evident in the books and art galleries of Europe and America, and in the architecture of their cities, even after the revolution of modern art in the early twentieth century. They involved the whole area of culture that was neither theological nor scientifi c but concerned with moral and civic questions about what human beings ought to be or ought to do, with the answers refl ected in matters of taste, style, propriety, decorum, personal character, and education. In particular, it was in Renaissance Italy that an almost purely secular attitude fi rst appeared, in which life was no longer seen by leading thinkers as a brief preparation for the hereafter.

The Italian Cities and the New Conception of Life

The towns of Italy, so long as trade converged in the Mediterranean, were the biggest and most bustling of all the towns that rose in Europe during the Middle Ages. The crafts of Italy included many refi ned trades such as those of the goldsmith or stonecarver, which were so zealously pursued that artisanship turned into art, and a delight in the beautiful became common among all classes. Merchants made fortunes in commerce: they lent their money to popes or princes and so made further fortunes as bankers. They bought the wares of the craftsmen-artists. They rejoiced, not so much in money or the making of money, as in the beautiful things and psychological satisfactions that money could buy; and if they forgot the things that money could not buy, this is only to say again that their outlook was becoming more “secular.”

The Italian towns were independent city-states. There was no king to build up a government for Italy as a whole, and for several generations the popes were either absent at Avignon or engaged in disputes arising from the

The Italian infl uence

The Italian city-states

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 56pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 56 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

576. The Renaissance in Italy

Great Schism, so that the infl uence of Rome was unimportant. The merchant oligarchies, each in its own city, enjoyed an unhampered stage on which to pursue interests other than those of business. In some, as at Milan, they succumbed to or worked with a local prince or despot. In others, as at Florence, Venice, and Genoa, they continued to govern themselves as republics. They had the experience of contending for public offi ce, of suppressing popu- lar revolt or winning popular favor, of producing works of public munifi cence, of making alliances, hiring armies, outwitting rivals, and conducting affairs of state. In short, Italy offered an environment in which human personalities could develop in many secular directions.

All this was especially true in Florence, the chief city of Tuscany, which had grown wealthy in the later Middle Ages from the production of woolens. In the fi fteenth century it had a population of about 60,000, which made it only moderately large as Italian cities went. Yet, like ancient Athens, Florence produced an extraordi- nary sequence of gifted individuals. From the years of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who all died before 1375, to those of Machiavelli, who lived until 1527, an amazing number of the leading fi gures of the Italian Renais- sance were Florentines. Like Athens also, Florence lost its republican liberty as well as its creative powers. Its history can be summarized in that of the Medici family. The founder of the family fortunes was Giovanni (1360–1429), a merchant and banker of Florence. His son, Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), allying himself with the popular element against

The Medici family

The wealthiest persons in Ital- ian towns were often bankers who made money from the kind of fi nancial exchange that is portrayed in this fi fteenth- century illustration. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 57pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 57 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156058

some of the leading families of the republic, soon became unoffi cial ruler himself. Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo the Magnifi cent (1449–1492), also used his great wealth to govern but is chiefl y remembered as a poet, connoisseur, and lavish benefactor of art and learning. In the next century Tuscany became a grand duchy, of which the Medici were hereditary grand dukes until the family died out in 1737. Thus established, they furnished numerous cardi- nals and two popes to the church, and two Medici women became queens of France.

What arose in Italy, in these surroundings, was no less than a new secular conception of life. It seemed very doubtful whether a quiet, cloistered, or celibate life was on a higher plane

than an active gregarious life, or family life, or even a life of promiscuity and adventure. It was hard to believe that clergy were any better than laity or that life led to a stern divine judgment in the end. That human will and intelligence might prove misleading seemed a gloomy doctrine. The belief that human beings were frail creatures, in need of God’s grace and salvation, though per-

haps said aloud and in public places, seemed to evoke less feeling in the heart. Instead, what captivated the Italians of the Renaissance was a sense of the vast range of human powers.

Formerly, the ideal behavior had been seen in renunciation, in a certain disdain for the concerns of this world. Now a life of involvement was also prized. Formerly, poverty had been greatly respected, at least in Christian doctrine. Now there was more praise for a proper enjoyment of wealth. Medieval Europeans had admired a life of contemplation, or meditative withdrawal. Now the humanist Leonardo Bruni could write, in 1433, “The whole glory of man lies in activity.” Often, to be sure, the two attitudes existed in the same person. Sometimes they divided different groups within the same city. As always, the old persisted along with the new. The result might be psychological stress and civil confl ict.

The new esteem for human activity took both a social and an individu- alistic turn. In cities maintaining their republican forms, as at Florence in the early fi fteenth century, a new civic consciousness or sense of public

A secular conception of life

Individualism

Two wool merchants display their goods and bags of wool. This illustration, which is from a 1492 book on arithmetic, shows the use of both Arabic and Roman numerals. (Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 58pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 58 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

59

duty was expressed. For this purpose the writings of Cicero and other ancients were found to be highly relevant, since they provided an ethics independent of the Christian and medi- eval tradition. There was also a kind of cult of the great individual, hardly known to the ancients, which gave little attention to collective responsibility. Renaissance individualism emphasized the outstanding attainments of extraordinary men (women, by contrast, were usually expected to pursue the ordinary tasks of domestic life). The great man shaped his own destiny in a world governed by fortune. He had virtù, the quality of being a man ( vir, “man”), and although a few women might also exhibit virtù, it was a quality that in the society of the day was more to be expected in the most aggressive adult males. It meant the successful demonstration of human powers. A man of virtù, in the arts, in war, or in state- craft, was a man who knew what he was doing, who, from resources within himself, made the best use of his opportunities, hewing his way through the world and excelling in all that he did. For the arts, such a spirit is preserved in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.

The growing preoccupation with human actions can be traced in new forms of paint- ing, sculpture, and architecture that arose in Italy at this time. These arts likewise refl ected

This procession is part of a fresco that Benozzo Gozzoli executed in 1469 for a Medici chapel. Although its title refers to the three kings on their way to Bethlehem, it actually represents important personages in fi fteenth-century Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici is on a white horse, followed by a throng of supporters. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

6. The Renaissance in Italy

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 59pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 59 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156060

an increasing this-worldliness—a new sense of reality and a new sense of space—that was different from that of the Middle Ages and would underlie much European thought until the early twentieth century. Space was no longer indeterminate, unknowable, or divine; it was a zone occupied by physical human beings, or one in which human beings might at least imagine themselves moving about. Reality meant visible and tangible persons or objects in this space, “objective” in the sense that they looked or felt the same to all normal persons who perceived them. It was a function of the arts to convey this reality, however idealized or suffused by the artist’s individual feeling, in such a way that observers could recognize in the image the identity of the subject portrayed. Despite the growing emphasis on individual achievements, knowledge itself was understood to be more than a subjective perception or the unique vision of a creative genius.

Architecture refl ected the new tendencies. Although the Gothic cathedral at Milan was built as late as 1386, at Florence and elsewhere architects preferred to adapt Greco-Roman principles of design, such as symmetrical arrangements of doors and windows, the classi- cal column, the arch and the dome. More public buildings of a nonreligious character were built, and more substantial town houses were put up by wealthy merchants, in styles meant to represent grandeur, or civic importance, or availability and convenience for human use. Gardens and terraces were added to many such buildings.

Sculpture, confi ned in the Middle Ages to the niches and portals of cathedrals, now emerged as an independent and free-standing art. Its favored subjects were human beings, now presented so that the viewer could walk around the object and see it from all directions. The difference

from the religious fi gures carved on medieval churches was very great. Like the architects, the sculptors in parting from the immediate past found much in the Greek and Roman

Realism in sculpture and painting

Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as the Magnifi cent, examines a model for a villa that was built for him about 1480 on the out- skirts of Florence. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 60pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 60 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

61

tradition that was modern and useful to their purpose. They produced portrait busts of eminent contemporaries, or fi gures of great leaders, sometimes on horse-back, or statues depicting characters from Greco-Roman history and mythology. The use of the nude, in mythological or allegorical subjects, likewise showed a conception of humanity that was more in keeping with the Greek than with the Christian tradition.

Painting was less infl uenced by the ancients, since the little of ancient painting that had survived was unknown during the Renaissance. The invention of painting in oils opened new pathways for the art. Merchants, ecclesiastics, and princes provided a mount- ing demand. In subject matter painting remained conservative, dealing most often with religious themes. It was the conception and presentation that were new. The new feeling for space became evident. With the discovery of the mathematics of perspective, space was presented in exact relation to the beholder’s eye. The viewer, in a sense, entered into the world of the painting. A three-dimensional effect was achieved, with careful repre- sentation of distance through variation of size, and techniques of shading or chiaroscuro added to the illusion of physical volume. Human fi gures were often placed in a setting of painted architecture, or against a background of landscape or scenery, showing castles or hills, which though supposedly far away yet framed the composition with a knowable boundary. In such a painting everything was localized in place and time; a part of the real world was caught and put in the picture. The artistic aspiration was not to suggest eternity or transcendent ideas, as in earlier religious painting, nor yet to express private fantasy or the workings of the unconscious, as in much modern art, but to present a familiar theme in an understandable setting, often with a narrative content, that is, by the telling of a story.

Like the sculptors, painters studied human anatomy and also portrayed people in dis- tinctive and living attitudes. Faces took on more expression as artists sought to depict individual personalities. Painting became less symbolic, less an intimation of general or abstract truths, more a portrayal of concrete realities as they met the eye. In Bellini’s por- trait of a condottiere (p. 62), for example, the reader can see how a strong, real, and vivid personality looks out from the canvas. Similarly, the great religious paintings were peo- pled with human beings. In Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper Christ and his disciples are seen as a group of men each with his own characteristics. Raphael’s Madonnas seem to be young Italian women, and in the mighty fi gures of Michelangelo the attributes of humanity invade heaven itself.

Humanism: The Birth of “Literature”

The literary movement in Renaissance Italy is called humanism because of the rising inter- est in humane letters, litterae humaniores. There had indeed been much writing in the later Middle Ages. Much of it had been of a technical character, as in theology, philosophy, or law; some of it had been meant to convey information, as in chronicles, histories, and descriptions of the physical world. Great hymns had been composed, lively student songs had been sung at the universities, plays had been performed in cathedrals, and the old leg- ends of King Arthur and Roland had been written down. Troubadours had praised the wonders of true love, and occasionally a monk would try his hand at a long narrative poem. Yet a new kind of literature and literary culture began to appear in the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries in Italy. A new class of writers looked upon literature as their main life’s work, wrote for each other and for a somewhat larger public, and used writing to deal with general questions, or to examine their own states of mind, or to resolve their own dif- fi culties; or they used words to achieve artistic effects, or simply to please and amuse their

6. The Renaissance in Italy

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 61pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 61 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156062

readers. Almost all of the writers were men, but a few women also entered the new literary culture and contributed to the era’s expanding literary themes. The writings of Christine de Pisan, for example, helped to spread humanist ideas in France during the early fi fteenth century (her family had moved to France from Italy) and also demonstrated that women could participate in the debates of European intellectual life.

The Italian humanists, like their predecessors, wrote a good deal in Latin. They dif- fered from earlier literate persons, however, in that they were usually not members of the clergy. They complained that Latin had become monkish, barbaric, and “scholastic,” a

jargon of the schools and universities, and they greatly preferred the classic style of a Cicero or a Livy. Medieval Latin was a vigorous living language that used words in new senses, many of which have passed into English and the Romance languages as perfectly normal expressions. Yet in the ancient

writers the humanists found qualities that medieval writing did not have. They discovered a new range of interests, a new sensibility, a complex discussion of political and civic questions, a world presented without the overarching framework of religious belief. In addition, the Greeks and Romans unquestionably had style—a sense of form, a taste for the elegant and the epigrammatic. They had often also written for practical ends, in dia- logues, orations, or treatises that were designed for purposes of persuasion.

Humanists and Latin

PORTRAIT OF A CONDOTTIERE by Giovanni Bellini (Italian, 1430–1516)

This portrait provides an emphatic statement of Renais- sance individualism. The art- ist represents here a concrete, strong-willed human being rather than an abstract type, stressing his subject’s indepen- dence and self-suffi ciency by placing him against a dark and entirely vacant background. ( National Gallery of Art)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 62pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 62 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

63

If the humanists therefore made a cult of antiquity, it was because they saw kindred spirits in ancient cultures. They sensed a relevancy for their own time. The classical infl u- ence, never wholly absent in the Middle Ages, now reentered as a main force in the higher civilization of Europe. The humanists polished their Latin, and increasingly they learned Greek. They searched assiduously for classical texts hitherto unknown. Many were found; they had of course been copied and preserved by the monks of an earlier era.

But while a special dignity attached to writing in Latin, known throughout Europe, most of the humanists wrote in Italian also. Or rather, they used the mode of speech current in Florence. This had also been the language of Dante in the Divine Comedy. To this vast poem the humanists now added many writings in Florentine or Tuscan prose. The result was that Florentine became the standard form of modern Italian. It was the fi rst time that a European vernacular—that is, the com- mon spoken tongue as opposed to Latin—became thus standardized amid the variety of its dialects and adapted in structure and vocabulary to the more formal requirements of a written language. French and English soon followed, and most of the other European languages somewhat later.

The Florentine exile, Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, has been called the fi rst man of letters. The son of a merchant who had moved to the papal city of Avignon, Petrarch spent his life in travel throughout France and Italy. Although he trained for the law, and was ordained as a clergyman, he became a somewhat rootless critic of these two esteemed professions, which he denounced for their “scholasticism.” He lived in the generation after Dante, dying in 1374, and he anticipated the more fully developed humanism that was to come. His voluminous writ- ings show the complex, contradictory attitudes of early Renaissance thought. Attracted by life, love, beauty, travel, and connections with people of importance in church and state, he could also spurn all these things as ephemeral and deceptive. He loved Cicero for his com- mon sense and his commitment to political liberty; indeed, he discovered a manuscript of Cicero’s letters in 1345. He loved St. Augustine for his otherworldly vision of the City of God. But in Cicero’s writings he also found a deep religious concern, and in St. Augustine he esteemed the active man who had been a bishop, a writer heavily engaged in the contro- versies of his time, and one who taught that for true Christians the world is not evil.

Petrarch wrote sonnets in Italian, an epic in Latin, an introspective study of himself, and a great many letters that he clearly meant to be literary productions. He aspired to literary fame. In all this we see a new kind of writer, who uses language not merely as a practical tool but as a medium of more subtle expression, to commune with himself, to convey moods of discouragement or satisfaction, to clarify doubts, to improve his own understanding of the choices and options that life affords. With Petrarch, in short, literature became a kind of calling, and also a consideration of moral philosophy, still related but no longer subordinate to religion. It was moral philosophy in the widest sense, raising questions of how human beings should adjust to the world, what a good life ought to be, and where the ultimate rewards of living were to be found.

Petrarch was an indication of things to come. Boccaccio, his contemporary and also a Florentine, wrote the Decameron in Italian, a series of tales designed both to entertain and to impart a certain wisdom about human character and behavior. They were followed by the main group of humanists, far more numerous but less well remembered. Men of letters began to take part in public life, to gather students and found schools, to serve as secretaries to governing bodies or princes, and even to occupy offi ce themselves. Thus the humanist Coluccio Salutati became chancellor

The vernacular

Petrarch

The humanists

6. The Renaissance in Italy

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 63pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 63 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156064

of Florence in 1375. During the following decades Florence was threatened by the expan- sive ambitions of Milan, where the princely despotism of the Visconti family controlled the city-state. Against such dangers a new and intense Florentine civic consciousness asserted itself. Salutati, in addition to the usual duties of chancellor, served the state with his pen, glorifying Florentine liberty and identifying it with the liberties of ancient republican Rome before they were undermined by the Caesars. Two other humanists, Bruni and Poggio, suc- ceeded him as chancellor. Bruni wrote a history of Florence that marked a new achievement in historical writing, when compared with the annals and chronicles of the Middle Ages. He saw the past as clearly past, different from but relevant to the present; and he introduced a new division of historical periods. On the model of such ancient writers as Livy, he adopted a fl owing narrative form. And he used history for a practical political purpose, to show that Florence had a long tradition of liberty and possessed values and attainments worth fi ghting for against menacing neighbors. History became a new kind of useful knowledge. It took on a public value that it had once had for the Greeks and Romans and that it would retain in the future in Europe and eventually in other parts of the world: the function of heightening a sentiment, not yet of nationalism, but of collective civic consciousness or group identity. It was meant to arouse its readers to a life of commitment and participation.

All this literary activity was of a scholarly type, in which authors broadened their understanding as much by reading as by personal experience of the world. And schol-

arly activity, the habit of attending closely to what a page really said, had consequences that went beyond either pure literature or local patriotism. A new critical attitude developed. Bruni, in his history, showed a new analyti- cal sense of the need for authentic sources. Lorenzo Valla became one of

the founders of textual criticism. Studying the Latin language historically, he observed that its characteristic words and expressions varied from one time to another. He put this

Modern critical methods

The three men in this paint- ing were Florentine humanists around 1490. They appear in a larger work that the artist Domenico Ghirlandaio painted for a chapel. Ghirlandaio fol- lowed the typical Renaissance practice of using religious sto- ries or events to convey secular subjects and ideas. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 64pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 64 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

65

knowledge to the service of the king of Naples in a dispute with the pope. Valla showed, by analysis of the language used in the document, that the Donation of Constantine, on which the papacy then based its temporal claims, could not have been written in Constan- tine’s time in the fourth century, and so was a forgery. Such scholarship helped establish modern methods for assessing the truth of written texts, and it contributed also to human- ist optimism about the range and utility of human knowledge. Pico della Mirandola and others looked for aspects of truth not revealed in the Christian scriptures. In 1486, the enthusiastic and very learned Pico, for example, claimed at the age of 23 that he could summarize all human knowledge in 900 theses, which he had drawn from “the Chaldaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Grecian, Egyptian, and Latin sages.”

Schooling, Manners, and Family Life

While Italian humanism thus contributed much to literature and scholarship, to classical learning, and to the formation of modern national languages, it also had tangible and last- ing effects in education. Here its impact persisted in all regions of European civilization down to the present. The medieval universities were essentially places for professional training in theology, medicine, and law. Except in England this continued to be their pri- mary function. What came to be known as secondary education, the preparation of young men either for the universities or for “life,” owes more to the Renaissance. The organized education of women came much later; some girls learned to read at home or in one of the few female primary schools, but young women were excluded from humanist academies and Renaissance universities.

Medieval schooling had been chaotic and repetitious. Youngsters of all ages sat together with a teacher, each absorbing from the confusion whatever could be understood of Latin rules and vocabulary. The Renaissance launched the idea of put- ting different age groups or levels of accomplishment into separate classes, in separate rooms, each with its own teacher, with periodic promotion of the pupil from one level to the next. Latin remained the principal subject, with Greek now added. But many new purposes were seen in the study of Latin. It was intended to give skill in the use of language, including the pupil’s native tongue. Rhetoric was the art of using language to infl uence others. It heightened communication. Knowl- edge alone was not enough, said the historian and chancellor Bruni, who also wrote a short work on education—“to make effectual use of what we know we must add the power of expression.” Nor was Latin merely the necessary professional tool for the priest, the phy- sician, the lawyer, or the government servant. The student learned Latin (and Greek) in order to read the ancient writings—epics, lyrics, orations, letters, histories, dialogues, and philosophical treatises—and it was assumed that such writings offered practical lessons for the educated elites of every generation. Readers therefore learned how to fi nd relevant historical models or failures in the rise and decline of the Roman republic and the troubles of the Greek city-states. The classics were meant also to have a moral impact, to produce a balanced personality, and to form character. Not everyone could be important or gifted, said the humanist Vittorino, but we all face a life of “social duty” and are responsible for our “personal infl uence” on others. These aims became permanent themes in the educa- tional systems that trained the young men of early modern Europe.

Young people were trained also for a more civilized deportment in everyday social liv- ing. Personal style in the upper classes became somewhat more studied. Hitherto Europeans had generally acted like big children; they spat, belched, and blew their noses without

Renaissance education

6. The Renaissance in Italy

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 65pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 65 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156066

inhibition, snatched at food with their fi ngers, bawled at each other when they were unhappy, or sulked when their feelings were offended. It was Italians of the Renaissance who fi rst taught more polite habits. Books of etiquette began to appear, of which the most successful was Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528). The “courtier” was ancestor to the “gentleman”; “courtesy” was originally the kind of behavior suited to princely courts.

The “courtier,” according to Castiglione, should be a man of good birth but is chiefl y the product of training. His education in youth, and his efforts in mature years, should be

directed toward mixing agreeably in the company of his equals. His clothes should be neat, his movements graceful, his approach to other people perfectly poised. He must converse with facility, be profi cient in sports and arms, and know how to dance and appreciate music. He should know Latin and Greek.

With literary and other subjects he should show a certain familiarity but never become too engrossed. For the well-bred man speaks with “a certain carelessness, to hide his art, and show that what he says or does comes from him without effort or deliberation.” Pedantry and heaviness must yield to an air of effortless superiority, so that even when the courtier knows or does something seriously, he must treat it lightly as one of many accomplishments. At its

The “courtier”

This painting by the Italian artist Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) portrays an appreciation for the generations and social roles that constituted late Renaissance family life. Entitled simply Portrait of a Family, it arranges people by age and gender, thus suggesting a different identity and destiny for each person and each group. Fontana was one of the most prolifi c and success- ful women artists of the early modern era; and she conveyed her own knowledge of family life (having 11 children of her own) through her detailed artistic representations of specifi c indi- viduals and their social relationships. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 66pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 66 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

67

best, the code taught a consideration for the feelings of others and incorporated some of the moral ideas of the humanists, aiming at a creditable life in active society. Castiglione’s book was translated into numerous languages, and a hundred editions were printed before 1600.

Castiglione’s ideal court also included women, whose civilizing infl uence was sup- posed to encourage the good manners, polite conversation, and cultural graces that rough- edged men might otherwise ignore. Expressing views of men and women that shaped much of Renaissance culture, Castiglione expected men to cultivate a “robust and sturdy manliness,” which would be balanced in court society by the “soft and delicate tenderness” of women. Such distinctions suggested also the gender divisions in Renaissance families and households, including those that were far removed from the courts of princes.

The marriages that created Renaissance households grew out of careful negotiations in which the families of prospective brides and grooms sought to enhance their respective social positions. In Florence, for example, parents typically arranged for their daughters to be married by age 18 to older men whose economic or political connections would be advantageous to the young woman’s own family. Florentine husbands, who had usually reached age 30 before their fi rst marriage, were well advanced in trades or professions before they established their new households, which depended also on the dowries that they received through their marriage contracts. The different ages of husbands and wives reinforced the gender divisions in Renaissance families; men pursued their public careers with their pro- fessional peers while their much younger wives raised children in the home. The high mortality rates in Renaissance cities, however, meant that women often outlived their older husbands, and, as young widows, they were forced to raise the children and manage the household. The young men who attended the new Renaissance schools therefore came from families in which mothers usually provided the most important training during their early years. Renaissance education and manners, as taught in the new schools and acad- emies of the era, thus developed within the distinctive patterns of Italian family life and extended the other “lessons” that women were also teaching at home.

Politics and the Italian Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance, for all its accomplishments, produced no institution or great idea by which masses of people living in society could be held together. Indeed, the greatest of Europe’s institutions, the Roman church, in which Europeans had lived for centuries, and without which they did not see how they could live at all, fell into neglect under the Renaissance popes. Nor did Italy as a whole develop any effective political institu- tions. Florence during the fi fteenth century passed from a high-spirited republicanism to acceptance of one-man rule. Throughout the peninsula the merchants, bankers, connois- seurs, and courtly classes who controlled the city-states could not fi ght for themselves, nor arouse their citizens to fi ght for them. They therefore hired professional fi ghting men, condottieri, private leaders of armed bands, who contracted with the various city-states to carry on warfare and often raised their price or changed sides during hostilities. Italian politics became a tangled web, a labyrinth of subterfuge and conspiracy, a platform on which powerful individuals might exhibit their virtù. “Italian cunning” became a byword throughout Europe. Dictators rose and fell. The Medici became dukes in Florence, the Sforza in Milan, while in Venice and Genoa, where the republics survived, narrow oligar- chies held tight control. These states, along with the states of the church, jockeyed about like pugilists in a ring, held within an intricate, shifting, and purely local balance of power.

Renaissance marriages

6. The Renaissance in Italy

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 67pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 67 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156068

Italy was the despair of its patriots, or of such few as remained. One of these was Niccolò Machiavelli, who, in The Prince (1513), wrote the most lasting work of the Italian Renaissance. He dreamed of the day when the citizens of his native Florence, or indeed of all

The governing council in Florence deliberates on going to war against Pisa during a brief period of republican revival after the Medici were expelled in 1494. A nemesis, or omen of fail- ure and retribution, fl oats over the councilors’ heads and represents the challenge of making political decisions in a Renaissance Italian state. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 68pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 68 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

69

Italy, should behave like early Romans—show virility in their politics, fi ght in citizen armies for patriotic causes, and uphold their dignity before Europe. It was outside Italy, in kings Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis XI of France, and Henry VII of England, that Machiavelli was obliged to fi nd his heroes. He admired them because they knew how to exercise power and how to build strong states. In The Prince he produced a handbook of statecraft that he hoped Italy might fi nd useful. He produced also the fi rst purely secular treatise on politics.

Medieval writings on politics, those of Thomas Aquinas or Marsiglio of Padua, for example, had always talked of God’s will for the government of people, with such accom- panying matters as justice and right, or divine and natural law. All this Machiavelli put aside. He “emancipated” politics from theology and moral philosophy. He undertook to describe simply what rulers actually did. What really happens, said Machiavelli, is that effective rulers and governments use their power to act only in their own political interest. They keep faith or break it, observe treaties or repudiate them, are merciful or ruthless, forthright or sly, peace- able or aggressive, according to their estimates of their political needs. Machiavelli was pre- pared to admit that such behavior was bad; he only insisted that it was in this way, however regrettably, that successful rulers behaved. He was thought unduly cynical even in an age that lacked political delicacy. He had nevertheless diagnosed the new era with considerable insight. It was an age when politics was in fact breaking off from religion, with the building up of state power and authority emerging as goals that required no other justifi cation.

But the most successful states of the time, as Machiavelli saw, were not in Italy. They were what history knows as the New Monarchies, and they owed their strength to some- thing more than princely craft, for they enjoyed a measure of loyalty from the people they governed. The city-states in Renaissance Italy failed to sustain even this limited sense of

Machiavelli

Uses of political power

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI by Cristofano dell’Altissimo (Italian, c. 1525–1605)

Machiavelli’s famous book, The Prince, developed a new, secular account of how political rulers gained and consolidated their control of state power. Although his writings were criticized for ignoring Christian ethical values, Machiavelli’s ideas marked a key starting point for modern European political thought. (Corbis)

6. The Renaissance in Italy

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 69pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 69 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156070

loyalty between governments and their people. Italian politics became an affair of indi- vidual or elite virtù; and, as outsiders began to realize, the people of Italy lost interest in both the politics and the wars of their own city-states.

So Italy, the sunny land of balmy Mediterranean skies, rich in the busy life of its cities, its moneyed wealth, its gorgeous works of art, became vulnerable to the depredations of less easygoing peoples, from Spain and the north, who possessed political and military institu-

tions in which men could act together in large numbers. In a new age of rising national monarchies the city-states of Italy were too small to compete. In 1494 a French army crossed the Alps. Italy became a bone of contention between France and Spain. In 1527, during a later phase of this long confl ict,

an army of undisciplined Spanish and German mercenaries, joined by footloose Italians, fell upon Rome itself. Never, not even from the barbarian Goths of the fi fth century, had Rome experienced anything so horrible and degrading. The city was sacked, thousands were killed, soldiers milled about in an orgy of rape and loot, the pope was imprisoned, and car- dinals were mockingly paraded through the streets facing backward on the backs of mules.

After the sack of Rome the Italian Renaissance faded away. Politically, for over three hundred years, Italy remained divided, the passive object of the ambitions of outside powers. Meanwhile its culture permeated the rest of Europe.

7. THE RENAISSANCE OUTSIDE ITALY Outside Italy people were much less conscious of any sudden break with the Middle Ages. Developments north of the Alps, and in Spain, were more an outgrowth of what had gone before. There was indeed a cultural Renaissance in the Italian sense, and some Flemish masters introduced artistic innovations even before the new techniques were used by painters in Italy. In the north also, as in Italy, writers favored a revival of classical Latin, but the modern written languages also began to develop.

The northern Renaissance resembled the earlier southern Renaissance in blending the old and the new, but the religious element was much stronger than in Italy. The most important northern humanists were writers like Thomas More in England and Erasmus in Holland. The French humanism that produced the earthy François Rabelais also produced the austere John Calvin.

Religious Scholarship and Science

Historians like to distinguish between the “pagan” humanism of Italy and the Christian humanism of the north. In the north, Christian humanists stud- ied the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible and read the Church Fathers, both Latin and Greek, in order to deepen their understanding of Christianity

and to restore its moral vitality. Among people without pretense to humanistic learning, religion also remained a force. Medieval intellectual interests persisted. This is apparent from the continuing foundation of universities. The humanists generally regarded uni- versities as centers of a pedantic, monkish, and scholastic learning. Concentrating upon theology, or upon medicine and law, the universities gave little encouragement to experi- mental science and still less to purely literary studies. In Italy in the fi fteenth century no new universities were established. But in Spain, in France, in Scotland, in Scandinavia, and above all in Germany, new universities continued to develop. Between 1386 and 1506 no less than 14 universities were established in Germany. At one of the newest, Witten- berg, founded in 1502, Martin Luther was to launch the Protestant Reformation.

Italian vulnerability

Christian humanists

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 70pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 70 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

717. The Renaissance outside Italy

Germany at this time, on the eve of the great religious upheaval, and before the shift of the principal commercial arteries from central Europe to the Atlantic seaboard, was a main center of European life. Politically, the German-speaking world was an ill-defi ned and ill-organized region, composed of many diverse parts, from which the Netherlands and Switzerland were not yet differentiated. Economically, nevertheless, western and southern Germany enjoyed a lead over most of Western Europe; the towns traded busily, and German banking families, like the famous Fugger, controlled more capital than any others in Europe. Technical inventiveness was alive; mining was developing; and it was in the Rhineland, at Mainz, that Gutenberg, about 1450, produced the fi rst European books printed with movable type. In painting, the western fringe of the Germanic world produced the Flemish masters, and south Germany gave birth to imaginative artists such as Albrecht Dürer and the Holbeins.

Intellectually, Germany shared in the Latin culture of Europe, a fact often obscured by the Latin names that German authors used in the early modern era. Regiomontanus (the Latin name of Johann Müller) laid the foundations during his short lifetime (1436–1476) for a mathematical conception of the universe. He was probably the most infl u- ential scientifi c worker of the fi fteenth century, especially since Leonardo da Vinci’s scientifi c labors remained unknown. Nicholas of Cusa (1401?–1464), a Rhinelander, was a churchman whose mystical philosophy entered into the later development of mathematics and science. From such a background of mathematical interests came Copernicus (Niklas Koppernigk, 1473–1543), who believed that the earth moved about the sun; he was indeed a Pole, but he came from the mixed German-Polish region of East Prussia. Fortifi ed by the same mathematical interests, Europe’s best-known cartographers were also Germans, such as Behaim and Schöner, whose world maps represented the most advanced geographical knowledge of the time. Paracelsus (Latin for Hohenheim) undertook to revolutionize medicine at the University of Basel. His wild prophecies made him a mixture of scientist and charlatan; but, in truth, science was not yet clearly distinguished from the occult, with which it shared the idea of control over natural forces. A similar fi gure, remembered in literature and the arts, was the celebrated Dr. Faustus. In real life, Faust, or Faustus, was perhaps a learned German of the fi rst part of the sixteenth century. He was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil in return for knowl- edge and power, The Faust story was dramatized in England as early as 1593 by Christopher Marlowe, and, much later, by Goethe in German poetry. In the legend of Faust later genera- tions were to see a symbol of the inordinate ambitions of modern people.

The idea that human powers could understand and control physical nature developed especially north of the Alps, but this idea also corresponded in many ways to the more purely Italian and humanistic emphasis on the infi nite richness of human personalities. Together, these ideas constituted the new Renaissance spirit, for both stressed the eman- cipation of humanity’s limitless potentialities. The two ideas constantly interacted; in fact, most of the scientifi c workers just mentioned—Regiomontanus, Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus—spent many years in Italy, receiving the stimulus of Italian thought.

Mysticism and Lay Religion

In the north a genuine religious impulse went beyond the religious humanistic scholarship and sustained a stronger interest in Christian mysticism. Where in Italy the religious sense, if not extinct, seemed to pass into a joyous and public cult in which God was glorifi ed by works of art, in the north it took on a more spiritual and moral tone. Germany in the

German contributions to early modern science

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 71pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 71 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156072

fourteenth century produced a series of mystics. The mystic tendencies of Nicholas of Cusa have been mentioned. More typical mystics were Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) and

Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471), author of the Imitation of Christ. The essence of mysticism lay in the belief, or experience, that the individual soul could in perfect solitude commune directly with God. The mystic had no need of reason, nor of words, nor of joining with other people in open worship, nor

of the sacraments administered by the priests—nor even of the church. The mystics did not rebel against the church; they accepted its pattern of salvation; but they also offered, to those who could follow, a deeper religious experience in which the church as a social insti- tution had no place. All social institutions, in fact, were transcended in mysticism by the individual soul; and on this doctrine, both profound and socially disruptive, Martin Luther was later to draw.

For the church, it was signifi cant also that religion was felt deeply outside the clergy. Persons stirred by religion, who in the Middle Ages would have taken holy orders, now frequently remained laymen. In the past the church had often needed reform. But in the past, in the bad times of the tenth century, for example, the clergy had found reformers within their own ranks. The church had thus been repeatedly reformed and renewed with- out revolution. Now, in the fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries an ominous line seemed to be increasingly drawn: between the clergy as an established interest, inert and set in its ways, merely living, and living well, off the church; and groups of people outside the clergy—religious laypersons, religiously inclined humanists and writers, impatient and headstrong rulers—who were more infl uential than ever before and more critical of eccle- siastical abuses.

Lay religion was especially active in the Netherlands. A lay preacher, Gerard Groote, attracted followers there by calling for spiritual regeneration. In 1374 he founded a reli- gious sisterhood, which was followed by establishments for religiously minded men. They

called themselves, respectively, the Sisters and the Brothers of the Com- mon Life, and they eventually received papal approval. They lived com- munally, but not as monks and nuns, for they took no vows, wore ordinary clothing, and were free to leave at will. They worked at relieving the poor and in teaching. The schools of the Brothers, since some of them came to have as many as a thousand boys, were the fi rst to be organized in separate

classes, each with its own room and its own teacher, according to the pupil’s age or level of advancement. The Sisters maintained similar though less elaborate schools for girls. Students learned to read and write, but the emphasis was on a Christian ideal of character and conduct, and the goal was to instill such qualities as humility, tolerance, reverence, love of one’s neighbor, and the conscientious performance of duty. This Modern Devotion, as it was called, spread widely in the Netherlands and adjoining parts of Germany.

Erasmus of Rotterdam

In this atmosphere grew up the greatest of all the northern humanists, and indeed the most notable fi gure of the entire humanist movement, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). Like all the humanists, Erasmus chose to write in a “purifi ed” and usually intricate Latin style. He regarded the Middle Ages

as benighted, ridiculed the scholastic philosophers, and studied deeply the classical writers of antiquity. He had the strength and the limitations of the pure man of letters. To the hard questions of serious philosophy he was largely indifferent; he feared the unenlightened

Mysticism and the individual soul

The Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life

Erasmus of Rotterdam

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 72pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 72 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

73

excitability of the common people, and he was almost wholly unpolitical in his outlook. He rarely thought in terms of worldly power or advantage and made too little allowance for those who did. An exact contemporary to the most worldly Renaissance popes, Erasmus was keenly aware of the need for reform of the clergy. He put his faith in education, enlightened discussion, and gradual moral improvement. He led no burning crusade and counseled against all violence or fanaticism. He prepared new Greek and Latin editions of the New Testament. Urging people to read the New Testament in the vernacular languages, he hoped that a better understanding of Christ’s teaching might turn them from their evil ways. In his Praise of Folly he satirized all worldly pretensions and ambitions, those of the clergy most emphatically. In his Handbook of a Christian Knight he showed how a man might take part in the affairs of the world while remaining a devout Christian, and in his infl uential treatise On Civility in Children he offered guidance for proper behavior in the social situations of daily life. Tolerance, restraint, good manners, scholarly understanding, a love of peace, a critical and reforming zeal, and a reasonable tone from which shouting and bad temper were always excluded—such were the Erasmian virtues.

Erasmus achieved an international eminence such as no one of purely intellectual attainments had ever enjoyed. He corresponded with the most powerful people in Europe. He lectured at Cambridge and edited books for a publisher at Basel. The king of Spain named him a councilor, the king of France called him to Paris, and Pope Leo X assisted him when he was in trouble. Theologians found fault with Erasmus’s ideas (in which, indeed, the supernatural had little importance), but among the leaders of the church, the popes and prelates, he had many admirers. Erasmus, it must be noted, attacked only the abuses in the church, the ignorance or sloth of the clergy, and the moral or fi nancial cor- ruption of their lives. The essence and principle of the Roman Catholic church he never called into question. Whether the Erasmian spirit, so widely diffused about 1520, would have suffi ced to restore the church without the revolutionary impact of Protestantism is one of the many unanswerable questions of history.

ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM by Hans Holbein, the Younger (German, 1497–1543)

This portrait was painted in 1523, when Erasmus was 56, and the Lutheran Reformation had begun in Germany. A classic portrayal of humanism at its best, the painting captures the life of thought and emphasizes the only weapon that Erasmus could use—the pen. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

7. The Renaissance outside Italy

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 73pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 73 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156074

8. THE NEW MONARCHIES Meanwhile, in Europe outside Italy, kings were actively building the institutions of the modern state. It was these states, more than any other single factor, that were to determine the course of the sixteenth-century religious revolution. Whether a country turned Protes- tant, remained Catholic, or divided into separate religious communities would depend very largely upon political considerations.

War, civil war, class war, feudal rebellion, and plain banditry affl icted a good deal of Europe in the middle of the fi fteenth century. In this formless violence central govern- ments had become very weak. Various rulers now tried to impose a kind of civil peace. They have been conveniently called the New Monarchs, but they were not really very new because they resumed the interrupted labors of kings in the High Middle Ages. They thus laid foundations for later national, or at least territorial, states.

The New Monarchs offered the institution of monarchy as a guarantee of law and order. Arousing latent sentiments of loyalty to the reigning dynasty, they proclaimed that hereditary monarchy was the only legitimate form of public power. They especially enlisted the support of middle-class people in the towns, who were tired of the private wars and marauding habits of the feudal nobles. Townspeople were willing to let parliaments be dominated or even ignored by the king, for parliaments had proved too often to be strong- holds of unruly barons, or had merely accentuated class confl ict. The king, receiving money in taxes, was able to organize armies with which to control the nobles. The use of the pike and the longbow, which enabled the foot soldier to stand against the horseman, was here of great potential value. The king, if only he could get his monarchy suffi ciently organized and his fi nances into reliable order, could hire large numbers of foot soldiers, who generally came from the growing population of commoners, unlike the knightly horsemen. But to organize his monarchy, the king had to break down the mass of feudal, inherited, custom- ary, or “common” law in which the rights of the feudal classes were entrenched. For this purpose, at least on the Continent, the New Monarch made use of Roman law, which was now actively studied in the universities. He called himself a “sovereign”—it was at this time that kings began to be addressed as “majesty.” The king, said the experts in Roman law, incorporated the will and welfare of the people in his own person. He could therefore make law by his own authority, regardless of previous custom or even of historic liberties— and they quoted Latin phrases to argue that “what pleases the prince has the force of law.”

The New Monarchy in England, France, and Spain

The New Monarchy came to England with the dynasty of the Tudors (1485–1603), whose fi rst king, Henry VII (1485–1509), after gaining the throne by force, put an end to the civil turbulence of the Wars of the Roses.

In these wars the great English baronial families had seriously weakened each other, to the great convenience of the king and the bulk of the citizenry. Henry VII passed laws against “livery and maintenance,” the practice by which great lords maintained private armies wearing their own livery or insignia, and he used his royal council as a new court to deal with property disputes and infractions of the public peace. It met in a room decorated with stars, whence its name, the Star Chamber. It represented the authority of the king and his council, and it operated without a jury. Later denounced as an instrument of despotism, it was popular enough at fi rst, because it preserved order and rendered substantial justice. Henry VII, though miserly and unpleasant in person, was accepted as a good ruler. National feeling in England consolidated around the house of Tudor.

The Tudors

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 74pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 74 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

75

In France the New Monarchy was represented by Louis XI (1461–1483), of the Valois line, and his successors. In the fi ve centuries since the fi rst French king had been crowned, the royal domain had steadily expanded from its original small nucleus around Paris through a combination of inheritance, marriage, war, intrigue, and conquest. Louis XI continued to round out the French borders. Inter- nally, he built up a royal army, suppressed brigands, and subdued rebellious nobles. He acquired far greater powers than the English Tudors to raise taxation without parliamentary consent. The French monarchy also enlarged its powers over the clergy. We have seen how, by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, the Gallican church had won consider- able independence to manage its own administrative affairs. In 1516 King Francis I reached an agreement with Pope Leo X in the Concordat of Bologna, which rescinded the Prag- matic Sanction. The pope henceforth received fi nancial income from French ecclesiastics, but the king appointed the French bishops and abbots. The fact that, after 1516, the kings of France already controlled their own national clergy was one reason why, in later years, they were never tempted to turn Protestant.

Strictly speaking, there was no kingdom of Spain. Various Spanish king- doms had combined into two, Aragon and Castile. To Aragon, which lay along the Mediterranean side of the peninsula, belonged the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Sicily, and the south Italian kingdom of Naples. To Castile, after 1492, belonged the newly discovered Americas. The two were joined in a personal union by the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469. The union was personal only; that is, both kingdoms recognized the two monarchs, but they had no common political, judicial, or administrative institutions. There was little or no Spanish national feeling; indeed, the Catalans in northern Aragon spoke a language quite different from Castilian Spanish. The most signifi cant common feeling throughout Spain came from the sense of belonging to the Spanish Catholic church. The common memory was that of the Christian crusade against the Moors. The one common institution, whose offi cials had equal authority and equal access to all the kingdoms, was a church court, the Inquisition. Meanwhile, the reconquista was at last completed when the southern tip of Spain, Granada, was conquered from the Moors in 1492. Its annexation added to the heterogeneous character of the Spanish dominions.

In these circumstances the New Monarchy in Spain followed a religious bent. Unifi cation took place around the church. The rulers, though they made efforts at political centralization, worked largely through facilities offered by the church, and the early sense of “Spanishness” was linked to a sense of Catholicity. Formerly the Spanish had been among the most tolerant of Europeans; Christians, Muslims, and Jews had managed to live together. But in the wave of religious excitement that accompanied the conquest of Granada both the Jews and the Moors were expelled. The expulsion of the Jews by a decree of 1492 was actually a sign of former toleration in Spain, for the Jews had been ear- lier expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. They were not again legally allowed in England until the mid-seventeenth century, nor in France (with some excep- tions) until the French Revolution. In Spain, as in the history of many European peoples, the emergence of an early “national” consciousness seemed to express or produce an anti- Semitism that defi ned Jews as “outsiders.” 2

The Valois

Aragon and Castile

2 The Jews who left Spain (the Sephardic Jews) went to North Africa and the Middle East, and in smaller numbers to the Dutch Netherlands and even to southwestern France (one of the exceptions noted above). Those who left England two centuries earlier generally went to Germany, the great center of Ashkenazic Jewry in the Middle Ages. Driven from Germany in the fourteenth century they concentrated in Poland, which remained a great center of European Jews until the Nazi massacres of the 1940s.

8. The New Monarchies

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 75pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 75 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156076

All persons in Spain were now supposed to be Christians. In fact, however, Spain was one of the places in Europe where a person’s Christianity could not be taken for granted, because many Spanish families had been Jewish or Muslim for centuries and had only

accepted Christianity to avoid expulsion. Hence arose a fear of false Chris- tians, of an unassimilated element secretly hostile to the foundations of Spanish life. It was feared that Moriscos (Christians of Moorish back- ground) and Marranos (Christians of Jewish background) retained a clan- destine sympathy for the religion of their forebears. Thousands of such

persons were brought before the Inquisition, where, as in the civil courts under Roman procedure, torture could be employed to extort confessions. It was thus safest to be profuse in one’s external religious devotions because adherence to the Catholic Church became the way of proving oneself to be a good Spaniard.

The life of Spain carried forward some of the long-existing commitment to a crusade— which had now evolved into a campaign within Spain against Moriscos and Marranos, and a new campaign against the Moors in Africa itself, which the Spanish invaded immedi- ately after the conquest of Granada. The Spanish also extended their religious energies into the Americas, where the Spanish church set about gathering the Indians into the Christian fold. And Spain’s strong religious identity would soon contribute to its growing role in the wider political and religious confl icts of sixteenth-century Europe. The Spanish history of crusades against Muslims had prepared the country (before Protestantism ever appeared) to become a leading defender of Roman Catholic traditions as well as an advocate for Catholic renewal and internal reforms.

The Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Supremacy

Ideas of the New Monarchy were at work even in Germany, which is to say, in the Holy Roman Empire. There were three kinds of states in the empire. There were the princely states such as Saxony, Brandenburg, or Bavaria, each of which was a small hereditary dynastic monarchy in itself. There were also ecclesiastical states—bishoprics, abbacies, etc.—in which the bishop or abbot, whose rule was of course not hereditary, conducted the govern- ment. A large portion of the area of the empire consisted of these church-states. Third, there were the imperial free cities, some 50 in number; their collective area was not large, but they dominated the commercial and fi nancial life of the country.

The German states, over the centuries, had prevented the emperor from infringing upon their local liberties. They had taken care to keep the emperorship an elective offi ce, so that with each election local liberties could be reaffi rmed. After 1356 the right of elect-

ing an emperor was vested in seven electors: four of the princely lords—the Count Palatine, Duke of Saxony, Margrave of Brandenburg, and King of Bohemia—and three of the ecclesiastical lords—the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. In 1452 the electors chose the Archduke of Austria to

be emperor. His family name was Habsburg. The Habsburgs, by using the resources of their hereditary possessions in Austria (and later elsewhere) and by delicately balancing and brib- ing the numerous political forces within Germany, managed to get themselves consistently reelected to the Holy Roman emperorship in every generation, with one exception, from 1452 until 1806. The Habsburg emperors also tried to introduce the centralizing principles of the New Monarchy into an empire that lacked institutions for the exercise of centralized power.

Under Maximilian I (1493–1519) there seemed to be progress in that direction: the empire was divided into administrative “circles,” and an Imperial Chamber and Council were

Fusing the national and the Catholic

The Habsburgs

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 76pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 76 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

779. The Protestant Reformation

created, but they were all doomed to failure before the immovable obstacle of states’ rights. Maximilian was also the author of the Habsburg family fortunes through his strategic use of royal marriages, which brought the Habsburgs into control of a vast empire. Maximilian’s grandson, Charles, thus inherited from his four grandparents the lands of Austria, the Nether- lands, and part of Burgundy; Castile and Aragon in Spain; the whole of Spanish America; and scattered possessions in Italy and the Mediterranean. In addition, in 1519, Charles was elected Holy Roman Emperor and so became the symbolic head of all Germany.

Charles V of the empire (he was known as Charles I in Spain) was thus beyond all comparison the most powerful ruler of his day. But still other fortunes awaited the house of Habsburg. The Turks, who had occupied Constantinople in 1453, were at this time push- ing through Hungary and menacing central Europe. In 1526 they defeated the Hungarians at the battle of Mohacs. The parliaments of Hungary, and of the adjoining kingdom of Bohemia, hoping to gain allies in the face of the Turkish threat, thereupon elected Charles V’s brother Ferdinand as their king. Ferdinand soon lost much of Hungary to the Turkish Sultan, Suleiman I, but he retained his royal crown and gradually expanded Habsburg infl uence in central Europe. No royal family since Charlemagne had stood so far above all rivals. Contemporaries cried that Europe was threatened with “universal monarchy,” with a kind of imperial system in which no people could preserve its independence from the Habsburgs.

The reader who wishes to understand the early modern European religious revolution and the consequent emergence of Protestantism must bear in mind the intricate interplay of the factors that have now been outlined: the decline of the church; the growth of secular and humanistic feeling; the spread of lay religion outside the offi cial clergy; the rise of monarchs who wished to control everything in their kingdoms, including the church; the resistance of feudal elements to these same monarchs; the lassitude of the popes and their fear of church councils; the division of Germany; the Turkish entry into central Europe; the crusading traditions in Spain; the preeminence of Charles V; and the fears felt in other countries, especially in France, of absorption by the amazing empire of the Habsburgs.

9. THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Three streams contributed to the religious upheaval in sixteenth-century Europe. First, among common people, or the laboring poor, who might fi nd their spokesmen among local priests, there was an endemic dissatisfaction with all the grand apparatus of the church, or a belief that its bishops and abbots were part of a wealthy and oppressive ruling class. For such people, religious ideas became mixed with a protest against the whole social order. They found expression in the great peasant rebellion in Germany in the 1520s. The sects that emerged from these social groups are known historically as Anabaptists, and the modern Baptists, Mennonites, and Moravian Brothers are among their descendants. Second, and forming a group generally more educated and with broader views of the world, were the middle classes of various European cities, especially of cities that were almost autonomous little republics, as in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. They might wish to manage their own reli- gious affairs as they did their other business, believing that the church hierarchy was too much embedded in a feudal, baronial, and monarchical system with which they had little in common. The modern churches of Calvinist origin came in large part from this stream. Third, there were the ruling sovereigns and princes, who had long disputed with the church on matters of property, taxes, legal jurisdiction, and political infl uence. All such rulers

Charles V

Political and social discontents

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 77pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 77 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156078

wanted to be masters in their own territory. In the end it was the power of such rulers that determined which form of religion should offi cially prevail. The Lutheran and Anglican

churches were in this tradition, and to some extent the Gallican church, as the French branch of the Roman Catholic church was called. As it turned out, by 1600, the second and third streams had won many successes, but the fi rst was suppressed. Socio-religious radicalism was reduced to an under-

current in countries where Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, or Roman Catholic churches were established during the sixteenth century.

Since northern Europe became Protestant while the south remained Catholic, it may look as if the north had broken off in a body from a once solid Roman church. The reality was not so simple. Let us for a moment put aside the term “Protestant,” and think of the adherents of the new religion as religious revolutionaries. 3 Their ideas were revolutionary

Strands of Protestantism

This painting entitled Interrogation of the Jews, by an unknown artist in the 1480s, suggests the dangers that non-Christian people faced in late fi fteenth-century Spain. Infl uential, wealthy interrogators ques- tioned the beliefs or behavior of persons whose religion made them “suspicious” and vulnerable to the powerful people who distrusted them. (The Granger Collection, NYC)

3 The word “Protestant” arose as an incident in the struggle, at fi rst denoting certain Lutherans who drew up a formal protest against an action of the diet of the empire in 1529. Only very gradually did the various groups of anti-Roman reformers think of themselves as collectively Protestant.

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 78pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 78 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

79

EUROPE, 1526 The main feature of the political map of Europe about 1526 is the predominance of the house of Habsburg. Much of Europe was ruled by the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, who was at the same time King Charles I of Spain. Charles left his possessions in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia to his brother and those in Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, and America to his son, thereby establish- ing the Austrian and Spanish branches of the Habsburg dynasty. France was nearly encircled by Habsburg dominions and habitually formed alliances to oppose the Habsburg kings.

Habsburg Dominions

Church Lands

Boundary of Holy Roman Empire

0 100 200 300 miles

Aegean Sea

Black Sea

Adriatic Sea

ATLANTIC OCEAN

North Sea

Ba lt i

c Se

a

Vistula R.

Dniester R .

Dan u be R.

Rhine

R.

M e d i t e r r a n e a n

S e a

Danu b

e R

.

R U S S I A (MUSCOVY)

FINLAND

S W E D E N

ESTONIA

LIVONIA

COURLAND

LITHUANIA

PRUSSIA

NORWAYSHETLAND

ORKNEY I.

SCOTLAND

ENGLAND

IRELAND

WALES

F R A N C E

P Y R E N E E S

CATALONIA

NAVARRE

AR AG

ON

GR A N A D A

PORTUGAL S P A I N

C A S T I L E

B A L E

A R I C

I .

SULTANATE OF FEZ

SULTANATE OF ALGIERS SULTANATE OF TUNIS

DAUPHINÉ

SAVOY

CORSICA (Genoa)

SARDINIA (Aragon)

SICILY (Aragon)

MALTA (Knights of St. John)

IONIAN I. (Venice)

NAPLES (Aragon)

PAPAL STATES

A LBA

N IA

GREECE

MOREA

(Venice)

CRETE (Venice)

CHIOS (Genoa)

RHODES (Turkish) CYPRUS (Venice)

O T

T O

M A

N

E M

P I R E

CRIMEA

KHANATE OF THE CRIMEA YEDISAN

MONTENEGRO

BOSNIA

WALLACHIA

TRANSYLVANIA H U N G A R Y

P O L A N D

GALICIA C A R P A

T H

I A N

S

POLAND

MORAVIA BOHEMIA

SILESIA

A U

ST RI

A

BRANDENBURG

SAXONY

BAVARIA

TYROL SWISS

CONFEDERATION

FR .

CO MT

É

LUX.

BELGIAN NETH.

DUTCH NETHERLANDS

PALA- TINATE

VENETIAN REPUBLIC

DALMATIA

B U

R G

U N

D Y

TH E

H EB

RI DE

S

DENMARK

M O

LDAVIA

PODOLIA

Dublin

Edinburgh

York

London Canterbury

Calais (England)

St. Malo Paris

Rouen

Orléans

Angoulême

Bordeaux

Bourges

Bayonne

Avignon

Marseille

Barcelona

Santiago

Burgos

Valladolid

Escorial

Oporto

Lisbon

Toledo

Madrid

Seville Granada Cadiz

Valencia

Melilla (Spain) Algiers

Tunis

Rome

Naples

Florence

Venice

Parma Milan

Worms

Sofia

Mohacs

Belgrade

Salonica

Palermo Lepanto

Bucharest

Adrianople

Constantinople

Smyrna

Munich

Augsburg

Ratisbon

Hamburg

Berlin Wittenberg

Prague

Danzig

Copenhagen

Warsaw

Helsingfors

Stockholm

Riga

Novgorod

Moscow

Vilna

Kiev

Genoa

Geneva

Strasbourg Vienna

Budapest

Trent

Basel

Metz

Brussels Antwerp

Münster

Cologne

Breslau Cracow

Schmalkalden

Trier Lemberg

Bergen Oslo

because they held, not merely that “abuses” in the church must be corrected, but also that the Roman church itself was wrong in principle. Even so, there were many who hoped, for years, that old and new ideas of the church might be combined. Many deplored the extremes but gradually in the heat of struggle had to choose one side or the other. The issues became drawn, and each side aspired to destroy its adversary. For over a century the revolutionaries maintained the hope that “popery” would everywhere fall. For over a

9. The Protestant Reformation

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 79pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 79 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156080

century the upholders of the old order worked to annihilate or reconvert “heretics.” Only slowly did Catholics and Protestants come to accept each other’s existence as an estab- lished fact of European society. Though the religious frontier that was to prove permanent appeared as early as 1560, it was not generally accepted until after the Thirty Years’ War, which ended in 1648.

Luther and Lutheranism

The fi rst who successfully defi ed the older church authorities was Martin Luther. He was a monk, and an earnest one, until he was almost 40 years old. A vehement and spiritually uneasy man, with many dark and introspective recesses in his personality, Luther was

terrifi ed by the thought of the awful omnipotence of God, distressed by his own sense of inadequacy, apprehensive of the devil, and suffering from the chronic conviction that he was damned. The means offered by the church to allay such spiritual anguish—the sacraments, prayer, attendance at Mass— gave him no satisfaction. From a reading and pondering of St. Paul

(Romans i, 17)—“the just shall live by faith”—there dawned upon him a new realization and sense of peace. He developed the doctrine of justifi cation by faith alone. This held that what “justifi es” a person is not what the church knew as “works” (prayer, alms, the sacra- ments, holy living) but “faith alone,” an inward bent of spirit given to each soul directly by God. Good works, Luther thought, were the consequence and external evidence of this inner grace, but in no way its cause. People did not “earn” grace by doing good; they did the good because they possessed the grace of God. With this idea Luther for some years lived content. Even years later some high-placed churchmen believed that in Luther’s doctrine of justifi cation by faith there was nothing contrary to the teachings of the Catholic church.

Luther, now a professor at Wittenberg, was brought out of seclusion by an incident of 1517. A friar named Tetzel was traveling through Germany distributing indulgences, authorized by the pope to fi nance the building of St. Peter’s in Rome. Tetzel claimed that

indulgences would free people from some of the punishments of purgatory, and in return for the indulgences the faithful paid certain stipulated sums of money. Luther thought that people were being deluded, that no one could obtain grace in this way, or ease the pains of relatives in purgatory, as was

offi cially claimed. In the usual academic manner of the day, he posted 95 theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg. Reviewing the Catholic sacrament of penance, Luther held in these theses that, after confession, the sinner is freed of sinful burdens not by the priest’s absolution but by inner grace and faith alone. Increasingly, as Luther described his view of Christian faith, it seemed that the priesthood performed no necessary function in the spiritual relation between human beings and God.

Luther at fi rst appealed to the pope, Leo X, to correct the abuse of indulgences in Germany. When the pope refused action Luther (like many before him) urged the assembly of a general church council as a religious authority above the pope. He was obliged, how- ever, to admit in public debate that even the decision of a general council might be mistaken. The Council of Constance, he said, had in fact erred in its condemnation of John Huss. But if neither the pope, nor yet a council, had authority to defi ne true Christian belief, where was such authority to be found? Luther’s answer was, in effect: there is no such authority. He held that individuals might read the Bible and freely make their own interpretations accord- ing to their own conscience. This idea was as revolutionary for the church as would be the assertion today that neither the Supreme Court nor any other body may authoritatively

Luther’s “justifi cation by faith”

Indulgences

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 80pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 80 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

81

interpret or enforce the Constitution of the United States, since each citizen may interpret the Constitution in his or her own way.

From his fi rst public appearance Luther won ardent supporters, for there was a good deal of resentment in Germany against Rome. In 1519 and 1520 he rallied public opin- ion in a series of tracts, setting forth his main beliefs. He declared that the claim of the clergy to be different from the laity was an imposture. He urged people to fi nd Christian truth in the Bible for themselves, and in the Bible only. He denounced the reliance on fasts, pilgrimages, saints, and Masses. He rejected the belief in purgatory. He reduced the seven sacraments to two— baptism and the communion, as he called the Mass. In the latter he repudi- ated the new and “modern” doctrine of transubstantiation, while affi rming that God was still somehow mysteriously present in the bread and wine. He declared that the clergy should marry, upbraided the prelates for their luxury, and demanded that monasticism be eliminated. To drive through such reforms, while depriving the clergy of their pretensions, he called upon the temporal power, the princes of Germany. He thus issued an invitation to the state to assume control over religion, an invitation which, in the days of the New Monarchy, a good many rulers were enthusiastically willing to accept.

Threatened by a papal bull with excommunication unless he recanted, Luther solemnly and publicly burned the bull. Excommunication followed. To the emperor, Charles V,

Luther’s criticisms of the Church

Martin Luther and his wife Catherine, portrayed here by the artist Lucas Cranach, the Elder, represent the acceptance of marriage among the clergy and religious leaders of the new Prot- estant churches. Catherine had lived in a convent before she married Luther and took on the new tasks of a religious wife in a Protestant minister’s household. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

9. The Protestant Reformation

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 81pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 81 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156082

now fell the duty of apprehending the heretic and repressing the heresy. Luther was sum- moned to appear before a diet of the empire, held at Worms in the Rhineland. He declared that he could be convinced only by Scripture or right reason; otherwise “I neither can nor will recant anything, since it is neither right nor safe to act against conscience. God help me! Amen.” He was placed under the ban of the empire. But the Elector of Saxony and other north German princes took him under their protection. In safe seclusion, he began to translate the Bible into German.

Lutheranism quickly swept over Germany, assuming the proportions of a national upheaval. It became mixed with all kinds of political and social revolution. A league of imperial knights, adopting Lutheranism, attacked

their neighbors, the church-states of the Rhineland, hoping by annexations to enlarge their own meager territories. In 1524 the peasants of a large part of Germany revolted. They were stirred by new religious ideas, worked upon by preachers who went beyond Luther in asserting that each individual could readily understand what was right or wrong. Their aims, however, were social and economic; they demanded a regulation of rents and secu- rity of common village rights and complained of exorbitant exactions and oppressive rule by their manorial overlords. Luther repudiated all connection with the peasants, called them fi lthy swine, and urged the princes to suppress them by the sword. The peasants were unmercifully put down, but popular unrest continued to stir the country, expressing itself, in a religious age, in various forms of extreme religious frenzy.

Various religious leaders attracted devout followers, who came to be known collec- tively as Anabaptists. Some said that all the world needed was love, some that Christ would soon come again, some that they were saints and could do no wrong, and some that infant baptism was useless, immersion of full-grown adults being required, as described in the Bible. The roads of Germany were alive with religious radicals, of whom some tens of thousands converged in 1534 on the city of Münster. There they proclaimed the reign of the saints, abolished property, and introduced polygamy as sanctioned in the Old Testament. A Dutch tailor, John of Leyden, claimed that authority came to him directly from God. Hemmed in by besieging armies, he ruled Münster by a revolutionary terror. Luther advised his followers to join even with Catholics to repress such a dangerous religious and social menace. After a full year Münster fell to the forces of its former rulers. The “saints” were pitilessly rooted out; John of Leyden died in torture.

Luther, horrifi ed at the way in which religious revolution became confused with social revolution, defi ned his own position more conservatively. He restricted, while never deny- ing, the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, and he made a larger place

for an established clergy, Lutheranized, to be sure, but still established as teachers over the laity. Always well disposed to temporal rulers, having called upon the princes to act as religious reformers, he was thrown by the peasant and Anabaptist uprisings into an even closer alliance with them.

Lutheranism became more submissive to the state. Christian liberty, Luther insisted, was an internal freedom, purely spiritual, known only to God. In worldly matters, he said, the good Christian owed obedience to established authority. Lutheranism thus came to view the state with more deference and respect than governments usually received from either Roman Catholicism or the Calvinism that soon arose.

In the revolution that was rocking Germany it was not the uprising of imperial knights, nor that of peasants or tailors and journeymen, that was successful, but the rebellion of the higher orders of the Empire against the emperor. Charles V, as Holy Roman Emperor, was bound to uphold Catholicism because only in a Catholic world did the Holy Empire

Social revolution

Luther’s reaction

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 82pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 82 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

83

have any meaning. The states of the empire, always fearing the loss of local liberty, saw in Charles’s efforts to repress Luther a threat to their own freedom. Many imperial free cities, and most of the dynastic states of north Germany, now insisted on adding to their other rights and liberties the right, or liberty, to determine their own religion. The right or power to reform, they said, belonged to member states, not to the empire itself. They became Lutheran, locally, introduc- ing Lutheran bishops, doctrines, and forms of worship. Where a state turned Lutheran it usually confi scated the church properties within its borders, a process that consider- ably enriched some of the Lutheran princes and gave them a strong material interest in the success of the Lutheran movement. In most of the church-states, since the Catholic archbishop or bishop was himself the government, Catholicism prevailed. But a few church-states turned Lutheran. A good example of the secularization of a church- state was afforded in East Prussia, just outside the empire. This territory belonged to the Teutonic Order, a Catholic organization of which the grand commander, an elective offi cial, was at this time Albert of Brandenburg. In 1525 Albert declared for Luther and converted East Prussia into a secular duchy, of which he and his descendants became hereditary dukes.

The radical Anabaptist move- ment in Münster was severely repressed after the city’s former rulers regained control in early 1536. This illustration depicts the public torture and death of John of Leyden, whose punishment served as a vivid warning to other revolutionary Protestants throughout Germany. (akg-images/Newscom)

9. The Protestant Reformation

Political rebellion

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 83pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 83 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156084

Against the emperor, a group of Lutheran princes and free cities formed the League of Schmalkald. The king of France, Francis I, though a Catholic in good standing, allied with and supported the League. Political interests overrode religious ones. Against the “univer- sal monarchy” of the swollen Habsburgs the French found alliances where they could, allying with the Turks as with the Lutherans, building up a balance of power against their mighty foe. It became the studied policy of Catholic France to maintain the religious divi- sion of Germany.

Threatened by French and Turkish armies and challenged by the resistance of German princes within his own empire, Charles appealed to the pope, urging him to assemble a Europe-wide council in which all disputed matters could be considered, the Protestants

could be heard, compromises could be effected, and church unity and German unity (such as it was) could be restored. The king of France schemed at Rome to prevent the pope from calling any such council. The kings of both France and England urged national councils instead, in which religious questions could be settled on a national basis. Pope after pope

delayed. The papacy feared that a council of all Latin Christendom might get out of con- trol, since Catholics as much as Protestants demanded reform. To the papacy, remembering the Council of Constance, nothing was more upsetting than the thought of a council, not even the Protestants, not even the Turks. So the popes procrastinated, no council met, years passed, and a new generation grew up in Lutheranism. Meanwhile the Schmalkaldic League, allied with France, actually went to war with the emperor in 1546. Germany fell into an anarchy of civil struggle between Catholic and Protestant states, the latter aided by France. The war was ended by the Peace of Augsburg of 1555.

The terms set at Augsburg signifi ed a complete victory for the cause of Lutheranism and states’ rights. Each state of the empire received the liberty to be either Lutheran or

Catholic as it chose. No individual freedom of religion was permitted; if a ruler or a free city decided for Lutheranism, then all persons had to be Lutheran. Similarly in Catholic states all had to be Catholic. The Peace of Augsburg provided also, by the so-called Ecclesiastical Reservation, that

Charles’s appeals to the papacy

The Peace of Augsburg

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 1309–1555

1309–1378 “Babylonian Captivity”: Papacy in Avignon

1337–1453 Hundred Years’ War between England and France

1348–1350 Black Death decimates European population

c. 1350–1500 Renaissance Humanism and Art

1378–1417 Schism of Roman Catholic Church: Popes in Avignon and Rome

1454 Johann Gutenberg begins printing books with movable type

1494 French invasion of Italy destroys independence of city-states

1513 Niccolò Machiavelli writes The Prince

1517 Martin Luther posts his “95 theses”; beginning of Protestant Reformation

1545–1563 Roman Catholic Council meets at Trent; promotes Catholic reforms

1555 Peace of Augsburg recognizes Protestant and Catholic states in Germany

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 84pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 84 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

85

any Catholic bishop or other churchman who turned Lutheran in the future (or who had turned Lutheran as recently as 1552) should not carry his territory with him, but should turn Lutheran as an individual and move away, leaving his land and its inhabitants Catholic. Since the issues in Germany were still far from stabilized, this proviso was often disre- garded in later years.

The Peace of Augsburg was thus, in religion, a great victory for Protestantism, and at the same time, in German politics and constitutional matters, a step in the disintegration of Germany into a mosaic of increasingly separate states. Lutheranism prevailed in the north and in the south in the duchy of Württemberg and various detached islands formed by Lutheranized free cities. Catholicism prevailed in the south (except in Württemberg and certain cities), in the Rhine valley, and in the direct possessions of the house of Habsburg, which in 1555 reached as far north as the Netherlands. The Germans, because of condi- tions in the Holy Roman Empire, were the one large European people to emerge from the religious confl ict almost evenly divided between Catholic and Protestant.

No rights were granted by the Peace of Augsburg to another group of religious revo- lutionaries which neither Lutherans nor Catholics were willing to tolerate, namely, the followers of John Calvin.

Lutheranism was also adopted by the kings of Denmark and Sweden as early as the 1520s. Since Denmark controlled Norway, and Sweden ruled Finland and the eastern Baltic, all Scandinavia and the Baltic regions became, like north Germany, Lutheran. Beyond this area Lutheranism failed to take root. Like Anglicanism in England (to be described shortly), Lutheranism was too closely associated with established states to spread easily as an international movement. The most successful international form of the Protestant movement was Calvinism.

Calvin and Calvinism

John Calvin was a Frenchman, born Jean Cauvin, who called himself Calvinus in Latin. Born in 1509, he was a full generation younger than Luther. He was trained both as a priest and as a lawyer and had a humanist’s knowledge of Latin and Greek, as well as Hebrew. At the age of 24, experiencing a sudden conversion, or fresh insight into the meaning of Christianity, he joined forces with the religious revolutionar- ies of whom the best known was then Luther. Three years later, in 1536, he published, in the international language, Latin, his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Where Luther had aimed much of his writing either at the existing rulers of Germany, or at the German national feeling against Rome, Calvin addressed his Institutes to all the world. He seemed to appeal to human reason itself; he wrote in the severe, logical style of the trained lawyer; he dealt fi rmly, lucidly, and convincingly with the most basic theological issues. In the Institutes people in all countries, if dissatisfi ed with the existing Roman church, could fi nd cogent expression of universal propositions, which they could apply to their own local circumstances as they required.

With Luther’s criticisms of the Roman church, and with most of Luther’s fundamental religious ideas, such as justifi cation by faith and not by works, Calvin agreed. In what they retained of the Catholic Mass, the communion or Lord’s Supper as they called it, Luther and Calvin developed certain doctrinal differences. Both rejected transubstantiation, but where Luther insisted that God was somehow actually present in the bread and wine used in the service (“consubstantiation”), Calvin and his followers tended more to regard it as a pious act of symbolic or commemorative character.

Calvin’s Doctrines

9. The Protestant Reformation

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 85pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 85 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156086

There were two chief differences between Calvin and Luther. Calvin made far more of the idea of predestination. Both, drawing heavily on St. Augustine, held that human beings could never earn salvation by their own actions, that any grace that anyone possessed came

from the free action of God alone. God, being Almighty, knew and willed in advance all things that happened, including the way in which every life would turn out. God thus knew and willed that some were saved and some were damned. Calvin, a severe critic of human nature, felt that those who

had grace were relatively few. They were the “elect,” the “godly,” the small group chosen without merit of their own for salvation. People could feel in their own minds that they were among the saved, God’s chosen few, if throughout all trials and temptations they persisted in pursuing a saintly life. Thus the idea of predestination, of God’s omnipotence, instead of turning to fatalism and resignation, became a challenge to unrelenting effort, a sense of burning conviction, a conviction of being on the side of that Almighty Power which must in the end be everlastingly triumphant. It was the most resolute spirits that were attracted to Calvinism. Calvinists, in all countries, were militant, uncompromising, perfectionist—or Puritan, as they were called fi rst in England and later in America.

The second way in which Calvinism differed from Lutheranism was in its attitude to society and to the state. Calvinists refused to recognize the subordination of church to state, or the right of any government to lay down laws for religion. On the contrary, they insisted that true Christians, the elect or godly, should Christianize the state. They wished to remake society itself into the image of a religious community. They rejected the institu- tion of bishops (which both the Lutheran and Anglican churches retained) and provided instead that the church should be governed by presbyteries, elected bodies made up of ministers and devout laymen. By thus bringing an element of lay control into church affairs, they broke the monopoly of priestly power and so promoted secularization. On the other hand, they were the reverse of secular, for they wished to Christianize all society.

Calvin, called in by earlier reformers who had driven out their bishop, was able to set up his model Christian community at Geneva in Switzerland. A body of ministers ruled the church; a consistory of ministers and elders ruled the town. The rule was strict; all loose,

light, or frivolous living was suppressed; disaffected persons were driven into exile. The form of worship was severe and favored the intellectual rather than the emotional or the aesthetic. The service was devoted largely to long sermons elucidating Christian doctrine, and all appeals to the

senses—color, music, incense—were rigidly subdued. The black gown of Geneva replaced brighter clerical vestments. Images, representing the saints, Mary, or Christ, were taken down and destroyed. Candles went the way of incense. Chanting was replaced by the sing- ing of hymns. Instrumental music was frowned upon, and many Calvinists thought even bells to be a survival of “popery.” In all things Calvin undertook to regulate his church by the Bible. Nor was he more willing than Luther to countenance any doctrine more radical than his own. When a Spanish refugee, Michael Servetus, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and thus denied the divinity of Christ, sought asylum at Geneva, Calvin pronounced him a heretic and had him burned at the stake.

Reformers of all nationalities fl ocked to Geneva to see and study a true scriptural com- munity so that they might reproduce it in their own countries. Geneva became the Protestant

Rome, the one great international center of Reformed doctrine. Everywhere Calvinists made their teachings heard (even in Spain and Italy in isolated cases), and everywhere, or almost everywhere, little groups that had locally and spontaneously broken with the old church found in Calvin’s Institutes

Predestination

Calvin’s Geneva

The spread of Calvinism

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 86pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 86 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

87

a reasoned statement of doctrine and a suggested method of organization. Thus Calvinism spread very widely. In Hungary and Bohemia large elements turned Protestant, and usually Calvinist, partly as a way of opposing the Habsburg rule. In Poland there were many Calvinists, along with less-organized Anabaptists and Unitarians, or Socinians, as those who denied the Trinity were then called. Calvinists spread in Germany, where, opposing both Lutheran and Catholic churches as ungodly impositions of worldly power, they were disliked equally by both. In France the Huguenots were Calvinist, as were the Protestants of the Netherlands. John Knox in the 1550s brought Calvinism to Scotland, where Presby- terianism became and remained the established religion. At the same time Calvinism began to penetrate England, from which it was later to reach British America, giving birth to the Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches of the United States.

Calvinism was far from democratic in any modern sense. It carried an almost aris- tocratic outlook, in that those who sensed themselves to be God’s chosen few felt free to dictate to the wider population of lost souls. Yet in many ways Calvinism entered into the development of what became democracy. For one thing, Calvinists never venerated the state; they always held that the sphere of the state and of public life was subject to moral judgment. For another, the Calvinist doctrine of the “calling” taught that a person’s labor had a religious dignity and that any form of honest work was pleasing in the sight of God. In the conduct of their own affairs Calvinists developed a type of self-government. They formed “covenants” with one another and devised machinery for the election of presbyteries. They refused to believe that authority was transmitted downward through bishops or through kings. They were inclined also to a democratic outlook, because in most countries they remained an unoffi cial minority. Only at Geneva, in the Dutch Netherlands, in Scotland,

Calvinism and democracy

This image of John Calvin suggests that his infl uence among Protestants came from his intellectual rigor as well as his disciplined leadership of the religious reformers in Geneva. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

9. The Protestant Reformation

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 87pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 87 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156088

and in New England (and for a few years in England in the seventeenth century) were Calvinists ever able to prescribe the mode of life and religion of a whole country. In England, France, and Germany, Calvinists remained in opposition to the established authorities of church and state and hence were disposed to favor limitations upon established power. In Poland and Hungary many Calvinists were nobles who disliked royal authority.

The Reformation in England

England was peculiar in that its government broke with the Roman church before adopting any Protestant principles. Henry VIII (1509–1547) in fact prided himself on his orthodoxy. When a few obscure persons, about 1520, began to whisper Luther’s ideas in England,

Henry himself wrote a Defense of the Seven Sacraments in refutation, for which a grateful pope conferred upon him the title “Defender of the Faith.” But the king had no male heir. Recalling the violent anarchy from which the Tudor dynasty had extricated England, and determined as a New Mon-

arch to build up a durable monarchy, he decided that he must remarry in order to have a son. He therefore requested the pope, Clement VII, to annul his existing marriage to Cath- erine of Aragon. Popes in the past had obliged monarchs in similar situations. The pope now, however, was embarrassed by the fact that Catherine, who objected, was the aunt of the Habsburg emperor, Charles V, whom the pope was in no position to offend. Henry, not a patient man, pushed matters forward. He appointed a new archbishop of Canterbury, repudiated the Roman connection, secured the annulment of his earlier marriage, and mar- ried the youthful Anne Boleyn. The fact that only three years later he put to death the unfortunate Anne, and thereafter in quick succession married four more wives, for a total of six, threw considerable doubt on the original character of his motives.

Henry acted through Parliament, believing, as he said, that a king was never stronger than when united with representatives of his kingdom. In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, which declared the English king to be the “Protector and Only Supreme Head of

the Church and Clergy of England.” All subjects were required, if asked, to take the oath of supremacy acknowledging the religious headship of Henry and rejecting that of the pope. For refusing this oath Sir Thomas More, a statesman and humanist best known as the author of Utopia, was executed for treason. The Roman Catholic Church, in the twentieth century, would pro-

nounce More to be a saint, but Henry won English support for most of his policies. He closed all the monasteries in England, seized the extensive monastic lands, and passed them out to numerous followers. He thus strengthened and reconstituted a landed aristocracy that had been seriously weakened in the Wars of the Roses. This new landed gentry remained fi rm supporters of the house of Tudor and the English national church, whatever its doctrines.

It was Henry’s intent not to change the doctrines at all. He simply wished to be the supreme head of an English Catholic church. On the one hand, in 1536, he forcibly sup- pressed a predominantly Catholic rebellion, and, on the other, in 1539, through the Six Articles, required everybody to believe in transubstantiation, the celibacy of the clergy, the need of confession, and a few other aspects of Catholic faith and practice. But it proved impossible to maintain this position, for a great many people in England began to favor one or another of the ideas of Continental Reformers, and a small minority were willing to accept the entire Protestant position.

For three decades the government veered about. Henry died in 1547 and was suc- ceeded by his 10-year-old son, Edward VI, the child of his third wife, Jane Seymour.

Henry VIII

The Act of Supremacy

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 88pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 88 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

89

The Protestant party now came to the fore. But Edward died in 1553 and was succeeded by his much older half-sister, Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon and a devout Roman Catholic whose whole life had been embittered by the English break with Rome. Mary tried to re-Catholicize England, but she actually made Catholicism more unpopular among the English people. In 1554 she married Philip of Spain, who became king of England, though

STATE RELIGIONS IN EUROPE ABOUT 1560 This map shows the legally authorized, established churches about 1560, but it does not show the precise distributions of religious communities. Many Catholics lived north of the heavy line, and many Protestants south of it. Most widely dispersed were the Calvinists and the more radi- cal Protestants or Anabaptists. In Germany, under the Holy Roman Empire, each principality and free city chose its own religion; hence, the Germans were the only large European popula- tion to emerge from the Reformation almost evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants.

Lutheran

Anglican

Calvinist

Roman Catholics

A,C, and RC designate Anabaptists, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics in countries where theirs was not the dominant religion.

Border between Protestant State Churches and Roman Catholic Church Approximate Eastern Border of Western Christianity

0 100 200 miles

C

C

C

C C

C C

C C

C C

C

C

C C

CC

C

C

C

C

C

C

C

C

C

C

C

A A

A

A

A

A

A

A A

A A

A

R C

R C

R C

R C

NORWAY

DENMARKIRELAND

S W E D E N

SCOTLAND

ENGLAND

FRANCE

SPAIN

NETHER- LANDS

POLAND

HUNGARY AUSTRIA

ITALY

BOHEMIA BAVARIA

SAXONY

PRUSSIA

TRANSYLVANIA

MORAVIA WÜRTTEMBERG

BRANDENBURG

G E

R M

A N

Y

Rome

Trent

Geneva

Vienna

Frankfurt

WittenbergCanterbury

9. The Protestant Reformation

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 89pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 89 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156090

Queen Elizabeth I wanted her portraits to convey her power and royal grandeur. This paint- ing, probably from the 1580s, uses her clothing and jewels to show her wealth and also to affi rm her political stature. (The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images)

only in name. The English did not like Philip, nor the Spanish, nor the intense Spanish Catholicism that Philip represented. Under Mary, moreover, some 300 persons were burned at the stake, as heretics, in public mass executions. It was the fi rst (and last) time that such a thing had happened in England, and it set up a wave of horror. In any event, Mary did not live long. She was succeeded in 1558 by Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth, the child of Anne Boleyn. Whatever Elizabeth’s real views in religion might be (she concealed them successfully and was rumored to have none), she could not be a Roman Catholic. For Cath- olics she was illegitimate and so unable to be queen.

Under Elizabeth the English became Protestant, gradually and in their own way. The Church of England took on a form of its own. Organizationally, it resembled a Lutheran

church. It was a state church, for its existence and doctrines were deter- mined by the monarch acting through Parliament. All English subjects were obliged to belong to it, and laws were passed against “recusants,” a term used to cover both the Roman Catholics and the more advanced Calvinists

who refused to acknowledge it. With the exception of monasteries and certain other church foundations, the Church of England retained the physical possessions, buildings, and inter- nal organization of the medieval church—the bishops and the archbishops, who continued to sit in the House of Lords, the episcopal courts with their jurisdiction over marriage and wills, the tithes or church taxes paid by all landowners, the parish structure, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

In religious practice, the Church of England was defi nitely Protestant: English replaced Latin as the language of the liturgy, there was no cult of the saints, and the clergy married, though Elizabeth confessed to some embarrassment at the thought of an archbishop having

The Church of England

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 90pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 90 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

91

a wife. In doctrine, it was Elizabeth’s policy to make the dogmas broad and ambiguous, so that persons of all shades of belief could be more readily accommodated. The Thirty-nine Articles (1563), composed by a committee of bishops, defi ned the Protestant creed of the Anglican church. All but one of the Anglican bishops had been newly appointed by Elizabeth at her accession; many had lived in exile among Continental Protestants in the reign of Mary Tudor; and except on the matter of church government through bishops (known as episcopacy) a strong Calvinist impress was set upon Anglican belief in the time of Elizabeth.

The same ecclesiastical settlement was prescribed for Ireland, where English or rather Anglo-Norman conquerors had settled since the twelfth century, shortly after the Norman conquest of England. A replica of the Church of England was now established, called the Church of Ireland, which took over the properties and position of the Roman church. The native Irish, however, remained almost solidly Roman Catholic. As in Hungary or Bohemia people who resented the Habsburgs were likely to turn Protestant rather than share in the ruler’s religion, so in Ireland the fact that the ruling English were Protestant only confi rmed the Irish in their attachment to the Roman church. The Catholic priests, deprived of status, income, and church buildings, and often in hiding, became national leaders of a discon- tented people.

The Consolidation of Protestantism by 1560

Neither in England, nor in Germany, nor in international Calvinism were the religious issues regarded as settled in 1560. Nor had the Roman church accepted the new situation. But by 1560 the chief Protestant doctrines had been affi rmed, and geographically Protes- tantism had made many conquests. The institutional unity of Latin Christendom had been broken. A world of separate churches, states, and nations was taking its place.

Protestants differed with one another, yet there was much that all had in common. All rejected the papal authority. None participated in any effective international organization; the ascendancy of Geneva was spiritual only and proved to be temporary. All Protestants rejected the special, sacerdotal, or supernatural character of the priesthood; indeed, the movement was perhaps most fundamentally a revolt against the medieval position of the clergy. Protestants generally called their clergy ministers, not priests. All Protestant clergy could marry. There were no Protestant monks, nuns, or friars. All Protestant churches replaced Latin with the vernacu- lar in religious services—English, French, German, Czech, as the case might be. All Prot- estants reduced the number of sacraments, usually to two or three; such sacraments as they retained they regarded more as symbols than as actual carriers of divine grace; all believed, in one way or another, in justifi cation by faith. All denied transubstantiation, or the miracle of the Mass. All gave up the obligatory confessional, and with it priestly absolution. All gave up the idea of purgatory as a kind of temporal zone between heaven and hell and hence abandoned the practice of saying prayers and Masses for the dead. It need hardly be added that nothing like indulgences remained. All gave up the cult of the saints and of the Virgin Mary, whose intercession in heaven was no longer expected. All declared that the one true source of Christian belief was the Holy Scripture. And while all established Protestant churches in the sixteenth century insisted on conformity to their own doctrines, allowing no individual freedom, Protestants never fl atly repudiated the right of private judgment in matters of conscience.

It has sometimes been maintained that one of the motivations for the spread of Protes- tantism was economic—that a new acquisitive, dynamic, capitalistic impulse shook off the

What Protestants held in common

9. The Protestant Reformation

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 91pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 91 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156092

restrictions imposed by medieval religion. The fact that Protestant England and Holland soon underwent a rapid capitalistic development gives added credibility to this idea. The alacrity with which Protestant governments confi scated church lands shows a keen material interest; but in truth, both before and after the Reformation, governments confi scated church properties without breaking with the Roman church. That profound economic changes were occurring at the time will become apparent in Chapter 3. Yet it seems that economic conditions were far less decisive than religious convictions and political circumstances. Calvinism won followers not only in cities but also in agrarian countries such as Scotland, Poland, and Hungary. Lutheranism spread more successfully in the less economically active regions of north Germany than in the busy south. The English were for years no more inclined to Protestantism than the French, and in France, while many lords and peasants turned Protestant, Paris and many other towns remained as steadfastly Catholic. It is possi- ble that Protestantism, by casting a glow of religious righteousness over a person’s daily business and material prosperity, later contributed to the economic success of Protestant peoples and to new cultural assumptions about the moral failings of poor people, but it does not seem that a Protestant work ethic or other economic factors were of any distinctive importance in shaping the fi rst stages of Protestantism.

The new religious movements had a more immediate infl uence on attitudes about marriage and the family. In contrast to medieval Catholicism, which had praised sexual

abstinence and celibacy as key traits of the most exalted religious persons, Protestantism strongly promoted marriage as the ideal social institution for clergy and lay people alike. Parenthood became honorable for even the most pious Protestant leaders. Although women sometimes wrote hymns

Protestants and family life

The ideal Protestant household is represented by an unknown artist in this sixteenth-century Dutch painting of the family of a successful merchant. There are clear divisions between the men, women, and children, but everyone expresses the sobriety, wealth, and social appearance of a prosperous Calvinist community. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 92pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 92 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

9310. Catholicism Reformed and Reorganized

or preached in the more radical Protestant churches, the model Protestant woman was the conscientious mother in a devout, religious household. The opportunities, even if limited, that some women had found in medieval convents and religious communities disappeared in Protestant societies, which may explain why nuns in Protestant territories were often among the last persons to accept the new religious ideas.

Apart from the new emphasis on marriage, however, Protestants did little to change the role of women in Christian churches or in the wider social order. The pastors in Protestant communities were all men, and though more women may have become literate in order to read the Bible, they became less visible in Protestant rituals as the long venerated female saints vanished from prayers, religious writings, and charitable institutions. Meanwhile, women in the convents of Catholic countries were more strictly cloistered and controlled as Catholicism developed its own powerful movements for reform and reorganization.

10. CATHOLICISM REFORMED AND REORGANIZED The Catholic movement corresponding to the rise of Protestantism is known as the Catholic Reformation or the Counter Reformation. Catholics have usually preferred the former term and Protestants have preferred the latter, but both are applicable. On the one hand the Catholic church underwent a genuine reform, which might have worked itself out in one way or another even if the stimulus of revolutionary Protestantism had been absent. On the other hand the character of the reform, the measures adopted, and the new sense of urgency became an explicit response to the Protestant challenge; and certainly, also, there was a good deal of purely “counter” activity aimed at the elimination of Protestantism as such.

The demand for reform was as old as the abuses against which it was directed. Charac- teristically, it had expressed itself in the demand for a general or ecumenical church council. The conciliar movement, defeated by the popes about 1450, showed signs of revival after 1500. The Lutheran upheaval thus provoked new calls for a general council of the church, and we have seen how Charles V, in the interests of German unity, sought to persuade the pope to assemble an adequately empowered council, which might remove some of the abuses in the church and take away the grounds upon which many Germans were turning to Lutheranism. But meanwhile the king of France found reason to favor the pope and to oppose the emperor. The French king, Francis I (1515–1547), could support the pope because he had obtained from the papacy what he wanted, namely, control over the Gallican church, as acquired in the Concordat of Bologna of 1516. And he had reason to oppose Charles V, because the Habsburgs ruled not only in Germany but also in the Netherlands, Spain, and much of Italy, thus encircling France and threatening Europe with what contemporaries called “universal monarchy.” Francis I therefore actively encouraged the Protestants of Germany, as a means of maintaining dissension there, and used his infl uence at Rome against the calling of a council by which the troubles of the Catholic world might be relieved.

Gradually there arose a party of reforming cardinals who concluded that the need for reform was so urgent that all dangers of a council must be risked. Pope Paul III summoned a council to meet in 1537, but the wars between France and the empire forced its abandon- ment. Finally, in 1545, a council assembled and began deliberations. It met at Trent, on the Alpine borders of Germany and Italy. The Council of Trent, which shaped the destiny of modern Catholicism, sat at irregular intervals for almost 20 years. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that some of the main decisions made at Trent were substantially modifi ed.

The call for reform

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 93pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 93 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156094

The Council of Trent

The council was beset by pressing political diffi culties, which seemed to show that under troubled conditions an international council was no longer a suitable means of regulating Catholic affairs. Signifi cantly, it was not well attended. Whereas earlier councils of the church had assembled as many as 500 prelates, the attendance at Trent was never nearly so great; it sometimes fell as low as 20 or 30, and the important decree on “justifi cation,” the prime issue raised by Luther, and one on which some good Catholics had until then believed a compromise to be possible, was passed at a session where only 60 prelates were present. Even with the small attendance, the old conciliar issue was raised. A party of bish- ops believed that the bishops of the Catholic church, when assembled in council from all parts of the Catholic world, collectively constituted an authority superior to that of the pope. To stave off this “episcopal” movement was one of the chief duties of the cardinal legates deputed by the pope to preside over the sessions.

The popes managed successfully to resist the idea of limiting the papal power. In the end they triumphed, through a fi nal ruling voted by the council, that no act of the council should be valid unless accepted by the Holy See. It is possible that had the conciliar theory

won out, the Catholic church might have become as disunited in modern times as the Protestant. It was clear, at Trent, that the various bishops tended to see matters in a national way, in the light of their own problems at home, and to be frequently under strong infl uence from their respective secular monarchs. In any case, the papal party prevailed, which is to say that the

centralizing element, not the national, triumphed. The Council of Trent thus preserved the papacy as a unifying center for the Catholic church and helped prevent the very real threat of its dissolution into state churches. Even so, the council’s success was not immediate, for in every important country the secular rulers at fi rst accepted only what they chose of its work, and only gradually did its infl uence prevail.

Questions of national politics and of church politics apart, the Council of Trent addressed itself to two kinds of labors—to a statement of Catholic doctrine and to a reform

of abuses in the church. When the council began to meet in 1545, the Prot- estant movement had already gone so far that any reconciliation was prob- ably impossible: Protestants, especially Calvinists, simply did not wish to belong to the church of Rome under any conditions. In any case, the Council of Trent made no concessions.

It declared that justifi cation or salvation by God’s grace came to humans through their works and faith combined. It enumerated and defi ned the seven sacraments, which were held to be vehicles of grace independent of the spiritual state of those who received them. The priesthood was declared to be a special estate set apart from the laity by the sacra- ment of holy orders. The procedures of the confessional and of absolution were clarifi ed. Transubstantiation was reaffi rmed. As sources of Catholic faith, the council put Scripture and tradition on an equal footing. It thus rejected the Protestant claim to fi nd true faith in the Bible alone and reasserted the validity of church development since New Testament times. The Vulgate, a translation of the Bible into Latin by St. Jerome in the fourth cen- tury, was declared to be the only version on which authoritative teaching could be based. The right of individuals to believe that their own interpretation of Scripture was more true than that of church authorities (private judgment) was denied. Latin, as against the national languages, was prescribed as the language of religious worship—a requirement that would continue to shape Catholic liturgy until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Celibacy of the clergy was maintained, and monasticism was upheld. The existence of purgatory

Preserving papal authority

The Council of Trent: defi ning Catholic doctrine

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 94pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 94 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

95

was reaffi rmed. The theory and correct practice of indulgences were restated. The venera- tion of saints, the cult of the Virgin, and the use of images, relics, and pilgrimages were approved as spiritually useful and pious actions.

It was easier for a council to defi ne doctrines than to reform abuses, since the latter consisted in the rooted habits of people’s lives. The Council of Trent decreed, however, a drastic reform of the monastic orders. It acted against the abuse of indulgences while upholding the principle. It ruled that bishops should reside habitually in their dioceses, attend more carefully to their proper duties, and exercise more administrative control over clergy in their own dioceses. The abuse by which one man had held numerous church offi ces at the same time (pluralism) was checked, and steps were taken to assure that church offi cials should be competent. To provide an educated clergy, the council ordered that a seminary should be set up in each diocese for the training of priests.

The New Catholicism

As laws in general have little force unless sustained by shared opinions, so the reform decrees of the Council of Trent would have remained ineffectual had not a renewed sense of religious seriousness been growing at the same time. Herein lay the inner force of the Catholic Reform. In Italy, as the Renaissance became more undeniably pagan, and as the sack of Rome in 1527 showed that even many Catholics had lost respect for the Roman clergy, the voices of moralists began to be heeded. The line of Renaissance popes was succeeded by a line of reform- ing popes, of whom the fi rst was Paul III (1534–1549). The reforming popes insisted on the primacy of the papal offi ce, but they regarded this offi ce, unlike their predecessors, as a moral and religious force. In many dioceses the bishops began on their own initiative to be stricter. The new Catholic religious sense, more than the Protestant, centered in a reverence for the sacraments and a mystical awe for the church itself as a divine institution. Both men and women founded many new religious orders, of which the Jesuits became the most famous. Others were the Oratorians for men and the Ursulines for women. The new orders dedicated themselves to a variety of educational and philanthropic activities. Missionary fervor for a long time was more characteristic of Catholics than of Protestants. It reached into Asia and the Americas, and in Europe expressed itself as an intense desire for the reconversion of Protestants. It showed itself, too, in missions among the poor, as in the work of St. Vincent de Paul among the human wreckage of Paris, for which the established Protestant churches failed to produce anything comparable. In America, as colonies developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Protestant clergy tended to take the layman’s view of the Indians, while Catholic clergy labored to convert and protect them; and the Catholic church generally worked to mitigate the brutal treatment of enslaved Africans, to which the pastors in English and Dutch colonies, per- haps because they were more dependent upon the laity, remained largely indifferent.

We have seen how in Spain, where the Renaissance had never taken much hold, the very life of the country was connected to a kind of ongoing Christian crusade. It was in Spain that much of the new Catholic feeling fi rst developed; and it was Spain that now generated a new surge of Catholic missionary activity. Spanish writers provided the most infl uential sixteenth-century accounts of Catholic mysticism, including Teresa of Avila’s famous descriptions of her encounters with Christ. Spain was also the home country of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556). A soldier in youth, he too, like Luther and Calvin, had a religious “experience” or “conversion,” which occurred in 1521, before he had heard of Luther and while Calvin was still a boy.

Catholic religious renewal

The Jesuits

10. Catholicism Reformed and Reorganized

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 95pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 95 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156096

Loyola resolved to become a soldier of the church, a militant crusader for the pope and the Holy See. On this principle he established the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. Authorized by Pope Paul III in 1540, the Jesuits constituted a monastic order of a new type, less attached to the cloister, more directed toward active participation in the affairs of the world. Only men of proven strength of character and intellectual force were admitted. Each Jesuit had to undergo an arduous mystical training, set forth by Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises. The order was ruled by an iron discipline, which required each member to see in his immediate superior the infallibility of the Holy Church. As Loyola explained in his Spiritual Exercises, if the church teaches to see something as black even when the eye sees it as white the mind must believe it to be black.

For 200 years the Jesuits were the most famous schoolmasters of Catholic Europe, eventually conducting some 500 schools for boys of the upper and middle classes. These schools taught the Catholic faith, but they also taught the principles of gentlemanly deport- ment (their teaching of dancing and dramatics became a scandal to more puritanical Catho- lics), and they carried over the Renaissance and humanist idea of the Latin classics as the main substance of adolescent education. The Jesuits made a specialty of work among the ruling classes. They became confessors to kings and hence involved in political intrigue. In an age when Protestants subordinated an organized church either to the state or to an

St. Ignatius Loyola’s religious inspiration is portrayed in this painting by Peter Paul Rubens, whose work often represented the religious and political leaders of Catholic countries. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 96pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 96 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

97

individual conscience, and when even Catholics frequently thought of the church within a national framework, the Jesuits seemed almost to worship the church itself as a divine institution that must remain internationally organized and governed by the Roman pontiff. All full-fl edged Jesuits took a special vow of obedience to the pope. Jesuits in the later ses- sions of the Council of Trent fought obstinately, and successfully, to uphold the position of Rome against that of the national bishops.

By 1560 the Catholic church, renewed by a deepening of its religious life and by an uncompromising restatement of its dogmas and discipline, had devised also the practical machinery for a counteroffensive against Protestantism. The Jesuits acted as an interna- tional missionary force. They recruited members from all countries, including those in which the governments had turned Protestant. English Catholics, for example, trained as Jesuits on the Continent, returned to England to attempt to overthrow the heretic usurper, Elizabeth, seeing in the universal church a higher cause than national independence in religion. Jesuits poured also into the most hotly disputed regions where the religious issue still swayed in the balance—France, Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary. As after every great revolution, many people moved from an initial burst of Protestantism toward a revived interest in the old religious order, especially as the more crying evils within the Catholic church were corrected. The Jesuits reconverted many who thus hesitated.

For the more recalcitrant other machinery was provided. All countries censored books; Protestant authorities labored to keep “papist” works from the eyes of the faithful, and Catholic authorities took the same pains to suppress all knowledge of “heretics.” All bishops, Anglican, Lutheran, and Catholic, regulated reading matter within their dioceses. In the Catholic world, with the trend toward centralization under the pope, a special impor- tance attached to the list published by the bishop of Rome, the papal Index of Prohibited Books. Only with special permission, granted to reliable persons for special study, could Catholics read books listed on the Index, which was not abandoned until the 1960s.

All countries, Protestant and Catholic, also set up judicial and police machinery to enforce conformity to the accepted church. In England, for example, Elizabeth established the High Commission to bring “recusants” into the Church of England. All bishops, Prot- estant and Catholic, likewise possessed machinery of enforcement in their episcopal courts. But no court made itself so dreaded as the Inquisition. In reality two distinct organizations went under this name, the word itself being simply an old term of the Roman law, signifying a court of inquest or inquiry. One was the Spanish Inquisition, established originally, about 1480, to ferret out Jewish and Muslim survivals in Spain. It was then introduced into all countries ruled by the Spanish crown and employed against Protestantism, particularly in the Spanish Netherlands, which was an important center of Calvinism. The other was the Roman or papal Inquisition, established at Rome in 1542 under a permanent committee of cardinals called the Holy Offi ce; it was in a sense a revival of the famous medieval tribu- nal established in the thirteenth century for the detection and repression of heresy. Both the Spanish and the Roman Inquisitions employed torture, for heresy was regarded as the supreme crime, and all persons charged with crime could be tortured, in civil as well as ecclesiastical courts, under the existing laws. In the use of torture, as in the imposition of the harshest sentence, burning alive, the Roman Inquisition was less severe than the Span- ish. The Roman Inquisition in principle offered a court to protect purity of faith in all parts of the Catholic world. But the national resistance of Catholic countries proved too strong; few Catholics wished the agents of Rome inquiring locally into their opinions; and the Roman Inquisition never functioned for any length of time outside of Italy.

Enforcing religious conformity

10. Catholicism Reformed and Reorganized

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 97pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 97 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 2 The Upheaval in Western Christendom, 1300–156098

In the “machinery” of enforcing religious belief, however, no engine was to be so powerful as the apparatus of state. Where Protestants won control of government, people became Protestant. Where Catholics retained control of governments, Protestants became in time small minorities. And it was in the clash of governments, which is to say in war, for about a century after 1560, that the fate of European religion was worked out. In 1560 the strongest powers of Europe—Spain, France, Austria—were all offi cially Catholic. The Protestant states were all small or at most middle-sized. The Lutheran states of Germany, like all German states, were individually of little weight. The Scandinavian monarchies were far away. England, the most considerable of Protestant kingdoms, was a country of only 4 million people, with an independent and hostile Scotland to the north, and with no sign of colonial empire yet in existence. In the precedence of monarchs, as arranged in the earlier part of the century, the king of England ranked just below the king of Portugal, and next above the king of Sicily. Clearly, had a great combined Catholic crusade ever devel- oped, Protestantism could have been wiped out. Yet such a crusade, partially launched on various fronts by the king of Spain, never succeeded. Religious divisions became a per- manent reality in European culture, contributing eventually, like Renaissance humanism and the new European monarchies, to a gradual secularization of modern societies. And in later, more secular times, the idea and practice of religious tolerance would develop as a stabilizing solution for the intractable confl icts that long threatened the lives of individual believers as well as the survival of entire religious communities.

For suggested further readings and useful Web sites, interactive exercises, glossary, chronologies, and more, go to the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e .

pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 98pal85549_ch02_049-098.indd 98 03/08/13 7:02 PM03/08/13 7:02 PM

Final PDF to printer

99

C h a p t e r 3 THE ATLANTIC WORLD, COMMERCE, AND WARS OF RELIGION, 1560–1648

European history in the period following 1560 is often described as the age of the Wars of Religion, which may be said to have ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. France, England, the Nether- lands, and the Holy Roman Empire fell into internal and international struggles in which religion was often the most burning issue, but in which political, constitutional, economic, and social questions were also involved. This time of long, drawn-out confl icts between Catholics and Protestants, however, was also a time of important economic transitions. From the beginning of the sixteenth century European society was transformed by contacts with a newly discovered overseas world, which contributed deci- sively to the expansion of global trade routes, the emergence of a new commercial capitalism, and the formation of new social classes.

This was the era in which the modern global economic system began to develop and in which

new exchanges with people in Asia, Africa, and the Americas began to reshape social, economic, and political power within Europe itself. The effects of these profound changes, however, were obscured and delayed by the politico-religious struggles. In the present chapter we must fi rst examine the geographical discoveries, then survey the broad new economic and social developments under way, and fi nally trace the impact of the religious wars on various parts of Europe. The wars, as we shall see, left Spain and Germany very much weakened, and opened the way for the English, Dutch, and French to profi t from the global economic changes and to play leading roles in the transnational confl icts of early modern times.

11. The Opening of the Atlantic

12. The Commercial Revolution

13. Changing Social Structures

14. The Wars of Catholic Spain: The Netherlands and England

15. The Disintegration and Reconstruction of France

16. The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648: The Disintegration of Germany

Chapter emblem: Detail from Jean Bourdichon (1457–1521), The Four Estates of Society: Work, which shows a carpenter working with the tools of his craft. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 99pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 99 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648100

11. THE OPENING OF THE ATLANTIC Always until about 1500 the Atlantic Ocean had been a barrier, an end. About 1500 it became a bridge and a starting place for new cross-cultural communications and confl icts. The consequences were enormous for all concerned. In general, they were favorable for Europeans but devastating for peoples elsewhere—in America through massive depopula- tion by diseases such as smallpox brought from Europe, in Africa through the transatlantic slave trade, and ultimately in places as far away as Australia through the destruction of long-existing cultures or languages. Older, celebratory accounts of Europe’s “overseas discoveries” have therefore been widely challenged in recent decades as historians have revised the story of European expansion from the perspective of Native Americans or African Americans. Viewed from these perspectives, Columbus’s fi rst voyage to America in 1492 launched a history of terrible losses rather than an era of heroic European explora- tions and conquests.

But few would deny that the new, complex association of the Old and New Worlds, as Europeans called them, became a momentous event in human history. The endless

migration of people, the worldwide movement of trade, and the disorient- ing experiences of cross-cultural encounters marked the true beginning of modern global history. Europeans transformed or even destroyed numer- ous other cultures, but their own culture was also transformed through steadily expanding contacts with other peoples, social traditions, and reli-

gions in every part of the world. A new wealthy commercial class grew up in cities along Europe’s Atlantic coast. Naval power became decisive. European populations grew with the adoption of the American potato, and people in Europe became dependent on imported commodities such as sugar and tobacco. European writers took increasing pride in their understanding of the world and in what they regarded as the superiority of their own cul- tural or religious traditions. There was also much speculation on the diversity of the human races and cultures, which sometimes led to a new kind of race consciousness on the part of Europeans and sometimes to a cultural relativism in which European customs were seen as only one variant of human behavior as a whole. Meanwhile, people in the Americas and Africa struggled to defend their own evolving cultures and institutions as European soldiers, traders, and missionaries entered the various civilizations of an increasingly inter- connected transatlantic economic system.

The Portuguese in the East

Europeans had skirted their Atlantic coast since prehistoric times. Vikings had settled in Iceland in the ninth century and had even reached North America soon thereafter. In 1317 Venetians had established the Flanders galleys, commercial fl otillas that regularly made the passage between the Adriatic and North seas. In the fi fteenth century, improvements in shipbuilding, the rigging of sails, and the adoption of the mariner’s compass made it feasible to sail on the open ocean out of sight of land. When the Portuguese about 1450 settled in the Azores Islands, in the mid-Atlantic, they found steady westerly winds to assure a safe return to Europe. It seemed that the ocean might even lead to Asia.

For centuries Asia had been a source for Europe of many highly valued commodities, partly manufactures in which Europe could not compete, such as silk and cotton fabrics, rugs, jewelry, porcelains, and fi ne steel, and partly raw or semimanufactured drugs and foodstuffs, such as sugar and, above all, spices. Europeans had never themselves gone to the

Cultural transformation and destruction

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 100pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 100 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

10111. The Opening of the Atlantic

sources of supply of Eastern goods. Somewhere, east of Suez, barely known to Europeans, was another world of other merchants who moved the wares of China, India, and the East Indies Spice Islands by caravan over land and by boat through the Red Sea or Persian Gulf to the markets of the eastern Mediterranean. Traders of the two worlds met and did business at such thriving centers as Alexandria or Beirut or Constantinople.

In 1498 the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, having rounded Africa in the wake of other intrepid explorers, found himself in the midst of the unknown world of Arab commerce. He landed on the Malabar Coast (the southwest coast of India), where he found a busy commercial population of heterogeneous religious background. These people knew at least as much about Europe as Europeans did about India (one Jew was able to act as da Gama’s interpreter), and they realized that the coming of the Portuguese would disturb their established channels of commerce. Da Gama, playing upon local rivalries, was able to load his ships with the coveted wares, but on his second voyage, in 1502, he came better prepared, bringing a fi ghting fl eet of no less than 21 vessels. A fero- cious war broke out between the Portuguese and Arab merchants, the latter supported in one way or another by the Egyptians, the Turks, and even the distant Venetians, all of

EUROPEAN DISCOVERIES, 1450–1600 Discovery means the bringing of newly found countries within the habitual knowledge or per- manent commercial activity of the society from which the discoverer comes. Although sailors and travelers from Asia had long made voyages to distant places and engaged in trade across the Indian Ocean or South Pacifi c, it was the Europeans who discovered much of the Atlantic world in the sense indicated here. They did so in the period between 1450 and 1600, using maritime skills and geographical knowledge developed in the Mediterranean and off the Atlantic coast. Dates on the map show the years of fi rst signifi cant European arrival at the points indicated.

I N D I A N O C E A N P A C I F I C O C E A N

PACIFIC OCEAN A T L A N T I C

O C E A N

A R C T I C O C E A N

Cabral 1500

1418 Columbus

1492

da Ga

ma 14

98

Dias 1488

da Gam a

1498

1472

1485

1485

Re tur

n o f M

ag ell

an 's E

xp ed

itio n

1527

Magellan 1521

1595

1511

1517

1520 St. Francis Xavier 1549

Barentz 1596

1600

1598

1588

Chancellor 1553

1515

15061446

Davis 1585

1575

Cabot 1497Cartier

1533

Verrazano 1523

Vespucci 1499

1515

1520

1560 1535

Pizarro 1528

Balboa 1513

Magellan 1521

Cortés 1519

DeSoto 1539

Coronado 1540

1542

Drake 1578

1505

M ag

el la

n

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 101pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 101 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648102

whom had an interest in maintaining the old routes of trade. For the Portuguese, trained like the Spaniards in long wars against the Moors at home, no atrocities were too horrible to commit against the “infi dels” whom they found as competitors at the end of their long commercial quest. Cities were devastated along the Malabar Coast, ships were burned at their docks, prisoners were butchered, and their dismembered hands, noses, and ears were sent back as derisive trophies. One Brahmin, mutilated in this way, was left alive to bear them to his people. Such, unfortunately, was India’s introduction to the highly assertive “methods” of early modern Europe’s transoceanic trade.

In the following years the Portuguese built permanent fortifi ed stations at Goa on the Malabar Coast, at Aden near the mouth of the Red Sea, at Hormuz near the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and in East Africa. In 1509 they reached Malacca, near modern Singapore,

from which they passed northward into China itself and eastward to Amboina, the heart of the Spice Islands, just west of New Guinea. Thus an empire was created, the fi rst of Europe’s commercial-colonial empires, maintained by superiority of fi rearms and sea power and by forceful economic interven- tions that combined trade with war and plunder. The early European traders

were soon followed by bold Jesuits, including St. Francis Xavier, who, by 1550, had bap- tized thousands of souls in India, Indonesia, and even Japan.

By the new sea route the European cost of Asian goods was much reduced, for the old route had involved many transshipments, unloadings, and reloadings, movements by sea and by land, through the hands of many merchants. In 1504 spices could be bought in Lisbon for only a fi fth of the price demanded in Venice. The Venetians (who in their desperation even talked of digging a Suez canal) were hopelessly undersold in western European markets: their trade thereafter was confi ned to products of the Middle East. As for the Portuguese, never was a commercial monopoly built so fast. The lower prices added enormously to European demand and consumption. Beginning in 1504, only fi ve years after da Gama’s fi rst return, an average of 12 ships a year left Lisbon for the expand- ing Asian trade.

The Discovery of America

Meanwhile, the same quest for a route to the East had led to the somewhat disappointing discovery of America. Like most such discoveries, this was no chance hit of an isolated genius. Behaim’s globe, constructed in 1492, the very year of Columbus’s fi rst voyage, suggested that China could be reached by crossing the Atlantic and thus supported the idea of sailing westward to arrive in the East. Nevertheless, it was Christopher Columbus who had the persistence and daring to undertake the unprecedented westward voyage. Before the invention of suffi ciently accurate clocks (in the eighteenth century) mariners had no way of determining longitude, that is, their east-west position, and learned geographers greatly underestimated the probable distance from Europe westward to Asia. When Columbus struck land, he naturally supposed it to be an outlying part of the Indies. The people were soon called Indians, and the islands where Columbus landed, the West Indies.

Columbus had sailed with the backing of Queen Isabella of Castile, and the new lands became part of the composite dominions of the crown of Spain. The Spaniards, hoping to fi nd a sea route that would enable them to beat the Portuguese to the East (which da Gama had not yet reached), received Columbus’s fi rst reports with enthusiasm. For his second voyage they gave him 17 ships, fi lled with 1,500 workmen and artisans. Columbus him- self, until his death in 1506, kept probing about in the Caribbean, baffl ed and frustrated,

Portuguese trading empire

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 102pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 102 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

103

still believing he had discovered a route to Asia and hoping to fi nd something that looked like the fabulous East. Other Europeans were more willing to see the new lands as a previ- ously unknown place in which they could pursue new wealth and power. Indeed, the lands were soon given a new European name—America—after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci reported that neither the islands nor the mainland seemed to be connected with Asia. Spanish churchmen began to view America as a new fi eld for crusading and conver- sion. The Spanish government saw it as a source of gold and silver for the royal exchequer. Footloose gentry of warlike habits, left idle by the end of war with the Moors in Iberia, turned to America to make their fortunes. The conquistadores fell upon the new lands. Hernando Cortés led a small Spanish army that conquered the Aztecs in Mexico between 1519 and 1521. Taking advantage of divisions among peoples within Aztec territories, the conquistadores used massacres and sieges to complete a conquest that brought “New Spain” into a grow- ing Spanish Empire. Francisco Pizarro’s later expedition into the Inca Empire in Peru also resorted to brutal tactics of deception and murder to remove the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, and thereby expand Spain’s imperial control across the Andes during the 1530s. The colo- nizing Spanish forces quickly despoiled the native empires in both Mexico and Peru. Mines for precious metals were opened almost immediately. The Indians were put to

Conquest begins in the Americas

An Episode in the Conquest of America was painted by the Dutch artist Jan Mostaert about 1545. In this detail from an early European visualization of the New World, the American Indians are seen as naked, helpless, confused, and very different from Europeans. (The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

11. The Opening of the Atlantic

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 103pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 103 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648104

forced labor, in which many died. The rapid decline in the Indian population, the attempts of the church to protect its Indian converts, and the restrictions set by royal authorities on their exploitation soon led to the importation of African slaves. More than 120,000 enslaved Africans were brought to America by 1575, and another 500,000 arrived over the next 50 years. This massive, forced migration of Africans continued for more than two centuries via a far-reaching European-managed slave trade that would carry 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas by the middle of the nineteenth century. The great majority would be transported to Portuguese-controlled Brazil and to the various West Indian sugar islands, but many also went to the Spanish Empire and to the later British Empire in North America. Indeed, the number of enslaved Africans reaching America, including the two continents and the West Indies, was far greater than the number of Europeans who settled there before 1800; and some enslaved persons were also taken from Africa into Portugal, Spain, England, and other parts of Europe.

Meanwhile, explorers began to make their way along the vast American continent that barred them from Asia. A Spanish expedition, led by Ferdinand Magellan, found a southwestern passage in 1520, sailed from

the Atlantic into the Pacifi c, crossed the Pacifi c, reached the Philippine Islands, and fought its way through hostile Portuguese across the Indian Ocean back to Spain. The globe was thus circumnavigated for the fi rst time, and new ideas about the true size and intercon- nection of the oceans were brought back to Europe. Geographical experts immediately incorporated the new knowledge. Europeans still knew little about the vast, newly dis- covered continents, however, and other explorers sailing for Spain, the Cabots sailing for England, Jacques Cartier for France, began the long and fruitless search for a northwest passage to the Pacifi c. An English expedition, looking for a northeast passage, discovered the White Sea in 1553. English merchants immediately began to take the ocean route to Russia. Archangel became an ocean port.

For a century it was only the Spanish and Portuguese who followed up the new ocean routes to America and the East. The monarchs of these two peoples, in a treaty of 1494, asserted that the globe should be divided between them by an imaginary north-and-south line that ran from a point in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean through the north pole and across eastern Asia. Spain claimed all the Americas by this treaty, and Portugal, all rights of trade in Africa, Asia, and the East Indies. But when the Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral discovered Brazil in 1500, it was found to be far enough east to lie within the Portuguese area, and after Magellan landed on the Philippine Islands in 1521, they were claimed to be in the Spanish zone.

In the populous, long-established civilizations of the East the Portuguese were never more than a handful of outsiders who could not impose their language, their religion, or their way of life. It was otherwise in the Americas, where previously unknown diseases such as smallpox decimated the native populations, and where Spanish invaders set about imposing European culture on the weakened and demoralized survivors.

The Spanish Empire in America

In South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, after the fi rst ferocity of the conquista, the Spanish established their own civilization. In Protestant countries, and also in France,

as the years went on there arose an extremely unfavorable idea of the Spanish regime in America, where, it was noted, the Inquisition was pres- ently established and the native peoples were reduced to servitude by

Further explorations

Spanish colonial rule

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 104pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 104 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

105

the conquerors. The Spanish themselves came to dismiss this grim picture as a false legend concocted by their rivals. The true character of the Spanish Empire in America is not easy to portray. The Spanish government (like the home governments of all colonial empires) regarded its empire as existing primarily for the benefi t of the mother country. The Indians were put into servitude, to work in mines or in agriculture. They also died in large numbers from infections brought by Europeans to which Europeans over past centuries had developed immunities but against which the native American peoples had no such protection. The same was true farther north in what later became the United States. Religious critics of Spanish brutality, including, most notably, Bartolomé de las Casas, condemned the pervasive abuse of the native populations, and the Spanish govern- ment made efforts to moderate the exploitation of Indian labor. It attempted to regulate the encomienda, a labor and land system in which Indians were required to work for an owner a certain number of days in the week, while retaining parcels of land on which to work for themselves. How much the royal regulations were enforced on remote enco- miendas is another question, to which answers vary. Black African slavery became some- what less important in most of the Spanish American economy than it later became in the Dutch, French, and English colonies or in Portuguese Brazil. But the white population remained relatively small. Castilian Spaniards looked down on American-born whites, called Creoles. Since fewer women than men emigrated from Spain, there arose a large class of mestizos, of mixed white and Indian descent.

The mestizos, along with many Indians, adopted to a considerable degree the Spanish language and the faith of the Spanish church. The Indians, while unfree, had usually lacked freedom under their own tribal chiefs. The sufferings of Indians, however, took new forms. They faced the harsh conditions of the Spanish labor system, but they were now spared from the violence of recurring tribal wars; they also fell under the strict religious controls of the Spanish Inquisition, but they were no longer threatened by traditional Aztec or Inca rituals of human sacrifi ce. Meanwhile, new forms of education began to develop within the Spanish Empire. The printing press was brought to Mexico in 1544. By the middle of the sixteenth century Spanish America consisted of two great viceroyal ties, those of Mexico and Peru, with 22 bishoprics, and with a university in each viceroyalty; the University of Lima was established in 1551, that of Mexico in 1553. When Harvard College was founded in New England (in 1636), there were fi ve universities on the European model in Spanish America.

In 1545 a great discovery was made, the prodigiously rich silver depos- its at Potosí in Peru. (It is now in Bolivia.) Almost simultaneously, better methods of extracting silver from the ore by the use of mercury were devel- oped. American production of precious metals shot up suddenly and portent- ously. For years, after the midcentury, 500,000 pounds of silver and 10,000 pounds of gold fl owed annually from America to Spain. The riches of Potosí fi nanced the European projects of the king of Spain. Peruvian ores, Indian labor, and Spanish management combined to make possible the militant, anti-Protestant phase of the Counter Reformation.

But the Spanish also found American natural resources that would become more valu- able in Europe than all of the gold and silver in colonial mines, because the Indians intro- duced Europeans to new plants such as beans, potatoes, maize, tomatoes, and squash. These nutritious foods were taken back to Europe, where, in the long run, they became much more useful than any precious metal in the daily lives and meals of everyone in Europe. American food plants eventually transformed European agriculture, changed the cuisine in every European country, and improved the diets of people in even the poorest social classes.

The Potosí silver mines

11. The Opening of the Atlantic

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 105pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 105 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648106

Europeans negotiate with an African chief and his council on the Guinea coast, perhaps for the purchase of slaves who will be transported to America. The Europeans have guns while the Africans have only spears, but in contrast to early European images of American Indians the Africans are fully clothed and seated in a dignifi ed manner. (The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY)

Black slaves are stooped over in a diamond-processing operation in Brazil, while white overseers watch with whips. (The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 106pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 106 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

107

Historical Interpretations and Debates Europe and the Americas

Historians have long argued that the European encounter with the New World transformed Old World societies as well as cultures in the Americas. As these two infl uential historians explain in their accounts of cross-cultural exchanges and perceptions, the discovery of previ- ously unknown lands and peoples profoundly altered both the material lives and the intellectual perspectives of early modern Europeans. Note the contrasting themes of social and cultural history that Alfred Crosby Jr. and J. H. Elliott develop in their interpretations of how European contacts with American Indians changed the history of Europe.

Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972, 2003) The [American] Indian produced some of the most important of all food plants. He also gave humanity such nonfoods as tobacco, rubber, and certain cottons, but let us restrict ourselves to . . . his most valuable food crops. . . .

American plants [enabled the European] farmer to produce food from soils that, prior to 1492, were rated as useless because of their sandiness, altitude, aridity, and other factors. . . .

The American crops of primary importance in Europe have been beans, maize, and, above all, potatoes. . . . String beans and lima beans were among the chief products of seventeenth-century Spain. . . . The bean spread to almost all the latitudes of Europe, but the impact of maize was . . . restricted almost entirely to the southern half of that continent. . . .

Maize has had an important infl uence on population growth in southern Europe. . . . [But] another factor . . . has been Europe’s love affair with the common American potato. . . . It was the Irish, of course, who fi rst wholeheartedly adopted the potato. . . . As the crop spread in Ireland, the population grew, which made further spread of the tuber almost compulsory, for no other plant could feed so many Irishmen on such small plots of land. One-and-a-half acres, planted with potatoes, would provide enough food, with the addition of a bit of milk, to keep a family hearty for a year.

J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (1970) The temptation was almost overpoweringly strong [for Europeans] to see the newly- discovered lands in terms of the enchanted isles of medieval fantasy. . . . [And] the Christian and the classical tradition were likely to prove the obvious points of departure for any evaluation of the New World and its inhabitants. . . .

The reverence . . . for their Christian and classical traditions had salutary consequences for their approach to the New World, in that it enabled them to set it into some kind of perspective in relation to themselves. . . . Christendom’s own sense of self-dissatisfaction found expression in the longing for a return to a better state of things. The return might be to the lost Christian paradise, or to the Golden Age of the ancients, or to some elusive combination of both these imagined worlds. With the discovery of the Indies . . . it was all too easy to transpose the ideal world from a world remote in time to a world remote in space. . . .

It was an idyllic picture, and the humanists made the most of it, for it enabled them to express their dissatisfaction with European society, and to criticize it by implication. America and Europe became antitheses—the antitheses of innocence and corruption. . . .

But by treating the New World in this way, the humanists were closing the door to understanding an alien civilization. America was not as they imagined it. . . . But the dream was a European dream, which had little to do with the American reality.

Sources: Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. 170, 176–78, 181–83; J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 1992), pp. 24–27.

11. The Opening of the Atlantic

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 107pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 107 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648108

Meanwhile, beginning in 1565, the Spanish also established a lucrative trade route between their colonies in Mexico and the Philippines. Large ships called the “Manila Galleons” carried vast cargoes of silver from Acapulco to Manila, where the silver was traded for Chinese luxury goods—spices, porcelain, silks, and ivory—all of which were transported back to Mexico and on to Europe. This valuable trade continued until the early nineteenth century. It carried perhaps a third of all the silver extracted from Spain’s American colonies off to Asia; and it helped to create the fi rst modern global network for commercial exchange, in part because it brought Chinese consumers the only commodity that they wanted to buy from Europeans during this era. Silver from New World mines therefore sustained the whole Asian-American-European trading system and enabled Spain to control much of the bur- geoning global market for Chinese products.

The opening of the Atlantic thus reoriented Europe. In an age of oceanic communica- tions Europe became a center from which America, Africa, and Asia could all be reached. In Europe itself, the Atlantic coast now enjoyed great advantages over the older Mediter- ranean ports and the towns in central Europe. No sooner did the Portuguese begin to bring spices from the East Indies than Antwerp began to fl ourish as the point of redistribution for northern Europe. But for a century after the Spanish and Portuguese began to build their empires, the northern peoples did not take to the oceans. French corsairs did indeed put out from Bayonne or Saint-Malo, and Dutch prowlers and English “sea dogs” followed at the close of the century, all bent upon plundering the Iberian treasure ships. Still the Spanish and Portuguese kept their monopoly. No organized effort, backed by governments, came from the north until about 1600. For it is by no means geography alone that determines economic development; the English, Dutch, and French could not make use of the new Atlantic opportunities until they had cleared up their domestic troubles and survived the perils and hazards of the Wars of Religion.

12. THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION In the great economic readjustment that was taking place in Europe, the opening of ocean trade routes was important, but it was by no means the only factor in shaping what historians call the early modern “Commercial

Revolution.” Two other key factors were the growth of population and a long, gradual rise in prices, or a slow infl ation.

European population again grew rapidly, as in the High Middle Ages, reaching about 108 million in 1600, of which more than 20 million represented the growth during the sixteenth century. The increase took place in all countries, though the distribution was quite different from the population increases in more recent times. England in 1600 had less than 5 million inhabitants. France had four times as many, and the German states altogether almost as many as France. Italy and Spain had fewer than France, and distant Russia, within its then boundaries, may have had no more than 10 million people. Some cities grew substantially, with London and Paris approaching 200,000; Antwerp, Lisbon, and Seville, thanks to the ocean trade, jumped to 100,000 by 1600. But smaller towns remained much the same; Europe as a whole was probably no more urbanized than in the later Middle Ages. Most of the popu- lation growth represented an increasing density in the rural regions.

The steady rise in prices, which is to say the steady decline in value of a given unit of money (such as a shilling), constituted a gradual infl ation. It has been called a “price revolution,” but it was so slow as to be hardly comparable to the kinds of infl ation known in some modern societies.

Population growth

The price revolution

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 108pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 108 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

10912. The Commercial Revolution

One cause seems to have emerged from the growth of population itself, which set up an increasing demand for food. This meant that new land was brought under cultivation, land that was less fertile, more inaccessible or more diffi cult to work than the fi elds that had been cultivated previously. With increasing costs of production, agricultural prices rose; in England, for example, they about quadrupled during the sixteenth century. Prices were also pushed upward by the increase in the volume of money. The royal habit of debasing the currency brought a larger amount of money into circulation, since larger numbers of fl orins, reals, or livres were obtained from the same amount of bullion. The fl ow of gold and silver from America also made money more plentiful, but the impact of Peruvian and Mexican mines can easily be exaggerated. Even before the discovery of America, the development of gold and silver mines had augmented the European money supply. Although the expan- sion of both population and commerce checked the infl ationary forces, the long trend of prices was upward. It affected all prices, including rents and other payments that were set in money values, but the price of hired labor, that is, wages, rose the least. The price changes thus had different effects on the well-being of different social classes.

The rising prices and growing population enhanced the economic opportunities for commercial enterprises. Merchants could count on increasing numbers of customers, new people could enter trade with hope of success, stocks of goods rose in value with the passage of time, and borrowed money could more easily be repaid. Governments benefi ted also, insofar as kings could count on having more taxpayers and more soldiers.

The Spaniards stamped out much of the Indian religion, which they viewed as idolatrous. Yet it is to Spanish priests that we owe the preservation of much of our knowledge of the pre-Conquest culture. This page is from a book in which a Spaniard wrote down the Aztec language in the Latin alphabet. A human sacrifi ce is also depicted. (Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 109pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 109 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648110

The economic changes in Europe in the early modern period thus led to the “Commercial Revolution,” a broad term signifying the rise of a capitalistic economy and the transition from a town-centered to a nation-centered economic system. This “revolution” was an exceptionally slow and protracted one; it began at least as early as the fourteenth century and lasted until machine industry began to overshadow commerce in the early nine- teenth century.

Changes in Commerce and Production

In the Middle Ages the town and its adjoining country formed an economic unit. Craftsmen, organized in guilds, produced common articles for local use. Peasants and lords sold their agricultural products to the local town, from which they bought what the craftsmen pro- duced. The town protected itself by its own tariffs and regulations. In the workshop the master both owned his “capital”—his house, workbench, tools, and materials—and acted as a workman himself along with half a dozen journeymen and apprentices. The masters owned a modest capital, but they were hardly capitalists. They produced only upon order, or at least for customers whose tastes and number were known in advance. There was little profi t, little risk of loss, and not much innovation.

All this changed with the widening of the trading area, or commercial market. Even in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, there was a certain amount of long-distance trading in articles that could not be produced as well in one place as in another. Gradually more articles came within this category. Where goods were produced to be sold at some time

in the future, in faraway places, to persons unknown, the local guildmaster could not manage the operation. He lacked the money (or “capital”) to tie up in stocks of unsold wares; he lacked the knowledge of what distant customers wanted, or where, in what quantities, and at what price people

would buy. In this new type of long-distance business, new kinds of entrepreneurs became prominent in European commercial life. They usually started out as merchants working in an extensive market and ended up as bankers. The Italian Medici family has been mentioned as important in Renaissance banking and culture. Equally typical were the German Fuggers.

New entrepreneurs

The silver mines at Potosí, por- trayed here in a late sixteenth- century illustration, sent over 500,000 pounds of silver to Spain every year. American precious metals and the labor of American Indians enabled the Spanish government to wage its costly European wars and to maintain a lucrative trade with Chinese merchants in Asia. (The Granger Collection, NYC)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 110pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 110 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

111

The fi rst of this family, Johann Fugger, a small-town weaver, came to Augsburg in 1368. He established a business in a new kind of cloth, called fustian, in which cotton was mixed with other fabrics to produce clothing that was thicker or heavier than the woolens and linens in which people then clothed themselves. Fugger thus enjoyed a more than local market. Gradually the family began to deal also in spices, silks, and other Eastern goods obtained at Venice. Later generations invested their large profi ts in other enterprises, nota- bly mining. They lent money to the Renaissance popes. They lent Charles V the money he needed to obtain election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. They became bankers to the Habsburgs in both Germany and Spain. Together with other German and Flemish bankers, the Fuggers fi nanced the Portuguese trade with Asia, either by outright loans or by provid- ing in advance, on credit, the cargoes that the Portuguese traded for spices. The wealth of the Fuggers became proverbial and declined only through repeated Habsburg bankruptcies and with the general economic decline that beset Germany in the sixteenth century. By that time, however, the family had become a kind of model for the transnational, commercial practices that were reshaping the sixteenth-century European economy.

Other dealers in cloth, less spectacular than the fi rst Fugger, broke away from the town- and-guild framework in other ways. England until the fi fteenth century was an exporter of raw wool and an importer of fi nished woolens from Flanders. In the fi fteenth century certain English entrepreneurs began to develop the spinning, weaving, and dyeing of wool in England. To avoid the restrictive practices of the towns and guilds they “put out” the work to people in the country, providing them with looms and other equipment for the purpose, of which they generally retained the ownership themselves. This “putting out” or “domestic” system spread very widely outside the guild system, and, by the early modern period, typically depended on a gendered division of labor. Women usually did the work of spinning wool into thread

The “putting out” system

JAKOB FUGGER, “THE RICH” by Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)

This portrait of the German merchant and banker Jakob Fugger (1459–1525) suggests that the wealth of early modern commercial families attracted the interest of prominent artists as well as the attention of powerful monarchs. Dürer’s painting conveys both the status and sense of purpose that char- acterized Fugger’s wide-ranging economic career. (De Agostini/Getty Images)

12. The Commercial Revolution

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 111pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 111 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648112

STUDY OF TWO BLACK HEADS by Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669)

One major component of the new international trade was the transportation of enslaved black Africans to the Americas. Some Africans arrived also in Europe, where their presence con- tributed to the growing speculation on the diversity of the human races. Rembrandt, though he never traveled more than 20 miles from his native Leyden, painted all types of people who streamed into the Netherlands, including these two men who had to cope with the social and racial hierarchies of the strange European world into which they were cast. (The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 112pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 112 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

113

(hence the later English term for an unmarried woman, “spinster”); men usually wove the thread into cloth. In France the cloth dealers of Rouen, feeling the competition of the new silk trade, developed a lighter, cheaper, and more simply made type of woolen cloth. Vari- ous guild regulations in Rouen, to protect the workers there, prohibited the manufacture of this cheaper cloth. The Rouen dealers, in 1496, took the industry into the country, installed looms in peasant cottages, and farmed out the work to the peasants. The new commercial enterprises therefore weakened the guilds’ economic infl uence and created new processes for both the production of goods and the accumulation of capital.

Capital and Labor

The system of rural household industry remained typical of production in many lines (cloth, hardware, etc.) in western Europe until the introduction of factories in the late eigh- teenth century. It signifi ed a new divergence between capital and labor. On the one hand were the workers, men and women who worked as the employer needed them, received wages for what they did, and had little interest in or knowledge of more than their own task. Living both by agri- culture and by cottage industry, they formed an expansible labor force, available when labor was needed, left to live by farming or local charity when times were bad. On the other hand was the manager or entrepreneur (almost always a man) who directed the whole affair. He had little or no personal acquaintance with the workers. Esti- mating how much of his product, let us say woolens, he could sell in a national or even international market, he purchased the needed raw materials, passed out wool to be spun by one group of peasants, took the yarn to another group for weaving, collected the cloth and took it still elsewhere to be dyed, paying wages on all sides for services rendered, while retaining ownership of the materials and the equipment and keeping the coordination and management of the whole enterprise in his own head. Much larger business enterprises could be established in this way than within the municipal framework of guild and town. Indeed, the very master weavers of the guilds often sank to the status of subcontractors, hardly different from wage employees, of the great “clothiers” and “drapers” by whom the business was dominated. The latter, with the widening market, became personages of national or even international repute. And, of course, the bigger the business the more of a capital investment it represented.

Certain other industries, new or virtually new in the fi fteenth and six- teenth centuries, could by their nature never fi t into a town-centered system and were capitalistic from the start, in that they required a large initial out- lay before any income could be received. Mining was one such industry, and another was printing and the book trade. Books had a national and even international market, being mainly in Latin; and no ordinary craftsman could afford the outlay required for a printing press, for fonts of type, supplies of paper, and stocks of books on hand. Printers therefore borrowed from capitalists or shared with them an interest in business. Shipbuilding was so stimulated by the shift to the oceans as almost to be a new industry, and still another was the manufacture of cannons and muskets. For the latter the chief demand came from the state, from the New Monarchies that were organizing national armies. In the rise of capital- ism the needs of the military were in fact fundamentally important. Armies, which started out by requiring thousands of weapons, in the seventeenth century required thousands of uniforms, and in the eighteenth century many new barracks and fortifi cations. These heavy demands were the fi rst to require mass production. Where governments themselves did

Divergence between capital and labor

New industries

12. The Commercial Revolution

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 113pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 113 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648114

not take the initiative, private middlemen stepped in as links to the many small handicraft workers and families who before the industrial age still manufactured the actual product.

The new sea route to the East and the discovery of America brought a vast increase in trade not only of luxury items but of imported commodities like rice, sugar, tea, and other consumer goods. Older commercial activities within Europe were also transformed by the widening of markets. Spain increasingly drew cereals from Sicily. The Netherlands were fed from Poland; the French wine districts lived on food brought from northern France. With the growth of shipping, the timber, tar, pitch, and other “naval stores” of Russia and the Baltic entered the commercial scene. There was thus an ever-growing movement of heavy staple commodities, in which again only persons controlling large funds of capital could normally take part.

Not all capital was invested; some was simply lent to the church, to governments, to impecunious nobles, or, though perhaps this was the least common type of lending in the sixteenth century, to persons engaged in trade and commerce. Bankers and others who lent money expected to receive back, after a time, a larger sum than that of the loan. They expected “interest”; and they some-

times received as much as 30 percent a year. In the Middle Ages the taking of interest had been frowned upon as usury, denounced as avarice, and forbidden in the canon law. It was still frowned upon in the sixteenth century by almost all but the lenders themselves. The Catholic Church maintained its prohibitions. The theologians of the University of Paris

New banking practices

The growing production of cloth in early modern Europe depended on the labor of fami- lies in rural cottage industries. Spinning thread became an important economic activity for many women, as Jean Bourdi- chon (1457–1521) demonstrates in this illustration of a family at work. The man is apparently a skilled woodworker, and the child is gathering wood chips that can be used for cooking food or heating the house. The solid walls and ceiling show that this is a prosperous, hard- working family. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 114pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 114 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

115

also ruled against it in 1530. Luther, who hated bankers like the Fuggers, continued to preach against usury. Calvin made allowances, but as late as 1640, in capitalist Holland itself, the stricter Calvinist ministers still denounced lending at interest.

Religious interventions, however, could never stop the practice. Borrowers com- pounded with lenders to evade prohibitions, and theologians of all churches began to dis- tinguish between “usury” and a “legitimate return.” Gradually, as interest rates fell, as banking became more established, and as loans were made for economically productive uses rather than to sustain ecclesiastics, princes, and nobles in their personal habits, the feeling against a “reasonable” interest died down and interest became an accepted feature of capitalism. The Bank of Amsterdam, for example, attracted depositors because they knew their money was safe, would earn interest, and could be withdrawn at will. Deposits thus fl owed into the bank from all countries and enabled it to make low-interest loans that fi nanced new commercial activities.

The net effect of all these developments was a “commercialization of industry.” The dynamic, entrepreneurial persons in commercial life were the merchants. Industry, the actual processes of production, still in an essentially handicraft stage, was subordinate to the buyers and sellers. Producers— spinners, weavers, hatters, metalworkers, gunsmiths, glassworkers—worked to fi ll the orders of the merchants, and often with capital that the merchants supplied and owned. The entrepreneur who knew where the article could be sold prevailed over the person who simply knew how to produce it. This commercial capitalism remained the typical form of capitalism until after 1800, when, with the introduction of power machinery, it yielded to industrial capitalism, and merchants became dependent on industrialists who owned, under- stood, and organized the machines.

Mercantilism

There was still another aspect of the Commercial Revolution, namely, the various govern- ment policies that go historically under the name of “mercantilism.” Rulers, as we have seen, were hard pressed for money and needed more of it as their coins fell in value. The desire of kings and their advisers to force gold and silver to fl ow into their own kingdoms was one of the fi rst impulses leading to mercantilist regulation. Gradually this “bullionist” idea was replaced by the more general idea of building up a strong and self-suffi cient economy. The means adopted, in either case, was to “set the poor on work,” as they said in England, to turn the country into a hive of industry, to discourage idleness, begging, vagabondage, and unem- ployment. New crafts and manufactures were introduced, and favors were given to merchants who provided work for “the poor” and who sold the country’s products abroad. It was thought desirable to raise the export of fi nished goods and reduce the export of unpro- cessed raw materials, to curtail all imports except of needed raw materials, and thus obtain a “favorable” balance of trade so that other countries would have to pay their debts in bullion. Since all this was done by a royal or nationwide system of regulations, mercantilism became in the economic sphere what the state building of the New Monarchies was in the political, signifying the transition from town to national units of social living.

Mercantilists frowned upon the localistic and conservative outlook of the guilds. In England the guilds ceased to have importance. Parliament, in the time of Elizabeth, did on a national scale what guilds had once done locally when it enacted the Statute of Artifi cers of 1563, regulating the admission to appren- ticeship and the level of wages in various trades. In France the royal government maintained

Commercial capitalism

Opposition to guilds

12. The Commercial Revolution

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 115pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 115 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648116

the legal existence of the guilds, because they were convenient bodies to tax, but it deprived them of most of their old independence and used them as organizations through which royal control of industry could be enforced. In both countries the government assisted merchants who wished to set up domestic or cottage industry in the country, against the protests of the town guilds, which in their heyday had forbidden rural people to engage in crafts. Govern- ments generally tried to suppress idleness. The famous English Poor Law of 1601 (which remained in effect, with amendments, until 1834) was designed to force able-bodied people to work and to relieve the absolute destitution of those who could not.

Governments likewise took steps to introduce new industries. The silk industry was brought from Italy to France under royal protection, to the dismay of French woolen and linen interests. The English government assisted in turning England from a producer of raw wool into a producer of fi nished woolens, supervising the immigration of skilled Flemish weavers and even fetching from faraway Turkey, about 1582, two youths who understood the more advanced dyeing arts of the Middle East. Generally, under mercantil- ism, governments fought to steal skilled workers from each other while prohibiting or

discouraging the emigration of their own skilled workers, who might take their trade secrets and “mysteries” to foreign parts.

By such means governments helped to create a national market and an industrious nationwide labor supply for their great merchants. Without such government support the great merchants, such as the drapers or clothiers,

could never have risen and prospered. The same help was given to merchants operating in foreign markets. Henry VII of England in 1496 negotiated a commercial treaty with Flanders; and in the next century the kings of France signed treaties with the Ottoman Empire by which French merchants obtained privileges in the Middle East. A merchant backed by a national monarchy was in a much stronger position than one backed merely by a city, such as Augsburg or Venice. This backing on a national scale was again given when national governments subsidized exports, paying bounties for goods whose production they wished to encourage, or when they erected tariff barriers against imports to protect their own producers from competition. Thus a national tariff system was superimposed on the old network of provincial and municipal tariffs. These latter were now thought of as “internal tariffs,” and mercantilists usually wished to abolish them to create an area of free trade within the state as a whole. But local interests were so strong that for centuries the European monarchies were unable to get rid of local tariffs except in England. Meanwhile, however, the new commercial capitalism developed everywhere with the support of government protections, subsidies, and economic interventions.

In distant parts of the world, or in less accessible regions nearer home, such as the Muslim lands or Russia, it was not possible for individual European merchants to act by merely private initiative. Merchants trading with such countries needed a good deal of capi- tal, they often had to obtain special privileges and protection from native rulers, and they

had to arm their ships against Barbary or Malay pirates or against hostile Europeans. Merchants and their respective governments came together to found offi cial companies for the transocean trade. In England, soon after the English discovery of the White Sea in 1553, a Russia Company was estab- lished. A Turkey Company soon followed. Shortly after 1600 a great many

such companies were operating out of England, Holland, and France. The most famous of all were the East India Companies, which the English founded in 1600, the Dutch in 1602, the French not until 1664. In 1672 the English also chartered the Royal African Company, which for a time controlled the English slave trade and the gold imports from west Africa.

National markets

Chartered trading companies

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 116pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 116 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

117

Each of these companies was a state-supported organization with special rights. Each was a monopoly in that only merchants who belonged to the company could legally engage in trade in the region for which the company had a charter. Each was expected to fi nd markets for the national products, and most of them were expected to bring home gold or silver. With these companies the northern European peoples began to encroach on the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly in America, Africa, and the East. With them new commercial-colonial empires would be launched and expanded. But, as we have already observed, before this could happen it was necessary for certain domestic and transnational European confl icts and controversies to be settled.

13. CHANGING SOCIAL STRUCTURES Social structure, for present purposes, refers to the composition, functions, and interrelation- ships of social classes. Because changes in social structure are slow, they are hard to iden- tify in specifi c decades or particular periods of time. In general, however, with the effects of the Commercial Revolution, population growth, and the falling value of money, the classes of Europe, broadly defi ned, took on forms that were to last until the industrializing era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These classes were the landed aristocracy, the peasantry or mass of agricultural workers, the miscellaneous middle classes, and the urban poor.

The headquarters of the Dutch East India Company in Bengal in 1665, long before the British gained predominance there. It is wholly walled off from the Indian life around it, with offi ces, living quarters, and spacious gardens for employees of the company. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

13. Changing Social Structures

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 117pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 117 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648118

While all prices rose in the sixteenth century, it was agricultural prices that rose the most. Anyone who had agricultural products to sell was likely to benefi t. Among such ben- efi ciaries were peasants who held small plots of land in return for fi xed payments to a manorial lord. Many such payments were set in unchangeable sums of money, in the old values of the fourteenth or even thirteenth century, so the price infl ation of the sixteenth century enabled some peasants in effect to pay much less to the lord than in the past. Other rural workers, however, either held no land of their own or produced only at a subsistence level with nothing to sell in the market. Such peasants, and hired hands dependent

on wages, found their situation worsened. Village life became less egalitar- ian than it had been in the Middle Ages. In England a class of small free- holders (the “yeomanry”) developed between the landed gentry and the rural poor. On the Continent, at least in France, western Germany, and the

Netherlands, an increasingly prosperous class of peasants acquired more secure property rights, resembling those of small freeholders in England. But both in England and on the Continent a large class of unpropertied rural workers remained in poverty and excluded from the emerging international markets for agricultural products.

Land rents went up as agricultural prices rose, and infl ation and population growth drove up rentals for housing in the towns. Owners of real property (that is, land and buildings) were favored by such changes, but within the former class of feudal lords the effects were mixed. If one’s great-grandfather had let out land in earlier times in exchange for fi xed sums of money, the value of the income received had actually declined. But those landowners who received payments in kind from their tenants, for example, in bushels of wheat or barley, or who managed their large estates themselves, could sell their actual agricultural products at current prices and so increase their money income.

Social Classes

The former feudal class, or nobles, thus turned into a more modern kind of aristocracy. If income from their estates declined, they sought paid service in the king’s army or govern- ment or appointment to the more prestigious offi ces in the church. If landed income increased, they were more wealthy. In either case, and even if they served as military com- manders, they became more concerned with civilian pursuits; and they were likely to develop more refi ned tastes and pay more attention to the education of their children. Like the peas-

ants, the landowning class became more heterogeneous, ranging from the small gentry to the great peers of England and from small or impoverished nobles to the grands seigneurs of France. Some led a life of leisure; others were eager to work in the higher reaches of organized government. The most

impoverished nobles sometimes had the longest pedigrees. As their social functions changed, and as persons of more recent family background competed for education, government employment, and even military service, there came to be an increasing importance set upon ancestry as a badge of status. Among the upper class, there was more insistence on high birth and distinguished forebears in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than there had been before. But many nobles also claimed that they deserved special privileges because they contributed meritorious service to kings or the expanding national governments.

Below the aristocracy were the “middle classes,” or “bourgeoisie.” Bourgeois was a French word, which, like the English “burgher,” originally meant a person living in a chartered town or borough and enjoying its liberties.

The bourgeoisie was the whole social class made up of individual bourgeois. In a much later sense of the word, derived from Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, the term “bourgeoisie”

Small freeholders

The nobility

The bourgeoisie

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 118pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 118 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

119

was applied to the class of owners of capital. This Marxist concept of the bourgeoisie must be kept distinct from the meaning of the word in an earlier era. “Bourgeoisie” referred in prein- dustrial times to the middle levels of society between the aristocracy, which drew its income from land, and the laboring poor, who depended on wages or charity, or who often went hun- gry. Class lines tended to blur as aristocratic families formed the habit of living in towns and middle-class burghers began to buy land in the country. Some bourgeois thus came to live on landed rents, while some of the gentry and aristocracy, most notably in England, bought shares in the great overseas trading companies or engaged in other forms of business enterprise. Aris- tocrats possessing large agricultural estates, timberlands, or mines increasingly brought their products to market to be sold at a profi t. But even when aristocrat and bourgeois became eco- nomically more alike, a consciousness of social difference between them remained.

The middle class became more numerous in the sixteenth century, and increasingly so thereafter. It was an indefi nite category, since the countries of Europe were very different in the size and importance of their middle classes, in the kinds of persons who belonged to them, and in the types of occupations that bourgeois people pursued. Near the top were the urban elites who gov- erned the towns; they might draw their incomes from rural property, from commerce, or from the emoluments of government itself, and they sometimes intermarried with persons of noble status. Especially where the towns were strong or royal government was weak, as in the Netherlands, the German free cities, or north Italy, such urban patriciates formed virtual aristocracies in themselves. But in a larger social perspective, or in the context of the more powerful monarchical states, the families of merchants, bankers, and shipowners were middle class, as were those of the traditional learned professions, law and medicine. So, in general, were judges, tax offi cials, and other employees of governments, except in the highest ranks. In the professions and in government service the younger sons of the aristocracy might be found alongside the offspring of the middle classes, most commonly in England, less so in France, and even less as one moved into Germany or Spain.

The clergy was drawn from all classes. There were poor parish priests, who might be the sons of peasants, and there were bishops and abbots from the most prominent noble families; but the bulk of the clergy was recruited from middle-class families. In Protestant countries, where the clergy married, their sons and daughters became an important element in the middle class. Members of trade guilds were middle class, though the guilds differed widely in social status, from those of the great wholesale merchants or the goldsmiths, down through the guilds of such humble occupations as the tanners and barrel makers. At the bottom the middle class faded into the social world of small retail shopkeepers, inn- keepers, owners of workshops in which ordinary articles were manufactured by hand, the lesser skilled tradespeople, and their employees, journeymen, and apprentices.

The mass of the population in all countries was composed of the work- ing poor. These included not only the unskilled wage laborers but the unemployed, unemployable, and paupers, with a large fringe that turned to vagabondage and begging. They were unable to read or write and were often given to irregular habits that distressed both middle-class persons and government offi cials. Poverty was increasingly viewed as an example or outcome of immorality. The efforts of mercantilist governments to put the poor to work, or to make them contribute to the wealth of the country, have already been mentioned. Charitable relief also developed toward the end of the sixteenth century, as shown in the English Poor Law of 1601 and in similar efforts on the Continent. The idea gained ground that begging was a public nuisance and that the poor should thus be segregated in workhouses or hospices from the rest of society. Most of the poor were of course not recipients of such relief. They were

Middle-class growth and diversity

The working class poor

13. Changing Social Structures

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 119pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 119 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648120

the working men and women who tilled the fi elds, wove the cloth, tended the livestock, dug in the mines, or went to sea as fi shermen and common sailors. They also found work in the towns as casual laborers, porters, water carriers, or removers of excrement; or they entered the domestic service of noble and upper middle-class families, whose rising stan- dard of living required a growing number of chambermaids, cooks, washerwomen, foot- men, lackeys, coachmen, and stable boys. Domestic service was in fact the most common job for women during the entire period of early modern history, and the pay for such work remained extremely low. Wages rose less than prices in the sixteenth century. The poor, if not positively worse off than in former times, gained the least from the great commer- cial developments with which economic history is usually concerned. The very growth of social differentiation, the fact that the middle and upper classes made such advances, left the condition of the poor correspondingly worse.

OLD WOMAN COOKING EGGS by Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599–1660)

Velázquez was best known for his portraits of people at the Spanish royal court, but he also portrayed the lives and character of the lower classes—as in this painting of an unknown woman preparing food for a child. (DeA Picture Library/The Granger Collection, NYC)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 120pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 120 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

121

Social Roles of Education and Government

Education in the latter part of the sixteenth century took on an altogether new importance for the social system. One consequence of the Reformation, in both Protestant and Catholic countries, was the attempt to put a serious and effective pastor in each parish. This set up a demand for a more educated clergy. The growth of commerce made it necessary to have literate clerks and agents. Governments wanted men from both the noble and middle classes who could cooperate in large organizations, be reliable, understand fi nance, keep records, and draft proposals. There was also a widespread need for lawyers. Every profession, commercial enterprise, and government institution, in short, was seeking better-educated persons to manage and advance their interests.

The new demand for education was met by an outburst of philanthropy, which reached a high point in both England and France between about 1580 and 1640. Many endowed scholarships were established. At what would now be called a secondary level, hundreds of “grammar schools” were founded at this time in England. In France the collèges combined the work of the English grammar school with what corresponded to the fi rst year or two of university work at Oxford or Cambridge. Of the 167 most important French colleges still existing at the time of the Revolution in 1789, only 36 had been founded in the centuries before 1560, and 92 were established in the years between 1560 and 1650. Provision for girls’ schools was more sporadic, but the Ursuline sisters, for example, founded in Italy in 1535, had estab- lished about 350 convents by the year 1700 in Catholic Europe and even in Canada, in most of which the education of girls was a principal purpose and occupation of the sisters.

Dutch and Swiss Protestants founded the universities of Leyden and Geneva. New universities, both Protestant and Catholic, appeared in Germany. In Spain the multiplica- tion of universities was phenomenal. Castile, with only 2 universities dating from the Mid- dle Ages, had 20 by the early seventeenth century; Salamanca was enrolling over 5,000 students a year. Five universities also existed in Spanish America by 1600. In England, new colleges were founded at Oxford and Cambridge, and it was especially in these years that some of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges became very wealthy. Annual freshman admissions at Oxford, barely 100 in 1550, rose to over 500 in the 1630s, a fi gure not exceeded, or even equaled, during the following 200 years.

The schools, colleges, and universities drew their students from a wide range of social classes. There was less organized schooling for girls than for boys, but an intelligent and lucky boy of poor family had perhaps a better chance for education than at any time in Europe until very recently. In Spain most of the students seem to have been lesser nobles, or “hidalgos,” aspiring to positions in the church or government; but hidalgos were very numerous in Spain, over- lapping with what might be called the middle class in other countries. The French col- leges, including those operated by the Jesuits, recruited their students very widely, taking in the sons of nobles, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and even, more rarely, of peas- ants. English grammar schools did likewise; it was in later times that a few of them, like Eton and Harrow, became more exclusive public schools. As for universities, we have detailed knowledge for Oxford, which recorded the status of its students at matriculation, classifying them as “esquires,” “gentlemen,” “clergy,” and “plebeians.” From 1560 to 1660 about half of the Oxford students were plebeians, which in the language of that time could embrace the whole middle class from big merchants down to quite modest social levels. It seems certain that Oxford and Cambridge were more widely representative of the English people in 1660 than in 1900.

New schools and universities

Wider access to education

13. Changing Social Structures

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 121pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 121 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648122

Social classes were formed not only by economic forces, and not only by education, but also by the actions of governments. Government could inhibit economic growth, as in

Spain, or promote it, as in England. We have noted how kings contributed to the rise of commercial capitalism and a new business class by granting monopolies, borrowing from bankers, and issuing charters to trading com- panies. In many countries, and notably in France, many families owed their

middle-class position to the holding of government offi ces, some of which might become a form of inheritable property. It might also be the action of governments, as much as eco- nomic conditions, that defi ned or promoted distinctions between nobles and commoners, or “privileged” and “unprivileged” classes. Where peasants suffered heavily from royal taxes, it was more from political than from economic causes. The king, by “making” nobles—that is, by conferring titles of nobility on persons who did not inherit them— could raise a few in the middle class to higher status. Tax exemption could also be a sign of high social standing. The king exercised political power, but he was simultaneously the fountain of social honor at the top of “society.” The royal court formed the apex of a pyra- mid of social rank, in which each class looked up to or down upon the others. Those favored with the royal presence disdained the plain country nobility, who sniffed at the middle classes, who patronized or disparaged the hired servants, day laborers, and the poor. Looking upward in the social hierarchy, people were expected to show deference toward those with higher social status.

Government and social classes

A seventeenth-century monk is teaching in Spain at the Uni- versity of Salamanca, one of the largest European universities of the time and an example of how such institutions expanded in both Catholic and Protestant countries during the century after the Protestant Reforma- tion. Many students are more interested in their friends or other distractions than in the instructor’s lecture–which sug- gests the continuities of class- room experiences across the centuries. (Index/The Bridgeman Art Library)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 122pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 122 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

123

Eastern and Western Europe

One other remark may be made on social structure. It was in the sixteenth century that important social differences developed between eastern and western Europe. In the west, the Commercial Revolution and the gradual emergence of global trading systems brought advantageous changes to the middle class and even to many of the peasants for whom the old burdens of the manorial system were lightened. In eastern Europe, it was the lords who benefi ted from rising prices and the growing market for grain and forest products. Here too the institution of the manor existed; but the peasants’ land tenures were more precarious than in the west and more dependent on accidents of death or on the wishes of the lord. The lords in eastern Europe also tended to work a larger part of their manors with their own workforces for their own use or profi t.

The rise of prices and expansion of Baltic shipping gave the lords a strong incentive to increase their output. In northeast Germany (where such lords were called Junkers), in Poland, and as time went on in Russia, Bohemia, and Hungary, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing into the eighteenth, a vast process set in by which most of the peasantry sank into more restrictive forms of serfdom. This process was hastened in many regions by the violence and insecurity engendered by the religious wars. Typically, peasants lost their individual parcels of land or received them back on the condition that they render unpaid labor services to the lord. Usually peasants owed three or four days a week of such forced labor (called robot in Bohemia and adjoining territories), remaining free to work during the remainder of the week on their own parcels. Often the number of days of robot exacted by the lord was greater, since in eastern Europe, where central monarchy was weak and centralized legal systems were almost unknown, the lord himself was the fi nal court of appeal for his people. His people were in fact his “subjects.”

Serfdom in Germany was not called serfdom, but “hereditary subjection.” By what- ever name they were known throughout eastern Europe, serfs, or hereditary subjects of the manorial lord, could not leave the manor, marry, or learn a trade without the lord’s express permission. The lord, drawing on this large reserve of compulsory labor, using most of it for agriculture but teaching some quick-minded youths the various handicrafts that were needed on the estate, worked the land as his own venture, sold the produce, and retained the profi t.

Thus, in eastern Europe at the beginning of modern times, the rural masses lost per- sonal freedoms and lived in a poverty that was mostly unknown among the peasants to the west, poor as the latter were. In western Europe there were peasants who were already on the way to becoming small proprietors. They were free people under the law. They could migrate, marry, and learn trades as opportunity offered. Those who held land could defend it in the royal courts and raise crops and take part in the market economy on their own account. They owed the lord no forced labor—or virtually none, for the 10 days a year of corvée still found in parts of France hardly compared with the almost full-time robot of the peasant in eastern Europe.

The landlord in the east, from the sixteenth century onward, was solidly entrenched in his own domain, monarch of all he surveyed, with no troublesome bourgeoisie to annoy him (for towns were few), and with kings and territorial rulers solicitous of his wishes. Travelers from the west were impressed with the wealth of great Polish and Lithuanian magnates, with their palatial homes, private art galleries, well-stocked libraries, collections of jewels, gargantuan dinners, and lavish hospitality. The Junkers of northeast Germany lived more modestly, but enjoyed the same kind of independence and social superiority.

Serfdom in eastern Europe

13. Changing Social Structures

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 123pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 123 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648124

The growing power of wealthy landlords and the weakening position of impoverished peasants would have decisive social and political consequences for the later history of Prussia, Poland, Russia, and the Austrian world. But meanwhile, amidst all the economic growth, social development, and overseas conquests that have been described in the preceding pages, Europe was torn by the destructive ferocity of the Wars of Religion.

14. THE WARS OF CATHOLIC SPAIN: THE NETHERLANDS AND ENGLAND

The Ambitions of Philip II

Charles V, having tried in vain for 35 years to preserve religious unity in Germany, abdi- cated his many crowns and retired to a monastery in 1556, the year after the Peace of Augsburg had given the ruler of each German state the right to choose its own religion. He left Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary (or the small part of it not occupied by the Turks) to his brother Ferdinand, who was soon elected Holy Roman Emperor (see map, p. 79). All his other possessions Charles left to his son Philip, who became Philip II of Spain. The Habsburg dynasty remained thereafter divided into two branches, the Austrian and the Spanish. The two cooperated in European affairs. The Spanish branch for a century was the more important. Philip II (1556–1598) not only possessed the Spanish kingdoms but in 1580 inherited Portugal, so that the whole Iberian peninsula was brought under his rule. He possessed the 17 provinces of the Netherlands and the Free County of Burgundy, which were member states of the Holy Roman Empire, lying on its western border, adjacent to France. Milan in north Italy and Naples in the south belonged to Philip, and since he also held the chief islands, as well as Tunis, he enjoyed a naval ascendancy in the western Mediterranean that was threatened only by the Turks. For fi ve years, until the death of Queen Mary in 1558, he was titular king of England, and in 1589, in the name of his daughter, he laid claim to the throne of France. Almost all of Central and South America belonged to Philip II, and after 1580 all the Portuguese Empire as well, so that except for a few nautical daredevils all ships plying the open ocean were the Spanish king’s.

Philip II therefore naturally regarded himself as an international fi gure, and even more so because he combined the organizing methods of a new monarchy with a profound inter- est in the political and religious issues that were dividing post-Reformation Europe. He saw Spain as a leader of European Catholicism, and he believed that the advance of Span- ish power in Europe served the cause of the universal church as well as the interests of his own monarchy and the people of Spain. Yet his attempts to protect and enhance Spanish

power in Italy sometimes led to confl icts with the popes, and much of his foreign policy was directed against the Ottoman Empire in a continuing struggle for control of the Mediterranean Sea. European Protestantism was thus only one of Philip’s many international concerns.

Philip’s active participation in Europe’s religious wars should therefore be seen as part of his wider military and political campaigns to protect Spanish and Habsburg interests rather than a single-minded crusade for Catholicism. In his personal life, he was serious, devout, and hardworking. He gave the most detailed attention to the management of his far-fl ung territories. The wealth that fl owed to his country from Potosí and other mines in South America enabled Philip to pursue his goals throughout Europe and the Mediter- ranean. Meanwhile, Spain also entered upon the Golden Age of its early modern culture.

In this period, the siglo de oro, running in round dates from 1550 to 1650, Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote (in two parts, 1605, 1615) and Lope de Vega wrote his 200 dramas,

Philip’s goals

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 124pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 124 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

125

while El Greco, Murillo, and Velázquez painted their pictures, and the Jesuit Suarez composed works on philosophy and law that were read even in Protestant countries. As Cervantes showed in Don Quixote, many Spaniards were highly aware of the enduring ten- sions between high ideals and the diffi cult realities of social, political, and religious life. But Catholic traditions and the Catholic church remained a powerful force in Spanish cul- ture. The church was vitally present at every social level, from the archbishop of Toledo, who ranked above grandees and could address the king as an equal, down to a host of penniless and mendicant friars, who mixed with the poorest people in Spain.

Philip II built himself a new royal residence, the Escorial, which well expressed in solid stone its creator’s political and religious determination. Madrid itself was a new town, merely a government center, far from the worldly distractions of Toledo or Valladolid. But it was 30 miles from Madrid, on the bleak arid plateau of central Castile, overlooked by the jagged Sierra, that Philip chose to erect the Escorial. He built it in honor of St. Lawrence, on whose feast day he had won a battle against the French. The connecting buildings were laid out in the shape of a grill, since, according to martyrologists, St. Lawrence, in the year 258, had been burned alive on a grill over burning coals. Somber and vast, made of blocks of granite meant to last forever, and with its highest spire rising 300 feet from the ground, the Escorial was designed not only as a palace but as a center for religious life and the effi cient management of a vast empire. Working constantly in this somber setting, Philip II dispatched his couri- ers to Mexico, to Manila, to Vienna, and to Milan. He sent his troops off to Italy and the Netherlands, his diplomats to all the royal courts of Europe, and his spies wherever they were needed—seeking to extend the infl uence of his powerful state and (when possible) to promote the Catholicism in which he devoutly believed.

The fi rst years of Philip’s reign were also the fi rst years of Elizabeth’s reign in England, where the religious issue was still in fl ux; they were years in which Calvinism agitated the Netherlands, and when France, ruled by teenaged boys, fell into implacable civil war. Religious loyalties that knew no frontiers overlapped all political boundaries. Everywhere there were people who looked for guidance outside their own countries. Fervent Calvinists in England, France, and the Netherlands felt closer to one another than to their own monarchs or their own neighbors. Fervent Catholics, in all three countries, welcomed the support of international Catholic forces—the Jesuits, the king of Spain, the pope. National unity threatened to dissolve or was not yet formed. The sense of mutual trust between people who lived side by side was eaten away; and people who lived not only in the same country, but in the same town, on the same street, or even in the same house, turned against each other in the name of a higher religious cause.

For about fi ve years, beginning in 1567, it seemed that a resurgent Catholicism might prevail throughout Europe. Catholic forces took the offensive on all fronts. In 1567 Philip sent a new and fi rmer governor gen- eral to the Netherlands, the Duke of Alva, with 20,000 Spanish soldiers; the duke proceeded to suppress religious and political dissidents by establishing a Council of Troubles. In 1569 Philip, who was preparing for a new war with the Ottoman Turks, put down a revolt of the Moriscos (converted Muslims) in Spain. In the same year the Catho- lics of northern England, led by the Duke of Norfolk and sewing the cross of crusaders on their garments, rose in armed rebellion against their heretic queen. In the next year, 1570, the pope excommunicated Elizabeth and absolved her subjects from allegiance to her, so that English Catholics, if they wished, could henceforth in good conscience conspire to overthrow her. In 1571 the Spanish joined with the Venetians and others to win a great naval battle against the Turks, at Lepanto off the coast of Greece. Although this battle was

The Escorial

The Catholic offensive

14. The Wars of Catholic Spain: The Netherlands and England

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 125pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 125 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648126

part of the ongoing military struggle for political and economic control of the Mediter- ranean, some Spanish sailors wove a cross on their sails and portrayed their war with the Ottomans as a new Christian resistance to Islam. In the next year, 1572, the Catholic lead- ers of France, with the advice of the pope and of Philip II, decided to make an end of the Huguenots, or French Protestants. Over 3,000 were seized and put to death on the eve of St. Bartholomew’s Day in Paris alone; and this massacre was followed by other violence and lesser liquidations throughout the provinces.

But none of these victories proved enduring. The Turks soon recovered from their defeat at Lepanto and built a new fl eet. In fact, they took Tunis from Philip two years later. The Moriscos were not assimilated (they would be expelled from Spain in 1609). The English Catholic rebellion was stamped out; 800 persons were put to death by Elizabeth’s government. The revolt in the Netherlands remained very much alive, as did the French Huguenots. Twenty years later England was Protestant, the Dutch were winning indepen- dence, a Huguenot had become king of France, and the Spanish fl eet had gone to ruin in northern waters. Despite the global power and wealth of the vast Spanish Empire, Spain’s armies and naval forces would fi nally abandon their long campaign to drive the Muslims from the Mediterranean and the Protestants from northern Europe.

KING PHILIP II OF SPAIN by Titian (Italian, 1488–1576)

This portrait of the Spanish king suggests the highly focused political, religious, and military purpose in this devout Catholic monarch. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 126pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 126 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

127

The Revolt of the Netherlands

The Netherlands, or Low Countries, roughly comprised the area of the modern kingdoms of the Netherlands and Belgium and the grand duchy of Luxembourg. They consisted of 17 provinces, which in the fi fteenth century, one by one, had been inherited, purchased, or conquered by the dukes of Burgundy, from whom they were inherited by Charles V and his son, Philip II. In the mid-sixteenth century neither a Dutch nor a Belgian nationality yet existed. In the northern provinces the people spoke German dialects; in the southern provinces they spoke dialects of French; but neither here, nor elsewhere in Europe, was it felt that language boundaries had anything to do with political borders. The southern provinces had for centuries been busy commercial centers, and we have seen how Antwerp, having once fl ourished in trade with Venice, now fl ourished in trade with Lisbon. The northern provinces that were most open to the sea, the counties of Holland and Zeeland, had developed rapidly in the fi fteenth century. They had a popular literature of their own, written in their own kind of German, which came to be called Dutch. The wealth of the northern provinces was drawn from deep-sea fi shing. Amsterdam was said to be built on herring bones, and the Dutch, when they added trading to fi shing, still lived by the sea.

The northern provinces felt no tie with each other and no sense of difference from the southern provinces. Each of the 17 provinces was a small state or country in itself, and each enjoyed typical medieval liberties and privileges. The only common bond of all 17 provinces was simply that beginning with the dukes of Burgundy they had the same ruler; but since they had the same ruler, they were called upon from time to time to send delegates to an estates general, and so developed an embryonic sense of federal collaboration. The feeling of Netherlandish identity was heightened with the accession of Philip II, for Philip, unlike his father, was thought of as foreign, a Spaniard who lived in Spain; and after 1560 Spanish governors general, Spanish offi cials, and Spanish troops were seen more frequently in the Netherlands. Moreover, since the Netherlands was the crossroads of Europe, with a tradition of earnestness in religion, Protestant ideas took root very early, and after 1560, when reli- gious wars began in France, a great many French Calvinists fl ed across the borders. At fi rst, there were probably more Calvinists in the southern provinces than in the northern, more among the people whom we now call Belgians than among those whom we now call Dutch.

The Dutch revolt against Philip II was inextricably political and religious at the same time, and it became increasingly an economic struggle as the years went by. It began in 1566, when some 200 nobles of the vari- ous provinces founded a league to check the “foreign” or Spanish infl uence in the Netherlands. The league, to which both Catholic and Protestant nobles belonged, petitioned Philip II not to employ the Spanish Inquisition in the Netherlands. They feared the trouble it would stir up; they feared it as a foreign court; they feared that in the enforce- ment of its rulings the liberties of their provinces would be crushed. Philip’s agents in the Netherlands refused the petition. A mass revolt now broke out. Within a week fanatical Calvinists pillaged 400 churches, pulling down images, breaking stained-glass windows, defacing paintings and tapestries, making off with gold chalices, destroying with a fi erce contempt the symbols of “popery”—and “idolatry.” The rank and fi le for these anti- Catholic and anti-Spanish demonstrations consisted chiefl y of journeymen wage earners, whose fury was driven by social and economic grievances as well as religious belief. Before such vandalism the more moderate petitioning nobles recoiled; the Catholics among them, as well as less militant Protestants, unable to control their revolutionary followers, began to look upon the Spanish authorities with less disfavor.

The Netherlands provinces

Revolt of the Netherlands

14. The Wars of Catholic Spain: The Netherlands and England

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 127pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 127 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648128

Philip II, appalled at the sacrilege, forthwith sent in the Inquisition, the Duke of Alva, and reinforcements of Spanish troops. Alva’s Council of Troubles, nicknamed the Council of Blood, sentenced some thousands to death, levied new taxes, and confi scated the estates of a number of important nobles. These measures united people of all classes in opposi- tion. What might otherwise have been primarily a confl ict between social classes now took on the character of a national opposition. At its head emerged one of the noblemen whose estates had been confi scated by Spanish forces, William of Orange (called William the Silent), Philip II’s “stadholder” or lieutenant in the County of Holland. Beginning to claim the authority of a sovereign, William authorized ship captains to make war at sea. Fishing crews, “sea dogs,” and downright pirates began to raid the small port towns of the Nether- lands and France, descending upon them without warning, desecrating the churches, loot- ing, torturing, and killing, in a wild combination of religious rage, political hatred, and lust for booty. The Spanish reciprocated by renewing their land confi scations, their inquisitorial tortures, and their burnings and hangings. The Netherlands was torn by anarchy, revolu- tion, and civil war. No lines were clear, either political or religious. But in 1576 the anti- Spanish feeling prevailed over religious difference. Representatives of all 17 provinces, putting aside the religious question, formed a union to drive out the Spanish at any cost.

The Involvement of England

But the Netherlands revolution, though it was becoming a national revolution with politi- cal independence as its fi rst aim, was only part of the international politico-religious strug-

gle. All sorts of other interests became involved in it. Queen Elizabeth of England lent aid to the Netherlands, though for many years surreptitiously, not wishing to provoke a war with Spain, in which it was feared that English Catholics might side with the Spaniards. Elizabeth was troubled by having

on her hands an unwanted guest, Mary Queen of Scots. Mary had remained a Catholic and had been queen of France until her husband’s premature death, and queen of Scotland until driven out by irate Calvinist lords, and who—if the pope, the king of Spain, the Jesuits, and many English Catholics were to have their way—would also be queen of England instead of the usurper Elizabeth. 1 Elizabeth under these circumstances kept Mary Stuart imprisoned. Many intrigues were afoot to put Mary on the English throne, some with and some without Mary’s knowledge.

In 1576 Don Juan, hero of the Spanish naval victory at Lepanto and half-brother of Philip II, became governor general of the embattled Netherlands. He developed a grandi- ose plan to subdue the Netherlands and then to use that country as a base for an invasion of England. After overthrowing Elizabeth with Spanish troops, he would put Mary Stuart on the throne, marry her himself, and so become king of a re-Catholicized England. Thus the security of Elizabethan and Protestant England was coming to depend on the outcome of fi ghting in the Netherlands. Elizabeth signed an alliance with the Netherlands patriots.

Don Juan died in 1578 and was succeeded as governor general of the Netherlands by the prince of Parma. A diplomat as well as a soldier, Parma broke the solid front of the 17 provinces by a mixture of force and persuasion. He promised that the historic liberties of the provinces would be respected, and he appealed not only to the more zealous Catholics but also to moderates who were wearying of the struggle and repelled by mob violence and

England lends support to the Dutch

1 Mary Stuart, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, was the next lawful heir to the English throne after Elizabeth, since Elizabeth had no children.

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 128pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 128 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

129

religious vandalism. On this basis he rallied the southernmost provinces to his side. The seven northern provinces, led by Holland and Zeeland, responded by forming the Union of Utrecht in 1579. In 1581 they formally declared their independence from the king of Spain, calling themselves the United Provinces of the Nether- lands. Thus originated what was more commonly called the Dutch Repub- lic, or simply “Holland” in view of the predominance of that county among the seven. The great Flemish towns—Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges—at fi rst sided with the “Dutch” Union.

Where formerly all had been turmoil, a geographical line was now drawn. The south rallying to Philip II now faced a still rebellious north. But neither side accepted any such partition. Parma still fought to reconquer the north, and the Dutch, led by William the Silent, still struggled to clear the Spanish out of all 17 provinces. Meanwhile the two sides fought to capture the intermediate Flemish cities. When Parma moved upon Antwerp, still the leading port of the North Sea, and one from which an invasion of England could best be mounted, Elizabeth at last openly entered the war on the side of the rebels, sending 6,000 English troops to the Netherlands in 1585.

The Union of Utrecht

THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1648 This group of towns and provinces, along the lower reaches of the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers, originated in the Middle Ages as part of the Holy Roman Empire. The northern or Dutch provinces were recognized as independent of the empire in 1648. Early in the seventeenth century a political frontier emerged between the “Dutch” and “Belgian” parts, but the word “Belgium” was not used until much later, the southern or Habsburg provinces being called the Spanish Netherlands in the seventeenth century and the Austrian Netherlands in the eighteenth. The large bishopric of Liège remained a separate church-state until the French Revolution. The language frontier, then as now, ran roughly east and west somewhat south of Brussels, with French to the south and Flemish (a form of Dutch, and hence Germanic) to the north of the line.

0 10 20 30 40 50 miles

Spanish (Belgian) Netherlands

United Provinces, Independent, 1572, 1609, 1648

Church Lands

Boundary of Holy Roman Empire

Ijssel Meer

North Sea

Sc he

ldt

R.

M eu

se R.

R h

in e

R .

FRIESLAND

OVERIJSSEL

THE GENERALITYZEELAND

LUXEMBOURG

L IÈ

G EH

A IN

A U

LT

FLANDERS

ARTOIS

FRANCE

BRA BA

N T

Münster

Amsterdam

Utrecht The Hague

Ryswick

Bruges

Ghent

Lille

Calais

Brussels

Liège Aix-la-Chapelle

Cologne

Antwerp

Trier

14. The Wars of Catholic Spain: The Netherlands and England

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 129pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 129 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648130

England was now clearly emerging as the chief bulwark of Protestantism and of anti- Spanish feeling in northwestern Europe. In England itself, the popular fears of Spain, the

popular resentment against Catholic plots revolving about Mary Stuart, and the popular indignation at “foreign” and “outside” meddling in English matters produced an unprecedented sense of national solidarity. The country rallied to Protestantism and to Elizabeth, and even the Catholic minority for

the most part disowned the conspiracies against her. The English were now openly and defi - antly allied with the Protestant Dutch. Not only were they fi ghting together in the Nether- lands, but both English and Dutch sea raiders also fell upon Spanish shipping, captured the treasure ships, and even pillaged the mainland coast of northern South America. Elizabeth was negotiating with Scotland, with German Calvinists, and with French Huguenots. At the Escorial it was said that the Netherlands could only be rewon by an invasion of England, that the queen of the heretics must be dethroned, that it was cheaper to launch a gigantic attack upon England than to pay the cost of protecting Spanish galleons year after year against the depredations of piratical sea dogs.

Philip II therefore prepared to invade England. The English retorted with vigor. Mary Stuart, after almost 20 years of imprisonment, was executed in 1587; an aroused Parlia- ment, more than Elizabeth herself, demanded her life on the eve of foreign attack. Sir Francis Drake, most spectacular of the sea dogs, sailed into the port of Cádiz and burnt the very ships assembling there to join the Armada. This was jocosely described as singeing the beard of the king of Spain.

The great Armada, the armada católica, was ready early in 1588. With crosses on the sails and banners bearing the image of the Holy Virgin, it went forth as to a new Lepanto against the Turks of the north. It consisted

of 130 ships, weighing 58,000 tons, carrying 30,000 men and 2,400 pieces of artillery— the most prodigious assemblage of naval power that the world had ever seen. The plan was for the fl eet to sail to the Netherlands, from which it was to escort the prince of Parma’s army across the straits to the English coast.

But the Armada never reached the Spanish army. It was met in the English Channel by some 200 English vessels, which encircled the Spanish fl eet near Calais. The English craft—lighter, smaller, and faster, though well furnished with guns—harried the lumbering mass of the Armada, broke up its formations, and attacked its great vessels one by one.

England as bulwark of Protestantism

The Spanish Armada

The vast size of the Spanish naval armada and the English opposition to it are suggested in this illustration by an unknown artist. Both navies had crosses on the fl ags of their ships, thereby claiming divine support for their cause and indicating the reli- gious and national stakes in this epic confl ict. (Universal History Archive/ Getty Images)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 130pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 130 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

131

It found no refuge at Calais, and English fi reships drove it out again to sea. Then arose a great storm, which the English would later call the “Protestant wind.” The storm blew the broken Armada northward around the tip of Scotland, the Orkneys, the Hebrides, and northern Ireland—forbidding coasts that the Spaniards had to skirt without charts or pilots or adequate provisions, and which they strewed with their wreckage and their bones.

The Results of the Struggle

The war for control of the Netherlands went on for several years, even after Philip died in 1598. In the wars with Spain the English had, above all else, assured their national inde- pendence. They had acquired an intense national spirit, a love of “this other Eden, demi- paradise,” “this precious stone set in the silver sea,” as Shakespeare wrote; and they had become more solidly Protestant, almost unanimously set against “popery.” With the ruin of the Armada, they were more free to take to the sea; we have seen how the English East India Company was founded in 1600.

In the Netherlands, the battle lines swayed back and forth until 1609, when the two sides agreed to a Twelve Years’ Truce. By this truce the Neth- erlands were partitioned. The line of partition ran somewhat farther north than it had in Parma’s time, for the Spaniards had retaken Antwerp and other cities in the middle zone. The 7 provinces north of the line, those that had formed the Union of Utrecht in 1579, were henceforth known as Dutch. The 10 provinces south of the line were known as the Spanish Netherlands. Protestants in the south either became Catholics or fl ed to the north, so that the south (the modern Belgium) became solidly Catholic, while the number of Protestants in the north was increased. Even so, the Dutch were not a completely Protestant people, for probably as many as a third of them remained Catholic. Calvinism was the religion of most Dutch burghers and the religion favored by the state; but in the face of an exceptionally large religious minority the Dutch Netherlands adopted a policy of toleration.

Partition of the Netherlands

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 1492–1648

1492 Christopher Columbus reaches America

1519–1522 Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigates the globe

1519–1533 Spanish conquests of Native American empires in the Americas

1556–1598 Reign of King Philip II in Spain

1562–1598 Religious and civil wars in France

1565 “Manila Galleons” open Spanish trade route between Asia and America

1566 Revolt against Spanish control begins in the Netherlands

1588 Spanish Armada is destroyed off the coast of England and Scotland

1598 King Henry IV issues Edict of Nantes; grants religious rights to French Protestants

1618–1648 The Thirty Years’ War in Germany

1648 Peace of Westphalia recognizes system of sovereign European states

14. The Wars of Catholic Spain: The Netherlands and England

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 131pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 131 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648132

The southern Netherlands were ruined by almost 40 years of war. The Dutch, more- over, occupied the mouth of the Scheldt River and refused to allow oceangoing vessels to proceed upstream to Antwerp or to Ghent. The Scheldt remained “closed” for two centu- ries, and the Flemish cities never recovered their old position. Amsterdam became the com- mercial and fi nancial center of northern Europe; it retained its commercial supremacy for a century and its fi nancial supremacy for two centuries. For the Dutch, as for the English, the weakening of Spanish naval power opened the way to the sea. The Dutch East India Company was organized in 1602. Both the Dutch and the English began to found overseas colonies. The English established a colony in Virginia in 1607, the Dutch launched the colonization of New York in 1612.

As for Spain, while it remained the most formidable military power of Europe for another half-century, its political and economic decline had already begun. At the death of Philip II the monarchy was living from hand to mouth, habitually depending on the next arrival of treasure from the

Indies. The productive forces of the country were weakened by infl ation, taxation, emigra- tion, and depopulation. At Seville, for example, only 400 looms were in operation in 1621, where there had been 16,000 a century earlier. Spain suffered from the very circumstances that made it great. Qualities that developed in the centuries of religious war and in the reli- ance upon imported gold or silver from America were not those on which a more modern economy and society could easily be built. The long history of campaigns against infi dels and heretics had produced an exceptionally large number of minor aristocrats who often saw their class status as a reason to avoid various forms of mundane work. Their relative indifference to the newer, expanding institutions of European commercial activity may have infl uenced the country as a whole. In any case, many of the ablest Spaniards continued to enter the church, and there were few innovations in Spain’s political and economic life.

The very unity accomplished under Ferdinand and Isabella threatened to dissolve. After more than a century of the Inquisition people were still afraid of false Christians

and crypto-Muslims. The lingering hostility for the Moriscos thus rose again after 1600. The Moriscos included some of the best farmers and most skilled artisans in the country. They lived in almost all parts of Spain and were in no sense a “foreign” element, since they were simply the descen-

dants of those Spaniards who, in the Muslim period, which had begun 900 years before, had adopted the Muslim religion and Arabic language and culture. They had later con- verted to Christianity, but the true and pure Christians accused them of hiding their anti- Christian beliefs, of preserving in secret the rites of Islam, and of sympathizing with the North African Barbary pirates. They were thought to be clannish, marrying among them- selves; and they were so effi cient, sober, and hardworking that they outdistanced other Spaniards in competition. In 1609 some 150,000 Moriscos were driven out of Valencia; in 1610 some 64,000 were driven from Aragon; and in 1611 there were also mass expulsions from Castile. About 300,000 people were expelled from the whole of Spain. They were men, women, and children of every age and social level, but all were simply put on boats and sent off with what they could carry. A few Moriscos went to other parts of southern Europe, but most settled in North Africa. Spain, whose total population was rapidly falling in any case, thus passed through another phase of abrupt religious expulsions in which the country lost one of its most productive and socially valuable minorities.

Nor could the Christian kingdoms hold peaceably together, despite the centralizing projects of the main government minister, the Count of Olivares. Coming to power under King Philip IV in 1621, Olivares sought to curb the independence of the church, increase the king’s revenues, control the aristocracy, and send the Spanish army into both the Netherlands

The beginnings of Spanish decline

The Moriscos

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 132pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 132 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

133

and the religious wars in Germany. His policies provoked strong opposition throughout Spain. In 1640 Portugal, which had been joined to the Spanish crown since 1580 when its own ruling line had run out, reestablished its independence. That same year Catalonia rose in an armed rebellion that would continue (with French support) for almost 20 years. Catalonia was at last reconquered, but it managed to preserve its old privileges and separate identity. Castile and Catalonia were now almost as disunited, in spirit and in institutions, as in the days of Isabella and Ferdinand. They suffered, too, during the seventeenth century from a line of kings whose mental peculiarities reached the point of positive imbecility. Meanwhile, however, the might of Spain could still be felt in both Germany and France.

15. THE DISINTEGRATION AND RECONSTRUCTION OF FRANCE

Both France and Germany, in the so-called Wars of Religion, fell into an advanced state of decomposition. France was torn apart by almost 40 years of civil war between 1562 and 1598, while Germany entered a long period of civil troubles that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War between 1618 and 1648. From this decomposition France recovered in the seventeenth century, but Germany did not.

Political and Religious Disunity

The Wars of Religion in France, despite the religious savagery shown by partisans of both sides, were also the sixteenth-century recurrence of a long French political struggle. They were essentially a new form of the old phenomenon of feudal rebellion against a higher central authority. “Feudal,” in this postmedieval sense, generally refers not to nobles only, but to all sorts of groups having rights within the state, and so includes towns and prov- inces, and even craft guilds and courts of law, in addition to the church and the noble class. It remained to be seen whether all these elements could be welded into one body politic.

In France the New Monarchy, resuming the work of medieval kings, had imposed a certain unity on the country. Normally the country acted as a unit in foreign affairs. The king alone made treaties, and in war his subjects all fought on his side, if they fought at all. Internally, the royal centralization was largely admin- istrative; that is, the king and those who worked for him dealt with sub- ordinate bodies of all kinds, while these subordinate bodies remained in existence with their own functions and personnel. France by the ideas of the time was a very large country. It was three times as large as England and more than four times as populous—roughly 18 million in the sixteenth century. At a time when the trav- eler could move hardly 30 miles a day, it took three weeks of steady plodding to cross the kingdom. Local infl uence was therefore very strong. Beneath the platform of royalty there was almost as little substantial unity in France as in the Holy Roman Empire. When the empire had 300 “states,” France had some 300 areas with their own legal systems. Where the empire had free cities, France had bonnes villes, the king’s “good towns,” each with its stubbornly defended corporate rights. Where the empire had middle-sized states like Bavaria, France had provinces as great as some European kingdoms—Brittany, Burgundy, Provence, Languedoc—each ruled by the French king, to be sure, but each with its own identity, autonomy, laws, courts, tariffs, taxes, and parliament or provincial estates. To all this diversity, in France as in Germany, was now added diversity of religion. Calvin himself was by birth and upbringing a Frenchman; and Calvinism spread very rapidly in France during the 1550s.

Centralization vs. localism

15. The Disintegration and Reconstruction of France

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 133pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 133 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648134

Nor was France much attached to a papal or international Catholicism. The French clergy had long struggled for its national or Gallican liberties; the French kings had dealt rudely with popes, ignored the Council of Trent, and allied for political reasons with both the Lutherans and the Turks. Since 1516 the king of France had the right to nominate the French bishops. The fact that both the French monarchy and clergy already felt indepen- dent of Rome held them back from the revolutionary solutions of Protestantism. The Prot- estantism that did spread in France therefore developed without government support and embraced the most radical theological wing of the Reformation, namely Calvinism, which preached at kings, attacked bishops, smashed religious images, and desecrated Catholic churches. Within the main countries that became Protestant—England, north Germany, even the Netherlands—this extreme Protestantism was the doctrine of a minority. In France there was no middle-of-the-road Protestantism, no broad and comfortable Anglicanism, no halfway Lutheranism inspired by governments; and in the long run, as will be seen, the middle of the road was occupied by Catholics.

At fi rst, however, the Huguenots, as the French Calvinists were called, though always a minority, were neither a small group nor modest in their demands. In a class analysis, it is clear that it was chiefl y the nobility that

was attracted to Protestantism, though of course it does not follow that most French Protes- tants were nobles, since the nobility was a small class. More than a third, and possibly almost a half, of the French nobility was Protestant in the 1560s or 1570s. Frequently the seigneur, or lord of one or more manors, believed that he should have the right to regulate religion on his own estates, as the princes of Germany decided the religion of their own ter- ritories. It thus happened that a lord might defy the local bishop, put a Calvinist minister in his village church, throw out the images, simplify the sacraments, and have the service con- ducted in French. In this way peasants also became Huguenots. Occasionally peasants turned Huguenot without encouragement by the lord. It was chiefl y in southwestern France that Protestantism spread as a general movement affecting whole areas. But in all parts of the country, north as well as south, many towns converted to Protestantism. Usually this meant that the bourgeois oligarchy, into whose hands town government had generally fallen, went over to Calvinism and thereupon banned Catholic services. The journeymen wage earners might follow along; or estranged by class differences arising from within the local economy, they might remain attached to their old priests. In general, the unskilled laboring population probably remained the least touched of all classes by Calvinist doctrine.

Both Francis I and Henry II opposed the spread of Calvinism—as did Lutheran and Anglican rulers—for Calvinism, a kind of grassroots move- ment in religion, rising spontaneously among laity and reforming ministers, seemed to threaten not only the powers of monarchy but also the very idea of

a nationally established church. The fact that in France the nobility, a traditionally ungov- ernable class, fi gured prominently in the movement only made it look more like political or feudal rebellion. Persecution of Huguenots, with burnings at the stake, began in the 1550s.

Then in 1559 King Henry II was accidentally killed in a tournament. He left three sons, of whom the eldest in 1559 was only 15. Their mother, Henry’s widow, was Catherine de’ Medici, an Italian woman who brought to France some of the polish of Renaissance Italy, along with some of its taste for political intrigue, with which she attempted to govern the coun- try for her royal sons. (Their names were Francis II, who died in 1560, Charles IX, who died in 1574, and Henry III, who lasted until 1589.) With no fi rm hand in control of the monarchy, the country fell apart; and in the ensuing chaos both Catholic and Huguenot factions tried to get control of the youthful monarchs for their own purposes. The Huguenots, under persecution,

The Huguenots

Opposition to Calvinism

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 134pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 134 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

135

were too strong a minority to go into hiding. Counting among their number a third or more of the professional warrior class, the nobles, they took naturally and aggressively to arms.

The Civil and Religious Wars

The civil wars in sixteenth-century France were not wars in which one region of a country takes up arms against another, each retaining some apparatus of government, as in the American Civil War or the civil wars of the seventeenth century in England. They were civil wars of the kind fought in the absence of government. Roving bands of armed men, without territorial base or regular means of subsistence, wandered about the country, fi ght- ing and plundering, and joining or separating from other similar bands that were quickly formed or quickly dissolved. The changing economic and social conditions of the era detached many people from their old routines and threw them into a life of adventure. The more prominent leaders could thus easily obtain followers, and at the coming of such cohorts the peasants usually took to the woods, while bourgeois townspeople would lock the gates of their cities. Peasants would form protective leagues, like vigilantes; and even small towns maintained diminutive armies.

The Huguenots were led by various personages of rank, such as Admiral de Coligny and Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, a small independent kingdom at the foot of the Pyrenees between Spain and France. A pronounced Catholic party arose under the Guise family, headed by the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. Catherine de’ Medici was left in the middle, opposed like all monarchs to Calvinism but unwilling to fall under the domination of the Guises. While the Guises wished to extirpate heresy, they wished even more to govern France. Among the Huguenots some fought for local liberties in religion, while the more ardent spirits hoped to drive “idolatry” and “popery” out of all France, and indeed out of the world itself. Catherine de’ Medici for a time tried to play the two parties against each other. But in 1572, fearing the growing infl uence of Coligny over the king, and taking advantage of a great concourse of infl uential Huguenots in Paris to celebrate the marriage of Henry of Navarre, she decided to rid herself of the Huguenot leaders at a single blow. In the resulting massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day some thousands of Huguenots were dragged from their beds after midnight and unceremoniously murdered. Coligny was killed; Henry of Navarre escaped by temporarily changing his religion.

This outrage only aroused Huguenot fury and led to a renewal of civil war throughout the country, with mounting atrocities committed by both sides. The armed bands slaugh- tered each other and terrorized noncombatants. Both parties hired companies of mercenary soldiers, mainly from Germany. Spanish troops invaded France at the invitation of the Guises. Protestant towns, such as Rouen and La Rochelle, appealed for armed support from Elizabeth of England, reminding her that kings of England had once reigned over their parts of France; but Elizabeth was too preoccupied with her own problems to give more than very sporadic and insignifi cant assistance. Neither side could subdue the other, and hence there were numerous truces, during which fi ghting still fl ared up, since no one had the power to impose peace.

Gradually, mainly among the more perfunctory Catholics, but also among moderate Protestants, there developed still another group who thought of themselves as the “politicals” or politiques. The politiques con- cluded that too much was being made of religion, that no doctrine was important enough to justify everlasting war, that perhaps after all there might be room for two churches, and that

St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre

The Politiques

15. The Disintegration and Reconstruction of France

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 135pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 135 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648136

what the country needed above all else was civil order. Theirs was a secular rather than a religious view. They believed that people lived primarily in the state, not in the church. They were willing to overlook the religious ideas of people in different churches if such persons would simply obey the king and go peaceably about their business. To escape anarchy they put their hopes in the institution of monarchy. Henry of Navarre, now again a Protestant, was at heart a politique. Another was the political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530–1596), the fi rst thinker to develop the modern theory of sovereignty. He held that in every society there must be one power strong enough to give law to all others, with their consent if pos- sible, without their consent if necessary. Thus from the disorders of the religious wars in France was germinated the idea of royal absolutism and of the sovereign state.

The End of the Wars: Reconstruction under Henry IV

In 1589 both Henry III, the reigning king, and Henry of Guise, the Catholic party chief who was trying to depose him, were assassinated by a partisan of the other. The throne now came by legal inheritance to the third of the three Henrys, Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot chieftain. He reigned as Henry IV. Most popular and most amiably remembered of all French kings, except for medieval St. Louis, he was the fi rst of the Bourbon dynasty, which was to last until the French Revolution.

The civil wars did not end with the accession of Henry IV. The Catholic party refused to recognize him, set up a pretender against him, and called in the Spaniards. Henry, the politique, sensed that the majority of the French people were still Catholic and that the

THE ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S DAY MASSACRE by François Dubois (French, 1529–1584)

This massacre of Protestants in Paris in 1572 sparked further atrocities and massacres by both sides in France’s religious wars. As the Huguenot painter François Dubois suggested in this portrayal of the killings, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre also became an enduring symbol of the brutal confl icts that divided the nation throughout the late sixteenth century. (De Agostini/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 136pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 136 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

137

Huguenots were not only a minority but, after 30 years of civil strife, an increasingly unpop- ular minority. Paris especially, Catholic throughout the wars, refused to admit the heretic king within its gates. Supposedly remarking that “Paris is well worth a Mass,” Henry IV in 1593 abjured the Calvinist faith, and subjected himself to the elaborate processes of papal absolution. Thereupon the politiques and less excitable Catholics consented to work with him. The Huguenots, at fi rst elated that their leader should become king, were now not only outraged by Henry’s abjura- tion but also alarmed for their own safety. They demanded positive guarantees for their personal security as well as protection of their religious liberty.

Henry IV in 1598 responded by issuing the Edict of Nantes. The Edict granted to every seigneur, or noble who was also a manorial lord, the right to hold Protestant services in his own household. It allowed Protestant- ism in towns where it was in fact the prevailing form of worship, and in any case in one town of each bailliage (a unit corresponding somewhat to the English shire) throughout the country; but it barred Protestant churches from Catholic episcopal towns and from a zone surrounding and including the city of Paris. It promised that Protestants should enjoy the same civil rights as Catholics, the same chance for public offi ce, and access to the Catholic universities. In certain of the superior law courts it created “mixed chambers” of both Protestants and Catholics—somewhat as if a stated minority representation were to be legally required in United States federal courts today. The Edict also gave Protestants their own means of defense, granting them about 100 fortifi ed towns to be held by Protestant garrisons under Protestant command.

The Huguenot minority, reassured by the Edict of Nantes, became less of a rebellious element within the state. The majority of the French people, however, viewed the Edict with suspicion. The parlements, or supreme law courts, of Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Aix, and Rennes all refused to recognize it as the law of the land. It was the king who forced toleration upon the country. He silenced the parlements and subdued Catholic opposition by doing favors for the Jesuits. France’s chief minority was thus protected by the central government, not by popular wishes. Where in England the Catholic minority had no rights at all, and in Germany the religious question was settled only by cutting the country into small and hostile fragments, in France a compromise was effected, by which the Protestant minority had both individual and territorial rights. A considerable number of French states- men, generals, and other important persons in the seventeenth century were Protestants.

Henry IV, having appeased the religious controversy, did everything that he could to let the country gradually recover from its decades of civil war. His ideal, as he breezily put it, was a “chicken in the pot” for every Frenchman. He worked also to restore the ruined government, to collect taxes, pay offi cials, discipline the army, and supervise the adminis- tration of justice. Roads and bridges were repaired and new manufactures were introduced under mercantilist principles. Never throughout his reign of 21 years did he summon the Estates General. A country that had just hacked itself to pieces in civil war was scarcely able to govern itself, and so, under Henry IV, the foundations of the later royal absolutism of the Bourbons were laid down.

Henry IV was assassinated in 1610 by a crazed fanatic who believed him a menace to the Catholic church. Under his widow, Marie de’ Medici, the nobility and upper Catholic clergy again grew restless and forced the summoning of the Estates General, in which so many confl icting and mutually distrustful interests were represented that no program could be adopted. Marie dismissed them in 1615 to the general relief of all concerned. No Estates General of the kingdom as a whole thereafter met until the French Revolution. Remembering the violent

Henry IV accepts Catholicism

The Edict of Nantes

The foundations of absolutism

15. The Disintegration and Reconstruction of France

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 137pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 137 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648138

chaos of the previous century, most people in France, even many nobles, became more willing to accept a national government that would be conducted by and through the king.

Cardinal Richelieu

In the name of Marie de’ Medici and her young son, Louis XIII, the control of affairs gradu- ally came into the hands of an ecclesiastic, Cardinal Richelieu. In the preceding generation Richelieu might have been called a politique. It was the state, not the church, whose inter- ests he worked to further. He tried to strengthen the state economically by mercantilist edicts. He attempted to draw impoverished gentlemen into trade by allowing them to engage in maritime commerce without loss of noble status. For wholesale merchants, as an incen- tive, he made it possible to become nobles, in return for payments into the royal exchequer. He founded and supported many commercial companies on the Anglo-Dutch model.

For a time, however, it seemed that civil war might break out again. Nobles still feuded with each other and evaded the royal jurisdiction. Richelieu prohibited private warfare and ordered the destruction of all forti- fi ed castles not manned and needed by the king himself. He even prohibited

dueling, a custom much favored by the nobles of the day, but regarded by Richelieu as a mere remnant of private war. The Huguenots, too, with their own towns and their own armed forces under the Edict of Nantes, had become something of a state within the state. In 1627 the Duke of Rohan led a Huguenot rebellion, based in the city of La Rochelle, which received military support from the English. Richelieu after a year suppressed the rebellion and in 1629, by the Peace of Alais, amended the Edict of Nantes. For this highly secularized cardinal of the Catholic church it was agreeable for the Protestants to keep their religion but not for them to share in the instruments of political power. The Huguenots lost, in 1629, their fortifi ed cities, their Protestant armies, and all their military and territorial rights, but in their religious and civil rights they were not offi cially disturbed for another 50 years.

The French monarchy, having reestablished its centralizing powers and aspirations after the civil wars, now began to revive the old foreign policy of Francis I, who had opposed on every front the European supremacy of the house of Habsburg. The Spanish power still encircled France at the Pyrenees, in the Mediterranean, in the Free County of Burgundy (the Franche-Comté), and in Belgium. The Austrian branch had pretensions to supremacy in Germany and all central Europe. Richelieu found his opportunity to assail the Habsburgs in the civil and religious struggles that now began to affl ict Germany.

16. THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR, 1618–1648: THE DISINTEGRATION OF GERMANY

The Holy Roman Empire extended from France on the west to Poland and Hungary on the east. It included the Czechs of Bohemia and sizable French-speaking populations in what are now Belgium, Lorraine, eastern Burgundy, and western Switzerland; but with these exceptions the empire consisted of people who spoke various dialects of the German language (see maps, pp. 79, 144–145). For most people at this time, however, language was far less important than religion as the uniting or shared identity of a community; and in religion the empire was almost evenly divided. Where in England, after stabilization set in, Roman Catholics sank to a minority of some 3 percent, and in France the Huguenots fell to not much over 5 percent, in Germany there was no true minority, and hence no

Renewed threat of civil war

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 138pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 138 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

139

majority, and religion gave no foundation for German or imperial unity. Possibly there were more Protestants than Catholics in the empire in 1600, for not only was Protestantism the state religion in many of the 300 states, but individual Protestants were also numerous in the legally Catholic states of the Austrian Habsburgs. Bohemia had a Protestant major- ity, rooted in the Czech people. Farther east, outside the Holy Roman Empire, the Hungar- ian nobles were mainly Protestant, and Transylvania, in the elbow of the Carpathian Mountains, was an active center of Calvinism.

In 1500 Germany had led in many aspects of European life, but by 1600 it had lost much of its former cultural creativity and leadership. Where both Catholics and Calvinists recognized international affi liations, Luther- ans were suspicious of the world outside the Lutheran states of Germany and Scandinavia, and hence suffered from a cultural isolation. The German universities, both Lutheran and Catholic, attracted fewer students than formerly, and their intellectual effort was consumed in combative dogmatics, each side demonstrating the truth of its own ideas. Many of the most deadly, large-scale campaigns against witchcraft took place in the small German states, and more women were burned as witches in Germany than in other countries in western Europe. The commerce of south Germany and the Rhineland was in decay, both because of the shift of trade to the Atlantic and because the Dutch controlled the mouth of the Rhine in their own interests. German bankers, such as the Fuggers, were of slight importance after 1600. Capital was now being formed in the centers of maritime trade.

Background of the Thirty Years’ War

The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had provided that in each state the government could pre- scribe the religion of its subjects. In general, over the following decades, the Lutherans made considerable gains, putting Lutheran administrators into the church states, or “secularizing” them and converting them into lay principalities. In addition, Calvinism spread into Germany. Though Calvinists had no rights under the Peace of Augsburg, a number of states became Calvinist. One of these was the Palati- nate, important because it was strategically placed across the middle Rhine, and because its ruler, the Elector Palatine, was one of the seven persons who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1608 the Protestant states, urged on by the Elector Palatine, formed a Protestant union to defend their gains. To obtain support, they negotiated with the Dutch, with the English, and with Henry IV of France. In 1609 a league of Catholic German states was orga- nized by Bavaria. It looked for help from Spain.

The Germans were thus falling apart, or rather coming together, into two parties in anticipation of religious confl icts, and each party solicited foreign assistance against the other. Other issues were also maturing. The Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the Dutch, signed in 1609, was due to expire in 1621. The Spanish (whose international military power was still unaffected by internal decline) were again preparing to crush the Dutch Republic. Since the Dutch insisted on independence, a renewal of the Dutch-Spanish war appeared to be inevitable. The Spanish also wished to consolidate the Habsburg position in central Europe and enhance their access to the Netherlands by gaining control of new territories along the Rhine River and in various Swiss cantons (see map, pp. 144–145).

These Spanish designs in the Rhineland and Switzerland naturally aroused the opposi- tion of France. Moreover, the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family was slowly bestir- ring itself to eradicate Protestantism in its own domains and to turn the Holy Roman Empire into a more modern type of state. The idea of a strong power in Germany was

German decline

Lutheran gains

16. The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648: The Disintegration of Germany

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 139pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 139 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648140

abhorrent to the French. Through opposition to the Habsburgs, France was again put in the position of chief protector of Protestantism. France was a giant of Europe, over four times as populous as England, over 10 times as populous as Sweden or the Dutch Republic, incomparably more populous than any single German state. And France after 1600 was at last relatively unifi ed within.

The Thirty Years’ War, resulting from all these pressures, was therefore exceedingly complex. It was a German civil war fought over the Catholic- Protestant issue. It was also a German civil war fought over constitutional issues, between the emperor striving to build up the central power of the

empire and the member states struggling to maintain independence. These two civil wars by no means coincided, for Catholic and Protestant states were alike in objecting to impe- rial control. It was also an international war, between France and the Habsburgs, between Spain and the Dutch, with the kings of Denmark and Sweden and the prince of Transyl- vania becoming involved, and with all these outsiders fi nding allies within Germany, on whose soil most of the battles were fought. The wars were further complicated by the fact that many of the generals were soldiers of fortune who aspired to create principalities of their own and who fought or refused to fi ght whenever it suited their own convenience.

The Four Phases of the War

The fi ghting began in Bohemia. It is in fact customary to divide the war into four phases, the Bohemian (1618–1625), the Danish (1625–1629), the Swedish (1630–1635), and the Swedish-French (1635–1648).

In 1618 the Bohemians, or Czechs, fearing the loss of their Protestant liberties, dealt with two emissaries from the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias (who was also their king), by a method occasionally used in that country—throwing them out of the window. After this “defenestration of Prague” the king-emperor sent troops to restore his authority, whereupon the Bohemians deposed him and elected a new king. In order to obtain Protestant assistance, they chose the Calvinist Elector Palatine, the head of the Prot- estant Union, who assumed the title of Frederick V. He brought aid to the Bohemians from the Protestant Union, the Dutch, and the Protestant prince of Transylvania (who was at this time supported by the Ottoman Empire). The Emperor Ferdinand, Matthias’s successor, assisted by money from the pope, by Spanish troops sent from Milan, and by the forces of Catholic Bavaria, managed to overwhelm the Bohemians at the battle of the White Moun- tain in 1620. Frederick fl ed, jeered or pitied as the “winter king.” His ancestral domains in the Palatinate were overrun by the Spaniards.

The Habsburgs now set out to reconquer and revolutionize Bohemia. The Emperor Ferdinand got himself elected as king of Bohemia and soon confi scated the estates of almost half the Bohemian nobles. He granted these lands as endowments for Catholic churches and monasteries or as gifts to adventurers of all nationalities who had entered his service and who became the new landed aristocracy of Bohemia.

With Protestant fortunes at a low ebb, and the Protestant Union itself dissolved in 1621, the lead in Protestant affairs was now taken by the king of Denmark, who was also Duke of Holstein, a state of the Holy Roman Empire. With a little aid from the Dutch and English, and with promises from Richelieu, he entered the fray. Against him the Emperor Ferdinand raised another army, or, rather, commissioned Albert of Wallenstein to raise one on his own private initiative. Wallenstein assembled a force of professional fi ghters, of all nationalities, who lived by pillage rather than by pay. His army was his personal

The complexity of the Thirty Years’ War

The Bohemian war

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 140pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 140 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

141

instrument, not the emperor’s, and he therefore followed a policy of his own, which was so tortuous and well concealed that the name of Wallenstein has always remained an enigma. Wallenstein and other imperial generals soon defeated the king of Denmark, reached the Baltic coast, and even invaded the Danish peninsula.

The full tide of the Counter Reformation now fl owed over Germany. Not only was Catholicism again seeping into the Palatinate, and again fl ooding Bohemia, but it also rolled northward into the inner recesses of the Lutheran states. By the Edict of Restitution, in 1629, the emperor declared all church territories secularized since 1552 automatically restored to the Catholic church. Some of these territories had been Protestant since the old- est person could remember. Terror swept over Protestant Germany. It seemed that the whole Protestant Reformation, now a century old, might be undone.

The Habsburg-Catholic advance raised alarms across northern Europe, especially in France and Sweden. Richelieu, however, was still putting down fractious nobles and Huguenots. He had not yet consolidated France to his satisfaction and believed that France, without fi ghting itself, could coun- ter the Habsburg ambitions through the use of allies. He sent diplomats to help extricate the king of Sweden from a war with Poland, and he promised him fi nancial assistance, which soon rose to a million livres a year in return for the maintenance in Germany of 40,000 Swedish troops. The Dutch subsidized the Swedes with some 50,000 fl orins a month.

The king of Sweden was Gustavus Adolphus, a ruler of superlative ability, who had conciliated all parties in Sweden and had extended Swed- ish holdings on the east shore of the Baltic. Using Dutch and other military experts, he had created the most modern army of the time, noted for its fi rm

French and Swedish alarm

Gustavus Adolphus

The violence of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, depicted here in a vivid illustration by Jacques Callot entitled simply The Hanging Tree (1633), produced terror, bitter memories, and political divisions in central Europe that lasted long after the fi ghting fi nally ended in 1648. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

16. The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648: The Disintegration of Germany

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 141pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 141 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648142

discipline, high courage, and mobile cannon. Himself a religious man, he had his troops march to battle singing Lutheran hymns. He was ideally suited to be the Protestant cham- pion, a role he now willingly took up, landing in Germany in 1630. Richelieu, besides giving fi nancial help, negotiated with the Catholic states of Germany, playing on their fears of imperial centralization and seeking to isolate the emperor, against whom the well- disciplined Swedish army was now hurled.

The Swedes, with military aid from Saxony, won a number of spectacular victories, at Breitenfeld in 1631 and Lützen in 1632, where, however, Gustavus Adolphus was killed. His chancellor, Oxenstierna, carried on. The Swedish army penetrated into Bohemia and as far south as the Danube. But the brilliant Swedish victories came to little. Both sides were weakened by disagreement. Wallenstein, who disliked the Spanish infl uence in Germany, virtually ceased to fi ght the Swedes and Saxons, with whom he even entered into private talks hoping to create an independent position for himself. He was fi nally disgraced by the emperor and assassinated by one of his own staff. On the Swedish-Saxon side, the Saxons decided to make a separate peace. Saxony therefore signed with the emperor the Peace of Prague of 1635. The other German Protestant states concurred in it and withdrew their sup- port from the Swedes. The emperor, by largely annulling the Edict of Restitution, allayed Protestant apprehensions. The Swedes were left isolated in Germany. It seemed that the German states were coming together, that the religious wars might be nearing an end. But, in fact, in 1635, the Thirty Years’ War was still evolving into a protracted fi nal phase. Neither France nor Spain wished peace or reconciliation in Germany.

Richelieu renewed his assurances to the Swedes, paid subsidies even to the wealthy Dutch, hired a German princeling, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, to maintain an army of Germans in the French service, and at last brought Catholic France into open support of the German Protestants.

So the French fi nally moved toward the Rhine, though not at fi rst with the success for which the French or Protestants had hoped. The Spanish, from their bases in Belgium and Franche-Comté, drove instead deep into

France. Champagne and Burgundy were ravaged, and Paris itself was seized with panic. The Spanish also raided the south. The French had a taste of the plunder, murder, burnings, and stealing of cattle by which Germany had been affl icted. But the French soon turned the tables. When Portugal and Catalonia rebelled against Philip IV in 1640, France immedi- ately recognized the independence of Portugal under the new royal house of Braganza— as did England, Holland, and Sweden with equal alacrity. French troops streamed over the Pyrenees into Catalonia, spreading the usual devastation. Richelieu even recognized a Catalan republic.

In Germany the last or Swedish-French phase of the war was not so much a civil war among Germans as an international struggle on German soil. Few German states now sided with the French and Swedes. A feeling of national resentment against foreign inva- sion even seemed to develop.

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648

Peace talks began in 1644 in Westphalia, at the two towns of Münster and Osnabrück. The German states were crying for peace, for a fi nal religious settlement, and for “reform” of the Holy Roman Empire. France and Sweden insisted that the German states should indi- vidually take part in the negotiations, a disintegrating principle that the German princes eagerly welcomed and which the emperor vainly resisted. To Westphalia, therefore,

European involvement

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 142pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 142 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

143

hundreds of diplomats and negotiators now repaired, representing the empire, its member states, Spain, France, Sweden, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Portuguese, the Venetians, numerous other Italians, and the pope. There had been no such European congress since the Council of Constance, and the fact that a European assemblage had in 1415 dealt with affairs of the church, and now in the 1640s dealt with affairs of the state, war, and power, was a measure of the secularization that had come over Europe.

The negotiations dragged on, because the armies were still fi ghting, and after each battle one side or the other raised its terms. France and Spain refused to make peace with each other at all and in fact remained at war until 1659. But for the Holy Roman Empire a settlement was reached in 1648 in the two treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, which became commonly known as the Peace of Westphalia.

The Peace of Westphalia represented a general checkmate to the Catholic Counter Reformation in Germany. It not only renewed the terms of the Peace of Augsburg, grant- ing each German state the right to determine its own religion, but it also added Calvinism to Lutheranism and Catholicism as an acceptable faith. On the controversial issue of church territories secularized after 1552 the Protestants won a complete victory; Catholic claims to the territories were abandoned.

The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been advanced by the drawing of internal religious frontiers in the days of Luther, was now confi rmed in politics and international law. Borderlands of the empire fell away. The Dutch and Swiss ceased to belong to it, and both the United Provinces and Swiss cantons (or Helvetic Body) were recognized as sovereign and inde- pendent. From the disintegrating western frontier of the Holy Roman Empire the French cut off small pieces, receiving sovereignty over three Lorraine bishoprics, which they had occupied for a century, and certain rights in Alsace that were so confused that they later led to trouble. The king of Sweden received new territories in northern Germany, thus adding to Sweden’s trans-Baltic possessions.

It was in the new constitution of the empire itself, not in territorial changes, that the greatest victory of the French and their Swedish and Dutch allies was to be found. The German states, over 300 in number, became virtually sovereign. Each received the right to conduct diplomacy and make trea- ties with foreign powers. The Peace of Westphalia further stipulated that no laws could be made by the empire, no taxes could be raised, no soldiers could be recruited, no war could be declared or peace terms ratifi ed except with the consent of the imperial estates—the 300-odd princes, ecclesiastics, and free cities in the Reichstag assembled. Since it was well known that agreement on any such matters was impossible, the principle of self- government, or of medieval constitutional liberties, was used to destroy the empire itself as an effective political entity. While most other European countries were consolidating under royal absolutism, Germany sank back toward fragmentation and localism.

The Peace of Westphalia blocked the Counter Reformation, frustrated the Austrian Habsburgs, and forestalled for almost two centuries any movement toward German national unifi cation. Within Europe as a whole, however, it marked the advent in international law of the modern system of sovereign states. The diplomats who assembled at Westphalia represented independent powers that recognized no superior or common tie. No one any longer pretended that Europe had any signifi - cant religious or political unity. Statesmen delighted in the absence of any such unity, in which they sensed the menace of “universal monarchy.”

Lengthy peace negotiations

Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire

Germany fragmented

System of sovereign states

16. The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648: The Disintegration of Germany

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 143pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 143 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648144

Austrian Habsburgs

Spanish Habsburgs

Swedish Dominions

Brandenburg-Prussia

Church Lands

Ottoman Empire controlled lands

Boundary of the Holy Roman Empire

0 100 200 300 miles

A d r i a t i c S e a

A T L A N T I C O C E A N

N o r t h S e a

Ba l t i

c

Se a

E N G L I S H C H A N N E L

M e d i t e r r a n e a n

S e

a

Vistu la R.

C A T A

L O N I

A

NAVARRE

A R A G

O N

PORTUGAL (TO SPAIN

1580–1640)

C A S T I L E

ALGERIA TUNISIA

SA VO

Y

CORSICA (Genoa)

SARDINIA

SICILY

MALTA (Knights of St. John)

IONIAN I. (Venice)

NAPLES

PAPAL STATES

A LBA

N IA

MONT

BOSNIA

MORAVIA BOHEMIA

SILESIA

AU ST

RI A

BRAND ENBUR

G

SAXONY

BAVARIA

SWISS CANTONS FR

AN CH

E-

CO MT

É

SPANISH NETH.

PALATINATE

DENMARK

KINGDOM OF THE TWO SICILIES

TUSCANY

PIED M

O N

T

GREAT POLAND

PO M

ER A

LI ABR

AN

DE NB

UR G-PR

USSIA

(TO SWEDEN, 1658)

SCHLESWIG

HOLSTEIN

HANOVER

MINOR

GERMAN STATES LO

RR AI

NE

AL SA

CE

KI N

G D

O M

O F

HU NG

AR Y

SLAVONIA

SER

SWEDISH POMERANIA

REPUBLIC

OF VENICE

MINORCA

MAJORCA

C

DUC OF

PRUS

LITTLE POLAND

P Y R E N E E S

B A L E A

R I C I .

S W E D E N

NORWAY

SCOTLAND

IRELAND

B A R B A R Y S T A T E S

FEZ AND MOROCCO

KINGDOM OF DENMARK AND NORWAY

ENGLAND

(COMMONWEALTH 1649–1660 UNITED KINGDOM 1707)

F R A N C E

S P A I N

H U N G A

SHETLAND I.

ORKNEY I.

UNITED PROVINCES

Dublin

Edinburgh

Liverpool

London

Rennes Paris

Rouen

Orléans

Bordeaux

Montauban

Avignon

Marseille

Barcelona

La Coruña

Valladolid

Escorial

Oporto

Lisbon Toledo

Madrid

Seville MalagaCadiz

Valencia

Oran (Spain)

Algiers

Tunis

Rome

Naples

Florence

Venice

Parma Milan

Belgrade

Murcia

Ceuta(Spain) Tangier

Bari

Aquila

Bristol Ryswick Amsterdam

Utrecht

Bremen

Verden Osnabrück

Lübeck Stralsund

Stettin

Leipzig

Dresden

Belfast

Zara

Nantes

Lyon

Saragossa

Mérida

León

Helsi

Stockholm

Danzig

Palermo

Genoa

Strasbourg

Vienna Budap

Augsburg

Brussels

Cologne Breslau

CracoPrague ManzTrier

Metz

Münster

Hamburg

Berlin Magdeburg

Copenhagen

Warsaw

Bergen

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 144pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 144 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

145

EUROPE, 1648 This map shows the European states at the time of the Peace of Westphalia. A plurality of inde- pendent sovereign states was henceforth consid- ered normal. The plurality of religions was also henceforth taken for granted within Europe as a whole, though each state continued to require or favor religious uniformity within its borders. By weakening the Habsburgs and furthering the dis- integration of Germany, the Peace of Westphalia opened the way for a (short-term) seventeenth- century expansion of the Ottoman Empire in southeastern Europe and the later political ascen- dancy of France.

16. The Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648: The Disintegration of Germany

Aegean Sea

Black Sea

L I T H U A N I A

GREECE

CRETE (Venice)

RHODES (Turkish)

CYPRUS (Venice)

O T

T O

M A

N

E M

P I R E

CRIMEA

TENEGRO

WALLACHIA

TRANSYLVANIA BESSARABIA

DOBRUJA

RBIA

BULGARIA

MELLIA

FINLAND

ESTONIA

LIVONIA

COURLAND

HY F SIA

YEDISAN

GALICIA PODOLIA

MOLDAVIA

INGRIA

C A R

P A

T H

I A N

S

R U S S I A

P O L A N D

R Y

ngfors

Riga

Minsk

Salonica

Constantinople

Smyrna

est

ow Lemberg

Bucharest

Kiev

Moscow

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 145pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 145 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 3 The Atlantic World, Commerce, and Wars of Religion, 1560–1648146

Europe was understood to consist of a large number of unconnected sovereignties, free and detached atoms, or states, which acted according to their own laws, following their own political interests, forming and dissolving alliances, exchanging embassies and legations, alternating between war and peace, shifting position with a shifting balance of power.

Physically Germany was wrecked by the Thirty Years’ War. Cities were sacked by mercenary soldiers with a rapacity that their commanders could not control; or the commanders themselves, drawing no supplies from their home governments, systematically looted whole areas to maintain their armies. Magdeburg was besieged ten times; Leipzig, fi ve. In one woolen town of Bohemia, with a population of 6,000 before the wars, the citizens fl ed and disappeared, the houses collapsed, and eight years after the peace only 850 persons were found there. The peasants, murdered, put to fl ight, or tortured by soldiers to reveal their few valuables, ceased to farm; agriculture was ruined; starvation followed, and with it came pestilence. Even revised modern estimates allow that in many extensive parts of Germany as much as a third of the population may have perished. The effects of fi re, disease, undernourishment, homelessness, and exposure in the seventeenth century were terrible because of the lack of means to combat them. The horrors that civilians have suffered in modern wars are thus not wholly different from horrors that men and women experienced in the past.

Germany as such, physically wrecked and politically cut into small pieces, ceased for a long time to play any signifi cant part in European affairs. A kind of political and cultural vacuum existed in central Europe. On the one hand, the western or Atlantic peoples— French, English, Dutch—began in the seventeenth century to take the lead in European politics, trade, and culture. On the other hand, in eastern Germany, around Berlin and Vienna, new and only half-German centers of power began to form. These themes will be traced in the two following chapters.

With the close of the Thirty Years’ War the Wars of Religion came to an end. While religion remained an issue in some later confl icts and within some countries, it was never again an important cause of confl icts in the transnational political affairs of Europe as a whole. In general, by the close of the seventeenth century, the division between Protestant and Catholic had become stabilized. Neither side any longer expected to make territorial gains at the expense of the other. Both the Protestant and the Catholic reformations were accom- plished facts. The political struggle for territory, wealth, and strategic alliances had become secularized in that “reasons of state” now prevailed over religious allegiances in shaping both the foreign policies of governments and the military confl icts of sovereign powers.

For suggested further readings and useful Web sites, interactive exercises, glossary, chronologies, and more, go to the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e.

pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 146pal85549_ch03_099-146.indd 146 03/08/13 7:07 PM03/08/13 7:07 PM

Final PDF to printer

147

C h a p t e r 4 THE GROWING POWER OF WESTERN EUROPE, 1640–1715

If the reader   were to take a map of Europe, set a compass on the city of Paris, and draw a circle with a radius of 500 miles, a zone would be marked out from which much of modern European and “Western” civilization radiated after about 1640. It was within this zone that a secular society, modern natural science, a developed capitalism, the modern state, parliamentary government, democratic ideas, machine industry, and much else either originated or received their fi rst full expression. The extreme western parts of Europe—Ireland, Portugal, and Spain—were somewhat outside the zone in which the most rapid changes occurred. But within it were England, southern Scotland, France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, western and central Germany, and northern Italy. This area, for over 200 years beginning in the seventeenth century, was the earth’s principal center of what anthropolo-

gists might call cultural diffusion. Although the economy and culture of western Europe were deeply infl uenced by the expanding trade and contacts with people outside Europe, the growing power of western European states, trading companies, science, and cultural institutions had a profound and spreading impact on the rest of Europe, the Americas, and ultimately the whole world.

This western European infl uence grew steadily in the half-century following the Peace of Westphalia. The fading out of the Italian Renaissance, the subsiding of religious wars, the ruin of the Holy Roman Empire, and the decline of Spain all cleared the stage on which the Dutch, English, and French were to become the principal political, economic, and cultural actors. But the Dutch were few in number, and the English during most of the sev- enteenth century were weakened by domestic discord. It was France that for a time played the most imposing role. The whole half-century of European history following the Peace of Westphalia is in fact often called the Age of Louis XIV.

17. The Grand Monarque and the Balance of Power

18. The Dutch Republic

19. Britain: The Civil War

20. Britain: The Triumph of Parliament

21. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph of Absolutism

22. The Wars of Louis XIV: The Peace of Utrecht, 1713

Chapter emblem: Detail from a portrait of King Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743). (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 147pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 147 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715148

17. THE GRAND MONARQUE AND THE BALANCE OF POWER

This king of France inherited his throne in 1643 at the age of 5, assumed the personal direction of affairs in 1661 at the age of 23, and reigned for 72 years until his death in 1715. No one else in modern history has held so powerful a position for so long a time. Louis XIV was more than a fi gurehead. For over half a century, during his whole adult life, he was the actual and working head of the French government. Inheriting the state institu- tions that Richelieu had developed earlier in the seventeenth century, he made France the strongest country in Europe. Using French money, by bribes or other inducements, he built up a pro-French interest in virtually every country from England to Turkey. His policies and the counterpolicies that others adopted against him set the pace of public events, and his methods of government and administration, war and diplomacy, became a model for other rulers to copy. During this time the French language, French thought and literature, French architecture and landscape gardens, and French styles in clothes, cooking, and eti- quette became the accepted standard for Europe. Louis XIV was called by his fascinated admirers Louis the Great, the Grand Monarque, and the Sun King.

Internationally, the consuming political question of the last decades of the seventeenth century (at least in western Europe—eastern Europe we reserve for the next chapter) was

the fate of the still vast possessions of the Spanish crown. Spain was drifting into a condition that nineteenth-century Europeans would later ascribe to Turkey, “the sick man of Europe.” To its social and economic decline was added hereditary physical deterioration of its rulers. In 1665 the Spanish throne was inherited by Charles II, an incompetent ruler affl icted by many

ills of mind and body, impotent, mentally defi cient, the pitiable product of generations of intermarriage among various branches of the extended Habsburg family. His rule was irresolute and feeble. It was known from the moment of his accession that he could have no children and that the Spanish branch of the Habsburg family would die out with his death. The whole future not only of Spain but also of the Spanish Netherlands, the Spanish hold- ings in Italy, and all Spanish America was therefore in question. Charles II dragged out his miserable days until 1700, the object of jealousy and outright assault during his lifetime, and precipitating a new European war by his death.

Louis XIV, who in his youth married a sister of Charles II, intended to benefi t from the debility of his royal brother-in-law. His expansion- ist policies followed two main lines. One was to push the French borders eastward to the Rhine, annexing the Spanish Netherlands (or Belgium) and the Franche-Comté or Free County of Burgundy, a French-speaking

region lying between ducal Burgundy and Switzerland (see maps, pp. 144–145, 149). Such policies along France’s eastern frontier involved the further dismemberment of the Holy Roman Empire. The other line of Louis XIV’s ambitions, increasingly clear as time went on, was his hope of obtaining the entire Spanish inheritance for himself. By combining the resources of France and Spain he would make France supreme in Europe, in America, and on the sea. To promote these ends Louis XIV intrigued with the smaller and middle-sized powers of Europe and also contacted dissidents (i.e., potential allies) in all the countries whose governments opposed him.

If Louis XIV had achieved his aims, he would have created the “universal monar- chy” dreaded by diplomats, that is to say, a political situation in which one state might subordinate all others to its will. The technique used against universal monarchy was the

The weakness of Spain

The ambitions of Louis XIV

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 148pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 148 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

14917. The Grand Monarque and the Balance of Power

THE EXPANSION OF FRANCE, 1661–1713 The map shows how the for- eign policy and wars of King Louis XIV gradually extended France’s borders toward the east and northeast, bringing the Franche-Comté and new lands in both Alsace and Lorraine under French control. Louis also gained other territories in the Spanish Netherlands and expanded French holdings in the south along the frontier with Savoy. In addition to the expan- sion shown here, Louis XIV’s other great ambition was to obtain control of Spain and the Spanish Empire in the Americas.

French Boundary in 1661

Boundary of the Greatest Gains of Louis XIV

France in 1713

0 100 miles50

Rh on

e R

.

Seine R.

Rh in

e R.

North Sea

Mediterranean Sea

SPANISH NETHERLANDS

FRANCHE- COMTÉ

ALSACE

LO RR

AIN E

BADEN

SAVOY THE

MILANESE

UNITED PROVINCES

SWISS CONFEDERATION

HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Paris

Strasbourg

Metz

Geneva

Dijon

Verdun

Antwerp Cologne

balance of power. Universal monarchy had formerly been almost achieved in Europe by the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs. The Habsburg supremacy had been blocked mainly by a balance of power headed by France, of which the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia were the outstanding triumphs. Now, in the seventeenth century, the danger of universal monarchy came from France, and it was against France that the balance of power was directed.

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 149pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 149 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715150

The Idea of the Balance of Power

The aim of statesmen pursuing policies of balance of power in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries was generally to preserve their own inde- pendence of action to the utmost. Hence the basic rule was to ally against

any powerful state threatening domination. If one state seemed to dictate too much, others would shun alliance with it unless they were willing (from ideological sympathy or other reasons) to become its puppets. They would seek alliance with the other weaker states instead. They would thus create a balance or counterweight, or “restore the balance,” against the state whose ascendancy they feared. Another more subtle reason for preferring alliance with the weak rather than with the strong was that in such an alliance the leaders of each state could believe their own contribution to be necessary and valued, and by threatening to withdraw their support could win consideration of their own policies. Indeed, the balance of power may be defi ned as a system in which each state tends to throw

its weight where it is most needed, so that its own importance may be enhanced.

The purpose of balance-of-power politics was not to preserve peace but to preserve the sovereignty and independence of the states of Europe, or the “liberties of Europe,” as they were called, against potential aggres-

sors. The system was effective as a means to protect most sovereign governments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Combinations were intricate, and alliances were readily made and unmade to deal with emerging situations. One reason for the effective- ness of the system lay in the great number of states capable of pursuing an independent foreign policy. These included not only the greater and middle-sized states of Austria, Spain, France, England, Holland, Sweden, and Bavaria, but a great number of small inde- pendent states, such as Denmark, the German principalities, Portugal after 1640, and Savoy, Venice, Genoa, and Tuscany. States moved easily from one alliance to another or from one side of the balance to another. They were held back by no ideologies or historic sympathies, especially after the religious wars subsided, but could freely choose or reject allies, aiming only to protect their own independence or enlarge their own interests. Moreover, owing to the military technology of the day, small states might count as impor- tant military partners in an alliance. By controlling a strategic location, like the king of Denmark, or by making a contribution of ships or money, like the Dutch Republic, they might add just enough strength to an alliance to balance and overbalance the opposing great power and its allies.

As the ambitions of Louis XIV became bolder, and as the capacity of Spain to resist them withered away, the prevention of a French universal monarchy depended increas- ingly on combining the states of Europe into a balance of power that could effectively block France’s expansionist policies. The balance against Louis XIV was engineered mainly by the Dutch. The most tireless of his enemies, and the one who did more than any other to checkmate him, was the Dutchman William III, the prince of Orange, who in his later years was king of England and Scotland as well.

Let us, after fi rst surveying the Dutch in the seventeenth century, turn to the British Isles, where a momentous confl ict occurred between Parliament and king. We shall then examine the French absolute monarchy under Louis XIV and conclude the present chap- ter with the wars of Louis XIV, particularly the War of the Spanish Succession, in which the collective resistance to French ambitions ultimately restored the European balance of power.

Motives for alliances

Balance-of-power politics

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 150pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 150 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

15118. The Dutch Republic

18. THE DUTCH REPUBLIC Dutch Culture and Government

The ambassadors of kings, strolling beside a canal at The Hague, might on occasion observe a number of burghers in plain black garments step out of a boat and proceed to make a meal of cheese and herring on the lawn, and they would recognize in these portly fi gures the provincial delegates of the Estates General of the United Provinces, as the Dutch govern- ment was known in the diplomatic language of the day. Though noblemen lived in the country, the Dutch were the most bourgeois of all peoples. They were not the only republi- cans in Europe, because the Swiss cantons, Venice, Genoa, and even England for a few years were republics, but of all republics the United Provinces was by far the most wealthy, the most fl ourishing, and the most important in international diplomacy and culture.

The Dutch acquired a nationality of their own in the long struggle against Spain, and the memories of that war contributed to a pride in their own freedom and independence. In the later phases of the war with Spain, notably during the Thirty Years’ War, they were able to rely more on their wealth and diplomacy than on actual fi ghting, so that during the whole seventeenth century they enjoyed a degree of comfort, and of intel- lectual, artistic, and commercial achievement unexcelled in Europe. The classic Dutch poets and dramatists wrote at this time, making a literary lan- guage of what had formerly been a dialect of Low German. Hugo Grotius produced, in his Law of War and Peace, a pioneering treatise on international law. Baruch Spinoza, of a family of refugee Portuguese Jews, quietly turned out works of philosophy, examining the nature of reality, of human conduct, and of church and state. Spinoza made his living by grinding lenses; there were many other lens grinders in Holland; some of them developed the microscope, and some of these, in turn—Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, and others—peering through their microscopes and beholding for the fi rst time the world of microscopic life, became founders of modern biological science. The greatest Dutch scien- tist was Christian Huyghens (1629–1695), who worked mainly in physics and mathemat- ics; he improved the telescope (a Dutch invention), made clocks move with pendulums, discovered the rings of Saturn, and launched the wave theory of light. A less famous writer, Balthasar Bekker, in his World Bewitched (1691) delivered a decisive blow against the expiring superstition of witchcraft. Meanwhile, the extraordinarily learned scholar and art- ist Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) developed an important seventeenth-century argument for the education of women in her infl uential treatise The Learned Maid or Whether a Maid May Be Called a Scholar (1638).

But the most eternally fresh of the Dutch creations, suffering from no barrier of time or language, were the superb canvases of the painters. Frans Hals produced bluff portraits of the common people. Jan Vermeer threw a spell of magic and quiet dignity over men, and especially women, of the burgher class, many of whom he portrayed in typical domestic scenes. Rembrandt conveyed the mystery of human consciousness itself. In Rembrandt’s Masters of the Cloth Guild (see p. 152) we face a group of six men who seem about to speak from the canvas, inclined slightly forward, as intent on their business as judges on the pro- ceedings in a courtroom. Such men conducted the affairs of Holland, in both commerce and government; intelligent, calculating, and honest but determined to drive a hard bargain; the sober black cloaks, with the clean white collars, set against the carved woodwork and rich table covering of the Cloth Hall, seem to suggest that personal vanity must yield to collec- tive undertakings and that personal simplicity must be maintained in the midst of material

Dutch achievements

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 151pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 151 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715152

opulence. And in Vermeer’s Geographer (see p. 156), painted in 1669, there appears not only an immaculately scrubbed and dusted Dutch interior, but something of a symbol of the modern world in its youth—the pale northern sunlight streaming through the window, the globe and the map, the dividers in the scholar’s right hand, instrument of science and math- ematics, the tapestry fl ung over the table (or is it a new rug brought from Asia?), the head lifted in thought, and eyes resting on an invisible world of fresh discoveries and opening horizons. The same interest in the complexities of human character and the details of house- hold objects appears in many of Vermeer’s paintings, including G irl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (see p. 154), which he painted in the late 1650s, The Milkmaid (c. 1660), and The Artist’s Studio (c. 1665). Like other Dutch artists in this era, Vermeer discovered and portrayed the aesthetic pleasures in the common experiences of daily life.

Dutch paintings also showed certain characteristics of the wider seventeenth-century artistic style that came to be known as Baroque. The fascination with lighting, the represen- tation of interior spaces, the use of distinctive colors or subtle hues, and a more naturalistic image of human beings often shaped the distinctive appearance of Baroque paintings. In contrast to most Dutch artists, however, many of the best-known Baroque painters identifi ed with the Catholic Church or the Counter Reformation. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens was one prominent example of this identifi cation with Catholicism in the Low Countries (see his Portrait of the Artist with Isabelle Brant on p. 153). Rubens often

THE MASTERS OF THE CLOTH GUILD by Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669)

This painting was done on commission for the guild of “clothiers” in Amsterdam. These men were the prosperous leaders of the guild; and they were members of a dynamic merchant class that supported both a fl ourishing community of creative artists and the expanding Dutch role in global commercial systems. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 152pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 152 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

153

painted infl uential Catholic political fi gures as well as dramatic biblical scenes, but art in the Netherlands tended to emphasize the quotidian scenes of urban life rather than the pas- sions of religious ecstasy or the grandeur of royal families.

In religion, after initial disputes, the Dutch Republic adopted toleration. Early in the seventeenth century the Dutch Calvinists divided. One group favored a modifi cation of Calvinism, with a toning down of the doctrine of absolute predestination. This more moder- ate Calvinism drew its main support from the comfortable burghers and its doctrines from a theologian of Leyden named Arminius, whose ideas were condemned at an international Calvinist synod in 1618. But beginning in 1632 the Arminians were tolerated. Rights were granted to the large Catholic minority. Jews had

Religious toleration

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST WITH ISABELLE BRANT by Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640)

Isabelle Brant married Rubens about the time he painted this dual portrait (c. 1610), which conveys the affection in an early seventeenth-century marriage. This painting suggests the importance of family relationships for an artist whose best-known works often portrayed famous public fi gures or Catholic religious themes. (Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich/Art Resource, NY)

18. The Dutch Republic

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 153pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 153 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715154

GIRL READING A LETTER AT AN OPEN WINDOW by Jan Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675)

Vermeer’s characteristic interest in the mysteries of human character, the subtle shades of light, and the complex folds of a curtain appear in this painting of a young woman who seems to have received a disconcerting message or perhaps long anticipated news from afar. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 154pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 154 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

155

long been welcomed in the republic; and Christian sects despised everywhere else, such as the Mennonites, found a refuge in Dutch towns. Although none of these people had as many political or economic rights as the Calvinists, the resulting mixture stimulated both the intellectual life and the commercial enterprise of the country.

The Dutch as early as 1600 had 10,000 ships, and throughout the seventeenth century they owned most of the shipping of northern Europe. They were the carriers between Spain, France, England, and the Baltic. They also settled in Bordeaux to buy wines, lent money to vintners, and soon owned many vineyards in France itself. They sailed on every sea. They entered the Pacifi c by way of South America, where they rounded Cape Horn and named it after Hoorn in Holland. Organized in the East India Company of 1602, their merchants increasingly replaced the Portuguese in India and the Far East. In Java, in 1619, they founded the city of Batavia—the Latin name for Holland. (The city is now called Jakarta.)

Not long after 1600 the Dutch reached Japan. But the Japanese, fearing the political consequences of Christian penetration, in 1641 expelled all other Europeans and confi ned the Dutch to limited operations on an island near Nagasaki. The Dutch remained for over two centuries the sole link of the West with Japan. In 1612 the Dutch founded their fi rst settlement on Manhattan Island, and in 1621 they established a Dutch West India Com- pany to exploit the loosely held riches of Spanish and Portuguese America. The new West India company also entered the expanding Atlantic slave trade and transported enslaved Africans to recently founded Dutch colonies at Pernambuco and Bahia in Brazil (lost soon thereafter) and at Curaçao and Guiana in the Caribbean. In 1652 the Dutch captured the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa from the Portuguese. Dutch settlers soon appeared. Moving inland, they occupied the territory of the Khoikhoi and displaced or enslaved the people whose ancestors had lived there for centuries. These Dutch settlers mixed with French Huguenots and others in southern Africa and gradually became the Afrikaner peo- ple, whose modern language and religion still refl ect their mainly Dutch origins.

In 1609 the Dutch founded the Bank of Amsterdam. European money was a chaos; coins were minted not only by great monarchs but also by small states and cities in Germany and Italy, and even by private persons. In addition, under infl ationary pressures, kings and others habitually debased their coins by adding more alloy, while leaving the old coins in circulation along with the new. Anyone handling money thus accumulated a miscellany of uncertain value. The Bank of Amsterdam accepted deposits of such mixed money from all persons and from all coun- tries, assessed the gold and silver content, and, at rates of exchange fi xed by itself, allowed depositors to withdraw equivalent values in gold fl orins minted by the Bank of Amsterdam. These were of known and unchanging weight and purity. They thus became an internation- ally sought money, an international measure of value, acceptable everywhere. Depositors were also allowed to draw checks against their accounts. These conveniences, plus a safety of deposits guaranteed by the Dutch government, attracted capital from all quarters and made possible loans for a wide range of purposes. Amsterdam remained the fi nancial cen- ter of Europe until the French Revolution.

Under their republican government the Dutch enjoyed great freedom, but it can hardly be said that their form of government met all the requirements of a modern state. The seven provinces that sent representatives to the Estates General of the United Provinces were all jealous of their own independence. Each province had, as its executive, an elected stadholder, but there was no stadholder for the United Provinces as a whole. This diffi culty was overcome by the fact that most of the various provinces usually elected the head of

Dutch explorations and settlements

The Bank of Amsterdam

18. The Dutch Republic

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 155pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 155 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715156

the house of Orange as their own stadholder. This family had enjoyed exceptional prestige in the republic since the days of William the Silent and the wars for independence, but the prince of Orange, apart from being stadholder, was simply one of the feudal noblemen of the country. In general, however, the commercial class had more wealth than the older noble families, and affairs were usually managed by the burghers.

THE GEOGRAPHER by Jan Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675)

The impact on Europe of the opening of the Atlantic may be seen in this painting. For the fi rst time in human history it had become possible to understand with some accuracy the relation- ships of the oceans and continents around the globe. The Dutch built up a large ocean-going trade, and many of the leading cartographers lived in the Netherlands. (Album/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 156pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 156 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

157

Politics in the Dutch Republic was a seesaw between the burghers, pacifi stic and absorbed with business, and the princes of Orange, to whom the country owed most of its military security. When foreigners threatened invasion, the power of the stadholder increased. When all was calm, the stadholder could do little. The Peace of Westphalia produced a mood of confi dence in the burghers, followed by a constitutional crisis, in the course of which the stadholder William II died, in 1650. No new stadholder was elected for 22 years. The burgher, civilian, and decentralizing tendencies prevailed.

In 1650, eight days after his father’s death, the third William was born in the house of Orange, seemingly fated never to be stadholder and to pass his life as a private nobleman on his own estates. William III grew up to be a grave and reserved young man, small and rather stocky, with thin, compressed lips and a determined spirit. He learned to speak Dutch, German, English, and French with equal facility and to understand Italian, Spanish, and Latin. He observed the requirements of his religion, which was Dutch Calvinism, with sober regularity. He had a strong dislike for everything magnifi cent or pompous; he lived plainly, hated fl attery, and took no pleasure in social conversation. In these respects he was the opposite of his life- long enemy the Sun King, whom he resembled only in his diligent preoccupation with affairs. In 1677 William married the king of England’s niece, Mary Stuart.

Foreign Affairs: Confl ict with the English and French

Meanwhile matters were not going favorably for the Dutch Republic. In 1651 the revolu- tionary government then ruling England passed a Navigation Act. This act may be con- sidered the fi rst of a long series of political measures by which the British began to build their colonial empire. It was aimed against the Dutch carrying trade. It provided that goods imported into England and its dependencies must be transported on English ships or on ships belonging to the country exporting the goods. Because the Dutch were too small a people to be great producers and exporters themselves, and lived largely by carrying the goods of others, they saw in the new English policy a threat to their economic existence. The Dutch and English soon entered into a series of three wars, running with interruptions from 1652 to 1674 and generally inde- cisive, though in 1664 the English annexed New Amsterdam and renamed it New York.

While thus assaulted at sea by the English, the Dutch were menaced on land by the French. Louis XIV made his fi rst aggressive move in 1667, claiming the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comté by alleging certain rights of his Spanish wife, and overrunning the Spanish Netherlands with his army. The Dutch, to whom the Spanish Netherlands were a buffer against France, set into motion the mechanism of the balance of power. Dropping tem- porarily their disputes with the English, they allied with them instead; and because they were able also to secure the adherence of Sweden, the resulting Triple Alliance was suffi cient to give pause to Louis XIV, who withdrew from the Spanish Netherlands. But in 1672 Louis XIV again rapidly crossed the Spanish Netherlands, attacked with forces fi ve times as large as the Dutch, and occupied three of the seven Dutch provinces.

A popular clamor now arose among the Dutch for William of Orange, demanding that the young prince, who was 22 years of age, be installed in the old offi ce of stadholder, in which his ancestors had defended them against Spain. He was duly elected stadholder in six provinces. In 1673 these six provinces voted to make the stadholderate hereditary in the house of Orange. William, during his whole “reign” in the Netherlands, attempted to centralize

William of Orange

Threats by sea and land

The election of William as stadholder

18. The Dutch Republic

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 157pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 157 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715158

and consolidate his government, put down the traditional liberties of the provinces, and free himself from constitutional checks, moving generally in the direction of absolute monarchy. He was unable, however, to go far in this course, and the United Provinces remained a decentralized patrician republic until 1795.

Meanwhile, to stave off the immediate menace of Louis XIV, William resorted to a new manipulation of the balance of power. He formed an alliance this time with the minor powers of Denmark and Brandenburg (the small German state around Berlin) and with the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs. Nothing could indicate more clearly the new European concern about the balance of power than this coming over of the Dutch to the Habsburg side. This alliance presented a forceful new challenge to Louis XIV and pushed him into negotiations that ended this phase of his expansionist wars. Peace was signed in 1678 (by the treaty of Nimwegen), but only at the expense of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, from which Louis XIV took the long coveted Franche-Comté, together with another batch

of towns in Flanders (see map, p. 149). The Dutch preserved their territory intact.

In the next ten years came the great windfall of William’s life. In 1689 he became king of England. He was now able to bring the British Isles into his perpetual combinations against France. Because the real impact of

France was yet to be felt, and the real bid of Louis XIV for universal monarchy was yet to be made, and because the English at this time were rapidly gaining in strength, the entrance of England was a decisive addition to the balance formed against French expansion. In this way the constitutional upheavals in England, by bringing a determined Dutchman to the English throne, entered into the general stream of European affairs and helped to assure that western Europe and its overseas offshoots should not be dominated totally by France.

19. BRITAIN: THE CIVIL WAR After the defeat of the Spanish Armada and recession of the Spanish threat the English were for a time less closely involved with the affairs of the Continent. They played no signifi cant part in the Thirty Years’ War and were almost the only European people west of Poland who were not represented at the Congress of Westphalia. At the time of the Westphalia negotiations in the 1640s they were in fact engaged in a civil war of their own. This English civil war was a milder variant of the Wars of Religion that desolated France, Germany, and the Netherlands. It was fought not between Protestants and Catholics as on the Continent, but between the more extreme or Calvinistic Protestants called Puritans and the more moderate Protestants, who adhered to the established Church of England. As in the wars on the Continent, religious differences were mixed indistinguishably with political and constitutional issues. As the Huguenots represented to some extent feudal rebelliousness against the French monarchy, as German Protestants fought for states’ rights against imperial centralization, and the Calvinists of the Netherlands for provincial liber- ties against the king of Spain, so the Puritans asserted the rights of Parliament against the mounting claims of royalty in England.

The civil war in England took many lives, but was less destructive than most such wars on the Continent; and England escaped the worst horrors of the Wars of Religion. The same was not true of the British Isles as a whole. After 1603 the kingdoms of England and Scotland, while otherwise separate, were ruled by the same king; the kingdom of Ireland remained, as before, a dependency of the English crown. Between England and Presbyterian Scotland there was constant friction, but the worst trouble was between England and Catholic Ireland, which was the scene of religious warfare as savage as that on the Continent.

William comes to the English throne

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 158pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 158 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

15919. Britain: The Civil War

England in the Seventeenth Century

For the English the seventeenth century was an age of great achievement, during which they made their debut as one of the chief peoples of modern Europe. In 1600 only 4 or 5 million persons, in England and Lowland Scotland, spoke the English language. The number did not rise rapidly for another century and a half. But the population began to spread. Religious discontents, reinforced by economic pressures, led to considerable emi- gration. Twenty thousand Puritans settled in New England between 1630 and 1640, and a similar number went to Barbados and other West India islands during these same years. A third stream, again roughly of the same size, but made up mainly of Scottish Presbyterians, settled in northern Ireland under government auspices, driving away or expropriating the native Celts. English Catholics were allowed by the home government to settle in Maryland. A great many members of the Church of England went to Virginia during and after the midcentury civil war, adding to the small settlement made at Jamestown in 1607. Except for the move- ment to northern Ireland, called the “plantation of Ulster,” these migrations took place without much attention on the part of the government, through private initiative organized in commercial companies. After the middle of the century the government began deliber- ately to build an empire. New York was conquered from the Dutch, Jamaica from the Span- ish, and Pennsylvania and the Carolinas were established. All the thirteen colonies except Georgia were founded before 1700, but there were at that time still less than half a million Europeans and Africans in British North America.

The English also, like the Dutch, French, and Spanish at the time, were creating their national culture. Throughout western Europe the national languages, encroaching upon international Latin on the one hand and local dialects on the other, were becoming new linguistic vehicles for the expression of thought and feeling. William Shakespeare helped to shape the evolving English language through the enduring infl uence of his great plays, including the famous tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear —all of which were fi rst

English emigration to North America

The English playwright William Shake- speare helped to shape the modern English language as well as much of the later history of English theater and lit- erature. This image of the famous author appeared on an early seventeenth-century edition of his collected works. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 159pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 159 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715160

performed and published in the early years of the seventeenth century. John Milton pub- lished his infl uential epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained later in this same century, after the bitter confl icts of the English Civil War. Shakespeare and Milton pro- jected their complex conceptions of human experience, aspirations, and tragedy with the imaginative power of both new and old words. The English classical literature, rugged in form but deep in content, vigorous yet subtle in insight, majestic, abundant, and sonorous in expression, was almost the reverse of French classical writing, with its virtues of order, economy, propriety, and graceful precision. Proud of their literary culture and their own great writers, the English could never thereafter quite yield to French standards, nor be dazzled or dumbfounded, as some peoples were, by the cultural glories of the Age of Louis XIV. There were no seventeenth-century painters comparable to those on the Continent, but in music it was the age of Thomas Campion and Henry Purcell, and in architecture the

century closed with the great buildings of Christopher Wren. Economically the English were enterprising and affl uent, though in

1600 far outdistanced by the Dutch. They had a larger and more produc- tive country than the Dutch, and were therefore not as limited to purely

mercantile and seafaring occupations. Coal was mined around Newcastle, but it was not yet a leading source of English wealth. The great industry was the growing of sheep and manufacture of woolens, which were the main export. Spinning and weaving were done mostly by workers in the country, under the putting-out system, and organized by mer- chants according to the methods of commercial capitalism. Since 1553 the English had traded with Russia by way of the White Sea; they were increasingly active in the Baltic and eastern Mediterranean; and with the founding of the East India Company, in 1600, they competed with the Dutch in assaulting the old Portuguese monopoly in India and East Asia. But profi table as such overseas operations were becoming, the main wealth of England was still in the land. The richest men were not merchants but landlords, and the landed aristocracy formed the richest class.

Background to the Civil War: Parliament and the Stuart Kings

In England, as elsewhere in the seventeenth century, the kings clashed with their old medi- eval representative institutions. In England the old institution, Parliament, won out against the king. But this was not the unique feature in the English development. In Germany the estates of the Holy Roman Empire triumphed against the emperor, and much the same thing, as will be seen, occurred in Poland. But on the Continent the triumph of the old representative institutions generally meant political dissolution or even anarchy. Suc- cessful governments were generally those in which kingly powers increased; this was the strong tendency of the time, evident even in the Dutch Republic after 1672 under William of Orange. The unique thing about England was that Parliament, in defeating the king, arrived at a workable form of government. Government remained strong but came under parliamentary control. This determined the character of modern England and launched into the history of Europe and of the world the great movement of liberalism and repre- sentative institutions.

The violent struggles that ultimately produced England’s new political order emerged from the confl icting ambitions of the Stuart kings and the most powerful social groups in

the English Parliament. In 1603, on the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Eng- lish crown was inherited by the son of Mary Stuart, James VI of Scotland. As a descendant of Henry VII he became king of England also, taking there the title of James I. James was a philosopher of royal absolutism. He had

Economic activity

The Stuarts and Parliament

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 160pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 160 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

161

even written a book on the subject, The True Law of Free Monarchy. By a “free” monar- chy James meant a monarchy free from control by Parliament, churchmen, or laws and customs of the past. It was a monarchy in which the king, as father to his people, looked after their welfare as he saw fi t, standing above all parties, private interests, and pressure groups. He even declared that kings drew their authority from God and were responsible to God alone, a doctrine known as the divine right of kings.

Any ruler succeeding Elizabeth would probably have had trouble with Parliament, which had shown signs of restlessness in the last years of her reign but had deferred to her as an aging woman and a national symbol. She had maintained peace within the country and fought off the Spaniards, but these very accomplishments persuaded many people that they could safely bring their grievances into the open. James I was a foreigner, a Scot, who lacked the touch for dealing with the English and who was moreover a royal pedant, the “wisest fool in Christendom,” as he was uncharitably called. Not content with the actual or implicit methods of political control, as Elizabeth had been, he read the Parliament tire- some lectures on the royal rights. He also was in constant need of money because the wars against Spain had left a considerable debt. James was far from economical, and, in any case, in an age of rising prices, he could not live within the fi xed and customary revenues of the English crown. These were of medieval character, increasingly quaint under the new national and international conditions.

Neither to James I nor to his son Charles I, who succeeded him in 1625, would Parlia- ment grant adequate revenue. It distrusted them both, partly for fi nancial reasons and partly on religious grounds. Many members of Parliament were Puritans, whose Calvinist beliefs made them dissatisfi ed with the organization and doctrine of the Church of England. Elizabeth had tried to hush up religious troubles, but James threatened to “harry the Puritans out of the land,” and Charles supported the Church hierarchy, which under Archbishop Laud sought to enforce religious conformity. Many members of Parliament were also lawyers, who feared that the common law of England, the historic or customary law, was in danger. They disliked the prerogative courts—the Star Chamber set up by Henry VII to settle disputes without the deliberations of a jury and the High Commission set up by Elizabeth to ensure conformity to the theology of the Church of England. They heard with trepidation the new doctrine that the sovereign king could make laws and decide cases at his own discretion. Last but not least, practically all members of Parliament were property owners. Landowners, supported by the merchants, feared that if the king succeeded in raising taxes on his own authority, their wealth would be insecure. Hence there were multiple causes for a growing parliamentary resistance.

In England the Parliament was so organized as to make resistance effective. There was only one Parliament for the whole country. There were no provincial or local estates, as in the Dutch Republic, Spain, France, Germany, and Poland. All parliamentary opposition was therefore concen- trated in one place. In this one Parliament, there were only two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The landed interest dominated in both houses, the noblemen in the Lords and the gentry in the Commons. In the Commons the gentry, who formed the bulk of the aristocracy, mixed with representatives of the merchants and the towns. Indeed the towns frequently chose country gentlemen to represent them. These connections sug- gest why the houses of Parliament (especially the Commons) did not accentuate, as did the estates on the Continent, the class division within the country.

Nor was the church present in Parliament as a separate force. Before Henry VIII’s break with Rome the bishops and abbots together had formed a large majority in the House of Lords. Now there were no abbots left, for there were no monasteries. The House of

Parliamentary resistance

19. Britain: The Civil War

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 161pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 161 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715162

Lords was now predominantly secular; in the fi rst Parliament of James I there were 82 lay peers and 26 bishops. The great landowners had captured the House of Lords. The smaller landowners of the Commons had been enriched by receiving former monastic lands and had prospered by raising wool. The merchants had likewise grown up under mercantilistic protection. Parliament was strong not only in organization but also in the social interests and wealth that it represented. No king could long govern against its will.

In 1629 king and Parliament came to a deadlock. Charles I attempted to rule without Parliament, which could legally meet only at the royal summons. He intended to give England a good and effi cient government. Had he succeeded, the course of English consti- tutional development would have paralleled that of France. But by certain reforms in Ireland he antagonized the English landlords who had interests in that country. By support- ing the leadership and theology of the Church of England he made enemies of the Puritans. And by attempting to modernize the navy with funds raised without parliamentary consent (called “ship money”) he alarmed all property owners, who feared that they would be forced to pay for policies they opposed.

The ship-money dispute illustrates the best arguments of both sides. It was the old custom in England for coastal towns to provide ships for the king’s service in time of war. More recently, these coastal towns had pro- vided money instead. Charles I wished to maintain a navy in time of peace

and to have ship money paid by the country as a whole, including the inland counties. In the old or medieval view it was the function of the towns that were directly affected to maintain a fl eet. In the new view, sponsored by the king, the whole nation was the unit on which a navy should be based. The country gentlemen whom Parliament mainly repre- sented, and most of whom lived in inland counties, had less interest in the navy, and in any case were unwilling to pay for it unless they could control the foreign policies for which a navy might be used. The parliamentary class represented the idea, derived from the Middle Ages, that taxes should be authorized by Parliament. The king represented the newer ideas of monarchy that were developing on the Continent, which included a belief in the king’s right to collect revenues that were needed by the state. The politically signifi cant classes in England would not accept such ideas. Until the king could govern with the confi dence of Parliament, or until Parliament itself was willing, not merely to keep down taxes but to assume the fi nancial responsibilities of government under modern conditions, neither a navy nor any effectual government could be maintained.

The Scots were the fi rst to rebel. In 1637 they rioted in Edinburgh against attempts to impose the Church of England’s prayer book and episcopal organization in Scotland. Charles, to raise funds to put down the Scottish rebellion, convoked the English Parliament in 1640, for the fi rst time in 11 years. When it proved hostile to him, he dissolved it and

called for new elections. The same men were returned. The resulting body, because it sat theoretically for 20 years without new elections, from 1640 to 1660, is known historically as the Long Parliament. Its principal leaders

were small or moderately well-to-do landowning gentry. The merchant class, while fur- nishing no leaders, lent its support.

The Long Parliament, far from assisting the king against the Scots, used the Scottish rebellion as a means of pressing its own demands. These were revolutionary from the outset. Parliament insisted that the chief royal advisers be not merely removed but impeached and put to death. It abolished the Star Chamber and the High Commission. The most extreme Calvinist element, the “root and branch” men or “radicals,” drove through a bill for the abolition of bishops, revolutionizing the Church of England. In 1642 Parlia- ment and king came to open war: the king drawing followers mainly from the north and

The ship-money dispute

The Long Parliament

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 162pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 162 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

163

west; the Parliament, from the commercially and agriculturally more advanced counties of the south and east (see map, p. 170). A series of bloody battles steadily weakened the king’s position, and his army dissolved in 1646. During the war, as the price of support from the Scottish army, Parliament also transformed the government’s offi cial Protestant- ism by adopting the Solemn League and Covenant, which made Presbyterianism the estab- lished legal religion of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

The Emergence of Cromwell

The parliamentary forces, called Roundheads from the close haircuts favored by Puritans, gained their major military victories with an effi cient new army, the New Model Army, and a highly competent commander, Thomas Fairfax. The wars also brought a hitherto unknown gentleman named Oliver Cromwell to the foreground. A devout Protestant, he organized an especially effective regiment in the New Model Army, the Ironsides, in which extreme Protestant exaltation provided the basis for morale, discipline, and the will to fi ght. By the late 1640s Cromwell had become the most powerful political and military leader of the parliamentary forces. The army, in which a more popular class was repre- sented than in the Parliament, became the center of advanced democratic ideas. Many of the soldiers objected to Presbyterianism as much as to the Church of England. They favored a free toleration for all “godly” forms of religion, with no superior church organi- zation above local groups of like-minded spirits.

Cromwell concluded that the defeated king, Charles I, could not be trusted, that “ungodly” persons of all kinds put their hopes in him (what later ages would call counter- revolution), and that he must be put to death. Because Parliament hesitated, Cromwell with the support of the army moved against Parliament. The Long Parliament, having started in 1640 with some 500 members, had sunk by 1649 to about 150 (for this revolution, like others, was pushed through by a minority); of these Cromwell now drove out almost 100, leaving a Rump of 50 or 60. This operation was called Pride’s Purge, after Colonel Pride who commanded the armed force that intimidated Parliament; and in subsequent revolutions such forced removals have been commonly known as purges, and the residues, sometimes, as rumps. The Rump condemned King Charles for “treason” and sent him to death on the scaffold in 1649.

England, or rather the whole British Isles, was now declared a republic. It was named the Commonwealth. Cromwell tried to govern as best he could. Religious toleration was decreed except for Unitarians and atheists on the one hand, and except for Roman Catholics and the most obstinate supporters of the Church of England on the other. Cromwell had to subdue both Scotland and Ireland by force. In Scotland the execution of the king, violating the ancient national Scottish monarchy of the Stuarts, had swung the country back into the royalist camp. Cromwell crushed the Scots in 1650.

Meanwhile the Protestant and Calvinist fury swept over Ireland. A massacre of newly settled Protestants in Ulster in 1641 had left bitter mem- ories that were now avenged. The Irish garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford were defeated and massacred. Thousands of Catholics were killed; priests were put to the sword, and women and small children were dispatched in cold blood. Where formerly, in the “plantation” of Ulster, a whole Protestant population had been settled in northern Ireland, bodily replacing the native Irish, now Protestant landlords were scattered over the country as a whole, replacing the Catholic landlords and retaining the Catholic peasantry as their tenants. Ireland’s native religion and clergy were driven underground, a foreign and detested church was established, and a new and foreign landed aristocracy,

Pride’s Purge

Religious violence in the Commonwealth

19. Britain: The Civil War

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 163pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 163 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715164

originally recruited in large measure from military adventurers, was settled upon the coun- try, in which it ceased to reside as soon as it assured the payment of its rents.

In England itself Cromwell ruled with great diffi culty. His regime was more successful in pursuing English commercial and colonial interests abroad, for he not only completed the violent subjugation of Ireland, but in the Navigation Act of 1651, which barred Dutch ships from carrying goods between other countries and England or its colonies, he also opened the previously noted English attack on the Dutch maritime supremacy. He further waged a war with Spain in which England acquired Jamaica, thereby expanding England’s involvement in the new slave-based sugar production system in the Caribbean and launch- ing an English campaign for some of the vast inheritance of the Spanish Habsburgs. But he failed to gain the support of a majority of the English. The Puritan Revolution, like others, produced its extremists. It failed to satisfy the most ardent and could not win over the truly conservative, so that Cromwell found himself reluctantly more autocratic, and more alone.

A party arose called the Levellers, who were in fact what later times would call radical political democrats. They were numerous in the Puritan army, though their chief spokesman, John Lilburne, was a civilian. Appealing to natural rights and to the rights of Englishmen, they asked for a nearly universal manhood suffrage, equality of representation, a written

constitution, and subordination of Parliament to a reformed body of voters. The Levellers thus anticipated many ideas of the American and French revolutions over a century later, but they were at this time repressed and expelled from the army. There were others in whom religious and social radicalism were indistinguishably mixed. George Fox, going

Religious and social radicalism

The execution of King Charles I marked the dramatic triumph of the radical, parliamentary forces in 1649, but the king’s death—portrayed here in a seventeenth-century engraving— raised unprecedented questions about the proper limits for political authority and religious radicalism in English society. (The Granger Collection, NYC)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 164pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 164 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

16520. Britain: The Triumph of Parliament

beyond Calvinism or Presbyterianism, led a new movement of radical religious dissenters who became known as the Society of Friends, or “Quakers.” The Quakers were condemned by the established Protestant clergy and many were imprisoned, but the movement contin- ued to attract inspired adherents by insisting that all believers could have new revelations of spiritual truth, by rejecting various social and religious hierarchies, and by allowing or even encouraging women to preach at their meetings. A more ephemeral group, the “Dig- gers,” proceeded to occupy and cultivate common lands, or lands privately owned, in a general repudiation of property. The Fifth Monarchy Men were a millennial group who felt that the end of the world was at hand. They were so called from their belief, as they read the Bible, that history has seen four empires, those of Assyria, Persia, Alexander, and Caesar; and that the existing world was still “Caesar’s” but would soon give way to the fi fth monarchy, of Christ, in which justice would fi nally prevail.

Among the many religious groups that emerged during the era of the English Revolution, the Quakers became especially notorious for their critique of religious hierarchies and their will- ingness to let women speak at their meetings. The novelty of the group is suggested in this seventeenth-century French illustration of a woman addressing a Quaker assembly. (Fotomas Index/Bridgeman Art Library)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 165pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 165 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715166

Cromwell opposed all such radical movements, which threatened both well-established persons and long-established social and religious hierarchies. As a regicide and a Puritan, however, he could not seek support from the royalists or the former leaders of the Church of England. Unable to agree even with the Rump, he abolished it also in 1653, and thereafter vainly attempted to govern, as Lord Protector, through representative bodies devised by himself and his followers, under a written constitution, the Instrument of Government. Actually, he was driven to place England under military rule, the regime of the “major gen- erals.” These offi cials, each in his district, repressed malcontents, vagabonds, and “bandits,” closed ale houses, and prohibited cockfi ghting, in a mixture of moral puritanism and politi- cal dictatorship. Cromwell died in 1658; and his son was unable to maintain the Protector- ate. Two years later, with all but universal assent, royalty was restored. Charles II, son of the recently executed Charles I, became king of England and of Scotland.

Cromwell, by beheading a king and keeping his successor off the throne for 11 years, left a lesson that was not forgotten. Though he favored constitutional and parliamentary government and had granted a measure of religious toleration, he had in fact ruled as a dictator in behalf of a stern Puritan minority. The English people now began to blot from

their memories the fact that they had ever had a real revolution. The fervid dream of a “godly” England was dissipated forever. What was remembered was a nightmare of standing armies and major generals, of grim Puritans and overwrought religious enthusiasts. The English lower classes ceased to have any political role or consciousness for over a century, except in spo-

radic rioting over food shortages or outbursts against the dangers of “popery.” Democratic ideas were rejected as “levelling.” They were generally abandoned in England after 1660 or were cherished by obscure individuals and religious radicals who could not make them- selves heard. Such ideas, indeed, had a more continuous history in the English colonies in America, where some leaders of the discredited revolution took refuge.

20. BRITAIN: THE TRIUMPH OF PARLIAMENT The Restoration, 1660–1688: The Later Stuarts

What was restored in 1660 was not only the monarchy, in the person of Charles II, but also the Church of England and the Parliament. Everything, legally, was supposed to be as it had been in 1640. The difference was that Charles II, knowing the fate of his father, was careful not to provoke Parliament to extremes and that the classes represented in Parlia- ment, frightened by the disturbances of the past 20 years, were now more warmly loyal to the king and more willing to uphold the established Church of England.

Parliament during the Restoration enacted some far-reaching legisla- tion. It changed the legal basis of land tenure, abolishing certain old feudal payments owed by landholders to the king. The possession of land thus came to resemble modern private property, and the landowning class

became more defi nitely a propertied aristocracy. In place of the feudal dues to the king, which had been automatically payable, Parliament arranged for the king to receive income in the form of taxation, which Parliament could raise or reduce in amount. This gave a new power to Parliament and a new fl exibility to government. The aristocracy thus cleared their property of customary restrictions and obligations, and at the same time undertook to sup- port the state by imposing taxes on themselves. The English aristocracy proved more will- ing than the corresponding classes on the Continent to pay a large share of the expenses of government. Its reward for this taxation was that, for a century and a half, it virtually ran the government to the exclusion of everyone else. Landowners in this period directed not

Legacy of the revolution

New legislation

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 166pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 166 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

167

only national affairs through Parliament but also local affairs as justices of the peace. The justices, drawn from the gentry of each county, decided small lawsuits, punished misde- meanors, and supervised the parish offi cials charged with poor relief and care of the roads. The regime of the landlord-justices came to be called the “squirearchy.”

Other classes drew less immediate advantage from the Restoration. The Navigation Act of 1651 was extended, so that commercial, shipping, and manufacturing interests were well protected. But in other ways the landed classes now in power showed themselves unsym- pathetic to the business classes of the towns. Many people in the towns were Dissenters, of the element formerly called Puritan and now refusing to accept the restored Church of England. Parliament excluded Dissenters from the town “corporations,” or governing bodies, forbade any dissenting clergymen to teach school or come within fi ve miles of an incorporated town, and prohibited all religious meetings, called “conventicles,” not held accord- ing to the forms and by the authority of the Church of England. The effect was that many middle-class townspeople found it diffi cult or impossible to follow their preferred religion, to obtain an education for their children, either elementary or advanced (for Oxford and Cambridge were a part of the established church), to take part in local affairs through the town corporations, or to sit in the House of Commons. The lowest classes, the very poor, were discouraged by the same laws from following sectarian and visionary preachers. Another enactment fell upon them alone, the Act of Settlement of 1662, which decentral- ized the administration of the Poor Law, making each parish responsible only for its own paupers. Poor people, who were very numerous, were condemned to remain in the parishes where they lived. A large section of the English population was immobilized.

But it was not long after the Restoration that Parliament and king were again at odds. The main issue was again religion. Many Protestants throughout Europe at this time were returning voluntarily to Roman Catholicism, a tendency naturally dreaded by the Protestant churches. This kind of conversion was most conspicuously illustrated when the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus himself, Queen Christina of Sweden, abdicated her throne and was received into the Roman church. In England the national feeling was excit- edly anti-Catholic. No measures were more popular than those against “popery”; and the squires in Parliament, stiffl y loyal to the Church of England, dreaded papists even more than Dissenters. The king, Charles II, was personally inclined to Catholicism. He admired the magnifi cent monarchy of Louis XIV, which he would have liked to duplicate, insofar as possible, in England. At odds with his Parliament, Charles II made overtures to Louis XIV. The secret treaty of Dover of 1670 was the outcome. Charles thereby agreed to join Louis XIV in his expected war against the Dutch; and Louis agreed to pay the king of England 3 million livres a year during the war. He hoped also that Charles II would soon fi nd it opportune to rejoin the Roman church.

While these arrangements were unknown in detail in England, it was known that Charles II was well disposed to the French and to Roman Catholicism. England went to war again with the Dutch. The king’s brother and heir, James, Duke of York, publicly announced his conversion to Rome. Charles II, in a “declaration of indulgence,” announced the nonenforcement of laws against Dissenters. The king declared that he favored general toleration, but it was rightly feared that his real aim was to promote Roman Catholicism in England. Parliament retorted in 1673 by passing the Test Act, which required all offi ceholders to take communion in the Church of England. The Test Act renewed the legislation against Dissenters and also made it impossible for Catholics to serve in the government or in the army and navy. The Test Act remained on the statute books until 1828.

Exclusion of Dissenters

Charles II and the Test Act

20. Britain: The Triumph of Parliament

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 167pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 167 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715168

Although Charles’s pro-French and pro-Catholic policies were extremely unpopular, the situation might not have come to a head except for the avowed Catholicism and French orientation of Charles’s brother James, due to be the next king because Charles had no legitimate children. A strong movement developed in Parliament to exclude James by law from the throne. The exclusionists—and those generally who were most suspicious of the king, Catholics, and the French—received the nickname of Whigs. The king’s supporters were popularly called Tories. The Whigs, while backed by the middle class and merchants of London, drew their main strength from the upper aristocracy, especially certain great noblemen who might expect, if the king’s power were weakened, to play a prominent part in ruling the country themselves. The Tories were the party of the lesser aristocracy and gentry, those who were suspicious of the “moneyed interest” of London, and felt a strong loyalty to church and king. These two parties, or at least their names, became permanently established in English public life. But all the Whigs and Tories together, at this time, did not number more than a few thousand persons.

The Revolution of 1688

James II, despite Whig vexation, became king in 1685. He soon antagonized even the Tories, who strongly supported the Church of England. As landowners they appointed most of the parish clergy, who imparted Tory sentiments to the rural population; and mem- bers of landowning Tory families frequently became bishops, archdeacons, university functionaries, and other high personnel of the church. The laws keeping Dissenters and Catholics from offi ce had given Anglicans (i.e., members of the Church of England) a monopoly in local and national government and in the army and navy. James II acted as if there were no Test Act, claiming the right to suspend its operation in individual cases, and appointed a good many Catholics to infl uential and lucrative positions. He offered a pro- gram, as his brother had done, of general religious toleration, to allow Protestant Dissent- ers as well as Roman Catholics to participate in public life.

Such a program, whether frankly meant as a secularizing of politics or indirectly intended as favoritism to Catholics, was repugnant to the Church of England. Seven bish- ops refused to endorse it. They were prosecuted for disobedience to the king but were acquitted by the jury. James, by these actions, violated the liberties of the established

church, threatened the Anglican monopoly of church and state, and aroused the popular terrors of “popery.” He was also forced to take the position philosophically set forth by his grandfather James I, that a king of England could make and unmake the law by his own will. The Tories joined the Whigs in opposition. In 1688, a son was born to James II and baptized into the Catholic faith. The prospect now opened up of an indefi nite line of Catholic rulers in England. The leaders of both parties thereupon aban-

doned James II and offered the throne to his grown daughter Mary, who was brought up a Protestant before her father’s conversion to Rome.

Mary was the wife of William of Orange. William, it will be recalled, had spent his adult life blocking the ambitions of the king of France, who had threatened Europe with a “universal monarchy” by absorbing or inheriting the global territories of Spain. To William III it would be a mere distraction to be husband to a queen of England, or even

to be king in his own name, unless England could be brought to serve his own purposes. He was immutably Dutch; his purpose was to save Holland and hence to ruin Louis XIV. His chief interest in England was to bring the English into his balance of power against France. Because the English were

Whigs and Tories in opposition to the crown

William invades England

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 168pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 168 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

16920. Britain: The Triumph of Parliament

Sources: H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The Social Causes of the Great Rebellion,” in Men and Events: Historical Essays (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), pp. 200, 204–205; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 4–5.

Historical Interpretations and Debates The Meaning of the English Revolution

Debates about the signifi cance of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution often focus on how the Revolution transformed the political or economic infl uence of various social groups. Although many historians have argued that landed, aristocratic elites emerged from the seventeenth-century upheavals as the dominant power in English society, there is much disagreement about whether the revolutionary events also enhanced or weakened the political position of other people in the multiple layers of English social life. Such differences appear in the writings of Hugh R. Trevor-Roper and Phyllis Mack, who seek to explain the Revolution’s historical meaning for some of its diverse social groups and participants.

Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, “The Social Causes of the Great Rebellion” (1957) The Great Rebellion . . . [was] not the clear-headed self-assertion of the rising bourgeoisie and gentry, but rather the blind protest of the depressed gentry. . . .

It was the blind revolt of the gentry against the Court, of the provinces against the capital; the backwash against a century of administrative and economic centralization. Since they were animated by passion, not by positive political ideas, . . . the radical gentry, when they were in power, found themselves without a policy. Ultimately, after a period of fumbling experiments, they gave up the effort, accepted back the old political system, and sank into political quietism. . . .

The rebellion itself . . . took place because a failure of political ability coincided with a general economic crisis. . . . Perhaps indirectly the rebellion may have forwarded the undoubted change of mentality between the early and the late seventeenth century in England. . . . But, equally, it may have impeded that progress for a generation. . . . What we can say. . . is that it was not, in itself, a successful stage in the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth- Century England (1992) The [religious] prophets of the Civil War period, many of them laborers, farmers, or artisans, understood their condemnation of an engorged clergy and aristocracy as both a spiritual and social protest. And since women were commonly identifi ed with the poor and deprived, . . . one would expect that those radical movements that championed the poor and deprived would also champion the increased authority of women. Yet . . . those sects that were most radical in challenging traditional social and economic relationships were least likely to be attentive to the needs and rights of oppressed people who were female. Conversely, those women who were most conscious of their authority as females, Quaker and non-Quaker, were also those middle and upper class women who had the least affi nity with the plight of the laboring classes. . . .

Women as [religious] prophets enjoyed virtually the only taste of public authority they would ever know. Some of them used that author- ity to write and publish their own works, to organize separate women’s meetings, or to chal- lenge the greater authority of the male leaders. . . .

The historian’s attentiveness to the issue of gender is likely to raise more questions than it answers. . . . [But] it suggests . . . that the private actions of ordinary individuals have affected larger social and political movements as profoundly as the deeds of great and famous men, forcing us to broaden our defi nition of the term “politics.”

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 169pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 169 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715170

generally anti-French, and had chafed under the pro-French tendencies of their kings, Wil- liam quickly reached an understanding with the discontented Whigs and Tories. Protected by a written invitation from prominent Englishmen, he invaded England with a consider- able army. James II fl ed, and William was proclaimed co-ruler with Mary over England and Scotland. In the next year, 1690, at the Boyne River in Ireland, a motley army of Dutchmen, Germans, Scots, and French Huguenots under William III defeated a French and Irish force led by James II. Thus the constitutional power of the English Parliament was reaffi rmed, and Anglican Protestantism remained the offi cial religion of the English nation. James II fl ed to France.

ENGLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY The maps show the principal seventeenth-century English towns and the rough division of the country into royalist and parliamentary regions during the English Civil War. King Charles I drew his strongest support from the north and west; Parliament drew its strongest support from the southeast and from London. Similar regional political patterns emerged in later con- fl icts between the Royalist “Tories” and the Parliamentary “Whigs.” The Whigs were gener- ally supported by the upper aristocracy and the commercial classes of London, who opposed the pro-French, pro-Catholic policies of the Stuart kings Charles II and James II.

Controlled by the King

Conquered by the King

Controlled by Parliament

Conquered by Parliament

ENGLISH CIVIL WAR, 1642–43

Controlled by the King

Conquered by the King

Controlled by Parliament

Conquered by Parliament

ENGLISH CIVIL WAR, 1644–45

0 100 miles50

S C O T L A N D

E N G L A N D

W A L E S

S C O T L A N D

E N G L A N D

W A L E S

Nottingham

Liverpool

Cardigan

Stratton

Gloucester

London

Norwich

Coventry

Nottingham

Hull

Lancaster

Glasgow Edinburgh

Liverpool

Cardigan

Stratton

Gloucester

London

Norwich

Coventry

Hull

Lancaster

Glasgow Edinburgh

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 170pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 170 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

171

Louis XIV of course refused to recognize his inveterate enemy as ruler of England. He maintained James at the French court with all the honors due the English king. It was thereafter one of his principal war aims to restore the Catholic and Stuart dynasty across the Channel. The English now had new reasons to fi ght the French. A French victory would mean counterrevolution and royal absolutism in England. The whole Revolution of 1688 was at stake in the French wars.

In 1689, Parliament enacted a Bill of Rights, stipulating that no law could be suspended by the king (as the Test Act had been), no taxes could be raised or army maintained except by parliamentary consent, and no sub- ject (however poor) could be arrested and detained without legal process. William III accepted these articles as conditions to receiving the crown. Thereafter the relation between king and people was a kind of contract. It was further provided, by the Act of Settlement of 1701, that no Catholic could be king of England; this excluded the descendants of James II, known in the following century as the Pretenders. Parliament also passed the Toleration Act of 1689, which allowed Protestant Dissenters to practice their religion but still excluded them from political life and public service. Because ways of evading these restrictions were soon found, and because even Catholics were not molested unless they supported the Pretenders, there was thereafter no serious trouble over religion in England and Lowland Scotland.

The English Parliament could make no laws for Scotland, however, and it was feared that James II might someday be restored in his northern kingdom. The securing of the parliamentary revolution in England, and of the island’s defenses against France, required that the two kingdoms be organically joined; but there was little sentiment in Scotland, for a merger with the English. The English tempted Scottish political leaders with economic advantages. The Scots still had no rights in the English East India Company, nor in the English colonies, nor within the English system of mercantilism and Navigation Acts. They obtained such rights by consenting to a union. Although anti-merger sentiment remained strong in much of Scotland, the United Kingdom of Great Britain was created in 1707. The Scots retained their own legal system and established Presbyterian church, but their government and parliament were merged with those of England. The term “British” came into use to refer to both English and Scots.

As for Ireland, it was now feared as a center of Stuart and French intrigue. The Revolu- tion of 1688 marked the climax of a long record of trouble. Ireland had never been simply “conquered” by England, though certain English or rather Anglo-Norman families had carved out estates there since the twelfth century. By the end of the Middle Ages Ireland was organized as a separate kingdom with its own parliament, subordinate to the English crown. During the Reformation the Irish remained Catholic while England turned Protestant, but the monasteries were dissolved in Ireland as in England; and the organized church as such, the established Church of Ireland, with its apparatus of bishoprics, parishes, and tithes, became an Anglican commu- nion in which the mass of native Irish had no interest. Next came the planta- tion of Ulster, already mentioned, in which a mass of newcomers, mainly Scottish and Presbyterian, settled in the northern part of the island. Then in Cromwell’s time, as just noted, English landlords spread through the rest of the country; or rather, a new Anglo-Irish upper class developed, in which English landowning families, residing most often in England, added the income from Irish estates to their miscellaneous revenues.

Ireland therefore by the close of the seventeenth century was a very mixed country. Probably two-thirds of its population was Catholic, of generally Celtic ethnic background; perhaps a fi fth was Presbyterian, with recent Scottish connections; the small remainder

Bill of Rights and the Toleration Act

The Irish threat to the Revolution of 1688

20. Britain: The Triumph of Parliament

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 171pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 171 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715172

was made up of Anglicans, largely Anglo-Irish of recent or distant origin in England, who controlled most of the land, manned the offi cial church, and were infl uential in the Irish parliament. It was essentially a landlord and peasant society, in which the Presbyterian and Catholic populations were overwhelmingly agricultural and poor, towns were small, and the middle class scarcely developed.

After the Revolution of 1688, in which the fi nal overthrow of James II took place in Ireland at the Boyne River, the English feared Ireland as a source of danger to the postrevo- lutionary arrangements in England and as a likely site for anti-English resistance to develop among subjugated Catholics. English elites who were defending their own liberties at home

thus set about destroying the religious, political, and social liberties of Irish Catholics. In addition to the burden of an alien church and absentee land- lordism, the Irish were now subjected to a new “penal code.” Catholic clergy were banished, and Catholics were forbidden to vote or to sit in the Irish parliament. Catholic teachers were forbidden to teach, and Catholic parents

were forbidden to send children overseas to be educated in Catholic schools. No Catholic could take a degree at Trinity College (Dublin University), an Anglican institution. Catholics in Ireland were forbidden to purchase land, to lease it for more than 31 years, to inherit it from a Protestant, or even to own a horse worth more than £5. Catholics were forbidden to be attorneys, to serve as constables, or, in most trades, to have more than two apprentices. Some disabilities fell on the Protestant Irish also. Thus Irish shipping was excluded from the British colonies, nor could the Irish import colonial goods except through England. Export of Irish woolens and glass manufactures was prohibited. No import tariff on English manufactures could be levied by the Irish parliament. About all that was left to the Irish, in international trade, was the export of agricultural produce; and the foreign exchange acquired in this way went very largely to pay the rents to absentee landlords.

The purpose of the penal code was in part strategic, to weaken Ireland as a potentially hostile country during a long period of English wars with France. In part it was commer- cial, to favor English manufactures by removing Irish competition. And in part it was social, to confi rm the position of the Anglican interest, or “ascendancy” as it came to be called. Parts of the code were removed piecemeal in the following decades, and a Catholic merchant class grew up in the eighteenth century; but much remained in effect for a long

Restrictions for Catholics

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 1642–1713

1642–1648 Civil War in England

1649 Execution of King Charles I in London

1649–1658 Oliver Cromwell leads the English “Commonwealth” and “Protectorate”

1660 Restoration of English Monarchy, King Charles II

1661 King Louis XIV takes personal control of French government; reign continues to 1715

1685 Revocation of Edict of Nantes; persecution of French Protestants

1688 “Glorious Revolution” brings William and Mary to English throne and strength- ens power of Parliament

1702–1713 War of Spanish Succession; “balance of power” limits French expansion

1713 Peace of Utrecht

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 172pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 172 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

17321. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph of Absolutism

time, so that, for example, a Catholic could not vote for members of the Irish parliament until 1793, and even then could not be elected to it. In general, the Irish emerged from the seventeenth century as the most repressed people of western Europe.

England, immediately after the expulsion of James II, joined William III’s coalition against France. To the alliance England brought a highly competent naval force, together with very considerable wealth. William’s government, to fi nance the war, borrowed £1,200,000 from a syndicate of private lenders, who in return for holding government bonds were given the privilege of operating a bank. Thus originated, in 1694, both the Bank of England and the British national debt. Owners of liquid assets, merchants of London and Whig aristocrats, having lent their money to the new regime, had a compelling reason to defend it against the French and James II. And having at last a government whose policies they could control, they were willing to entrust it with money in large amounts. The national debt rapidly rose, while the credit of the government held consistently good; and for many years people on the Continent were astonished at the wealth that the British government could tap at will and the quantities of money that it could pour into the wars of Europe.

The events of 1688 came to be known to the English as the Glori- ous Revolution. The Revolution was portrayed as vindicating the principles of parliamentary government, the rule of law, and even the right of rebel- lion against tyranny (though, as noted above, England’s governing classes denied all such rights in Ireland). The overthrow of James II and the enactment of new parliamentary restrictions on the power of English kings have often been depicted as the climax in the growth of English constitutional self-government. Political writers like John Locke, shortly after the events, helped to give wide currency to these ideas. There was in truth some justifi cation for these views even though in more recent times some writ- ers have “deglorifi ed” the Revolution of 1688. They point out that it was an upper-class movement, promoted and maintained by an exclusionary landed aristocracy. The Parlia- ment that boldly asserted itself against the king was at the same time closing itself to large segments of the English people. Where in the Middle Ages members of the House of Commons had usually received pay for their services, this custom disappeared in the seventeenth century, so that thereafter only men with independent incomes could sit. After the parliamentary triumph of 1688 this tendency became a matter of law. An act of 1710 required members of the House of Commons to possess private incomes at such a level that only a few thousand persons could legally qualify. This income had to come from the ownership of land. England from 1688 to 1832 was the best example in modern times of a true aristocracy, that is, of a country in which the men of an aristocratic landowning class not only enjoyed privileges but also conducted the government. But the landowning inter- est was then the only social group that was suffi ciently wealthy, numerous, educated, and self-conscious to stand politically on its own feet. Although it depended on the labor and trade of men and women who could never vote or hold offi ce, the rule of the “gentlemen of England” was, within its strict social limits, an evolving, early regime of political liberty.

21. THE FRANCE OF LOUIS XIV, 1643–1715: THE TRIUMPH OF ABSOLUTISM

French Culture in the Seventeenth Century

Having traveled in the outer orbits of the seventeenth-century European political system, we come now to its radiant and mighty center, the domain of the Sun King himself, the

Coalition against France

The Glorious Revolution

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 173pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 173 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715174

France against which the rest of Europe felt obliged to combine because its power threat- ened the interests of so many other countries—the future of the Spanish possessions, the independence of Holland, the maintenance in England of the parliamentary revolution. The France of Louis XIV owed much of its ascendancy to the quantity and quality of its people. Population was stabilized or possibly even falling in the seventeenth century, the last century in which France was seriously disturbed by famines and peasant rebellions. With 19 million inhabitants in 1700 France was still over three times as populous as England and twice as populous as Spain. Its fertile soil, in an agricultural age, made it a wealthy country, though the wealth was very unevenly distributed.

France was big enough to harbor many contradictions. Millions of its people lived in poverty, yet the number in comfortable or even luxurious circumstances was very large. There were both modest country nobles and cosmopolitan grands seigneurs. The middle class included an inordinate

number of lawyers, offi ceholders, and bureaucrats. The country was less commercial than Holland or England, yet in sheer numbers there may have been more merchants in France than in either of the other two countries. Protestants were a declining minority, yet in the mid-seventeenth century there were still more French Huguenots than Dutch Calvinists. It was a self-suffi cient country, yet the French in this century began trading in India and Madagascar, founded colonial settlements in Canada, penetrated the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley, set up sugar plantations in the West Indies, expanded their ancient commerce with the Levant, enlarged their mercantile marine, and for a time had the lead- ing navy of Europe. France, in short, became a highly active participant in the widening networks of global trade and European colonization.

The dominance of France meant the dominance not merely of power but of a people whom most Europeans viewed as the forefront of seventeenth-century civilization. They carried over the versatility of the Italy of the Renaissance. In Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain they produced a notable school of painters, their architecture was emulated throughout Europe, and they excelled in military fortifi cation and engineering. Much of their literature, though often written by bourgeois writers, was designed for an aristocratic and courtly audience, which had put aside the uncouth manners of an earlier day and prided itself on the refi nement of its tastes and perceptions. Corneille and Racine wrote austere tragedies on the personal confl icts and social relations of human life. Molière, in his com- edies, ridiculed bumbling doctors, new-rich bourgeois, and foppish aristocrats, making the word “marquis” almost a joke in the French language. La Fontaine gave the world his animal fables, and La Rochefoucauld, in his witty and sardonic maxims, a nobleman’s candid judgment on human nature. In Descartes the French produced a great mathemati- cian and scientifi c thinker; in Pascal, a scientist who was also a profound spokesman for Christianity; in Bayle, the father of modern skeptics. It was French thought and the French language, not merely the armies of Louis XIV, which in the seventeenth century were sweeping the European world.

Louis XIV understood that France’s dominant position in Europe required more than large armies and that a fl ourishing cultural life greatly enhanced the interna- tional prestige of even the wealthiest or most powerful sovereign state. He therefore gave generous fi nancial support to his favorite writers and artists, especially those who produced works for his new palace at Versailles. He also brought the arts and sciences into the state’s administrative system by

establishing royal academies in which various theorists taught the correct principles for art, literature, music, dance, and scientifi c knowledge. The favored or offi cial aesthetic

The contradictions of French society

Patronage of the arts by Louis XIV

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 174pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 174 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

175

theory in these academies was called classicism, a theory that emphasized order, harmony, and the artistic achievements of antiquity. Following the example of painters such as Pous- sin, young artists learned to portray scenes from classical Roman history or mythology with harmonious and almost geometric precision. The great literary theorist of the day, Nicolas Boileau, urged writers to emulate the poetic works of ancient writers who had shown how literature addresses the timeless themes of human knowledge and transcendent truths rather than the frivolities of daily life. The classicism of French artists and writers thus fi t comfortably with the Sun King’s appreciation for order, harmony, and hierarchy in every sphere of social, political, and cultural life.

Yet neither the king nor his offi cial academies could control all of France’s artistic and intellectual activity. Some literary critics, soon known as the “Moderns,” began to argue that modern literature and knowledge had in fact surpassed the achievements of antiquity and that Boileau’s academic writers, soon called the “Ancients,” deferred much too rigidly to ancient authorities. Meanwhile, other centers of intellectual life emerged outside the royal academies in the new salons of Paris. Developing rapidly in the second half of the seventeenth century, the salons became the unoffi - cial gathering places for Parisian nobles, wealthy professional persons, and creative writers or artists. They were organized by upper-class women who invited people into their homes to discuss philosophy, literature, and art—all of which could be debated

Salons

The French playwright Molière often performed in his own plays, including some that were staged at the court of Louis XIV. He is portrayed here as a character in The School for Wives, a popular comedy about confl icts and deceptions in the relations between women and men. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

21. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph of Absolutism

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 175pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 175 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715176

without the formal constraints and solemnity of the academies. The salons attracted criti- cism and even ridicule from some people in the government and academies, partly because they were created by energetic women and partly because they fl ourished outside the offi - cial cultural institutions of the state. But the Parisian salons, like the royal academies, became an enduring, distinctive institution in French cultural life. They also welcomed distinguished foreign visitors, thus contributing to the spread of French ideas and social mores throughout Europe. Parisian-style salons eventually appeared in other European cities, along with French fashion, French manners, and the French language.

The Development of Absolutism in France

This ascendancy of French culture went along with a regime in which political liberties were at a discount. The culture embellished what historians have often called the “absolute monarchy” of Louis XIV, though the king’s power was never as far-reaching as the term “absolutism” suggests. The Sun King had to secure the cooperation of the nobility and other social classes; and his power was constrained in various ways by regional institutions, French legal traditions, and a fragmented system of local economies. Like other European countries, France had a tradition of political rights and liberties that were associated with older, even feudal, political and legal institutions. It had an Estates General, which had

not met since 1615 but was not legally abolished. In some regions Provin- cial Estates, still meeting frequently, retained a measure of self-government and of power over taxation. There were about a dozen bodies known as parlements, 1 which, unlike the English Parliament, had developed as courts

of law, each being the supreme court for a certain area of the country. The parlements upheld certain “fundamental laws” that they said the king could not overstep, and they often refused to enforce royal edicts that they declared to be unconstitutional. France, beneath the surface, was almost as diverse as Germany (see map, p. 184). French towns had won charters of acknowledged rights, and many of the great provinces enjoyed liberties written into old agreements with the crown. These local liberties created institutional complications for a would-be “absolute” monarch. There were some 300 “customs” or regional systems of law; it was observed that travelers sometimes changed laws more often than they changed horses. Internal tariffs ran along the old provincial borders. Tolls were levied by manorial lords. The king’s taxes fell less heavily on some regions than on others. Neither coinage nor weights and measures were uniform throughout the country. France was a bundle of territories held together by allegiance to the king.

This older kind of feudal freedom discredited itself in France at the very time when in Germany a neo-feudal localism was pulling the Holy Roman Empire to pieces, and when in England the older feudal liberties were making a transition to a more modern form of political liberty, embodied in the parliamentary though aristocratic state. In France the old medieval or local type of liberty became associated with disorder. It has already been related how after the disorders of the sixteenth-century religious wars people had turned with relief to the monarchy and how Henry IV and then Richelieu had begun to make the

monarchy strong. The troubles of the Fronde, beginning in 1648, provided additional incentive for the centralization of political power in France.

The Fronde broke out immediately after the Peace of Westphalia, while Louis XIV was still a child, and was directed against Cardinal Mazarin, who

The “parlements”

The Fronde

1 Spelled parlements in French, to distinguish from the English Parliament.

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 176pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 176 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

177

was governing in his name. It was an abortive revolution, led by the same elements, the parlements and the nobility, which were to initiate the great French Revolution in 1789. The parlements, especially the Parlement of Paris, insisted in 1648 on their right to pronounce certain royal edicts unconstitutional. Barricades were thrown up and street fi ghting broke out in Paris. The nobility rebelled, as it had often in the past. Leadership was assumed by certain prominent noblemen who had enough wealth and infl uence to believe that, if the king’s power were contained, they might govern the country themselves. The nobility demanded a calling of the Estates General, expecting to dominate over the bourgeoisie and the clergy in that body. Armed bands of soldiers, unemployed since the Peace of Westphalia and led by nobles, roamed about the country terrorizing the peasants. If the nobles had their way, it was probable that the manorial system would fall on the peasants more heavily, as in eastern Europe, where triumphant lords were at this very time exacting increased labor services from the peasants. Finally the rebellious nobles called in Spanish troops to bol- ster their uprising, though France was still at war with Spain. By this time the bourgeoisie,

INSPIRATION OF THE EPIC POET by Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665)

Poussin’s interest in both the themes and forms of classicism appear in this image of a poet who yearns for the honor of a laurel crown as he meditates on the Greek god Apollo (with his lyre) and Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. The painting shows the careful symmetry and bal- ance of much seventeenth-century French art. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

21. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph of Absolutism

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 177pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 177 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715178

together with the parlements, had withdrawn support from the rebellious nobles. The agi- tation subsided in total failure. Bourgeoisie and aristocracy could not work together; the nobles outraged people throughout France by bringing Spanish soldiers into their rebellion; and the frondeurs, especially after the parlements deserted them, had no base of popular support and no systematic or constructive program, aiming only at the overthrow of the unpopular Cardinal Mazarin and at obtaining offi ces and favors for themselves.

After the Fronde, as after the religious wars, the bourgeoisie and peasantry of France, to protect themselves against the claims of the aristocracy, were in a mood to welcome the exercise of strong power by the kings. And in the young Louis XIV they had a man more than willing to grasp all the power he could get. Louis, at age 23, on Mazarin’s death in 1661, announced that he would govern the country himself. He was the third king of the Bourbon line. It was the Bourbon tradition, established by Henry IV and by Richelieu, to draw the teeth from independent aristocrats, and this was a tradition that Louis XIV now followed. He was not a man of any transcendent abilities, though he had the capacity, often found among successful executives, of learning a good deal from conversation with experts. His education was somewhat limited, having been made purposely easy; but he had the ability to see and stick to defi nite lines of policy, and he was extremely methodical and industrious in his daily habits, scrupulously loading himself with administrative business throughout his reign. He was extremely fond of himself and his position of king- ship, with an insatiable appetite for admiration and fl attery; he loved magnifi cent display and elaborate etiquette, though to some extent he simply adopted them as instruments of policy rather than as a personal whim.

With the reign of Louis XIV the “state” in its modern form took a long step forward. The state in the abstract has always seemed somewhat theoretical to the English-speaking world. Let us say, for simplicity, that the state represents a fusion of justice and power. A sovereign state possesses, within its territory, a monopoly over the administration of justice and the use of force. Private persons neither pass legal judgments on others nor control pri- vate armies of their own. For private and unauthorized persons to do so, in an orderly state, constitutes rebellion. This was in contrast to the older feudal practice, by which feudal lords maintained manorial courts and led their own followers into battle. Against these feudal

practices Louis XIV energetically worked, though not with complete suc- cess, claiming to possess in his own person, the sovereign ruler, a monopoly over the lawmaking processes and the armed forces of the kingdom. This is the deeper meaning of his reputed boast, L’état, c’est moi— “the state is

myself.” In the France of the seventeenth century, divided by classes and by regions, there was in fact no practical means of consolidating the powers of state except in a shared defer- ence to one individual.

The state, however, while representing law and order within its borders, has gener- ally stood in a lawless and disorderly relation to other states, because no higher monopoly of law and force has existed. Louis XIV, personifying the French state, had no particular regard for the claims of other states or rulers. He was constantly either at war or preparing for war with his neighbors. The modern state, indeed, was created by the needs of peace at home and war abroad. Machinery of government, as devised by Louis XIV and others, was a means of giving order and security within the territory of the state, and of raising, supporting, and controlling armies for use against other states.

The idea that law and force within a country should be monopolized by the lawful king was the essence of the seventeenth-century doctrine of absolutism. Its principal theorist in the time of Louis XIV was the French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who advanced the

“L’etat, c’est moi”

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 178pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 178 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

179

old Christian teaching that all power comes from God and that all who hold power are responsible to God for the way they use it. He held that kings were God’s representatives in the political affairs of earth. Royal power, according to Bossuet, was absolute but not arbi- trary. The use of power could not be arbitrary because it must be reasonable and just, like the will of God that it refl ected; but it was absolute in that it was free from dictation by parle- ments, estates, or other subordinate elements within the country. Law, therefore, was the will of the sovereign king, so long as it conformed to the higher law that was the will of God.

This doctrine, affi rming the divine right of kings, was popularly held in France at the time and was taught in the churches. Absolutism and absolute monarchy became the prevailing concepts of government on much of the European continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It must be remembered, however, that these terms referred more to legal theories than to facts. A ruler, in theory, could be absolute because he was not legally bound by any other persons or institutions in the country. In reality he became dependent upon a host of advisers and bureaucrats; he often had to compromise with vested interests; and he could be thwarted by the sheer weight of local custom or meet resistance from lawyers, ecclesiastics, nobles, grandees, hereditary offi ceholders, and miscellaneous dignitaries. And the slow pace of both transportation and communication prevented early modern “absolutist” rulers from controlling their subjects as quickly or as effi ciently as governments have controlled their people in modern nation-states.

Government and Administration

Louis XIV’s early and perhaps most important administrative steps assured his tight control of the army. Armed forces in Europe had long been almost a private enterprise. Specialists in fi ghting, leading their own troops, worked for governments more or less as they chose, either in return for money or to pursue political aims of their own. This was especially common in central Europe, but even in France great noblemen had strong private infl u- ence over the troops, and in times of disorder nobles led armed retainers about the country. Colonels were virtually on their own. Provided with a general commission and with funds by some government, they recruited, trained, and equipped their own regiments, and likewise fed and supplied them, often by preying upon bourgeois and peasants in the vicinity. In these circumstances it was often diffi cult to say on whose side soldiers were fi ghting. It was hard for governments to set armies into motion and equally hard to make them stop fi ghting, for commanders fought for their own interests and on their own momentum. War was not a “continuation of policy”; it was not an act of the state; it easily degenerated, as in the Thirty Years’ War, into a kind of aimless and perpetual violence.

Louis XIV made war an activity of state. He saw to it that all armed persons in France fought only for him. This produced peace and order within France, while strengthening the fi ghting power of France against other states. Under the older conditions there was also little integration among different units and branches of the army. Infantry regiments and cavalry went largely their own way, and the artillery was supplied by civilian technicians under contract. Louis XIV created a stronger unity of control, put the artillery organically into the army, systematized the military ranks and grades, and clarifi ed the chain of com- mand, placing himself at the top. The government supervised recruiting, required colonels to prove that they were maintaining the proper number of soldiers, and assumed most of the responsibility for equipping, provisioning, clothing, and housing the troops. Higher

Absolutism

War: a state activity

21. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph of Absolutism

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 179pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 179 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715180

offi cers, thus becoming dependent on the government, could be subjected to discipline. The soldiers were put into uniforms, taught to march in step, and housed in barracks; thus they too became more susceptible to discipline and control.

Armed forces became less of a terror to their own people and a more effective weapon in the hands of government. They were employed usually against other governments but sometimes to suppress rebellion at home. Louis XIV also increased the French army in size, raising it from about 100,000 to about 400,000. These changes, both in size and in degree of government control, were made possible by the growth of a large civilian admin- istration, the heads of which were also civilians under the control of Louis XIV. They were in effect the fi rst ministers of war, and their assistants, offi cials, inspectors, and clerks constituted the fi rst organized war ministry.

Louis XIV was a vain man, but he connected his vanity to a broader political strategy to overawe the country with his own grandeur. He built himself a whole new city at the old village of Versailles about 10 miles southwest of Paris. Where the Escorial in Spain

had the atmosphere of a monastery, Versailles was a monument to worldly splendor. Tremendous in size, fi tted out with polished mirrors, gleaming chandeliers, and magnifi cent tapestries, opening on to a formal park with fountains and shaded walks, the palace of Versailles became the marvel of Europe and the envy of lesser kings. It was virtually a public building,

much of it used for government offi ces, with nobles, churchmen, notable bourgeois, and servants milling about on the king’s affairs. The more exclusive honors of the château were reserved for the higher nobles. The king surrounded his daily routine of rising, eat- ing, and going to bed (known as the lever, dîner, and coucher ) with an infi nite series of ceremonial acts, so minute and so formalized that there were, for example, six different

The splendor of Versailles

LOUIS XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud (French, 1659–1743)

The grandeur of the Sun King is con- veyed in this portrait by Rigaud. He uses the king’s clothing, stance, and royal emblems to express the power of the French monarchy. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 180pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 180 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

181

entries of persons at the lever, and a certain gentleman at a specifi ed moment held the right sleeve of the king’s nightshirt as he took it off. The most exalted persons thought themselves the greater for thus waiting on so august a being. With such honors, and by more material favors, many great nobles were induced to live habitually at court. Here, under the royal eye, they might engage in palace intrigue but were kept away from real political agitation in the provinces. Versailles had a debilitating effect on the French aristocracy.

For most positions in the government, as distinguished from his personal entourage, Louis XIV preferred to use men whose upper-class status was recent. Such men, unlike hereditary nobles, could aspire to no independent political infl uence of their own. He never called the Estates General, which in any case no one except some of the nobility wanted. Some of the Provincial Estates, because of local and aristocratic pressures, were allowed to remain functioning. He temporarily destroyed the independence of the parlements, commanding them to accept his orders, as Henry IV had commanded them to accept the Edict of Nantes. He developed a strong system of administrative coordination, centering in a number of councils of state, which he attended in person, and in “intendants” who represented these councils throughout the country. Councilors of state and the intendants in provincial districts were generally of bourgeois origin or newly ennobled. Each inten- dant, within his district, embodied all aspects of the royal government— supervising the fl ow of taxes and recruiting of soldiers, keeping an eye on the local nobility, dealing with towns and guilds, controlling the more or less hereditary offi ceholders, policing the marketplaces, relieving famine, watching and often participating in the local law courts. A fi rm and uniform administration was superimposed upon the heterogeneous mass of the old France. In con- trast to England, many local questions were handled by agents of the central government, usually honest and often effi cient, but essentially bureaucrats constantly instructed by, and reporting back to, their superiors at Versailles.

Economic and Financial Policies: Colbert

To support the reorganized and enlarged army, the panoply of Versailles, and the grow- ing civil administration, the king needed a good deal of money. Finance was always the weak spot in the French monarchy. Methods of collecting taxes were costly and ineffi cient. Direct taxes passed through the hands of many intermedi- ate offi cials; indirect taxes were collected by private concessionaries called tax farmers, who made a substantial profi t. The state always received far less than what French taxpayers actually paid. But the main weakness arose from an old bargain between the French crown and nobility; the king might raise taxes without consent only if he refrained from taxing the nobles. Only the “unprivileged” classes paid direct taxes, and these came almost to mean the peasants only, because many bourgeois in one way or another obtained exemptions. The system was outrageously unjust in throwing a heavy tax burden on the poor and helpless. Louis XIV was willing enough to tax the nobles but was unwilling to fall under their control, and only toward the close of his reign, under extreme stress of war, was he able, for the fi rst time in French history, to impose direct taxes on the aristocratic elements of the population. This was a step toward equality before the law and toward sound public fi nance, but the nobles and wealthiest bourgeois taxpayers received numerous concessions and exemptions that greatly reduced the fi nancial value of the reforms.

Administrative tactics of Louis XIV

Taxation

21. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph of Absolutism

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 181pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 181 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

182

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 182pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 182 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

183

Like his predecessors, Louis resorted to all manner of expedients to increase his rev- enues. He raised the tax rates, always with disappointing results. He devalued the cur- rency. He sold patents of nobility to ambitious bourgeois. He sold government offi ces, judgeships, and commissions in the army and navy. For both fi nancial and political reasons the king used his sovereign authority to annul the town charters, then sold back reduced rights at a price; this produced a little income but demoralized local government and civic spirit. The need for money arose from the fundamental inability to tax the wealthy. This problem refl ected the weakness and limitations of absolutism because the government’s refusal to share its rule with the propertied classes corrupted much of French public life and undermined the political aptitude of the French people.

Louis XIV wished, if only for his own purposes, to make France economically power- ful. His great fi nance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert worked for 20 years to do so. Colbert went beyond Richelieu in the application of mercantilism, aiming to make France a self- suffi cing economic unit, to expand the export of French goods, and to increase the wealth from which government income was drawn. There was not much that he could do for agriculture, the principal industry of the kingdom, which remained less developed than in England and the Netherlands. But he managed to reduce internal tariffs in a large part of central France, where he set up a tariff union oddly entitled the Five Great Farms (because the remaining tolls were collected by tax farmers); and although vested interests and provincial liberties remained too strong for him to do away with all internal tariffs, the area of the Five Great Farms was in itself one of the largest free-trade areas in Europe, being about the size of England.

For the convenience of business Colbert promulgated a Commercial Code, replacing much of the local customary law with a new model of busi- ness practice and regulation. He improved communications by building roads and canals. Working through the guilds, he required the handicraft manufac- turers to produce goods of specifi ed kind and quality, believing that foreigners, if assured of quality by the government, would purchase French products. He gave subsidies, tax exemp- tions, and monopolies to expand the manufacture of silks, tapestries, glassware, and woolens.

Colbert also helped to found colonies, built up the navy, and established the French East India Company, which soon expanded the French presence in India. During this same era, the East India Company occupied and began to develop a new Caribbean colony in Saint-Domingue, a territory on the western side of the island of Hispaniola that Spain would offi cially cede to France in 1697. Enslaved Africans were taken to Saint-Domingue, where they became the labor force in a colonial plantation economy that would later pro- duce very large and profi table shipments of sugar, coffee, and indigo for European mar- kets. Within France itself, export of some goods, notably foodstuffs, was forbidden, for the government wished to keep the populace quiet by holding down the price of bread.

The Five Great Farms

Colbert’s Commercial Code

Thirty thousand workers were employed at one time in the building of the great royal château at Versailles. The seventeenth-century painting by Adam François van der Mueleh (upper) illustrates the complex labor and planning that were required during the process of construc- tion; the lower painting by Pierre Denis Martin dates from the early eighteenth century, and it shows the activity that surrounded Versailles when the king, government ministers, and nobles were assembled in the vast buildings and gardens. The grandeur and scale of these buildings were designed to symbolize the king’s power and to create a sense of awe in the foreign visitors who came to meet Louis XIV or his advisers. (Royal Collection, London) (RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

21. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph of Absolutism

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 183pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 183 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715184

Export of other goods, mainly manufactures, was encouraged, partly as a means of bring- ing money into the country, where it could be funneled into the royal treasury. The growth of the army, and the fact that under Louis XIV the government placed unprecedentedly large orders for military uniforms, overcoats, weapons, and ammunition, greatly stimu- lated the employment of weavers, tailors, and gunsmiths and advanced the commercial capitalism by which such labors were organized. Trade and manufacture thus developed in France under more direct government guidance than in England; and the French gave the English an extremely brisk competition throughout the early modern era. Not until the age of iron and coal did France begin economically to lag.

In general, the system elaborated in the two centuries of Bourbon rule, known in retro- spect as the Old Regime, was a society in which groups of many kinds could identify their own special interests with those of the absolute monarchy. But it rested on a precarious incon- sistency. On the one hand, the royal government, through its intendants and bureaucracy,

FRANCE FROM THE LAST YEARS OF LOUIS XIV TO THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 The map gives an idea of the diversity of law and administration before the Revolution. Dark areas are “pays d’etats,” provinces in which representative bodies (“estates”) continued to meet. Cities named are the seats of what the French called parlements (see p. 176). The key indicates Colbert’s tariff union, the Five Great Farms. The area marked with hatching remained outside the French tariff system entirely; it continued to trade with the states of the Holy Roman Empire (from which it had been annexed) without interference by the French government. Numerals indicate the price of salt, i.e., the varying burden of the salt tax, in vari- ous regions. In general, regions farthest from Paris enjoyed the most “privileges” or “liber- ties,” preserving their legal and judicial identity, Provincial Estates, local tariffs, and a favored position in national taxation.

0 50 100 miles

Pays d'États

Colbert's Tariff Union

Area Remaining Entirely Outside the French Tariff System

Seats of Parlements or Supreme Courts of Law

Numerals indicate the Price of Salt, i.e., the Amount of Salt Tax

8 58

60 27

61 15 61

10

30

25

20

3

7

10

9 7

60

3 60

2

9 30

7

13

AUSTRIAN NETHERLANDS

GERMAN STATES

SWITZER- LAND

ITALY

TO THE POPE

Arras

Metz

Nancy

Colmar

Dijon Besançon

Grenoble

AixToulouse

Perpignan

Pau

Bordeaux

Rennes

Paris

Rouen

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 184pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 184 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

185

worked to restrict the privileges of provinces, nobles, and others. On the other hand, it multi- plied and protected these and other privileges in its perpetual need for money. The inconsis- tency was not resolved until the Revolution of 1789, when the principle of equality of rights would replace the regime of privilege.

Religion: The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685

The consolidation of France under Louis XIV reached its high point in his policies toward religion. For the Catholics, Louis backed the old claims of the Gallican church to enjoy a certain national independence from Rome. He repressed the movement known as Jansenism, a kind of theological Calvinism within the Catholic church, which persisted for almost two centuries. Jansenists criticized moral laxity in high places as well as the reli- gious infl uence of the Jesuits, so there was wide support at Versailles when the king moved against all the main centers of Jansenist theology. But it was the Protestants who suffered most in a new wave of religious persecutions.

France, in the early years of Louis XIV’s reign, still allowed more religious toleration than any other large state in Europe. The Huguenots had lost their separate political status under Richelieu, but they continued to live in relative security, protected by the Edict of Nantes of 1598. From the beginning, however, toleration had been a royal rather than a popular policy, and under Louis XIV the royal policy changed. The fate of Catholics at the hands of a triumphant Parliament in England suggests that the Protestants in France would have been no better off under more popular institutions.

Bending all other institutions to his will, Louis XIV resented the presence of heretics among his subjects. He considered religious unity necessary to the strength and dignity of his rule. He fell under the infl uence of certain Catholic advisers, who, not content with the attrition by which some Protestants were turning back to Catholicism in any case, wished to hasten the process to the greater glory of themselves. Systematic conversion of Huguenots was begun. Life for Protestant families was gradually made unbearable. Finally they were literally “dragooned,” mounted infantrymen being quartered in Huguenot homes to reinforce the persuasions of missionaries. In 1685 Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes. During the persecutions hundreds of thousands of Protestants left France, migrating to Holland, Germany, and America. Their loss was a severe blow to French economic life, for although Protestants were found in all levels of French society, those of the commercial and industrial classes were the most mobile. With the revocation of the Edict of Nantes France embarked on a century of offi cial intolerance (slowly mitigated in practice), under which Protestants in France were in much the same position as Catholics in the British Isles. The fact that 100 years later, when Prot- estants were again tolerated, many of them were found to be both commercially prosperous and politically loyal suggests that they actually fared far better than the Catholic Irish.

All things considered, the reign of Louis XIV brought considerable advantages to the French middle and lower classes. His most bitter critics, with the natural exception of Protestants, were disgruntled nobles such as the duke of Saint-Simon, who thought that he showed too many favors to per- sons of inferior social rank. Because Protestants were an unpopular minority, his repression of them won much approval. Colbert’s system of economic regulation, and perpetuation of the guilds, meant that innovation and private enterprise developed less fully than in England, but France was economically stronger in 1700 than in 1650. Peasants were heavily taxed to pay for Louis XIV’s wars, and they suffered through devastating famines after 1690 (also caused partly by the wars). But they did not sink into the serfdom that was rising in eastern

Louis XIV seeks religious unity

Accomplishments of Louis XIV

21. The France of Louis XIV, 1643–1715: The Triumph of Absolutism

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 185pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 185 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715186

Europe. Compared to later times, France was still a hodgepodge of competing jurisdic- tions, special privilege, and bureaucratic ineptitude. The king was in truth far from absolute but France was nevertheless the best organized of the large monarchies on the Continent. Louis XIV, in turning both high and low into dutiful subjects, may even have advanced the cause of abstract civil equality. For a long time he was generally popular. What fi nally turned his people against him in his last years was the strain of his incessant wars.

22. THE WARS OF LOUIS XIV: THE PEACE OF UTRECHT, 1713

Before 1700

From the outset of his reign Louis pursued a vigorous foreign policy. The quarrel between the house of France and the house of Habsburg had gone on for more than a century. When Louis XIV assumed his personal rule in 1661, Spanish territories still faced France on three sides (northeast, east, and south), but Spain was so weakened that this fact was no longer a menace to France; indeed, the surrounding Spanish territories were now a tempta- tion to French expansion. Louis XIV could count on popular support in France, for the dream of a frontier on the Rhine and the Alps was captivating to Frenchmen. He struck fi rst in 1667 by sending a large army into the Spanish Netherlands. He was blocked, as noted

The systematic repression of French Huguenots after 1685 was widely condemned in Protes- tant countries. Images such as this gruesome depiction of torture contributed to the interna- tional hostility for Louis XIV and to the foreign acceptance of French refugees who scattered into Protestant states throughout Europe and North America. (De Agostini/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 186pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 186 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

18722. The Wars of Louis XIV: The Peace of Utrecht, 1713

earlier, by the Triple Alliance of the Dutch, the English, and the Swedes. With strength renewed by reforms at home, and in alliance now with Charles II of England, he struck again in 1672 (the “Dutch War”), invading the Dutch provinces on the lower Rhine, and this time raising up against him his great adversary, the prince of Orange. William III, bringing the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs, Brandenburg, and Denmark into alliance with the Dutch Republic, forced Louis to sign the treaty of Nimwegen in 1678. The French gave up their ambitions against Holland but took from Spain the rich prov- ince of Franche-Comté, which outfl anked Alsace on the south and brought French power to the borders of Switzerland (see map, p. 149).

In the very next year, Louis further infi ltrated the dissolving frontier of the Holy Roman Empire, this time in Lorraine and Alsace. By the Peace of Westphalia the French king had rights in this region, but the terms of that treaty were so ambiguous, and the local feudal law so confusing, that claims could be made in contrary directions. In 1681 French troops occupied the city of Strasbourg, which, as a free city of the Holy Roman Empire, regarded itself as an independent little republic. A protest went up throughout Germany against this undeclared invasion. But Germany was not a political unity. Since 1648 each German state conducted its own foreign policy, and at this very moment, in 1681, Louis XIV had an ally in the Elector of Brandenburg (forerun- ner of the kings of Prussia). The diet of the Holy Roman Empire was divided between an anti-French and a pro-French party. The emperor, Leopold I, was distracted by develop- ments in the East. The Hungarians, incited and fi nanced by Louis XIV, were again rebelling against the Habsburgs. They appealed to the Ottoman Turks, and Ottoman forces in 1683 moved up the Danube and besieged Vienna. Louis XIV, if he did not on this occasion posi- tively assist the Turks, ostentatiously declined to join the proposed crusade against them.

The emperor, with Polish assistance, was able to push the Ottoman army out of Austria. Returning to his western problems and observing the western border of the empire crum- bling, Franche-Comté already lost, the Spanish Netherlands threatened, and Lorraine and Alsace absorbed bit by bit, the Emperor Leopold gathered the Catholic powers into a com- bination against the French. The Protestant states at the same time, aroused by the French revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and by Huguenot émigrés who called down the wrath of God on the perfi dious Sun King, began to ally the more readily with William of Orange. Catholic and Protestant enemies of Louis XIV thus came together in 1686 in the League of Augsburg, which comprised the Holy Roman Emperor, the kings of Spain and of Sweden, the electors of Bavaria, Saxony, and the Palatinate, and the Dutch Republic. In 1686 the king of England was still a protégé of France, but three years later, when William became king in England, that country too joined the League.

The War of the League of Augsburg began in 1688. The French armies won battles but could not drive so many enemies from the fi eld. The French navy could not overpower the combined fl eets of the Dutch and English. Louis XIV found himself badly strained (it was at this time that he fi rst imposed direct taxes on the French nobles) and fi nally made peace at Ryswick in the Netherlands in 1697, leaving matters about where they had been when the war began.

In all the warring and negotiating the question had not been merely the fate of this or that piece of territory, nor even the French thrust to the east, but the eventual disposition of the whole empire of Spain. The Spanish king, Charles II, prematurely senile, momentarily expected to die, yet lived on year after year. He was still alive at the time of the Peace of Ryswick. The greatest diplomatic issue of the day was still unsettled.

French incursions into the Holy Roman Empire

The War of the League of Augsburg

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 187pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 187 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715188

The War of the Spanish Succession

The War of the Spanish Succession lasted 11 years, from 1702 to 1713. It was less destruc- tive than the Thirty Years’ War, for armies were now supplied in more orderly fashion, subject to more orderly discipline and command, and could be stopped from fi ghting at the will of their governments. Except for the effects of civil war in Spain and of deadly famines in France, the civilian populations were generally spared from violence and destruction. In this respect the war foreshadowed the typical warfare of the eighteenth century, fought by professional armies rather than by whole peoples. Among wars of the largest scale, the War of the Spanish Succession was the fi rst in which religion counted for little, the fi rst in which commerce and sea power were the principal stakes, and the fi rst in which English money was liberally used in Continental politics. It was also the fi rst that can be called a “world war,” because it involved the overseas world together with the leading powers of Europe. Wars within Europe were becoming linked to the global competition for colonies and trade.

The struggle had long been foreseen. The two main aspirants to the Spanish inheri- tance were the king of France and the Holy Roman Emperor. Each had married a sister of the perpetually moribund Charles II, and each could hope to place a younger member of his family on the throne of Spain. During the last decades of the seventeenth century the pow- ers had made various treaties agreeing to “partition” the Spanish possessions. The idea was, by dividing the Spanish heritage between the two claimants, to preserve the balance of power in Europe. But when Charles II fi nally died in 1700, it was found that he had made a will, which stipulated that the empire of Spain should be kept intact, that all Spanish terri- tories throughout the world should go to the grandson of Louis XIV, and that if Louis XIV refused to accept in the name of his 17-year-old grandson, the entire inheritance should

pass to the son of the Habsburg emperor in Vienna. Louis XIV decided to accept. With Bourbons reigning in Versailles and Madrid, even if the two thrones were never united, French infl uence would now run from Belgium to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from Milan to Mexico and Manila. At Ver- sailles the word went out: “The Pyrenees exist no longer.”

Never, at least in almost two centuries, had the political balance within Europe been so threatened. Never had the other states faced such a pros- pect of relegation to the sidelines. William III acted at once; he gathered the stunned or hesitant diplomats into the last of his coalitions, the Grand

Alliance of 1701. Although he died the next year, before hostilities began, and with Louis XIV at the seeming apex of his grandeur, William had in fact launched the engine that was to crush the Sun King. The Grand Alliance included England, Holland, and the Austrian emperor, supported by Brandenburg and eventually by Portugal and the Italian duchy of Savoy. Louis XIV could count on Spain, which was generally loyal to the late king’s will. Otherwise his only ally was Bavaria, whose rivalry with Austria made it a habitual satel- lite of France. The Bavarian alliance gave the French armies an advanced position toward Vienna and maintained that internal division within Germany that was fundamental to the politics of the time, and of a long time to come.

The war was long, mainly because each side no sooner gained a temporary advantage than it raised its demands on the other. The English, though they sent relatively few troops to the Continent, produced in John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, a preeminent military commander for the Allied forces. The Austrians were led by Prince Eugene of Savoy. The Allies won notable battles at Blenheim in Bavaria (1704), and at Ramillies (1706), Oude- narde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) in the Spanish Netherlands. The French were routed;

“The Pyrenees exist no longer”

Threats to political balance

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 188pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 188 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

189

Louis XIV asked for peace but then would not agree to a treaty because the Allied terms were so enormous. Louis fought to hold the two crowns, to conquer Belgium, to get French merchants into Spanish America, and at the worst in self-defense. After minor successes in 1710 he again insisted on controlling the crown of Spain. The Spanish fought to uphold the will of the deceased king, the unity of the Spanish possessions, and even the integrity of Spain itself—for the English moved in at Gibraltar and made a menacing treaty with Portugal. Meanwhile, the Austrians landed at Barcelona and invaded Catalonia, which (as in 1640) again rose in rebellion, recognizing the Austrian claimant, so that all Spain fell into civil war.

The Austrians fought to keep Spain in the Habsburg family, to crush Bavaria, and to carry Austrian infl uence across the Alps into Italy. The Dutch fought as always for their security, to keep the French out of Belgium, and to control access to the river Scheldt. The English fought for these same rea- sons and also to keep the French-supported Catholic Stuarts out of England and preserve the Revolution of 1688. It was to be expected that the Stuarts, if they returned, would ruin the Bank of England and repudiate the national debt. Both maritime powers, England and Holland, fought to keep French merchants out of Spanish America and to advance their own commercial position in America and the Mediterranean. These war aims made the Whigs the implacable war party in England, whereas the vaguely pro-Stuart and anticom- mercial Tories were quite willing to make peace at an early date. As for the minor allies, Brandenburg and Savoy, their rulers had simply entered the alliance to gain such advan- tages as might turn up.

The Peace of Utrecht

Peace was fi nally made at the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt of 1713 and 1714. The treaty of Utrecht, with its allied instruments, in fact partitioned the world of Spain. But it did not divide it between the two legal claimants only. The British remained at Gibraltar, to the great irritation of the Span- iards, and likewise annexed the island of Minorca. The Duke of Savoy eventually gained the former Spanish island of Sardinia in return for his contribution to the Allied cause. The rest of the Spanish Mediterranean holdings—Milan, Naples, and Sicily—passed to the Austrian Habsburgs, as did the Spanish Netherlands (or Belgium), subsequently referred to as the Austrian Netherlands. In Spain itself, shorn of its European possessions but retain- ing America, the grandson of Louis XIV was confi rmed as king (Philip V of Spain), on the understanding that the French and Spanish thrones should never be inherited by the same person. The Bourbons reigned in Spain, with interruptions, from Philip V to the republican revolution of 1931. French infl uence was strong in the eighteenth century, for a good many French courtiers, advisers, administrators, and merchants crossed the Pyrenees with Philip V. They helped somewhat to revive the Spanish monarchy by applying the methods of Louis XIV, and they passed a swelling volume of French manufactures through Seville into Spanish America.

The old objective of William III, to prevent domination by France, was realized at last. The war itself was the main cause of French loss of strength. It produced poverty, misery, and depopulation, and it exposed Louis XIV to severe criticism at home. Recurring famines and tax increases provoked peasant uprisings, which were brutally repressed. Dissatisfaction with the war led also to a revival of aristocratic and parliamentary opposition. By the peace treaties the French

Motives of the warring states

The partition of Spain’s holdings

Consequences of the war for France

22. The Wars of Louis XIV: The Peace of Utrecht, 1713

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 189pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 189 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715190

abandoned, for the time being, their efforts to conquer Belgium. They ceased to recog- nize the Stuart pretender as king of Great Britain. They surrendered to the British two of their colonies, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (called Acadia), and recognized British sovereignty in the disputed American Northwest, known as the Hudson Bay territory. But the French were only checked, not downed. They retained the conquests of Louis XIV in Alsace and the Franche-Comté. Their infl uence was strong in Spain. Their deeper strength and capacity for recovery were soon evident in renewed economic expansion. Their language and civilization continued to spread throughout Europe.

The Dutch received guarantees of their security. They were granted the right to garri- son the “Dutch Barrier,” a string of forts in Belgium on the side toward France. But the Dutch, strained by the war and outdistanced by England, never again played a primary role in European political affairs. Two other small states ascended over the diplomatic horizon, Savoy (or Piedmont) and Brandenburg. The rulers of both, for having sided with the

The battle of Blenheim, fought in Bavaria in 1704, was a great victory for the English and the Allied forces that joined to oppose the French in the War of the Spanish Succession. Blenheim brought fame and honors to the British commander, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough; for the French, it was the fi rst in a series of devastating military defeats that steadily weakened the power of Louis XIV. (Fotomas Index/Bridgeman Art Library)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 190pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 190 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

191

victors, were recognized as “kings” by the treaty of Utrecht. Savoy came to be known as “Sardinia,” and Brandenburg as “Prussia.” More will be said of Prussia in the next chapter.

The greatest winners were the British. Great Britain made its appear- ance as a great power. The union of England and Scotland had taken place during the war. Based at Gibraltar and Minorca, Britain was now a power in the Mediterranean. Belgium, the “pistol pointed at the heart of England,” was in the innocuous hands of the Austrians. The British added to their American hold- ings, but far more valuable than Newfoundland and Nova Scotia was the asiento extorted from Spain. The asiento granted the lucrative privilege (which the French had sought) of providing Spanish America with African slaves. Much of the wealth of Bristol and Liverpool in the following decades was to be built upon the slave trade. The asiento, by permitting one shipload of British goods to be brought each year to Porto Bello in Panama, also provided opportunities for illicit trade in nonhuman cargoes.

The Spanish Empire was pried open, and British merchants entered on an era of wholesale smuggling into Spanish America, competing strenuously with the French, who because of their favored position in Spain were usually able to go through more legal channels. Moreover, the British, by defeating France, assured themselves of a line of Protestant kings and of the maintenance of constitutional and parliamentary government.

Britain becomes a great power

PEASANT FAMILY IN A ROOM by Louis Le Nain (French, 1593–1648)

Although Le Nain portrayed a family in the fi rst half of the seventeenth century, the people in this painting do not differ much from the peasants who later suffered through wars, famines, and tax increases in the last decades of the long reign of Louis XIV. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

22. The Wars of Louis XIV: The Peace of Utrecht, 1713

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 191pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 191 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe, 1640–1715192

THE ATLANTIC WORLD AFTER THE PEACE OF UTRECHT, 1713 The map shows the partitioning of the Spanish Empire and the rise of the British. Spain and its American possessions went to the Bourbon Philip V; the European possessions of Spain—the Netherlands, Milan, Naples, and Sicily—went to the Austrian Habsburgs. Britain meanwhile was strengthened by the union of England and Scotland, the acquisition of Minorca, Gibraltar, and the commercial privilege of the “asiento” from Spain, and of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia from France. The French, for their part, had taken control of rich, Caribbean lands in Saint-Domingue (Santo Domingo) through an earlier treaty with Spain.

Britain

France

Portugal

Spain

Colonial Powers

ATLANTIC OCEAN

HUDSON’S BAY

NEW FRANCE

PORTUGAL

GUIANA

SPAIN

FRANCE

GREAT BRITAIN Formed in 1707 by union of England and Scotland

FLORIDA (Spain)

PRUSSIA

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

GUELDERLAND (Prussia 1714)

RUSSIA

SWEDEN

TO AUSTRIAN HABSBURGS 1714–1720

Spanish Netherlands, Sicily, Naples & Milan

MEXICO

LOUISIANA

NEW GRANADA

AFRICA

ANGOLA

GUINEA

SP. NETH.

NAPLES

MILAN

SICILY

CANARY I. (Spain)

CAPE VERDE I. (Port.)

AZORES (Port.)

PERU B R A Z I L

CUBA

SANTO DOMINGO (France 1697)

NEWFOUNDLAND (France to Britain, 1713)

NOVA SCOTIA (Acadia) (France to Britain, 1713)

JAMAICA (Britain

1670) LESSER ANTILLES (British and French since about 1630)

(Dutch)

(Dutch)

(French)

ASI ENT

O

(Sp . to

Br. 1 713)

S L A V

E S

SARDINIA (Savoy, 1714, 1720)

M

INORCA (Spain to Britain, 1713)

GIBRALTAR (Spain to Britain, 1713)

Porto Bello

(Dutch)

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 192pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 192 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

193

The ratifi cation of the Peace of Utrecht actually marked a further step in the evolution of English constitutional history. The Whigs, who were the main supporters of the war with France, thought the treaty insuffi ciently favorable to England. The Tories, pledged to peace, had won the House of Commons in 1710, but the Whigs continued to control the House of Lords. Queen Anne, at the request of Tory leaders and in the interests of peace, raised 12 Tory commoners to the peerage in order to create a Tory majority in the Lords and hence to obtain ratifi cation of the treaty. This established itself as a precedent; it became an unwritten article of the British constitution that when the Lords blocked the Commons on an important issue, the monarch could create enough new lords to make a new majority in that House. After 1713, the Lords never again allowed themselves to be swamped by newcomers and thus acceded in all future disputes to the will of the Com- mons. The landed aristocracy and their merchant allies could now govern as they saw fi t. The result was a rapid increase of wealth in England, precipitating within a few genera- tions a veritable Industrial Revolution.

Except for the addition of England, the same powers were parties to the treaty of Utrecht in 1713 as to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and they now confi rmed the system of international relations established by Westphalia. The powers accepted each other as members of the European system; recognized each other as sovereign states connected only by free negotiation, war, and treaty; and adjusted their dif- ferences through rather facile exchanges of territory, made in the interests of a balance of power, and without regard to the nationality or presumed wishes of the peoples affected. With Germany still in its “feudal chaos,” Italy divided into minor states or controlled by foreign kings, and Spain subordinated to France, the treaty of Utrecht left France and Great Britain as the two most vigorous impe- rial powers of Europe. These countries soon became the two principal carriers and export- ers of the European civilization that would spread its empires, institutions, and ideas throughout much of the modern world. In the next chapter we look at how the societies of central and eastern Europe, developed along lines of their own, even when they were strongly infl uenced by the growing power and wealth of the western European states.

Confi rmation of the European system

For suggested further readings and useful Web sites, interactive exercises, glossary, chronologies, and more, go to the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e.

22. The Wars of Louis XIV: The Peace of Utrecht, 1713

pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 193pal85549_ch04_147-194.indd 193 03/08/13 7:09 PM03/08/13 7:09 PM

Final PDF to printer

This page intentionally left blank

195

C h a p t e r 5 THE TRANSFORMATION OF EASTERN EUROPE, 1648–1740

In eastern Europe,  in the century after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, it became apparent that political systems that failed to become more “modern” might be in danger of going out of existence. In the mid- seventeenth century most parts of eastern Europe belonged to one or another of three older, decen- tralized political organizations—the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Poland, and the empire of the Ottoman Turks (see maps, pp. 199, 200). All three were loosely organized and increasingly ineffective. They were challenged and gradually superseded by

three new and stronger powers—Prussia, Austria, and Russia. These three, by overrunning the intermediate ground of Poland, came to adjoin one another and cover all eastern Europe except the Balkans, which remained within the Ottoman Empire. It was in this same period that Russia expanded territorially, adopted some of the technical and administrative apparatus of western Europe, and became an active participant in European affairs.

East and West are of course relative terms. For the Russians Germany and even Poland were “western.” But for Europe as a whole a signifi cant though indefi nite social and economic line ran roughly along the Elbe and the Bohemian Mountains to the head of the Adriatic Sea. East of this line towns were fewer than in the West, human labor was less productive, and the middle classes were less strong. Above all, the peasants were governed by their landlords. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, in eastern Europe in contrast to what happened in the West, the peasants increasingly lost many of their older, feudal-type rights and freedoms. The commercial revolution and widening of the market created a strong merchant class in western Europe and tended to turn working people into a legally free and mobile labor force. In eastern Europe these changes strengthened the great landlords who produced for export and who secured their labor force by the institutions of

23. Three Aging Empires

24. The Formation of an Austrian Monarchy

25. The Formation of Prussia

26. The Transformation of Russia

Chapter emblem: Russian workers building the new city of St. Petersburg during the reign of Tsar Peter I (1689–1725). (Bettmann/Corbis)

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 195pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 195 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740196

serfdom and “hereditary subjection.” The main social unit was the agricultural estate. The lord exploited his estate with uncompensated compulsory labor (or robot ) furnished by his people, who could neither migrate, marry, nor learn a trade except as he permitted, and who, until the eighteenth century, had no legal protector or court of appeal other than him- self. In the East, therefore, the landlords were exceedingly powerful. They were the only signifi cant political class. And the three new states that grew up during this era—Prussia, Austria, Russia—were alike in being landlord states.

23. THREE AGING EMPIRES In 1648 the whole mainland of Europe from the French border almost to Moscow was occupied by the three large and loosely built structures that have been mentioned—the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Poland, and the empire of the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman power reached deeply into Europe, to about 50 miles from Vienna, and it extended over what is now Romania and over the Tartars on the north shore of the Black Sea. Even so, its European holdings were but a projection from the main mass of the Ottoman Empire in Asia and Africa. Poland extended from roughly 100 miles east of Berlin to a hundred miles west of Moscow and virtually from “sea to sea” in the old phrase of its patriots, from the Baltic around Riga almost to the Black Sea coast. The Holy Roman Empire extended from Poland and Hungary to the North Sea.

These three empires were by no means alike. The Holy Roman Empire bore some of the oldest traditions of Christendom. Poland too had old connections with western Europe and Christian religious institutions. Ottoman Turkey was a Muslim power, closely

connected to the Islamic civilization of the Middle East and fi lled with peoples who generally lived outside European cultural traditions (despite a long history of Mediterranean trade and commerce). Yet in some ways the three resembled each other. In all of them central authority had become weak, consisting largely of understandings between a nominal head and outlying

dignitaries or potentates. All lacked effi cient systems of administration and government. All faced challenges from the newer, centralizing states that were now developing in coun- tries such as France. All, but especially Poland and the Ottoman Empire, were made up of diverse ethnic or language groups. The whole immense area was therefore politically weak. It was malleable in the hands of kings or ruling elites who might become a little stronger than their neighbors. We must try to see in what this weakness consisted, and how newer, stronger state forms were created.

The Holy Roman Empire after 1648

The Holy Roman Empire, especially after the Peace of Westphalia, lacked almost all the resources of a functioning imperial system. It possessed no real army, revenues, or working organs of a central government; and as Voltaire later observed, it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Created in the Middle Ages, it was Roman in that it was believed to continue the imperial sway of ancient Rome, and it was holy in being the secular counter- part to the spiritual empire of the pope. It had been ruined by the Reformation, which left the Germans divided almost evenly between Protestant and Catholic, with each side there- after demanding special safeguards against the other. The empire continued, however, to be universal in principle, having no relation to nationality and theoretically being a form of government suitable to all peoples, although it had never lived up to this theoretical claim

Weaknesses of the empires

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 196pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 196 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

19723. Three Aging Empires

and had shown no expansionist tendency since the Middle Ages. In actuality, the empire was roughly coterminous with the German states and the region of the German language, except that it excluded after 1648 the Dutch and Swiss, who no longer considered them- selves German; and it likewise excluded those Germans who since the fourteenth century had settled along the eastern shores of the Baltic.

Large parts of the empire had suffered repeatedly from the Thirty Years’ War. Yet the war, and the peace terms that followed it, only accentuated an economic situation that had already become unfavorable. Postwar revival was diffi cult; the breakup of commercial connections and the wartime losses of savings and capital were hard to overcome. Germany fell increasingly out of step with the economic expansion and cultural changes in western Europe. The burgher class, its ambitions blocked, lost much of its old vitality. No overseas colonies could be founded, for want of strong enough government backing, as was shown when a colonial venture of Brandenburg came to nothing. There were no stock exchanges in German cities until one was established at Vienna in 1771, half a century after those of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Laws, tariffs, tolls, and coinage were more diverse than in France. Even the calendar varied. It varied, indeed, throughout Europe as a whole, because Protestant states long declined to accept the corrected calendar issued by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582; in parts of divided Germany the holidays, the date of the month, and the day of the week changed every few miles. The arts and letters, fl ourishing in western Europe as never before, were at a low ebb in Germany during the seventeenth century. In science the Germans during and after the Thirty Years’ War accomplished less than the English, Dutch, French, or Italians, despite the great mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the infl uential intellectual leaders of the age. Only in music, in the work of performers and composers such as the Bach family, did the Germans at this time excel. But music was not then much heard beyond the place of its origin. Germany was thus mostly a byway in the new creative arts and culture of seventeenth-century Europe.

After the Thirty Years’ War each German state had sovereign rights. These “states” numbered some 300 or 2,000, depending on how they were counted. The higher fi gure included the “knights of the empire,” found in south Germany and the Rhineland. They were persons who acknowledged no overlordship except that of the emperor himself. The knights had tiny estates of their own, averaging not over 100 acres apiece, consisting of an “independent” castle and a manor or two, completely enclosed by the territory of a larger surrounding state. But even without the knights there were about 300 states capable of some independence of action—free cities, abbots without subjects, archbishops and bish- ops ruling with temporal power, landgraves, margraves and dukes, and one king, the king of Bohemia.

All these states were intent on preserving what were called the “Germanic liberties.” They were gladly assisted by outside powers, notably but not exclusively France. The Germanic liberties meant freedom of the member states from control by emperor or empire. The rulers of the most important states within the empire elected the emperor (there were nine electors by the end of the seventeenth century), and they always required the successful candidate to accept certain “capitulations,” in which he promised to safeguard all the privileges and immuni- ties of the states. The Habsburgs, though consistently elected after 1438, had none of the advantages of hereditary rulers, each having to bargain away in turn any gains made by his predecessor. The elective principle meant that imperial power could not be accumulated and transmitted from one generation to the next. It opened the doors to foreign intrigue, because

Effects of the Thirty Year’s War

The “Germanic liberties”

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 197pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 197 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740198

the electors were willing to consider whichever candidate would promise them most. The French repeatedly supported a rival candidate to the Habsburgs. After 1648 they had sup- porters in the electoral college, Bavaria and Cologne being the most consistently pro-French. In 1742 the French obtained the elevation of their Bavarian ally to the imperial throne. The offi ce of emperor became a political football for Germans and non-Germans alike.

Nor would the German states, after the Thirty Years’ War, allow any authority to the imperial diet. The diet possessed the power to raise troops and taxes for the whole empire, but the power remained unused because the various states feared that any such action would diminish their own authority and independence. Meanwhile, the states that insisted with such obstinacy on their liberties from the empire gave few liberties to their subjects. The free cities were closed urban oligarchies, as indeed were most cities in other countries, but in Germany the burgher oligarchs controlled free cities that were almost like sovereign states. Most of the other European countries, large or small, developed in the direction of a central- izing absolutism. Such absolutism was checked for Germany as a whole, only to reappear in miniature in hundreds of different places. Each ruler thought himself a little Louis XIV, each court a small Versailles. Subjects became attached by ties of sentiment to their rulers, who almost always lived in the neighborhood and could be readily seen by passers-by. People liked the small courts, the small armies, the gossipy politics, and the familiar offi cials of their tiny states; and despite all its fl aws, the empire had the merit of holding this conglom- eration of states in a lawful relation to one another. For a century and a half after the Peace of Westphalia small states existed alongside larger ones, or often totally enclosed within them, without serious fear for their security and without losing their independence.

Yet there were many ambitious rulers in Germany after the Peace of Westphalia. They had won recognition of their sovereignty in 1648. They were busily building absolutist monarchies, and they aspired also to expand their dominions. There were other ways of doing this than by devouring their smaller neighbors outright. One was by marriage and inheritance. The empire in this respect was a paradise for fortune hunters; the variety of possible marriages was enormous because of the great number of ruling families. Another outlet for ambition lay in the high politics of the empire. The Wittelsbach family, which ruled in Bavaria, managed to win an electorate in the Thirty Years’War. Using this political infl uence, they consistently placed family members in prominent ecclesiastical posts throughout the Rhineland and attracted support from France, which in turn backed them against the Habsburgs. The Guelph family, ruling in Hanover, schemed for years to obtain an electorate, which they fi nally extorted from the emperor in 1692; in 1714 they inherited the throne of Great Britain with King George I, preferred by the British as Protestants to their Catholic Stuart cousins. The Hohenzollerns, electors of Brandenburg, inherited territories as far apart as the Rhine and Vistula rivers.

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, 1660–1795 The upper panel of this map indicates boundaries as of 1660; the lower panel those of 1795, by which time the Ottoman Empire had been pushed back toward the Balkans and the Republic of Poland had been destroyed by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Both panels show the evolving social border between the eastern and western agrarian zones, running from the mouth of the Elbe River into central Germany and down to Trieste. East of this line, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the peasants sank toward a new kind of serfdom in which they rendered forced labor to their lords on large farms. West of the line the peasants owed little or no forced labor and tilled small farms that they owned or rented. This line marks a somewhat imprecise but signifi cant social boundary that would also have an important infl uence on the political and economic history of modern Europe. This complex area is also shown in simplifi ed form on p. 200.

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 198pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 198 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

199

B a l t i

c S e

a

Vistula R.

Danu be R.

Elbe R.

R hi

ne R.

A d

riatic Sea

Black Sea

DENMARK

SWISS CONFED.

VENICE

PI ED

M O

N T

BAVARIA

BOHEMIA

SAXONY SILESIA

SWEDEN

GALICIA

H U N G A R Y

TRANSYLVANIA

TUSCANY PAPAL STATES

BOSNIA

SERBIA

OTTOMAN EMPIRE BULGARIA

MOLDAVIA

HANOVER

AUSTRIA

AUSTRIAN MONARCHY

RUSSIAN EMPIRE

P R U S S I A

FRANCE

Riga

Moscow

Minsk

Kiev

Lemberg

Warsaw

Budapest

Prague

Vienna

Berlin

Trieste

Rome

Cologne

0 100 200 miles

Boundary of Holy Roman Empire

Boundary between Agrarian Zones

Church Lands

1795

0 100 200 miles

Boundary of Holy Roman Empire

Boundary between Agrarian Zones

Church Lands

1660

B a l t i

c S e

a

Danu be R.

Elbe R.

R hi

ne R.

A d

riatic Sea

Black Sea

Vistula R.

DENMARK

SWISS CONFED.

VENICE

PI ED

M O

N T

FR A

N C

E

BAVARIA

BOHEMIA

SAXONY SILESIA

BR AN

DE NBU

RG-PRUSSIA

SWEDEN

REPUBLIC OF POLAND

TUSCANY PAPAL STATES

KI N

G D

O M

O

F HU

NG AR

Y

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

AUST RIA MORAVI

A

R U

S S

I A

GALICIA

HUNGARY

TRANSYLVANIASLAVONIA BOSNIA

SERBIA

BULGARIA

MOLDAVIA

Riga Moscow

Minsk

Kiev

Lemberg

Warsaw

Budapest

Prague

Vienna

Berlin

Trieste

Cologne

Rome

23. Three Aging Empires

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 199pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 199 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740200

AGING EMPIRES AND NEW POWERS The left panel shows the “three aging empires” that occupied much of central and eastern Europe in the seventeenth century. Though maintaining themselves with growing diffi culty under modern conditions, the Polish Republic lasted until 1795, the Holy Roman Empire until 1806, and the Ottoman Empire until 1923. Meanwhile, beginning in the seventeenth century, the political leadership in this area was assumed by three rising monarchical states that were developing new institutions such as standing armies and professional bureaucracies. These reorganizing states were the Austrian Empire of the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollern kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire of the Romanovs. They are shown in the right panel. All three fi gured prominently in the affairs of Europe for over 200 years; and all would perish in the First World War, 1914–1918.

B a l t

i c

S e a

A dr iat ic Sea

Black Sea

N o r t h S e a

Mediterranean Sea

REPUBLIC OF POLAND

K. O

F H

U NG

AR Y

HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

O T

T O

M A

N

E M P I R E

Moscow

Warsaw

Budapest Vienna

Berlin

Constantinople

0 100 200 300 miles

1660

B a l t

i c S

e a

A

dr iatic Sea

Black Sea

N o r t h S e a

Mediterranean Sea

AUSTRIAN

MONARCHY

RUSSIAN EMPIRE PRUSSIA

O T T O M A N E M P I R E

Moscow

Warsaw

BudapestVienna

Berlin

Constantinople

0 100 200 300 miles

Boundary of Holy Roman Empire

1795

The half-century after the Peace of Westphalia was thus a highly critical period in cen- tral Europe. The situation in Germany was fl uid. No one could tell which, if any, of the half- dozen chief German states would emerge in the lead. Nothing was crystallized; anything

might happen. Two states defi nitely came forward after 1700, built by the skill and persistence of their rulers—Austria and Prussia. It is a curious and revealing fact that neither really had a political or cultural name of its own.

They were for a long time known most commonly as “houses”—the house of Austria or Habsburg and the house of Brandenburg or Hohenzollern. Each house put together a certain combination of territories. Each would have been as willing to possess any other territorial combination had the course of events been different. By extension of meaning, one came to be called “Austria,” which for centuries had been simply an archduchy on the upper Danube. The other, “Prussia,” for centuries had meant only a certain stretch of the Baltic coast. To these two states we shall shortly turn.

The Republic of Poland about 1650

Running almost 1,000 miles eastward from the Holy Roman Empire in the middle of the seventeenth century lay the vast tract of the Republic of Poland, called a republic because its king was elected and because the political classes took pride in their constitutional

Austria and Prussia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 200pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 200 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

201

liberties. Its vast size was one cause of its internal peculiarities. No administrative system could have kept up with the expansion of its frontiers, so that a large degree of freedom had always been left to outlying lords. In addition, this geographical expansion had given the Republic of Poland a heterogeneous population with diverse cultures, languages, and religions.

The Polish state was a far more recent and less substantial creation than the Holy Roman Empire. It was made up of two main parts, Poland proper (the Kingdom of Poland) in the west and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the east. They had been joined by a union of their crowns (see maps, pp. 199, 200). Only in the west was there a large Polish population. The Duchy of Prussia, a fi ef of the Polish crown, was peopled mainly by Germans. Further east a Byelorussian

Poland and Lithuania

COUNT STANISLAS POTOCKI by Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)

This portrait of a well-known eighteenth-century Polish nobleman—painted by David in 1781—expresses the sense of independent grandeur that characterized the Polish aristocracy for several centuries in the early modern era. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

23. Three Aging Empires

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 201pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 201 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740202

and Ukrainian peasantry was subject to a scattering of Polish and Lithuanian landlords. Even in Poland itself the town population was not generally “Polish” in its language or culture. Most townspeople were Germans and Jews. The Jews spoke Yiddish, derived from German, and were very numerous because a king of Poland in the later Middle Ages had welcomed Jewish refugees fl eeing from anti-Jewish violence in Germany. They lived in separate communities with their own law, language, and religion, forming large vibrant islands of Orthodox Jewish life in the Gentile ocean. The Germans too held aloof, resist- ing assimilation to the cultures and communities that surrounded them. An unsurpassable barrier thus existed between town and country. There was no national middle class. The offi cial and political language was Latin. Roman Catholicism was the leading religion.

Poland is interesting as the region in which the landed aristocracy prevailed over all other groups in the country, neither allowing the consolidation of the state on absolutist lines, nor yet creating an effective constitutional or parliamentary government. The Polish aristocracy, or szlachta, made up some 8 percent of the population, a far higher proportion than the aristocracy of any country in western Europe. On this ground the old Polish king- dom has sometimes been considered, especially by later Polish nationalists, as the pos- sessor of an early form of democracy. The aristocracy were sticklers for their liberties, called the “Polish liberties,” which resembled the German liberties in that they consisted largely of a fi erce suspicion of central authority and were a perpetual invitation to foreign interference. As in the Holy Roman Empire, the monarchy was elective, and the king upon election had to accept certain contractual agreements, which, like the German “capitulations,” prevented the accumulation of monarchical authority. The Poles were too politically divided to accept one of their own number as king, so from 1572 to the extinc- tion of Poland over two centuries later there were only two native Polish kings who reigned for any length of time. One of these kings was the national hero John Sobieski,

who led a decisive campaign against the army of the Ottoman Empire during the 1680s.

As in Germany, the central diet was ineffective, so the centers of politi- cal action were local. The aristocracy met in 50 or 60 regional diets, turbu- lent assemblages of warlike gentry, in which the great lords used the lesser

lords for their own purposes. The central diet, from which the towns were excluded, was a periodic meeting of emissaries, under binding instructions from the regional diets. It came to be recognized, as one of the liberties of the country, that the central diet could take no action to which any member objected. Any member, by stating his unalterable opposition, could oblige a diet to disband. This was the famous liberum veto, the free veto, and to use it to break up a diet was called “exploding” the diet. The fi rst diet was exploded in 1652. Of 55 diets held from that year to 1764, 48 were exploded.

Government under these conditions became a paralyzing stalemate. The monopoly of law and force, characteristic of the modern state, failed to develop in Poland. The king of Poland had practically no army, no law courts, no offi cials, and no income. The nobility paid no taxes, and no institution had the authority or power to make reforms. By 1750 the revenues of the king of Poland were about one-thirteenth those of the tsar of Russia and one seventy-fi fth those of the king of France. Armed force was in the hands of a dozen or so aristocratic leaders, who also conducted their individual foreign policies, pursuing their own adventures against the Turks, or bringing in Russians, French, or Swedes to help them against other Poles. The landlords became local monarchs on their manorial estates. The mass of the rural population fell deeper into a serfdom scarcely different from slavery, bound to compulsory labor on estates resembling plantations, with police and disciplinary

Weakness of central government

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 202pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 202 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

203

powers in the hands of the lords and with no outside legal or administrative system to set the limits of exploitation.

The huge expanse comprised under the name of Poland was, in short, a political vacuum; and as more powerful centers developed, notably around Berlin and Moscow, the push against the Polish frontiers became steadily stronger. It was facilitated by the Poles themselves. As early as 1660 the East Prussian fi ef became independent of the Polish crown. As early as 1667 the Musco- vites reconquered Smolensk and Kiev. Already there was confi dential talk of partitioning Poland, which, however, was deferred for a century. Much of the history of modern Europe would have been different had the seventeenth-century Republic of Poland held together or built a more powerful, centralized state. There may have been no kingdom of Prussia and no Prussian infl uence in Germany; nor would Russia have become the chief Slavic power or reached so far into central Europe.

The Ottoman Empire about 1650

The Ottoman state, the third of the three multicultural empires that together spread over so much of central and eastern Europe, was larger than either of the others, and in the seventeenth century it was much more solidly organized and powerful. In 1529 the Turks had attacked Vienna and seemed about to move into Germany, where the bitter confl icts of the Lutheran Reformation were then dividing and distracting the German princes. To most people in Europe the Turks were a mystery as well as a commercial rival or a looming military threat. We have seen, for example, how Philip II of Spain sent his navy to wage war against Ottoman forces in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth century. But Turkish culture and institutions were still not well known in Europe. The Turks had lived orig- inally in central Asia, from where they migrated into Anatolia during the Middle Ages and eventually conquered Constantinople in 1453. They were Muslims who drew much of their Islamic civilization from the Arabs and Persians, whom they had also conquered and with whom they had developed extensive cultural and economic exchanges over several centuries. Turkish armies had entered the Balkans even before their conquest of Constan- tinople, and they steadily gained control of new Balkan territories after military victories, such as the Battle of Kosovo (1389). The Ottoman Empire later expanded deeper into Europe under the skillful leadership of Suleiman the Magnifi cent, who introduced impor- tant legal reforms and also led the army that was turned back from Vienna in 1529.

The Ottoman Empire remained the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean and southeastern Europe throughout the seventeenth century, and their dominions extended, about 1650, from the Hungarian plain and the south Russian steppes as far as Algeria, the upper Nile, and the Persian Gulf. The empire was based to a large degree on military profi ciency.

Long before the European states had established permanent military forces, the Turks already had a standing army, of which the well-disciplined janissaries were the main strik- ing force. The janissaries were originally recruited from Christian children taken from their families in early childhood, brought up as Muslims, reared in military surround- ings, and forbidden to marry (this restriction was gradually dropped in the late sixteenth century). Without social ties, interests, or ambitions outside the military organization to which they belonged, the janissaries were an ideal professional fi ghting force under the control of political leaders. The Turkish forces were long as well equipped as the Christian, being especially strong in heavy artillery. But by the mid-seventeenth century they were

Pressures on Poland

23. Three Aging Empires

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 203pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 203 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740204

beginning to fall behind. Their armies had changed little, or for the worse, since the days of Suleiman the Magnifi cent a century before, whereas in the better-organized Christian states discipline and military administration had been improved, and fi rearms, land mines, and siegecraft had become more effective.

The Turks cared little about assimilating subject peoples to their language or institu- tions. Local populations within the empire thus retained most of their cultural traditions and autonomy. Law was based on religious law derived from the Qur’an. Law courts and judges were hard to distinguish from religious authorities, for there was no separation between religious and secular spheres. The sultan was also the caliph, the commander of the faithful; while on the one hand there was no clergy in the European sense, on the other hand religious infl uences affected all aspects of life. The Turks, for the most part, applied the Muslim law only to Muslims; and the overall administration of imperial policies was controlled by a powerful government offi cial called the grand vizier.

The Ottoman government left its non-Muslim subjects to settle their own affairs in their own way, not according to nationality, which was gen- erally indistinguishable, but according to religious groupings. The Greek Orthodox church, to which most Christians in the empire belonged, thus

became an almost autonomous intermediary between the sultan and a large fraction of its subjects. Armenian Christians and Jews formed other separate bodies. Except in the west- ern Balkans (Albania and Bosnia) there was no general conversion of Christians to Islam

Tolerance of non- Muslim subjects

De Agostini/Getty Images

Suleiman the Magnifi cent was the most important sultan in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. During his long reign (1520–1566) Suleiman introduced numerous imperial reforms and expanded Ottoman power deep into the Balkans and central Europe, where his forces came into repeated confl ict with the Austrian Habsburgs. This Turkish miniature shows Suleiman in his exalted position as he receives a visiting emissary. (De Agostini/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 204pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 204 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

205

during the Turkish rule, although there were many individual cases of Christians turning Muslim to obtain the privileges of the ruling faith. North of the Danube the Christian princes of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia (later combined into modern Romania) continued to rule over Christian subjects. They were kept in offi ce for that purpose by the sultan, to whom they paid tribute. In general, because their subjects were more profi table to them as Christians, the Turks were not eager to proselytize for Islam.

The Ottoman Empire was therefore a relatively tolerant empire, far more so than the states of Europe. Christians in the Ottoman Empire fared better than Muslims would have fared in Christendom or than the Moors and Jews had in fact fared in Spain. Christians were less disturbed in Turkey than were Protestants in France, after 1685, or Catholics in Ireland. The empire was tolerant because it was composite, an aggregation of peoples, religions, and laws, having no drive, as did the Western states, toward internal unity and complete legal sovereignty. The same tolerance was evident in the attitude toward foreign merchants, who were active throughout most of the empire.

The king of France had had treaty arrangements with Turkey since 1535, and many traders from Marseilles had spread over the port towns of the Middle East. They were exempted by treaty from the laws of the Ottoman Empire and were liable to trial only by their own judges, who though residing in Turkey were appointed by the king of France. They were free to exercise their Roman Catholic religion, and if disputes with Muslims arose, they appeared in special courts where the word of an infi del received equal weight with that of a follower of the prophet. Similar rights in Turkey were obtained by other European states. Thus began “extraterritorial” privileges of the kind obtained by Europeans in later centuries in China and elsewhere, wher- ever the local laws were regarded as “backward,” or hostile to Europeans. To the Turks of the seventeenth century there was nothing exceptional about such arrangements. Only much later, under Western infl uence and the rise of modern nationalism, did the Turks come to resent these “capitulations” as impairments of their own sovereignty.

Yet the Turkish rule was often oppressive, and the “terrible Turk” was the recurring religious and military nightmare of eastern Europe. Ottoman rule was oppressive to Christians if only because it relegated them to a secondary position and because everything they held holy was viewed by the Turks with little respect and even (at times) with contempt. But Ottoman rule could be oppressive also in that it was often arbitrary and brutal even by the none too sensitive standards of Europeans. It was worse in these respects in the seventeenth century than formerly, for the central authority of the sultans gradually became corrupt, and the outlying governors, or pashas, had a virtual free hand with their subjects.

Those parts of the Ottoman Empire that adjoined the Christian states were among the least fi rmly attached to Constantinople. The Tartar Khans of south Russia, like the Christian princes of the Danubian principalities, were sim- ply protégés who paid tribute. Hungary was occupied by the Ottomans, but it was more a battlefi eld than a province. These regions were disputed by Germans, Poles, and Russians. It seemed in the middle of the seventeenth century as if the grip of the Turks might be relaxing. But a series of capable grand viziers, of the Köprülü family, came to power and retained it contrary to Turkish customs for 50 years. Under them the empire again launched a military campaign to expand into the Habsburg lands in central Europe. By 1663 the janissaries were again mobilizing in Hungary. Tartar horse- men were on the move. Central Europe again felt the old terror. The pope feared that the dreaded Ottoman enemy might break into Italy. Throughout Germany by the emperor’s

“Extraterritorial” privileges

Disputed regions

23. Three Aging Empires

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 205pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 205 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740206

order special “Turk bells” sounded the alarm. The states of the empire voted to raise a small imperial army. The Holy Roman Empire thus bestirred itself temporarily against the historic enemy of European Christians. However, it was not under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire, but by the house of Austria that the Turks were repelled.

24. THE FORMATION OF AN AUSTRIAN MONARCHY The Recovery and Growth of Habsburg Power, 1648–1740

The Austria that was gaining international infl uence by 1700 was actually a new creation, though not as obviously so as the two other rising states in Prussia and Russia. The Austrian Habsburgs had long enjoyed an eminent role. Formerly their position had rested on their headship of the Holy Roman Empire and on their family connection with the wealthy Habsburgs of Spain. In the seventeenth century these two supports collapsed. The hope for an effective Habsburg Empire in Germany disappeared in the Thirty Years’ War. The connection with Spain lost its value as Spain declined, and it vanished when in 1700 Spain passed to the Bourbon family of France. The Austrian royal family in the latter half of the seventeenth century stood at the great turning point of its fortunes. It successfully made a diffi cult transition, emerging from the husk of the Holy Roman Empire and building an empire of its own. At the same time the Habsburgs continued to be Holy Roman Emperors and remained active in German affairs, using resources drawn from outside Germany to maintain their infl uence over the German princes. The relation of Austria to the rest of Germany remained a political conundrum down to the twentieth century.

The Austrian Habsburgs held direct control over three main geographical regions of Europe. Their oldest territories were the “hereditary provinces”—Upper and Lower Austria, with the adjoining Tyrol, Styria,

Carinthia, and Carniola. Second, they controlled the kingdom of Bohemia—Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia joined under the crown of St. Wenceslas. Third, there was the kingdom of Hungary—Hungary, Transylvania, and Croatia joined under the crown of St. Stephen. Nothing held all these regions together except the fact that the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, in the seventeenth century, reaffi rmed its political grip upon them all. During the Thirty Years’ War the dynasty rooted Protestantism and feudal rebelliousness out of Austria and the hereditary provinces. It also reconquered and re-Catholicized Bohemia, and in the following decades it was able to conquer Hungary.

Since 1526 most of Hungary had been occupied by the Turks. For generations the Hun- garian plain was a theater of intermittent warfare between the armies of Vienna and Constan- tinople. The struggle had fl ared up again in 1663, when, as noted earlier, the armies of the Ottoman Empire began to move up the Danube. A mixed force, assembled from the empire and its various European allies, stopped this advance and obliged the Turks in 1664 to accept a 20-year truce. But Louis XIV, who in these years was busily dismembering the western frontier of the Holy Roman Empire, stood to profi t greatly from an Ottoman diversion on the Danube. He incited the Turks (old allies of France through common hostility to the Habsburgs) to resume their assaults, which they did as the 20-year truce came to a close.

In 1683 a large Turkish army reached Vienna and set up an extended siege of the city. The Turks again, as in 1529, threatened to break through to the main centers of German culture and political power. The garrison and people of Vienna, greatly outnumbered, held off the besiegers for two months, enough time for a defending force to arrive from other parts of eastern Europe.

Dominions of Austria

Vienna besieged by the Turks

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 206pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 206 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

20724. The Formation of an Austrian Monarchy

Both sides showed the “international” character of the confl ict. The Turkish army included Christians—Romanian and Hungarian—the latter in rebellion against Habsburg rule in Hungary. The anti-Turkish force was composed mainly of Poles, Austrian dynastic troops, and Germans from various states of the Holy Roman Empire. It was fi nanced largely by Pope Innocent XI; it was commanded in the fi eld by the Habsburg general, Duke Charles of Lorraine, who hoped to protect his inheritance on the eastern borders of France from annexation by Louis XIV, and its higher command was entrusted to John Sobieski, king of Poland. Sobieski contributed greatly to the victory of the Habsburg allies at the battle of Vienna, which broke the Ottoman siege and also was the last great military effort of the moribund Republic of Poland. After the Turks abandoned their siege, a general anti- Turkish counteroffensive developed across southeastern Europe. Armed forces of the pope, Poland, Russia, and the republic of Venice joined with the Habsburgs in new cam- paigns. It was in this war, in fi ghting between Turks and Venetians, that the Parthenon at Athens, which had survived for 2,000 years but which the Turks now used as a citadel for storing ammunition, was severely damaged when a Venetian bombardment set off an explosion of the Turkish munitions.

The Habsburgs had the good fortune to obtain the services of a man of remarkable talent, Prince Eugene of Savoy. Eugene, like many other servants of the Austrian house, was not Austrian at all; he was in fact French by origin and education but like many aristocrats of the time he was an international per- sonage. More than anyone else he was the founder of the modern Austrian state. Distinguished both as a military administrator and as a commander in the fi eld, he reformed the supply, equipment, training, and command of the Habsburg forces, along lines laid out by Louis XIV; and in 1697 he won the battle of Zenta, driving the Ottoman forces out of Hungary. At the Peace of Karlowitz (1699) the Turks yielded most of Hungary, together with Transylvania and Croatia, to the Habsburg house; and the Ottoman Empire was pushed back permanently into Romania and the Balkans.

The Habsburgs were now free to pursue their ambitions in the west. They entered the War of the Spanish Succession to win the Spanish crown, but they had to content themselves by the treaty of Rastatt in 1714 with the annexation of the old Spanish Netherlands and with Milan and Naples. Prince Eugene, freed now in the west, again turned eastward. Never before or afterward were the Austrians so brilliantly successful. Eugene captured Belgrade and pushed through the Iron Gate into Wallachia. But the Ottoman Empire was by no means helpless, and Turkish armies later drove the Austrians from much of the Balkan territory they had recently occupied. The Peace of Belgrade (1739) drew a new frontier that on the Austrian side remained unchanged until the twentieth century. The Turks continued to hold Romania and the whole Balkan peninsula except Catholic Croatia, which was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburg government, to open a window on the Mediterranean, developed a seaport at Trieste. Meanwhile the Ottoman Empire remained an important contributor to the cross-cultural exchanges, contacts, and confl icts that constantly infl uenced the political and economic life of every European country in the Mediterranean world.

The Austrian Monarchy by 1740

Thus the royal house of Austria, in two or three generations after its humiliation at the Peace of Westphalia, acquired a new empire of considerable proportions. Though installed in Belgium and Italy, it was essentially an empire of the middle Danube, with its headquarters

Prince Eugene of Savoy

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 207pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 207 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740208

The Austrian Habsburgs mobilized a large force of military alllies, including Polish troops under King John Sobieski, to repel the Turkish army that besieged Vienna in 1683. This painting by Franz Geffels (1635–c. 1699) portrays the fi nal, decisive clash that forced the Turks to abandon their siege of the city. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

at Vienna in Austria proper, but possessing also the sizable kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia. Though German infl uence was strong, the empire was international—or nonna- tional. At the Habsburg court, and in the Habsburg government and army, the names of Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, and Italian noblemen were common. When nationalist move- ments later swept over Europe in the nineteenth century, the empire was denounced as tyrannical by Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Czechs, Poles, Italians, and even by some Germans, whose national ambitions were blocked by its existence. In more recent times, disillusioned by nationalism in central and eastern Europe, some historians tended to romanticize unduly the old Habsburg monarchy, noting that it had at least the merit of holding many discordant peoples together.

The empire was based on a cosmopolitan aristocracy of landowners who felt closer to each other, despite differences of language, than to the laboring masses who worked on their estates. Not for many years, until after 1848, did the Habsburg government really touch these rural masses; it dealt with the landed class and with the relatively few cities, but it left the land-

lords to control the peasants. The old diets, or assemblies, survived in Bohemia, Hungary, and the Austrian provinces. No diet was created for the empire as a whole. The regional diets were essentially assemblages of landlords; and though they no longer enjoyed their medieval freedoms, they retained powers over taxation and administration and a sense of constitutional liberty against the crown. So long as they produced taxes and soldiers as needed, and accepted the wars and foreign policy of the ruling house, no questions were

An international empire

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 208pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 208 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

209

asked at Vienna. Religion was a different matter, however, for the Habsburgs forcefully repressed the Protestantism that had spread widely across both Bohemia and Hungary. Many of the estates of Protestant nobles and rebels were confi scated, giving the Habsburgs valuable lands with which to reward soldiers and supporters from all parts of Europe. An increasingly heterogeneous population of Germans, Croats, and Serbs settled in Habsburg territories, especially in Hungary. Meanwhile, the peasants remained in, or reverted to, serfdom.

Despite the concerted political, religious, and military policies of the Habsburg rulers, the Austrian Empire was still a collection of territories held together by a political allegiance to the same Habsburg monarch. Inhabitants of Austria proper considered their ruler as arch- duke, Bohemians saw in him the king of Bohemia; Magyars, the apostolic king of Hungary. Each country retained its own law, diet, and political life, all of which made it diffi cult or

THE GROWTH OF THE AUSTRIAN MONARCHY, 1521–1772 The map shows the main body of the Austrian monarchy as it evolved in the eighteenth century and endured until the collapse of the empire in 1918. There were three main parts: (1) a nucleus, composed of Austria and adjoining duchies, often called the “hereditary provinces”; (2) the lands of the Bohemian crown, which became Habsburg in 1526 and where the Habsburgs reas- serted their power during the Thirty Years’ War; and (3) the lands of the Hungarian crown, where at fi rst the Habsburgs held only the segment called Imperial Hungary, the rest remaining within the Ottoman Empire until the Habsburgs gained almost full control in 1699. In the fi rst partition of Poland (1772) the Habsburgs annexed Galicia. Silesia was lost to Prussia in 1740.

Danube R.

Da nub

e R.

Vistula R.

AUSTRIA

TYROL STYRIA

CARNIOLA

CR OA

TIA

CARINTHIA

MORAVIA BOHEMIA

SILESIA (TO PRUSSIA 1740)

HUNGARY

SLAVONIA

TRANSYLVANIA

GALICIA

Belgrade

Mohacs

Budapest

Lemberg

Pressburg

Cracow Prague

Vienna

0 50 100 miles

Austria in 1521

Crown of Bohemia 1526

Imperial Hungary 1526

Galicia (From First Partition of Poland 1772)

Crown of Hungary 1526–1699

From Ottoman Empire

24. The Formation of an Austrian Monarchy

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 209pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 209 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740210

impossible for the Habsburgs to establish laws and institutions that would be accepted in all the territories they ruled. No shared “national” feeling in the people held these regions together, and even the several aristocracies were joined only by common service to the Habsburgs. For the empire to exist, all crowns had to be inherited by the same person.

As the Habsburgs consolidated their control of Hungary, the king-archduke, Charles VI (1711–1740), devised a form of insurance to guarantee such an undivided succession. This

took the form of a document called the Pragmatic Sanction, fi rst issued in 1713. By it every diet in the empire and the various archdukes of the Habsburg family were to agree to regard the Habsburg territories as indivis- ible and to recognize only the Habsburg line of heirs. The matter became urgent when it developed that Charles would have no male heir. The direct

male line of the Austrian Habsburgs, as of the Spanish a few years before, was about to become extinct. But Charles did have a daughter, Maria Theresa, and he gradually won acceptance of the “Pragmatic Sanction” by all parts of his empire and all members of his family. Women had never inherited the Habsburg monarchy, and, by law, a woman could not rule Austria; but the Pragmatic Sanction recognized Maria Theresa’s right to the Habsburg throne and to the inheritance of all Habsburg territories. Charles set about having foreign powers guarantee the agreement, knowing that Bavaria, Prussia, or others might well put in claims for this or that part of the inheritance. This process took years, and was accomplished at the cost of many damaging concessions. Finally all powers signed the agreement. Charles VI died in 1740, having done all that could be done, by domestic law and international treaty, to assure the continuation of the Austrian Empire.

Like all such plans, however, the legal agreements could not be forcefully defended from a tomb, and Charles was scarcely dead when armed “heirs” presented themselves. A great war broke out to partition the Austrian Empire, as the Spanish Empire had been partitioned shortly before. Bohemia threw off its allegiance. Hungary almost did the same. But these events became connected to wider European confl icts during “The War of the Austrian Succession,” which will be discussed in a later chapter. At the moment it is enough to know that by 1740 a populous empire of great military strength existed on the Danube.

25. THE FORMATION OF PRUSSIA It was characteristic of the seventeenth century that very small states were able to play an infl uential part in European affairs, seemingly out of all proportion to their size. The main reason why small states could act as great powers was that armies were small and weapons were simple. Diffi culties of supply and communications, the poor condition of the roads, the lack of maps, the absence of general staffs, together with many other administrative and technical diffi culties, reduced the number of soldiers who could be successfully man- aged in a campaign. The battles of the Thirty Years’ War, on the average, were fought by armies of less than 20,000 men. And while Louis XIV, by the last years of his reign, built up a military establishment aggregating some 400,000, the actual fi eld armies in the wars of Louis XIV did not exceed, on the average, 40,000. Armies of this size were well within the reach of smaller powers. If especially well trained, disciplined, and equipped, and if ably commanded, the armies of smaller states could defeat those of much larger neighbors. On this fact, fundamentally, the German state of Prussia would be built. But Sweden was actually the fi rst such smaller power to exploit this kind of military opportunity with spec- tacular consequences.

Charles VI and the Pragmatic Sanction

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 210pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 210 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

21125. The Formation of Prussia

Sweden’s Short-Lived Empire

Sweden almost, but not quite, formed an empire in central and eastern Europe in the seventeenth century. The population of Sweden at the time was not over a million; it was smaller than that of the Dutch Republic. But the Swedes produced a line of extraordinary rulers, ranging from genius in Gustavus Adolphus (1611–1632) through the brilliantly erratic Queen Christina (1632–1654) to the amazing military exploits of Charles XII (1697–1718). The elective Swedish kingship was made hereditary, so that the royal power was freed from control by the estates. Craftsmen and experts were brought from the west, notably Holland; war industries were subsidized by the government; and an army was created with many novel features in weapons, organization, and tactics.

With this army Gustavus Adolphus crossed the Baltic in the Thirty Years’ War, made alliances with Protestant German princes, cut through the Holy Roman Empire, and helped to ward off the Habsburg unifi cation of Germany. The Swedish crown, by the Peace of Westphalia, received certain coastal regions of Germany. Subsequently, in a complex series of wars, the Swedes won control of virtually all the shores and cities of the Baltic. Only Denmark at the mouth of that sea and the territories of the house of Brandenburg, which had almost no ports, remained independent. For a time the Baltic was a Swedish lake. The Russians were shut off from it, and the Poles and even the Germans, who lived on its shores, could use the Baltic only on Swedish terms.

The fi nal Swedish campaign for imperial expansion took place during the meteoric reign of Charles XII. As a young man he found his dominions attacked by Denmark, Poland, and Russia; he won remarkable victories over them but would not make peace; he then led an army back and forth across the eastern European plain, only to be crushed by the Russians. He fl ed to the Ottoman Empire and spent several years as a guest and protégé of the Turks before he eventually returned to Sweden. By the time Charles died in 1718 the Swedish sphere had contracted to Sweden itself, except that Finland and reduced holdings in northern Germany remained Swedish for a century more. The Swedes in time proved themselves exceptional among European peoples in not harping on their former greatness. They successfully and peace- ably made the transition from the role of an important military state to that of a small power.

The Territorial Growth of Brandenburg-Prussia

In the long run it was to be Prussia that dominated the northern part of central Europe. Prussia became famous for its “militarism,” which may be said to exist when military needs and military values permeate all other spheres of life. Through its infl uence on Germany over a period of two centuries Prussia played a momentous part in modern European and world history. The south coast of the Baltic, where Prussia was to arise, was an unpromising site for the creation of a strong political power. It was an uninviting coun- try, thinly populated, with poor soil and without mineral resources, more backward than Saxony or Bohemia, not to mention the busy centers of south Germany and western Europe. It was a fl at open plain, merging imperceptibly into Poland, without prominent physical features or natural frontiers (see maps, pp. 4–5, 195, 200, 214–215). The coastal region directly south from Sweden was known as Pomerania. Inland from it, shut off from the sea, was Brandenburg, centering about Berlin. Brandenburg had been founded in the Middle Ages as a border state, a “mark” or “march” of the Holy Roman Empire, to fi ght

Swedish territorial victories

Charles XII

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 211pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 211 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740212

the battles of the empire against the then heathen Slavs. Its ruler, the margrave, was one of the seven princes who, after 1356, elected the Holy Roman Emperor. Hence he was com- monly called the Elector of Brandenburg. After 1415 the electors were always of the Hohenzollern family.

All Germany east of the Elbe, including Brandenburg, represented a medieval conquest by German-speaking peoples—the German Drang nach Osten, or drive to the East. From the Elbe to Poland, German conquerors and settlers had replaced the Slavs, eliminating them or absorbing them by inter-

marriage. Eastward from Brandenburg, and outside the Holy Roman Empire, stretched a region inhabited by Slavic peoples. Next to the east came “Prussia,” which eventually was to give its name to all territories of the Hohenzollern monarchy. This original Prussia formed part of the lands of the Teutonic Knights, a military crusading order that had conquered and Christianized the native peoples in the thirteenth century. Except for its seacoast along the Baltic, the duchy of Prussia was totally enclosed by the Polish kingdom. To the north, along the Baltic, as far as the Gulf of Finland, German minorities lived among Lithuanians, Latvians (or Letts), and Estonians. The towns were German, founded as German commercial colonies in the Middle Ages, and many of the landlords were German also, descendants of the

Teutonic Knights, and later known as the “Baltic barons.” Modern Prussia began to emerge in the seventeenth century when a num-

ber of territories came into the hands of the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg. In 1618 the Elector of Brandenburg inherited the duchy of Prussia. Another important development occurred when the old ruling line in Pomerania

expired during the Thirty Years’ War. Although the Swedes succeeded in taking the better part of Pomerania, including the city of Stettin, the Elector of Brandenburg received at the Peace of Westphalia eastern Pomerania. Barren, rural, and harborless though it was, it at least had the advantage of connecting Brandenburg with the Baltic. The Hohenzollerns no sooner obtained it than they began to dream of joining it with their duchy of Prussia to the east, a task that required the absorption of an intermediate and predominantly Slavic area, which was part of Poland, a task not accomplished until 1772.

Had the duchy of Prussia and eastern Pomerania been the only acquisitions of the Hohenzollerns, their state would have been oriented almost exclusively toward eastern Europe. But at the Peace of Westphalia they received, in addition to eastern Pomerania, new territories on the west bank of the Elbe. Moreover, through the play of family inheri- tances common in the Holy Roman Empire, the Hohenzollerns had earlier, in 1614, come to control the small state of Cleves on the Rhine at the Dutch border and a few other small territories also in western Germany. These were separated from the main Hohenzollern lands around Brandenburg by many intermediate German principalities, but the western territories provided direct contact with the more advanced regions of western Europe and a base from which larger holdings in the Rhineland were eventually to be built up.

In the seventeenth century the dominions of the house of Brandenburg were therefore developing in three disconnected territories. The main one was Brandenburg, with adjoin- ing Pomerania and territories along the Elbe. There was also a detached eastern territory in the duchy of Prussia and another small detached western territory on and near the Rhine. To connect and unify these three territorial possessions became the long-range policy of the Brandenburg house.

In the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, in 1640, a young man of 20, named Frederick William, succeeded to these diverse possessions. Known later as the Great Elector, he was the fi rst of the several infl uential leaders

Germans expand eastward

Territorial acquisitions of the Hohenzollerns

The Great Elector

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 212pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 212 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

213

who shaped modern Prussia. He had grown up under trying conditions. Brandenburg was one of the parts of Germany to suffer most heavily from the war. Its location made it the stamping ground of Swedish and Habsburg armies. In 1640, in the 22 years since the beginning of the war, the population of Berlin had fallen from about 14,000 to about 6,000. Hundreds of villages had been completely wiped out.

Frederick William concluded that in his position, ruling a small and open territory, without natural frontiers or the strategic possibility of defense in depth, he must put his main reliance on a competent army. With an effective army, even if small, he could force the stronger states to take him into their calculations and thereby enter with some hope of advantage into the politics of the balance of power. This long remained the program of the Brandenburgers—to have an army but not to use it, to conserve it with loving and even miserly care, to keep an “army in being,” and to gain their ends by diplomatic maneuver. They did so by siding with France against the Habsburgs, or with Sweden against Poland. They aspired also to the title not merely of margrave or elector, but to the rank of king. The opportunity came in 1701, when the Habsburg emperor was preparing to enter the War of the Spanish Succession. The emperor requested the elector of Brandenburg, who was then Frederick III, to support him with 8,000 troops. The elector named his price: recognition of himself, by the emperor, as king “in Prussia.” The emperor yielded; the title, at fi rst explicitly limited to the less honorable king in Prussia, soon became king of Prussia. The elector Frederick III of Brandenburg became King Frederick I of Prussia. Another thread was torn from the fraying fabric of the Holy Roman Empire; and there was now a German king above all the other German princes.

The Prussian Military State

The preoccupation of Prussia with its army was unquestionably defensive in origin, arising from the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War. But it outlasted its cause and shaped the evolving character of the country. Prussia was not unique in the attention it paid to its armed forces. The unique thing about Prussia was the disproportion between the size of the army and the size of the resources on which the army was based. The government, to maintain

Frederick William, who became known as the Great Elector, governed Prussia for almost 50 years (1640–1688) and set his country on a course toward new power and military infl uence in central Europe. (Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY)

25. The Formation of Prussia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 213pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 213 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740214

North Sea Baltic Sea

North Sea Baltic Sea

North Sea Baltic Sea

North Sea Baltic Sea

Rhine R.

Elbe R.

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Nieman R.

Rhine R.

Elbe R.

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Nieman R.

Elbe R.

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Nieman R.

Rhine R.

Elbe R.

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Nieman R.

Rh in

e R

.

KROSSEN 1482

BEUTHEN 1603–1607

EAST FRIESLAND

1744

GUELDERS 1715

SILESIA FROM AUSTRIA 1740

RAVENSBURG 1614

MARK 1614

MAGDEBURG 1648

FARTHER POMERANIA 1648

DUCHY OF PRUSSIA

1618

CLEVES 1614

MANSFIELD 1780

SOUTH PRUSSIA 1793

WEST PRUSSIA

1772 NEW EAST PRUSSIA

1772

DANZIG 1793

Berlin Berlin

BerlinBerlin

0 50 100 150 200 miles

Brandenburg 1415

Acquisitions 1462–1614

Brandenburg 1614

Brandenburg-Prussia 1648

THE NUCLEUS 1415–1614

1

AT THE DEATH OF THE GREAT ELECTOR BY 1688

POLISH ACQUISITIONS 1772–1807

THE CONQUEST OF SILESIA BY 1748

Prussia 1688

Acquisitions 1715–1748

Prussia 1748

Acquisitions 1748–1772

Temporary Acquisitions 1793–1795, to 1807

2

3 4

THE GROWTH OF PRUSSIA, 1415–1918 The maps shown here, going well beyond the scope of this chapter, give a conspectus of Prus- sian history from the time when Brandenburg began to expand in the seventeenth century. One may see, by looking at all the panels together, how Prussia was really an east-European state until 1815; its center of gravity shifted westward, in signifi cant degree, only in the nine- teenth century. Panel 2 shows the early formation of three unconnected territories; Panel 3, the huge bulk of Silesia relative to the small kingdom that annexed it; Panel 4, the fruits of the partitions of Poland; Panel 5, Napoleon pared Prussia down. The main crisis at the Congress of Vienna, and its resolution, are shown in Panels 6 and 7. Bismarck’s enlargement of Prussia appears in Panel 8. The boundaries established by Bismarck remained unchanged until the fall of the monarchy in 1918.

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 214pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 214 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

215

the army, had to direct and plan the life of the country for this purpose. Nor was Prussia the originator of the “standing” army, kept active in time of peace and always preparing for war. Most governments adopted the methods of Louis XIV in establishing standing armies, not merely to promote foreign ambitions but to keep armed forces out of the hands of nobles or military adventurers and under control by the state.

But Prussia was unique in that, more than in any other country, the army developed a life of its own, almost independent of the life of the state. It was older than the Prussian state itself. In 1657 the Great Elector fought a great battle at Warsaw with soldiers from all parts of his dominions. It was the fi rst time that men from Cleves, Brandenburg, and ducal Prussia had ever done anything together. The army was the fi rst “all Prussian” institution. Institutions of civilian government devel- oped later and largely to meet the needs of the army. And in later generations the army proved more durable than the state. When Prussia collapsed during the Napoleonic wars in 1806, the spirit and morale of the Prussian army carried on; and when the Hohenzollern Empire fi nally crashed in 1918, the Prussian-shaped army still maintained its life and tradi- tions within the Weimar Republic, which again it survived. Not until the defeat of Adolf

The Prussian army

Rh in

e R.

Elbe R.

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Nieman R.

Rhine R.

Elbe R.

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Nieman R.

Rhine R.

Elbe R.

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Nieman R.

Rhine R.

Elbe R.

Oder R.

Vistula R.

Nieman R.

North Sea Baltic Sea

North Sea Baltic Sea

North Sea Baltic Sea

North Sea Baltic Sea

LOST TO GRAND DUCHY OF WARSAW

AND TO RUSSIA 1807LOST TORHINE CONFEDERATION STATES AND TO FRANCE 1807 SAXONY

(TO PRUSSIA)

POLAND (TO RUSSIA)

HESSE

SCHLESWIG

HOLSTEIN

HANOVER

SWEDISH POMERANIA

PART OF SAXONY

RHINELAND

POSEN

Berlin Berlin

BerlinBerlin

0 50 100 150 200 miles

Prussia 1807–1814

Territory Lost in 1807

Prussia 1814

Proposed Territorial Changes 1814

CUT DOWN BY NAPOLEON 1807–1814

RUSSO-PRUSSIAN PROPOSALS 1814

BISMARCK’S CONQUESTS 1866

AGREED AT CONGRESS OF VIENNA 1815

Prussia 1814

Recovered or Acquired 1815

Prussia 1863

Acquisitions 1866

5 6

7 8

25. The Formation of Prussia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 215pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 215 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740216

Hitler in the Second World War and the establishment of a new republican regime was the army and its military traditions totally subordinated to civilian authority.

In all countries, to some extent, the machinery of the modern state developed as a means of supporting armed forces, but in Prussia the process was exceptionally clear and simple. In Prussia the rulers drew roughly half their income from the crown domain and only about half from taxes. The

crown domain, consisting of manors and other productive enterprises owned directly by the ruler as a traditional lord, was in effect a kind of government property, for the Prussian rulers used their income almost entirely for state purposes, being personally simple and even Spartan in their habits. The rulers of Prussia, until a century after the accession of the Great Elector, were able to pay the whole cost of their civil government from their own income, the proceeds of the crown domain. To develop the domain and transfer the funds into government expenditures, they created a large body of civilian offi cials. The domain bulked so large that much of the economy of the country was not in private hands but con- sisted of enterprises owned and administered by the state. For additional income the Great Elector introduced taxes of the kind used in France, such as excise taxes on consumers’ goods and a government monopoly on the sale of salt. All taxes, for a century after the accession of the Great Elector, were levied for the use of the army.

Economic life grew up under government sponsorship, rather than through the enter- prise of a venturesome business class. This was because, for a rural country to maintain an organized army, productive and technical skills had to be imported, mainly from the West. The Great Elector in his youth spent a number of years in Holland, where he was impressed by the wealth and prosperity that he saw. After becoming elector he settled Swiss and Frisians in Brandenburg (the Frisians were akin to the Dutch); he welcomed Jews from Poland; and when Louis XIV began to persecute the French Protestants, he provided funds and special offi cials to assist the immigration of 20,000 Huguenots to Brandenburg. French immigrants for a time formed a sixth of the population of Berlin and were the most advanced commercial element of that comparatively undeveloped city. The government, as in France under Colbert, initiated and helped to fi nance various industries; but the impor- tance of such government participation was greater than in France, because the amount of privately owned capital available for investment was incomparably less. Military needs, more than elsewhere, dominated the market for goods, because civilian demand in so poor a country was relatively low; the army, in its requirements for food, uniforms, and weapons became a strong force in shaping the early modern economic growth of the country.

The army had a profound effect also on the social development and class structure of Prussia. The civilian middle class remained generally submissive to the military priorities, and it became the policy of the rulers to absorb practically the whole landed aristocracy, the Junkers, into mili- tary service. They used the army, with conscious purpose, as a means of

implementing an “all Prussian” psychology in the landed families of Cleves, Brandenburg, Pomerania, and the former dominions of the Teutonic Knights. The fact that Prussia was a very recent and artifi cial combination of territories, so that identifi cation with it was not a natural sentiment, made it all the more necessary to instill loyalty by martial means. Emphasis fell on duty, obedience, service, and sacrifi ce. That military virtues became characteristic of the whole male Prussian aristocracy was also due, like so much else, to the small size of the population. In France, for example, with perhaps 50,000 male adult nobles, only a small minority served as army offi cers. In Prussia there were few Junker families that did not have some of their members in uniform.

Maintaining the army

The army and Prussian society

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 216pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 216 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

217

The Great Elector and his successors, like all absolutist rulers of the era, repressed the estates or parliamentary assemblages in which the landed aristocracy was the main element. To mollify the squires, the rulers promised commissions in the army to men of their class. They promised them also a free hand over their peasants. The Prussian monarchy was largely based on an understanding between the ruler and the landlord gentry—the latter agreed to accept the ruler’s government and to serve in his army, in return for hold- ing their own peasants in hereditary subjection. Serfdom spread in Prussia as elsewhere in eastern Europe. In East Prussia the peasants fell into conditions that were as deplorable as the agricultural conditions in Poland.

The Prussian rulers believed that the Junkers made better army offi cers because they were accustomed to the habit of commanding their own peasants. To preserve the offi cer class, legislation forbade the sale of “noble” lands, that is, manors, to persons not noble. In France, again by way of contrast, where manorial rights had become simply a form of property, bourgeois persons and even peasants could legally acquire man- ors and enjoy a lordly or “seigneurial” income. In Prussia this was not possible; classes were frozen by owning nonexchangeable forms of prop- erty. It was thus harder for middle-class people to enter the aristocracy by setting up as landed gentry. The bourgeois class in any case had little spirit of independence. Few of the old towns of Germany were in Prussia. The Prussian middle class was not wealthy, and it had not gained much infl uence through the posses- sion of private property. The typical middle-class man was an offi cial who worked for the government as an employee of the large crown domain or in an enterprise subsidized by the state. The civil service in Prussia, from the days of the Great Elector, became notable for its honesty and effi ciency. But the middle class, more than elsewhere, deferred to the nobles, served the state, and accepted the pervasive public role of the army.

These distinctive features of Prussia developed especially under Frederick William I, who was king from 1713 to 1740. He was an earthy, uncouth man, who disdained whatever savored of “culture,” to which his father, his grandfather (the Great Elector), and also his son (Frederick the Great) were all strongly attracted. He begrudged every penny not spent on the army. He cut the expense of the royal household by three-fourths. On his coronation journey to Königsberg he spent 2,547 thalers, where his father had spent 5 million. He ruled the country in a fatherly German way, supervising it like a private estate, prowling the streets of Berlin in an old seedy uniform, and disciplining negligent citizens with blows of his walking stick. He worked all the time and expected everyone else to do likewise.

He loved the army, which all his policies were designed to serve. He was the fi rst Prussian king to appear always in uniform. He rearranged the order of courtly precedence, moving army offi cers up and civilians down. His love of tall soldiers is famous; he col- lected a special unit, men between 6 and 7 feet tall, from all over Europe, and indeed the Russian Tsar Peter the Great sent him some from Asia. He devised new forms of discipline and maneuver, founded a cadet corps to train the sons of the Junkers, and invented a new system of recruiting (the canton system, long the most effective in Europe), by which each regiment had a particular district or canton assigned to it as a source of soldiers. He raised the size of the army from 40,000 at his accession to 83,000 at his death. During his reign Berlin grew to be a city of 100,000, of whom 20,000 were soldiers, a proportion probably matched in no other city of Europe. He likewise left to his successor (for he fought practi- cally no wars himself) a war chest of 7,000,000 thalers.

Limited social mobility

Frederick William I

25. The Formation of Prussia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 217pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 217 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740218

With this army and war chest Frederick II, later called the Great, who became king in 1740, startled Europe. Charles VI of Austria had just died. His daughter Maria Theresa

entered upon her manifold inheritance, which depended on the long- negotiated guarantees of the Pragmatic Sanction. While others waited, Frederick struck. Serving no notice, he quickly moved his military forces into Silesia, which was a part of the kingdom of Bohemia on the side toward

Poland, lying in the upper valley of the Oder River and adjoining Brandenburg on the north. The addition of Silesia to the kingdom of Prussia almost doubled the population and added valuable industries, so that Prussia now, with 6 million people and an army that Frederick raised to 200,000, at last established itself as a great power. It must be added that, judged simply as a human accomplishment, Prussia was a remarkable political and military creation, a state made on a shoestring, a triumph of work and duty.

26. THE TRANSFORMATION OF RUSSIA The affairs of central and eastern Europe, from Sweden to Turkey and from Germany to the Caspian Sea, were profoundly interconnected. The underlying theme of the present chapter, it may be recalled, is that this whole great area was fl uid, occupied by the weakening political bodies of the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire and that in this fl uid area three new powers gradually developed—the modern Austrian monarchy, the kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire. All, too, in varying degree, became modern eighteenth- century states by borrowing various ideas and administrative systems from western Europe, though each of these new eastern states also retained its own distinctive political, social, and cultural characteristics.

In the century after 1650 the old tsardom of Muscovy evolved into modern Russia. Moving out from the region around Moscow, the Russians not only established them-

selves across northern Asia, reaching the Bering Sea about 1700, but also entered into closer relations with Europe, undergoing especially in the time of Tsar Peter the Great (1682–1725) a rapid process of Europeaniza- tion. To what extent Russia became truly European has always been an

open question, disputed both by western Europeans and by Russians themselves. In some ways the Russians had been European from as far back as Europe itself can be said to have existed, that is, from the early Middle Ages. Ancient Russia had been colonized by Vikings, and the Russians had become Christian long before the Swedes, the Lithuanians, or the Finns.

Yet Russia had not been part of the general development of medieval and early modern Europe for a number of reasons. Russia had been converted to the Greek Orthodox branch of Christianity; therefore, the religious and cultural infl uence of Constantinople, not of Rome, had predominated. Second, the Mongol invasions and conquest about 1240 had kept Russia under Asian domination for about 250 years, until 1480 when a grand duke of Muscovy, Ivan III (1462–1505), was able to throw off the Mongol overlordship and cease payment of tribute. Last, Russian geography, especially the lack of warm-water or ice-free seaports, had made commerce and communication with western Europe diffi - cult. Russia had therefore not shared in the general European economic development after about 1100, and the changes that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may accurately be called a kind of “Europeanization.” There was in this era a wholesale Russian borrowing of the new knowledge and institutions that had developed in the early

The advances of Frederick the Great

Europeanization

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 218pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 218 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

21926. The Transformation of Russia

modern European states; and this Europeanizing of many Russian institutions was by no means a unique thing. It was a step in the expansion of modern European forms of social organization and hence in the formation of the modern world as we have known it in recent centuries. Developing strategies for reform that other societies would also follow in later historical eras, the Russians began to introduce western European methods of state and economic organization while also seeking to protect their own interests and distinctive cultural traditions.

In some ways the new Russian Empire resembled the new kingdom of Prussia. Both took form in the great plain that runs uninterruptedly from the North Sea into inner Asia. Both lacked natural frontiers and grew by addi- tion of territories to an original nucleus. In both countries the state arose primarily as a means of supporting a modern army. In both the government developed autocratically, in conjunction with a landlord class that was brought into state service and which in turn held the peasantry in serfdom. Neither Russia nor Prussia had a strong commercial class or an urban banking system that could exert political infl uence. In neither country could the modern state and army have been created without the impor- tation of new skills from western Europe. Yet Prussia, with its German connections, its Protestant religion, its universities, and its proximity to the busy commercial artery of the

Parallels with Prussia

The uniforms of these Prussian soldiers in the era of King Frederick II (1740–1786) represent the status and importance of the military class in Prussian society during the eighteenth century. (akg-images/Newscom)

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 219pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 219 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740220

Baltic, was far more European than Russia, and the Europeanization of Russia may per- haps better be compared with the later “westernization” of Japan. In the Russia of 1700, as in the Japan of 1870, the main purpose of the administrative and social reformers was to obtain scientifi c, technical, and military knowledge from the West, in part with a view to strengthening their own countries against penetration or conquest by Europeans. Yet here too the parallel must not be pushed too far. In time, the Russian upper classes intermar- ried with Europeans and entered more widely than the later Japanese elites into European cultural life. Russian music and literature eventually became well known and infl uential among modern European intellectuals, and Russia itself developed a unique blend of Euro- pean and central Asian cultural traits.

Russia before Peter the Great

The Russians in the seventeenth century, as today, were a medley of peoples distinguished by their language, which was of the Slavic family, of the great Indo-European language group. The Great Russians or Muscovites lived around Moscow. Moving out from that area, they had penetrated the northern forests and had also settled in the southern steppes and along the Volga, where they had assimilated various Asian peoples known as Tartars. After two centuries of expansion, from roughly 1450 to 1650, the Russians had almost but not quite reached the Baltic and the Black seas. The Baltic shore was held by Sweden. The Black Sea coast was still held by Tartar Khans under the protection of Ottoman Turkey. In the rough borderlands between Tartar and Russia lived the semi-independent cowboy-like Cossacks, largely recruited from migratory Russians. West of Muscovy were the White Russians (or Byelorussians) and southwest of Muscovy the Little Russians (Ruthenians or Ukrainians), both in the seventeenth century under the rule of Poland, which was then the leading Slavic power.

The energies of the Great Russians were directed principally eastward. They conquered the Volga Tartars in the sixteenth century and reached the Ural Mountains, which they immediately crossed. Muscovite pioneers, set- tlers, and townbuilders streamed along the river systems of Siberia, felling

timber and trading in furs as they went. In the 1630s, while the English were building Boston and the Dutch New York, the Russians were establishing towns in the vast Asian stretches of Siberia, reaching to the Pacifi c itself. A whole string of settlements, remote, small, and isolated—Tomsk and Tobolsk, Irkutsk and Yakutsk—extended for 5,000 miles across northern Asia.

It was toward the vast heartland of central Asia that Muscovy really faced, looking out upon Persia and China across the deserts. The bazaars of Moscow and Astrakhan were fre- quented by Persians, Afghans, Indians, and Chinese. The Caspian Sea, into which fl owed the Volga, the greatest of Russian rivers, was better known than was the Baltic. Europe as viewed from Moscow was more distant and less accessible than other busy trading centers to the south and east. During most of the seventeenth century even Smolensk and Kiev belonged to Poland. Yet the Russians were not totally shut off from Europe. In 1552, when Ivan the Terrible conquered Kazan from the Tartars, he had a German engineer in his army. In the next year, 1553, Richard Chancellor arrived in Moscow from England by the roundabout way of Archangel on the White Sea. Thereafter trade between England and Muscovy was continuous. The tsars valued Archangel as their only inlet from the West through which military materials could be imported. The English valued it as a means of reaching the wares of Persia.

Russian expansion to the east

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 220pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 220 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

221

Russia in the seventeenth century refl ected its long estrangement from the culture and social mores that had been developing in Europe. Women of the upper classes were secluded and often wore veils. Men wore beards and skirted garments that seemed exotic to Europeans. Customs also seemed crude to European visitors; wild drunkenness and revelry alternated with mysterious rituals of repentance and religious prostration. Traditional superstitions remained infl uential among the highest classes of church and state; and murder, kidnapping, torture, and elaborate physical cruelty were common forms of social control. The Russian church did not support the kinds of educational or charitable institutions that the Catholic and Protestant churches had established in western Europe. Churchmen feared the incipient European infl uences. “Abhorred of God,” declared a Russian bishop, “is any who loves geometry; it is a spiritual sin.” Even arithmetic was hardly understood in Russia. Arabic numerals were not used, and merchants computed with the abacus. The calendar was dated from the creation of the world. Ability to predict an eclipse seemed a form of magic. Clocks, brought in by Europeans, seemed as wonderful in Russia as they did in China, where they were brought in by Jesuits at about the same time.

Yet this great, non-European Russia, which fronted on inner Asia, was European in some of its fundamental social institutions. It possessed a variant of the manorial and feu- dal systems. It experienced the same wave of constitutional crises that was sweeping over Europe at the same time. Russia had a duma or council of retainers and advisers to the tsar, and the rudiments of a national assembly corresponding to meetings of the estates in west- ern Europe. In Russia as in Europe the question was whether power should remain in the hands of these bodies or become concentrated in the hands of the ruler. Ivan the Terrible, who ruled from 1533 to 1584 and was the fi rst grand duke of Muscovy to assume the title of tsar, 1 was a shrewd observer of contemporary events in Poland. He saw the dissolution that was overtaking the Polish state and was determined to avoid it in Muscovy. His feroc- ity toward those who opposed him made him literally terrible, but though his methods differed from the methods commonly used in Europe, his aims were the aims of his

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 1640–1740

1640–1688 Frederick William, the Great Elector, develops state and military power in Prussia

1663 Ottoman Empire begins new phase of expansion in Central Europe

1667–1671 Stephen Razin leads rebellion of rural population in Russia

1683 Ottoman imperial army is forced to abandon siege of Vienna

1698–1725 Tsar Peter the Great introduces European reforms in Russia

1711–1740 Habsburg King-Archduke Charles VI builds the Austrian Empire

1713–1740 King Frederick William I expands the army and wealth of the Prussian state

1 The Slavic word tsar, like the German Kaiser, derives from Caesar, a title used as a synonym for emperor in the Roman, the Holy Roman, and the Byzantine (or eastern Roman) Empires. The spelling czar, also common in English, reveals the etymology and the current English-language pronunciation, zar.

Russian estrangement from Europe

26. The Transformation of Russia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 221pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 221 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740222

European contemporaries. Not long after his death Russia passed into a period known as the Time of Troubles (1604–1613), during which the Russian nobles elected a series of tsars and demanded certain assurances of their own liberties. But the country was racked by contending factions and a civil war in which the violence resembled the religious wars in France or the Thirty Years’ War in central Europe.

In 1613 a national assembly, hoping to settle the troubles, elected a 17-year-old boy as tsar, or emperor, believing him young enough to have no connection with any of the warring factions. The new boy tsar was Michael Romanov, of a gentry family, related by marriage to the old line of

Ivan the Terrible. Thus was established, by vote of the political classes of the day, the Romanov dynasty that ruled in Russia until 1917. The early Romanovs, aware of the fate of elective monarchy in Poland and elsewhere, soon began to repress the representative institutions of Russia and set up as absolute monarchs. Here again, though they were often more lawless and violent than any European king, the Russian monarchs followed the gen- eral pattern of contemporary Europe.

Nor can it be said that the main social development of the seventeenth century in Russia, the sinking of the peasantry into an abyss of helpless serfdom, was exclusively a Russian phenomenon. The same process gener-

ally took place in eastern Europe. Serfdom had long been overtaking the older free peas- antry of Russia. In Russia, as in the American colonies, land was abundant and labor was scarce. Labor therefore tended to migrate over the great Russian plain. In the Time of Troubles, especially, there was a good deal of movement. The landlords, wishing to assure themselves of their labor force, obtained the support of the Romanov tsars.

The manor, or what corresponded to it in Russia, came to resemble the slave planta- tion of the New World. Laws against fugitive serfs were strengthened; lords won the right to recover fugitives up to 15 years after their fl ight, and fi nally the time limit was abolished altogether. Peasants came to be so little regarded that a law of 1625 authorized anyone kill- ing another man’s peasant simply to give him another peasant in return. Lords exercised police and judicial powers. By a law of 1646 landowners were required to enter the names of all their peasants in government registers; peasants once so entered, together with their descendants, were regarded as attached to the estate on which they were registered. Thus the peasants lost the freedom to move at their own will. For a time they were supposed to have secure tenure of their land; but a law of 1675 allowed the lords to sell peasants without the land, and thus to move peasants like chattels at the will of the owner. This sale of serfs without land, which made their condition more like slavery as then practiced in America, became indeed a distinctive feature of serfdom in Russia, because in Poland, Prussia, Bohemia, and other regions of serfdom, the serf was generally regarded as “bound to the soil,” inseparable from the land.

Against the loss of their freedom the rural population of Russia protested as best it could, murdering landlords, fl eeing to the Cossacks, taking refuge in a vagrant existence, countered by wholesale government-organized manhunts and by renewed and more strin- gent legislation. A tremendous uprising was led in 1667 by Stephen Razin, who gath- ered a host of fugitive serfs, Cossacks, and adventurers, outfi tted a fl eet on the Caspian Sea, plundered Russian vessels, defeated a Persian squadron, and invaded Persia itself. He then turned back, ascended the Volga, killing and burning as he went and proclaiming a war against landlords, nobles, and priests. Cities opened their gates to him; an army sent against him went over to his side. He was fi nally captured and put to death in 1671. The consequence of the rebellion, for over a century, was that serfdom was clamped on the Russian peasants more fi rmly than ever.

The Romanovs

Serfdom in Russia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 222pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 222 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

223

Even from the church the increasingly wretched rural people drew little comfort. The Russian Orthodox church at this time went through a great internal crisis, and ended up as hardly more than a department of the tsardom, useful to the government in instilling a pervasive, unquestioning reverence for Holy Russia. The Russian church had historically looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as its head. But the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks made the head of the Greek Orthodox church a merely tolerated inferior to the Muslim sultan-caliph, so that the Russians in 1589 set up an independent Russian patriarch of their own. In the following generations the Russian patriarchate fi rst became dependent on, then was abolished by, the tsarist government.

In the 1650s the Russian patriarch undertook certain church reforms, mainly to correct mistranslations in Russian versions of the Bible and other sacred writings. The changes aroused the horror and indignation of the general body of believers. Deeply attached to the mere form of the written word and believing the faith itself to depend on the customary spell- ing of the name of Jesus, the malcontents saw in the reformers a band of cunning Greek scholars perpetrating the work of Antichrist and the devil. The patriarch and higher church offi cials forced through the reforms but only with the help of the government and the army. Those who rejected the reforms came to be called Old Believers, and they vehemently denounced every change in the texts and rituals of the established church. More fanatical than the reform-minded clergy, agitated by visionary preachers and dividing into innumerable sects, the Old Believers became very numerous, especially among the peasants. Old Believers were active in Stephen Razin’s rebel- lion and in all the sporadic peasant uprisings that followed. The peasants, already placed by serfdom outside the protection of law, were now also estranged from the established religion. A distrust of all organized authority settled over the Russian masses, to whom both church and government seemed to serve as mere engines of repression.

Old Believers

Stephen Razin became an almost mythic fi gure in Russian popular memory after leading a vast peasant rebellion in the late 1660s. This painting by Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (1848–1916) suggests Razin’s later prominence in Russian culture and his symbolic status in modern social and political movements. (akg-images/Newscom)

The Russian Orthodox church

26. The Transformation of Russia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 223pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 223 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740224

But while willing enough to modernize sacred texts by correcting mistranslations from the Greek, the Russian church offi cials resisted the kind of modernization that was coming in from western Europe. They therefore opposed Peter the Great at the end of the century. After 1700 no new patriarch was appointed. Peter put the church under a committee of bishops called the Holy Synod, and to the Synod he attached a civil offi cial called the Procurator of the Holy Synod. The Procurator was not a churchman but head of a govern- ment bureau whose task was to see that the church did nothing displeasing to the tsar. Peter thus secularized the church, making himself in effect its head. But while the consequences were more extreme in Russia than elsewhere, it must again be noted that Peter’s control of the church followed the general pattern of early modern Europe. Secular supervision of religion had become the rule almost everywhere, especially in Protestant countries. Indeed an Englishman of the time thought that Peter the Great, in doing away with the patriarchate and putting the church under his own control, was wisely imitating England, which he had visited in his youth.

Peter the Great: Foreign Affairs and Territorial Expansion

The Russia in which Peter the Great became tsar in 1682 was thus already European in some ways and had in any case been in contact with western Europeans for over a century. Without Peter, Russia would have developed its European connections more gradually. Peter, by his tempo and methods, made the process a social revolution.

Peter obtained his fi rst knowledge of western Europe in Moscow itself, where a part of the city known as the German quarter was inhabited by Europeans of various nationalities, whom Peter often visited as a boy. Peter also in his early years mixed with western travelers at Archangel, still Rus-

sia’s only port, for he was fascinated by the sea and took lessons in navigation on the White Sea from Dutch and English ship captains. Like the Great Elector of Brandenburg, Peter as a young man spent over a year in western Europe, especially Holland and England, where he became profoundly aware of the commercial and technical backwardness of his own country. He had considerable talents as a mechanic and organizer. He labored with his own hands as a ship’s carpenter in Amsterdam and talked with political and business lead- ers about the means for introducing the newer European organization and technology into Russia. He visited workshops, mines, commercial offi ces, art galleries, hospitals, and forts. Europeans saw him as a kind of alien genius, a giant of a man standing a head above most others, bursting with physical vitality and plying all he met with interminable questions on their manner of working and living. He had neither the refi nement nor the pretension of Western monarchs; he mixed easily with workmen and technical people, dressed cheaply and carelessly, loved horseplay and crude practical jokes, and dismayed his hosts by the squalid disorder in which he and his companions left the rooms put at their disposal. A man of acute practical mind, he was as little troubled by appearances as by moral scruples.

Peter on his visit to Europe in 1697–1698 recruited almost 1,000 experts for service in Russia, and many more followed later. He cared nothing for the civilization of Europe except as a means to an end, and this end was to create an army and a state that could stand against the most powerful European states. His aim from the beginning was in part defen- sive, to ward off the Poles, Swedes, and Turks who had long pushed against Russia; and in part expansionist, to obtain warm-water seaports on the Baltic and Black seas, which would offer year-round access to trade with Europe. For all but two years of his four- decade reign Peter was at war.

Exposure to the West

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 224pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 224 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

225

The Poles were a receding threat to Peter’s ambitions. A Polish prince had indeed been elected tsar of Muscovy during the Time of Troubles, and for a while the Poles aspired to conquer and Catholicize the Great Russians. But in 1667 the Russians had regained Smolensk and Kiev, and the growing anarchy in Poland made that country no longer a menace, except as the Swedes or others might install themselves in Polish territories. The Ottoman Turks and their Tartar depen- dencies, though no longer expanding, were still obstinate foes. Peter before going to Europe managed in 1696 to capture Azov at the mouth of the Don, but he was unable to hold any of the Black Sea coast; and he came to recognize the inferiority of the Russian army during these campaigns. The Swedes were at this time the main enemy of Russia. Their army, for its size, was still probably the best in Europe. They controlled the whole eastern shore of the Baltic including the Gulf of Finland. In 1697, the Swedish king having died, Peter entered into an alliance with Poland and Denmark to partition the overseas possessions of the Swedish house.

The new king of Sweden, the youthful Charles XII, was in some ways as crude as Peter (as an adolescent he had sheep driven into his rooms in the palace in order to enjoy the warlike pleasure of killing them), but he proved also to have remarkable aptitude as a general. In 1700, at the battle of Narva, with an army of 8,000 men, he routed Peter’s 40,000 Russians. The tsar thus learned another lesson on the need to reform and westernize his state and army. Fortunately for the Russians Charles XII, instead of immediately pressing his advantage in Russia, spent the following years in furthering Swedish interests in Poland, where he forced the Poles to

The Swedes

The aspirations of Peter the Great are suggested in this formal portrait of a monarch whose clothing and appearance resemble the style of western European elites in the early eighteenth century. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

Polish threat recedes

26. The Transformation of Russia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 225pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 225 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740226

elect the Swedish candidate as their king. Peter meanwhile, with his imported offi cers and technicians, reformed the training, discipline, and weapons of the Russian army.

Eventually, Charles XII invaded Russia with a large and well-prepared force. Peter used against him the strategy later used by the Russians against Napoleon and Adolf Hitler; he drew the Swedes into the endless plains, exposing them to the Russian winter, which happened to be an exceptionally severe one, and in 1709, at Poltava in south Russia, he met and overwhelmed the demoralized remainder. The entire Swedish army was destroyed at Poltava, only the king and a few hundred fugitives managing to escape across the Turkish frontier. Peter in the next years was thus able to conquer Livonia and part of eastern Finland. He landed troops near Stockholm itself. He campaigned in Pomerania almost as far west as the Elbe. Never before had Russian infl uence reached so deeply into Europe. The imperial day of Sweden was now over, terminated by Russia. Peter had won for Russia a piece of the Baltic shore and with it warm-water outlets. These signifi cant developments were confi rmed in the treaty of Nystadt, which ended the Great Northern War (1700–1721) and opened the eastern Baltic to the ascending power of Russia.

War is surely not the father of all things, as has been sometimes claimed, but these wars did a good deal to shape imperial Russia. The undisciplined, poorly organized Russian army was transformed into a pro- fessional force of the kind maintained by Sweden, France, or Prussia. The

elite of the old army had been the streltsi, a kind of Moscow guard, composed of nobles and constantly active in politics. A rebellion of the streltsi in 1698 had cut short Peter’s tour of Europe; he had returned and quelled the mutiny by ferocious use of torture and execution, killing fi ve of the rebels with his own hands. The streltsi were liquidated only two years before the great Russian defeat at Narva. Peter then rebuilt the army from the ground up. He employed European offi cers of many nationalities, paying them half again as much as native Russians of the same grades. He fi lled his ranks with soldiers supplied by districts on a territorial basis, somewhat as in Prussia. He put the troops into uniforms resembling those of the western European armies, and he organized them in regiments of standardized composition. He armed them with muskets and artillery of the kind used in Europe and tried to develop a new service of supply.

With this army he not only drove the Swedes back into Sweden but also dominated Russia itself. At the very time of the Swedish invasion large parts of the country were in rebellion, as in the days of Stephen Razin, for the whole middle and lower Volga, together with the Cossacks of the Don and Dnieper, rose against the tsar and rallied behind slogans of class resentment and hatred of the tsar’s foreign experts. Peter crushed these distur- bances with the usual ruthlessness. The Russian Empire, loose and heterogeneous, was held together by military might.

While the Swedish war was still in progress, even before the decisive battle of Poltava, Peter laid the foundations of a wholly new city in territory conquered from the Swedes and inhabited not by Russians but by various Baltic peoples. Peter named it St. Petersburg after himself and his patron saint. From the beginning it was more truly a city than Louis’s spectacular

creation at Versailles established at almost the same time. Standing at the head of the Gulf of Finland, it was Peter’s chief window on the West. Here he established the offi ces of government, required noblemen to build town houses, and gave favorable terms to foreign merchants and craftsmen to settle. Peter meant to make St. Petersburg a symbol of the new Russia. It was a new city facing toward Europe and drawing the minds of the Russians west- ward, replacing the old capital, Moscow, which faced toward Asia and was the stronghold

War and imperial Russia

The founding of St. Petersburg

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 226pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 226 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

227

of opposition to his westernizing program. St. Petersburg soon became one of the leading cities of northern Europe. It remained the capital of Russia (renamed Petrograd in 1914) until the Revolution of 1917, when Moscow resumed its old role. After the Revolution Petrograd became Leningrad. Its name reverted to St. Petersburg on the eve of the dissolu- tion of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Internal Changes under Peter the Great

The new army, the new city, the new and expanding government offi ces all required money, which in Russia was very scarce. Taxes were imposed on an inconceivable variety of objects—on heads, as poll taxes; on land; on inns, mills, hats, leather, cellars, and coffi ns; on the right to marry, sell meat, wear a beard, or be an Old Believer. The tax burden fell mainly on the peasants; and to assure the payment of taxes the mobility of peasants was further restricted. Borderline individuals were classifi ed as peasants in the government records, so that serfdom became both more onerous and more nearly universal. To raise government revenues and to stimulate production, Peter adopted the mercantilist policies that Colbert had promoted in France. He encouraged exports, built a fl eet on the Baltic, and developed mining, metal- lurgy, and textiles, which were indispensable to the army. He organized mixed groups of Russians and foreigners into commercial companies, provided them with capital from government funds (little private capital being available), and gave them a labor supply by assigning them the use of serfs in a given locality.

Serfdom, in origin mainly an agricultural institution, began to spread in Russia as an industrial institution also. Serf owners obtained the right to sell serfs without land, or to move them from landed estates into mines or towns, which made it easier for industry in Russia to develop on the basis of unfree labor. Nor were the employers of serfs, in these government enterprises, free to modify or aban- don their projects at will. They too were simply in the tsar’s service. The economic system rested largely on impressment of both management and labor, not on private profi t and wages as in the increasingly capitalistic economies of western Europe. In this way Peter’s efforts to force Russia to a European level of material productivity widened the social differences between Russia and western Europe.

To oversee and operate this system of tax collecting, recruiting, eco- nomic controls, serf hunting, and repression of internal rebellion Peter cre- ated a new administrative system. The old organs of local self-government wasted away. The duma and the national assembly, ineffective in that they could not function without disorder, now disappeared. In their place Peter put a “senate” dependent on himself, and 10 territorial areas called “governments,” or gubernii. The church he ruled through his Procurator of the Holy Synod. At the top of the whole structure was the tsar himself, an absolute ruler and autocrat of “All the Russias.” Before his death, dissatisfi ed with his son, he abolished the rule of hereditary succession to the tsardom, claiming the right for each tsar to name his own successor. Transmission of supreme power was thus put out- side the domain of law, and in the following century the accession of tsars and tsarinas was marked by strife, conspiracy, and assassination. The whole system of centralized absolutism, while in form resembling that of the absolutist European monarchies, notably France, was in fact signifi cantly different, for it lacked legal regularity, was handicapped by the poor educa- tion of many offi cials, and was imposed on a turbulent and largely unwilling population. The empire of the Romanovs has been called a state without a people.

Mercantilism encouraged

Serfs in industry

New administrative system

26. The Transformation of Russia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 227pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 227 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740228

Peter sought to assure the success of his reforms by developing what was called “state service,” which his predecessors had already begun. Virtually all landowning and serf- owning aristocrats were required to serve in the army or civil administration. Offi ces were multiplied to provide places for all. In the state service birth counted for nothing. Peter used men of all classes; Prince Dolgoruky was of the most ancient nobility, Prince Menshi- kov had been a cook, the tax administrator Kurbatov was an ex-serf, and many others were foreigners of unknown background. Status in Peter’s Russia depended not on inherited rank, which Peter could not control, but on rank in his state service. “History,” wrote a Scot serving in Peter’s army, “scarcely affords an example where so many people of low birth have been raised to such dignities as in tsar Peter’s reign, or where so many of the highest birth and fortune have been leveled to the lowest ranks of life.”

In this respect especially, Peter’s program resembled a true social rev- olution. It created a new governing element in place of the old, almost what in modern terms would be called a party, a body of radical reformers work- ing zealously for the new system with a personal interest in its preservation.

These men, during Peter’s lifetime and after his death, were the bulwarks against an anti- reform reaction; and they became the main agents in making Peter’s revolution stick. In time the new families evolved into hereditary positions themselves. The priority of state service over personal position was abandoned a generation after Peter’s death. Offi ces in the army and government were fi lled by men of property and birth. After Peter’s revolu- tion, as after some others, the new upper class became merged with the old.

Peter’s social revolution

The construction of the city of St. Petersburg became the most important architectural proj- ect in Peter the Great’s long-term campaign to westernize Russian society. This new city was designed to be a western-looking capital and a new center for commercial contacts with west- ern Europe; like the construction of the French palace at Versailles, the Russian tsar’s archi- tectural goals required the labor of thousands of poor workers and peasants. (Bettmann/Corbis)

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 228pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 228 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

229

Revolutionary also, suggesting the great French Revolution or the Russian Revolu- tion of 1917, were Peter’s unconcealed contempt for everything reminiscent of the old Russia and his zeal to reeducate his people in the new ways. He required all gentry to put their sons in school. He sent many abroad to study. He simplifi ed the Russian alphabet. He edited the fi rst newspaper to appear in Russia. He ordered the preparation of the fi rst Russian book of etiquette, teaching his subjects not to spit on the fl oor, scratch them- selves, or gnaw bones at dinner, to mix socially with women, take off their hats, converse pleasantly, and look at people while talking. The beard he took as a symbol of Muscovite backwardness; he forbade it in Russia, and himself shaved a number of men at his court. He forced people to attend evening parties to teach them manners. He had no respect for hereditary aristocracy, torturing or executing the highborn as readily as the peasants. As for religion, Peter was described as a pious man who enjoyed singing in church, but he was contemptuous of ecclesiastical dignity, and in one wild revel paraded publicly with drunken companions clothed in religious vestments and mocking the priests. Like many revolutionists since his time, he was aggressively secular.

The Results of Peter’s Revolution

Peter’s tactics provoked a strong reaction. Some adhered strictly to the old ways; oth- ers simply thought that Peter was moving too fast and too indiscriminately toward the new. Many Russians resented the inescapable presence of foreigners, who often looked down on Russians and who enjoyed special privileges such as the right of free exit from Russia and higher pay for similar employment. One center around which malcontents rallied was the church. Another was Peter’s son Alexis, who declared that when he became tsar he would put a stop to the innovations and restore respect for the customs of old Russia. Peter, fearing his own son’s collaboration with anti-reform conspirators, had Alexis tortured to death. He then ruled that each tsar should choose his own successor. He would stop at nothing to remake Russia in his own fashion.

Peter died in 1725, proclaimed “the Great” in his own lifetime by his admiring Senate. Few persons in all history have exerted so strong an individual infl uence, which indirectly became more far-reaching as the stature of Russia itself grew in later centuries. Though the years after Peter’s death were years of turmoil and vacillation, his revolutionary changes held fi rm against those who would undo them. It is not simply that he Europeanized Russia and conquered a place on the Baltic; these developments might have come about in any case. It is by the methods he used, his impatient forcing of a new culture on Russia, that he set the future character of his empire. His harsh methods fastened autocracy, serfdom, and bureaucracy more fi rmly upon the country. Yet he was able to reach only the upper classes. Many of these became more Europeanized than he could dream, habitually speaking French and living spiritually in France or in Italy. But as time went on many upper-class Russians, because of their very knowledge of Europe, became impatient of the stolid immovability of the peasants around them, felt estranged from their own country, or were troubled by a guilty feeling that their position rested on the degradation and enslavement of human beings. Russian psychology, often mysterious to later generations in western Europe could perhaps be explained in part by the violent paradoxes set up by rapid Europeanization. As for the peasant masses, they remained outside the new system, egregiously exploited, separated from their rulers and their social superiors, regarded by them as brutes or children, never sharing in any comparable way in their increasingly Europeanized

Resistance to reforms

26. The Transformation of Russia

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 229pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 229 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 5 The Transformation of Eastern Europe, 1648–1740230

civilization. Much of this worked itself out in the social confl icts of later times. As for Peter’s own time, Russia by his efforts came clearly out of its isolation, its social elites and government reorganized to play a part

in international affairs; and its history thenceforward was a part of the history of Europe and increasingly of the world. Russia, like Prussia and the Austrian monarchy, was to be counted among the powers of Europe.

The rising infl uence of these three monarchies depended in part on their ability to acquire modern weaponry, organize more effi cient bureaucracies, and bring new forms of European knowledge into their government institutions. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, European science and technologies often gave European states a comparative advantage in their economic, political, and military encounters with other peoples or governments—as the ruling elites in Austria, Prussia, and Russia had learned from their own struggles for

THE GROWTH OF RUSSIA IN THE WEST At the accession of Peter the Great in 1682 the Russian Empire, expanding from the old grand duchy of Muscovy, had almost reached the Black and Baltic seas. Most of Peter’s conquests were in the Baltic region where he pushed back the Swedes and built St. Petersburg. Under Catherine the Great (1762–1796) Russia took part in the three partitions of Poland and also reached the Black Sea. Tsar Alexander I (1801–1825), thanks largely to the Napoleonic wars, was able to acquire still more of Poland and annex Finland and Bessarabia; he also made con- quests in the Caucasus. In the nineteenth century the western boundary of Russia remained stabilized, but additional gains were made in the Caucasus. Russia also spread over northern Asia in the seventeenth century, fi rst reaching the Pacifi c as early as 1630.

V ol

ga R.

White Sea

Black Sea

C aspian

Sea

ARCTIC OCEAN

Ba lti

c Se

a

SWEDEN

POLAND

O T T O M A N E M P I R E

Archangel

Moscow

Warsaw

Constantinople

Kiev

Azov Astrakhan

Smolensk

Muscovy in 1462

Acquisitions 1462–1682

V ol

ga R.

White Sea

Black Sea

C aspian

Sea ARCTIC OCEAN

Bal tic

Se a

SWEDEN

POLAND

O T T O M A N E M P I R E

INGRIA AND LIVONIA, 1720

CAUCASUS

Archangel

Moscow

Warsaw

Constantinople

Kiev

Azov Astrakhan

Smolensk

St. Petersburg

Russia in 1682

Acquisitions of Peter the Great, 1682–1725

Exclusion of peasants

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 230pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 230 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

231

V ol

ga R.

White Sea

Black Sea

C aspian

Sea

ARCTIC OCEAN

Bal tic

Se a

SWEDEN

POLAND

O T T O M A N E M P I R E

FINLAND 1808

1772

179317951815

BESSARABIA 1812

YEDISAN 1792 KRIM

TARTARS 1783

MINGRELIA 1803

GEORGIA 1801

DAGHESTAN 1813

Archangel

Moscow

Warsaw

Constantinople

Kiev

Azov Astrakhan

Smolensk

St. Petersburg

Russia in 1725

Acquisitions 1725–1815

V ol

ga R.

White Sea

Black Sea

C aspian

Sea

ARCTIC OCEAN

Bal tic

Se a

SWEDEN

POLAND

O T T O M A N E M P I R E

FINLAND

CAUCASUS

CIRCASSIA 1829

KARS 1878

Archangel

Moscow

Warsaw

Constantinople

Kiev

Azov Astrakhan

Smolensk

St. Petersburg

Russia in 1815

Acquisitions 1815–1914

power in central Europe. Indeed, the new science would ultimately become one of the most distinctive and signifi cant forces in modern world history. Science helped to transform eco- nomic production, military strategies, and traditional cultures as well as imperial confl icts in Europe and around the world. We must therefore look more closely at the ways in which the development of modern scientifi c thought increasingly infl uenced the knowledge and control of both nature and human beings.

26. The Transformation of Russia

For suggested further readings and useful Web sites, interactive exercises, glossary, chronologies, and more, go to the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e .

pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 231pal85549_ch05_195-232.indd 231 03/08/13 7:30 PM03/08/13 7:30 PM

Final PDF to printer

This page intentionally left blank

233

C h a p t e r 6 THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF THE WORLD

The seventeenth century  has been called the cen- tury of genius, in part because it was the age when science became “modern.” It was the great age of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton, whose combined life- times spanned the century, with Galileo dying and Newton being born in the same year, 1642. When Galileo was young, those who studied the natural world still labored largely in the dark, isolated from one another and from the general public, working oftentimes by methods of trial and error, not alto- gether clear on what they were trying to do, with their thinking still complicated by ideas not nowa- days considered scientifi c. They had nevertheless accomplished a good deal, without which the intel-

lectual revolution of the seventeenth century would not have occurred. But in a way all sci- entifi c investigators before Galileo seem to be precursors, patient workers destined never to enter into the world toward which they labored. By 1727, when Newton died, a new interna- tional scientifi c community had emerged. Scientists, or “natural philosophers” as they were then called, communicated regularly with one another, and science was recognized as one of the principal enterprises of European society. Although the word “scientist” was not used until the early nineteenth century, scientifi c methods of inquiry had been defi ned. The store of factual knowledge had become very large. The fi rst modern scientifi c synthesis, or coher- ent theory of the physical universe, had been presented by Newton. Scientifi c knowledge was applied increasingly to navigation, mining, agriculture, and many branches of manufac- ture. Science and invention were joining hands. Science was accepted as the main force in the advancement of civilization and progress. And science was becoming popularized; many people who were not themselves scientists “believed” in science and attempted to apply scientifi c habits of thought to diverse problems of social and political life.

The history of science is too complex a story to be told in this book, but there are a few ideas about it that even a book of this kind must attempt to make clear. First, science, purely as a form of thought, is one of the

Science

27. The Emergence of a Scientifi c Culture: Bacon and Descartes

28. The Road to Newton: The Law of Universal Gravitation

29. New Knowledge of Human Beings and Society

30. Political Theory: The School of Natural Law

Chapter emblem: Scholar Holding a Thesis on Botany, by the seventeenth-century artist Willem Moreelse. (Toledo Museum of Art)

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 233pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 233 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World234

supreme achievements of the human mind, and to have a historical understanding of human intellectual powers one must sense the importance of science, as of philosophy, literature, or the arts. Second, science has increasingly affected practical affairs, entering into the health, wealth, and happiness of humankind. It has changed the size of populations and the use of raw materials, revolutionized methods of production, transport, business, and war, and so helped to relieve some human problems while aggravating others. This is especially true of modern civilization since the seventeenth century. Third, in the modern world ideas have had a way of passing over from science into other domains of thought. Many peo- ple today, for example, in their notions of themselves, their neighbors, or the meaning of life, are infl uenced by ideas that they believe to be those of Freud or Einstein—they talk of repressions or relativity without necessarily knowing much about them. Ideas derived from biology and from Darwin—such as evolution and the struggle for existence—have likewise spread far and wide. Similarly the scientifi c revolution of the seventeenth century had repercussions far beyond the realm of pure science. It changed many European ideas about religion, God, nature, and human beings. It helped to shape and spread infl uential new beliefs, such as that the physical universe is essentially orderly and harmonious, that human reason is capable of understanding and using it for social purposes, and that human affairs can be conducted by methods of peaceable exchange of ideas and rational discus- sion. Thus was laid a foundation for belief in free and democratic institutions.

The historical infl uence of modern science therefore extended far beyond the specifi c knowledge that transformed the human understanding and use of nature. Scientifi c methods for establishing truth or defi ning progress shaped a wide range of modern social institu- tions, including armies, hospitals, universities, trading companies, government bureaucra- cies, law courts, and even literary journals. The meaning of the word “modern” became linked to the intellectual prestige of science, and scientifi c knowledge became the most distinctive and important new intellectual force in modern Europe and the wider modern world. The purpose of this chapter is to sketch the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and the emergence of the scientifi c view of the world and of human affairs. The chapters that follow will describe the increasing application of this new knowledge in the expanding global economy and the infl uence of scientifi c thought in eighteenth-century European culture, which is generally known as the Age of Enlightenment.

27. THE EMERGENCE OF A SCIENTIFIC CULTURE: BACON AND DESCARTES

Science before the Seventeenth Century

The scientifi c view became characteristic of elite European society about the middle of the seventeenth century. There had, indeed, been a few in earlier times who caught glimpses

of a whole civilization reared upon science. To us today the most famous of these earlier scientifi c thinkers is Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), the uni- versal genius of the Italian Renaissance, who had been artist, engineer, and scientifi c theorist all in one. Leonardo, by actual dissection of dead bodies,

had obtained an accurate knowledge of human anatomy; he had conceived of the circula- tion of the blood and the movement of the earth about the sun; and he had drawn designs for submarines and airplanes and speculated on the use of parachutes and poison gases. But Leonardo had not published his scientifi c ideas. He was known almost exclusively as an artist. His work in science remained outside the stream of scientifi c thought, without infl uence

Leonardo da Vinci

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 234pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 234 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

23527. The Emergence of a Scientifi c Culture: Bacon and Descartes

on its course. It was not even known until the discovery of his private notebooks in the twentieth century. Leonardo thus fi gures in the history of science as an isolated genius, a man of brilliant insights and audacious theories, which died with their author’s death, whereas science depends on a transmission of ideas in which investigators build upon one another’s discoveries, test one another’s experiments, and fi ll in the gaps in one another’s knowledge. Modern science evolved as a kind of new cultural system, more dependent on communications and widely shared cultural beliefs than on the brilliance of isolated think- ers. Leonardo’s scientifi c work, remaining unpublished, never entered the cultural institu- tions in which new scientifi c knowledge would be produced, challenged, and revised.

A century after the death of Leonardo da Vinci educated Europeans were by no means scientifi cally minded. Among thoughtful persons many currents were stirring. On the one hand there was a great deal of skepticism, a constantly doubting frame of mind, which held that no certain knowledge is possible for human beings at all, that all beliefs are essentially only customs, that some people believe one thing and some another, and that there is no sound way of choosing between them. This attitude was best expressed by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), whose thought distilled itself into an eternal question, Que sais-je? “What do I know?” with the always implied answer, “Nothing.” Montaigne’s philosophy led to a tolerant, humane, and broad-minded out- look, but as a system of thought it was not otherwise very constructive. On the other hand, there was also a tendency to overbelieve in mysterious, supernatural powers, aris- ing from the same inability to distinguish between true and false. There was no accepted line between chemistry and alchemy or between astronomy and astrology; all alike were regarded as ways of penetrating the “secrets” of nature. The sixteenth century had been a great age of charlatans, such as Nostradamus and Paracelsus, some of whom, notably Paracelsus, mixed magic and valid science in a way hardly understandable to modern scientists. As late as the seventeenth century, especially in central Europe where the Thirty Years’ War produced chaos and terror, kings and generals kept private astrologers to divine the future.

The two centuries from about 1450 to about 1650 were also the period when fear of witches was at its height. The great campaign against witches thus coincided with Europe’s brutal religious wars and also with the early development of the new scientifi c culture among members of Europe’s educated elite, but even highly educated persons often believed that witches actually existed. Witches were blamed for all kinds of natural disasters and personal tragedies—bad harvests, epidemics, the mysterious deaths of children. Although most of the persons prosecuted for witchcraft were women, men were also imprisoned or executed for various crimes of “sorcery.” The witchcraft panic lasted longest in Germany and central Europe, probably kept alive by the insecurities engendered by the Thirty Years’ War. But about 20 persons were hanged as witches in Massachusetts as late as 1692, for the English colonies, as a remote and outly- ing part of the European world, were among the last to feel the newer intellectual currents that were spreading across Europe. The last known execution for witchcraft took place in 1722 in Scotland.

It was by no means clear, in the early part of the seventeenth century, how Euro- pean societies were going to develop. Europe might conceivably have fallen into a kind of pervasive political chaos. We have seen how much of Europe was racked by chronic and marauding violence, which was gradually ended by the consolidation of the modern state and the conversion of armed bands into organized and disciplined armies; but this more orderly political outcome was by no means apparent during the decades of the Thirty

Witchcraft panic

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 235pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 235 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World236

Years’ War and the revolutionary upheavals in England. Similarly, in matters of the mind, there was no settled order. Doubt went with superstition, indifference with persecution. Science in time provided Europe with a new faith in itself. The rise of science in the seven- teenth century possibly saved European civilization from drifting into a long postmedieval afterglow or from wandering off into the diverse, dead-end paths of endless skepticism, ineffectual philosophizing, desultory magic, or mad fear of the unknown.

Bacon and Descartes

Two men stand out as prophets of an intellectual world reconstructed by science. One was the Englishman Francis Bacon (1561–1626); the other was the Frenchman René Descartes (1596–1650). Both published their most infl uential books between 1620 and 1640. Both addressed themselves to the problem of knowledge. Both asked themselves how it is pos- sible for human beings to know anything with certainty or to have a reliable, truthful, and usable knowledge of the world of nature. Both shared in the doubts of their day. They branded virtually all beliefs of preceding generations (outside religion) as worthless. Both ridiculed the tendency to put faith in ancient books, to cite the writings of Aristotle or oth- ers, on questions having to do with the workings of nature. Both attacked earlier methods of seeking knowledge; they rejected the methods of the “schoolmen” or “scholastics,” the thinkers in the academic tradition of the universities founded in the Middle Ages. On the

Women were executed on charges of witchcraft from the later Middle Ages down through the seventeenth century, when a new fear of witches happened to coincide with the early modern scientifi c revolution. This mid-seventeenth-century English illustration shows a typical pattern of persecution in which several women were put to death at the same time for the alleged crime of “sorcery” or conspiring with “witches.” (Topham/The Image Works)

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 236pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 236 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

237

whole, medieval philosophy had been deductive. That is, its characteristic procedure was to start with defi nitions and general propositions and then discover what further knowl- edge could be logically deduced from the broad defi nitions thus accepted. Or it proceeded by affi rming the inherent nature of an object (e.g., “man is a political animal”) and then describing how objects of such a nature do or should behave. These methods, which owed much to Aristotle and other ancient codifi ers of human thought, had generally ceased to be fruitful in producing new knowledge of nature. Bacon and Descartes held that the medi- eval (or Aristotelian) methods approached truth from the wrong direction. They held that truth is not something that we postulate at the beginning and then explore in all its rami- fi cations, but that it is something that we fi nd at the end, after a long process of specifi c investigation, experiment, and intermediate thought.

Bacon and Descartes therefore went beyond mere doubt and proposed a new analyti- cal method to challenge the cultural drift toward skepticism. They offered a constructive program, and though their programs were different, they both became advocates for a sci- entifi c conception of objective truth. They maintained that there was a true and reliable method of knowledge. And they maintained in addition that once this true method was known and practiced, once the real workings of nature were understood, people would be able to use this knowledge for their own purposes, control nature in their own interests, make useful inventions, improve their mechanical arts, and add generally to human wealth and comfort. Bacon and Descartes thus argued that science provided a new foundation for human progress as well as objective knowledge about the natural world.

Francis Bacon planned a great work in many volumes, to be known as the Instauratio Magna or “Great Renewal,” calling for a complete new start in science and civilization. He completed only two parts. One, pub- lished in 1620, was the Novum Organum or new method of acquiring knowledge. Here he insisted on the inductive method. In the inductive method we proceed from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the abstract. For example, in the study of leaves, if we examine millions of actual leaves of all sizes and shapes and if we assemble, observe, and compare them with minute scrutiny, we are using an inductive method in the sense meant by Bacon; if successful, we may arrive at a knowledge, based on observed facts, of the general nature of a leaf as such. If, on the other hand, we begin with a general idea of what we think all leaves are like, that is, all leaves have stems, and then proceed to describe an individual leaf on that basis, we are following the deductive method; we draw logical implications from what we already know, but we learn no more of the nature of a leaf than what we knew or thought we knew at the beginning.

Bacon advised his readers to put aside all traditional ideas, to rid themselves of preju- dices and preconceptions, to look at the world with fresh eyes, to observe and study the innumerable things that are actually perceived by the senses. Thinkers before Bacon used the inductive method, but he formalized it as a method and became a leading philoso- pher of empiricism, which asserted that reliable knowledge must be based on observation and experience. This philosophy has always proved a useful safeguard against fi tting facts into preconceived or purely abstract patterns. It demands that we let our ideas and actions be shaped by actual facts as we observe them. The new scientifi c knowledge thus linked particular facts to general principles and typically combined inductive method with the broader claims of deductive thought. The knowledge that developed from such empiri- cal and analytical methods came to be viewed as stable truths that did not simply express the subjective beliefs of a particular person or cultural tradition; indeed, such knowledge

Francis Bacon and empiricism

27. The Emergence of a Scientifi c Culture: Bacon and Descartes

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 237pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 237 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World238

seemed to offer truths that all people could accept, no matter how they might otherwise differ in their religious beliefs, cultural traditions, or social ranks.

The other completed part of Bacon’s great work, published in 1623, was called in its English translation The Advancement of Learning. Here Bacon developed the same ideas and insisted also that true knowledge was useful knowledge. In The New Atlantis (1627), he portrayed a scientifi c utopia whose inhabitants enjoyed a perfect society through their knowledge and command of nature. This emphasis on the usefulness of knowledge became the other main element in the Baconian tradition. In this view there was no sharp differ- ence between pure science and applied science or between the work of the purely scientifi c investigators and that of the inventors who in their own way probed into nature and devised instruments or machines for putting natural forces to work. The fact that knowledge could be used for practical purposes became a sign or proof that it was true knowledge. For example, the fact that soldiers could aim their cannon and hit their targets more accurately in the seventeenth century became a proof of the theory of ballistics that scientists had worked out in research that was far removed from a battlefi eld. Enthusiastic Baconians believed that knowledge was power. True knowledge could be put to work, if not immedi- ately at least in the long run, after more knowledge was discovered. It was useful to man- kind, unlike the “delicate learning” of the misguided scholastics. In this coming together of knowledge and power arose the far-reaching modern idea of progress. And in it arose many modern problems, because the power given by scientifi c knowledge can be used for either good or evil.

But Bacon, though a force in redirecting the European mind, never had much infl u- ence on the development of actual science. Kept busy as Lord Chancellor of England and in other government duties, he was not even fully abreast of the most advanced scientifi c thought of his day. Bacon’s greatest intellectual weakness was his failure to understand the role of mathematics. Mathematics, dealing with pure abstractions and proceeding deduc- tively from axioms to theorems, was not an empirical or inductive method of thought such as Bacon demanded. Yet science in the seventeenth century went forward most success- fully in subjects where mathematics could be applied. Even today the degree to which a subject is truly scientifi c depends on the degree to which it can be made mathematical. We have pure science where we have formulas and equations, and the scientifi c method itself is both inductive and deductive.

Descartes was a great mathematician in his own right. He is considered the inventor of coordinate geometry. He showed that by use of coordinates (or graph paper, in simple language) any algebraic formula could be plotted

as a curve in space, and contrariwise that any curve in space, however complex, could be converted into algebraic terms and thus dealt with by methods of calculation. His general philosophy therefore contributed to the growing scientifi c belief that the vast world of nature could be reduced to mathematical form.

Descartes set forth his ideas in his Discourse on Method in 1637 and in many more technical writings. He advanced the principle of systematic doubt. He began by trying to doubt everything that could reasonably be doubted, thus sweeping away past ideas and clearing the ground for his own “great renewal,” to use Bacon’s phrase. Despite this far-reaching skepticism, however, he held that he could not doubt his own existence as a thinking and doubting being ( cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I exist”). He then deduced, by systematic reasoning, the existence of God and much else. He arrived at a phi- losophy of dualism, the famous “Cartesian dualism,” which held that God has created two kinds of fundamental reality in the universe. One was “thinking substance”—mind, spirit,

René Descartes

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 238pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 238 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

239

consciousness, subjective experience. The other was “extended substance”—everything outside the mind and hence a material reality that could be understood through objective knowledge. Of everything except the mind itself the most fundamental and universal qual- ity was that it occupied a portion of space, minute or vast. Space itself was conceived as infi nite and everywhere geometric.

This philosophy had profound and long-lasting effects. For one thing, the seemingly most real elements in human experience, color and sound, joy and grief, seemed somehow to be shadowy and unreal, or perhaps illusory, with no objective existence outside the mind itself. But all else was quantitative, measurable, reducible to formulas or equations. Over all else, over the whole universe or half-universe of extended substance, the most powerful instrument available to the human understanding, namely, mathematics, reigned supreme. “Give me motion and extension,” said Descartes, “and I will build you the world.”

Descartes also shared Bacon’s belief in empirical research, useful knowledge, and human progress. Instead of the “speculative philosophy of the schools,” he wrote in the Discourse on Method, one might discover a “practical philosophy by which, understanding the forces and action of fi re, water, air, the stars and heavens and all other bodies that sur- round us, . . . we can use these forces . . . and so make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature. And this is desirable not only for the invention of innumerable devices . . . , but mainly also for the preservation of health, which is undoubtedly the principal good and foundation of all other good things in this life.” Science, in short, opened the way to a bet- ter life than philosophy alone could ever produce.

RENÉ DESCARTES by Frans Hals (1584–1666)

Descartes worked for many years in Amsterdam, where he developed his work in math- ematics, described his philo- sophical methods of systematic doubt, and sat for this famous portrait by Frans Hals. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

27. The Emergence of a Scientifi c Culture: Bacon and Descartes

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 239pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 239 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World240

28. THE ROAD TO NEWTON: THE LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION

Scientifi c Advances

Meanwhile actual scientifi c discovery was advancing on many fronts as new “natural philosophers” shared information in the emerging networks of scientifi c communication. The new knowledge did not advance on all fronts with equal speed. Some of the sciences were, and long remained, depen-

dent mainly on the collection of specimens. Botany was one of these; Europe’s knowl- edge of plants expanded enormously with the explorations overseas. New edible plants were brought from the Americas, and the botanical gardens and herb collections in Europe also became far more extensive than ever before, bringing important enlargements in the stock of medicinal drugs as well as new foods. Other sciences drew their impetus from intensive and open-minded observation. In 1543 the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius published The Structure of the Human Body, an infl uential book that renewed and mod- ernized the study of anatomy. Formerly anatomists had generally held that the writings of Galen, dating from the second century c.e., contained an authoritative description of all human muscles and tissues. They had indeed dissected cadavers but had dismissed those not conforming to Galen’s description as somehow abnormal or not typical. Vesalius, by contrast, decided on the basis of his own careful dissections that Galen’s descriptions of the human body were often wrong. Developing comprehensive accounts of the human skeleton, organs, and circulatory system with detailed references to the actual bodies he examined, Vesalius constructed what historians of science would describe as a new “para- digm” for the later study of human anatomy.

In physiology also, dealing with the functioning rather than the structure of living bodies, there was considerable progress. Here the method of laboratory experiments could be profi tably used. William Harvey, after years of laboratory work in England (which included the vivisection of animals), published in 1628 a book On the Movement of the Heart and Blood, which set forth the doctrine of the continual circulation of the blood through arteries and veins. The Italian Marcello Malpighi, using the newly invented micro- scope, confi rmed Harvey’s fi ndings by the discovery of capillaries in 1661. The Dutch scientist Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, also by use of the microscope, provided new informa- tion about blood corpuscles, spermatozoa, and bacteria, of which he left published draw- ings. Another seventeenth-century Dutch scientist, Régnier de Graaf, published the fi rst description of the female ovaries, thus challenging Galen’s ancient theories of human sexuality and the long-accepted idea that women contributed less than men to the biologi-

cal processes of reproduction. These sciences, and also chemistry, although work in them went for-

ward continually, did not come fully into their own until after 1800. They were long overshadowed by astronomy and physics. Here mathematics could be most fully applied, and mathematics underwent a rapid develop-

ment in the seventeenth century. Decimals came into use to express fractions, the symbols used in algebra were improved and standardized, and in 1614 logarithms were invented by the Scot John Napier. Coordinate geometry was mapped out by Descartes, the theory of probabilities was developed by Blaise Pascal, and calculus was invented simultaneously in England by Newton and in Germany by Leibniz. These advances made it more gener- ally possible to think about nature in purely quantitative terms, to measure with greater

Botany, anatomy, and physiology

Astronomy and physics

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 240pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 240 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

24128. The Road to Newton: The Law of Universal Gravitation

precision, and to perform complex and laborious computations. Physics and astronomy were remarkably stimulated, and it was in this fi eld that the most infl uential scientifi c revo- lution of the seventeenth century took place.

The Scientifi c Revolution: Copernicus to Galileo

Ever since Ptolemy had codifi ed ancient astronomy in the second century c.e., educated Europeans had held a conception of the cosmos that we call Ptolemaic. The cosmos in this ancient Greek view was a group of concentric spheres, a series of balls within balls each having the same center. The innermost ball was the earth, made up of hard, solid, earthy substance such as people were familiar with under- foot. The other spheres, encompassing the earth in series of closer or more distant geometric circles, were all transparent. They were the “crystalline spheres” made known to us by the poets; their harmony was the “music of the spheres.” These spheres all revolved about the earth, each sphere containing, set in it as a jewel, a luminous heavenly body or orb that moved about the earth with the movement of its transparent sphere. Near- est to the earth was the sphere of the moon; then, in turn, the spheres of Mercury and Venus, then the sphere of the sun, then those of the outer planets. Last came the outermost sphere containing all the fi xed stars studded in it, all moving majestically about the earth in daily motion, but motionless with respect to each other because they were held fi rmly in the same sphere. Beyond the sphere of the fi xed stars, in general belief, lay the “empyrean,” the home of angels and immortal spirits; but this was not a matter of natural science.

The Ptolemaic system

A SCHOLAR HOLDING A THESIS ON BOTANY by Willem Moreelse (Dutch, before 1630–1666)

This scholar may be a new doc- tor of the University of Utrecht, where the little-known painter Willem Moreelse worked in the seventeenth century. Crowned with the laurel, the success- ful candidate proudly displays his thesis, on which the Latin words announce “any plant shows the presence of God”— an example of the growing scientifi c interest in hitherto unknown plants that reached Europe from other parts of the world in this era. (Toledo Museum of Art)

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 241pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 241 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World242

Persons standing on the earth and looking up into the sky thus felt themselves to be enclosed by a dome in which their own position was the center. In the blue sky of day they could literally see the crystalline spheres; in the stars at night they could behold the orbs that these spheres carried with them. All revolved about the observer, presumably at no very alarming distance. The celestial bodies were commonly supposed to be of differ- ent material and quality from the earth. The earth was of heavy dross; the stars and planets and the sun and moon seemed made of pure and gleaming light, or at least of a bright ethe- real substance almost as tenuous as the crystal spheres in which they moved. The cosmos was a hierarchy of ascending perfection. The heavens were purer than the earth.

This Ptolemaic or geocentric system corresponded to actual appearances, and except for scientifi c knowledge would be highly believable today. It was formulated also in rigor- ous mathematical terms. Ever since the Greeks, and becoming increasingly intricate in the Middle Ages, a complex geometry had grown up to explain the observed motion of the heavenly bodies. The Ptolemaic system was a mathematical system. And it was for purely mathematical reasons rather than from empirical observations that it fi rst came to be recon- sidered. There was a marked revival of mathematical interest at the close of the Middle Ages, in the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries, a renewed concentration on the philosophi- cal traditions of Pythagoras and Plato. In these philosophies could be found the doctrine that numbers might be the fi nal key to the mysteries of nature. With them went a meta- physical belief that simplicity was more likely to be a sign of truth than complexity and that a simpler mathematical formulation was better than a more complicated one.

These ideas motivated Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), born in Poland of German and Polish background, who, after study in Italy, wrote his epochal work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs. In this book,

published in 1543 after his death, he held the sun to be the center of the solar system and of the whole universe; the earth, he argued, was one of the planets revolving in space around it. This view had been entertained by a few isolated thinkers before. Copernicus gave a mathematical demonstration. To him it was a purely mathematical problem. With increas- ingly detailed knowledge of the actual movement of the heavenly bodies it had become necessary, as the years passed, to make the Ptolemaic system more intricate by the addition of new “cycles” and “epicycles,” until, as John Milton expressed it later, the cosmos was

With Centric and Concentric scribbled o’er, Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb.

Copernicus needed fewer such hypothetical constructions to explain the known move- ments of the heavenly bodies. The heliocentric or sun-centered theory was mathematically simpler than the geocentric or earth-centered theory that it would gradually displace.

The Copernican doctrine long remained a hypothesis known only to experts. Most astronomers for a time hesitated to accept it, seeing no need, from the evidence yet pro- duced, to make such a radical readjustment of the older Ptolemaic paradigm. Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the greatest authority on the actual positions and movements of the heavenly bodies in the generations immediately after Copernicus, never accepted the Copernican system in full. But his assistant and follower, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), building on

Tycho’s exact observations, not only accepted the Copernican theory but carried it further.

Kepler, a German, was a kind of mathematical mystic, part-time astrologer, and scientifi c genius. Copernicus had believed the orbits of the

planets about the sun to be perfect circles. Tycho showed that this belief did not fi t the observable facts. It was Kepler who discovered that the orbits of the planets were ellipses.

Nicholas Copernicus

Johannes Kepler

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 242pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 242 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

243

The ellipse, like the circle, is an abstract mathematical fi gure with knowable properties. Kepler demonstrated that the closer a planet is to the sun in its elliptical orbit, the faster it moves; and he showed that the length of time in which the several planets revolve about the sun varies proportionately with their distance from the sun.

It is not possible for most people to understand the mathematics involved, but it is possible to realize the astounding implications of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Kepler showed that the actual world of stubborn facts, as observed by Tycho, and the purely rational world of mathematical harmony, as surmised by Copernicus, were not really in any contradiction to each other—that they really corresponded exactly. Why they should he did not know; it was the mystery of numbers. He digested an overwhelming amount of hitherto unexplained information into a few brief statements. He showed a cos- mic mathematical relationship between space and time. And he described the movement of the planets in explicit formulas, which any competent person or scientifi c community could verify at will.

The international character of early modern scientifi c culture can be seen in the next important contributions of the Italian Galileo (1564–1642).

Galileo

The Copernican conception of a solar system revolving around the sun was long unknown out- side a small circle of experts, and few persons understood the mathematics upon which it was based. But the meaning of the Copernican theories later spread in visual images that depicted the new astronomical view of the sun, earth, and other planets. (Enzo & Paolo Ragazzini/Corbis)

28. The Road to Newton: The Law of Universal Gravitation

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 243pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 243 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World244

So far the question of the substance of the heavenly bodies had hardly been reconsidered. Indeed, they were not thought of as bodies at all, but rather as orbs. Only the sun and moon had any dimension; stars and planets were only points of light; and the theories of Copernicus and Kepler, like those of Ptolemy, might apply to insubstantial luminous objects in motion. In 1609 Galileo built a telescope. Turning it to the sky, he perceived that the moon had a rough and apparently mountainous surface, as if made of the same kind of material as the earth. Seeing clearly the dark part of the moon in its various phases, and not- ing that in every position it only refl ected the light of the sun, he concluded that the moon was not itself a luminous object, another indication that it might be made of earthlike sub- stance. He saw spots on the sun, as if the sun were not pure and perfect. He found that the planets had visible breadth when seen in the telescope but that the fi xed stars remained only points of light, as if incalculably further away. He discovered also that Jupiter had satel- lites, moons moving around it like the moon around the earth. These discoveries reassured him of the validity of the Copernican theory, which he had in any case already accepted. They suggested also that the heavenly bodies might be of the same substance as the earth, masses of matter moving in space; and if the heavenly bodies consisted of matter, it became easier to think of the earth itself as simply another heavenly body revolving about the sun. The difference between the earth and the heavens was disappearing. This struck a terrifying blow at all earlier philosophy and theology. Some professors were afraid to look through the telescope, and Galileo was condemned for heresy and forced by his church to renounce his description of the solar system; but he never really changed his scientifi c views.

Moreover, where Kepler had found mathematical laws describing the movement of planets, Galileo now found mathematical laws describing the movement of bodies on the earth. Formerly it had been thought that some bodies were by nature heavier than others and that heavier bodies fell to the ground faster than light ones. Galileo in 1591, according to the traditional story, dropped a 10-pound and a 1-pound weight simultaneously from

Popperfoto/Getty Images

Galileo’s scientifi c research, which included the use of a telescope and led to a clash with church authorities, gave him an enduring stature in European intellectual history. This later image of Galileo portrays him as the idealized early modern “man of science,” working alone to dis- cover and describe new knowledge. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 244pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 244 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

245

the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The truth of this story has been questioned, but in any case Galileo showed that despite all previous speculation on the subject two bodies of different weights, when allowance was made for differences in air resistance due to differ- ences of size or shape, struck the ground at the same time. His further work in dynamics, or the science of motion of bodies, took many years to accomplish. He had to devise more refi ned means for measuring small intervals of time, fi nd means of estimating the air resis- tance, friction, and other impediments that always occur in nature, and conceive of pure or absolute motion, and of force and velocity, in abstract mathematical terms. He made use of a new conception of inertia, in which only change in motion, not the origination of motion, had to be explained. This dispensed with the need of an Unmoved Mover felt in the older philosophy; and yet Galileo could still not answer certain questions about the motion of objects—questions that would soon be examined again by Isaac Newton.

The Achievement of Newton: The Promise of Science

Historians of science now tend to stress the collective and cultural components of scien- tifi c advances rather than “Great Man” accounts of the lone scientifi c genius, but it was the supreme creative achievement of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) that brought Kepler and Galileo together in a new explanation of universal motion. Connecting the breakthroughs of his infl uential predecessors, Newton was able to show that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Galileo’s laws of terrestrial motion were two aspects of the same laws. Galileo’s discovery that moving bodies move uniformly in a straight line unless defl ected by a defi nite force made it nec- essary to explain why the planets, instead of fl ying off in straight lines, tend to fall toward the sun, the result being their elliptical orbits—and why the moon, similarly, tends to fall toward the earth. Newton seems early to have suspected that the explanation would be related to Galileo’s laws of falling bodies and that the pull of the earth upon objects on earth might resemble a pull characterizing all bodies in the solar system. Great technical diffi culties stood in the way, but fi nally, after inventing calculus, and using a new measure- ment of the size of the earth made by a Frenchman and experiments with circular motion made by the Dutch Huyghens on the pendulum, Newton was able to bring his calculations to fruition. He soon published, in Latin, his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philoso- phy (1687), a book that would bring the “law of universal gravitation” into both the science and the wider intellectual debates of early modern Europe.

This stupendous book showed that all motion that could be timed and measured, whether on the earth or in the solar system, could be described by the same mathematical formulas. All matter moved as if every particle attracted every other particle with a force proportionate to the product of the two masses and inversely proportionate to the square of the distance between them. This “force” was universal gravitation. What it was New- ton did not pretend to explain. For 200 years the law stood unshaken, always verifi ed by every new relevant discovery. Only in the past century were its limitations found; it does not hold good in the infi nitesimal world of subatomic structure or in the macrocosm of the whole physical universe as now conceived.

It was in Newton’s time that the pursuit of natural knowledge became institutionalized, and Newton himself fi rst presented his theories at London’s Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge. Such institutions, possessing equipment and funds, were engaged in scientifi c study, most notably at the Royal Society of London, founded in 1662, and the Royal Academy of Sciences in France, founded in 1666. Both originated when earlier and

Universal gravitation

28. The Road to Newton: The Law of Universal Gravitation

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 245pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 245 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World246

Historical Interpretations and Debates Continuity and Discontinuity in the

Scientifi c Revolution Historians have waged spirited debates about the ways in which early modern scientists both reaffi rmed traditional religious beliefs and launched a “modern” method for understanding the natural world. Such discussions therefore focus on broad questions about the nature of historical continuity and change and about the relation between deep structures of belief and revolutions in thought. A contrasting emphasis on continuity and change thus becomes one of the themes in the interpretations of B. J. T. Dobbs and Richard Westfall as they analyze the signifi cance of Isaac Newton and the Scientifi c Revolution.

Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, “Newton as Final Cause and First Mover” (2000) I intend to undermine one of our most hallowed explanatory frameworks, that of the Scientifi c Revolution. . . .

No matter what one chooses to emphasize from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, . . . one must, it seems, bring the action to a dramatic climax in the work of Isaac Newton. The narrative has assumed all the characteristics of an inevitable progression; we have the sense that Newton must appear on the scene to pull the disparate strands of development into a grand synthesis. . . .

We choose for praise the thinkers that seem to us to have contributed to modernity, but we unconsciously assume that their thought patterns are fundamentally just like ours. Then we look at them . . . and discover . . . that our intellectual ancestors are not like us at all. . . . They have metaphysical and religious commitments that they should have known were unnecessary for a study of nature; . . . they take seriously such misbegotten ideas as astrology, alchemy, [and] magic. . . .

[So] how could Newton . . . have pursued alchemy as he did . . . ? What Newton hoped to gain from alchemy was a precise knowledge of the Deity. . . . If he, Newton, could but demonstrate the laws of divine activity in nature . . . then he could demonstrate in an irrefutable fashion the existence and providential care of the Deity—a grand goal, though hardly a modern one. . . .

Richard S. Westfall, “The Scientifi c Revolution Reasserted” (2000) Dobbs announces her intention to undermine the concept of the Scientifi c Revolution. In contrast, I intend to defend it. . . .

Before the Scientifi c Revolution, theology was queen of all the sciences. As a result of the Scientifi c Revolution, we have redefi ned the word “science,” and today other disciplines . . . strive to expand their self-esteem by appropriating the word in its new meaning to themselves. . . . The focus of the change, the hinge on which it turned, was the Scientifi c Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. . . . I am convinced that there has been no more fundamental change in the history of European Civilization. . . .

In its most general terms, the Scientifi c Revolution was the replacement of Aristotelian natural philosophy, which . . . had completely dominated thought about nature in western Europe during the previous four centuries. . . .

For those who accepted the new astronomy and the new mechanics, Aristotelian natural philosophy had become untenable. If the transformation of scientifi c thought were to proceed, a new natural philosophy had become a necessity. What fi lled this need came to be called the mechanical philosophy. . . .

With Newton the new science and the new philosophy of nature found their defi nitive form in which they shaped the scientifi c tradition in the West for the coming two centuries. The very nature of the new enterprise that the Scientifi c Revolution

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 246pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 246 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

247

Sources: Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, “Newton as Final Cause and First Mover,” in Rethinking the Scientifi c Revolu- tion, edited by Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25, 29, 34, 36, 38–39; Richard S. Westfall, “The Scientifi c Revolution Reasserted,” in ibid. , pp. 41, 43, 45, 47–48.

Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs . . . (contd . . .) I would like to suggest that [we

evaluate] . . . Newton in a different way: not as one of history’s all-time winners, not as the First Mover of modern science, not as the Final Cause of the Scientifi c Revolution, but as one of history’s great losers, a loser in a titanic battle between the forces of religion and the forces of irreligion.

Richard S. Westfall . . . (contd . . .) inaugurated insured that the Newtonian system would be modifi ed. . . . As long as we remember those modifi cations, it does appear to me that the system, in a broad sense that emphasizes its fundamental features in their contrast with earlier ones, continues to reign, and I see no prospect whatever that the reign will terminate.

informal groups, usually gentlemen of the landed class, received offi cial charters from their governments to pursue scientifi c interests. Scientifi c periodicals began to be published. Sci- entifi c societies provided the medium for prompt interchange of ideas indispensable to the growth of scientifi c knowledge. They held meetings, proposed projects for research, and published articles not only on the natural sciences and mathematics, but also on paleogra- phy, numismatics, chronology, legal history, and natural law. The work of the learned had not yet evolved into modern academic specializations.

In all these activities the promise of science seemed fulfi lled. Even in practical affairs conveniences followed, as anticipated by the Baconi- ans. The tides could now be understood and predicted by the gravitational interplay of earth, moon, and sun. Exact mathematical knowledge of the celestial bodies, together with the invention of more accurate timepieces, was of great help to navigation and mapmaking. Measures of latitude, or of north-south distances on the spherical earth, had been known to the ancient Greeks. But longitude, or east-west distances, could not be measured until the eighteenth century, when it became possible to determine it by use of a chronometer and observation of heavenly bodies at a known time. Merchant ships and naval squadrons could thus operate with more assurance about where they were sailing. Places on land could be located and mapped more exactly. Eighteenth- century Europeans were the fi rst human beings to have a fairly accurate idea of the shapes and sizes of all the continents and oceans. Better local and regional maps of places in Europe also became available.

Mathematical advance, including the development of calculus, which allowed an exact treatment of curves and trajectories, reinforced by technical discoveries in the working of metals, led to an increased use of artillery. Armies in 1750 used twice as many cannons per soldier as in 1650. Naval ordnance also improved. These items made armed forces more expensive to maintain, requiring governments to increase their taxes, and hence producing constitutional crises. Improved fi rearms heightened the advantage of armies over insur- rectionists or private fi ghting bands, thus strengthening the sovereignty of the state. They also gave Europeans the military advantage over other peoples, in America, India, or else- where, on which the world ascendancy of Europe was built in the eighteenth century. The new scientifi c knowledge thus contributed to the expansion of Europe’s colonial empires as well as the growing internal power of European governments.

Scientifi c improvements

28. The Road to Newton: The Law of Universal Gravitation

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 247pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 247 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World248

The signifi cance of the steam engine may also be cited. Steam power would eventu- ally almost literally move the world. In 1700 it was only in its earliest stages, but it was in sight on the horizon. A Frenchman, Denis Papin, in 1681 invented a device in which steam moved a piston, but it produced so little power that it was used only in cooking. British scientists also turned their minds to the possible uses of steam. Robert Boyle, discoverer of “Boyle’s Law” on the pressure of gases, studied the problem; scientists, mechanics, and instrument makers collaborated. In 1702 Thomas Newcomen, a man without scientifi c training who associated with scientists, produced the steam engine known thereafter as Newcomen’s engine, from which, as will be seen, James Watt developed the steam engine as we know it. Newcomen’s engine was primitive according to later ideas. It burned so much fuel that it could be used only in coal mines. But it began to be used, and not long after 1700 it was widely employed to pump water from the coal pits. It saved labor, cheap- ened production, and opened hitherto unusable deposits to exploitation. It was the fi rst application of steam to an economic purpose.

No distinction was yet felt between pure and applied science. The modern sense of the word hardly existed, even in the early eighteenth century; what we call “science” was still called natural philosophy or “useful knowledge.” Traveling public lecturers, in explaining the laws of force and motion, showed their application in devices such as pulleys, scales, levers, cogwheels, waterwheels, and pumps. Such lectures were attended, especially in England, by a mixed audience of philosophers, experimenters, inventors, artisans, landed gentlemen who wished to develop their estates, and small businessmen wishing to enlarge their markets. The scientifi c movement thus opened the way to agricultural and industrial improvements in Great Britain and other places where the new knowledge was brought into economic activities.

The Scientifi c Revolution and the World of Thought

The infl uence of the Scientifi c Revolution extended far beyond the era’s new technologies, and the changing scientifi c knowledge soon began to challenge or revise some of the oldest religious and intellectual traditions of European culture. The new astronomy and physics led to what has been called the greatest spiritual readjustment that human beings have been required to make. The old heavens were exploded. Humans were no longer the center of creation. The luminaries of the sky no longer shone to light their way or to give them beauty. The sky itself was an illusion, its color a thing in the mind only, for anyone looking upward was really looking only into the darkness of endless space. The old cosmos, com- fortably enclosed and ranked in an ascending order of purity, gave way to a new cosmos that seemed to consist of an infi nite emptiness through which particles of matter were dis- tributed. Humans were the puny denizens of a material object moving through space along with other very distant material objects of the same kind. About the physical universe there was nothing especially Christian, nothing that the God portrayed in the Hebrew or the Christian Bible would be likely to have made. The gap between religious and scientifi c explanations for the natural world, always present yet always bridged in the Middle Ages, now began to produce new public confl icts and new personal struggles to reconcile faith and reason. Such tensions were felt with growing anguish by some seventeenth-century writers. The Frenchman Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), for example, was an accomplished scientist, a preeminent mathematician, and a deep but often troubled Christian believer. He left a record of his religious beliefs, anxieties, and fears in his Pensées, or Thoughts, jottings and personal refl ections from which he hoped some day to write a great book on

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 248pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 248 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

249

the Christian faith. “I am terrifi ed,” he said in one of these jottings, “by the eternal silence of these infi nite spaces.”

But on the whole the cultural reaction was more optimistic. Man might be merely a reed, as Pascal said, but Pascal added, he was “a thinking reed.” Human beings might be no longer the physical center of the universe. But it was the human mind that had penetrated the universal laws by which the planets and the earth itself were put in motion. The Newtonian system, as it became popularized, a process that took about 50 years, led to a great intellectual confi dence. Never had there been so much optimism about the intellectual powers of human beings. As the English poet Alexander Pope put it,

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.

The Newtonian system

FOUNDING OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND THE OBSERVATORY IN 1666 by Henri Testelin (1616–1695)

Testelin was an instructor at the Royal Academy of Painting and a strong defender of the aca- demic traditions in French art. He portrayed King Louis XIV visiting the new Royal Academy of Sciences in this painting, which expresses his respect for both the king and the new scientifi c knowledge. But Testelin’s life also exemplifi ed another side of late seventeenth-century French culture. He was a Protestant who eventually had to give up his academic position and move to the Netherlands to practice his religion. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

28. The Road to Newton: The Law of Universal Gravitation

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 249pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 249 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World250

Or, according to another epigram on the subject, there was only one universe to discover, and this universe had been discovered by Newton. Everything seemed possible to human reason. Although Newton and most other scientists continued to believe in the existence of God, the old feeling of dependency on divine powers and judgments lost much of its force or became something to be discussed by clergymen in church on Sunday. Human beings were not really little creatures, spiritual wayfarers in an alien natural world, yearning for a reunion with God that would bring peace. They were creatures of great capacity in their own right, living in a natural world that was understandable and manageable. These ideas contributed greatly to the secularizing of European society, gradually pushing religion and churches to the sidelines of European political power and many of the era’s new intellec- tual debates.

The scientifi c discoveries also reinforced the old philosophy of natural law. This phi- losophy, developed by the Greeks and renewed in the Middle Ages, held that the universe is fundamentally orderly and that there is a natural rightness or justice, universally the same for all people and knowable by reason. It was very important in political theory, where it stood out against arbitrariness and the merely random claims of self-interested power. The laws of nature as discovered by science were somewhat different, but they taught the same lesson, namely, the orderliness and minute regularity of the world. It was reassuring to feel that everywhere throughout an infi nite space every particle of matter was quietly attracting every other particle by a force proportionate to the product of the masses and inversely proportionate to the square of the distance. The physical universe laid bare by science—orderly, rational, balanced, smoothly running, without strife or rivalry or

Isaac Newton became the famous public symbol of the new scientifi c knowledge and the new scientifi c researcher. This portrait by an anony- mous artist emphasizes the focused brilliance that made Newton an icon in the expand- ing institutions of scientifi c culture and in the wider devel- opment of eighteenth-century intellectual life. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 250pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 250 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

25129. New Knowledge of Human Beings and Society

contention—became a model on which many thinkers, as time went on, hoped to refashion human society. They hoped to make society also fulfi ll the rational rule of law, much like scientists had shown how material objects adhere to the laws of nature.

In some ways it would be possible to exaggerate the impact of pure science. Scien- tists themselves did not usually apply their scientifi c ideas to religion and society. Few suffered the spiritual torment of Pascal. Both Descartes and Newton wrote carefully argued tracts that asserted the truth of certain religious doctrines. Bacon and Harvey were conservative politically, upholders of king against Parliament. The Englishman Joseph Glanvill, in the 1660s, used Cartesian dualism to demonstrate the probable existence of witches. Descartes, despite his systematic doubt, held that the customs of one’s country should usually be accepted without question. Natural science, in the pure sense, was not inherently revolutionary or even upsetting. If Europeans in the seventeenth century began to waver in many old beliefs, it was not only because of the stimulus of pure science but also because of an increasing knowledge and study of humanity itself.

29. NEW KNOWLEDGE OF HUMAN BEINGS AND SOCIETY The discovery and exploration of the world overseas became a decisive new infl uence on European views of human cultures and the nature of human beings. Europe was already becoming part of the world as a whole and could henceforth understand itself only by comparison with non-European regions. Great reciprocal infl uences were at work, and the cultural exchanges fl owed in both directions. The infl uences of European expansion on other parts of the world are easily seen: the Indian societies of America were modifi ed or sometimes almost extinguished; the indigenous societies of Africa were dislocated and many of their members were enslaved and transported; in the long run even the ancient societies of Asia were to be disrupted or undermined. European ideas and institutions altered the ways in which other peoples described their own cultures, and the exchanges or confl icts with Europe reshaped identities wherever such interactions occurred. From the beginning, however, the counterinfl uence of the rest of the world upon Europe was equally great. It took the form of new medicines, new diseases, new foods, new and exotic manu- factures brought to Europe, and the growth of material wealth in western European coun- tries, but it also affected European thinking. New questions were raised about the diversity of religious traditions, the history of languages, and the origins of human civilizations. The growing involvement with other cultures undermined the old Europe and its ideas, just as Europe was undermining the old cultures beyond the oceans. Vast new hori- zons opened before Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Europeans of this period were the fi rst people to know the globe as a whole, to establish colonial out- posts around most of the world, or to realize the variety of the human race and its multi- farious manners and customs.

The Current of Skepticism

This encounter with the diversity of human cultures was very unsettling. The realization of human differences had the effect, in Europe, of breaking what has been called the “cake of custom.” A new sense of the relative nature of social institutions developed. It became harder to believe in any absolute rightness of one’s own ways. Montaigne, already men- tioned, expressed the relativist outlook clearly, and nowhere more clearly than in his famous essay on cannibals. The cannibals, he said humorously, did in fact eat human fl esh;

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 251pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 251 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World252

that was their custom, and they have their customs as Europeans also have theirs; they would think some European ways odd or inhuman; peoples differ, and who are we to judge? The cannibals cooked human bodies after the people were dead, but Europeans burned human beings when they were still alive. Travelers’ books spread the same mes-

sage increasingly through the seventeenth century. As one of them observed (whether or not rightly), in Turkey it was the custom to shave the hair and wear the beard, in Europe to shave the beard and wear the hair; what differ- ence does it really make?

That the ways of non-Europeans might be good ways was emphasized by Jesuit mis- sionaries. Writing from the depths of the Mississippi Valley or from China, the Jesuit fathers often dwelt on the natural goodness and mental alertness of native peoples they encountered, perhaps hoping in this way to gain support in Europe for their missionary labors. Meanwhile, people coming from the American wilderness or from Asia sometimes appeared in Europe itself. In 1684 a delegation of aristocratic Siamese arrived in Paris, followed by another in 1686. The Parisians went through a fad for Siam (now Thailand); they recounted how the king of Siam, when asked by a missionary to turn Christian, replied that divine Providence, had it wished a single religion to prevail in the world, could easily have so arranged it. The philosophical Siamese seemed civilized and wise; they allowed Christians to preach in their own country, whereas it was well known what would happen to a Siamese missionary who undertook to preach in Paris. China also was seen at this time as a civilized center of learning, tolerance, and wise ethical traditions. By 1700 there were even professors of Arabic, at Paris, Oxford, and Utrecht, who said that Islam

was a religion to be respected, as good for Muslims as Christianity was for Christians.

Thus was created a strong current of skepticism, holding that all beliefs are relative, varying with the time, place, and culture in which they develop.

The greatest spokesman for this kind of relativism or skepticism at the end of the century was Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Bayle was infl uenced by the scientifi c discoveries also; not exactly that he understood them, for he was an almost purely literary scholar, but he realized that many popular beliefs were without scientifi c foundation. Between 1680 and 1682 a number of comets were seen. The one of 1682 was studied by a friend of Newton’s, Edmond Halley, the fi rst man to predict the return of a comet. He identifi ed the comet of 1682 with the one observed in 1302, 1456, 1531, and 1607, and predicted its reappear- ance in 1757 (it appeared in 1759); it was seen again in 1910 and 1986 and is still called Halley’s Comet. In the 1680s people were talking excitedly about the signifi cance of comets. Some said that comets emitted poisonous exhalations; others, that they were supernatural omens of future events.

Bayle, in his Thoughts on the Comet, argued that there was no basis for any such beliefs except human credulity. In 1697 he published his Historical and Critical Diction- ary, a tremendous repository of miscellaneous lore, conveying the message that what is called truth is often mere opinion, that most people are amazingly gullible, that many things fi rmly believed are really ridiculous, and that it is very foolish to hold too strongly to one’s own views. Bayle’s Dictionary remained a reservoir on which skeptical writers continued to draw for generations. Bayle himself, having no fi rm basis in his own mind for settled judgment, mixed skepticism with an impulse to faith. Born a Protestant, he was converted to Roman Catholicism, then returned to his Calvinist background. In any case his views made for toleration in religion. For Bayle, as for Montaigne, no opinion could justify burning your neighbor at the stake.

Travelers’ tales

Skepticism

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 252pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 252 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

253

The New Sense of Evidence

But in the study of humankind, as in the study of physical nature, Europeans of the sev- enteenth century were not generally content with skepticism. They usually sought to go beyond a doubting mood, important and salutary as such an attitude was. In the sub- jects collectively called the humanities, as in pure science, they were looking for a more advanced understanding of human behavior. They wanted new means of telling the true from the false, a new method for arriving at some degree of certainty of conviction. And here, too, a kind of scientifi c view of the world arose, if that term is understood in a general sense. The new human sciences took the form of a new interest in observable evidence. Evidence is that which allows one to believe a thing to be true, or at least truer than some- thing else for which the evidence is weaker. And if to believe without evidence is the sign of nonscientifi c or irrational thinking, to require evidence before believing is in a way to be scientifi c, or at least to trust and use the power of human intelligence.

The arrival of ambassadors from Siam at Versailles in 1684 made a vivid impression on a French generation that was fascinated by reports on distant lands and peoples. Although the bowing ambassadors show the requisite respect for the Sun King, their presence in France contributed to the growing speculation on cultural differences and the relativism of cultural customs. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

29. New Knowledge of Human Beings and Society

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 253pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 253 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World254

The new belief in the need for evidence revealed itself in many ways. One of the clearest was in the law. The English law of evidence, for example, began to take on its modern form at the close of the seventeenth century. It was long believed that less evidence should be necessary in arriving at a verdict of guilty in trials for the most atrocious crimes; this was thought necessary to protect society from the more hideous offenses. From the end of the seven-

teenth century, in English law, the judge lost his power of discretion in deciding what should constitute evidence, and the same rules of evidence were applied in all forms of accusation, the essential legal question becoming always the same—did such-and-such a fact (however outrageous) occur or did it not? After 1650 mere hearsay evidence, long vaguely distrusted, was ruled defi nitely out of court. After 1696 even persons charged with felony were allowed legal counsel.

The new emphasis on empirical evidence was probably the main force in putting an end to the delusionary charges of witchcraft. What made witch- craft so credible and so fearsome was that many persons confessed them- selves to be witches, admitting to supernatural powers and to evil designs

upon their neighbors. Many or most such confessions were extracted under torture. Reform- ers urged that confessions obtained under torture were not evidence, that people would say anything to escape unbearable pain, so that no such confessions offered the slightest ground for believing in witches. As for the voluntary confessions, and even the boastings of some people of their diabolical powers, it was noted that such statements often came from persons who would today be called hysterical or psychotic. Witches came to be regarded as self- deluded. Their ideas of themselves were no longer accepted as reliable or objective evidence. But it must be added that, except in England, the use of legal torture lasted through most of the eighteenth century in criminal cases in which the judge believed the accused to be guilty.

History and Historical Scholarship

The systematic study of past human societies, which would come to be called the his- torical sciences, also developed rapidly at this time. History, like the law, depends on the discovery and use of evidence. The historian and the judge must answer the same kind of question—did such-and-such a fact really occur? All knowledge of history, insofar as it disengages itself from legend, propaganda, or wishful thinking, rests ultimately on pieces of evidence, written records, and other material objects created in the past and surviving in some form or other in the present. On this mass of material the vast picture of the past is built, and without it people would be ignorant of their own antecedents or would have only folktales and unconfi rmed oral traditions. Oral history often shapes personal and collec- tive memories, and it provides important information; but judges and historians know that people remember past events with very different facts and perspectives.

There was thus much skepticism about history in the seventeenth century. Some said that history was not a form of true knowledge because it was not mathematical. Others said that it was useless because Adam, the perfect man, neither had nor needed any history. Many felt that what passed for history was only a mass of fables. History was distrusted also because historians were often pretentious, claiming to be high-fl ying men of letters, writing for rhetorical or inspirational appeal or for argumentative reasons, disdaining the hard labor of empirical study. History was losing the confi dence of thinking people who came to view science as the model for reliable knowledge. How was it possible, they asked, to feel even a modicum of certainty about alleged events that had happened long before any living person had been born?

English law of evidence

Evidence and witchcraft

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 254pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 254 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

255

This doubting attitude itself arose from a stricter sense of evidence, or from a realiza- tion that there was really no proof for much of what was said about the past. But scholars set to work to assemble what evidence they could fi nd. They hoped to create a new history, one that should contain only reliable statements. Europe was littered with old papers and parchments. Abbeys, manor houses, and royal archives were full of written documents, many of them of unknown age or unknown origin, often written in a handwriting that people could no longer read. Learned and laborious enthusiasts set to work to explore this accumulation. They added so much to the efforts of their predecessors as virtually to create modern critical scholarship and erudition. The French Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon, in 1681, in his book On Diplomatics (referring to ancient charters and “diplomas”) established the science of paleography, which deals with the deciphering, reading, dating, and authentication of man- uscripts. The Frenchman DuCange in 1678 published a dictionary of medieval Latin that is

New historical scholarship

THE GROWTH OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE The four maps show the best scientifi c knowledge at their respective dates. Behaim has no inkling of the existence of America and has fi lled in the hemisphere opposite to Europe with a mass of islands, representing what he has heard of the East Indies and Japan. He knows pretty well the limits of Africa. Schöner in 1523 fi lls in America and even distinguishes two American continents. He knows of the Gulf of Mexico but fails to realize the narrowness of the Isthmus of Panama. He knows of the Straits of Magellan (but not Cape Horn) and hopefully fi lls in a corresponding Northwest Passage in the north. His conception of the Indian Ocean is quite accurate. To Homan, two centuries later, the size and shapes of oceans and continents are well known, but he believes New Guinea is joined to Australia and is frankly ignorant of the northwest coast of North America, representing it by a straight line. The Great Lakes and the interior of North America have become known to Europe. D’Anville in 1761 has no island of Tasmania, does not understand that Alaska is a peninsula, and believes the American polar regions to be impassable by sea. Otherwise his map is indistinguishable from one on the same scale today—though the cultural interpretations or meanings of geographical spaces have con- tinued to evolve.

BEHAIM 1492 SCHÖNER 1523

HOMAN 1716 D'ANVILLE 1761

29. New Knowledge of Human Beings and Society

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 255pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 255 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World256

still used. Other historians spent whole lifetimes exploring archives, collecting, editing, or publishing masses of documents, comparing manuscript copies of the same text and trying to discover what the author had really written, rejecting some texts as fabrications or forg- eries, pronouncing others to be genuine pieces of historical evidence. Others made them- selves experts in ancient coins, many of which were far more ancient than the oldest manuscripts; they founded the science of numismatics. Still others, or indeed the same persons, turned to a critical examination of the inscriptions on old buildings and ruins, looking for the earliest possible information about specifi c people or events.

Another important but little-known historical “science,” namely, chronology, was also pursued with new attention to precise evidence and dates. Chronology deals with the age of the world and with fi nding a common denominator between the dating sys- tems of various peoples. Probably it is not natural for the human mind to think in terms of dates at all. For nonhistorically minded people, or for people who are little concerned with verifi able evidence, it is enough to know that some things happened “long ago.” In the seventeenth century the new interest in numbers, evident in physical science, turned also to the human past. Archbishop James Ussher, an Anglican prelate of Ireland, after much study of the Bible, announced the date of 4004 b.c.e. as the year in which the world was created. His chronological system was later printed in the margins of the Authorized

The early modern interest in the preservation and study of historical materials led to a systematic organization of the libraries and sources that careful scholarship would require. This seventeenth- century engraving of a library in Leiden shows the subjects that scholars studied and the tables at which they stood to read the books. Although women were not present in this scholarly meeting place, the engraving shows that dogs apparently had free access to the library’s main reading room. (Corbis)

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 256pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 256 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

257

Version of the English Bible and some fundamentalists still adhere to it as if it were part of the Bible itself. But Ussher’s system was not accepted by scholars even in his own time. New geographical knowledge was revealing China and its dynasties to Europe; historical knowledge was beginning to discover ancient Egypt. The Chinese and Egyptian records claimed a greater antiquity for their countries than the Old Testament seemed to allow for the human race. There was much erudite conjecture; one scholar about 1700 counted 70 estimates of the age of the world, ranging as high as 170,000 years, a fi gure that then seemed fantastic and appalling.

The diffi culty was not only in the language of the Old Testament. It was in fi nding the correspondence between the chronological systems of different peoples. A Chinese system of dating by dynasties might be coherent within itself, but how could it be equated with the European system of dating from the birth of Christ, a date as little known to the Chinese as the date of Wu Wang was to Europeans? Even European records presented the same diffi - culty; the Romans counted by consulships, or from the supposed year of the founding of Rome; many medieval documents told only the year of an obscure ruler’s reign. Only infi nite patience, interminable research, and endless calculation could reduce such a jum- ble to the simple system of modern textbooks. This is of more importance than may be at fi rst recognized. A common system of dating is a great aid to thinking of human history as an interconnected whole. An overall conception of the human race is made easier by the dating of all events according to what Europeans called the Christian era. This itself, it may be pointed out, is an arbitrary and conventional scale, because Christ is now thought to have been born not in 1 c.e., but in 4 b.c.e.

Common dating was increasingly important for practical affairs as well as for historical knowledge. Europe was disunited even on the Christian calendar. Protestant and some Orthodox countries followed the old or Julian calendar; Catholic countries, the corrected or Gregorian calendar issued in the sixteenth century under authority of Pope Gregory XIII. The two calendars varied in the seventeenth century by 10 days. Only gradually was the Gregorian calendar accepted, by England in 1752, by Russia in 1918. Most other peoples today, in China, India, the Arabic world, and elsewhere, use or recognize the Gregorian calendar as a shared calendar for modern global life. Without a uniform way of specifying days and years it would be diffi cult to trans- act international affairs, hold international conferences, make plans, or pay and receive money; a global system for defi ning time and dates thus became essential for global eco- nomic exchanges and communications. This common dating, easily taken for granted, was a consequence of the expanding global infl uence of Europe in modern times; and it became both a symbolic and a practical expression of the exchanges between different cultures in the modern world.

The Questioning of Traditional Beliefs

The historical sciences provided a foundation on which a knowledge of human activities in the past could be built, and the growing geographical knowledge provided a panorama of human diversity in the present. This new knowledge shared with natural science the view that many traditional ideas were erroneous but that much could now be known by a more disciplined use of the human mind. The humanities and the sciences were alike in demanding evidence for belief and in trusting the power of reason. In their impact on the traditional certainties of European life, the studies of human cultures exerted possibly a greater direct force than those of nature. Pascal, in his defense of the Christian faith, feared the spirit of Montaigne, the mood of skepticism and denial, which he felt himself, more than he feared the fi ndings of mathematical and physical science. And the movement of

A common system of dating

29. New Knowledge of Human Beings and Society

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 257pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 257 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World258

historical thought, with its insistence on textual criticism and verifi able evidence, threw doubt on much of the Christian religion, or at least on the sacred history and miracles

related in the Bible, which was considered to be part and parcel of religion itself.

In 1678 a French priest, Richard Simon, published a pioneering work in Biblical criticism, his Critical History of the Old Testament. Although his book was condemned both by the church and by the government of

Louis XIV, Simon always felt himself to be an orthodox Christian; Catholic faith, he insisted, depended more on church tradition than on the literal statements of the Bible. He simply applied to the Old Testament the methods of textual criticism that others were applying to secular documents. He concluded that the Old Testament, as known, rested on medieval manuscripts, many of which were of unknown or doubtful origin, that monkish copyists had introduced errors and corruptions, and that the books thought to have been written by Moses could not have been written by him, because they contained obvious contradictions and matter clearly inserted after his death. Others went further, questioning not merely the evidence of the Biblical text, but the very possibility of some events that it related. From the scientifi c idea of the absolute regularity of nature on the one hand, and from a strong sense of human credulity on the other, they denied that miracles could have ever occurred; and they looked upon oracles and prophecies among either the Greeks or the Hebrews with a dubious eye.

The most profoundly disturbing of all thinkers of the time was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), the lens grinder of Amsterdam, a Jew whose ances- tral family had emigrated from Portugal to escape the repression of Jewish communities in Iberia. Spinoza became an independent-minded, skeptical

philosopher who was excommunicated by his own synagogue and who refused a profes- sorship at the University of Heidelberg, craving only the quiet to think in peace. He drew on both the scientifi c and humanistic thought of his day to develop a philosophy holding that God had no existence apart from the world, that everything was itself an aspect of

Biblical scholarship and criticism

Baruch Spinoza

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 1543–1697

1543 Publication of Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs and Vesalius’s The Structure of the Human Body

1609 Galileo builds a telescope

1620–1627 Francis Bacon argues for empirical method to advance knowledge

1637 René Descartes publishes Discourse on Method

1651 Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan

1662 Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge is chartered in London

1666 Royal Academy of Sciences is founded in Paris

1687 Isaac Newton publishes Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

1690 John Locke publishes Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government

1697 Pierre Bayle publishes Historical Critical Dictionary

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 258pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 258 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

259

God—a philosophy technically called pantheism but considered by many to be really atheistic. Spinoza therefore rejected Cartesian dualism, but he also denied the inspira- tion of the Bible, disbelieved in miracles and the supernatural, rejected all revelation and revealed religion, Jewish or Christian, and held that few if any governments of the day were really just. He taught a pure, stern, and intellectual ethical code, and one that had few consolations for the average person. His name became a byword for impiety and hor- rendous unbelief. People were literally afraid to read his works, even when they could fi nd them, which was not often because of the censorship. His infl uence spread slowly, through the mediation of other writers, contributing to the later development of rationalist philosophy.

More widely read, less abstruse, were the writings of the Englishman John Locke (1632–1704), who summarized many of the intellectual trends of his lifetime and exerted a strong infl uence for the following hundred years. He combined practical experience and theoretical interests in a philosophy that dwelled on the merits of common sense. Educated in medicine, he kept in touch with the sciences and was acquainted with Newton. He was associated with the great Whig noblemen who were the main authors of the English revo- lution in 1688. For political reasons he spent several years in the 1680s in the Netherlands, where he became familiar with new philosophical work on the Continent. He wrote on many subjects—fi nance, economics, education, religious policy, political theory, general philosophy—always with an engaging directness and the sober air of a sensible man of the world. In his Letter on Toleration (1689) he advocated an established church but with toleration of all except Roman Catholics and atheists; these he held to be dangerous to society: the former because of a foreign allegiance; the latter because they lacked a basis of moral responsibility. In his Reasonableness of Christianity he argued that Christian- ity, rightly considered, is after all a reasonable form of religion; this softened the friction between religion and natural knowledge but tended to shut out the supernatural and merge religious feeling into an unruffl ed common sense.

Locke’s deepest book was his Essay Concerning the Human Understanding (1690). Here he faced the great problem of the day, the problem of knowledge and skepticism; he asked if it was possible to know anything with certainty, and how certain knowledge was arrived at. His answer was that true or certain knowledge is derived from experience— from perceptions by the sense organs and refl ection of the mind on these perceptions. Locke at the end of the century thus echoes Bacon at the beginning; they became the two great pillars of empirical philosophy, insisting on experience and observation as the source of truth. Locke denied Descartes’s doctrine of innate ideas, or inevitable disposition of the human mind to think in certain ways. He held that the mind at birth is a blank tablet or tabula rasa and that the social environment shapes what people think or believe. Locke’s environmentalist philosophy became fundamental to liberal and reforming thought in later years. It seemed that false ideas or superstitions were the result of bad environment and bad education. It seemed that the evil in human actions was due to bad social institutions and that an improvement in human society would improve human behavior. This philoso- phy, whether or not wholly true in the fi nal analysis, was largely true with respect to many practical conditions. A better education, for example, seemed to offer better opportunities for personal advancement and social well-being. Locke’s philosophy thus gave confi dence in the possibility of social progress and turned attention to a sphere in which planned and constructive action was possible, namely, the sphere of government, public policy, and legislation. Here we touch on political theory, to which Locke contributed Two Treatises of Government (these works are discussed later in this chapter).

29. New Knowledge of Human Beings and Society

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 259pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 259 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World260

30. POLITICAL THEORY: THE SCHOOL OF NATURAL LAW

Political theory can never be strictly scientifi c. Science deals with what currently exists or has existed. It does not tell what ought to exist. To describe what society and government ought to be like, in view of human nature and the capacity to be miserable or contented, is a main purpose of political theory. Political theory is in a sense more practical than sci- ence. It is the scientists and scholars who are most content to observe facts as they are; and even when they seek to improve material conditions, they do not seek (or expect) to change the basic structures of the natural world. Practical people, however, and those scientists and scholars who have practical interests, must always ask themselves what ought to be done, what institutional structures ought to be changed, what policies ought to be adopted, what measures ought to be taken, what state of affairs ought to be maintained or brought about. Conservatives and radicals, traditionalists and innovators, are alike in this respect. It is impossible in human affairs to escape the word “ought,” or to stop thinking about pos- sible changes in social and political systems.

But political theory was affected by the scientifi c view. The Renaissance Italian, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), whom we have discussed earlier, had opened the way in this direction. Machiavelli too had his “ought”; he preferred a republican form of government in which citizens felt a patriotic

attachment to their state. But in his book The Prince he disregarded the question of the best form of government, a favorite question of Christian and scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages. He separated the study of politics from theology and moral philosophy. He undertook to describe how governments and rulers actually behaved. He observed that successful rulers behaved as if holding or increasing power were their only object, that they regarded all else as means to this end. Princes, said Machiavelli, kept their promises or

Niccolò Machiavelli

The Dutch, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), portrayed here in a painting by Samuel Van Hoogstraten, developed a materialist or pantheistic philosophy that provoked strong opposi- tion from many of his contemporaries; but Spinoza became an infl uential thinker for later writers who expressed skepticism about traditional religious beliefs. (Bettmann/Corbis)

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 260pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 260 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

26130. Political Theory: The School of Natural Law

broke them, told the truth or distorted it, sought popularity or ignored it, advanced public welfare or disrupted it, conciliated their neighbors or destroyed them—depending merely on which course of action seemed the best means of advancing their political interests. All this was bad, said Machiavelli; but that was not the question, for the question was to fi nd out what rulers really did. Drawing his conclusions from the observable evidence of history, Machiavelli chose to be nonmoral in order to produce what might be called a “scientifi c” account of political power. To most readers he seemed to be simply immoral. Nor was it possible to draw the line between The Prince as a scientifi c description of fact and The Prince as a book of maxims of conduct. In telling how successful rulers obtained their successes, Machiavelli also suggested how rulers ought to proceed. And though govern- ments did in fact continue to behave for the most part as Machiavelli said, most people refused to admit that they ought to.

Natural Right and Natural Law

Political theory in the seventeenth century did not generally embrace the cynicism attrib- uted to Machiavelli. Nor did it fall into the skepticism of those who said that the customs of one’s country should be passively accepted or that one form of government was about as good as another. It directly faced the question, What is right? The seventeenth century was the classic age of the philosophy of natural right or of natural law.

The idea of natural law underlies a good deal of modern democratic development, and its decline over the last century has been closely con- nected with many of the troubles of recent times. It is not easy to say in what the philosophy of natural law essentially consisted. It held that there is, somehow, in the structure of the world, a law that distinguishes right from wrong. It held that right is “natural,” not a mere human invention or cultural construction. This right is not determined, for any country, by its heritage, tradition, or customs, nor yet by its actual laws (called “positive” laws) of the kind that are enforced in the law courts. All these may be unfair or unjust. We detect unfairness or injustice in them by comparing them with natural law as we understand it; thus we have a basis for saying that cannibalism is bad or that a law requiring forced labor from orphan children is unjust. Nor is natural law, or the enduring rightness of something, determined by the authority of any person or people. No king can make right that which is wrong. No people, by its will as a people, can make just that which is unjust. Right and law, in the ultimate sense, exist outside and above all peoples. They are universal, the same for all. No one can make them up to suit themselves. A good king or a just people is a king or people whose actions correspond to the objective standard. But how, if we cannot trust our own positive laws or customs, or our leaders, or even our collective selves, can we know what is naturally right? How do we discover natural law?

The answer, in the natural law philosophy, is that we discover it by reason. Philosophers of natural law said that human beings are rational animals. And they assumed that all human beings have, at least potentially and when better enlightened, the same powers of reason and understanding—Germans or English, Asians, Africans or Europeans. This view favored a cosmopolitan outlook and made international agreement and general world progress seem realizable goals. As time went on, the premises of this philosophy came to be questioned. By the twentieth century it was widely thought that the human mind was not especially rational but was motivated by unconscious drives or urges or instincts and that human cultural dif- ferences were so fundamental that people of different nationalities or classes could never expect to see things in the same way. Challenged by such theories of human irrationality and

“Natural law” and “natural right”

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 261pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 261 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World262

cultural difference (which could be promoted with much ancient and modern evidence), the older philosophy of a universal natural law lost its hold on many minds.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, it was generally accepted. Some, carrying over the philosophy of the Middle Ages, thought of natural law as an aspect of the law of God. Others, more secular in spirit, held that the natural law stood of itself. These included even some churchmen; a group of theologians, mainly Jesuits, were condemned by the pope in 1690 for holding that universal right and wrong might exist by reason only, whether God existed or not. The idea of natural law and the faith in human reason went side by side, and both were fundamental in the thought of the time. They were to be found everywhere in Europe, in their religious or their secular form.

On the basis of natural law some thinkers tried to create an international law or “law of nations,” to bring order into the maze of sovereign territorial states, great and small, that

was developing in Europe. Hugo Grotius, in 1625, published the fi rst great book devoted exclusively to this subject, his Law of War and Peace. Samuel Pufendorf followed with his Law of Nature and of Nations in 1672. Both held that sovereign states, though bound by no positive law or authority,

should work together for the common good, that there was a community of nations as of individuals, and that in the absence of a higher international sovereignty they were all still subordinate to natural reason and justice. Certain concrete doctrines, such as the freedom of the seas or the immunity of ambassadors, were put forward. The principles of interna- tional law were seen as an extension of natural law. The content came to include specifi c agreements between governments, certain kinds of admiralty and maritime law, and the terms of treaties such as the treaties of Westphalia, Utrecht, and others. Such laws and trea- ties expressed transnational principles or agreements, even though the means for enforcing such principles remained weak or nonexistent in the era’s endless political confl icts and wars. They could nevertheless be viewed historically as the fi rst halting steps toward a more legally coherent, international, and secular management of political affairs among the emerging, modern European states.

Hobbes and Locke

In domestic affairs the philosophy of natural law, though it rather favored constitutional- ism, was used to justify both constitutional and absolutist governments. Right itself was held to be in the nature of things, beyond human power to change. But forms of govern- ment were held to be the means to an end. No philosopher at the time thought the state could have an absolute value in itself. The state had to be “justifi ed,” made acceptable to the moral consciousness or to reason. There were, indeed, important competing philoso- phies. On the side of absolutism was the doctrine of the divine right of kings. On the side of constitutionalism were arguments based on heritage or custom, emphasizing the char- ters or compacts of former times and the historic powers of towns, parliaments, and estates. But neither the supernatural argument of the divine right of kings nor the historical argu- ment pointing back to liberties of the Middle Ages was entirely satisfactory in the scien- tifi c atmosphere of the seventeenth century. Neither argument could be completely justifi ed within the frameworks of reason or morality that now shaped the ideas of the most acute European thinkers. Both the absolutist and the constitutional views of government were therefore reinforced in the seventeenth century by the concept of natural law; and two English political theorists showed most clearly how both sides in this debate built their opposing arguments on similar foundations of natural law. Absolutism was philosophi- cally justifi ed by Thomas Hobbes; constitutionalism, by John Locke.

“Law of nations”

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 262pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 262 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

263

Hobbes (1588–1679) followed the scientifi c and mathematical discov- eries of his time with more than an amateur interest. In philosophy he held to a materialistic and even atheistic system. In English politics he sided with the king against Parliament; he disliked the disorder and violence of the civil war of the 1640s and the unstable conditions of the English republic of the 1650s. He concluded that humans have no capacity for self-government. His opinion of human nature was low; he held that people in the state of nature, or as they could be imagined to exist without government, were quarrelsome and turbulent, forever locked in a war of all against all. In his famous phrase, life in the state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brut- ish and short.” Acting on their fear of each other and seeking to obtain order or enjoy the advantages of law and right, people came to a kind of agreement or “contract” by which they surrendered their freedom of action into the hands of a ruler. It was necessary for this ruler to have unrestricted authority, because order could be maintained only by the exer- cise of absolute government powers. It was intolerably dangerous, according to Hobbes, for anyone to question the actions of government, for such questioning might reopen the way to chaos. Government must therefore be a kind of Leviathan (the monster mentioned in the Bible, Job 41); and Hobbes in fact used the word Leviathan for the title of his princi- pal book, published in 1651, two years after the execution of King Charles I.

By this book Hobbes became the leading secular exponent of absolutism and one of the principal theorists of the unlimited sovereignty of the state. His infl uence on later thinkers was very great. He accustomed political theorists to the use of purely natural arguments. He quoted freely from the Bible, but the Bible had no infl uence on his thought. After Hobbes, all advanced political theorists regarded government as a device created by human purpose. It was no longer considered, except popularly and except by professional theologians, as part of God’s divine dispensation to human history. Hobbes also affected later theorists by his arguments for a sovereign authority, which obliged them to refute his idea of an unlim- ited personal sovereign. But he was never a popular writer. In England the cause that he favored lost infl uence in the course of the seventeenth-century revolutions. In those conti- nental countries where royal absolutism prevailed his arguments were received with secret gratifi cation, but his irreligion was too dangerous to make public, and the absolutist argu- ment, on the popular level, remained that of the divine right of kings. In any case Hobbes’s arguments were in some ways insuffi cient for real monarchs. Hobbes abhorred struggle and violence. He believed that absolutism would produce civil peace, individual security, and a rule of law. He also held that absolute power depended on, or had at least originated in, a free and rational agreement by which people accepted it. An absolute monarchy that fl a- grantly violated these conditions could with diffi culty be justifi ed even by the doctrines of Hobbes. It is in these respects that Hobbes differs from totalitarian theorists of more recent times. For Hobbes, in the fi nal analysis, absolute power was an expedient to promote indi- vidual welfare. It was a means to advance or protect the realization of natural law.

John Locke (1632–1704), as has been seen, also stood in the main cur- rent of scientifi c thought and discovery. But in his political philosophy he carried over many ideas of the Middle Ages, as formulated in the thirteenth century by St. Thomas Aquinas and kept alive in England by successive thinkers of the Anglican church. Medieval philosophy had never favored an absolute power. With Hobbes, Locke shared the idea that good government is an expedient of human pur- pose, neither provided by divine Providence nor inherited by a national tradition. He held, too, like Hobbes and the whole school of natural law, that government was based on a kind of contract, or rational and conscious agreement upon which authority was based. In contrast to Hobbes, he sided with Parliament against the king in the practical struggles of politics.

John Locke

Absolutism and Thomas Hobbes

30. Political Theory: The School of Natural Law

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 263pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 263 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World264

About 1680, in the course of these disputes, he wrote Two Treatises of Government, which, however, were not published until shortly after the parliamentary revolution of 1688–1689.

Locke took a more genial view of human nature than Hobbes. As he showed in his other books, he believed that a moderate religion was a good thing and above all that people could learn from experience and hence could be educated to an enlightened way of life. These ideas favored a belief in self-government. Locke declared (in contradiction to Hobbes) that people in the “state of nature” were reasonable and well disposed, willing to get along with one another though handicapped by the absence of public authority. They likewise had a moral sense, quite independently of government; and they also possessed by nature certain individual rights, quite apart from the state. These rights were the rights to life, liberty, and property.

Locke placed heavy emphasis on the right of property, by which he usually meant the possession of land. His philosophy can in fact be regarded as an expression of the landed classes of England, who challenged the power of kings by defending the political and social rights of private property. Individuals in the state of nature are not altogether able, accord- ing to Locke, to win general respect for their individual natural rights. They cannot by their own efforts protect what is “proper” to them, that is, their property. They agree to set up government to enforce observance of the rights of all. Government is thus created by a con- tract, but the contract is not unconditional, as claimed by Hobbes. It imposes mutual obliga- tions. The people must be reasonable; only rational beings can be politically free. Liberty is not an anarchy of undisciplined will; it is the freedom to act without compulsion by another. Only rational and responsible creatures can exercise true freedom; but adult human beings, according to Locke, are or can be educated to be rational and responsible. They therefore can and should be free. Locke never really explained how these political rights, obligations, and freedoms might apply to women as well as to men, so there has been much modern debate about Locke’s theoretical contributions to later campaigns for women’s rights. In his own early modern context, however, Locke’s writings explicitly supported the political rights and obligations of men who were claiming an active role in government affairs.

On government, also, as Locke described it, certain conditions and obligations are imposed. If a government breaks the contract, if it threatens the natural rights that it is the sole purpose of government to protect, if, for example, it takes away a man’s property with- out his consent, then the governed have a right to reconsider what they have done in creating the government and may even in the last extremity rebel against it. The right to resist gov- ernment, Locke admits, is very dangerous, but it is less dangerous than its opposite, which would lead to the loss of all liberty; and in any case Locke assumes that those who might resist the government in such situations would still be reasonable and responsible people.

If Locke’s ideas seem familiar, especially to Americans, it is because of the wide popu- larizing of his philosophy in the century after his death. Nowhere was his infl uence greater

than in the British colonies. The authors of the American Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution of the United States knew the writ- ings of Locke very thoroughly. Some phrases of the Declaration of Inde- pendence echo his very language. In Great Britain also, and in France and

elsewhere, in the course of time, Locke’s infl uence was immense. But it should be noted that his ideas did not always mean the same thing for all people or in all places. Locke did not extend his ideas of human liberty to enslaved Africans, apparently because he viewed slavery as a legitimate form of private property. Locke himself invested in the slave- trading Royal African Company and endorsed the development of slavery in the American colonies. The growing infl uence of Locke’s political theories may also have contributed

Locke’s infl uence

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 264pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 264 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

265

indirectly to the emergence of new racist ideas in the eighteenth century. New justifi cations for slavery became necessary when the political classes of England and America began to believe that human beings possessed natural rights to life, liberty, and property. How could slavery be reconciled with such beliefs? The answer appeared in new forms of rac- ism, which justifi ed the enslavement of Africans by arguing that the African “race” lacked certain rational human traits of the European “race” and that black people could be denied fundamental human rights because they differed from other human beings.

In general, however, Locke’s ideas of natural rights and human liberty were later used to challenge absolutist or repressive institutions, including also the slave trade and the legal systems that supported slavery. The right to human liberty, including the liberty of enslaved persons, would eventually be viewed as more universal, or more natural, than certain “prop- erty rights” of slaveholders—though slavery would not be abolished in most European colonies or postcolonial nations until the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Locke’s theories of contractual government gained international infl uence in the evolving debates about monarchical power. What Locke did was to convert an episode in English history into an event of universal political meaning. In England, in 1688, certain great lords, winning the support of the established church, gentry, and merchants, deposed one king and brought in another. On the new king they imposed certain obligations—specifi ed in the Bill of Rights of 1689 and all dealing with legal or technical interpretations of the English constitution. The Revolution of 1688 was a very English affair. England in 1688 was still little known to the rest of Europe. The proceedings in England, in so far as they were known to most Euro- peans, might seem no different from a rebellion of the magnates of Hungary. Locke, in

JOHN LOCKE by John Greenhill (English, 1642–1676)

Locke’s writings on govern- ment and natural rights sum- marized the arguments against royal power in England and also won adherents wherever political theorists challenged monarchical absolutism. (Snark/Art Resource, NY)

30. Political Theory: The School of Natural Law

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 265pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 265 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 6 The Scientifi c View of the World266

arguing that Parliament had been right to eject James II, put the whole affair on a level of reason, natural right, and human nature. It thus came to have meaning for people who had

no connection with the specifi c problems of English political history. At the same time, Locke made the English revolution a sign of progress

rather than reaction. The new and modern form of government in 1690 was royal absolutism, with its professional bureaucracy and corps of paid offi - cials. Almost everywhere there was resistance to the kings, led by landed

interests and harking back to earlier freedoms. Such resistance seemed to many Europeans to be feudal and medieval. Locke made the resistance in England, namely, the Revolution of 1688 against James II, into a modern and forward-looking movement. He checked the prestige of absolutism. He gave new prestige to constitutional principles. He carried over, in modifi ed form, many ideas from the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, who had generally maintained that kings had only a relative and restricted power and were responsible to their peoples. To these ideas he added the force of the newer scientifi c view of the world. He did not rest his case on supernatural or providential arguments. He did not say that constitutional government was the will of God. He said that it rested on experience and observation of human nature, on recognition of certain individual rights and especially the right of property, and on the existence of a purely natural law of reason and justice. He was an almost entirely secular thinker, and, as such, he developed ideas that could be drawn into the political and social confl icts of most modern nations.

One must not claim too much for Locke, or for any writer. England was in fact, in 1688, more modern in many ways than other countries in Europe. The Glorious Revolu- tion was in fact not exactly like uprisings of the landed and propertied classes elsewhere. England in the following century did in fact create a form of parliamentary government that was unique. But facts go together with the theories that give them an understandable meaning. Events in England, as explained by Locke, and as seen in other countries and even in England and its colonies through Locke’s eyes, launched into the mainstream of modern history the superb tradition of constitutional government, which has been one of the principal themes in the history of the modern world ever since.

By 1700, at the close of the “century of genius,” some beliefs that were to become characteristic of modern times had clearly taken form, notably a faith in science, in human reason, in natural human rights, and in progress. The new scientifi c knowledge was begin- ning to transform the global economy, the culture of European elites, and the confl icts within or among European empires. Meanwhile, the cultural institutions of modern sci- ence were spreading across Europe, and new scientifi c theories in physics, astronomy, and physiology were challenging both the theology and thought systems of earlier generations. The following period, generally known as the Age of Enlightenment, was to be a time of clarifying and popularizing ideas that the more creative seventeenth century had produced. These ideas were eventually to revolutionize Europe, America, and the world. They were also in subsequent years to be modifi ed, amended, challenged, and even denied. But they are still very much alive today.

Locke on the English revolution

For suggested further readings and useful Web sites, interactive exercises, glossary, chronologies, and more, go to the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e .

pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 266pal85549_ch06_233-266.indd 266 03/08/13 7:34 PM03/08/13 7:34 PM

Final PDF to printer

267

C h a p t e r 7 THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR WEALTH AND EMPIRE

In earlier   chapters we have seen how western Europe, and especially England and France, by about the year 1700 came to occupy a position of power and infl uence in Europe as a whole. We have traced the political history of western Europe through the War of the Spanish Succession, termi- nated in 1713–1714 by the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt. Affairs of central Europe and Germany have been described for the period up to 1740. In that year a new kingdom of Prussia and a new or renovated Austrian monarchy, each passing into the hands of a new ruler, stood on the eve of a struggle for ascendancy in central Europe. As for eastern Europe, we have observed the Europeanizing and

expansion of the Russian Empire. More important in the long run than these political events, and continuing throughout

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the cumulative expansion of all forms of knowledge, which we saw in the rapid development of seventeenth-century science and to which we return in the next chapter. Equally important was the growing wealth of Europe, or at least of the Atlantic region north of Spain. The new wealth, in the widest sense, meaning conveniences of every kind, resulted partly from the new technical and scientifi c knowledge, which in turn it helped to produce; and the two together, more wealth and more knowledge, helped to form one of the most far-reaching ideas of modern times, the idea of progress. This idea challenged the traditional deference to ancient authorities and fostered critical inquiry, creative innovations, and remarkable optimism in most spheres of social and intellectual life. “Progress” could include changes in the economy, in sci- ence and intellectual life, in education, in political institutions, and in most other forms of human activity, but in every context a belief in the progressive direction of human history encouraged Europeans to assume that the future would be better than the past. Although the world wars and environmental problems of more recent times would eventually

31. Elite and Popular Cultures

32. The Global Economy of the Eighteenth Century

33. Western Europe after the Peace of Utrecht, 1713–1740

34. The Great War of the Mid–Eighteenth Century: The Peace of Paris, 1763

Chapter emblem: Detail from an Indian miniature (c. 1785), showing an Englishwoman and one of her servants in India. (Werner Forman Archive/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 267pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 267 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire268

provoke widespread anxieties about the historical consequences of new technologies, a belief in progress, even if somewhat chastened, remains a powerful cultural force in all modern societies.

The new wealth of Europe was not like the age-old wealth of the great empires in the East, said by Milton to “shower on her kings barbaric pearl and gold.” It consisted of gold, to be sure, but even more of bank deposits and facilities for credit, of more and better devices for mining coal, casting iron, and spinning thread, more productive agricul- ture, better and more comfortable houses, a wider variety of diet on the table, more and improved sailing ships, warehouses, and docks; more books, more newspapers, more med- ical instruments, more scientifi c equipment; greater government revenues, larger armies, and more numerous government employees. The new wealth also fl owed from the labor of enslaved workers and the commodities they produced in the Americas, but in the wealthier European countries, and because of the growing accumulation of capital, more people were freed from the necessity of toiling for food, clothing, and shelter. Drawing on the profi ts of an increasingly global economy, more Europeans were able to devote themselves to all sorts of specialized callings in government, management, fi nance, war, teaching, writing, inventing, exploring, and researching, and in producing the amenities rather than the bar- est necessities of life. These new forms of mechanical production, social organization, and specialized knowledge also began to spread to European colonies around the world, thus contributing to the expanding systems of transoceanic trade and to the growing belief in human progress.

31. ELITE AND POPULAR CULTURES The accumulation of wealth and knowledge was not evenly distributed among the various social classes. There had always been differences between rich and poor, with many gra- dations between the extremes, but at the time we are now considering, as the seventeenth century turned into the eighteenth, there came to be a more obvious distinction between elite and popular cultures. The terms are hard to defi ne. The elite culture was not exactly the culture of the rich and well-to-do, nor was the popular culture limited to the poor and lower economic classes. The word “elite” suggests a minority within a given range of interests; thus there are elites not only of wealth, but of social position and of power; elites of fashion, of patronage and connoisseurship in the arts, and of artists themselves; elites of education, of special training as in medicine and law, and of discovery and accomplish- ment in technology and the sciences. In general, persons taking part in an elite culture could share at will in the popular culture by attending public amusements or simply by talking familiarly with their servants. But the relation was asymmetric. Those born in pop- ular culture could not easily share in the intellectual or social culture of the elites, at least not without transforming themselves, through education or marriage, which could occur only in exceptional cases.

A main difference was simply one of language. At the popular level people generally used a local form of speech, varying from one place to another, with a distinctive accent, and with words that had become obsolete elsewhere or that might not be understood even a few miles away. In the Middle Ages the use of Latin helped to overcome this linguistic diversity, but Latin was becoming less common in even the most elite cultural groups by the late seventeenth century. Since the invention of printing and the rise of national litera- tures, and with the spreading infl uence of schools, of which we have seen that many were founded between 1550 and 1650, there came to be standard forms of English, French,

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 268pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 268 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

26931. Elite and Popular Cultures

Italian, and other languages that all educated persons could speak and read. Grammar and spelling became regularized. Virtually all printing was in a national language when it was not in Latin. Because only a minority were able to get the necessary educa- tion, however, the mass of the people continued to speak as they did before. Their way of talking was now considered a dialect, a peasant language, or what was called patois in French or Volkssprache in German. And while it may be true, as some scientifi c philologists have long argued, that no form of speech is inherently “better” than another, it is also true that facility in the national language was a sign of elite culture until the spread of universal elementary schooling in the nineteenth century. It gave access to at least certain segments of the elite culture, as it continues to do today, and it enabled educated persons to participate in the elite institutions of government, commerce, and the professions.

The elite culture was transmitted largely by way of books, but it could also be acquired by word of mouth within favored families and social circles. The popular culture, by contrast, was predominantly oral, although it was also expressed in cheaply printed almanacs, chapbooks, woodcuts, and broadsides. Because it was so largely oral, and left so few written records, popular culture is often diffi cult for historians to reconstruct, but it made up the daily lives, inter- ests, and activities of the great majority in all countries. It must always be remembered that what we read as history, in this as in most other books, is mostly an account of the actions of small minorities, either of power-wielders, decision-makers, and innovators whose pub- lic actions affected whole peoples, or of writers and thinkers whose ideas appealed to a limited audience. Persons who were illiterate or barely literate changed their ideas more slowly than the more mobile and more informed members of the elite. Cultural changes initiated by such elites spread slowly, generation after generation, to wider social classes, so that what was characteristic of popular culture at a given moment, such as a belief in magic, had often been common to all classes a century or two before. All people and social classes make history and participate in the processes of historical change, but the new knowledge, education, and wealth in early modern societies also created new social distinctions and new hierarchies of cultural power.

The humanism of the Renaissance, being transmitted so largely through books and the study of Greek and Latin, remained limited to persons who were educated in the elite culture. The strength of the Protestant Reformation lay in combining the efforts of highly educated leaders, such as Luther and Calvin, with the anger, distress, disillusionment, and hopes of many very ordinary people. The new science and the ensuing eighteenth-century Enlightenment emerged in the work of small numbers of researchers and writers, but their ideas slowly reshaped the thinking of others. The process of diffusion might be slow and uncertain. Astrology, for example, was in the Middle Ages a branch of scientifi c inquiry; in the seventeenth century astrologers were still consulted by emperors and kings; then both the clergy and secular thinkers denounced divination by the stars as a superstition, and astrology was expelled from astronomy, but horoscopes still appear today in American and European newspapers.

The differences of wealth, if not wholly decisive, were of great importance. Culture in the broader or anthropological sense of the word includes material circumstances of food, drink, and shelter. In some respects the lot of the poor in the seventeenth century was worse than in the Middle Ages. Less meat was eaten in Europe, because as population grew there was less land available for the raising of livestock. With the growth of a market economy many peasants raised

National languages

Oral vs. print culture

Living standards

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 269pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 269 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire270

wheat, but ate bread made of rye, barley, or oats, or even looked for acorns and roots in times of famine. The consumption of bread by working people in France in the eighteenth century was about a pound per day per person, because little else except cabbages and beans was eaten on ordinary days; after 1750 the use of white bread became more usual. Meanwhile the rich, or the merely affl uent, developed more delicate menus prepared by well-trained professional cooks, one of whom is said to have committed suicide when his souffl é fell before it was served.

In the towns the poor lived in crowded, unsanitary buildings, and in the country they lived in dark and shabby cabins where stoves only gradually replaced holes in the roof for

the escape of smoke. The poor had no glass in their windows, the middle classes usually had a few glass windows, and the rich displayed their wealth, in part, by installing glass windows and mirrors throughout both their urban apartments and their country estates. In humble homes the dishes were

wooden bowls, slowly replaced by pewter, while china plates began to appear on the tables of the more well-to-do. Table forks, with one for each diner, originating in Italy, were brought to France in the sixteenth century by Catherine de Medici along with other items of Italian culture, and soon spread among those able to afford them, though Louis XIV still preferred to use his fi ngers. Silver bowls and pitchers were ancient but became more elabo- rate and more often seen in upper-class circles. The poor had no furniture, or only a few benches and a mat to sleep on; the middle classes had chairs and beds; the rich not only had substantial furniture but were becoming more conscious of style. Among higher-income families it became usual to have houses with specialized rooms, such as separate bedrooms, and a dining room. New ideas about privacy, the meaning or autonomy of child- hood, and the health of the human body began to infl uence eighteenth-century architecture, so that well-to-do people wanted more private spaces for themselves and their children. The prominent and the fashionable also fi tted out larger rooms for social receptions and public entertainments, called salons in France, with walls of wood paneling, lighted by chandeliers refl ected in mirrors, and provided with sofas and armchairs, which the inven- tion of upholstery made more comfortable. The poor, after dark, huddled on chests or still sat together on the fl oor by a single candle.

In the use of beverages the seventeenth century saw a different kind of progress, if that is the right word. Coffee and tea, along with sugar and tobacco, all imported from overseas, were exotic rarities in 1600, more widely enjoyed in 1700, and available to all but the very destitute by the late eighteenth century. Coffee shops developed and taverns multiplied.

Cheap wines became more plentiful in southern Europe, as did beer in the north. The distillation of alcohol had been developed in the Middle Ages, when brandy, a distilled wine, was used as a medicine; by the seventeenth century it was a familiar drink. Whisky and gin also came into use at about

this time. The taverns and coffee shops offered a place for neighborly gatherings for the mid- dling and lower social classes; and writers began meeting in coffeehouses to discuss their work, share gossip, or argue about public events. During this same era, drunkenness became a more visible problem in European cities, especially among workers who could not drink in domestic privacy and who were therefore often seen in the streets, as shown by Hogarth’s pictures of “Gin Lane” in London about 1750. The migrations of displaced rural workers and the poverty in large cities also contributed to an increase in out-of-wedlock births and the abandonment of children. It was calculated that in Paris in 1780 there were 7,000 aban- doned children for 30,000 births, but many of these infants were brought from the country to be deposited in the foundling hospitals of the city, which were overwhelmed.

Housing conditions

Coffee and alcohol

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 270pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 270 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

271

Despite the growing differences in wealth, housing, and education, there was much that persons of all classes and cultures still shared. Most important, in principle, was religion. The refi ned and the rude, the learned and the untutored, heard the same sermons in church, were baptized, married, and buried by the same sacraments, often by the same priest, and were subject to religious and moral obligations that transcended the boundaries of social class. Such was most likely to be the case in small communities of unmixed religion or where the lord and

Religion

31. Elite and Popular Cultures

GIN LANE by William Hogarth (English, 1697–1764)

Hogarth showed both the pop- ularity and dangers of alcohol in the lives of Britain’s working classes, as in this illustration of drunkenness in the streets of London. (Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

The increasing import of coffee and tea made the eighteenth- century coffeehouse a popular meeting place in large cities such as London and Paris. The establishment portrayed here attracted a fashionable, wealthy clientele, but coffee was becom- ing less expensive and many coffeehouses also catered to the lower classes. (Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 271pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 271 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire272

lady of the manor attended the same church as the villagers. Where different churches existed in fact, whether or not offi cially tolerated, religion played less of a role in social cohesion. In England, for example, the Nonconformists, who succeeded the old Puritans after the Stuart Restoration, developed a kind of middle-class culture that was noticeably different from the culture of the Anglican gentry. Rich people in both Protestant and Catho- lic countries sometimes had their own private chaplains or built their own family chapels. In towns that were big enough for neighborhood diversifi cation some churches became fashionable and others merely popular. In any case some people in the seventeenth century were not very religious at all; these less religious persons included those in inaccessible rural areas as well as some of the poorest in the larger towns, who were often uprooted and homeless migrants from an overcrowded countryside. Reforming bishops, especially in France, undertook to ameliorate the situation, so that the seventeenth century was a great age of internal missionary work, and it may be that in the following century, as skepticism began to pervade the elite culture, the popular culture became more Christianized than it had been in the past.

Rich and poor were subject to the same diseases, the same dangers of tainted food and polluted water, and the same smells and fi lth in noisy streets littered with horse droppings, puddles, and garbage. But here too, of course, there were many social differences. In the elite culture people

depended on the daily assistance of servants and called on the medical advice of doctors, who had been trained in the universities, while ordinary sufferers sought out popular heal- ers, who were often women and whose remedies consisted of strange herbs or mysterious potions (women did not become doctors because they could not attend universities). It also made a difference whether one rode through the streets in a coach, as the affl uent did, or picked one’s way on foot with the common people. Congestion was worst in rapidly grow- ing cities, such as London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Naples, where the differences between wealth and poverty were both more extreme and more shockingly visible. There were recurrent fears of food shortages, as crop failure and local famine struck this or that region, in which case some starved and some ate less, while those able to do so simply paid higher prices. In some towns charitable organizations developed, often on the initiative of upper- class women, to fi nance and assist religious sisters in relief of the poor. Hunger and the fear of hunger sometimes produced riots, which however had little political signifi cance except insofar as upper-class people tried to make use of them for their own purposes.

It was also in less material aspects that the elite and popular cultures increasingly diverged. The upper strata set a new importance on polite manners, in which the French now set the tone, with much bowing, doffi ng of hats, and exchange of compliments, beside which the manners of ordinary people now seemed uncouth. The etiquette of princely courts became more formal, the court fools and jesters disappeared, and royalty surrounded itself not

with rough retainers but with ladies and gentlemen. About 1600 the plays of Shakespeare were staged in public theaters where all classes mixed and enjoyed the same perfor- mance, but in the following century it became usual for the upper classes to have private theaters. People of higher social position took to stylish dancing, which their children had to learn from dancing teachers, while plain people continued to cavort more spontaneously in country dances and jigs. For evening parties, the polite world met in salons to engage in the art of cultured conversation, while working people, especially in the country, met in a neighbor’s house after the day’s labors were over. Conversation was as important for the rural poor as for the educated elites; and while some of the men and women repaired

Health

Politeness, etiquette, entertainment

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 272pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 272 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

273

their tools or mended their clothes, the gathered families engaged in local gossip, listened to storytellers, or learned something about the wider world when a literate person read aloud from one of the cheaply printed books that were now circulating in even the smallest villages. The traveling peddlers who sold such books became a kind of early precursor to modern Internet communications as they carried new information and practical advice to widely scattered communities across the European countryside.

Enough of these books have survived, along with popular almanacs, to make it pos- sible to form some ideas of the mental horizons of the nonliterate and inarticulate classes. They were often written by printers or their employees or by others who were in effect intermediaries between the elite and popular cultures and who purposely addressed them- selves to what they knew of popular interests. The almanacs purveyed astrological observa- tions, advice on the weather, proverbs, and scraps of what had once been science but was now offered as occult wisdom. Other little books undertook to teach the ABCs or told how to behave in church; how to approach persons of the other sex; how to show respect for superiors; or how to compose a proper letter of love, thanks, or condolence, or have such a letter written by the professional letter writers to whose services illiterate persons resorted. Still others put into print the stories that had long circulated in the oral tradition, fairy tales, saints’ lives, or accounts of outlaws such as Robin Hood. Miracles, prodigies, witches, ogres, angels, and the devil fi gured prominently in such narratives.

It is a curious fact that where educated persons were now schooled in Greek mythol- ogy and admired the heroes of ancient Rome, the plain people were still engrossed by tales of medieval chivalry, knights errant, and holy hermits that had once been told in baronial halls. Memories of the times of King Arthur and Charlemagne lingered in the popular con- sciousness. There were many long and complex tales of the exploits of Roland and other paladins who had fought for Christianity against the infi dels, all set in a world of faraway adventure without defi nite location in time or place. Saracens, Moors, Turks, and Muslims, and at times Jews, were generally portrayed in such stories as menacing fi gures.

Belief in witchcraft and magic was to be found in 1600 in all social classes. The witches in Macbeth were perfectly believable to Shakespeare’s audience. Learned books were still written on these subjects, and indeed it may be that learned writers and the judges in law courts had stirred up more anxiety about witches and magicians than ordinary people would otherwise have felt. By 1700, however, a great change was evident: witches, magicians, and miscellaneous enchantments were disappearing from the elite culture, but they still fi gured in the popular mind. Unaffected as yet by either science or doubt, most ordinary people inclined to think that there was something true about magic, which they distin- guished as good and bad. Good magic unlocked the “secrets” of nature; popular writings on alchemy told of famous sages of the past who knew how to turn base metals into gold; there were special formulas that added to the effi cacy of prayer. Some older women had a secret knowledge of medicinal herbs, in which indeed there might be some pragmatic value but which was blended with the mysterious and the occult. Bad magic was used to cause harm; it taught the black arts; it gave force to curses; it often involved a compact with the devil; it was what made witches so fearsome. By 1700 such ideas were subsid- ing. Judges who were trained to evaluate empirical evidence no longer believed that such powers existed, and so would no longer preside at witchcraft trials. The same may be said of belief in prophecies and oracles: in the elite culture only those recorded in the Bible retained any credibility, but there was still a popular acceptance of recent prophecies and foretellings of the future.

Witchcraft and magic

31. Elite and Popular Cultures

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 273pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 273 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire274

Popular culture continued to express itself also in fairs and carnivals. For men and women who rarely traveled and lived limited lives, these were exciting events that occurred only at certain times of the year and to which people fl ocked from miles around. At the fairs one could buy things that local shops and the wandering peddlers could not supply. There would be puppet shows, jugglers, and acrobats. There were conjurers who refused to admit like modern magicians that they were using merely natural means. A mountebank was someone who mounted a platform ( banco in Italian) where he sold questionable remedies for various ills while keeping up a patter of jokes and stories, often accompanied by a clown. Blind singers and traveling musicians entertained the throngs, and for the tougher minded there were cockfi ghts and bear baiting. In such a hubbub itinerant preach- ers might denounce the vanities of this world or throw doubt on the wisdom of bishops and lawyers.

A CARNIVAL ON THE FEAST DAY OF SAINT GEORGE by Pieter Bruegel, the Younger (Flemish, 1564–1638)

Carnivals broke the normal patterns of daily life in towns and villages throughout the early modern era. This painting shows an early seventeenth-century carnival near the Flemish city of Antwerp, but the games, eating, drinking, dancing, and banners were typical of the carni- vals in almost every European village during this era. (Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Art Library)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 274pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 274 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

27532. The Global Economy of the Eighteenth Century

Carnival went on for several weeks preceding Lent. The word itself, from the Italian carne vale, meant “farewell to meat,” from which good Christians were to abstain during the 40-day Lenten fast; in France it climaxed in the Mardi Gras (“fat Tuesday”). It persisted in Protestant countries also. It was a time for big eating and heavy drinking, for general merry- making and foolery, and for playful inversions of the normal social hierarchies and cultural solemnities. Comical processions marched through the streets. Farces were performed and mock sermons were delivered. Young men showed their strength in tugs-of-war, footraces, and a rough-and-tumble kind of football. A common theme was what was called in England “the world turned upside down.” Men and women put on each other’s clothing. Horses were made to move backward with the rider facing the tail. Little street dramas showed the servant giving orders to the master, the judge sitting in the stocks, the pupil beating the teacher, or the husband holding the baby while the wife clutched a gun. In general, the car- nival was a time for defying custom and ridiculing authority. It is hard to know how much such outbursts were expressions of genuine resentments and how much they were only a form of play. They could, indeed, be both.

In 1600 people of all classes took part in these festive activities. In the following century, as both the Protestant and the Catholic Reformations extended their infl uences, the clergy undertook to purge such public events of what they considered excesses, and with the growth of the state the civil authorities began to frown on them as incitements to subversion. By 1700 the people of elite culture, the wealthy, the fashionable, and the educated, were more inclined to stay away; or they attended only as spectators to be amused at the simple pleasures of the common people. In the eighteenth century, as the various elites took to more formal manners and to neoclassicism in literature and the arts, the gulf between the elite and popular cultures widened. The clergy campaigned against the belief in magic and tried to restrain the faithful in the matter of pilgrimages and veneration of dubious local saints. As the medical profession developed, the popu- lar healers and venders of mysterious nostrums were seen as charlatans and quacks. As scientifi c and other knowledge increased among educated elites, those who lacked such knowledge appeared to be simply superstitious or ignorant. It may be said both that the elites withdrew from the popular culture and that the people as a whole had not yet been brought into the education and science of an evolving elite culture. In any case, class distinctions became sharper than ever. But nothing ever stands still, and before the year 1800 there were persons in the elite culture who were beginning to “rediscover” the people, to collect ballads and fairy tales, and to lay a foundation for what in the nineteenth cen- tury was called “folklore.”

32. THE GLOBAL ECONOMY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The opening of the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, it will be recalled, had reoriented Europe. In an age of oceanic communications western Europe became a center from which America, Asia, and Africa could all be reached. A global economy had been created. The fi rst to profi t from it had been the Portuguese and Spanish, and they retained their monop- oly through most of the sixteenth century; but the gradual decline of the Portuguese and Spanish paved the way for the triumph of the British, the French, and the Dutch. In the eighteenth century the most important economic development was the expansion of the global economy and the fact that Europe became incomparably wealthier than any other part of the world.

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 275pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 275 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire276

Commerce and Industry in the Eighteenth Century

The increase of wealth was brought about by the methods of commercial capitalism and handicraft industry. Though the Industrial Revolution in England is usually dated from 1760 or 1780, it was not until the nineteenth century that the use of steam engines and power-driven machinery, and the growth of large factories and great manufacturing cities, brought about the conditions of modern industrialism. The economic system of the eigh- teenth century, while it contained within itself the seeds of later industrialism, represented the fl owering of the older merchant capitalism, domestic industry, and mercantilist govern- ment policies that had grown up since the sixteenth century.

Most people in the eighteenth century lived in the country. Agriculture was still the greatest single industry and source of wealth. Cities remained small. London and Paris, the largest of Europe, each had a population of

600,000 or 700,000, but the next largest cities did not much exceed 200,000, and in all Europe at the time of the French Revolution in 1789 there were only 50 cities with as many as 50,000 people. Urbanization, however, was in itself no sign of economic advance- ment. Spain, Italy, and even the Balkan peninsula, according to an estimate made in the 1780s, each had more large cities (over 50,000) than did Great Britain. Urbanization did not equate with industry because most industry was carried on in the country, by peasants

Rural industry

Most people who were “engaged in manufactures” in eighteenth-century Europe still worked in their own rural homes. This engraving from the early 1780s shows three women at work on cloth in an Irish cottage, where they are spinning and winding thread while another woman contributes to the domestic production by preparing a meal and watching a child. (SSPL/The Image Works)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 276pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 276 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

277

and part-time agricultural workers who worked for the merchant capitalists of the towns. Thus, while it is true to say that most people still lived in the country, it would be false to say that their lives and labors were devoted exclusively to agriculture. One English esti- mate, made in 1739, held that there were 4,250,000 persons “engaged in manufactures” in the British Isles, a fi gure that included women and children and comprised almost half the entire population. These people worked characteristically in their own cottages, employed as wage earners by merchant capitalists under the “domestic” system. Almost half of them were engaged in the weaving and processing of woolens. Others were in the copper, iron, lead, and tin manufactures; others in leather goods; much smaller were the paper, glass, porcelain, silk, and linen trades; and smallest of all, in 1739, was the manufacture of cotton cloth, which accounted for only about 100,000 workers. The list suggests that nonagricul- tural occupations were already important in the preindustrial age.

Even with half its population engaged at least part of the time in manufactures, how- ever, England was not yet the unrivaled manufacturing country that it was to become after 1800. England in the eighteenth century produced no more iron than Russia and no more manufactures than France. The population of England was still small; it began to grow rapidly about 1760, but as late as 1800 France was still twice as populous as England and Scotland together. France, though less intensively developed than England, with probably far less than half its people engaged in manufactures, nevertheless, because of its greater size, remained the chief industrial center of Europe.

Although foreign and colonial trade grew rapidly in the eighteenth century, it is prob- able that, in both Great Britain and France, the domestic or internal trade was greater in volume and occupied more people. Great Britain, with no internal tariffs, with an insignifi - cant guild system, and with no monopolies allowed within the country except to inventors, was the largest area of internal free trade in Europe. France, or at least Colbert’s Five Great Farms, offered an almost equal-sized free-trading internal market. A great deal of economic activity was therefore domestic, consisting of exchange between town and town or between region and region. The proportions between domestic and international trade cannot be known. But foreign trade was increasingly important for the largest business enterprises. International trade created the greatest commercial fortunes and the main accumulations of new capital. And it was the foreign trade that led to international rivalry and war.

The World Economy: The Dutch, British, and French

On the international economic scene a great part was still played by the Dutch. After the Peace of Utrecht the Dutch ceased to be a great political power; but their role in commerce, shipping, and fi nance remained undi- minished, or diminished only when compared to the continuing commercial growth of France and Great Britain. They were still the middlemen and common carriers for other peoples. Their freight rates remained the lowest of Europe. They continued to grow rich on imports from the East Indies. To a large extent also, in the eighteenth century, the Dutch lived on their investments. The capital they had accumulated over 200 years they now lent out to French or British or other entrepreneurs. Dutch capital was to be found in every large commercial venture of Europe and was lent to governments far and wide. A third of the capital of the Bank of England in the mid-eighteenth century belonged to Dutch shareholders. The Bank of Amsterdam remained the chief clearinghouse and fi nancial center of Europe. Its supremacy did not end until a French Revolutionary army invaded Holland in 1795.

Trade

32. The Global Economy of the Eighteenth Century

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 277pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 277 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire278

The Atlantic trade routes, leading to America, to Africa, and to Asia, attracted the merchants of many nationalities in Europe. A great many East India companies were established—usually to do business in America as well as the East, for the “Indies” at the beginning of the eighteenth century

was still a general term for the vast regions overseas. Both the English and the French East India companies were reorganized, with an increased investment of capital, shortly after 1700. A number of others were established—by the Scots, the Swedes, the Danes, the imperial free city of Hamburg, the republic of Venice, Prussia, and the Austrian monarchy. But, with the exception of the Danish company that lasted some 60 years, they all failed after only a few years, either for insuffi ciency of capital or because they lacked strong diplomatic, military, and naval support. Their failure showed that, in the transoceanic trade, unassisted business enterprise was not enough. Merchants needed strong national backing to succeed in this sphere. Neither free city, nor small kingdom, nor tiny republic, nor the amorphous Austrian Empire provided a fi rm enough base to sustain a global

trading company. It was the British and French who won out in the commercial rivalry

of the eighteenth century. Britain and France were alike in having, besides a high level of industrial production at home, governments organized on a

national scale and able to protect and advance, under mercantilist principles, the interests of their merchants in distant countries. For both peoples the eighteenth century—or the three-quarters of a century between the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 and the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789—was an age of spectacular enrich- ment and commercial expansion.

Although the trade fi gures are diffi cult to defi ne precisely, French foreign and colonial trade may well have grown even more rapidly than the British in the years between the 1720s and the 1780s. In any event, by the 1780s, the two countries were about equal in their total foreign and colonial trade. The British in the 1780s enjoyed proportionately more of the trade with America and Asia; the French, more of the trade with the rest of Europe and the Middle East. The contest for global markets played an important part in the colonial and commercial wars between Britain and France all through the eighteenth century and on into the fi nal and climactic struggle, and British triumph, in the time of Napoleon.

Asia, America, and Africa in the Global Economy

In the expanding global economy of the eighteenth century each continent played its spe- cial part. The European trade with Asia was subject to an ancient limitation. Asia was almost useless as a market for European manufactures. There was much that Europeans wanted from Asia but almost nothing that Asians wanted from Europe. The peoples of Chinese, Indian, and Malay culture had elaborate civilizations with which they were con- tent; Asian elites in this era lacked the dynamic restlessness of European entrepreneurs, and the masses were so impoverished (more so even than in Europe) that they could buy noth- ing anyway. Europeans found that they could send little to Asia except gold. The trade of gold from Europe to Asia had gone on since ancient times, and even more gold and silver fl owed to east Asia from European colonies in the Americas after the sixteenth century. Accumulating over time, the wealth from this trade became one source of the fabulous treasures of Eastern princes. To fi nance the swelling demand for Asian products it was necessary for Europeans constantly to replenish their stocks of gold. The British found an important new supply in Africa along the Gulf of Guinea, where the Royal African

Commercial rivalry

East India companies

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 278pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 278 03/08/13 7:35 PM03/08/13 7:35 PM

Final PDF to printer

279

Company began to export gold from a region (the present Ghana) that was long called the Gold Coast. The word “guinea” became the name of a gold coin minted in England from 1663 to 1813 and long remained a fashionable way of saying 21 shillings.

What Europeans sought from Asia was still in part spices—pepper and ginger, cinnamon and cloves—now brought in mainly by the Dutch from their East India islands. But they wanted manufactured goods also. Asia was still in some lines superior to Europe in technical skill. It is enough to men- tion rugs, chinaware, and cotton cloth. The very names by which cotton fabrics are known in English and other European languages reveal the places from which they were thought to come. “Madras” and “calico” refer to the Indian cities of Madras and Calicut; “muslin,” to the Arabic city of Mosul. “Gingham” comes from a Malay word meaning “striped”; “chintz,” from a Hindustani word meaning “spotted.” Most of the Eastern manufactures were increasingly imitated in the eighteenth century in Europe. Axminster and Aubusson carpets competed with Oriental rugs. In 1709 a German named Boettcher discovered a formula for making a vitreous and translucent substance comparable to the porcelain of China; this European “china,” made at Sèvres, Dresden, and in England, soon competed successfully with the imported original.

Cotton fabrics were never produced in Europe at a price to compete with fabrics from India until after the introduction of power machinery, which began in England about 1780. Before that date the European demand for Indian cotton goods was so heavy that the woolen, linen, and silk interests became alarmed. They could produce nothing like the sheer muslins and bright calico prints that caught the public fancy, and many governments, to protect the jobs and capital involved in the old European textile industries, simply for- bade the import of Indian cottons altogether. But it was a time of many laws and little enforcement. The forbidden fabrics continued to come in, and the English writer Daniel Defoe observed in 1708 that, despite the laws, cottons were not only sought as clothing by all classes, but “crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushions, chairs and at last beds themselves were nothing but calicoes or Indian stuffs.” Gradually, in the face of tariff protection for “infant industries” in Europe, and the rapid growth of European cotton manufactures, import of cottons and other manufactures from Asia declined. After about 1770 most of the imports of the British East India Company con- sisted of tea, which was brought from China.

The Americas, including the West Indies, bulked larger than Asia in the eighteenth- century trade of western Europe. The American trade was based mainly on sugar—a popular commodity that generated enormous profi ts for European traders throughout the eighteenth century. Sugar had long been known in the East, and in the European Middle Ages little bits of it had trickled through to delight the palates of lords and prelates. About 1650 sugar cane was brought in quantities from the East and planted in the West Indies by Europeans. A whole new economic sys- tem arose over the next few decades. It was based on the “plantation.” A plantation was an economic unit consisting of a considerable tract of land, a sizable investment of capital, often owned by absentees in France or England, and a force of impressed labor, supplied by enslaved black workers brought from Africa. Sugar, produced in quantity with cheap labor at low cost, proved to have an inexhaustible market.

The eighteenth century was the golden age, economically speaking, of the West Indies. From its own islands alone, during the 80 years from 1713 to 1792, Great Britain imported a total of £162,000,000 worth of goods, almost all sugar; imports from India and China, in the same 80 years, amounted to only £104,000,000. The little islands of

Spices and Eastern manufactures

Sugar and the plantation system

32. The Global Economy of the Eighteenth Century

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 279pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 279 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire280

Jamaica, Barbados, St. Kitts, and others, as suppliers of Europe, not only dwarfed the whole mainland of British America but the whole mainland of Asia as well. For France, less well established than Britain on the American mainland and in Asia, the same eco- nomic pattern holds with greater force. France controlled the richest of all the Caribbean sugar colonies, Saint-Domingue, on the island that the English called Santo Domingo (which is now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

The plantation economy, fi rst established in sugar and later in cotton (after 1800), brought Africa into the foreground. Slaves had been obtained in Black Africa from time immemorial, by the Roman Empire and later by

the Muslim world, both of which, however, enslaved blacks and whites indiscriminately. After the European discovery of America, blacks were taken across the Atlantic by the Spanish and Portuguese to provide labor in places where disease and abuse had deci- mated the Native American populations. Dutch slavetraders also took enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619, a year before the arrival of the fi rst English Pilgrims in Massachusetts. But slavery in the Americas before 1650 may be described as less systematic. With the rise of the plantation economy after 1650, and especially after 1700, it became a fundamental economic institution. Slavery now formed the labor supply of a very substantial and heav- ily capitalized branch of world production. About 920,000 blacks were landed from Africa on the island of Jamaica alone between 1700 and 1800; and roughly 800,000 enslaved people were brought to the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The eighteenth century thus became the most active era in the long history of the Atlantic slave trade. Seeking the steady fl ow of profi ts that came mostly from an insatiable demand for slave labor on Caribbean and Brazilian plantations, European slave traders moved more than 5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas during the 100 years after 1700. It is certain that, until well after 1800, far more Africans than Europeans made the voyage to the Americas; and these manacled, disoriented, vulnerable human beings were transported everywhere in the most dehumanizing conditions of overcrowded slave ships.

The transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century was conducted mainly by English-speaking interests, principally in England but also in New England, followed as closely as they could manage it by the French. Yearly export of merchandise from Great Britain to Africa, used chiefl y in exchange for slaves, increased tenfold between 1713 and 1792. As for merchandise coming into Britain from the British West Indies, virtually all produced by slaves, in 1790 it constituted almost a fourth of all British imports. If we add British imports from the American mainland, including what after 1776 became the United States, the importance of black slave labor to the British economic system will appear still greater, because a great part of exports from the mainland consisted of agricultural prod- ucts, such as tobacco and indigo, produced in most places by slaves. The rapid growth of

trade within the British Empire and the phenomenal rise of British capital- ism in the eighteenth century were therefore based to a considerable extent on the enslavement of Africans. The town of Liverpool, an insignifi cant place on the Irish Sea in 1700, built itself up by the slave trade and the trade in slave-produced commodities to a busy transatlantic commercial center,

which in turn, as will be seen later, stimulated the “industrial revolution” in Manchester and other neighboring towns.

The western European merchants, British, French, and Dutch, sold the products of America and Asia to their own peoples and to those of central and eastern Europe. Trade with Germany and Italy was fairly stable. With Russia it enormously increased. To cite the British record only, Britain imported 15 times as much from Russia in 1790 as in 1700, and

Slave trade

Slavery and British capitalism

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 280pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 280 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

281

sold the Russians 6 times as much. The Russian landlords, as they became Europeanized, desired Western manufactures and the colonial products such as sugar, tobacco, and tea that could be purchased only from western Europeans. They had grain, timber, and naval stores to offer in return. Similarly, landlords of Poland and north Germany, in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, found themselves increasingly able to move their agricul- tural products out through the Baltic and hence increasingly able to buy the products of western Europe, America, and Asia in return. Eastern European landlords now had another incentive to make their estates more productive. The early modern global trading system therefore began to affect all parts of Europe, including also the landlords and peasants in central and eastern Europe. The large landowners who sought more profi ts with which to purchase commodities and other goods coming from the Americas and western Europe helped to spread “big” agriculture into new areas, developing in eastern Europe a system not unlike the plantation economy of the New World. This expanding system of European trade and agriculture had many effects. It contributed, along with political causes, to reduc- ing the bulk of the eastern European population to serfdom. It helped to bring western European culture to the upper classes of eastern Europe. And it helped to enrich the cities and merchants of western Europe.

The Wealth of Western Europe: Social Consequences

The wealth that accumulated along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe was, in short, by no means produced only by the efforts of western Europeans. All the world contributed to its formation. The natural resources of the Americas, the gold and people of Africa, the labor of enslaved workers on Caribbean islands, the resources and manufacturing skills of Asia, all alike went into producing the vastly increased volume of goods moving in world com- merce. Europeans directed the movement. They supplied capital; they contributed techni- cal and organizing abilities; and it was the demand of Europeans, at home in Europe and as traders abroad, that set increasing numbers of Indians to spinning cotton, Chinese to rais- ing tea, Malays to gathering spices, and Africans to the tending of sugar cane. A few non- Europeans might benefi t in the process—Indian or Chinese merchants “subsidized” by the East Indian companies, African chiefs who captured slaves from neighboring tribes and sold them to Europeans. But the profi ts of the world economy and the far-fl ung colonial empires really went to Europe. The new wealth, over and above what was necessary to keep the widely dispersed and polyglot labor force in being, and to pay other expenses, piled up in Britain, Holland, and France.

The new wealth was owned and managed by private persons. It accu- mulated within the system of private property and as part of the institutions of private enterprise or private capitalism. Governments were increasingly dependent on these private owners of property, for governments, in western Europe, had no important sources of revenue except loans and taxes derived from their peoples. When the owners of wealth gave their support, the government was strong and successful, as in England. When they withdrew support, the government collapsed, as it was to collapse in France in the Revolution of 1789.

In a technical sense there were many “capitalists” in western Europe, persons who had a little savings which they used to buy a parcel of land or a loom or entrusted to some other person to invest at interest. And in a general sense the new wealth was widely distrib- uted; the standard of living rose in western Europe in the eighteenth century, in part because the declining price of popular commodities made such goods more accessible for

Private property

32. The Global Economy of the Eighteenth Century

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 281pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 281 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire282

most European consumers. Tea, for example, which cost as much as £10 a pound when introduced into England about 1650, was an article of common consumption a hundred years later. But wealth used to produce more wealth, that is, capital, was owned or con- trolled in signifi cant amounts by relatively few persons. In the eighteenth century some people became unprecedentedly rich (including some who started quite poor, for it was a time of open opportunity); the great intermediate layers of society became noticeably more comfortable; and the people at the bottom, such as the serfs of eastern Europe, the Irish peasantry, the dispossessed farm workers in England, and the poorest peasants and workers of France, were worse off than they had been before. The poor continued to live in hovels. The prosperous created for themselves that pleasant, comfortable world of the eighteenth century that connoisseurs still admire, a world of well-ordered Georgian homes, closely cropped lawns and shrubs, furniture by Chippendale or à la Louis XV, coach-and-four, family portraits, high chandeliers, books bound in morocco, and a staff of servants “below stairs.”

European traders and merchants gained much of their new wealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from commodities produced on plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean. This plantation economy depended on the labor of enslaved African workers such as the people in this seventeenth century illustration, who are preparing tobacco for export from one of the Caribbean islands. (The Granger Collection, NYC)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 282pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 282 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

283

Families enriched by commerce, and especially the daughters, mixed and intermarried with the old families who owned land. Women thus played an essential economic role in the carefully arranged marriages that both protected and increased the wealth of upper-class families. Landowners needed the capital that could be acquired through marriages with the daugh- ters of wealthy traders; prosperous entrepreneurs sought the landed properties that might come into their families through marriages with women of the old aristocracy. But mar- riage was only one of the ways in which the old and new wealth of Europe came together. The merchant in England or France no sooner became prosperous than he bought himself a landed estate. In France he might also purchase a government offi ce or patent of nobil- ity. Contrariwise, the landowning gentleman, especially in England, no sooner increased his landed income than he invested the proceeds in commercial enterprise or government bonds. The two forms of property, bourgeois commerce and aristocratic land, tended to merge. The various propertied interests usually worked harmoniously together, and the unpropertied classes, the vast majority, could infl uence the government only by riot and tumult. The eighteenth century, though an era of rapid commercial expansion, was on the whole an age of considerable social stability in western Europe. It was the upheavals of the French Revolution that would eventually disrupt and transform much of the social and political order that had developed since the late seventeenth century through the fusion of commercial and landed wealth.

The foregoing might be illustrated from the lives of thousands of men and women. Two examples are enough, one English and one French. They show the working of the world economic system, the rise of the commercial class in western Europe, and the role of that class in the political life of the Western countries.

Thomas Pitt, called “Diamond” Pitt, was born in 1653, the son of a parish clergyman in the Church of England. He went to India in 1674. Here he operated as an “interloper,” trading in defi ance of the legal monopoly of the East India Company. Returning to England, he was prosecuted by the company and fi ned £400 but was rich enough to buy the manor of Stratford and with it the borough of Old Sarum, a rotten borough that gave him a seat in the House of Commons without the trouble of an election. He soon returned to India, again as an interloper, where he com- peted so successfully with the company that it fi nally took him into its own employment. He traded on his own account, as well as for the company, and he defended the position of the company in Chennai (a city then called Madras) against the local ruler of the Carnatic, the coastal area around Chennai, buying him off with money. In 1702, though his salary was only £300 a year, he purchased a 410-carat uncut diamond for £20,400. He bought it from an Indian merchant who had himself bought it from an English skipper, who in turn had stolen it from the slave who had found it in the mines and who had concealed it in a wound in his leg. Back in Europe, Pitt had his diamond cut at Amsterdam and sold it in 1717 to the regent of France for £135,000. The regent put it in the French crown; it was appraised at the time of the French Revolution at £480,000. “Diamond” Pitt died in 1726. One of his daughters became the Countess of Stanhope and one of his sons became the Earl of Londonderry. Another son became father to the William Pitt who guided Britain through the Seven Years’ War with France and who was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Chatham. The city of Pittsburgh was named for this Pitt, so that a fortune gained by unconventional or illicit means in India later gave its name to a frontier settlement in the interior of America. Chatham’s younger son, the second William Pitt, became prime min- ister at 24. The younger Pitt guided Britain through its wars with revolutionary France and Napoleon, until his death in 1806 during the high tide of the Napoleonic Empire.

Thomas Pitt

The merging of bourgeois and aristocratic wealth

32. The Global Economy of the Eighteenth Century

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 283pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 283 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire284

Jean-Joseph Laborde was born in 1724, of a bourgeois family in southern France, but his career showed how commercial wealth could transform a person’s social position. He went to work for an uncle who had a business at Bayonne trading with Spain and the East. From the prof-

its he built up vast plantations and slaveholdings in the colony of Saint-Domingue. His ships brought sugar to Europe and returned with prefabricated building materials, each piece carefully numbered, for his plantations and refi neries in the West Indies. Wealth from the sugar trade enabled him to become one of the leading bankers in Paris. His daughter became the Countess de Noailles. He himself received the title of marquis, which he did not use. He bought manors and châteaux near Paris. As a real estate opera- tor he developed that part of Paris, then suburban, now called the Chaussée d’Antin. By 1760 he was directing the king’s tax collection system; and during the Seven Years’ War he was sent by the French government to borrow money in Spain, where he was told that Spain would lend nothing to Louis XV but would gladly lend him personally 20,000,000 reals. In the War of American Independence Laborde raised 12,000,000 livres in gold for the government to help pay the French army and navy, thus contributing to the success of the American Revolution. He acted as investment agent for Voltaire, gave 24,000 livres a year to charity, and subscribed 400,000 livres in 1788 toward building new hospitals in Paris. In July 1789 he helped to fi nance the insurrection that led to the fall of the Bastille and the Revolution. His son, in June 1789, took the Oath of the Tennis Court, swearing to write a constitution for France. Despite his early support for the Revolu- tion, Laborde himself was guillotined in 1794. His children later turned to scholarship and the arts.

THE DUET by Arthur Devis (English, 1711–1787)

The prosperity of the upper classes in eighteenth-century England supported the cul- ture and comforts that are represented in this painting. Expanding global trade pro- vided a pleasant, comfortable life for increasingly wealthy European elites and a new market for good furniture, fi ne art, and talented gardeners. (Victoria & Albert Museum/Art Resource, NY)

Jean-Joseph Laborde

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 284pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 284 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

28533. Western Europe after the Peace of Utrecht, 1713–1740

33. WESTERN EUROPE AFTER THE PEACE OF UTRECHT, 1713–1740

Amid the social and economic transitions that were transforming early modern Europe’s relations with the wider world, the major European states continued their struggles for international power and political infl uence within Europe itself. The evolving competition for global trade and profi table colonies, however, became an increasingly important factor in most European confl icts, even when such confl icts extended the now-traditional efforts to maintain a stable balance of power among the various continental monarchies. The Peace of Utrecht, it will be recalled, had registered the defeat of French ambitions in the wars of Louis XIV. The French move toward “universal monarchy” had been blocked. The European state system had been preserved. Europe was to consist of independent and sovereign states, all legally free and equal, continuously entering or leaving alliances along the principles of the balance of power. The peace settlement of 1713–1714 placed the Bourbon Philip V on the Spanish throne but gave most of Spain’s European possessions, outside Spain itself, to the Austrian Habsburgs (see maps, pp. 192, 327). Great Britain, which had been consolidated during the wars as a combined kingdom of England and Scotland, took Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay region from France and, taking Gibraltar and Minorca from Spain, became a naval power in the Mediterranean. The British also received trading rights in Spanish America, thus expanding their role in the Atlantic slave trade and enhancing their position as the most dynamic power in the rapidly developing transatlantic economic system.

Governments now turned to repairing the damages of war. Spain was somewhat rejuvenated by the French infl uence under its new Bourbon monarchy. The drift and decadence that had set in under the last Habsburgs were at least halted. The Spanish state was administratively strengthened. Its offi cials followed the absolutist government of Louis XIV as a model. The estates of the east-Spanish kingdoms, Aragon and Valencia, ceased to meet, going like the Estates General of France into the limbo of obsolete institutions. On the whole the French infl u- ence in eighteenth-century Spain was intangible. Nothing was changed in substance, but the old machinery functioned with more precision. Administrators were better trained and took a more constructive attitude toward government work; they became more aware of the world north of the Pyrenees and recovered confi dence in their country’s future. They tried also to tighten up the administration of their American Empire. More revenue offi cers and coast guards were introduced in the Caribbean, whose zeal led to repeated clashes with smugglers, mainly British. Friction along the Spanish-controlled coasts of the American mainland, reinforced by Spanish dislike for British occupation of Gibraltar, kept Spain and Britain in a continual ferment of potential hostility.

The Dutch after Utrecht receded from the international political stage, though their alliance was always sought because of the huge shipping and fi nancial resources they con- trolled. The Swiss also became important in banking and fi nancial circles. The Belgians founded an overseas trading company in 1723 on the authority of their new Austrian ruler; this “Ostend Company” sent out six voyages to China, which were highly profi table, but the commercial jealousy of the Dutch and British obliged the Austrian emperor to with- draw his support as a price for British recognition of his daughter’s right to inherit the Austrian throne. The Ostend enterprise thus came to an end. The Scots began at about this time to play their remarkable role of energizing business affairs in many countries. Union with England gave them access to the British Empire and to the numerous commercial

Repairing the damages of war

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 285pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 285 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire286

advantages won by the English. John Law, the fi nancial wizard of France, was a Scot, as was William Paterson, one of the chief founders of the Bank of England.

France and Britain after 1713

Our main attention falls on Britain and France. Though one was the victor and the other the vanquished in the wars that ended in 1713, and though one stood for royal absolut- ism and the other for parliamentary constitutionalism in government, their development in the years after Utrecht was in some ways surprisingly parallel. In both countries for some years the king was personally ineffective, and in both the various propertied interests therefore gained many advantages. Both pursued the commercial and colonial expansion described above. Both went through a short period of fi nancial experimentation and frantic speculation in stocks, the fi nancial bubble bursting in each case in 1720. Each was there- after governed by a statesman, Cardinal Fleury in France and Robert Walpole in England, whose policy was to keep peace abroad and conciliate all interests at home. Fleury and Walpole held offi ce for about two decades, toward the end of which the two countries again went to war. But the differences are at least as instructive as the parallels.

In France the new king was a child, Louis XV, the great-grandson of Louis XIV, and only fi ve years old when his reign began in 1715. The government was entrusted to a regent, the Duke of Orleans, an elder cousin of the young king. Orleans, lacking the author- ity of a monarch, had to admit the aristocracy to a greater share of the power that nobles had lost during the long reign of Louis XIV. Most of the nobles had never liked the abso- lutist policies of Louis XIV, and there was much dissatisfaction with absolutism among all classes, because of the ruin and suffering brought by Louis XIV’s wars.

The higher nobles, ousted by Louis XIV, now reappeared in the gov- ernment. For a time Orleans worked through committees of noblemen, roughly corresponding to ministries, a system lauded by its backers as a revival of political freedom; but the committees proved so incompetent that they were soon abandoned. The old parlements of France, and especially

the Parlement of Paris, which Louis XIV had reduced to silence, vigorously reasserted themselves after his death. The parlements were primarily law courts, originally composed of bourgeois judges. But Louis XIV and his predecessors, to raise money, had made the judgeships into offi ces to be sold; and they attached titles of nobility to increase the price. Hence in the time of the Regency the judges of the parlements had bought or inherited their seats and were almost all nobles. Because they owned their offi ces as a kind of private property, they could not be removed by the king. The Regent conceded much infl uence to the Parlement of Paris, utilizing it to modify the will of Louis XIV. The parlements thus broadened their position, claiming the right to assent to legislation and taxes, through refusing to enforce government measures that they considered contrary to the unwritten constitution or fundamental laws of France. They managed to exercise this right, off and on, from the days of the Regency until the great Revolution of 1789. The eighteenth cen- tury, for France, was a period of absolutism checked and balanced by organized privileged groups. It was an age of aristocratic resurgence, in which the nobles won back many of the powers that Louis XIV had taken from them in the seventeenth century.

In Great Britain the Parliament was very different from the French par- lements, and the British aristocracy was more politically competent than the noblesse of France. Parliament proved an effective machine for the con- duct of public business. The House of Lords was hereditary, with the large

Aristocratic resurgence

The English Parliament

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 286pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 286 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

287

exception of the bishops, who were appointed by the government and made up about a quarter of the active members of the upper house. The House of Commons was not at all representative of the country according to modern ideas. Only the wealthy, or those patronized by the wealthy, could sit in it, and they were chosen by diverse and eccentric methods, in counties and towns, almost without regard to the size or wishes of the popu- lation. Some boroughs were owned outright, like the Old Sarum of the Pitt family. But through the machinations of bosses, or purchase of seats, all kinds of interests managed to get representatives into the Commons. Some members spoke for the “landed interest”; others for the “funded interest” (mainly government creditors); others for the “London interest,” the “West India interest,” the “East India interest,” and others. All of the leading economic groups and politically signifi cant social classes could expect to have their desires heeded in Parliament, and all therefore were willing to go through parliamentary channels. Parliament was corrupt, slow, and expensive, but it was effective. For Parliament was not only a roughly representative body; it had also acquired, in practice, the power to legislate.

Queen Anne, the last reigning Stuart, died in 1714. She was succeeded by George I, Elector of Hanover, as provided for by Parliament in the Act of Settlement of 1701. George I was the nearest relative of the Stuarts who was also a Protestant. A heavy middle- aged German who spoke no English, he continued to spend much of his time in Germany, and he brought with him to England a retinue of German ministers and mistresses. He was never popular in England, where he was regarded as at best a political convenience. He was in no position to play a strong hand in English public life, and during his reign Parliament gained considerable independence from the crown.

The main problem was still whether the principles of the Revolution of 1688 should be maintained. The Whigs, who considered the revolution as their work, long remained a minority made up of a few great landowning noblemen, wealthy London merchants, lesser businesspeople, and nonconformists in religion. The Whigs generally controlled the House of Lords, but the House of Commons was more uncertain; at the time of the Peace of Utrecht its majority was Tory. We have already noted the signifi cance for English consti- tutional development of the confl ict at that time between the prowar Whig majority in the House of Lords and the Tory majority in Commons and how the confl ict was resolved to help establish the enduring primacy of the House of Commons.

After 1714 the two parties tended to dissolve, and the terms “Whig” and “Tory” ceased to have much defi nite meaning. In general the gov- ernment, and the Anglican bishops who were close to the government, remained “Whig.” Men who were remote from the central government, or suspicious of its activities, formed a kind of country party quite different from the earlier Tories. Gentry and yeomen of the shires and byways were easily aroused against the great noblemen and men of money who led the Whigs. In the established church the lesser clergy were sometimes critical of the Whig bishops. Outside the offi cial church were a group of Anglican clergy who refused the oath of loyalty after 1688 and were called Non- Jurors; they kept alive a shadow church until 1805. In Scotland also, the ancestral home of the Stuarts, many were disaffected with the new regime.

Tories, Non-Jurors, and Scots made up a milieu after 1688 in which what would now be called counterrevolution might develop. Never enthusiastic for the “Whig wars” against France, critical of the mounting national debt that the wars created, distrustful of the busi- ness and moneyed interests, they began to look wistfully to the exiled Stuarts. After 1701, when James died in France, the Stuart claims devolved upon his son, who lived until 1766, scheming time and again to make himself king of England. His partisans were known as

Whigs and Tories

33. Western Europe after the Peace of Utrecht, 1713–1740

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 287pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 287 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire288

Jacobites, from Jacobus, the Latin for James. They claimed that he had a divine right to the monarchy and regarded him as “James III,” whereas others called him the Pretender. The

Jacobites felt that if he would give up his Catholic religion, he should be accepted as Britain’s rightful king.

The Whigs could not tolerate a return of the Stuarts. The restoration of “James III” and his divine-right partisans would undo the principles of the

Glorious Revolution—limited monarchy, constitutionalism, parliamentary supremacy, the rule of law, the toleration of dissenting Protestants, in short all that was summarized and defended in the political writings of John Locke. Moreover, those who held stock in the Bank of England or who had lent their money to the government would be ruined, because “James III” would surely repudiate a debt contracted by his foes. The Whigs were bound to support the Hanoverian George I. And George I was bound to look for support in a strange country among the Whigs.

George lacked personal appeal even for his English friends. To his enemies he was ridiculous and repulsive. The successful establishment of his dynasty would ruin the hopes of Tories and Jacobites. In 1715 the Pretender landed in Scotland, gathered followers from the Highlands, and proclaimed a rebellion against George I. Civil war seemed to threaten.

But the Jacobite leaders bungled, and many of their followers proved to be undecided. They were willing enough to toast the “king over the water” in protest against the Whigs but not willing in a showdown to see the Stuarts, and all that went with them, again in possession of the crown of England.

The Fifteen, as the revolt came to be called, petered out. But 30 years later came the Forty-fi ve. In 1745, during war with France, the Pretender’s son, “Bonnie Prince Charlie” or the “Young Pretender,” again landed in Scotland and again proclaimed rebellion. This time, though almost no one in England rallied, the uprising was more successful. A Scot- tish force penetrated to within 80 miles of London and was driven back and crushed with the help of Hanoverian regiments rushed over from Germany. The government set out to destroy Jacobitism in the Scottish Highlands. The social system of the Highlands was wiped out, the clans were broken up, and their lands were forcibly reorganized according to modern notions of property and of landlord and tenant.

The Jacobite uprisings confi rmed the old reputation of England in the eyes of Europe, namely, as Voltaire said, that its government was as stormy as the seas that surrounded it. To partisans of monarchy on the Continent the uprisings showed the weaknesses of parliamentary government. But their ignominious collapse actually strengthened the parliamentary regime in England. They left little permanent mark and soon passed into romantic legend.

The “Bubbles”

Meanwhile, immediately after the Peace of Utrecht, the problem of dealing with a large postwar government debt had to be faced in both England and France. Organized perma- nent public debt was new at the time. The possibilities and limitations of large-scale bank- ing, paper money, and credit were not clearly seen. In France there was much amazement at the way in which England and Holland, though smaller and less wealthy than France, had been able to maximize their resources through banking and credit and even to fi nance the alliance that had eclipsed the Sun King. In addition there was much private demand for both lending and borrowing money. Private persons all over western Europe were looking for enterprises in which to invest their savings. And promoters and organizers, anticipating

“James III”

Threats of civil war

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 288pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 288 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

289

a profi t in this or that line of business, were looking for capital with which to work. Out of this whole situation grew the “South Sea bubble” in England and the “Mississippi bubble” in France. Both bubbles broke in 1720, and both had important long-range effects.

A close tie between government fi nance and private enterprise was usual at the time, under mercantilist ideas of government guidance of trade. In England, for example, a good deal of the government debt was held by trading companies organized for that purpose. The government would char- ter a company, strengthen it with a monopoly in a given line of business, and then receive from the company, after the stockholders had bought up the shares, a large sum of cash as a loan. Much of the British debt, contracted in the wars from 1689 to 1713, was held in this way by the Bank of England, founded in 1694; by the East India Company, reorganized in 1708 in such a way as to provide funds for the government; and

Ties between government and private enterprise

33. Western Europe after the Peace of Utrecht, 1713–1740

Critics of John Law ridiculed the Scottish fi nancier’s plan to pay off the French government’s debt with profi ts from the sale of shares in the “Mississippi Company.” This early eighteenth- century Dutch cartoon, for example, described Law as a “wind monopolist” and mocked him for selling nothing more than strong breezes to naïve investors. (Bettmann/Corbis)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 289pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 289 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire290

by the South Sea Company, founded in 1711. The Bank enjoyed a legal monopoly over certain banking operations in London, the East India Company over trade with the East, the South Sea Company for exploiting the asiento and other commercial privileges extorted from Spain. The companies were owned by private investors. Savings drawn from trade and agriculture, put into shares in these companies, became available both for economic reinvestment and for use by the government in defraying the costs of war.

In 1716 the Prince Regent of France was attracted to a Scottish fi nan- cier, John Law, reputedly because Law had a remarkable mathematical system for gambling at cards. Law founded a much-needed French cen-

tral bank. In the next year, 1717, he organized a Compagnie d’Occident, popularly called the Mississippi Company, which obtained a monopoly of trade with Louisiana, where it founded New Orleans in 1718. This company, under Law’s management, soon absorbed the French East India, China, Senegal, and African companies. It now enjoyed a legal monopoly of all French colonial trade. Seeing this trade as a means to solve France’s fi nancial problems, the Regent authorized Law to assume the entire government debt. The Mississippi Company received from individuals their certifi cates of royal indebtedness or “bonds” and gave them shares of company stock in return. It proposed to pay dividends on these shares and to extinguish the debt from profi ts in the colonial trade and from a monop- oly over the collection of all indirect taxes in France. The project carried with it a plan for drastic reform of the whole taxation system, to make taxes both more fair to the taxpayer and more lucrative to the government. Shares in the Mississippi Company were gobbled up by the public. There was a frenzy of speculation, a wild fear of not buying soon enough. Quotations rose to 18,000 livres a share. But the company rested only on unrealized proj- ects. Shareholders began to fear for their money. They began to unload. The market broke sharply. Many found their life savings gone. Others lost ancestral estates on which they had borrowed in the hope of getting rich. Those, however, who had owned shares in the company before the rise, and who had resisted the speculative fever, lost nothing by the bursting of infl ated prices and later enjoyed a gilt-edged commercial investment.

Much the same thing happened in England, where many believed that Law was about to provide a panacea for France. The South Sea Company, outbidding the Bank of England, took over a large fraction of the public debt by receiving government “bonds” from their owners in return for shares of its stock. The size and speed of profi ts to be made in Spanish America were greatly exaggerated, and the market value of South Sea shares rose rapidly for a time, reaching £1,050 for a share of £100 par value. Other schemes abounded in the passion for easy money. Promoters organized mining and textile companies, as well as others of more fanciful or bolder design—a company to bring live fi sh to market in tanks, an insurance company to insure female chastity, even a company “for an undertaking which shall in due time be revealed.” Shares in such enterprises were snatched at mounting prices. But in September 1720 the South Sea stockholders began to sell, doubting whether opera- tions would pay dividends commensurate to £1,000 a share. They dragged down the whole unstable structure. As in France, many people found that their savings or their inheritances had disappeared in the fi nancial implosion of a speculative bubble.

Indignation in both countries was extreme. Both governments were implicated in the scandal. John Law fl ed to Brussels. The Regent was discredited; he resigned in 1723, and French affairs were afterward conducted by Cardinal Fleury. In England there was a change of ministers. Robert Walpole, a country gentleman of Whig persuasion who had long sat in the Commons and who had warned against the South Sea scheme from the beginning, became the principal minister to George I.

John Law

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 290pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 290 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

291

Britain recovered from the crisis more successfully than France. Law’s bank, a useful institution, was dissolved in the reaction against him, and France lacked an adequate bank- ing and credit system during the rest of the century. French investors developed a morbid fear of paper securities and a marked preference for putting their savings into land. In England the same fears were felt. Parliament passed the “Bubble Act,” forbidding all companies except those specifi cally chartered by the government to raise capital by the sale of stock. In both countries the development of joint-stock fi nancing along the lines of the modern corporation was slowed down for over a century. Business enterprises continued to be typically owned by individ- uals and partnerships, which expanded by reinvestment of their own profi ts and so had another reason to keep profi ts up and wages down. But in England Walpole managed to save the South Sea Company, the East India Company, and the Bank, all of which were temporarily discredited in the eyes of the public. England continued to perfect its fi nancial machinery.

The credit of the two governments was also shaken by the “bubbles.” Much of the French war debt was repudiated in one way or another. Repudiation was in many cases morally justifi able, for many government creditors were unscrupulous war profi teers, but fi nancially it was disastrous, for it discouraged honest people from lending their money to the state. Nor was much accomplished toward reform of the taxes. The nobles continued to evade taxes imposed on them by Louis XIV, John Law’s plans for taxation evaporated with the rest of his project, and when in 1726 a fi nance minister tried to levy a 2 percent tax on all property, the vested interests, led by the Parlement of Paris, demolished this pro- posal also. Lacking an adequate revenue, and repudiating its debts, the French monarchy had little credit. The conception of the public or national debt hardly devel- oped in France in the eighteenth century. The debt was considered to be the king’s debt, for which no one except a few ministers felt any responsibility. The Bourbon government in fact often borrowed through the church, the Provincial Estates, or the city of Paris, which lenders considered to be bet- ter fi nancial risks than the king himself. The government was severely handicapped in its foreign policy and its wars. It could not fully tap the wealth of its own subjects or expand- ing global commerce.

In England none of the government debt was repudiated. Walpole managed to launch and keep going the system of the sinking fund, by which the government regularly set aside the wherewithal to pay interest and principal on its obligations. The credit of the British government became absolutely fi rm. The debt was considered a national debt, for which the British people themselves assumed the responsibility. Parliamentary govern- ment made this development possible. In France no one could tell what the king or his ministers might do, and hence the French were reluctant to trust them with their money. In England the people who had the money could also, through Parliament, determine the policies of state, decide what the money should be spent for, and levy enough taxes to maintain confi dence in the debt. England’s social elites nevertheless shared the common French aversion to taxes that would most affect their own interests, and the landowners who controlled the British Parliament, like those who controlled the Parlement of Paris, resisted direct taxation. The British government therefore drew two-thirds or more of its revenues from indirect taxes paid by the mass of the population. Yet British landowners, even dukes, did pay signifi cant amounts of taxes. There were no exemptions by class or rank, as in France. All propertied interests had a stake in the government. The wealth of the country stood behind the national debt. The national credit seemed inexhaustible. This was

The “Bubble Act”

Credit and the National Debt

33. Western Europe after the Peace of Utrecht, 1713–1740

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 291pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 291 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire292

M. BACHELIER, DIRECTOR OF THE LYONS FARMS by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686–1755)

The “farms” of which M. Bachelier was a director were the semiprivate syndicates to which the French monarchy delegated or farmed out the collection of its indirect taxes. Tax farmers were generally hated, and many became very rich. Nothing is known of the man in this picture, but with his huge wig, his lace cuffs, and his left hand politely extended, he typifi es the ruling elite in early eighteenth-century France. (University of Michigan Museum of Art)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 292pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 292 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

293

the supreme trump card of the British in their wars with France from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 to the fall of Napoleon 120 years later. And it was the political freedom and power of Parliament that gave Britain’s government its economic strength.

Fleury in France; Walpole in England

Fleury was 73 years old when he took offi ce in 1726 and 90 when he left it. He was thus not inclined to initiate programs for the distant future. Louis XV, as he came of age, proved to be indolent and selfi sh. Public affairs drifted, while France grew privately more wealthy, espe- cially the commercial and bourgeois classes. Walpole likewise kept out of controversies. His motto was quieta non movere, “let sleeping dogs lie.” He sought to win over the Tory squires to the Hanoverian and Whig regime by keeping the land taxes low. This policy was success- ful, and Jacobitism quieted down. Walpole supported the Bank, the trading companies, and the fi nancial interests, and they in turn supported him. It was a time of political calm, in which the lower classes were quiet and the upper classes were not quarreling; and it was therefore a favorable time for the development of parliamentary institutions.

Walpole has been called the fi rst prime minister and the architect of cabinet government, a system in which the prime minister and the ministers who head the cabinet departments are also members of the legislative body. He saw to it, by careful rigging, that a majority in the Commons always supported him. He avoided issues on which his majority might be lost. He thus began to acknowledge the principle of cabinet responsibility to a majority in Parliament, which was to become an important characteristic of cabinet government. And by selecting colleagues who agreed with him, and getting rid of those who did not, he advanced the idea of the cabinet as a body of ministers bound to each other and to the prime minister, obligated to follow the same policies and to stand or fall as a group. Thus Parliament was not only a rep- resentative or deliberative body, but also one that developed an effective executive power, without which neither representative government nor any government could survive.

To assure peace and quiet in domestic politics the best means was to avoid raising taxes. And the best way to avoid taxes was to avoid war. Fleury and Walpole both tried to keep at peace. They were not in the long run successful. Fleury was drawn into the War of the Polish Succession in 1733. Walpole kept England out of war until 1739. He always had a war party to contend with, and the most bellicose were those interested in the American trade—the slave trade, the sugar plantations, and the illicit sale of goods in the Spanish Empire. The British offi cial fi gures show that while trade with Europe in the eighteenth century was always less in war than in peace, trade with America always increased during war, except, indeed, during the War of American Independence.

In the 1730s there were constant complaints of indignities suffered by Britons on the coasts of Spain’s American colonies. The war party produced a Captain Jenkins, who car- ried with him a small box containing a withered ear, which he said had been cut from his head by the outrageous Spaniards. Testifying in the House of Commons, where he “com- mended his soul to God and his cause to his country,” he stirred up a commotion that led to war. So in 1739, after 25 years of peace, England plunged with wild enthusiasm into the War of Jenkins’s Ear. “They are ringing the bells now,” said Walpole; “they will soon be wringing their hands.” The war soon merged into a confl ict involving Europeans and oth- ers in all parts of the world. European wars could no longer be contained within Europe. The global economic and colonial systems that produced the expanding global trade also produced a series of global wars in which the European powers extended their confl icts across all of the distant territories and seas they sought to control.

Cabinet government

33. Western Europe after the Peace of Utrecht, 1713–1740

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 293pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 293 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire294

34. THE GREAT WAR OF THE MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE PEACE OF PARIS, 1763

The fi ghting lasted until 1763, with an uneasy interlude between 1748 and 1756. It went by many names. The opening hostilities between England and Spain were called, by the English, the War of Jenkins’s Ear. The struggle on the Continent in the 1740s over the Habsburg inheritance of the Austrian Empire was often known as the War of the Pragmatic Sanction. The Prussians spoke of the three “Silesian” wars. British colonials in America called the fi ghting of the 1740s King George’s War, or used the term “French and Indian Wars,” for the whole sporadic confl ict. Disorganized and nameless struggles at the same time shook the peoples of India. Eventually these widely scattered confl icts came to be called by two names: the War of the Austrian Succession (for hostilities between 1740 and 1748) and the Seven Years’ War (for the confl icts between 1756 and 1763). The two wars were really one. They involved the same two principal issues: the global duel of Britain and France for colonies, trade, and sea power, and the European duel of Prussia and Austria for territory and military power in central Europe.

Eighteenth-Century Warfare

Warfare at the time was in a kind of classical phase, which strongly affected the develop- ment of events. It was somewhat slow, formal, elaborate, and indecisive. The enlisted ranks of armies and navies were fi lled with men considered economically useless, picked up by recruiting offi cers among unwary loungers in taverns or on the wharves. All governments protected their productive population, peasants, mechanics, and bourgeois, preferring to keep them at home, at work, and paying taxes. Soldiers became a class apart, enrolled for long terms, paid wages, professional in their outlook, and highly trained. They lived in barracks or great forts and were dressed in bright uniforms (like the British “redcoats”), which, because camoufl age was unnecessary, they wore even in battle. Weapons were not powerful; infantry was predominant and was armed in this era with the smooth-bore musket to which the bayonet could be attached. In war the troops depended on great supply depots built up beforehand, which were practically immovable with the transportation available, so that armies, at least in central and western Europe, rarely operated more than a few days’ march from their bases. Soldiers fought methodically for pay. Generals hesi- tated to risk their troops, which took years to train and equip and were very expensive. Strategy took the form not of seeking out the enemy’s main force to destroy it in battle but

of maneuvering for advantages of position, applying a cumulative and sub- tle pressure somewhat as in a game of chess.

There was little religious or national feeling in such wars, though new kinds of “patriotic” thought and identity began to emerge by the 1760s in

England and France. The Prussian army recruited half or more of its enlisted personnel outside Prussia; the British army was largely made up of Hanoverian or other German regiments; even the French army had German units incorporated in it. Deserters from one side were enlisted by the other. War was between governments, or between the oligarchies and aristocracies that governments represented, not between whole peoples. It was fought for power, prestige, or calculated practical interests, not for ideologies, moral principles, world conquest, national survival, or ways of life. Popular nationalism had developed far- thest in England, where “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the King,” both breathing a low opinion of foreigners, became popular songs during these mid-eighteenth-century wars.

Little national feeling

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 294pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 294 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

29534. The Great War of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Peace of Paris, 1763

Civilians were little affected, except in India or the American wilderness where European conditions did not prevail. In Europe, a government aspiring to conquer a neigh- boring province did not wish to ruin or antagonize it beforehand. The fact that the western European struggle was largely naval kept it well outside civilian experience. Never had war been so contained within such parameters, certainly not in the religious wars of earlier times or in the national and “total” wars initiated later. This was one reason why governments went to war so easily. On the other hand governments also withdrew from war much more readily than in later times. Their treasuries might be exhausted, their trained soldiers used up; only practical or strategic questions were at stake; there was no war hysteria or pressure of mass opinion; the enemy of today might be the ally of tomorrow. Peace was almost as easy to make as war. Peace treaties were negotiated, not imposed. So the eighteenth century saw a series of wars and treaties and rearrangements of alliances, all arising over much the same issues and with exactly the same powers present at the end as at the beginning.

The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748

The War of the Austrian Succession was started by the king of Prussia. Frederick II, or the “Great,” was a young man of 28 when he became king in 1740. His youth had not been happy; he was temperamentally incompat- ible with his father. His tastes as a prince had run to playing the fl ute, corresponding with French authors, and writing prose and verse in the French language. His father, the sober, military-minded Frederick William I, thought him frivolous and dealt with him so clumsily that at the age of 18 he tried to escape from the kingdom. Caught and brought back, he was forced to witness the execution, by his father’s order, of the friend and companion who had shared in his attempted fl ight. Frederick changed as the years passed from a jaunty youth to an aged cynic, equally undeceived by himself, his friends, or his enemies, and seeing no reason to expect much from human nature. Though his greatest reputation was made as a soldier, he retained his literary interests all his life, became a historian of merit, and is perhaps of all modern monarchs the only one who would have a respectable standing if considered only as a writer. An unabashed freethinker, like many others of his day, he considered all religions ridiculous and laughed at the divine right of kings; but he would have no nonsense about the rights of the house of Brandenburg, and he took a solemn view of the majesty of the state.

Frederick lost no time in showing a boldness that his father would have surely dreaded. He decided to conquer Silesia, and in December 1740, he invaded that province, a region adjoining Prussia, lying in the upper valley of the Oder, and belonging to the kingdom of Bohemia and hence to the Danubian Empire of the Habsburgs (see map, p. 214, panel 3). Frederick’s invasion thus violated the Pragmatic Sanction that the Austrian emperor Charles VI had methodically negotiated throughout his long reign. The Pragmatic Sanc- tion was the general agreement signed by the European powers, including Prussia, that had stipulated that all domains of the Austrian Habsburgs should be inherited integrally by the daughter of Charles VI, Maria Theresa. The issue was between negotiated agreements and force; and Frederick, in attacking Silesia, could invoke nothing better than “reason of state,” the welfare and expansion of the state of which he was ruler.

The Pragmatic Sanction was now universally disregarded. All turned against Maria Theresa. Bavaria and Saxony put in claims. Spain, still hoping to revise the Peace of Utrecht, saw another chance to win back former Spanish holdings in Italy. The decisive intervention was that of France, which was torn between ambitions on the European

Frederick II

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 295pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 295 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire296

continent and ambitions on the sea and beyond the seas. Economic and commercial advan- tage might dictate concentration on the transoceanic struggle with Britain. But the French nobles were less interested than the British aristocrats in commercial considerations. They were infl uential because they furnished practically all the army offi cers and diplomats. They saw in Austria the traditional enemy, in Europe the traditional fi eld of valor, and in Belgium, which now belonged to the Austrians, the traditional object for annexation to France. Cardinal Fleury, much against his will and judgment, found himself forced into

war against the Habsburgs. Maria Theresa was at this time a young woman of 23. She proved to

be one of the most capable rulers ever produced by the house of Habsburg. She bore 16 children, and set a model of conscientious family living at a

time of much indifference to such matters among the upper classes. She was as devout and as earnest as Frederick of Prussia was irreligious and seemingly fl ip. She dominated her husband and her grown sons as she did her kingdoms and her duchies. With practical sense and political talents, she reconstructed her empire without having any doctrinaire program, and she accomplished more in her methodical way than other rulers who pursued more spectacular projects of reform.

Soon after Frederick invaded Silesia, she gave birth to her fi rst son, the future emperor Joseph II, in March 1741. She was preoccupied at the same time by the widening political crisis. Her dominions were assailed by half a dozen outside powers and her two kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia (both of which had accepted the Pragmatic Sanction) were wait- ing to see which way their advantage lay. Facing these dangers from all directions, she traveled to Hungary, where she would be crowned with the crown of St. Stephen and rally essential support. She made a carefully arranged and dramatic appearance before the

Maria Theresa

The young Frederick II of Prussia, who would later be called Frederick the Great, was more interested in music and lit- erature than in the military and political tasks of a monarch—which he neverthe- less pursued boldly after becoming king in 1740. This painting by Antoine Pesne portrays the “Crown Prince” in the year before he inherited the Prussian throne. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 296pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 296 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

297

Hungarian political elite, implored them to defend her, and swore to uphold the liberties of the Hungarian nobles and the separate constitution of the kingdom of Hungary. All Europe told how the young queen, by raising aloft the infant Joseph, who was to be heir to the throne, at a session of the Hungarian parliament, had thrown the dour Magyars into paroxysms of chivalrous resolve. The story was not quite true, but it is true that she made an eloquent address to the Magyars and that she took her baby with her and proudly exhibited him. The Hungarian magnates pledged their “blood and life” and delivered 100,000 soldiers.

The war, as it worked out in Europe, was reminiscent of the struggles in the time of Louis XIV, or even of the Thirty Years’ War now a century in the past. It was, again, a kind of civil struggle within the Holy Roman Empire, in which a league of German princes banded together against the monarchy of Vienna. This time the anti-Habsburg forces included the new kingdom of Prussia. It was, again, a collision of Bourbons and Habsburgs, in which the French pursued their old policy of maintaining division in Germany by supporting the German princes against the Habsburgs. The basic aim of French policy, according to instructions given by the French foreign offi ce to its ambassador in Vienna in 1725, was to keep the empire divided, preventing the union of German powers into “one and the same body, which would in fact become formidable to all the other powers of Europe.” This time France had Spain on its side. Maria Theresa was supported only by Britain and Holland, which subsidized her fi nancially but had inadequate land forces. The Franco-German-Spanish combination was highly successful. In 1742 Maria Theresa, hard pressed, accepted the proposals of Frederick for a separate peace. She temporarily granted him Silesia, and he temporarily slipped out of the war that he had been the fi rst to enter. In 1745 the French won the battle of Fontenoy in Belgium, the greatest battle of the war; they dominated Belgium, which nei- ther the Dutch nor British were able to defend. In the same year they fomented the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland to weaken or overthrow the British monarch.

But the situation overseas offset the situation in Europe. It was America that tilted the balance. The French fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island was captured by an expe- dition of New Englanders in conjunction with the British navy. British warships drove French and Spanish shipping from the seas. The French West Indies were blockaded. The French government, in danger of losing the wealth and taxes drawn from the sugar and slave trades, announced its willingness to negotiate.

Peace was made at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. It was based on an Anglo- French agreement in which Maria Theresa was obliged to concur. Britain and France arranged their differences by a return to the prewar status quo. The British returned Louisburg despite the protests of the Americans and relaxed their stranglehold on the Caribbean. The French returned Madras, which they had captured, and gave up their hold on Belgium. The Atlantic powers recognized Frederick’s annexation of Silesia, and Belgium was returned to Maria Theresa at the insistence of Britain and the Dutch. She and her ministers were very dissatisfi ed. They would infi nitely have preferred to lose Belgium and keep Silesia. They were required, in the interest of a European or even intercontinental balance of power, to give up Silesia and to hold Belgium for the benefi t of the Dutch against the French.

The war had been more decisive than the few readjustments of the map seemed to show. It proved the weakness of the French position, straddled as it was between Europe and the overseas world. Maintaining a huge army for use in Europe, the French could not, like Britain, concentrate upon the sea. On the other hand, because they were vulnerable

Parallels with past wars

Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle

34. The Great War of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Peace of Paris, 1763

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 297pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 297 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire298

on the sea, they could not hold their gains in Europe or control Belgium. The Austrians, though bitter, had reason for satisfaction. The war had been waged as a campaign to parti- tion the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburg Empire still stood. Hungary had thrown in its lot with Vienna, a fact of much subsequent importance. Bohemia, which was almost lost, remained under Austrian control. In 1745 Maria Theresa got her husband elected Holy

MARIA THERESA AND HER FAMILY by Martin van Meytens (Austrian, 1695–1770)

Maria Theresa had an imposing public image in her dual roles as Queen in the Austrian house of Habsburg and mother in a large household of 16 children. This portrait of the Queen with her husband and many of her children shows her devotion to family life as well as the power she exercised in governing her empire. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 298pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 298 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

299

Roman Emperor as Francis I, a position for which, as a woman, she could not qualify. But the loss of Silesia was momentous. Silesia was as populous as the Dutch Republic, heavily German, and industrially the most advanced region east of the Elbe. Prussia by acquiring it doubled its population and more than doubled its resources. Prussia with Silesia was unquestionably a great power. Because Austria was still a great power, there were hence- forth two great powers in the vague world known as “Germany,” a situation that came to be known as the German dualism. But the transfer of Silesia, which doubled the number of Germans ruled by the king of Prussia, made the Habsburg Empire less German, more Slavic and Hungarian, more Danubian and international. Silesia was the keystone of Germany. Frederick was determined to hold it; Maria Theresa was determined to win it back. A new war was therefore foreseeable in central Europe. As for Britain and France, the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was clearly only a truce.

The next years passed in a busy diplomacy, leading to what is known as the “reversal of alliances” and the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756. The Austrians set themselves to checking the growth of Prussia. Maria Theresa’s foreign minister, Count Kaunitz, perhaps the most artful diplomat of the century, concluded that the rise of Prussia had revolutionized the balance of power. Kaunitz, dramatically reversing traditional policy, proposed an alliance between Austria and France—between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. He encouraged the long- standing French aspirations for Belgium in return for French support in the destruction of Prussia. The overtures between Austria and France obliged Britain, Austria’s former ally, to reconsider its position in Europe; the British had Hanover to protect and were favorably impressed by the Prussian army. An alliance of Great Britain and Prussia was concluded in January 1756. Meanwhile Kaunitz consummated his alliance with France. One consequence was to marry the future Louis XVI to one of Maria Theresa’s daughters, Marie Antoinette, the “Austrian woman” of French Revolutionary fame. The Austrian alli- ance was never popular in France. Some French thought that the ruin of Prussia would only enhance the Austrian control of Germany and so undo the fundamental “Westphalia system.” The French progressive thinkers, known as “philosophes,” believed Austria to be priest-ridden and backward and were for ideological reasons admirers of the freethinking Frederick II. Dissatisfaction with its foreign policy was one reason for the growth of inter- nal opposition to the Bourbon government.

In any case, when the Seven Years’ War broke out in 1756, though it was a continu- ation of the preceding war in that Prussia fought Austria, and Britain fought France, the belligerents had all changed partners. Great Britain and Prussia were now allies, as were, more remarkably, the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. In addition, Austria had concluded a treaty with the Russian Empire for the annihilation of Prussia.

The Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763: In Europe and America

Although the Seven Years’ War began in America, let us turn fi rst to Europe, where the war was another war of territorial “partition.” As a league of powers had but recently attempted to partition the empire of Maria Theresa, and a generation before had in fact partitioned the empires of Sweden and Spain, so now Austria, Russia, and France set out to partition the newly created kingdom of Prussia. Their aim was to relegate the Hohenzollerns to the ter- ritory of Brandenburg. Even with Silesia, Prussia had less than 6,000,000 people; each of its three principal enemies had 20,000,000 or more. But war was less an affair of peoples than of states and standing armies, and the Prussian state and Prussian army were the most

The Diplomatic Revolution of 1756

34. The Great War of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Peace of Paris, 1763

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 299pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 299 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire300

effi cient in Europe. Frederick fought brilliant campaigns, moved rapidly along interior lines, and eluded, surprised, and reattacked the badly coordi- nated armies opposed to him. He proved himself the great military genius of his day. But genius was scarcely enough. Against three such powers, reinforced by Sweden and the German states, and with no ally except Great

Britain (and Hanover) whose aid was almost entirely fi nancial, the kingdom of Prussia by any reasonable estimate had no chance of survival. There were times when Frederick believed all to be lost, yet he went on fi ghting, and his strength of character in these years of adversity, as much as his ultimate triumph, later made him a hero and symbol for the Germans. His subjects, Junkers and even serfs, advanced in patriotic spirit under exter- nal pressure. The coalition tended to fall apart. The French lacked enthusiasm; they were fi ghting Britain, the Austrian alliance was unpopular, and Kaunitz would never plainly promise them Belgium. The Russians found that the more they moved westward the more they alarmed their Austrian allies. Frederick was left to deal only with the implacable Austrians, for whom he was more than a match. By the peace of Hubertusburg in 1763 not only did he lose nothing but he also retained Silesia.

Schönbrunn Palace, near Vienna, was the great palace of the Austrian Habsburgs. It was planned to compete with the vast palace of their French Bourbon rivals, but the plan was never completed because Maria Theresa (1740–1780) thought that the building seen here was adequate for her needs. (De Agostini/Getty Images)

Frederick’s military triumphs

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 300pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 300 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

301

For the rest, the Seven Years’ War was a phase in the long dispute between France and Great Britain. Its stakes were supremacy in the grow- ing world economy, control of colonies, and command of the sea. The two empires had been left unchanged in 1748 by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Both held possessions in India, in the West Indies, and on the American mainland (see maps, pp. 192, 307). In India both British and French possessed only discon- nected commercial establishments on the coast, infi nitesimal specks on the giant body of India. Both also traded with the Chinese along the Pearl River Delta in South China. Both occupied colonial way stations on the route to Asia—the British in St. Helena and Ascen- sion Island in the south Atlantic, the French in the more valuable islands of Mauritius and Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The French were active also on the coasts of Madagascar. The greatest way station, the Cape of Good Hope, belonged to the Dutch. In the West Indies the British plantations were mainly in Jamaica, Barbados, and some of the Leeward Islands; the French, in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. All were supported by the booming Atlantic slave trade that was transporting millions of enslaved people from Africa.

On the American mainland the French had more territory and the British had more people. In the British colonies from Georgia to Nova Scotia lived perhaps 2 million Europeans, predominantly English but with strong infusions of Scots-Irish, Dutch, Germans, French, and Swedes. Philadelphia, with some 40,000 people, was as large as any city in England except London. Native Americans were decimated by disease or driven out of most Atlantic coastal lands. But the population in these areas continued to grow, in part because of the expanding slave trade. About 275,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Britain’s North American colonies before 1775, and by the late eighteenth century the African American population in these mainland territories had increased to more than 700,000 people. Mean- while, the number of Europeans grew to be almost a quarter as large as the population in the mother country. The European Americans, however, were provincial, locally minded, and incapable of concerted action. In 1754 the British government called a congress at Albany in New York, hoping that the colonies would assume some collective responsibility for the coming war. The congress adopted an “Albany plan of union” drawn up by Benjamin Franklin, but the colonial legislatures declined to accept it, through fear of losing their sepa- rate identity. The colonials were willing, in a politically immature way, to rely on Britain for military action against France.

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 1619–1763

1619 First enslaved Africans arrive in Virginia

1700–1780 Expansion of European plantation system in Caribbean “Sugar Islands”

1720 The “Mississippi Bubble” in France and “South Sea Bubble” in Britain

1740–1748 War of Austrian Succession in Europe

1740–1780 Queen Maria Theresa rules and expands the Austrian Empire

1740–1786 Frederick II (the Great) rules and expands the kingdom of Prussia

1756–1763 The Seven Years’ War; expansion of British power in India and America

34. The Great War of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Peace of Paris, 1763

British and French colonial interests

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 301pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 301 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire302

The French were still in possession of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island, a northern stronghold established by Louis XIV, located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was designed for naval domination of the north Atlantic and to control access to the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, and the vast region now called the Middle West. Through all this tract of country the French constantly came and went, but there were sizable French settlements only around New Orleans in the south and Quebec in the north. One source of French strength was that the French were more successful than the British in gaining the support of the Indians. This was probably because the French, being few in numbers, did not threaten to expropriate their lands and also because Catholics at this time were incompara- bly more active than Protestants in Christian missions among non-European peoples. The French were also active in the fur trade with Native Americans, an economic exchange that added important commercial components to French-Indian relations.

Both empires, French and British, were held together by mercantilist regulations framed mainly in the interest of the home countries. In some ways the British Empire was more liberal than the French; it allowed local self-government and permitted immigration from all parts of Europe. In other ways the British system was stricter. British subjects, for example,

were required by the Navigation Acts to use British ships and seamen—English, Scottish, or colonial—whereas the French were freer to use the transport services of other nations. British sugar planters had to ship raw sugar to the home country, there to be refi ned and sold to Europe, whereas French planters were free to refi ne their sugar in the Caribbean islands. The mainland British colonials were forbidden to manufacture ironware and numerous other articles for sale; they were expected to buy such objects from England. Because the British sold little to the West Indies, where the slave population had no income with which to buy, the mainland colonies, though less valued as a source of wealth, were a far more important market for British goods. The North American colonials had prospered under the restrictive system, but they were beginning to fi nd much of it irksome at the time of the Seven Years’ War, and indeed evaded it when they could.

Fighting was endemic in the empires, even during years of peace in Europe. Nova Scotia was a trouble spot. French in population, it had been annexed by Britain at the Peace of Utrecht. Its proximity to Louisburg made it a scene of perpetual agitation. The British government in 1755, foreseeing war with France, bodily removed about 7,000 of the mostly French-speaking inhabitants of Acadia, originally a French colony and part of Nova Scotia. Although they were dispersed throughout Britain’s North American colonies, some of these displaced people eventually migrated to Louisiana and preserved a distinctive identity in the French Cajun culture that developed there. But the great disputed area was the Alleghenies. British colonials were beginning to fi nd their way westward through the mountains. French traders, soldiers, and empire builders were moving eastward toward the same mountains from points on the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. In 1749, at the request of Virginia and London capitalists, the British government chartered a land-exploitation company, the Ohio Company, to operate in territory claimed also by the French. The French built a fort at the point where the Ohio River is formed by the junction of two smaller rivers—Fort Duquesne, later called Pittsburgh. A force of colonials and British regular troops, commanded by Gen- eral Braddock and colonial offi cers such as the young George Washington, started through the wilderness to dislodge the French. It was defeated in July 1755, but this frontier confron- tation soon led to wider confl icts. A year later France and Britain declared war.

The British were brilliantly led by William Pitt, subsequently the Earl of Chatham, a man of wide vision and exceptional confi dence. “I know that I can save the country,”

Mercantilist regulations

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 302pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 302 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

303

he said, “and I know that no one else can.” He concentrated British effort on the navy and colonies, while subsidizing Frederick of Prussia to fi ght in Europe, so that England, as he put it, might win an empire on the plains of Germany. Only the enormous fi nancial credit of the British government made such a policy feasible. In 1758 British forces fi nally took Fort Duquesne, and Louisburg fell again in the same year. Gaining entry to the St. Lawrence, the British moved upstream to Quebec, and in 1759 a force under General Wolfe, stealth- ily scaling the heights, appeared by surprise on the Plains of Abraham outside the fortress, forcing the garrison to accept a battle, which the British won. With the fall of Quebec no further French resistance was possible on the American mainland. The British also, with superior naval power, occupied Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean and French slavetrading outposts in Africa.

The Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763: In India

Both British and French interests meanwhile profi ted from disturbed conditions in India. As large as Europe without Russia, India was a congested country of impoverished masses, speaking hundreds of languages and following many religions and subreligions, the two greatest being the Hindu and the Muslim. Waves of invasion through the northwest frontier since 1001 C.E. had produced a Muslim Empire, whose capital was at Delhi and which for a time held jurisdiction over most of the country. These Muslim emperors were known as Great Moguls. The greatest was Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, built roads, reformed the taxes, patronized the arts, and attempted to minimize religious differences among his peoples. The Muslim artistic culture fl ourished for a time after Akbar. One of his succes- sors, Shah Jehan (1628–1658), built the beautiful Taj Mahal near Agra and at Delhi built the delicately carved alabaster palace of the Moguls, in which he placed the Pea- cock Throne made of solid gold and studded with gems.

But meanwhile there was restlessness among the Hindus. The Sikhs, who had originated in the fi fteenth century as a reform movement in Hin- duism, went to war with the Mogul emperor in the seventeenth century. They became one of the most ferociously warlike of Indian peoples. Hindu princes in central India meanwhile formed a “Mahratta confederacy” against the Muslim emperor at Delhi. Matters were made worse when Aurungzeb, the last signifi cant Mogul emperor (1658–1707), adopted repressive measures against the Hindus. After Aurungzeb, India fell into a political dissolution that made the country vulnerable to both internal rebellions and new interventions from the increasingly assertive Europeans. Many of the modern princely states originated or became autonomous at this time. Hindu princes rebelled against the Mogul. Muslims, beginning as governors or commanders under the Mogul, set up as rulers in their own right. Thus originated Hyderabad, which included the fabulous diamond mines of Golconda and whose ruler long was called the wealthiest man in the world. Princes and would-be princes fought with each other and with the emperor.

The situation in India resembled, on a larger and more multicultural scale, what had happened in Europe in the Holy Roman Empire, where irreconcilable religious differences (of Catholics and Protestants) had also torn the country asunder, ambitious princes and city-states had won a chaotic independence, and foreign armies appeared repeatedly as invaders. India, like central Europe, suffered chronically from war, intrigue, and rival pre- tensions to territory; and in India, as in the Holy Roman Empire, outsiders and ambitious insiders benefi ted together.

Religious and political upheaval in India

34. The Great War of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Peace of Paris, 1763

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 303pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 303 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire304

The instability and violence in the interior had signifi cant repercussions on the Indian coasts. Here handfuls of Europeans were established in the coastal cities. By the troubles in the interior the Indian authorities along the coasts were reduced, so to speak, to a size and power with which the Europeans could deal. The Europeans—British and French— were agents of their respective East India companies. These companies built forts, main- tained soldiers, coined money, and entered into treaties with surrounding Indian powers, under charter of their home governments and with no one to deny them the exercise of such sovereign rights or political autonomy. Agents of the companies, like Indians them- selves, ignored or respected the Mogul emperor as suited their own purpose. They were, at fi rst, only one of the many contending forces in the fl ux and refl ux of Indian affairs. Their presence in India showed the international reach of European companies, the worldwide competition between British and French interests, and the growing importance of India in

the global economic system. Neither the British nor the French government, during the Seven Years’

War, had any intention of territorial conquest in India, their policy in this respect differing radically from their colonial ambitions in America. Nor were the two trading companies pushing their agents toward imperialistic

Intentions of the British and the French

The battle of Quebec, depicted here in an English illustration of the British army’s surprise approach to the Plains of Abraham, allowed Britain to gain control over most of North America and to increase its power in the expanding, global system of eighteenth-century trade. (The Bridgeman Art Library)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 304pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 304 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

305

political interventions in South Asia. The company directors in London and Paris disap- proved of fantastic schemes to intervene in Indian politics, insisted that their agents should attend to business only, and resented every penny and every sou not spent to bring in commercial profi t. But it took a year or more to exchange messages between Europe and India, and company representatives in India, caught up in the Indian power struggles and overcome by the chance to make personal fortunes or by dreams of empire, acted very much on their own, committing their home offi ces without compunction. Involvement in Indian affairs was not exactly new. We have seen how “Diamond” Pitt, in 1702, purchased the goodwill of the local ruler of the Carnatic when he had threatened by military force to reduce the English traders at Madras to submission.

The fi rst European to exploit the possibilities of the changing situation in mid-eighteenth- century India was the Frenchman Joseph-François Dupleix, who believed that the funds sent out by the company in Paris to fi nance the Indian trade were insuffi cient. His idea seems to have been not empire-building but to make the company into a local territorial power in order that, from taxes and other political revenues, it might have more capital for its commer- cial operations. In any case, during the years of peace in Europe after 1748, Dupleix found himself with about 2,000 French troops in the Carnatic. He lent them out to neighboring local rulers in return for territorial concessions. He also began to drill Indian soldiers by European methods, thereby creating the fi rst regiments of “sepoys”—Indian troops who served in the military forces of the European companies. Following a program of backing claimants to various Indian thrones, he built up a clientele of local rulers who now had specifi c obligations to Dupleix himself. He was very successful, for a small number of well-armed European troops or sepoys could overcome much larger, poorly armed Indian forces in pitched battle. But he was recalled to France in 1754, after his company became apprehensive of war with Britain and other trouble; and he died in disgrace.

When war came in 1756, British interests in India were advanced chiefl y by Robert Clive. He had come to India many years before as a clerk for the East India Company but had shown military talents and an ability to comprehend Indian politics. He had maneuvered, with little success, against Dupleix in the Carnatic during the 1740s. In 1756, on hearing the news of war in Europe, Clive shifted his attention to Bengal, hoping to drive the French from their trading stations there. The French were favored in Bengal by the local Muslim ruler, Suraja Dowla, who pro- ceeded to anticipate Clive’s arrival by expelling the British from Calcutta (the city now called Kolkata). Capturing the city, he shut up 146 Englishmen in a small room without windows—soon known in England as the “Black Hole of Calcutta”—and kept them there all night, during which most of them died of suffocation. Clive, soon arriving with a small force of British and sepoys, routed Suraja Dowla at the battle of Plassey in 1757. He put his own puppet on the Bengal throne and extorted huge reparations both for the company and for himself. Returning to England, he was received with mixed feelings; but he was given a new title (Baron Clive of Passy) and appointed the “governor” of Bengal. He strove in India to reduce the almost incredible corruption of company employees there, individuals who abandoned virtually all moral scruples to pursue irresistible chances for easy riches. Finally he committed suicide in 1774.

It was British sea power, more fundamentally than Clive’s tactics, that assured the triumph of British over French ambitions in South Asia. The British government still had no intention of conquest in India, but it could not see its East India Company forced out by agents of the French company in collaboration with Indian princes. Naval forces were therefore dispatched to the Indian Ocean; and it was the British navy that made it possible

Robert Clive

34. The Great War of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Peace of Paris, 1763

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 305pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 305 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire306

for Clive to move quickly from Chennai to Kolkata. British ships also cut off the French posts in India from Europe and from each other. By the end of the war all the French estab- lishments in India, as in Africa and America, were at the mercy of the British. The French overseas colonies lay prostrate, and France itself was again detached from the transoceanic trade on which much of its commercial economy rested. In 1761 France made an alliance with Spain, which was alarmed for the safety of its own American Empire after the British victories at Quebec and in the Caribbean. But the British also defeated Spain.

The Peace Settlement of 1763

The British armed forces had been spectacularly successful. Yet the peace treaty, signed at Paris in February 1763, fi ve days before the Austro-Prussian peace of Hubertusburg, was by no means unfavorable to the defeated. The French Duke of Choiseul was a skillful and single-minded negotiator. The British, Pitt having fallen from offi ce in 1761, were represented

Britain’s imperial role in late eighteenth-century India is represented in this Indian miniature of a British offi cer’s wife surrounded by Indian servants. The social hierarchies within the growing empire appear in this scene of domestic order and wealth, which dates from about 1785. (Werner Forman Archive/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 306pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 306 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

307

by a confused group of parliamentary favorites of the new king, George III. France ceded to Britain all French territory on the North American mainland east of the Mississippi. Canada thereby became British, and the colonials of the thirteen colonies were relieved of the French presence beyond the Alleghenies. To Spain, in return for aid in the last days of the war, France ceded all holdings west of the Mississippi and at its mouth, including New Orleans. France thereby virtually abandoned the North American continent. But these regions were still of minor commercial importance for European trading companies, and the French, in return for surrendering them, retained many economically more valuable establishments elsewhere. In the West Indies the British planters, and in England the powerful “West India interest,” feared competition from the French sugar islands and wanted to exclude them from the protected economic system of the British Empire. France therefore received back Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as

French concessions

THE WORLD IN 1763 At the Peace of Paris of 1763 the British overseas empire trimphed over the French. The French ceded their holdings on the North American mainland east of the Mississippi to Britain, those west of the Mississippi to Spain. Britain also took Florida from Spain in 1763, but lost it, returning it to Spain in 1783, at the close of the War of American Independence. The French retained their sugar islands in the West Indies and their trading stations in India; they were stopped from empire-building but did not greatly suffer commercially from the Seven Years’ War. The British proceeded to build their empire in India.

Spanish Empire

Portuguese Empire

French Empire

British Empire

Dutch Empire

Ottoman Empire

Russian Empire

ATLANTIC OCEAN

PACIFIC OCEAN

Hudson Bay

PACIFIC OCEAN

INDIAN OCEAN

NORTH AMERICA

SOUTH AMERICA

AFRICA

A S I A

PHILIPPINES (Spain)

CHINA

PERU

PORTUGAL SPAIN

FRANCE

GREAT BRITAIN

SWEDEN

R U S S I A

INDIA

ICELAND

DUTCH EAST INDIES

ALASKA

GUIANA (Dutch & French)

FLORIDA (Britain, 1763–1783)

GREENLAND

GUINEAEUROPEAN SLAVE TRA

D IN

G STA

TIO N

S

ASCENSION (Britain)

ST. HELENA (Britain)

REU NIO

N

(Fra nce

)

BENGAL (Britain)

CEYLON (Dutch)

PERSIA

AUST. HUN.

POLANDH.R.E.

DEN.

NETHERLANDS

MEXICO

MAURITIUS (France)

JA PA

N

Canton

Ft. Duquesne

Louisburg

Dakar (France)

Cape Town (Dutch)

Tobolsk Tomsk

Irkutsk

Yakutsk

EAST INDIA

British Sphere, 1763

CEYLON (Dutch)

INDIA

Brahmaputra R.Ganges R.

H I M A L A Y A S

Bay of Bengal

Sut lej

R.

Arabian Sea CA R

N A

TI C

Delhi

Bombay (Britain)

Goa (Portugal)

Pondicherry (France) Madras (Britain)

Hyderabad

Calcutta (Britain)

Chandernagor (France)

Agra Plassey

CUBA (Spain)

JAMAICA (Britain)

SA NT

O D OM

INGO (Fran

ce)

HIS PAN

IOLA (Spai

n)

PU ERT

O RI CO (S

pain)

GUADALOUPE (France) MARTINIQUE

(France)

BARBADOS (Britain)

TRINIDAD (Britain)

CURACAO (Dutch)

CARIBBEAN SEA

VENEZUELA (Spain)

WEST INDIA

34. The Great War of the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Peace of Paris, 1763

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 307pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 307 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 7 The Global Struggle for Wealth and Empire308

most of its slavetrading stations in Africa; and the French still controlled the highly lucrative sugar plantations in Saint-Domingue (Santo Domingo). In India, the French remained in possession of their commercial installations—offi ces, warehouses, and docks—at Pondicherry (now Puducherry) and other cities. They were forbidden to erect fortifi cations or pursue political ambitions among Indian princes—a practice which neither the French nor the British government had hitherto much favored in any case.

The treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg, closing the prolonged war of the midcentury, made the year 1763 a memorable turning point. Prussia confi rmed its status as an emerg- ing major power, which meant that the dualism of Germany would continue. Austria and Prussia eyed each other as rivals. Frederick’s aggressive occupation of Silesia in 1740 was legalized and even given a new moral status in Prussia by the heroic defense that had proved necessary to retain the plunder. Frederick himself, from 1763 until his death in 1786, was a man of peace, philosophical and even benign. But the German crucible had boiled, and out of it had come a Prussia even more disposed by its escape from annihilation to glorify its army as the steel framework of its life.

The Anglo-French settlement was far-reaching and rather curious. Although the British won decisive victories everywhere in the global war, it resulted in no commercial calamity for France. French trade with America and the East grew as rapidly after the Seven Years’ War as before it, and by 1785 it was double what it had been in 1755. For England the war also opened up new commercial channels. British trade with America and the East probably tripled between 1755 and 1785. But the outstanding British gains were imperial and strategic. The European balance of power was preserved, the French had been kept out of Belgium, British colonial subjects in North America seemed secure, and Britain had again vindicated its command of the sea. British sea power implied, in turn, that British sea- borne commerce was safe in peace or war, while the seaborne commerce for the French, or of any others, depended ultimately on the political requirements of the British. But the French still had a few cards to play, and they would soon play them in the American and French revolutions.

For America and India the peace of 1763 was decisive in pushing the peoples of these two vast territories toward closer connections with the political and commercial institu-

tions of the British Empire. America north of Mexico was to become part of an English-speaking world. In India the British government was drawn increasingly into a policy of territorial occupation; a British “paramount power” eventually emerged in place of the empire of the Moguls. British political rule in India stimulated and protected British business there, until

in the greatest days of British prosperity India was one of the main pillars of the British economic system, and the road to India became in a real sense the lifeline of the British empire. But in 1763 this state of affairs was still in the future and was to be reached by many intermediate steps.

Repercussions of the settlement

For suggested further readings and useful Web sites, interactive exercises, glossary, chronologies, and more, go to the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e.

pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 308pal85549_ch07_267-308.indd 308 03/08/13 7:36 PM03/08/13 7:36 PM

Final PDF to printer

309

C h a p t e r 8 THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The eighteenth century,  or at least the years of that century preceding the French Revolution of 1789, is commonly known in European history as the Age of Enlightenment. This broad term may sim- plify or distort the era’s complex currents of cultural and political change, but no other name describes so many features of the time so well. People strongly felt that theirs was an enlightened age, and it is from their own evaluation of themselves that our term Age of Enlightenment is derived. Everywhere there was a feeling that Europeans had at last emerged from a long twilight. The past was generally regarded as a time of barbarism or darkness in which people knew much less about the laws of nature and the value of rational analysis. The sense of progress was all but

universal among the educated classes. It was the belief both of the forward-looking thinkers and writers known as the philosophes and of the forward-looking monarchs, the “enlight- ened despots,” together with their ministers and offi cials.

The leading ideas of the Enlightenment—optimistic beliefs in the historical advance of reason, science, education, social reform, tolerance, and enlightened government— have been constant themes in the modern world. The Enlightenment, in short, remains a dynamic tradition in cultural and political life. Intellectual debates since the eighteenth century have almost always returned, explicitly or implicitly, to questions about the valid- ity and legacy of Enlightenment conceptions of truth, knowledge, and progress. The Enlightenment has often been challenged or condemned by infl uential cultural movements (for example, romanticism, postmodernism, religious revivals) and by modern political ideologies (for example, fascism, ethnic nationalisms). Yet the vehemence of its modern critics confi rms the Enlightenment’s exceptional, enduring importance in the cultures and politics of modern societies.

35. The Philosophes— and Others

36. Enlightened Despotism: France, Austria, Prussia

37. Enlightened Despotism: Russia

38. The Partitions of Poland

39. New Stirrings: The British Reform Movement

40. The American Revolution

Chapter emblem: Detail from a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Allan Ramsay (1713–1784). (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 309pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 309 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment310

Eighteenth-century critiques of existing regimes and cultural traditions drew increas- ingly on the ideas of the Enlightenment; indeed, such ideas were contributing by the end of the century to explosive political revolutions in America and Europe. In later centuries, Enlightenment ideas continued to generate opposition to unpopular governments or domi- nant cultural ideologies or hierarchical social systems, but the Enlightenment was also condemned in many cultures. For its advocates and critics alike, however, the “Age of Enlightenment” has always represented a decisive historical moment and cultural force in the development of “modernity.”

35. THE PHILOSOPHES—AND OTHERS The Spirit of Progress and Improvement

The spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was drawn from the scientifi c and intel- lectual revolution of the seventeenth century. The Enlightenment carried over and popular- ized the ideas of Bacon and Descartes, of Bayle and Spinoza, and, above all, of Locke and Newton. It carried over the philosophy of natural law and of natural right. There had never been an age in which Europeans were so skeptical toward tradition, so confi dent in the powers of human reason and of science, so fi rmly convinced of the regularity and harmony

of nature, and so deeply imbued with the sense of civilization’s advance and progress.

The idea of progress has often been described as the dominant or char- acteristic idea of European civilization in the modern era, or since the late

seventeenth century. It is a belief, a kind of nonreligious faith, that the conditions of human life become better as time goes on, that in general each generation is better off than its pre- decessors and will contribute by its labor to an even better life for generations to come, and that in the long run all humankind will share in the same advance. All the elements of this belief had been present by 1700. It was after 1700, however, that the idea of progress became explicit. In the seventeenth century it had shown itself in a more rudimentary way in the sporadic intellectual dispute in England and France known as the quarrel of Ancients and Moderns (which, as noted earlier, also became part of the challenge to offi cial the- orists in Louis XIV’s academies). The Ancients held that the works of the Greeks and Romans had never been surpassed. The Moderns, pointing to science, art, literature, and invention, declared that their own time was the best, that it was natural for people of their time to do better than the ancients because they came later and built upon their predeces- sors’ achievements. The quarrel was never exactly settled, but a great many people in 1700 were Moderns.

Far-reaching also was the faith of the age in the natural faculties of the human mind. Extreme skepticism, but not a skeptical outlook, was rejected. Educated persons in the eighteenth century were less likely to be superstitious, terrifi ed by the unknown, or addicted to magic. The witchcraft mania abruptly died. Indeed all sense of the supernatural became dim for many Europeans. “Modern” people not only ceased to fear the devil but also to fear God. They thought of God less as a Father than as a First Cause of the physical universe. There was less sense of a personal God, or of the inscrutable imminence of divine Provi- dence, or of the human need for saving grace. God was less the God of Love than the inconceivably intelligent Being who had made the amazing universe now discovered by human reason. The great symbol of the Christian God was the Cross, on which a divine being had suffered in human form. The symbol of divinity that occurred to people of

Faith in progress

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 310pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 310 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

31135. The Philosophes—and Others

scientifi c view was the Watchmaker. The intricacies of the physical universe were com- pared to the intricacies of a watch, and it was argued that just as a watch could not exist without a watchmaker, so the universe as discovered by Newton could not exist without a God who created it and set it moving by its mathematical laws. It was almighty intelli- gence that was thought divine.

Of course not everyone was primarily moved by such ideas. The fi rst half of the eighteenth century was in fact also a time of continuing religious fervor, and new religious movements attracted deeply committed adherents throughout the whole century. Isaac Watts wrote many hymns that are still familiar in English-speaking churches; the great church music of J. S. Bach was composed mainly in the 1720s; Handel’s oratorio, The Messiah, was fi rst performed in 1741; and it was at about this time that congregations fi rst sang the Adeste fi deles (“O Come, All Ye Faithful”), originally Catholic in inspiration but soon adopted by Protestants also. The Lutherans of Germany were stirred by the movement known as Pietism, which stressed the inner spiritual experience of ordinary persons as distinct from the doctrines taught and debated in theological faculties. The quest for an “inner light,” or illumination of the soul rather than of the reason, was somewhat contrary to the main thrust of the Age of Enlight- enment, and a religious urge for improvement of the individual rather than of social institu- tions was hardly central to the ideas of the age, but such ideas were by no means merely conservative, for they were in general highly critical of the existing order.

Within the Church of England John Wesley, while a student at Oxford, joined a group of like-minded young men for prayer and meditation. They engaged in good works to relieve the sufferings of prisoners and the poor, to whom they distributed food and clothing, while also teaching them how to read. Going outside the restrictive system of parishes, Wesley and others took to “itinerant” preaching, often to immense crowds in open fi elds. Wesley is said to have traveled 250,000 miles within Great Britain over a period of 50 years. He and George Whitfi eld, who shared his views, preached also in the English American colonies, where they helped to arouse the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Such movements had a democratizing effect in stressing individual worth and spiritual consciousness independently of the established religious authorities. Indeed, the spokesmen for older churches dismissed such movements as “enthusiasm,” which was then a word of reproach. By the time he died in 1791, Wesley had about half a million followers in what were called Methodist societies. Wesley himself tried to keep them within the Church of England, but separate Methodist churches were already founded in England and the United States.

In a way these expressions of religious feeling refl ected differences between the popu- lar and elite cultures that have already been described. While some of the elite joined in the new movements, it was on the whole the less comfortable social classes who did so. The offi cial churches, Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic, did not wish to be disturbed by reli- gious revivalism. Bishops were cultivated gentlemen of the age. But the most vehement intellectual leaders pushed churches and theological traditions aside as they promoted the progressive uses of human reason.

The science and new learning in this “age of reason,” however, did not end the popular interest in magic or mystifi cation. A Swiss pastor, J. C. Lavater, attracted attention with his supposed science of “physiognomy,” by which a person’s character could be read in the play of the facial features. An Austrian physician, F. A. Mesmer, created a stir in Paris by arranging séances where people were touched by a wand, or sat in tubs, to receive “animal magnetism” in the hope of curing various ills. His “mesmerism” was an early stage in the

Religious fervor and Pietism

John Wesley and Methodism

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 311pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 311 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment312

discovery of hypnosis, but it is signifi cant that a committee of the Royal Academy of Sciences, after investigation, concluded that Mesmer’s own theories to explain these strange

phenomena were without foundation. More in the mainstream of the new intellectual culture was Freema-

sonry, which took form in England and soon spread to the Continent. The Masons were generally persons who held typical Enlightenment views, well

disposed toward reason, progress, toleration, and humane reforms, and respectful toward God as architect of the universe; but they met secretly in lodges, in an atmosphere of mys- terious rituals and occult knowledge. Men of all walks of life, nobles, clergy, and middle classes, belonged to the lodges (a few also allowed women to join). Freemasonry thus had the effect of bringing persons of different social classes together, somewhat harmlessly for self-improvement and the improvement of others. It aroused suspicion, however, because of its secrecy; and a small deviant offshoot, the Illuminati of south Germany, was consid- ered so dangerous that the Bavarian government suppressed it in 1786. There were later some who insisted that the French Revolution had been caused by a conspiracy of Illuminati, philosophes, and other clandestine plotters, but this idea was never any more than the belief of a few frightened conservative critics. The word Illuminati meant “the enlightened ones,” but the notion of secrecy was foreign to the Enlightenment, which relied above all else on publicity and the reading public.

The Philosophes

Philosophe is simply French for philosopher, but to be “philosophical” in the eighteenth century meant to approach any subject in a critical and inquiring spirit. The French word is used in English to denote a group of writers who were not philosophers in the sense of treating ultimate questions of knowledge or existence. They were social or literary crit- ics, popularizers, and publicists. Most philosophes were men, but many women also participated in Enlightenment culture. The French writer Emilie du Châtelet, for exam- ple, translated Newton and explained the signifi cance of the new theories in her scientifi c essays. Though often learned, the philosophes wrote to gain attention, and it was through the philosophes that the ideas of the Enlightenment spread. Formerly authors had gener- ally been persons of leisure, or talented protégés of aristocratic or royal patrons, or pro- fessors or clerics supported by the income from religious foundations. In the Age of Enlightenment a great many were freelancers, grub-streeters, or journalists. They wrote

for “the publick.” The reading public had greatly expanded; by the 1780s in France, liter-

acy rates had risen to 47 percent among men and 27 percent among women. The educated middle class, commercial and professional, was much larger

than ever before. Women readers formed a growing audience for novels and literary jour- nals, country gentlemen sought new scientifi c advice on agriculture, and even noblemen wished to keep informed. Newspapers and magazines multiplied, and people who could not read them at home could read them in coffeehouses or in reading rooms organized for that purpose. There was a great demand also for dictionaries, encyclopedias, and surveys of all fi elds of knowledge. The new readers wanted matters made interesting and clear. They appreciated wit and lightness of touch. From such a public, literature itself greatly benefi ted.

The style of the eighteenth century became admirably fl uent, clear, and exact, neither ponderous on the one hand nor frothy on the other. Such writings attracted new readers in every country, from the interior of Europe to the America of Benjamin Franklin. People

Freemasonry

The reading public

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 312pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 312 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

313

began to talk of “public opinion” as a kind of critical tribunal that judged the signifi cance of new books and established or destroyed the reputations of ambitious authors. This new public opinion, the French writer Malesherbes explained, was an independent social force “that all powers respect, that appreciates all talents, that pronounces on all people of merit.” Critical reviews of literature, art, and music provoked debates in newspapers, journals, and coffeehouses, all of which contributed to an expanding public sphere beyond the personal world of private households and outside the offi cial world of government institutions. The bourgeois middle class was becoming not only educated but also thoughtful and critical. But the expanding public sphere was not limited to the ideas or cultural preoccupations of a single social class.

The writings of the day were nevertheless affected by social conditions and by the cultural context that constrained their publication. They were all written under censorship. The theory of censorship was to protect people from harmful ideas as they were protected from shoddy merchandise or dishonest weights and measures. In England the censorship was so mild as to have little effect. Other countries, such as Spain, had a powerful censorship. France, the center of the Enlightenment, had both a complicated censorship and a large reading and writing public. The church, the Parlement of Paris, the royal offi cials, and the printers’ guilds all had a hand in the censoring of books. French censorship, however, was loosely administered, and after 1750 writers were little disturbed by it. It cannot be compared to the repressive censorship of more recent authoritarian governments. Yet in one way it had an unfavorable effect on French thought and letters. It discouraged writers from openly or explicitly addressing concrete public questions. Legally forbidden to criticize church or state, they threw their criticisms on a more abstract level. Barred from attacking matters in particular, they tended to attack matters in general. Or they talked of the customs of the Persians and the Iroquois but not the French. Their works became full of double meanings, sly digs, innuendoes, and jokes by which authors, if questioned, could declare that they did not mean what all the world knew they did mean. As for readers, they developed a taste for forbidden books, which were always easy enough to obtain through illicit channels and foreign booksellers.

Paris was the heart of the movement. Here, in the town houses of the well-to-do, literary and social celebrities gathered for literate conversation. It might occasionally happen that a notable philosophe was also wealthy; such was the case of Helvétius, who not only wrote books On the Mind and On Man but also gave grand entertainments at which such matters were discussed. Mainly, however, this mingling of people and ideas went on in salons conducted by women who became famous as hostesses, or salonnières, and who played a crucial mediating role in what came to be called the “Republic of Letters.” Madame de Geoffrin, for example, for a period of 25 years beginning about 1750, organized conversations of artists and writers at dinner, sometimes helped them fi nancially, and introduced them to persons of infl u- ence in high society or in government. She welcomed visiting foreigners also, such as Horace Walpole and David Hume from England and young Stanislas Poniatowski before he became king of Poland. Because other women held similar salons, philosophes and other writers had frequent opportunity to meet and exchange ideas.

Salons became well-organized meeting places at which authors introduced new works to critical readers, salonnières read letters from travelers or distant correspondents, and lively conversation spread the reputations of aspiring philosophes. The leading salonnières gave careful attention to the intellectual themes and social continuities of their salons.

Censorship

Paris: the heart of the Enlightenment

35. The Philosophes—and Others

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 313pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 313 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment314

Suzanne Necker, whose salon met on Friday afternoons during the 1770s and 1780s, prepared for her weekly conversations by listing in her journal the ideas and books that she wanted to discuss. Julie de Lespinasse provided opportunities for almost constant discus- sion at her Parisian home, where she received visitors every evening of the week for 12 years. “Her great art,” wrote one admirer, “was to show to advantage the minds of oth- ers, and she enjoyed doing that more than revealing her own.” Salons and salonnières pro- moted the ideals of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters in which talent and creativity counted for more than noble lineage; and though women lost much of their cultural infl u- ence after the 1780s, some salons of this kind survived the Revolution. In 1795, after the Terror, the widows of two eminent philosophes, Helvétius and Condorcet, opened or reopened their salons in Paris for people of moderate republican or liberal sentiments. Sophie Condorcet became a writer herself and a translator of Adam Smith. Her salon remained a center of liberal opposition during the years of Napoleon. More short-lived was the salon of the even more famous Germaine de Staël, who also wrote widely read books and who, among her many other ideas, deplored the subordination of women that the Revolution had done little to change. These post-Revolutionary salons became social-cultural meeting places in which much of France’s nineteenth-century liberalism would begin to emerge.

In Paris also, in the mid-eighteenth century, the most serious of all philosophe enterprises, the Encyclopédie, was published in 17 large volumes and completed over the years 1751 to 1772. Edited by Denis Diderot, it was a great compendium of scientifi c, technical, and historical knowledge, car- rying a strong undertone of criticism of existing society and institutions and

epitomizing the skeptical, rational, and scientifi c spirit of the age. It was not the fi rst encyclo- pedia, but it was the fi rst to have a distinguished list of contributors or to be conceived as a positive force for social progress. Virtually all the French philosophes contributed—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, d’Alembert (who assisted in the editing), Buffon, Turgot, Quesnay, and many others, all sometimes collectively called the Encyclopedists. Although edited in Paris, the Encyclopédie became very widely known and read. About 25,000 multivolumed sets were sold before the Revolution, about half of them outside France, because French had become an international language understood by educated persons all over Europe. Within France itself the Encyclopédie was read in all parts of the country and in the most infl uential ranks of society. At Besançon, for example, a city of about 28,000 inhabitants, 137 sets were sold to local residents, of whom 15 were members of the clergy, 53 were of the nobility, and 69 were lawyers, doctors, merchants, government offi cials, or others of what was called the Third Estate. The privileged groups whom the Encyclopedists most often criticized, that is, the clergy and the nobility, read the Encyclopédie or at least purchased it far out of propor- tion to their numbers in the population as a whole.

Men and women who considered themselves philosophes, or close to the philosophes in spirit, were found all over Europe. Frederick the Great was an eminent philosophe; not only was he the friend of Voltaire and host to a circle of literary and scientifi c men at Potsdam, but he also wrote epigrams, satires, dissertations, and histories, as well as works on military science; and he had a gift of wit, a sharp tongue, and a certain impishness toward the tradi- tional and the pompous. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, was also a philosophe for much the same reason. Maria Theresa, of Austria, was not a philosophe; she was too reli- gious and too little concerned with general ideas. Her son Joseph, on the other hand, as we shall see, proved to be virtually a philosophe enthroned. In England Bishop Warburton was considered by some of his friends as a philosophe; he held that the Church of England of his day, as a social institution, was exactly what pure reason would have invented. The Scottish

Diderot’s Encyclopédie

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 314pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 314 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

315

skeptical philosopher David Hume also counted as a philosophe, as did Edward Gibbon, who shocked the pious by his attacks on Christianity in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Dr. Samuel Johnson was not a philosophe, though he was best known for a typical eighteenth-century project—the compilation of a new dictionary of the English language. Johnson worried over the supernatural, adhered to the established church, defl ated pretentious authors, and even declared that Voltaire and Rousseau were evil men who should be sent “to the plantations.” There were also Italian and German philosophes, like the Marquis di Beccaria, who condemned torture and sought to humanize the criminal law, or Baron Grimm, who sent a literary newsletter from Paris to his many subscribers.

Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau

Most famous of all philosophes were the French trio, Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Rousseau (1712–1778). They differed vehemently with each other, but all were hailed as literary geniuses in their own day. All turned from pure literature to works of political commentary and social analysis. All thought that the existing state of society could be improved.

The salon of Madame de Geoffrin, depicted here by the artist Lemonnier, became one of the best-known meeting places for writers and artists in mid-eighteenth-century Paris. This imag- ined scene of an author reading from his work was painted early in the following century, but it shows the enduring cultural reputation of famous salons and salonnières. (RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

35. The Philosophes—and Others

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 315pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 315 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment316

Montesquieu, twice a baron, was a landed aristocrat, a seigneur or manorial lord in southwestern France. He inherited from his uncle a seat in the Parlement of Bordeaux and sat actively in that parlement after the death of Louis XIV. He was part of the noble resur- gence that began about 1715 and continued on through the eighteenth century. Although he shared many of the ideas in the stream of aristocratic and antiabsolutist thought, he went beyond a mere self-centered class philosophy. In his great work, The Spirit of Laws,

published in 1748, he developed two principal ideas. One was that forms of government varied according to climate and circumstances, for example, that despotism was suited to large empires in hot climates, and that democ- racy would work only in small city-states. His other great doctrine, aimed against royal absolutism in France (which he called “despotism”), was the

separation and balance of powers. In France he believed that power should be divided between the king and a great many “intermediate bodies”—parlements, provincial estates, organized nobility, chartered towns, and even the church. His position as a judge in parlement, a provincial, and a nobleman gave him good reasons to favor the fi rst three, and his work in Bordeaux helped him to recognize the importance of the bourgeoisie in French towns; as for the church, he observed that, while he took no stock in its teachings, he thought it useful as a barrier to undue centralization of government. He greatly admired the English constitution as he understood it, believing that England carried over, more success- fully than any other country, the feudal liberties of the early Middle Ages. He thought that in England the necessary separation and balance of powers was obtained by an ingenious mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (king, lords, and commons) and by a separation of the functions of the executive, legislature, and judiciary. This doctrine had a wide infl uence in Europe and was also well known to the Americans who in 1787 wrote the Constitution of the United States. Montesquieu’s own philosophe friends thought him too conservative and even tried to dissuade him from publishing his ideas. He was, indeed, technically a reactionary, favoring a scheme of things that antedated Louis XIV, and he was unusual among contemporaries in his admiration of the “barbarous” Middle Ages.

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws

This portrait of Voltaire (c. 1736) by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour suggests the playful, ironic style that made his works accessible and popular, even when he was attacking religious persecutions or the suppression of controversial ideas. (Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 316pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 316 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

317

Voltaire was born in 1694 into a comfortable bourgeois family and christened François-Marie Arouet; “Voltaire,” an invented name, is simply the most famous of all eighteenth-century pen names. Until he was over 40 he was known only as a clever writer of epigrams, tragedies in verse, and an epic. There- after he turned increasingly to philosophical and public questions. His strength throughout lay in the facility of his pen. He is the easiest of all great writers to read. He was always trenchant, logical, and incisive, sometimes scurrilous; mocking and sarcastic when he wished to be, equally a master of deft irony and of withering ridicule. However serious in his purpose, he achieved it by getting his readers to laugh.

In his youth Voltaire spent 11 months in the Bastille for what was considered to be impertinence to the Regent, who, however, in the next year rewarded him with a pension for one of his dramas. He was again arrested after a fracas with a nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan, but he moved to England to avoid another imprisonment. He remained an incor- rigible bourgeois, while never deeply objecting to the aristocracy on principle. Through his admirer Mme. de Pompadour (another bourgeois, though the king’s favorite) he later became a gentleman of the bedchamber and royal historian to Louis XV. These functions he fulfi lled in absentia, when at all, for Paris and Versailles were too unsafe for him. He was the personal friend of Frederick the Great, in whose household he lived for about two years at Potsdam. The two fi nally quarreled, for no stage was big enough to hold two such prima donnas for long. Voltaire made a fortune from his writings, pensions, speculations, and practical business sense. In his later years he purchased a manor at Ferney near the Swiss frontier. Here he became, as he said, the “hotel keeper of Europe,” receiving the streams of distinguished admirers, favor hunters, and distressed persons who came to seek him out. He died at Paris in 1778, at the age of 84, by far the most famous man of letters in Europe. His collected writings fi ll over 70 volumes.

Voltaire was mainly interested in the freedom of thought. Like Montesquieu, he was an admirer of England. He spent three years in that country, where, in 1727, he witnessed the state funeral accorded to Sir Isaac Newton and his burial in Westminster Abbey. Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters on the English (1733) and Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738) not only brought England increasingly before the consciousness of the rest of Europe but also popularized the new scientifi c ideas—the inductive philosophy of Bacon, the physics of Newton, and the psychology of Locke, whose doctrine that all true ideas arose from sense experience undercut the authority of religious belief. What Voltaire mainly admired in England was its religious liberty, its tolerance for diverse ideas and scientifi c inquiry, its relative freedom of the press, and its respect for men of letters like himself. Political liberty concerned him much less than it did Montesquieu. Louis XIV, a villain for Montesquieu and the neoaristocratic school, was a hero for Voltaire, who wrote a laudatory Age of Louis XIV (1751) praising the Sun King for the splendor of art and lit- erature in his reign. Voltaire likewise continued to esteem Frederick the Great, though he quarreled with him personally. Frederick was in fact almost his ideal of the enlightened ruler, a man who sponsored the arts and sciences, recognized no religious authority, and granted toleration to all creeds, welcoming Protestants and Catholics on equal terms if only they would be socially useful.

After about 1740 Voltaire became more defi nitely the crusader, preaching the cause of religious toleration. He fought to clear the memory of Jean Calas, a Protestant who was tortured and put to death on the false charge of murdering a son to prevent his conver- sion to Catholicism. He wrote also to exonerate a youth named La Barre, who had been executed for defi ling a wayside cross. Écrasez l’infâme! became the famous Voltairean war cry—“crush the infamous thing!” The infâme for him was bigotry, intolerance, and

Voltaire

35. The Philosophes—and Others

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 317pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 317 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment318

superstition and behind these the power of an organized clergy. He assaulted not only the Catholic Church but the whole traditional Christian view of the world as well. He argued for “natural religion” and “natural morality,” holding that belief in God and the difference between good and evil arose from reason itself. This doctrine had in fact long been taught by the Catholic Church. But Voltaire insisted that no supernatural revelation in addition to reason was desirable or necessary; belief in a special supernatural revelation, he argued, made people intolerant, stupid, and cruel.

Voltaire was also the fi rst to present a purely secular conception of world history. In his Essai sur les moeurs, or “Universal History,” he began with ancient China and surveyed the great civilizations in turn. Earlier writers of world history had put human events within a Christian framework. Following the Bible, they began with the Creation, proceeded to the Fall, recounted the rise of Israel, and so on. Voltaire put Judeo-Christian history within a much broader world history and placed religious thought in a sociological framework. He represented Christianity and all other organized religions as social phenomena or mere

human inventions. Spinoza had said as much; Voltaire’s engaging literary style helped to spread these ideas through Europe.

In matters of politics and self-government Voltaire was neither a lib- eral nor a democrat. His opinion of the human race was about as low as his

friend Frederick’s. If only a government was enlightened, he did not care how powerful it was. By an enlightened government he meant one that fought against sloth and stupidity, kept the clergy in a subordinate place, allowed freedom of thought and religion, encour- aged the development of reason and science, and advanced the cause of material and technical progress. He had no developed political theory, but his ideal for large civilized countries approached that of enlightened or rational despotism. Believing that only a few could be enlightened, he thought that rational elites and kings should have the power to carry out their program against all opposition. To overcome ignorance, credulity, and

priestcraft it was necessary for the state to be strong. What Voltaire most desired was liberty for the enlightened, or for people like himself.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was very different. Born in Geneva in 1712, he was a Swiss, a Protestant, and almost of lower-class origin. He never felt at ease in France or in Parisian society. His mother died a few days after

his birth, and he was neglected as a child. Running away from Geneva at age 16, he lived for years by odd jobs, such as copying music, and not until the age of 40 did he have any success as a writer. He was intellectually ambitious, but he viewed himself always as a social outsider. In addition, his personal relations with women were diffi cult and unstable; he fi nally settled down with an uneducated woman named Thérèse Levasseur and with her mother, who kept interfering in his affairs. By Thérèse he had fi ve children, all of whom he deposited at an orphanage. He had no social status, no money, and no sense of money, and after he became famous he lived largely by the generosity of his friends. He was pathetically and painfully maladjusted. He came to feel that he could trust no one, that those who tried to befriend him were deriding or betraying him behind his back. He condemned the cultural infl uence of French women, criticizing especially their prominent role in Parisian salons (“they do not know anything, although they judge everything”). He suffered from what would now be termed psychological complexes; possibly he was paranoid. He talked endlessly of his own virtue and innocence and complained bitterly that he was misunderstood.

But unbalanced though he was, he was possibly the most profound writer of the age and was certainly the most permanently infl uential. Rousseau felt, from his own experi- ence, that in society as it existed a good person could not be happy. He therefore attacked

Voltaire on politics

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 318pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 318 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

319

society, declaring that it was artifi cial and corrupt. He even attacked reason, calling it a false guide when followed without feelings or emotions. He felt doubts about the social and cultural progress that gave satisfaction to his contemporaries. In two “discourses,” one on the Arts and Sciences (1750), the other on the Origin of Inequality among Men (1753), he argued that civilization was the source of much evil and that life in a “state of nature,” were it only possible, would be much freer; and all people in such conditions would be far more equal. As Voltaire said, when Rousseau sent him a copy of his second discourse (Voltaire who relished civilization in every form), it made him “feel like going on all fours.” To Rousseau the best traits of human character, such as kindness, unselfi shness, honesty, and true understanding between different persons, were products of nature rather than the social progress of modern civilizations. Deep below reason, he sensed the presence of feeling. He delighted in the warmth of sympathy, the quick fl ash of intuition, the clear message of conscience. He was religious by temperament, for though he believed in no church, no clergy, and no revelation, he had a respect for the Bible, a reverent awe toward the cosmos, a love of solitary meditation, and a belief in a God who was not merely a “fi rst cause” but also a God of love and beauty. Rousseau thus made it easier for serious-minded people to slip away from orthodoxy and all forms of churchly discipline. He was feared by the churches as the most dangerous of all “infi dels” and was condemned both in Catholic France and Protestant Geneva.

In general, in most of his books, Rousseau, unlike so many of his contemporaries, gave the impression that impulse is more reliable than considered judgment, spontaneous feeling more to be trusted than critical thought. Mystical insights were for him more truth- ful than rational or clear ideas. He became the “man of feeling,” the “child of nature,” the forerunner of the coming age of romanticism, and an important source of all modern emphasis on the nonrational and the subconscious. He thus became an early, infl uential critic of the Enlightenment, even as he resembled other philosophes in his desire to change the existing social order.

In the Social Contract (1762), however, Rousseau seemed to contra- dict much of his famous sentiment for nature. In this book he held, some- what like Hobbes, that the state of nature was a brutish condition without law or morality. In other works he had held that human evil was due to the evils of society. He now held that good people could be produced only by an improved society. Earlier thinkers, such as John Locke, for example, had thought of the “contract” as an agreement between a ruler and a people. Rousseau thought of it as an agreement among the people themselves. It was a social, not merely a political, contract. Organized civil society, that is, the community, rested upon it. The social contract was an understanding by which all individuals surrendered their natural liberty to each other, fused their individual wills into a combined General Will, and agreed to accept the rulings of this General Will as fi nal. This General Will was the sovereign; and true sovereign power, rightly understood, was “absolute,” “sacred,” and “inviolable.” Government was secondary; kings, offi cials, or elected representatives were only delegates of a sovereign people. Rousseau devoted many diffi cult pages to explaining how the real General Will could be known. It was not necessarily determined by vote of a majority. “What generalizes the will,” he said, “is not the number of voices but the common interest that unites them.” He said little of the mechanism of government and had no admiration for parliamentary institutions. He was concerned with something deeper. Maladjusted outsider that he was, he craved a com- monwealth in which every person could feel that he or she belonged. He wished a state in which all persons had a sense of membership and participation.

Rousseau’s “discourses”

The Social Contract

35. The Philosophes—and Others

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 319pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 319 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment320

By these ideas Rousseau made himself the prophet of both democracy and nationalism. Indeed, in his Considerations on Poland, written at the request of Poles who were fi ghting against the partitions of their nation’s territories by foreign powers, Rousseau applied the ideas of the Social Contract in more concrete form and became the fi rst systematic theorist of a conscious and calculated nationalism. In writing the Social Contract he had in mind a small city-state like his native Geneva. But what he did, in effect, was to generalize and make applicable to large territories the psychology of small city republics—the sense of member- ship, of community and fellowship, of responsible citizenship and intimate participation in public affairs—in short, of a common and collective will. All modern states, democratic or undemocratic, strive to impart this sense of moral solidarity to their peoples. Whereas in democratic states the General Will can in some way be identifi ed with the sovereignty of the people, in dictatorships it becomes possible for individuals (or parties) to arrogate to them- selves the right to serve as spokesmen and interpreters of the General Will. Both totalitarians and democrats have regarded Rousseau as one of their prophets.

Rousseau’s infl uence on his contemporaries was spread also by his other writings and especially his novels, Émile (1762) and Julie, or the New Héloïse (1760). The novels were widely read in all literate classes of society, by men and especially by women, who found an emotional resonance in characters such as the ill-fated Julie, and who made a kind of cult of Jean-Jacques. He was a literary master, able to evoke shades of thought and feeling that few writers had touched before, and by his literary writings he spread in the highest circles a new respect for the common person, a love of common things, an impulse of human pity and compassion, a sense of artifi ce and superfi ciality in aristocratic life. Women took to nursing their own babies, as Rousseau said they should. Men began describing the delicacy of their sentiments. Tears became the fashion. The queen, Marie Antoinette, built herself a village in the gardens at Versailles, where she pretended to be a simple milkmaid. In all this there was much that was shallow or contrived or completely disconnected from the lives of people in a real peasant village. Yet this new interest in the lives of lower-class persons became the wellspring of modern humanitarianism, the force leading to a new sense of human equality. Rousseau estranged the French upper classes from their own mode of life. He made many of them lose faith in their own superiority. That was his main direct contribution to the French Revolution.

Political Economists

In France, somewhat apart from the philosophes, were the Physiocrats, whom their critics called “economists,” a word originally thought to be mildly insulting. Many of the Physiocrats, unlike the philosophes, were close to the government as administrators or advisers. Quesnay was phy-

sician to Louis XV, Turgot was an experienced offi cial who became minister to Louis XVI, and Dupont de Nemours, an associate of Turgot’s, became the founder of the indus- trial family of the Du Ponts in the United States. Such men concerned themselves with fi scal and tax reform and with measures to increase the national wealth of France. They argued that agriculture, grain production, and effi cient uses of the land provided essential economic foundations for an expanding national commerce. Moving away from earlier mercantilist strategies for government control of trade, they opposed guild regulations and price controls as impediments to the production and circulation of goods. The Physiocrats were the fi rst to use the term laissez-faire (“let them do as they see fi t”) as a principle of economic activity; and some proposed that even the grain trade should operate without government interventions—a politically risky proposal that no French king would ever

Physiocrats

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 320pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 320 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

321

accept. They favored strong government, however, relying on it to overcome traditional obstacles and to provide inducements for the establishment of new industries.

Economics, or what was long called political economy, arose from these activities of the Physiocrats, from the somewhat similar work of “cameralists” in the German states, and from the collection and analysis of quantitative data, that is, the birth of statistics. Political economy thus became another example of the belief that scientifi c methods should be used to understand human societies as well as nature. Economic thinking fl our- ished especially in Great Britain, and notably in Scotland, where Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776. By 1800 the Wealth of Nations had been translated into every western European language except Portuguese.

Adam Smith’s purpose, like that of the French Physiocrats, was to increase the national wealth by the reduction of barriers that hindered its growth. He undercut the premises of what we have called “the struggle for wealth and empire,” because he argued that to build up a nation’s wealth it was unneces- sary to have an empire. He attacked most of the program of mercantilism that had evolved since the sixteenth century, and he expected that Britain’s American colonies would soon become independent without loss to British trade. Where others looked to planning by an enlightened government, Adam Smith preferred to limit the functions of government to defense, internal security, and the provision of reasonable laws and fair law courts by which private differences could be adjudicated. For innovation and enterprise he counted more on private persons than on the state. He became the philosopher of the free mar- ket, the prophet of free trade. If there was a shortage of a given commodity, its price would rise and so stimulate producers to produce more, while also attracting new persons into that line of production. If there was an excess, if more was produced than purchasers would buy, both capital and labor would withdraw and gradually move into another area

Adam Smith

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU by Allan Ramsay (Scottish, 1713–1784)

Some hints of the complexities of Rousseau’s personality and thought appear in this por- trait by a Scottish artist who admired the famous writers of the French Enlightenment. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

35. The Philosophes—and Others

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 321pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 321 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment322

Historical Interpretations and Debates Social Institutions and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment

Historians have increasingly moved beyond the analysis of Enlightenment-era intellectual debates to examine the social and institutional contexts in which writers exchanged ideas or tried to build a literary reputation. The Parisian salons, which were organized and led by women called “salonnières,” became a key meeting place for the philosophes, but historians disagree about the salons’ openness and political infl uence. Many poor writers, for example, lived precariously in the marginal social world of “Grub Street” and never went to salons. Dena Goodman and Robert Darnton thus represent some of the different historical arguments that interpret the role of salons in Enlightenment-era literary culture.

Dena Goodman, “Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions” (1989) Why did [eighteenth-century French] women form salons? . . . In an age when women did not have or aspire to careers, the salon was just that: a career based on a long apprenticeship and careful study, resulting in the independence of a mastership. . . . Unlike the men who shaped themselves and made their mark in the world through careers, the salonnière reaped no material rewards from her labor. . . .

The salon offered the philosophes a social space that valued ideas and fostered discussion. . . . [Salons] were to be useful to those who directed and attended them, and, eventually, to the society at large beyond them. . . .

In addition to sponsoring serious and productive intellectual activity, the salons were crucial in establishing an undifferentiated social space in which such activity could take place. What distinguished salons from courts and the dominant society they represented was . . . the mixing of ranks and orders, [and] the absence of hierarchy and marks of social distinction [in the debates] that took place in them. The kind of conversation fostered in the salons depended upon a recognized equality among the speakers. . . .

For a collective project of Enlightenment, the salons were not simply diversions; nor were the women who ran them simply an audience whose social demands undermined the seriousness of male work. What the salons provided the philosophes was a serious social environment that established a structure for

Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982) Perhaps the literary world has always divided into a hierarchy whose extremes might be labeled a monde [society] of mandarins on the one hand and Grub Street on the other. . . . But the social and economic conditions of the High Enlightenment opened up an unusual gulf between the two groups during the last twenty-fi ve years of the Old Regime. . . .

Literacy probably doubled in the course of the [eighteenth] century, and the general upward swing of the economy, combined with improvements in the educational system, very likely produced a larger, wealthier, and more leisured reading public. Certainly book production soared. . . . But there is little evidence that writers benefi ted from any publishing boom. On the contrary, everything indicates that while the mandarins fattened themselves on pensions, most authors sank into a sort of literary proletariat. . . .

The most salient fact is that the marketplace could not support many more writers. . . . [And] once he had fallen into Grub Street, the provincial youth who had dreamt of storming Parnassus never extricated himself. . . .

Seen from the perspective of Grub Street, the republic of letters was a lie. . . . Grub Street had no principles, and it had no institutions of a formal kind. . . .

Despite the democratic play of wit, the salon remained a rather formal institution. It did not allow any putting of elbows on the table or any admission to those without introductions. During the last decades of the Old Regime, the salon became increasingly a

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 322pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 322 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

323

where demand was stronger. Demand would increase with lower prices, which depended on lower costs, which in turn depended on the specialization or division of labor. His most famous example was that of the pin factory of his time, where each of a dozen workers engaged in only one part of the process of manufacture, so that together they produced far more pins than if each worker produced whole pins; the price of pins then fell, and more pins could be used by more people. The same principle held in international trade; some countries or climates could produce an article more cheaply than others, so that if each specialized and then exchanged with the others, all would have more. Each nation could use its comparative advantage in certain spheres of production or trade to compensate for economic weaknesses in other spheres and also to increase its national wealth.

The motivation for all such production and exchange was to be the self-interest of the participants. As he said, we rely for our meat not on the goodwill of the butcher but on his concern for his own income. To those who might object that this was a system of selfi shness Adam Smith would reply (being a professor of moral philosophy at the Uni- versity of Glasgow) that a free market system was at least realistic, describing how people really behaved, and that a free market system was morally justifi ed because it ultimately produced a maximum both of freedom and of abundance. The mutual interaction of the enlightened self-interest of millions of persons would in the end, as if by an “invisible hand,” he said, result in the highest welfare of all. Among problems that Smith minimized, or accepted as lesser evils, were the economic insecurity of individuals, the destabiliz- ing political consequences of extreme differences in wealth, and the dangers of excessive dependence of a whole country on imports of essentials, such as food. If the visible hand of government continued to regulate the price of bread, for example, such actions showed how economic policies still had to fi t within the broader political goals of governments that wanted to prevent rioting, ensure social peace, and retain popular support.

Main Currents of Enlightenment Thought

It is clear that the main currents of eighteenth-century thought in France and Europe were divergent and inconsistent. There was a general belief in progress, reason, science, and civilization. Rousseau had his doubts and praised the imagined conditions in a precivi- lized state of nature. Montesquieu thought the church useful but did not believe in reli- gion; Rousseau believed in religion but saw no need for any church. Montesquieu was

Sources: Dena Goodman, “Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (Spring 1989), pp. 332–333, 337–339; Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 16, 18, 19–20, 23.

Dena Goodman . . . (contd. . . .) their discourse: a structure that, although it did have limits, was highly elastic and allowed for the growth of speakers and of speech. . . . [The] composition of salon society, and especially the inclusion of women in it, made it a model for that general public that was to be enlightened even as it was created.

Robert Darnton . . . (contd. . . .) preserve for the high philosophes, who generally abandoned the cafés to the lower species of littérateur. The café functioned as the antithesis of the salon. It was open to everyone, just one step from the street.

35. The Philosophes—and Others

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 323pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 323 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment324

concerned about practical political liberty; Voltaire would surrender political liberty in return for guarantees of intellectual freedom; Rousseau wanted emancipation from the restraints of society and sought the freedom that consists in merging with nature and with one’s fellows. Most philosophes were closest to Voltaire. They favored more tolerance for intellectual differences and more legal equality in European societies. It was not a very far-reaching equality, but it meant equality of rights for persons of different religions, a reduction of privileges enjoyed by nobles but not by commoners, greater equality of status in law courts and in the payment of taxes, and more opportunity for middle-class persons to rise to positions of social or political importance.

France was the main center of the Enlightenment. French philosophes traveled all over Europe. Frederick II and Catherine II invited French thinkers to their courts. French was the language of the academies of St. Petersburg and Berlin. Frederick wrote his philosophical works in the French language. The upper classes of Europe shared a uniform cosmopolitan culture, and this culture was predominantly French. But Britain was important also. Hitherto somewhat on the fringes of the European consciousness, Britain now moved closer to the center. Montesquieu and Voltaire may be said to have “discovered” Britain for Europe. Through them the ideas of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, and the whole theory of British liberty and parliamentary government became matters for general discussion and comment. We have seen, too, how Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was soon translated into many languages.

Although the Physiocrats and others had begun to advocate “laissez-faire” economic theories, the state was widely viewed as the main agent of social progress. Whether in the form of limited monarchy on the British model favored by Montesquieu, or of enlightened despotism preferred by Voltaire, or of the idealized republican commonwealth portrayed by Rousseau, the rightly ordered government was considered the best guarantee of social welfare. Even the political economists needed the state to shake people out of the habits of ages, sweep away a mass of local regulation, preserve law and order and the enforcement

of contracts, and so assure the existence of a free market. But if they relied on the state, they were not nationalists in any later sense of the word. As “universalists,” they believed in the unity of humankind under a natural law of right and reason and thus they carried over the classical and Christian outlook in a secular way. They supposed that all peoples would participate

eventually in the same progress. No nation was thought to have a distinctive message or unique path to progress. French ideas enjoyed a wide currency, but no one thought of them as peculiarly French, arising from a French “national character.” It was simply thought that the French at the time were in the vanguard of civilized thinking. Such was the idea of Condorcet, one of the later philosophes, a leading spokesman of the Enlightenment who became an active fi gure in the French Revolution, and also one of its victims, and who in 1794, while in hiding from his radical political enemies, wrote the great testament to the Enlightenment, his Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind.

36. ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM: FRANCE, AUSTRIA, PRUSSIA

The Meaning of Enlightened Despotism

Enlightened despotism is hard to defi ne, because it grew out of earlier forms of absolutism that Louis XIV and Peter the Great had established in France and Russia. Characteristi- cally, the enlightened despots drained marshes, built roads and bridges, codifi ed the laws,

Belief in the unity of humankind

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 324pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 324 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

32536. Enlightened Despotism: France, Austria, Prussia

repressed provincial autonomy and localism, curtailed the independence of church and nobles, and developed a trained and salaried offi cialdom. Kings had done all these things before. Enlightened despots differed from their “unenlightened” predecessors mainly in attitude and tempo. They said little of a divine right to the throne. They might even not emphasize hereditary or dynastic family rights. They justifi ed their authority on grounds of usefulness to society, calling themselves, as Frederick the Great did, the “fi rst servant of the state.”

Enlightened despotism was secular; it claimed no mandate from heaven and recognized no special responsibility to God or church. The typi- cal enlightened despot consequently favored toleration in religion, and this was an important new emphasis after about 1740; but here again there was precedent in the older absolutism, for the rulers of Prussia had been inclined toward toleration before Frederick, and even the French Bourbons had recognized a degree of religious liberty for almost a century following the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The secular outlook of the enlightened governments also shaped the common front they adopted against the Jesuits. High papalists, affi rming the authority of a universal church in Rome and asserting them- selves in other ways as the strongest religious order in the Catholic world, the Jesuits were distasteful to the enlightened monarchs. In the 1760s the order was banned in almost all Catholic countries. In 1773 the pope was persuaded to dissolve the Society of Jesus entirely. Governments in France, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and Naples confi scated Jesuit property and took over the Jesuit schools. Not until 1814 was the order reconstituted.

Enlightened despots wanted to be rational and reformist. The typical enlightened mon- arch set out to reconstruct the state by the use of reason. Sharing the widespread eighteenth- century view of the past as benighted, the new monarchs were impatient of custom and of all that was imbedded in custom or claimed as a heritage from the past, such as systems of customary law and the rights and privileges of church, nobles, towns, guilds, provinces, assemblies of estates, or, in France, the judicial bodies called parlements. The complex network of such institutions was disparagingly referred to as “feudalism.” Monarchs had long struggled against feudalism in this sense, but in the past they had usually compro- mised. The enlightened despot was less willing to compromise, and herein lay a difference in tempo. The new monarchs acted abruptly, desiring quicker results.

Enlightened despotism, in short, was an acceleration of the old central- izing institution of monarchy, which now put aside its quasi-sacred mantle and undertook to justify itself in the cold light of reason and secular use- fulness. In theory even the dynastic claim was awkward, for it also rested on inheritance from the past. Under enlightened despotism the idea of the state itself was changing, from the older notion of an entity that belonged by a kind of sanctifi ed property right to its ruler, to a newer notion of an abstract and impersonal authority that public offi - cials exercised to promote or protect the interests of a whole country. The king was simply the highest public offi cial or embodiment of the state’s authority.

The trend to enlightened despotism after 1740 owed a great deal to writers and philosophes, but it arose also out of a very practical situation, namely, the great wars of the mid-eighteenth century. War, in modern history, has usually led to concentration and rationalizing of government power, and the wars of 1740–1748 and 1756–1763 were no exception. Under their impact even those governments that were not considered enlight- ened, notably those of Louis XV and Maria Theresa, and even the government of Great Britain, which was certainly not despotic, embarked on programs that all exemplifi ed common centralizing patterns. They attempted to augment their revenues, devise new

The secular outlook

The roots of enlightened despotism

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 325pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 325 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment326

taxes, tax persons or regions hitherto more or less tax exempt, limit the autonomy of out- lying political bodies, and centralize and renovate their respective political systems. The workings of enlightened despotism might be seen in many states, but the new policies had the most far-reaching infl uence in the larger Continental countries—France and Austria, Prussia and Russia—and in the rather different, yet not wholly different, course of events in the British Empire.

The Failure of Enlightened Despotism in France

It was in France that enlightened despotism had the least success. Louis XV, who had inherited the throne as a child in 1715 and lived until 1774, was by no means stupid; but he was indifferent to most serious questions, absorbed in the daily rounds at Versailles, disin- clined to make trouble for people with whom he had personal contact, and interested in government only by fi ts and starts. His reputed remark, après moi le déluge, whether or not he really said it, suffi ciently characterizes his personal attitude to conditions in France. Yet the French government was not unenlightened, and many capable offi cials carried on its affairs all through the century. These offi cials generally understood the government’s basic problem. Most of the practical diffi culties of the French monarchy could be traced to its methods of raising revenue. It derived some income from the sale of offi ces and privi-

leges, which had the perverse effect of building up vested interests in the existing system. Among the government’s actual taxes the most important was the taille, a kind of land tax, generally paid only by peasants. Nobles were exempt from it on principle, and offi ceholders and bourgeois, for one

reason or another, were generally exempt also. In addition, the church, which owned between 5 and 10 percent of the land of the country, insisted that its property was not tax- able by the state; it granted to the king a periodic “free gift” that, though sizable, was less than the government might have received from direct taxation. The consequence of the tax exemptions was that, although France itself was wealthy and prosperous, the government was chronically poor, because the social classes that enjoyed most of the wealth and pros- perity did not pay taxes corresponding to their incomes.

Louis XIV, under pressure of war, had tried to tax everybody alike by creating new levies—the capitation or poll tax and the dixième or tenth, both of which were assessed in proportion to income; but these taxes had been widely evaded. A similar effort to tax higher incomes was made in 1726, but it too had failed. The propertied classes resisted taxation because they thought it degrading. France had succumbed to the appalling prin- ciple that to pay direct taxes was the sure mark of inferior status. Nobles, churchmen, and bourgeois also resisted taxation because they were kept out of the policymaking functions of government, and so they had no sense of political responsibility or control.

Tax collection

EUROPE, 1740 Boundaries show how territories were controlled by the various European states in 1740. There were now three Bourbon monarchies (France, Spain, and the Two Sicilies), while the Austrian monarchy possessed most of what is now Belgium, and in Italy the duchy of Milan and grand duchy of Tuscany, where the Medici family had recently died out. Prussia expanded by acquir- ing Silesia in the war of the 1740s. The fi rst partition of Poland in 1772 enlarged Prussia, Austria, and Russia. France acquired Lorraine in 1766 and Corsica in 1768. Otherwise there were no changes until the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars of 1792–1814.

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 326pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 326 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

327

North Sea

A T L A N T I C O C E A N

Ba lt i

c Se

a

M e d i t e r r a n e a n

S e a

Rhine R.

Danub e R.

Vis tu la

R .

A d r i a t i c S e a

Ebro

R.

Tagus R.

R h

ô n

e R.

S

e ine R.

Po R. Save R.

Elbe R.

G aronne

R .

Gu adalquivir R.

Oder R.

GREAT BRITAIN

FRANCE SWITZERLAND

SAVOY

TUSCANY

NAPLES

Corsica (Genoa)

Sardinia

SICILY

SPAINPORTUGAL PAPAL STATES

S W E D E N

SERBIA

IRELAND

SCOTLAND

ENGLAND

LORRAINE (France 1766)

BA LEA

RIC I.

Majorca (Spain)

Minorca (Britain)

K IN

G D

O M

O F

SA R

D IN

IA

CHANNEL I. (Britain)

Cape de la Hogue

DENMARK

KINGDOM OF DENMARK AND NORWAY

SCHLESWIG

WALES

AUSTRIAN NETHERLANDS

UNITED PROVINCES

PALATI- NATE

PAR- MA

MILAN VENETIA

KINGDOM OF THE TWO SICILIES

MALTA (Knights of St. John)

DALMATIA (Venice)

CR OA

TIA

BOSNIA

MONTENEGRO

A U S T R I A N M O N A R C H Y KINGDOM

OF HUNGARY

TYROL

AU STR

IA MORAVIA

BAVARIA

BOHEMIA

SILESIA SAXONYMINOR

GERMAN STATES

HANOVER (Britain)

NORWAY

LITHUANIA

EAST PRUSSIA

POLAND

P

R U S

S I A

PODOLIA

TRANSYLVANIA

BANAT

WALLACHIA

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

MOREA

IONIAN I. (Venice)

TUNISIA (Turkish)

ALGERIA (Turkish)MOROCCO

(Independent)

BRANDENBURG

A LBA

N IA

Paris

Lisbon Madrid

Gibraltar (Britain)

London

Rome

Venice

Berlin Warsaw

Budapest

St. Petersburg

Riga

Stockholm

Vienna

Granada Seville

Cadiz

Toledo

Almanza

Santiago

León

Burgos Pamplona

Barcelona

Tangier

Cagliari

Genoa Toulouse

Toulon Marseille

Avignon

Bordeaux Lyons Geneva

Besançon

Limoges

Tours

Quiberon Orléans

Metz ReimsRouen

Malplaquet

LiverpoolDublin

Edinburgh

Amsterdam

Utrecht

AntwerpOudenarde

Ramilles

Strasbourg

Turin

Bologna

Bari

Naples

Benevento

Palermo

Belgrade

PressburgMunich

Blenheim

Frankfurt Dresden

Prague

Cologne Leipzig

Magdeburg

Hamburg

Copenhagen Memel

Danzig

Thorn

Breslau

Lublin

Cracow Lemberg

Munkacz

Sofia

Salonica

Athens

Tunis

Algiers

Brennen

Minsk

0 200 400 miles

Bourbon Dominions

Habsburg Dominions

Boundary of Holy Roman Empire

36. Enlightened Despotism: France, Austria, Prussia

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 327pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 327 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment328

In the 1740s, under pressure of heavy war costs, a new tax was introduced, the vingtième or twentieth, which imposed a 5 percent tax on income from all forms of property and was to be paid irrespective of class status, provincial liberties, or previous exemptions of any kind. In practice, the vingtième amounted to less than 5 percent and fell only upon land, but it was paid by nobles and bourgeois alike and lasted until the Revolution. During the Seven Years’ War the government tried to increase it, without success. A clamor arose from the Parlement of Paris, the provincial parlements, the estates of Brittany, and the church. All these institutions were now stronger than in the days of Louis XIV, and they could now cite Montesquieu to justify their opposition to the crown. The parlements ruled the tax increase to be incompatible with the laws of France, that is, unconstitutional; and the pays d’états, or provinces having assemblies of estates, declared that their historic lib- erties were being violated. After several years of wrangling, Louis XV decided to push the matter no further.

But after the Seven Years’ War, burdened with war debts, the government sought to win effective central control by eliminating the parlements as a political force. In 1768 Louis XV called to the chancellorship a man named Maupeou, who simply abrogated the

old parlements and set up new ones in their place. Maupeou had the sympa- thy of Voltaire and most of the philosophes. In the “Maupeou parlements” the judges had no property rights in their seats but became salaried offi cials appointed by the crown with assurances of secure tenure; and they were forbidden to reject government edicts or to pass on their constitutionality,

being confi ned to purely judicial functions. Maupeou proposed to make the laws and judicial procedure more uniform throughout the whole country. Meanwhile, with the old

parlements out of the way, the government tried again to tax the privileged and exempted groups.

But Louis XV died in 1774. His grandson and successor, Louis XVI, though more conscientious than his grandfather and possessed by a genu-

ine desire to govern well, resembled Louis XV in that he lacked sustained will power and could not bear to offend the people who could get to see him personally. In any case he was only 20 in 1774. The kingdom resounded with outcries against Maupeou and his colleagues as minions of despotism and with demands for the immediate restoration of the old Parlement of Paris and all the others. Louis XVI, fearful of beginning his reign as a “despot,” therefore recalled the old parlements and abolished those that Maupeou had established. The abortive Maupeou parlements represented the farthest step taken by enlightened despotism in France. It was arbitrary, high-handed, and despotic for Louis XV to destroy the old parlements, but it was certainly “enlightened” in the sense then connoted by the word, for the old parlements were strongholds of aristocracy and privilege and had for decades blocked programs of legal and fi nancial reform.

Louis XVI, in recalling the old parlements in 1774, began his reign by pacifying the privileged classes. At the same time he appointed a reforming ministry. At its head was Turgot, a philosophe and a Physiocrat and a widely experienced government administra- tor. Turgot undertook to suppress the guilds and their privileged municipal monopolies in their several trades. He allowed greater freedom to the internal commerce in grain. He planned to abolish the royal corvée (a requirement that certain peasants labor on the roads a few days each year), replacing it by a money tax that would fall on all classes. He began to review the whole system of taxation and in religious matters was known even to favor the legal toleration of Protestants. The Parlement of Paris, supported by the Provincial Estates and the church, vociferously opposed him, and in 1776 he resigned. Louis XVI, by

The “Maupeou parlements”

Louis XVI

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 328pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 328 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

329

recalling the parlements, had made reform impossible. In 1778 France again went to war with Britain. The same cycle was repeated: war costs, debt, defi cit, new projects of taxa- tion, resistance to tax reform from the parlements and other semiautonomous bodies. In the 1780s the clashes led to revolution.

Austria: The Reforms of Maria Theresa (1740–1780) and of Joseph II (1780–1790)

For Maria Theresa the European war of the 1740s proved the extraordinary fl imsiness of her empire and the Austrian monarchy. Her subjects did not show much inclination to remain united under her rule, even when threatened by invading armies. The empire was only a loose bundle of territories without common purpose or common will. The Prag- matic Sanction devised by Charles VI, it should be recalled, had been meant not only to guarantee the Habsburg inheritance against foreign attack but also to secure the assent of the several parts of the empire to remain united under the woman who became the reigning Habsburg monarch.

The war of the 1740s led to internal consolidation. The reign of Maria Theresa set the course of all later development of the Austrian Empire and hence of the many peoples who lived within its borders. She was aided by a notable team of ministers, whose origin illustrated the nonnational character of the Habsburg system. Her most trusted adviser in foreign relations, the astute Kaunitz, was a Moravian; her main assistants in domestic affairs were a Silesian and a Bohemian- Czech. They worked smoothly with the German archduchess-queen and with German offi - cials in Vienna. Their aim was to prevent dissolution of the monarchy by enlarging and guaranteeing the fl ow of taxes and soldiers. This involved breaking the local control of territorial nobles in their diets. Hungary, profoundly separatist, was left alone. But the Bohemian and Austrian provinces were welded together, and a unifi ed state bureaucracy took the place of local self-government. Offi cials (following the form of mercantilist doc- trine called “cameralism” in central Europe) planned to augment the economic strength of the empire by increasing production. They reduced the infl uence of the local guild monop- olies; suppressed brigandage on the roads; and in 1775 created a tariff union of Bohemia, Moravia, and the Austrian duchies. This region became the largest area of free trade on the European continent, because even France was still divided by internal tariffs. Bohemia, industrially the most advanced part of the empire, benefi ted substantially; one of its cotton manufacturing plants, at the end of Maria Theresa’s reign, employed 4,000 persons.

The great social fact, both in the Habsburg lands and in all eastern Europe, was the serfdom into which the rural masses had progressively fallen during the past 200 years. Serfdom meant that the peasant owed more to the landlord than to the state. The serf owed labor to the lord, often unspecifi ed in amount or kind. The tendency, so long as the landlords ruled locally through their diets, was for the serf to do forced labor for six days a week on the lord’s land. Maria Theresa, from humane motives and also from a desire to control the manpower from which her armies were recruited, launched a systematic attack on the institutions of serfdom, which meant also an attack on the landed aristocracy of the empire. With the diets reduced in power, the protests of the nobles were less effective; still, the whole agricultural labor system of her territories was involved, and Maria Theresa proceeded with caution. Laws were passed against abuse of peasants by lords or their overseers. Other laws regu- larized the labor obligations, requiring that they be publicly registered and usually limit- ing them to three days a week. The laws were often evaded. But the peasant was to some

Internal consolidation of the empire

Attacks on serfdom

36. Enlightened Despotism: France, Austria, Prussia

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 329pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 329 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment330

extent freed from arbitrary exactions of the lord. Maria Theresa accomplished more to alleviate serfdom than any other ruler of the eighteenth century in eastern Europe, with the single exception of her own son, Joseph II.

The great archduchess-queen died in 1780, having reigned for 40 years. Her son, who had been co-regent with his mother since 1765, had little patience with her methods. Maria Theresa, though steady enough in aim, had always been content with partial measures. Instead of advertising her purposes by philosophical pronouncements, she disguised or understated them, never carrying matters to the point of arousing an unmanageable reaction

The restoration of the traditional parlements at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI was an important political victory for the privileged classes in French society, whose power had been challenged by the Maupeou ministry in the early 1770s. This illustration of the young king at the fi rst session of the restored Parlement of Paris (he occupies the elevated seat on the upper left side of the assembly) offers an early example of his lifelong tendency to align himself with older elites and to oppose reformers who wanted to reduce the power or privileges of the old nobility. The caption lists the royal offi cials and dignitaries who accompanied the king at this meeting of the Parlement in November 1774. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 330pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 330 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

331

or of uniting against her the vested interests that she undermined. She watched and waited. Joseph II was more impatient. Though he thought the French philosophes frivolous, and Frederick of Prussia a clever cynic, he was himself a pure representative of the Age of Enlightenment, and it is in his brief reign of 10 years that the character and the limitations of enlightened despotism can best be seen. He was a solemn, earnest, good man, who sensed the misery and hopelessness of the lowest classes. He believed existing conditions to be bad, and he would not regulate or improve them; he would end them. Right and reason, in his mind, lay with the views which he himself adopted; upholders of the old order were self-seeking or mistaken and to yield to them would be to compromise with evil.

“The state,” said Joseph, anticipating the later Philosophical Radicals in England, meant “the greatest good for the greatest number.” He acted accordingly. His 10 years of rule passed in a quick succession of decrees. Maria Theresa had regulated serfdom. Joseph abolished it. His mother had collected taxes from nobles as well as peasants, though not equally. Joseph decreed absolute equality of taxation. He insisted on equal punishment for equal crimes whatever the class status of the offender; an aristocratic army offi cer, who had stolen 97,000 gulden, was exhibited in the pillory, and Count Podstacky, a forger, was made to sweep the streets of Vienna chained to common convicts. At the same time many legal punishments were made less physically cruel. Joseph granted complete liberty of the press. He ordered toleration of all religions, except for a few popular sects that he thought too ignorant to allow. He granted equal civil rights to the Jews, and equal duties, making Jews liable, for the fi rst time in Europe, to service in the army. He even created Jewish nobles, an amazing phenomenon to those of aristocratic “blood.”

Joseph clashed openly and rudely with the pope. He demanded increased powers in the appointment and supervision of Catholic bishops, and he suppressed a good many monasteries, using their property to fi nance secular hospitals in Vienna, and thus laying the foundations for Viennese excellence as a medical center. He attempted also to develop the empire economically and built up the port of Trieste, where he even established an East India Company, which soon failed because neither capital nor naval support was forth- coming from central Europe. His attempts to reach the sea commercially through Belgium, like those of his grandfather at the time of the Ostend Company, were blocked by Dutch and British interests.

To force through his program Joseph had to centralize his state, like earlier rulers, except that he went further. Regional diets and aristocratic self-government fared even worse than under his mother. Where she had always sagaciously let Hungary go its own way, he applied most of his measures to Hungary also—what was right must be right everywhere. His ideal was a perfectly uniform and rational empire, with all irregularities smoothed out as if under a modern steamroller. He thought it reasonable to have a single language for administration and naturally chose German; this led to a program of German- izing the Czechs, Poles, Magyars, and others, which in turn aroused their strong linguistic resistance. Using the German language, and pushing the emperor’s program against regional and class opposition, was a hard-pressed, constantly growing, and increasingly disciplined body of offi cials. Bureaucracy became recognizably modern, with training courses, promotion schedules, retirement pensions, effi ciency reports, and visits by inspec- tors. The clergy likewise were employed as representatives of the state to explain new laws to their parishioners and teach due respect for the government. To watch over the whole structure Joseph created a secret police, whose agents, soliciting the confi dential aid of spies and informers, reported on the performance of government employees or on the ideas

Joseph II: the “revolutionary emperor”

36. Enlightened Despotism: France, Austria, Prussia

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 331pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 331 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment332

and actions of nobles, clergy, or others from whom trouble might be expected. The police state, so infamous to the liberal world, was fi rst systematically built up under Joseph as an instrument of enlightenment and reform.

Joseph II, the “revolutionary emperor,” anticipated much that was soon done in France by the Revolution and under Napoleon. He could not abide “feudalism” or “medievalism”;

he personally detested the nobility and the church. But few of his reforms proved lasting. He died prematurely in 1790, at the age of 49, disillusioned and broken-hearted. Joseph was a revolutionist without a party or support- ing political movement. He failed because he could not be everywhere and do everything himself, and because he was opposed by the most powerful

social groups in his empire. His reign demonstrated the limitations of a merely despotic enlightenment. It showed that a legally absolute ruler could not really do as he pleased. It suggested that drastic and abrupt reform could perhaps come only with a true revolution, on a wave of public opinion, and under the leadership of persons who shared in a coherent body of ideas.

Joseph was succeeded by his brother Leopold, one of the ablest rulers of the century, who for many years as grand duke of Tuscany had given that country the best government known in Italy for generations. Now, in 1790, Leopold was plagued by outcries from his sister, Marie Antoinette, caught in the turmoil of a real revolution in France. He refused to interfere in French affairs; in any case, he was busy dealing with the uproar left by Joseph. He abrogated most of Joseph’s edicts, but he did not yield entirely. The nobles did not win back full powers in their diets. The peasants were not wholly consigned to the old serfdom; Joseph’s efforts to provide them with land and to rid them of forced labor had to be given up, but they remained legally free to migrate, marry, or choose an occupation at will. Leopold died in 1792 and was followed by his son Francis II. Under Francis the aristocratic and clerical reaction gathered strength, terrifi ed by the memory of Joseph II and by the spectacle of revolutionary France, with which Austria went to war soon after Leopold’s death.

Prussia under Frederick the Great (1740–1786)

In Prussia, Frederick the Great continued to reign for 23 years after the close of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. “Old Fritz,” as he was called, spent the time peaceably, writing mem- oirs and histories, rehabilitating his shattered country, promoting agriculture and industry, replenishing his treasury, drilling his army, and assimilating his huge conquest of Silesia, and, after 1772, the Polish lands that fell to him in the fi rst partition of Poland. Frederick’s fame as one of the most eminent of enlightened despots rests, however, not so much on his actual innovations as on his own intellectual gifts, which were considerable, and on the admiring publicity that he received from such literary friends as Voltaire. “My chief occu- pation,” he wrote to Voltaire, “is to fi ght ignorance and prejudices in this country.  .  .  . I must enlighten my people, cultivate their manners and morals, and make them as happy as human beings can be, or as happy as the means at my disposal permit.” He did not con- ceive that sweeping changes were needed for happiness in Prussia. The country was doc- ile; its Lutheran church had long been subordinate to the state, its relatively few burghers were largely dependents of the crown, and the independence of the Junker landlords, as expressed in provincial diets, had been curtailed by Frederick’s predecessors. Frederick simplifi ed and codifi ed the many laws of the kingdom and made the law courts cheaper, more expeditious, and more honest. He kept up a wholesome and energetic tone in his civil

Limitations of Joseph’s reforms

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 332pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 332 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

33337. Enlightened Despotism: Russia

service. He protected religious freedom, and he decreed, though he did not achieve, a modicum of elementary education for all children of all classes. Prussia under Frederick was attractive enough for some 300,000 immigrants to seek it out.

But society remained stratifi ed in a way hardly known in the more western parts of Europe. Nobles, peasants, and burghers lived side by side in a kind of segregation. Each group paid different taxes and owed different duties to the state, and no person could buy property of the type owned by one of the other two groups. Property was legally classifi ed, as well as persons; there was little movement from one social group to another. These policies served a specifi c military purpose. They preserved a distinct peasant class from which to draw soldiers and a distinct aristocratic class from which to draw offi cers. The peasants, except in the western extremities of the kingdom, were serfs holding patches of land on precarious terms with obligations to labor on the estates of the lords. They were consid- ered the lord’s “hereditary subjects” and were not free to leave the lord’s estate, to marry, or to learn a trade except with his permission. Frederick in his early years considered steps to relieve the burden of serfdom. He did relieve it on his own manors, those belong- ing to the Prussian crown domain, which comprised a quarter of the area of the kingdom. But he did nothing for serfs belonging to the private landlords or Junkers. No king of Prussia could antagonize the Junker class, which commanded the army. On the other hand, even in Prussia, the existence of a monarchical state was of some advantage for the common person; the serf in Prussia was not so badly off as in adjoining areas—Poland, Livonia, Mecklenburg, or Swedish Pomerania—where the will of the landlords was the law of the land, and which therefore have been called Junker republics. In these countries cases came to light in which owners sold their serfs as movable property or gambled or gave them away, breaking up families in the process, as Russian landlords might do with their serfs or American plantation owners with their slaves. Such abuses were unknown in Prussia.

Frederick’s system was centralized not merely at Potsdam but in his own head. He himself attended to all business and made all important decisions. None of his ministers or generals ever achieved an independent reputation. As he said of his army, “no one rea- sons, everyone executes”—that is, no one reasoned except the king himself. Or again, as Frederick put it, if Newton had had to consult with Descartes he would never have discov- ered the law of universal gravitation. To have to take into account other people’s ideas, or to entrust responsibilities to people less capable than himself, seemed to Frederick waste- ful and anarchic. He died in 1786, after ruling 46 years and having trained no successors. Twenty years later Prussia was all but destroyed by Napoleon. It was not surprising that Napoleon should defeat Prussia, but Europe was amazed, in 1806, to see Prussia collapse so totally and abruptly. It was then concluded in Prussia and elsewhere that government by a mastermind working in lofty and isolated superiority did not offer a viable state system under modern conditions.

37. ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM: RUSSIA The Russian Empire has long been out of sight in the preceding pages. There are reasons for its absence, for it played no part in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth cen- tury, and its role in the early modern struggle for wealth and empire, which reached a cli- max in the Seven Years’ War, was somewhat incidental. In the Age of Enlightenment the role of Russia was passive. No Russian thinker was known to western Europe, but western

Social stratifi cation in Prussia

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 333pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 333 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment334

European thinkers were well known in Russia. The French-dominated cosmopolitan cul- ture of the European upper classes spread to the upper classes of Russia. The Russian court

and aristocracy took over French as their common conversational language. With French (German was also known, and sometimes English, for the Russian aristocrats were remarkable linguists) all the ideas boiling up in western Europe streamed into Russia. The Enlightenment, if it did not affect Russia profoundly, affected it signifi cantly. It extended the European

infl uence so forcibly pushed forward by Peter and carried further the estrangement of the Russian upper classes from their own people and their own native scene.

Russia after Peter the Great

Peter the Great died in 1725. To secure his revolution he had decreed that each tsar should name his successor, but he himself had named none and had put to death his own son Alexis to prevent social reaction. Peter’s long reign was therefore followed by a period of political instability. Rival factions at court—a German party and a native Russian party— struggled for control over successive tsars, tsarinas, and short-lived governments until a palace revolution in 1741 brought to the throne Peter the Great’s daughter, Elizabeth, who managed to hold power until her death 21 years later. Russian military power expanded during her reign; and she entered into European diplomacy and joined in the Seven Years’ War against Prussia, fearing that the continued growth of Prussia would endanger the new Russian position on the Baltic. Her nephew, Peter III, was almost immediately dethroned, and probably assassinated, by a group acting in the name of his young wife Catherine. The victorious coterie claimed that Peter III had been almost a half-wit, who at the age of 24 still played with paper soldiers. Using such rumors to justify her rise to power, Catherine was proclaimed the Empress Catherine II and later came to be called “the Great.” She enjoyed a long reign from 1762 to 1796, during which she acquired a somewhat exagger- ated reputation as an enlightened despot.

The names of the tsars and tsarinas between Peter I and Catherine II are of slight importance, but their violent and rapid sequence tells a story. With no principle of suc- cession, dynastic or other, the empire fell into a lawless struggle of parties, in which plots against ruling tsars alternated with palace revolutions upon their death. In all the confu- sion an underlying issue was always how Peter’s European reform program would turn out. Although Russia’s social elites were becoming more “European,” most people in western Europe still viewed Russia as an alien and remote place on the distant frontier of European culture.

Catherine the Great (1762–1796): Domestic Program

Catherine the Great was a German woman of a small princely house of the Holy Roman Empire. She had gone to Russia at the age of 15 to be married. She had immediately culti- vated the goodwill of the Russians, learned the language, and embraced the Orthodox church. Early in her married life, disgusted with her husband, she foresaw the chance of becoming empress herself. Like the other prominent woman ruler of this era in Europe, Maria Theresa, she approached political issues with a strong practical sense and great energy (though she did not share Maria Theresa’s devotion to family life). Catherine’s intellectual powers were as remarkable as her physical vigor; even after becoming empress she often got up at fi ve in the morning, lit her own fi re, and turned to her books, making a

Russia absorbs French culture

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 334pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 334 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

335

digest, for example, of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765. She corresponded with Voltaire and invited Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie, to visit her at St. Petersburg, where, she reported, he thumped her so hard on the knee in the energy of his conversation that she had to put a table between them. She bought Diderot’s library, allowing him to keep it during his lifetime, and in other ways won international renown by her benefactions to the philosophes, whom she regarded as useful press agents for Russia.

When she fi rst came to power, she publicized an intention to introduce certain enlightened reforms. She summoned a great consultative assembly, called a Legislative Commission, which met in 1767. From its numerous proposals Catherine obtained a good deal of information on conditions in the country and concluded, from the profuse loyalty exhibited by the deputies, that though a usurper and a foreigner she possessed a strong hold upon Russia. She subsequently enacted reforms that included a new legal codifi cation, restrictions on the use of torture, and a certain support of religious toleration, though she would not allow Old Believers to build their own chapels. Such innovations were enough to raise an admiring chorus from the philosophes, who saw in her, as they saw retrospectively in Peter the Great, the standard-bearer of an enlightened civilization among a backward people.

Whatever ideas Catherine may conceivably have had at fi rst, as a thoughtful and pro- gressive young woman, on the fundamental subject of reforming serfdom in Russia, did not last long after she became empress; and there was no consideration of reform after the great peasant insurrection of 1773, known as Pugachev’s rebellion. The condition of the Russian serfs was deteriorating. Serf owners were increasingly selling them apart from the land, breaking up families, using them in mines or manufactures, disciplining and pun- ishing them at will, or exiling them to Siberia. The serf population was restless, worked upon by the religious warnings of Old Believers and cherishing distorted popular memo- ries of the mighty hero, Stephen Razin, who a century before had led an uprising against the landlords. Class antagonism, though latent, was profound, and it may have grown when the rough muzhik, in some places, heard the lord and his family talking French so as not to be understood by the servants or saw them wearing European clothes, reading Euro- pean books, and adopting the manners of a foreign way of life.

In 1773 a Don Cossack, Emelian Pugachev, a former soldier, appeared at the head of an insurrection in the Urals. Following an old Russian cus- tom, he announced himself as the true tsar, Peter III (Catherine’s deceased husband), now returned after long travels in Egypt and the Holy Land. He surrounded himself with his own imperial family, courtiers, and even a secretary of state, He issued an imperial manifesto proclaiming the end of serfdom, taxes, and military conscription. Tens of hundreds of thousands, in the Urals and Volga regions, Tartars, Kirghiz, Cossacks, agri- cultural serfs, servile workers in the Ural mines, fi shermen in the rivers and in the Caspian Sea, fl ocked to Pugachev’s banner. The great host surged through eastern Russia, burning and pillaging, killing priests and landlords. The upper classes in Moscow were terrifi ed; 100,000 serfs lived in the city as domestic servants or industrial workers and their sym- pathies went out to Pugachev and his militant supporters. Armies sent against him were at fi rst unsuccessful. But famine along the Volga in 1774 dispersed the rebels. Pugachev, betrayed by some of his own followers, was brought to Moscow in an iron cage. Catherine forbade the use of torture at his trial, but he was executed by the drawing and quartering of his body, a punishment, it should perhaps be noted, used at the time in western Europe in cases of fl agrant treason.

Catherine’s reforms

Pugachev’s rebellion

37. Enlightened Despotism: Russia

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 335pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 335 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment336

Pugachev’s rebellion was the most violent peasant uprising in the history of Russia, and the most formidable mass upheaval in Europe in the century before 1789. Catherine replied to it by repression. She conceded more powers to the landlords. The nobles shook off the last vestiges of the compulsory state service to which Peter had bound them. The peasants were henceforth the only bound or unfree class. As in Prussia, the state came more than ever to rest on an understanding between ruler and gentry, by which the gentry accepted the monarchy, with its laws, offi cials, army, and foreign policy, and received from it, in return, the assurance of full authority over the rural masses. Government reached down through the aristocracy and the scattered towns, but it stopped short at the manor; there the lord took over and was himself a kind of government in his own person. Under these conditions the number of serfs increased, and the load on each became heavier. Catherine’s reign saw the culmination of Russian serfdom, which now ceased to differ in any important respect from the chattel slavery that controlled the lives of enslaved blacks in the Americas. One might read in the Moscow Gazette such advertisements as the following: “For sale, two plump coachmen; two girls 18 and 15 years, quick at manual work. Two barbers; one, 21, knows how to read and write and play a musical instrument; the other can do ladies’ and gentlemen’s hair.”

Catherine the Great: Foreign Affairs

Territorially Catherine was one of the main builders of modern Russia. When she became tsarina in 1762, the empire reached to the Pacifi c and into central Asia, and it touched upon the Gulf of Riga and the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic, but westward from Moscow one

CATHERINE THE GREAT by Alexander Roslin (Swedish, 1718–1793)

Catherine’s forceful character and slightly whimsical smile are represented in this portrait, which was painted shortly after the powerful tsarina sup- pressed the great peasant rebellion of 1773–1774. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 336pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 336 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

337

could go only 200 miles before reaching Poland, and no one standing on Russian soil could see the waters of the Black Sea (see maps, pp. 230–231). Russia was separated from cen- tral Europe by a wide band of loosely organized domains, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and nominally belonging to the Polish and Turkish states. Poland was an old enemy, which had once threatened Muscovy, and in both Poland and the Ottoman Empire there were many Greek Orthodox Christians with whom Russians felt an ideological tie.

Catherine’s supreme plan was to penetrate the entire area, Polish and Ottoman territories alike. In a war with the Ottoman Empire in 1772 she developed her “Greek project,” in which “Greeks,” that is, members of the Greek Orthodox Church, would replace Muslims as the dominant element throughout the Middle East. She defeated the Ottoman forces in the war, but was herself checked by the diplomatic pressures of the European balance of power. The result was the fi rst partition of Poland—a seizure of land and people in which the monarchs of Prussia, Russia, and Austria began to divide up Polish territory between them. Frederick took Pomerelia, which he renamed West Prussia; Catherine took parts of Byelorussia; Maria Theresa occupied Galicia. Frederick digested his portion with relish, realizing an old dream of the Brandenburg house; Catherine swallowed hers with somewhat less appetite, because she had satisfactorily controlled the whole of Poland before; to Maria Theresa the dish was distasteful, and even shocking, but she could not see her neighbors go ahead without her, and she shared in the feast by suppressing her moral scruples. “She wept,” said Frederick cynically, “but she kept on taking.” Catherine, in 1774, signed a peace treaty with the defeated Turks. This treaty opened opportunities for Russian expansion around the Black Sea, where the Ottoman sultan ceded control of Tartar principalities on the north coast and where the Russians soon founded the seaport of Odessa.

Territorial expansion

Emelian Pugachev, leader of the most violent, widespread peasant uprising in Russian history, was held in an iron cage before his trial and execution for treason. (Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France/ Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library)

37. Enlightened Despotism: Russia

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 337pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 337 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment338

Catherine had only delayed, not altered, her plans with respect to Ottoman Turkey. She decided to neutralize the opposition of Austria. She invited Joseph II to visit her in Russia, and the two sovereigns proceeded together on a tour of her newly won Black Sea provinces. Her long-time adviser and lover, Grigory Potemkin, accompanied Catherine on this tour, which included visits to numerous towns and fortresses that Potemkin had established in the Crimea. Although the Russians had actually made signifi cant progress in developing the region, Potemkin’s enemies claimed that the new towns were nothing but a facade—thus creating the famous phrase “Potemkin villages” to mean bogus evidence of a nonexistent prosperity. But Catherine achieved her main goal when Joseph II agreed to bring Austria into a war of conquest against the Ottoman Empire.

This war was interrupted by the French Revolution, however, and both governments reduced their commitments in the Balkans to await developments in western Europe. It became Catherine’s policy to incite Austria and Prussia into a war with revolutionary France, in the name of monarchy and civilization, in order that she might have a free hand in the Polish-Turkish sphere. Meanwhile she contributed to a collective assault on the nationalist and reforming movement among the Poles. In 1793 she arranged with Prussia for the second partition, and in 1795, with both Prussia and Austria, for the third. She was

the only ruler who lived to take part in all three partitions of Poland (which are described later in this chapter).

Her protestations of enlightenment tempt one to an ironic judgment of her career. Her foreign policy was purely expansionist and unscrupu- lous, and the net effect of her domestic policy, aside from a few reforms of

detail, was to favor the half-Europeanized aristocracy and to extend serfdom among the people. In her defense it may be observed that unscrupulous expansion was the accepted practice of the time, and that, domestically, probably no ruler could have corrected the social evils from which Russia suffered. If there was to be a Russian Empire, it had to be with the consent of the serf-owning gentry, which was the only articulate and politically signifi cant class. As Catherine observed to Diderot on the subject of reforms: “You write only on paper, but I have to write on human skin, which is incomparably more irritable and ticklish.” She had reason to know how easily tsars and tsarinas could be unseated and even murdered and that the danger for tsars came not from the peasants but from cliques of army offi cers and landlords.

Yet she remained attuned to western Europe. She never thought that Russian insti- tutions should become a model for others. She continued to recognize the standards of the Enlightenment. In her later years she gave careful attention to her favorite grandson, Alexander, closely supervising his education, which she planned on the western European model. She gave him as a tutor the Swiss philosophe La Harpe, who fi lled his mind with humane and liberal sentiments on the duties of princes. Trained by Catherine as a kind of ideal ruler, Alexander I was destined to cut a wide circle in the affairs of Europe, to help defeat Napoleon Bonaparte, to preach peace and freedom, and to suffer from the same internal cultural divisions and frustrations by which European-educated Russians were often affl icted.

The Limitations of Enlightened Despotism

Enlightened despotism, seen in retrospect, foreshadowed an age of revolutionary changes and even signifi ed a preliminary effort to revolutionize society by authoritative action from above. People were told by their own governments that reforms were needed, that many

Catherine’s reign evaluated

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 338pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 338 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

33938. The Partitions of Poland

privileges, special liberties, or tax exemptions were bad, that the past was a source of confusion, injustice, or ineffi ciency in the present. The state rose up as more completely sovereign, whether acting frankly in its own interest or claiming to act in the interest of its people. All old and established rights were brought into question—rights of kingdoms and provinces, orders and classes, legal bodies and corporate groups. Enlightened despotism overrode or exterminated the Society of Jesus, the Parlement of Paris, the autonomy of Bohemia, and the independence of Poland. Customary and common law was pushed aside by authoritative legal codes. Governments, by opposing the special powers of the church and the nobility tended to make all persons into uniform and equal subjects. To this extent enlightened despotism favored equality before the law. But it could go only a certain dis- tance in this direction. The king was after all a hereditary aristocrat himself, and no gov- ernment can be revolutionary to the point of breaking up its own foundations.

Even before the French Revolution enlightened despotism had run its course. Every- where the “despots,” for reasons of politics if not of principle, had reached a point beyond which they could not go. In France Louis XVI had appeased the privileged classes; in the Austrian Empire Joseph’s failure to appease them threw them into open revolt; in Prussia and in Russia the brilliant reigns of Frederick and Catherine actually increased the power of landlordism for most people in the countryside. Almost everywhere there was an aris- tocratic and even feudal resurgence. Religion also was renewing itself in many places. Many were again saying that kingship was in a sense divine, and a new alliance was forming between “the throne and the altar.” The French Revolution, by terrifying the old vested interests, was to accelerate and embitter an aristocratic and monarchical reaction that had already begun. Monarchy in Europe, ever since the Middle Ages, had generally been a centralizing but progressive institution that set itself against the feudal and eccle- siastical powers. Enlightened despotism was the culmination of the historic development of European monarchies. After the enlightened despots, and after the French Revolution, monarchy became on the whole nostalgic and backward-looking, supported most ardently by the churches and aristocracies that it had once tried to subdue and least of all by those who felt in themselves the surge of the future.

38. THE PARTITIONS OF POLAND The fate of eighteenth-century Poland has been mentioned as a consequence of the growing power of the newer Central European monarchies, but the partitions of Polish territories also illustrate the assumptions and practices of the so-called enlightened despots. Apart from the still somewhat non-European state of Russia, Poland in the eighteenth century was by far the largest state in Europe. It reached at the beginning of the century from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea and extended eastward for 800 miles across the north- European plain. But it was the classic example, along with the Holy Roman Empire, of an older political structure that failed to develop modern, centralizing government institutions (see maps, pp. 199, 200). It fell into ever deeper anarchy and confusion. Without army, revenues, or administration and internally divided among parties forever at cross-purposes, the country was a perpetual theater for foreign diplomatic maneuvering and was fi nally absorbed into the territories of its growing neighbors.

The Polish kings were chosen in elections that became an object of regular interna- tional interference. A movement for reform therefore began to gather strength after the 1730s, and Polish patriots sought to do away with the liberum veto and other elements in the constitution that made government impossible. The reformers were repeatedly frustrated,

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 339pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 339 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment340

however, by the infl uence of Catherine the Great and other foreign rulers who preferred a Poland in which they could intervene at will. Catherine’s candidate for the Polish throne, Stanislas Poniatowski, won an election in 1763, thereby giving her new infl uence over Poland’s domestic affairs. She

declared herself protector of the Polish liberties. It was to the Russian advantage to maintain the existing state of affairs in Poland rather than to divide the country with neighbors who might exclude Russian infl uence from their own spheres. The Prussian government, which was eager to join the old duchy of Prussia with its other territories in the east, developed a greater interest in dividing Poland as a means to enhance its own strategic position.

The opportunity for Prussia presented itself in 1772, when Russia’s war with Ottoman Turkey destabilized the situation in eastern Europe. The Russian victories in this war were so overwhelming that both Austrians and Prussians feared an enduring Russian disruption of the balance of power. The Prussians therefore came forward with a proposal to prevent an Austro-Russian war and to preserve the balance in eastern Europe by leaving the Otto- man Empire more or less intact. Looking for an alternative to Russian expansion into Ottoman lands, the Prussians proposed that all three European powers should annex terri- tory from Poland instead. The proposition was accepted by all three parties.

Poland was thus sacrifi ced. By the fi rst partition in 1772, its outer territories were cut away. Russia took an eastern slice around the city of Vitebsk. Austria took a southern slice, the region known as Galicia. Prussia realized its territorial ambitions by taking the Pomerelian borderland in West Prussia and creating a solid Prussian block from the Elbe to the borders of Lithuania (see map, p. 214, panel 4). The partition sobered the Poles, who renewed their efforts at a national revival, hoping to create an effective sovereignty that could secure the country against outsiders. But the Polish movement lacked deep popular strength, for it was confi ned mainly to nobles, whose confl icts had brought the country to ruin. The mass of the serf population and the numerous Jews did not much care at this time whether they were governed by Poles, Russians, or Germans.

Nevertheless, beginning in 1788, a reform party gathered strength. One of its mem- bers was King Stanislas Poniatowski himself, who had begun his reign as a protégé of the Russian empress. The reformers produced a new constitution in 1791. It made the Polish kingship hereditary, thus strengthening the executive government, and it reduced the powers of the great magnates while giving political rights to many burghers in the towns. By this time, however, the governments of eastern Europe were afraid of the French Revolution. Denouncing the Polish reformers as French-inspired Jacobins, Catherine the Great said she would “fi ght Jacobinism and beat it in Poland.” In collusion with a few disgruntled Polish noblemen she sent an army into Poland and destroyed the constitution of 1791. In agreement with Prussia she then carried out the Second Partition in 1793. In 1794 Thaddeus Kosciusko led a more revolutionary political movement, which included even a proposed abolition of serfdom. Although it received no aid from the revolutionaries then governing France, it was crushed in the general European counterrevolution when Russian and Prussian armies again invaded Poland, defeated Kosciusko, and in a Third Partition in 1795 divided what remained of the country among themselves and Austria. Poland as a political entity ceased to exist.

Many advanced thinkers of the day praised the partitions of Poland as a triumph of enlightened rulers, putting an end to an old nuisance. The three partitioning powers justifi ed their conduct on various grounds and even took pride in it as an enlightened diplomatic achievement by which they had prevented war among themselves. It was argued also that the partitions of Poland put an end to an old cause of international rivalry and war, replacing anarchy with more stable governments in a large area of eastern Europe. It is a fact that

Interference in Polish elections

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 340pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 340 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

341

Poland had been scarcely more independent before the partitions than after. It is to be noted also, though nationalist arguments were not used at the time, that on national grounds the Poles themselves had no claim to large parts of the old Poland. The regions taken by Russia were inhabited overwhelmingly by Byelorussians and Ukrainians, among whom the Poles were mainly a landlord class. Russia, even after the third partition, reached only to the true ethnic border of Poland. But later, after the fall of Napoleon, by general international agreement, the Russian sphere was extended deep into the territory inhabited by Poles.

The partitions of Poland, however extenuated, were nevertheless a great shock to the old system of Europe. Edmund Burke, in England, prophetically saw in the fi rst partition the crumbling of the old international order. His diagnosis was a shrewd one. The prin- ciple of the balance of power had been historically invoked to preserve the independence of European states and to secure weak or small ones against universal monarchy. It was now used to destroy the independence of a weak but ancient kingdom. Poland was not the fi rst European kingdom to be “partitioned,” but it was the fi rst to be partitioned without war and the fi rst to disappear totally. That Poland was partitioned without war, a source of great satisfaction to the partitioning powers, was still a very unsettling fact. It was alarm- ing for a huge state to vanish simply by cold diplomatic calculation. It seemed that no established rights were safe even in peacetime. The partitions of Poland showed that in a world where great powers had arisen through control of a modern state apparatus it was dangerous not to be strong. They suggested that any area failing to develop a sovereign state capable of keeping out foreign infi ltration, and so situated as to be within the reach of the great powers of Europe, was unlikely to retain its independence. In this way the history of eighteenth-century Poland anticipated, for example, the partitions of Africa a century later, when Africa too, lacking strong governments, was almost totally divided, without war, among half a dozen states of Europe.

Moreover the partitions of Poland, while maintaining a balance of power in eastern Europe, profoundly changed the balance of Europe as a whole. The disappearance of Poland was a blow to France, which had long used Poland, as it had used Hungary and Turkey, as an outpost of French infl uence in eastern Europe. The three eastern powers expanded their territory, while France enjoyed henceforth no permanent growth. Eastern Europe bulked larger than ever before in the affairs of Europe. Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire became contiguous. Although they had drawn somewhat differently on western European methods of statecraft and military organization to build their power, they had a common interest and objective in eastern Europe: the repression of Polish resistance to their rule. Polish resistance, dating from before the partitions and continuing thereafter, became the earliest example of modern revolutionary nationalism in Europe.

The independence of Poland, and of other submerged nationalities, later attracted wide support in western Europe, while the three great monarchies of eastern Europe were drawn together in common opposition to national liberation; this fact, plus the fact that the eastern monarchies were primarily landlord states, accentuated the political and social division of Europe in the nineteenth century between a western Europe that inclined to be liberal and an eastern Europe that inclined to be reactionary. The subsequent political divergence of west- ern and eastern Europe might therefore be compared to the earlier north–south religious divergence of Protestant and Catholic states, in that both the political and the religious dif- ferences contributed to the fragmentation of Europe and to the emerging nationalisms that would later shape the major, modern European confl icts. The fi rst great political assault on the older social order and political system in eighteenth-century Europe, however, came from the enlightened despots who destroyed the kingdom of Poland.

Debate over the partitions

38. The Partitions of Poland

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 341pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 341 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment342

POLAND SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The top panel shows, in simpli- fi ed form, the ethnic compo- sition of the area included in the Poland of 1772. In addition to languages shown, Yiddish was spoken by the large scat- tered Jewish population. The line set in 1795 as the western boundary of Russia persists through later changes. It reap- pears as the eastern border of Napoleon’s Grand Duchy and of Congress Poland. After the First World War the victori- ous Allies contemplated much this same line as Poland’s east- ern frontier (the dotted line in the fourth panel, known as the Curzon Line); but the Poles in 1920–1921 conquered territory farther east. After the Second World War the Russians pushed the Poles back to the same basic line, but com- pensated Poland with territory taken from Germany, as far west as the river Oder and its tributary, the Neisse. The posi- tion of Warsaw in each panel shows how Poland has been shoved westward.

Baltic Sea Smolensk

Stettin

Warsaw

Polish

Lithuanian

Latvian

Byelorussian

Ukrainian

German

Languages

Baltic Sea EAST

PRUSSIA

RUSSIA

AUSTRIA

PRUSSIA

Smolensk

Stettin

WarsawTo Russia

To Prussia

To Austria

1660 Boundary

The Three Partitions

1772 1793 1795

Baltic Sea

PRU SSI

A

RUSSIA

AUSTRIA

Smolensk

Stettin

Warsaw

Grand Duchy of Warsaw, 1808–1814

Congress Poland, 1815–1831

1772 Boundary

During and After the Napoleonic Era

1808–1831

Baltic Sea

SOVIET UNIONGERMANY

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Smolensk

Stettin

Warsaw

Poland, 1922–1939

Curzon Line, 1919

1772 Boundary

Poland After World War I

Baltic Sea

SOVIET UNION

EAST GERMANY

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Smolensk

Stettin

Warsaw

Poland After World War II

1772 Boundary

Poland After World War II

0 100 200 300 miles

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 342pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 342 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

34339. New Stirrings: The British Reform Movement

39. NEW STIRRINGS: THE BRITISH REFORM MOVEMENT

It was not only by monarchs and their ministers that the older privileged, feudal, and eccle- siastical interests were threatened. Beginning about 1760 they were challenged also by broader-based political and social groups. Growing out of the Enlightenment, and out of the failure of governments to cope with grave social and fi scal problems, a new era of revolutionary disturbance was about to open. It was marked above all by the great French Revolution of 1789, but the American Revolution of 1776 was also of international impor- tance. In Great Britain, too, the long-drawn-out movement for parliamentary reform that began in the 1760s was in effect revolutionary in character, though nonviolent, because it questioned the foundations of traditional English government and society. In addition, in the last third of the eighteenth century, there was revolutionary agitation in Switzerland, Belgium, and Holland, in Ireland, Poland, Hungary, Italy, and in lesser degree elsewhere. After 1800 revolutionary ferment was increasingly evident in Germany, Spain, and Latin America. This general wave of revolution in Europe and the Atlantic world may be said not to have ended until the revolutions of 1848 or even until the later consolidation of modern national states around 1870.

Onset of an Age of “Democratic Revolution”

For the whole period the term “Atlantic Revolution” has sometimes been used, because countries on both sides of the Atlantic were affected. It has been called also an age of “Democratic Revolution,” because in all the diversity of these upheavals, from the American Revolution to those of the mid-nineteenth century, certain principles of the modern democratic society were in one way or another affi rmed. In this view, the particular revolutions, attempted revolutions, or basic reform movements are seen as aspects of one great revolutionary wave by which virtually the whole area of Western civilization was transformed. There is also another view of this revolutionary age, namely, that each country presented a special case, which can be misunderstood if specifi c national events are described only as part of a vague general international turmoil. Thus the American Revolution, it is argued, was essentially a movement for independence, conservative in its objectives, and entirely different from the French Revolution, in which a thorough renovation of all society and ideas was con- templated; and both were utterly different from what happened in England, where there was no revolution at all. It need only be stressed here, however, that the American revolutionar- ies, the French Jacobins, the United Irish, the Dutch Patriots, and similar groups, though differing from each other, shared much in common that can only be characterized as revo- lutionary and as contributing to a revolutionary age in the Atlantic world.

It is important to see in what ways the movement that began about 1760 was and was not “democratic.” It did not generally demand universal suffrage, though a handful of per- sons in England made such demands as early as the 1770s and some of the American states practiced an almost universal male suffrage after 1776, as did the more militant French revolutionaries in 1792. It did not aim at a welfare state, nor question the right of property, though there were signs pointing in these directions in the most extreme wing of the French Revolution. It was not especially directed against monarchy as such. The quarrel of the colonial Americans was primarily with the British Parliament, not the king; the French proclaimed a republic by default in 1792, three years after their revolution began; the

“Age of Democratic Revolution”

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 343pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 343 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment344

revolutionary Poles after 1788 tried to strengthen their king’s position, not weaken it; and revolutionary groups could come into action where no monarchy existed at all, as in the Dutch provinces before the French Revolution, and the Swiss cantons, the Venetian Republic, or again in Holland, under French infl uence after 1795. Indeed the fi rst revolu- tionary outbreak of the period occurred in 1768 at Geneva, a very nonmonarchical small city-republic, ruled by a close-knit circle of hereditary patricians. Royal power, where it existed, became the victim of revolutionaries only where it was used to support various privileged social groups.

The revolutionary movement announced itself everywhere as a demand for “liberty and equality.” It favored declarations of rights and explicit writ- ten constitutions. It proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, or “nation,” and it formulated the idea of national citizenship. In this context the

“people” were essentially classless; it was a legal term, signifying not government but the community over which public authority was exercised and from which government itself was in principle derived. To say that citizens were equal meant originally that there was no difference between noble and commoner—a radical idea in societies that had always made legal distinctions between persons in different social categories. To say that the people were sovereign meant that neither the king, nor the British Parliament, nor any group of nobles, patricians, regents, or other elite possessed power of government in their own right; that all public offi cers were removable and exercised a delegated authority within limits defi ned by the constitution. There must be no “magistrate” above the people, no self-perpetuation in offi ce, no rank derived from birth and acknowledged in the law. Social distinctions, as the French said in their Declaration of Rights of 1789, were to be based only “on common utility.” Elites of talent or function there might be, but none of birth, privilege, or estate. “Aristocracy” in every form must be shunned. In representative bodies, there could be no special representation for special groups; representatives should be elected by frequent elections, not indeed by universal suffrage, but by a body of voters, however defi ned, in which each voter should count for one in a system of equal representation. Representation by numbers, with majority rule, replaced the older idea of representation of social classes, privileged towns, or other corporate groups.

In short, everything associated with absolutism, feudalism, or inherited rights (except the right of property) was repudiated. Likewise rejected was any connection between reli- gion and citizenship, or civil rights. The Democratic Revolution undermined the special position of the Catholic Church in France, the Anglican in England and Ireland, and the Dutch Reformed in the United Provinces. This was also the great period of what has been called Jewish “emancipation,” which gave Jews political and social rights that had been denied to them throughout the Middle Ages and early modern era. The whole idea that government, or any human authority, was somehow willed by God and protected by reli- gion faded away. A general liberty of opinion on all subjects was countenanced, in the belief that it was necessary to progress. Here again the secularism of the Enlightenment was carried from science and philosophy into many of the new political and cultural insti- tutions that emerged during this era of revolutionary change.

On the whole, the Democratic Revolution was a middle-class movement, and indeed the term “bourgeois revolution” was later invented to describe it. Many of its leaders in Europe, however, were in fact nobles who were willing to forgo the historic privileges of nobility; and many of its active supporters were of the poorer classes, especially in the great French Revolution. But the middle classes were the great benefi ciaries, and new middle-class or bourgeois societies generally emerged from the revolutionary upheavals.

Liberty and equality

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 344pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 344 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

345

Persons of noble ancestry continued to exist after the storm was over, but the social and political world of noble hierarchies was gone. Nobles henceforth either took part in vari- ous activities on much the same terms as others or retreated into exclusive drawing rooms to enjoy their aristocratic distinctions in private. The main drive of the working classes was still to come.

The English-Speaking Countries: Parliament and Reform

If the American Revolution was the fi rst act of a larger social and political drama, it must be understood also in connection with the broader British world of which the American colonies formed a part. The British Empire in the middle of the century was decentralized and composite. Thirty-one governments were directly subordinate to Westminster, rang- ing from the separate kingdom of Ireland through all the crown and charter colonies to the various political establishments maintained in Asia by the East India Company. The whole empire, with about 15,000,000 people of all colors in 1750, was less populous than France or the Austrian monarchy. The whole tract of the American mainland from Georgia to Nova Scotia compared in the number of its European or white population with Ireland or Scotland—or with Brittany or Bohemia—a fi gure of about 2,000,000 being roughly applicable in each case.

Britain had its own way of passing through the Age of Enlightenment. There was general contentment with the arrangements that followed the English Revolution of 1688—it has often been remarked that nothing is so conservative as a successful revolu- tion. British thought generally lacked the asperity of thought on the Continent. The writers who most resembled French philosophes, such as the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the English historian Edward Gibbon, were moderate in their political ideas. The prevailing mood, however, was one of complacency, a self-satisfaction in the glories of the unwritten British constitution by which Englishmen enjoyed liberties unknown on the Continent.

In Britain, Parliament was as supreme as the monarchs in most Conti- nental countries. The British Parliament was indeed more sovereign than any European ruler, because less that could be called “feudalism” remained in England than on the Continent. Nor was there any political “despotism” in England, enlightened or otherwise. The young George III, who inherited the throne in 1760, did feel himself to be a “patriot king.” He did wish to heighten the infl uence of the crown and to overcome the factionalism of parties. But it was through Parliament that he had to work. He had to descend into the political arena himself, buy up or otherwise con- trol votes in the Commons, grant pensions and favors, and make promises and deals with other parliamentary politicians. What he did in effect was to create a new faction, the “king’s friends.” This faction was in power during the ministry of Lord North from 1770 to 1782. It is worth noting that all factions were factions of Whigs, that the Tory Party was practically defunct, that Britain did not yet have a two-party system, and that the word “Tory,” as it came to be used by American revolutionaries, was little more than a term of abuse.

While Parliament was supreme, and constitutional questions appar- ently settled, there were nevertheless numerous undercurrents of discon- tent. These were expressed, because the press was freer in England than elsewhere, in many books and pamphlets that were read in the American colonies and helped to form the psychology of the American Revolution. There was, for example, a

The monarchy in Great Britain

English discontent

39. New Stirrings: The British Reform Movement

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 345pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 345 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment346

school of Anglo-Irish Protestant writers who argued that because Ireland was in any case a separate kingdom, with its own parliament, it ought to be less dependent on the central government at Westminster. The possibility of a similar separate state remaining within the British Empire, was one of the alternatives considered by Americans before they settled on independence. In England there was the considerable body of Dissenters, or Protestants not accepting the Church of England, who had enjoyed religious toleration since 1689 but continued to labor (until 1828) under various forms of political exclusion. They overlapped with two other amorphous groups, a small number of “commonwealthmen” and a larger and growing number of parliamentary reformers. The commonwealthmen, increasingly eccentric and largely ignored, looked back nostalgically to the Puritan Revolution and the republican era of Oliver Cromwell. They kept alive memories of the Levellers and ideals of equality, well mixed with a pseudo-history of a simple Anglo-Saxon England that had been crushed by the despotism of the Norman Conquest. They had less infl uence in England than in the American colonies and especially New England, whose origins were closely connected to the Puritan Revolution. The parliamentary reformers were a more diverse and infl uential group. They were condemned in the eighteenth century to repeated frustration;

not until the First Reform Bill of 1832 did they begin to accomplish their goals.

The very power of Parliament meant that political leaders had to take strong measures to assure its votes—measures that were generally denounced by their critics as “corruption.” Control of Parliament, and espe-

cially of the House of Commons, was sustained by various devices, such as patronage or the giving of government jobs (called “places”), or awarding contracts, or having infre- quent general elections (every seven years after 1716); or the fact that in many constituen- cies there were no real elections at all. The distribution of seats in the Commons bore no relation to numbers of inhabitants. A town having the right to send members to Parliament was called a “borough,” but no new borough was created after 1688 (or until 1832). Thus localities that had been important in the medieval or Tudor periods were represented, but towns that had grown up recently, such as Manchester and Birmingham, were not. A few boroughs were populous and democratic, but many had few inhabitants or none, so that infl uential “borough mongers” decided who should represent them in Parliament.

The reform movement began in England before the American Revo- lution, with which it was closely associated. Because complaints were diverse, it attracted people of different kinds. The fi rst agitation centered about John Wilkes, a journalist and member of Parliament who vehemently

attacked the policies of King George III. He was vindicated when the courts pronounced the arrest of his publisher illegal, but the king’s supporters expelled him from the House of Commons. Wilkes became a political hero, however, and was later reelected three times to the House, which refused to seat him. A whirl of protests, public meetings, and peti- tions supported him against the exclusionary actions of Parliament. His followers in 1769 founded the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, the fi rst of many societies dedicated to parlia- mentary reform. His case raised the question of whether the House of Commons should be dependent on the electorate and on the propriety of public agitation “out of doors” on polit- ical questions. It was in this connection, also, that debates in Parliament for the fi rst time came to be reported in the London press. Parliament stood on the eve of a long transition, by which it was to be converted from a select body meeting in private to a modern repre- sentative institution answerable to the public and its constituents. Wilkes himself fi nally regained his parliamentary seat in 1774 and soon introduced the fi rst of many reform bills, none of which passed for over half a century.

Parliamentary politics

The reform movement

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 346pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 346 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

THE HON. MRS. GRAHAM by Thomas Gainsborough (English, 1727–1788)

High social status is very evident in this portrayal of a young English gentlewoman. The wealth of her social class is apparent in the brooch, the plumes, the silks, bows and ruffl es, and in the strings of pearls. Her delicate hands and the classical colonnade suggest a life of leisure and cultural importance. This is the way that English aristocrats of the eighteenth century liked to imagine themselves and to be portrayed for posterity. (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh/The Bridgeman Art Library)

347

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 347pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 347 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment348

Meanwhile, the important Whig leaders, who had previously managed Parliament by manipulating elections in lightly populated boroughs, began to sense corruption in such methods after control passed to George III and his “friends.” Their most eloquent spokes-

man was Edmund Burke (1729–1797), who would become an infl uential founder of philosophical conservatism. Other reformers called for more frequent elections, “annual parliaments,” a wider and more equal or even universal male suffrage, with dissolution of some boroughs in which no one

was really represented. Burke favored none of these things; in fact he came strenuously to oppose them. He was more concerned that the House of Commons should be independent and responsible than that it should be mathematically representative. He thought that the landowning interest should govern. But he supported parliamentary reform by pleading for a strong sense of party in opposition to royal encroachments, and he argued that members of Parliament should follow their own best judgment of the country’s interests, bound neither by the king on the one hand nor by their own constituents on the other. Like other reformers, he objected to “placemen,” or jobholders dependent on their ministerial patrons, and he objected to the use made, for political purposes, of a bewildering array of pensions, sine- cures, honorifi c appointments, and ornamental offi ces, ranks, and titles. In his Economical Reform of 1782, which curtailed crown patronage, he got many of these abolished.

The reform movement evolved and took on new strength at the time of the French Revolution, spreading then to more popular levels, as members of the skilled artisan class responded to events in France by demanding a more adequate “representation of the peo- ple” in England. They then had upper-class support from Charles James Fox and a minority of the Whigs. But conservatism (as described in Burke’s critiques of the French Revolu- tion), satisfaction with the British constitution, and a new patriotism that arose during the wars against revolutionary France all raised an impassable barrier. Reform was delayed for another generation.

After the American Revolution, which was a kind of political civil war within the English-speaking world, the English reformers generally blamed the trouble with America on King George III. This was less than fair, because Parliament on the American question was never dragooned by the king. The most ardent reformers later argued that if Parlia- ment had been truly representative of the British people, the Americans would not have been driven to independence. This seems unlikely. In any case, reformers of various kinds, from Wilkes to Burke, were sympathetic to the complaints of the American colonials after 1763. There was much busy correspondence across the Atlantic. Wilkes was a hero in Boston as well as London. Burke pleaded for conciliation with the colonies in a famous speech of 1775. His very insistence on the powers and dignity of Parliament, however, made it hard for him to fi nd a workable solution; and after the colonies became inde-

pendent, he showed no interest in the political ideas of the new American states. It was the more radical reformers in England, as in Scotland and Ireland, who most consistently favored the Americans, both before and after independence. They of course had no power. On the American side, for a decade before independence, the increasingly discontented colonials, read-

ing English books and pamphlets and reports of speeches, heard George III denounced for despotism and Parliament accused of incorrigible corruption. All this seemed to confi rm what Americans had long been reading in the works of English Dissenters or old com- monwealthmen, now on the fringes of English society but sure of a receptive audience in the American colonies. The result was to make Americans suspicious of all actions by the British government, to sense tyranny everywhere, to magnify such things as the Stamp Act into a kind of plot against American liberties.

Edmund Burke

Reformers’ infl uence in American colonies

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 348pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 348 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

349

The real drift in England in the eighteenth century, however, despite the chronic criti- cism of Parliament, was for Parliament to extend its powers in a general centralization of the empire. The British government faced somewhat the same problems as centralizing governments on the Continent. All had to deal with the issues raised by the great war of the midcentury, in its two phases of the Austrian Succession and Seven Years’ War. Governments everywhere responded to the fi nancial and military costs of these wars by trying to increase their own central power. We have seen how the French government, in attempting to tap new sources of revenue, tried to encroach on the liberties of Brittany and other provinces and to subordinate the bodies that in France were called parlements. We have likewise seen how the Habsburg government, also in an effort to raise more taxes, repressed local self-government in the empire and consolidated power in a more centralized bureaucracy. The same tendency showed itself in the British system. The Habsburg revocation of a constitutional charter in Bohemia in 1749 had its parallel in the revocation of the charter of Massachusetts in 1774. The disputes of the French king with the estates of Brittany or Languedoc had their parallel in the disputes of the British Parliament with the provincial assemblies of Virginia or New York. And the French government’s unsuccessful attempts to collect more taxes from recalcitrant provincial nobles resembled the stymied British attempts to collect more revenue from their colonial subjects in North America.

Scotland, Ireland, India

The British also faced problems nearer home. Scotland proved a source of weakness in the War of the Austrian Succession. The Lowlanders were loyal enough, but the Highlanders revolted with French assistance in the Jacobite rising of 1745 and by invading England threatened to attack

British centralization

British rule in Scotland

Edmund Burke’s insistence on the politi- cal and social value of inherited traditions made him a key fi gure in the emergence of modern conservatism. Although he favored an independent Parliament in Britain, he wrote a famous critique of the revolution that abolished traditional royal prerogatives in France. He appears here in an engraving from the 1770s, after a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

39. New Stirrings: The British Reform Movement

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 349pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 349 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment350

the British government in the rear as it was locked in the struggle with France. The High- lands had never really been under any government, even under the old Scottish monarchy before the union of 1707 with England. Men in the Highlands looked to their chiefs, the heads of the clans, to tell them whom and when to fi ght. A few leaders could throw the whole region to the Stuarts or the French. The British government, after 1745, proceeded to make its sovereignty effective in the Highlands. Troops were quartered there for years. Roads were pushed across the moors and through the glens. Law courts enforced the law of the Scottish Lowlands. Revenue offi cers collected funds for the treasury of Great Britain. The chiefs lost their old quasi-feudal jurisdiction. The old system of land tenure was bro- ken up, and the holding of land from clannish chiefs was ended. Fighting Highlanders were incorporated into newly formed Highland regiments of the British army, under the usual discipline imposed by the modern state on its fi ghting forces. For 30 years the Scots were

forbidden to wear the kilt or play the bagpipes. In Ireland the process of centralization worked itself out more slowly.

How Ireland was subjected after the battle of the Boyne has already been described. It was a French army that had landed in Ireland, supported

James II, and been defeated in 1690. The new English constitutional arrangements, the Hanoverian succession, the Protestant ascendancy, the church and the land settlement in Ireland, together with the prosperity of British commerce, were all secured by the subor- dination of the smaller island. The native or Catholic Irish remained generally pro-French. The Presbyterian Irish disliked both the French and popery, but they were alienated from England also; many in fact emigrated to America in the generation before the American

The British in Ireland

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 1733–1795

1733 Voltaire publishes Philosophical Letters on the English

1741 Montesquieu publishes The Spirit of Laws

1751–1772 Publication of the Encyclopedia in Paris

1753 Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes Origin of Inequality among Men

1762 Rousseau publishes The Social Contract and Émile

1762–1796 Tsarina Catherine the Great reigns as enlightened despot in Russia

1769 Emergence of Reform Movement in British Parliament

1772 Prussia, Austria, and Russia impose the First Partition of Poland

1773 Emelian Pugachev leads a rebellion of the lower classes in Russia

1774–1792 King Louis XVI reigns in France

1776 Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations

1776–1783 Revolutionary War leads to American independence from Britain

1780–1790 Emperor Joseph II introduces “enlightened” reforms in Austria

1784 Britain creates the India Offi ce to manage British interests in India

1787 Written Constitution establishes new government in the United States

1793, 1795 Second and Third Partitions of Poland destroy the Polish state

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 350pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 350 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

351

Revolution. Ireland remained quiet in the midcentury wars. When the trouble began between the British Parliament and the American colonies, the Presbyterian Irish generally took the American side. They were greatly stirred by the example of American independence. Thousands formed themselves into Volunteer Companies; they wore uniforms, armed, and drilled; they demanded both internal reform of the Irish parliament (which was even less representative than the British) and greater autonomy for the Irish parliament as against the central government at Westminster.

Faced with these demands, and fearing a French invasion of Ireland during the War of American Independence, the British government made concessions. It allowed an increase of power to the Irish parliament at Dublin. But from the English parliament Catholics were still excluded. In the next war between France and Great Britain, which began in 1793, many Irish felt a warm sympathy for the French Revolution. Catholics and Presby- terians, at last combining, formed a network of United Irish societies throughout the whole island. They sought French aid, and the French barely failed to land a sizable army. Even without French military support, the United Irish rose in 1798 to drive out the English and establish an independent republic. The British, suppressing the rebellion, now turned to centralization. The separate kingdom of Ireland, and the Irish parliament, ceased to exist. The Irish were thereafter represented in the imperial Parliament at West- minster. These provisions were incorporated in the Act of Union of 1801, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which Irish nationalists vehemently disliked but which lasted until 1922.

British establishments in India also faced new interventions from the centralizing imperial policies of Parliament. At the close of the Seven Years’ War the various British posts in and around Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata (cities long known to the English as Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta) were unconnected with each other and subordinate only to the board of directors of the East India Company in London. Company employees interfered at will in the wars and politics of the Indian states and enriched themselves by such means as they could, not excluding graft, trickery, intimidation, rapine, and extortion. In 1773 the ministry of Lord North passed a Regulat- ing Act, of which the main purpose was to regulate the British subjects in India, whom no Indian government could control. The company was left with its trading activities, but its political activities were brought under parliamentary supervision. The act gathered all the British establishments under a single governor general, set up a new supreme court with British judges at Kolkata, and required the company to submit its correspondence on polit- ical matters for review by the ministers of His Majesty’s Government. Warren Hastings became the fi rst British governor general in India. He was so high-handed with some of the Indian princes, and made so many enemies among jealous English residents in Bengal, that he was denounced at home, impeached, and subjected to a trial that dragged on for seven years in the House of Lords. He was fi nally acquitted. After Clive, whose interventions had rapidly expanded British power there during the 1750s, Hastings was the main author of British supremacy in India. Meanwhile, in 1784 an India offi ce was created in the British ministry at home. The governor general henceforth ruled the growing British sphere in India almost as an absolute monarch but only as the agent of the ministry and Parliament of Great Britain.

Thus the trend in the British world was to centralization. Despite the fl utter of royal- ism under George III, it was to a centralization of all British territories under the authority of Parliament. What was happening in empire affairs, as in domestic politics in England, was a continuing application of the principles of 1689. The parliamentary sovereignty

Intervention in India

39. New Stirrings: The British Reform Movement

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 351pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 351 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment352

established in 1689 was now, after the middle of the eighteenth century, being applied to regions where it had heretofore had little effect. And it was against the centralizing author- ity of the British Parliament that the Americans primarily rebelled.

40. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Background to the Revolution

The behavior of the Americans in the Seven Years’ War, as viewed by the British govern- ment, left much to be desired. The several colonial legislatures rejected the Albany Plan of Union drafted by Franklin and commended to them by British offi cials. During the war it was the British regular army and navy, fi nanced by taxes and loans in Great Britain, that drove the French out of America. The war effort of the Anglo-Americans was desultory at best. After the defeat of the French the colonials had still to reckon with the Indians of the interior, who preferred French rule to that of their new British and British-colonial masters. Many tribes joined in an uprising led by Pontiac, a western chief, and they car- ried their attacks on colonial and British outposts as far eastward as the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers. Again, the colonials proved unable to deal with a problem vital to their own future, and peace was brought about by offi cials and army units taking their orders from Great Britain.

The British government now tried to make the colonials pay a larger share toward the expenses of the empire. The colonials had hitherto paid only local taxes. They were liable to customs duties, of which the proceeds went in principle to Great Britain; but these duties were levied to enforce the Acts of Trade and Navigation and to direct the fl ow of com- merce, not to raise revenue; and they were seldom paid, because the Acts of Trade and Navigation were persistently ignored. American merchants, for example, commonly imported sugar from the French West Indies, contrary to law, and even shipped in return the iron wares that it was against the law for Americans to manufacture for export. The colo- nials in practice paid only such taxes as were approved by their own local legislature for local purposes. The Americans in effect enjoyed a degree of tax exemption within the empire, and it was against this form of provincial privilege that Parliament began to move.

By the Revenue Act of 1764 (the “Sugar” Act), the British ministry, while reducing and liberalizing the customs duties payable in America, entered upon a program of actual and systematic collection. In the following year the ministry attempted to extend to British sub- jects in America a tax peaceably accepted by those in Great Britain and commonplace in most of Europe. This imposed on all uses of paper, as in newspapers and commercial and

legal documents, the payment of a fee that was certifi ed by the affi xing of a stamp. The Stamp Act aroused violent and concerted resistance in the colo- nies, especially among the businessmen, lawyers, and editors who were the most articulate class. It therefore was repealed in 1766. In 1767 Parliament, clumsily casting about to fi nd a tax acceptable to the Americans, hit upon the

“Townshend duties,” which taxed colonial imports of paper, paint, lead, and tea. Another outcry went up, and the Townshend duties were repealed, except the one on tea, which was kept as a token of the sovereign power of Parliament to tax all persons in the empire.

The colonials had proved stubborn; and they had argued that Parlia- ment had no authority to tax them because they were not represented in it. The British replied that Parliament represented America as much as it rep- resented Great Britain. If Philadelphia sent no actually elected deputies to

Colonial resistance to new taxes

Debate over representation

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 352pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 352 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

35340. The American Revolution

the Commons, so this argument ran, neither did Manchester in England. Both places enjoyed a kind of “virtual representation,” because members of the Commons did not merely speak for local constituencies but made themselves responsible for imperial inter- ests as a whole. To this many Americans retorted that if Manchester was not “really” rep- resented it ought to be, which was of course also the belief of the English reformers. Meanwhile the strictly Anglo-American question subsided after the repeal of the Stamp Act and the Townshend program. There had been no clarifi cation of principle on either side. But in practice the Americans had resisted signifi cant taxation, and Parliament had refrained from making any drastic use of its sovereign power.

The calm was shattered in 1773 by an event that proved, to the more dissatisfi ed Americans, the disadvantages of belonging to a global eco- nomic system in which the main policies were made on the other side of the ocean. The East India Company was in diffi culties. It had a great surplus of Chinese tea, and in any case it wanted new commercial privileges in return for the political privileges that it was losing in India by the Regulating Act of 1773. In the past the com- pany had been required to sell its wares at public auction in London; other merchants had handled distribution from that point on. Now, in 1773, Parliament granted the company the exclusive right to sell tea through its own agents in America to American local dealers. Tea was a large item of business in the commercial capitalism of the time. The colonial con- sumer might pay less for it, but the intermediary American merchant would be shut out. The company’s tea was boycotted in all American ports. In Boston, to prevent its forcible landing, a party of disguised men invaded the tea ships and dumped the chests into the harbor. To this act of vandalism the British government replied by measures far out of proportion to the offense. It “closed” the port of Boston, thus threatening the city with economic ruin. It virtually rescinded the charter of Massachusetts, forbidding certain local elections and the holding of town meetings.

And at the same time, in 1774, apparently by coincidence, Parliament enacted the Quebec Act. The wisest piece of British legislation in these troubled years, the Quebec Act provided a government for the newly con- quered Canadian French, granting them security in their French civil law and Catholic religion and laying foundations for the British Empire that was to come. But the act defi ned the boundaries of Quebec somewhat as the French themselves would have defi ned them, including in them all territory north of the Ohio River—the present states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. In the view of British legislators these boundaries were perfectly reasonable, because the few Europeans in the area were French, and since, in the age before canals or railways, the obvious means of reaching the whole region was by way of the St. Lawrence valley and the Lakes. But to the Americans the Quebec Act was a pro-French and pro-Catholic outrage, and at a time when the pow- ers of juries and assemblies in the old colonies were threatened, it was disquieting that the Quebec Act made no mention of such representative institutions for the new northern province. It was lumped with the closing of an American port and the destruction of the Massachusetts government as one of the “Intolerable Acts” to be resisted.

And indeed the implications of parliamentary sovereignty and centralized planning were now apparent. It was no longer merely an affair of taxation. A government that had to take account of the East India Company, the French Canadians, and the British taxpayers, even if more prudent and enlightened than Lord North’s ministry of 1774, could not possi- bly at the same time have satisfi ed the Americans of the thirteen seaboard colonies. These Americans, since 1763 no longer afraid of the French Empire, were less inclined to forgo

The Boston Tea Party

The Quebec Act

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 353pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 353 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment354

MRS. ISAAC SMITH by John Singleton Copley (American, then English, 1737–1815)

The wife of a Boston merchant, Mrs. Smith represents the bourgeois family background of many leaders in the American and French revolutions. In general, it was a background of sub- stance, comfort, and hard work. Mrs. Smith’s costume and surroundings (though less elegant than those portrayed in the painting of Mrs. Graham on p. 347) suggest her high station in New England society. Copley disliked the rising revolutionary agitation in America and emi- grated permanently to England in 1774. (Yale University Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 354pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 354 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

355

their own interests in order to remain under British protection or control. British poli- cies had aroused antagonism in the coastal towns and in the backwoods, among wealthy land speculators and poor squatter frontiersmen, among merchants and the workers who depended on the business of merchants. The freedom of Americans to determine their own political life was in question. Yet there were few in 1774, or even later, prepared to face the thought of independence from the British Empire.

The War of American Independence

After the “Intolerable Acts,” self-authorized groups met in the several colonies and sent delegates to a “continental congress” in Philadelphia. This body adopted a boycott of British goods, to be enforced on unwilling Americans by local organizers of resistance. Fighting began in the next year, 1775, when the British commander at Boston sent a detachment to seize unauthorized stores of weapons at Concord. On the way, at Lexing- ton, in a brush between soldiers and partisans, or “minutemen,” someone fi red the “shot heard round the world.” The Second Continental Congress, meeting a few weeks later, proceeded to raise an American army, appointed George Washington as the commanding general of its troops, dispatched an expedition to force Quebec into the revolutionary union, and entered into overtures with Bourbon France.

The Congress was still reluctant to repudiate the tie with Britain. But passions grew fi erce in consequence of the fi ghting. Radicals convinced moderates that the choice now lay between independence and enslavement. It appeared that the French, naturally uninter- ested in a reconciliation of British subjects, would give help if the avowed aim of American rebels was to dismember the British Empire. In January 1776 Thomas Paine, in his pamphlet Common Sense, made his debut as a kind of international revolutionary; he was to fi gure in the French Revolution and to work for revolution in England. He had come from England less than two years before, and he detested English society for its injustices. Eloquent and vitriolic, Common Sense identifi ed the independence of the American colonies with the cause of liberty for all humankind. It pitted freedom against tyranny in the person of “the royal brute of Great Britain.” It was “repugnant to reason,” said Paine, “to suppose that this Continent can long remain subject to any external power. . . . There is something absurd in supposing a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island.” Common Sense was read everywhere in the colonies, and its slashing argu- ments unquestionably spread a sense of proud isolation from the Old World. Such ideas also gained wide support in the Continental Congress, where Thomas Jefferson and other members of a special committee began drafting a theoretical and historical justifi cation for America’s separation from Britain. Like Paine, the authors linked their specifi c grievances to broad Enlightenment claims for universal human rights, thus giving the widest possible signifi cance to the armed rebellion of some sparsely settled colonies in Britain’s far-fl ung eighteenth-century empire. On July 4, 1776, the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, by which the United States assumed its separate and equal station among the powers of the earth.

The War of American Independence thereupon turned into another European struggle for empire. For two years more the French government remained ostensibly noninterventionist but meanwhile poured munitions into the colonies through an especially rigged-up commercial concern. Nine-tenths of the arms used by the Americans at the battle of Saratoga came from France. After the American

The “shot heard round the world”

Role of the European powers

40. The American Revolution

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 355pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 355 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment356

victory in this battle the French government concluded, in 1778, that the insurgents were a good political risk, recognized them, signed an alliance with them, and declared war on Great Britain. Spain soon followed, hoping to drive the British from Gibraltar and deciding that its overseas empire was more threatened by a restoration of British supremacy in North America than by the disturbing example of an independent American republic. The Dutch were drawn into hostilities through their trade with the Americans, which fl owed mostly by way of the Dutch West Indies. Other powers—Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Portu- gal, and Turkey—irked at British employment of blockade and sea power in time of war, formed an “Armed Neutrality” to protect their commerce from dictation by the British fl eet. The French, in a brief revival of their own sea power, landed an expeditionary force of 6,000 men in Rhode Island. The Americans suffered from the internal differences inseparable from all revolutions and were in any case still unable to govern themselves to any effect, meeting with the old diffi culties in raising both troops and money. It was therefore the participation of regiments of the French army, in conjunction with squadrons of the French fl eet, that made possible the defeat of the armed forces of the British Empire and so per- suaded the British government to recognize the independence of the United States. By the peace treaty of 1783, though the British were still in possession of New York and Savannah and though the governments befriending the Americans would just as soon have confi ned them east of the mountains, the new republic obtained territory as far west as the Missis- sippi. Canada remained British. It now received an English-speaking population of more than 60,000 refugee American “loyalists” who wanted to remain in the British Empire.

Signifi cance of the Revolution

The upheaval in America was a revolution in the Atlantic world as well as a war of inde- pendence. The Declaration of Independence was more than an announcement of secession

from the empire; it was a justifi cation of rebellion against established authority. Curiously, although the American quarrel had been with the Par- liament, the Declaration arraigned no one but the British king. One reason was that the Congress, not recognizing the authority of Parliament, could separate from Great Britain only by a denunciation of the British crown;

another reason was that the cry of “tyrant” made a more popular and fl aming issue. Boldly voicing the natural right philosophy of the age, the Declaration held as “self-evident”— that is, as evident to all reasonable people—that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These electrifying words leaped inward into America and outward to the world.

In the new states democratic equality made many advances. It was sub- ject, however, to a great limitation, in that it long applied only to white males of European origin. It was more than a century before women received the vote. American Indians were relatively few in number and most had already been pushed out of the coastal colonies; but the black

population at the time of the Revolution comprised about a fi fth of the emerging nation’s whole population. Many American whites of the revolutionary generation were indeed troubled by the institution of slavery. It was abolished outright in Massachusetts, and all states north of Maryland took steps toward its gradual extinction. But application of the principles of liberty and equality without regard to race or gender went far beyond the political and cultural assumptions of even the most enlightened white Americans at the

The Declaration of Independence

Equality advances and limitations

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 356pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 356 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

357

time. In the South, all censuses from 1790 to 1850 showed a third of the population to be slaves. For enslaved African Americans, the “self-evident” and “unalienable rights” would be blocked by a kind of internal political truce until slavery was fi nally abolished in the American Civil War—a social upheaval that might well be described as the fi nal, violent phase of a long revolutionary struggle that was fi rst announced, in 1776, in America’s Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, in the North, free blacks found that in fact, and often in law, they were debarred from voting, from adequate schooling, and from the wid- ening opportunities in which white Americans saw the essence of their national life and their superiority to Europe.

For the white male population, however, the Revolution had a democra- tizing effect in many ways. Lawyers, landowners, and businessmen who led the movement against Britain needed popular support, and to obtain it they were willing to make promises and concessions to the lower classes. Or the

Democratization

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) lived in England until he arrived in Philadelphia in 1774. He pub- lished his Common Sense anon- ymously two years later, after the armed confl ict had begun. Widely read, it helped persuade Americans to fi ght for complete independence from Britain. (Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-50794])

40. The American Revolution

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 357pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 357 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment358

popular elements, workmen and mechanics, farmers and frontiersmen, often dissidents in religion, extorted concessions by force or threats. There was a good deal of violence, as in all revolutions; the new states confi scated property from the counterrevolutionaries, called Tories, some of whom were tarred and feathered by infuriated mobs. The dissolution of the old colonial governments threw open all political questions. In some states more men became qualifi ed to vote. In some, governors and senators were now popularly elected, in addition to the lower houses of the legislatures as in colonial times. The principle was adopted, still unknown to the parliamentary bodies of Europe, that each member of a legis- lative assembly should represent about the same number of citizens. Primogeniture and entail, which landed families aspiring to an aristocratic mode of life sometimes favored, went down before the demands of democrats and small property owners. Tithes were done away with, and the established churches—Anglican in the South, Congregationalist in New England—lost their privileged position in varying degree. But the Revolution was not socially as profound as the revolution soon to come in France, or as the revolution in Russia in 1917. Property changed hands, but the law of property was modifi ed only in detail. There had been no such thing in British America as a native nobleman or even a bishop; clergy and aristocracy had been incomparably less ingrained in American than in European soci- ety, and the rebellion against them was thus less devastating in its effect.

The main importance of the American Revolution remained political and even con- stitutional in a strict sense. The American leaders were themselves part of the wider Age

of Enlightenment, sharing fully in its humane and secular spirit. But Mon- tesquieu was the only non-British thinker who signifi cantly infl uenced America’s political elite, and Montesquieu owed his popularity to his phi- losophizing upon English institutions. The Americans drew heavily on the writings of John Locke, but their cast of mind went back before Locke to the English Puritan movement of the fi rst half of the seventeenth century.

Their thought was formed not only by Locke’s ideas of human nature and government, but, as already noted, by the dissenting literature and the neorepublican writings that had never quite died out in England. The realities of life for fi ve generations in America had sharpened the old insistence upon personal liberty and equality. When the dispute with Britain came to a head, the Americans found themselves arguing for the historic and chartered rights of the English as well as the timeless and universal rights of man, both of which were invoked in the colonies to challenge the British imposition of parliamentary sovereignty. The Ameri- cans came to believe, more than any other people, that government should possess limited powers and operate only within the terms of a fi xed and written constitutional document.

All of the 13 new states quickly produced or reaffi rmed written constitutions, and each enshrined virtually the same principles. All asserted the central idea in the great Declara- tion, that it was to protect “unalienable” rights that governments were instituted among men and that whenever government became destructive to this end the people had a right to “institute new government” for their safety and happiness. All the constitutions under- took to limit government by a separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers. Most appended a bill of rights, stating the natural rights of the citizens and the actions that no government might justly take. None of the constitutions were as yet fully democratic; even the most liberal gave some advantage in public affairs to the owners of property.

Federalism, or the allocation of power between central and outlying governments, went along with the idea of written constitutions as a prin- cipal offering of the Americans to the wider world history of political theories and institutions. Like constitutionalism, federalism developed in

Infl uence of Enlightenment thinkers

Constitutionalism and federalism

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 358pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 358 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

359

the atmosphere of protest against a centralized sovereign power. It was a hard idea for Americans to work out, and until 1789 the states maintained only a loose affi liation in the Articles of Confederation. The United States was a union of 13 independent repub- lics. Disadvantages in this scheme becoming apparent, a constitutional convention met at Philadelphia in 1787 and drew up the constitution that is today the world’s oldest written instrument of government still in operation. In it the United States was conceived not merely as a league of states but as a union in which individuals were citizens of the United States of America for some purposes and of their particular states for others. Persons, not states, composed the federal republic, and the laws of the United States fell not merely on the states but on the people.

The international consequences of the American Revolution can hardly be overstated. By overburdening the French treasury, the American war became a direct cause of the French Revolution. Beyond that, it ushered in the age of predominantly liberal or demo- cratic revolution that lasted through the European revolutions of 1848 and even into later struggles for national independence or unity. The American doctrine, like most thought in the Age of Enlightenment, was expressed in universal terms of “man” and “nature.” All peoples regardless of their own history could apply it to themselves, because, as Alexander Hamilton once put it in his youth, “the sacred rights of man are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” The Americans, in freeing themselves, had done what all peoples ought to do to affi rm the “rights of man.”

The revolt in America offered a dramatic judgment on the old colonial system, convincing some, in England and elsewhere, that the empires for which they had long been struggling were hardly worth acquiring, because colonies in time, in the words of Turgot, fell away from the mother country “like ripe fruit.” The idea spread, because trade between Britain and America continued to prosper, that one could do business with a country without exerting political infl uence or control, and this idea became fundamental to the coming movement of economic lib- eralism and free trade. By coincidence, the book that became the gospel of the free trade movement, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, was published in England in the year 1776. The American example was pointed to by other peoples wishing to throw off colonial status—fi rst by the Latin Americans, then by the peoples of the older British dominions, and, fi nally, in the twentieth century, by those of Asia and Africa also. In Europe, the American example encouraged the type of nationalism in which subjugated nations aspired to be free. And at home the Revolution did much to determine the spirit and method by which the new nation spread across the North American continent and the ideas by which the United States, when it became a leading power a century and a half later, would explain and justify its national actions in the modern world.

More immediately, the American example was not lost on the many Europeans who sojourned in the new states during and after the war. Of these the French Marquis de Lafayette was the most famous, but there were many others: Thomas Paine, who returned to Europe in 1787; the future French revolutionist Brissot; the future Polish national leader Kosciusko; the future marshals of Napoleon, Jourdan and Berthier; the future reformer of the Prussian army Gneisenau. Numerous Americans also went to Europe, notably the aging Benjamin Franklin, who in the 1780s was incredibly lionized in the fashion- able and literary world of Paris. People and ideas thus fl owed in both directions across the Atlantic.

Signifi cance of American Revolution

40. The American Revolution

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 359pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 359 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 8 The Age of Enlightenment360

The establishment of the United States was taken in Europe to prove that many ideas of the Enlightenment were practicable. Rationalists declared that here was a people, free of past errors and superstitions, who showed how enlightened beings could plan their own affairs. Rousseauists

saw in America the very paradise of natural equality, unspoiled innocence, and patriotic virtue. But nothing so much impressed Europeans, and especially the French, as the spec- tacle of the Americans meeting in solemn conclave to draft their state constitutions. These, along with the Declaration of Independence, were translated and published in 1778 by a French nobleman, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld. They were endlessly and excitedly dis- cussed as Europeans projected their own ideas or traditions onto a place that they did not

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE by John Trumbull (American, 1756–1843)

Trumbull’s painting shows the committee that presented America’s Declaration of Inde- pendence to the Continental Congress in 1776. Although Franklin and Adams are standing with the committee, Thomas Jefferson is presenting the document. Trumbull met often with Jefferson in Paris when he was at work on this painting in the late 1780s, and the picture conveys a Jeffersonian view of the event it portrays. (Library of Congress [LC-DIG-pga-02322])

Vindication of Enlightenment ideas

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 360pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 360 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

361

really know. Constitutionalism, federalism, and limited government were not new ideas in Europe. They came out of the Middle Ages and were currently set forth in many quarters, for example, in Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Parlement of Paris. But in their prevailing form, and even in the philosophy of Montesquieu, they were associated with feudalism and aristocracy. The American Revolution made such ideas progressive. The American infl uence, added to the force of developments in Europe, made the thought of the later Enlightenment more democratic. The United States replaced England as the model country of advanced thinkers. On the Continent there was less passive trust in the enlightened despotism of the offi cial state and more confi dence in the idea of enlightened self-government.

The American constitutions seemed to offer a practical demonstration of the social contract. They offered a picture of men in a state of nature, having cast off their old govern- ment, deliberately sitting down to contrive a new one, weighing and judging each branch of government on its merits, assigning due powers to legislature, executive, and judiciary, declaring that all government was created by the people and in possession of a merely delegated authority, and listing specifi cally the inalienable human rights—inalienable in that they could not conceivably be taken away, because all persons possessed them even if denied them by force. And these rights were the very same rights that many eighteenth- century Europeans wanted for themselves—freedom of religion, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom from arbitrary arrest at the discretion of offi cials. And they were all based on the rigorous principle of equality before the law. The American example crystal- lized and made tangible the ideas that were strongly blowing in Europe, and the American example was one reason why the French, in 1789, began their revolution with a declaration of human rights and with the drafting of a written constitution.

And more deeply still, America became a kind of mirage or ideal vision for Europe, land of open opportunity and of new beginnings, free from the load of history and of the past, wistfully addressed by Goethe:

America, thou hast it better Than has our Continent, the old one.

It is evident that this was only part of the picture. The United States, as its later history was to show, bore a heavy load of inherited burdens and unsolved problems, especially slavery and pervasive racial discrimination. The new American nation had emerged from the com- plex cross-cultural encounters of the previous two centuries and from the wider history of the early modern Atlantic World—to which it remained deeply connected through its religions and politics, its international trade, and its diverse African, Indian, and European populations. But in a general way, until new revolutionary and radical social movements set in a century later, America stood for many Europeans as a kind of utopian opportu- nity for common people, a “new world” not only for the millions who emigrated to it but for other millions who stayed at home, who often wished that their own countries might become more like it, and many of whom might even have agreed with Abraham Lincoln in calling it the last best hope of earth.

For suggested further readings and useful Web sites, interactive exercises, glossary, chronologies, and more, go to the Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/palmerhistory11e.

40. The American Revolution

pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 361pal85549_ch08_309-362.indd 361 03/08/13 7:41 PM03/08/13 7:41 PM

Final PDF to printer

This page intentionally left blank

363

C h a p t e r 9 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

In 1789 France   fell into revolution, and the world has never since been the same. The French Revolution was by far the most momen- tous upheaval of the whole revolutionary age. It replaced the “old regime” with “modern society,” and at its extreme phase it became very radical, so much so that later revolutionary movements often looked back to it as a predecessor. The ideas of the French Revolution, spreading far beyond France itself, decisively infl uenced the subsequent devel- opment of political parties and ideological confl icts throughout much of Europe and elsewhere; indeed, the Revolution still provokes highly charged debates about the characteristics or consequences of social reform, political radicalism, and revolu- tionary violence.

At the time, in the age of the Democratic or Atlantic Revolution from the 1760s to the 1860s, the role of France was decisive. Even the Americans, without French military intervention, would

hardly have won such a clear settlement from England or been so free to set up the new states and new constitutions that have just been described. And while revolutionary disturbances in Ireland and Poland, or among the Dutch, Italians, and others, were by no means caused by the French example, it was the presence or absence of French aid that usually determined whatever successes they achieved. The Revolution in France also contributed to other revolutions in the wider Atlantic world. The great slave uprising in the French colony at Saint-Domingue, which began in 1791 and led eventually to the creation of the independent Republic of Haiti, was inspired in part by reports of the recently declared “rights of man” in France; and later French military interventions in Spain and

41. Social and Cultural Backgrounds

42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

43. The Revolution and Europe: The War and the “Second” Revolution, 1792

44. The Emergency Republic, 1792–1795: The Terror

45. The Constitutional Republic: The Directory, 1795–1799

46. The Authoritarian Republic: The Consulate, 1799–1804

Chapter emblem: Detail from The Tennis Court Oath by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). (RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 363pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 363 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution364

Portugal set off, somewhat indirectly, the revolutionary movements that swept across Latin America after 1808. Few revolutions, in short, have ever generated such far-reaching historical upheavals.

The French Revolution, unlike the Russian or Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century, occurred in what was in many ways the most advanced country of the day. France was the center of the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment. French science then led the world. French books were read everywhere, and the newspapers and politi- cal journals that became very numerous after 1789 carried a message that hardly needed translation. French was an international language for educated and aristocratic people in most European countries. France was also, potentially before 1789 and actually after 1793, the most powerful country in Europe. It may have been the wealthiest, though not per capita. With a population of 24,000,000 the French were the most numerous of all European peoples under a single government. Even Russia was hardly more populous until after the partitions of Poland. The Germans were divided, the subjects of the Habsburgs were of diverse nationalities, and the English and Scots together numbered at this time only 10,000,000. Paris, though smaller than London, was over twice as large as Vienna or Amsterdam. French exports to Europe were larger than those of Great Britain. It is said that half the goldpieces circulating in Europe were French. Europeans in the eigh- teenth century were in the habit of taking ideas from France; they were therefore, depend- ing on their social position, the more excited, encouraged, alarmed, or horrifi ed when revolution broke out in that country.

41. SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUNDS The Old Regime: The Three Estates

Some remarks have already been made about the social and political institutions of the Old Regime, as the prerevolutionary society came to be called after it disappeared, and about the failure of enlightened despotism in France to alter these institutions in any fundamental way. The essential fact about the Old Regime was that it was still legally aristocratic and in some ways feudal. Everyone belonged legally to an “estate” or “order” of society. The First Estate was the clergy, the Second Estate was the nobility, and the Third Estate included everyone else—from the wealthiest business and professional classes to the poor- est peasants and city workers. These categories were important in that the individual’s legal rights and personal prestige depended on the category to which he or she belonged. Politically, the estates were obsolescent; not since 1614 had they assembled in an Estates General of the whole kingdom, though in some provinces they had continued to meet as provincial bodies. Socially, they were obsolescent also, for the threefold division no longer corresponded to the real distribution of interest, infl uence, property, or productive activity among the French people.

Conditions in the church and the position of the clergy have sometimes been much exaggerated as a cause of the French Revolution. The church in France levied a tithe on all agricultural products, but so did the church in England; the French bishops often played a part in government affairs, but

so did bishops in England through the House of Lords. The French bishoprics of 1789 were no wealthier than those of the Church of England were found to be when investigated 40 years later. In actual numbers, in the secular atmosphere of the Age of Enlightenment, the clergy, especially the monastic orders, had greatly declined, so that by 1789 there were

The church

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 364pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 364 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

36541. Social and Cultural Backgrounds

probably not more than 100,000 Catholic clergy of all types in the entire population. But if the importance of the clergy has in the past been overemphasized, still it must be said that the church was deeply involved in the prevailing social system. For one thing, church bodies—bishoprics, abbeys, convents, schools, and other religious foundations—owned between 5 and 10 percent of the land of the country, which meant that collectively the church was the greatest of all landowners. Moreover, the income from church properties, like all income, was divided very unequally, and much of it found its way into the hands of the aristocratic occupants of the higher ecclesiastical offi ces.

The noble order, which in 1789 comprised about 400,000 persons, including women and children, had enjoyed a great resurgence since the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Distinguished government service, higher church offi ces, army, parlements, and most other public and semipublic honors were almost monopolized by the nobility in the time of Louis XVI, who, it will be recalled, had mounted the throne in 1774 and had abandoned recent attempts to break the nobility’s power in the traditional parlements. Repeatedly, through parlements, Provincial Estates, or the assembly of the clergy dominated by the noble bishops, the aristocracy had blocked royal plans for taxation and shown a desire to control the policies of state. At the same time the bourgeoisie, or upper crust of the Third Estate, had never been so infl uential. Although the “bourgeoisie” was an amorphous social category (indeed, some historians argue that “bourgeois” refers to a class that never had a real social identity), the number of French

The nobility

This image of French peasants shows how farmers prepared their fi elds and planted seeds dur- ing the 1760s, when the picture was published in a French book. The agrarian system shaped property rights and social hierar- chies as well as the supply of food in French cities—all of which created resentments or fears that contributed to the coming of the French Revolution. (Art Media/Heritage/The Image Works)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 365pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 365 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution366

merchants, lawyers, and other professional groups clearly grew over the course of the eighteenth century. The fi vefold increase of French foreign trade between 1713 and 1789 suggests the growth of the merchant class and of the legal and governmental classes asso- ciated with it. As members of the bourgeoisie became stronger, more widely read, and more self-confi dent, they resented the distinctions and privileges that enhanced the status of nobles. Some of these were fi nancial: nobles were exempt on principle from the most important direct tax, the taille, whereas bourgeois persons obtained exemption with more effort; but so many bourgeois enjoyed tax privileges that purely monetary self-interest was not primary in their psychology. The bourgeois resented the nobleman for his sense of superiority and his arrogance. What had formerly been customary respect was now felt as humiliation. Many otherwise successful and wealthy people felt that they were being shut out from offi ce and honors and that the nobles were seeking more power in government as a class. The Revolution thus began in the social and political collision of two moving objects, a rising aristocracy and a rising bourgeoisie.

The common people, below the commercial and professional families in the Third Estate, were probably as well off as in most countries. But they were not well off compared with the upper classes. Wage earners had by no means shared in the eighteenth-century wave of business prosperity.

Between the 1730s and the 1780s the prices of consumers’ goods rose about 65 percent, whereas wages rose only 22 percent. Persons dependent on wages were therefore badly pinched, but they were less numerous than today, for in the country there were many small farmers and in the towns many small craftsmen who made a living not by wages but by sell- ing the product of their own labor at market prices. Yet in both town and country there was a signifi cant wage-earning population, which was to play a decisive part in the Revolution.

The Agrarian System of the Old Regime

Over four-fi fths of the people were rural. The agrarian system had developed so that there was no serfdom in France as it was known in eastern Europe. The peasant owed no labor to the lord—except a few token services in some cases. The peasants worked for them- selves, either on their own land or on rented land; or they worked as sharecroppers; or they hired themselves out to the lord or to another peasant.

The manor, however, still retained certain surviving features of the feudal age. The noble owner of a manor enjoyed “hunting rights,” or the privilege of keeping game preserves and of hunting on his own and the peasants’ land. He usually had a monopoly over the village mill, bakeshop, or wine press, for the use of which he collected fees called banalités. He

possessed certain vestigial powers of jurisdiction in the manorial court and certain local police powers, from which fees and fi nes were collected. These seigneurial privileges were of course the survivals of a day when the local manor had been a unit of government and the noble had performed the functions of government, an age that had long passed with the development of the centralized modern state.

There was another special feature to the property system of the Old Regime. Every owner of a manor (there were some bourgeois and even wealthy peasants who had pur- chased manors) possessed what was called a right of “eminent property” with respect to all land located in the manorial village. This meant that lesser landowners within the manor “owned” their land in that they could freely buy, sell, lease, and inherit or bequeath it; but they owed to the owner of the manor, in recognition of his “eminent property” rights,

The Third Estate

Survival of feudal privileges

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 366pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 366 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

367

certain rents, payable annually, as well as transfer fees that were payable whenever the land changed owners by sale or death. Subject to these “eminent property” rights, landowner- ship was fairly widespread. Peasants directly owned about two-fi fths of the soil of the country; bourgeois, a little under a fi fth. The nobility owned perhaps a little over a fi fth and the church owned somewhat under a tenth, the remainder being crown lands, wastelands, or commons. Finally, all property rights were subject also to certain “collective” rights by which villagers might cut fi rewood, run their pigs in the commons, or pasture cattle on land belonging to other owners after the crops were in, which they could easily do because there were usually no fences or enclosures.

All this may seem rather complex, but it is important to realize that property is a changing institution. Even today, in industrialized countries, a high proportion of all prop- erty is in land, including natural resources in and below the soil. In the eighteenth century property meant land even more than it does today. The bourgeois class, whose wealth was so largely in ships, merchandise, or commercial paper, also invested heavily in land, and in 1789 they owned almost as much land in France as the nobility and more than the church. The Revolution was to revolutionize the law of property by freeing the private ownership of land from all the traditional and indirect encumbrances described—manorial fees, “emi- nent property” rights, communal village agricultural practices, and church tithes. It also was to abolish other older forms of property, such as property in public offi ce or in master- ships in the guilds, which had worked to the advantage mainly of closed and privileged groups. In fi nal effect the Revolution defi ned and established the institutions of private property in the modern sense and therefore brought the greatest economic benefi ts to the landowning peasants and the bourgeoisie.

The peasants not only owned two-fi fths of the soil but also worked almost all of it on their own initiative and risk. In effect, the land owned by the nobility, the church, the bourgeoisie, and the crown was divided up and leased to peasants in small parcels. France was thus already mainly a country of small farmers. There was no “big agriculture” as in England, eastern Europe, or the plantations of America. The manorial lord performed no economic function. He lived (there were of course exceptions) not by managing an estate and selling his own crops and cattle but by receiving innumerable dues and fees. During the eighteenth century, in connection with the general aristocratic resurgence, there took place a phenomenon often called the “feudal reac- tion.” Manorial lords, faced with rising living costs and acquiring higher living standards because of the general material progress, collected their dues more rigorously or revived old ones that had fallen into disuse. Leases and sharecrop- ping arrangements also became less favorable to the peasants. The farmers, like the wage earners, were under a steadily increasing pressure. At the same time the peasants resented the “feudal dues” more than ever because they often regarded themselves as the real own- ers of the land and viewed the lord as a gentleman of the neighborhood who for no reason enjoyed a special income and a status different from their own. Resentments arose because many of the fees and obligations in the property system no longer bore any relation to real economic usefulness or activity.

The political unity of France, achieved over the centuries by the monarchy, was like- wise a fundamental prerequisite, and even a cause, of the Revolution. Whatever social conditions might have existed, they could give rise to nationwide public opinion, nation- wide agitation, nationwide policies, and nationwide legislation only in a country already politically unifi ed as a nation. These conditions were lacking in central Europe. In France a centralized French state existed. Reformers did not have to create it but only capture and

The “feudal reaction”

41. Social and Cultural Backgrounds

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 367pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 367 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution368

remodel it. The French in the eighteenth century already had the sense of membership in a political entity called France. The Revolution saw a tremendous stirring or expansion of this sense of membership and of fraternity, turning it into a passion for citizenship, civic rights, voting powers, and the use of the state and its sovereignty for the public advantage; but at the very outbreak of the Revolution people could salute each other as citoyen or citoyenne and shout vive la nation!

Political Culture and Public Opinion after 1770

The social and economic resentments that existed among ambitious people in French cit- ies and among peasants in the French countryside could fi nally explode in a revolution-

ary upheaval because eighteenth-century writers had created a culture that encouraged political and social criticism. Educated persons in the Third Estate could draw on Enlightenment conceptions of reason, natural rights, and historical progress to complain about the irrationality of ancient privi- leges or the injustice of noble prerogatives. Enlightenment thought provided

a language in which people could now describe their dissatisfactions with the obstacles that stymied professional or economic ambitions.

It has been argued that the famous works of the French philosophes led directly to the revolutionary events of 1789; it was the “fault” of Voltaire, critics explained; it was the “fault” of Rousseau. Many who supported the Revolution also made such claims for its intellectual origins, so that the history of the French Revolution has always been linked in complex ways with the legacy of the Enlightenment. Yet most historians now argue that the connections between the philosophes and the Revolution were by no means as direct as people once imagined. The philosophes themselves favored enlightened social reforms, but they were not revolutionaries and, except perhaps for Rousseau, they rarely promoted the political rights of the lower classes. Their most important publications, including the famous Encyclopédie, often attracted more readers among the nobility than among the middle classes. Political theory was far less popular than novels or social satires; there was an enormous audience for Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Héloise, for example, but few persons read the Social Contract. The notion that great Enlightenment writers caused the French Revolution is therefore an inadequate explanation for what happened (much as claims that bourgeois economic interests caused the Revolution are also inadequate). It is nevertheless true that the Enlightenment contributed widely to new forms of criticism, public debate, and “public opinion,” most of which challenged the traditional authority of the French king and nobles.

The last two decades of the Old Regime were fi lled with intense political controversy as the monarchy sought unsuccessfully to suppress the traditional French parlements, as successive ministries sought to raise new revenues, as French journals reported on the new American state constitutions, and as pamphleteers increasingly attacked the offi cials and

courtiers at Versailles. The critical spirit that had developed in salons, cof- feehouses, and literary arguments spread rapidly into a developing public sphere of political debate. The new political pamphlets were scarcely con- cerned with the subtle nuances of political theory; in fact, many consisted

of little more than scandalous rumors of sexual misconduct or fi nancial corruption in the affairs of the royal family and government ministries. Stories of corruption in high places stripped away the once sacred image of the monarchy, the church, and the social hierarchy. At the same time, the reading public developed an interest in scandalous legal cases that

The Revolution and the Enlightenment

Critical spirit

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 368pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 368 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

36942. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

pitted members of the aristocracy against aggrieved persons of the Third Estate or that revealed immorality and decadence among ancient noble families. Lawyers could publish their legal briefs without securing the approval of government censors, and, using this freedom, they bolstered their legal arguments with appeals to popular sentiment or natural rights. The injustice of inherited privilege thus became a recurring theme in the scandalous stories of social and personal disputes that French lawyers carried from French courtrooms to the tribunal of public opinion.

By 1789, in France, educated persons in all social classes were coming to believe what Voltaire had said after the famous Calas Affair in the 1760s: “Opinion governs the world.” Campaigns to infl uence public opinion became a powerful political force in French society during the last decades of the Old Regime, and most such campaigns appealed for pub- lic support in the name of reason, rights, or justice. In these ways, the critical thought of Enlightenment culture entered into bitter political confl icts that led fi nally and unexpect- edly to the Revolution.

42. THE REVOLUTION AND THE REORGANIZATION OF FRANCE

The Financial Crisis

The Revolution was precipitated by a fi nancial collapse of the government. What over- burdened the government was by no means the costly magnifi cence of the court of Ver- sailles. Only 5 percent of public expenditures in 1788 was devoted to the upkeep of the entire royal establishment. What overburdened all governments was war costs, both current upkeep of armies and navies and the burden of public debt, which in all countries was due almost totally to the high costs of past wars. In 1788 the French government devoted about a quarter of its annual expenditure to maintenance of the armed forces and about half to the payment of its debts. British expenditures showed almost the same distribution. The French debt stood at almost 4 billion livres. It had been greatly swollen by the War of American Independence. Yet it was only half as great as the national debt of Great Britain, and less than a fi fth as heavy per capita. It was less than the debt of the Dutch Republic. It was apparently no greater than the debt left by Louis XIV three-quarters of a century before. At that time the debt had been lightened by repudiation. No responsible French offi cial in the 1780s even considered repudiation, a sure sign of the late eighteenth-century expansion and public infl uence of the well-to-do classes, who were the main government creditors.

Yet the debt could not be carried, for the simple reason that revenues fell short of necessary expenditures. This in turn was not due to national poverty but to the tax exemptions and tax evasions of privileged elements and to complications in the fi scal system, or lack of system, by which much of what taxpayers paid never came into the hands of the Treasury. We have already described how the most important tax, the taille, was generally paid only by the peasants—the nobles being exempt by virtue of their class privilege, and offi ceholders and other wealthy persons obtaining exemption in various ways. The church too insisted that its property was not taxable by the state; and its periodic “free gift” to the king, though substantial, was less than might have been obtained from direct taxation of the church’s land. Thus, although the country itself was prosperous, the government treasury was empty. The social classes that enjoyed most of the wealth of the country did not pay taxes corresponding to their income—and, even worse, they resisted taxation as a sign of inferior status.

Problems of taxation

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 369pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 369 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution370

A long series of responsible persons—Louis XIV himself, John Law, Maupeou, Turgot—had seen the need for taxing the privileged classes. Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker who became director of the fi nances in 1777, made moves in the same direction and, like his predecessors, was dismissed. His successor, Calonne, as the crisis mounted, came to even more revolutionary conclusions. In 1786 he produced a program in which enlightened despotism was tempered by a modest resort to representative institutions. He proposed, in place of the taille, a general tax to fall on all landowners without exemption, a lightening of indirect taxes and abolition of internal tariffs to stimulate economic production, and a con- fi scation of some properties of the church. He also sought to give the propertied elements a greater interest in the government by proposing the establishment of provincial assemblies in which all landowners should be represented without regard to estate or order.

Calonne’s program, if carried out, might have solved the fi scal problem and averted the Revolution. But it struck not only at noble privileges in taxation but also at the three-

fold hierarchic organization of society. Knowing from experience that the Parlement of Paris would never accept it, Calonne in 1787 convened an “assembly of notables,” hoping to win its endorsement of his ideas. The notables insisted on concessions in return, for they wished to share in con- trol of the government. A deadlock followed; the king dismissed Calonne

and appointed as his successor Loménie de Brienne, the exceedingly worldly-wise arch- bishop of Toulouse. Brienne tried to push the same program through the Parlement of Paris. The Parlement rejected it, declaring that only the three estates of the realm, assem- bled in an Estates General, had authority to consent to new taxes. Brienne and Louis XVI at fi rst refused, believing that the Estates General, if convened, would be dominated by the nobility. Like Maupeou and Louis XV, Brienne and Louis XVI tried to break the parle- ments, replacing them with a modernized judicial system in which the law courts should have no infl uence over fi nancial policies. This led to a veritable revolt of the nobles. All the parlements and Provincial Estates resisted; army offi cers refused to serve; the inten- dants hesitated to act; and noblemen began to organize political clubs and committees of correspondence. With his government brought to a standstill, and unable to borrow money or collect taxes, Louis XVI on July 5, 1788, promised to call the Estates General for the following May. The various classes were invited to elect representatives and also to draw up lists of their grievances.

From Estates General to National Assembly

Because no Estates General had met in over a century and a half, the king asked for propos- als on how such an assembly should be organized under modern conditions. This led to an outburst of public discussion, which soon expanded far beyond all previous campaigns to infl uence public opinion. Hundreds of political pamphlets appeared, many of them demand- ing a change in the old system by which the three estates sat in separate chambers, each chamber voting as a unit. This voting system was widely criticized because it meant, in practice, that the chamber of the Third Estate was always outnumbered. But in September 1788 the Parlement of Paris, restored to its functions, ruled that the Estates General should

meet and vote as in 1614, in three separate orders. The nobility, through the Parlement, thus revealed its aim. It had

forced the summoning of the Estates General to protect and enhance its own political infl uence, and in this way the French nobility initiated the

Revolution. The Revolution began as another victory in the aristocratic resurgence against the earlier absolutism of the king. The nobles actually had a liberal program: they

Resistance of the nobles

The aims of the nobility

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 370pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 370 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

371

demanded constitutional government, guarantees of personal liberty for all, freedom of speech and press, freedom from arbitrary arrest and confi nement. Many now were even prepared to give up special privileges in taxation; this might have worked itself out in time. But in return they hoped to become the preponderant political element in the state. It was their idea not merely to have the Estates General meet in 1789 but for France to be henceforth governed through the Estates General, a supreme body in three chambers— one for nobles, one for a clergy in which the higher offi cers were also nobles, and one for the Third Estate.

This was precisely what the Third Estate wished to avoid. Lawyers, bankers, business owners, government creditors, shopkeepers, artisans, working people, and peasants had no desire to be governed by lords temporal and spiritual. Their hopes for a new, more equi- table political and legal system formed by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, stirred by the revolution in America, rose to the utmost excitement when “good king Louis” called the Estates General. The ruling of the Parlement of Paris in September 1788 thus came to them as a slap in the face—an unprovoked class insult. The whole Third Estate turned on the nobility with detestation and distrust. The Abbé Sieyès in January 1789 published his famous pamphlet What Is the Third Estate?, declaring that the nobility was a useless caste that could be abolished without loss, that the Third Estate was the one necessary element of society, that it was identical with the nation, and that the people of the Third Estate thus embodied (or should embody) the sovereignty of the French nation. Through Sieyès the ideas of Rousseau’s Social Contract entered the thought of the Revolution. At the same time, even before the Estates General actually met, and not from the books of philosophes so much as from actual events and conditions, nobles and commoners viewed each other with fear and suspicion. The Third Estate, which had at fi rst supported the nobles against the “despotism” of the king’s ministers, now ascribed to the former the worst possible motives. Bourgeois critics vehemently rejected the political program and ambitions of the nobility. Class antagonism poisoned the Revolution at the outset and threw many articulate members of the Third Estate into a radical and destructive mood.

The Estates General met as planned in May 1789 at Versailles. The Third Estate, most of whose representatives were lawyers, would not accept the division of the orders into three separate chambers. It insisted that deputies of all three orders should sit as a single house and vote as individuals; this procedure would give an advantage to the Third Estate, because the king had granted it as many deputies as the other two orders combined. For six weeks a deadlock was maintained. On June 13 a few priests, leaving the chamber of the First Estate, came over and sat with the Third. They were greeted with jubilation. On June 17 the Third Estate declared itself the “National Assembly.” Louis XVI, under pressure from the nobles, closed the hall in which it met. The members found a neighboring indoor tennis court and there, milling about in a babel of confusion and apprehension, swore and signed the Oath of the Tennis Court on June 20, 1789, affi rming that wherever they gath- ered, they were the actually existing National Assembly and that they would not disband until they had drafted a constitution. This was a revolutionary step, for it assumed virtually sovereign power for a body that had no legal authority. The king ordered members of the three estates to sit in their separate houses, though he now presented a reforming program of his own, too late to win the confi dence of the disaffected and in any case continuing the organization of French society in legal classes. The self-entitled National Assembly refused to back down. The king faltered, failed to enforce his commands promptly, and allowed the Assembly to remain in being. In the following days, at the end of June, he summoned about 18,000 soldiers to Versailles.

The Third Estate reacts

42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 371pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 371 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution372

What had happened was that the king of France, in the dispute raging between nobles and commoners, chose the nobles. It was traditional in France for the king to oppose and reduce the autonomous powers of the nobility. For centuries the French monarchy had drawn strength from urban or bourgeois social groups. All through the eighteenth century the royal ministers had carried on the struggle against the privileged interests. Only a year before, Louis XVI had been almost at war with his rebellious aristocracy. In 1789 he failed to assert himself. He lost control over the Estates General, exerted no leadership, offered no program until it was too late, and provided no symbol behind which parties could rally. He

failed to make use of the profound loyalty to himself felt by the bourgeoisie and common people, who yearned for nothing so much as a king who would stand up for them, as in days of yore, against an aristocracy of birth and sta- tus. He tried instead, at fi rst, to compromise and postpone a crisis; then he found himself in the position of having issued orders that the Third Estate

boldly defi ed; and in this complex political predicament he yielded to his wife Marie Antoinette, to his brothers, and to the court nobles, all of whom told him that his dignity and authority were outraged and undermined. At the end of June Louis XVI undoubtedly intended to dissolve the Estates General by military force. But what the Third Estate most feared was a future in which the king would support the nobles as they sought to control the

Failure of royal leadership

Convoked for the fi rst time in 175 years, the Estates General met in a large hall at Versailles in May 1789. This picture shows Louis XVI seated on his throne, with deputies of the clergy seated on his right, those of the nobility on his left, and those of the Third Estate facing him at the other end of the hall. (akg-images/Newscom)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 372pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 372 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

373

government of the country. There was now no going back; the revolt of the Third Estate had allied Louis XVI with the nobles, and the Third Estate now feared the nobles more than ever, believing with good reason that they now had the king in their hands.

The Lower Classes in Action

The country meanwhile was falling into social dissolution, as the lower classes, below the bourgeoisie, moved into open rebellion against their economic and social conditions. For them too the convocation of the Estates General had seemed to herald a new era. The grievances of ages, and those that existed equally in other countries than France, rose to the surface. Short-run conditions were bad. The harvest of 1788 had been poor; the price of bread, by July 1789, was higher than at any time since the death of Louis XIV. It was also a time of widening economic depression; the rapid growth of trade since the American war had suddenly halted, so that wages fell and unemployment spread while scarcity drove food prices up. The government, paralyzed at the center, could not take its customary action to relieve the problem of food shortages. The masses were restless everywhere. Labor trouble broke out; in April a riot of workers devastated a wallpaper factory in Paris. In the rural districts there was much disorder. Peasants declared that they would pay no more manorial dues and were refusing to pay taxes. In the best of times the countryside was troubled by vagrants, beggars, and smugglers who fl ourished along the many tariff frontiers. Now the business depression reduced the income of honest peasants who engaged in weaving or other domestic industries in their homes; unemployment and indigence spread in the country; people were uprooted; and the result was to raise the number of vagrants to terrifying proportions. It was believed, because nothing was too bad to believe of the aristocrats (though it was not true), that they were secretly recruiting these “brigands” for their own purposes to intimidate the Third Estate. The economic and social crises thus became acutely political.

People in the towns feared that they would be swamped by beggars and desperadoes. This was true even of Paris, the largest city in Europe except London. The Parisians were also alarmed by the concentration of troops about Versailles. They began to arm in self- defense. All classes of the Third Estate took part. Crowds roamed the city, looking for weapons in arsenals and public buildings. On July 14 they came to the Bastille, a stronghold built in the Middle Ages to overawe the city, like the Tower of London in England. It was used as a place of detention for per- sons with enough infl uence to escape the common jails but was otherwise in normal times considered harmless; in fact there were few prisoners in the fortress, and there had been talk, some years before, of tearing it down to make room for a public park. Now, in the general turbulence, the governor had placed cannons in the embrasures. The crowd requested him to remove his cannons and to furnish them with arms. He refused. Through a series of misunderstandings, reinforced by the vehemence of a few fi rebrands, the crowd turned into a mob, which violently assaulted the fortress and which, when helped by a few trained soldiers and artillery pieces, persuaded the gov- ernor to surrender. The mob, enraged by the death of 98 of its members, streamed in and murdered 6 soldiers of the garrison in cold blood. The governor was also murdered while under escort to the Town Hall. A few other offi cials met the same fate. Their heads were cut off, stuck on the ends of pikes, and paraded about the city. While all this happened, the regular army units on the outskirts of Paris did not stir; their reliability was open to ques- tion and the authorities were in any case unaccustomed to fi ring on the people.

The storming of the Bastille

42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 373pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 373 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution374

The capture of the Bastille, though not so intended, had the effect of saving the Assem- bly at Versailles. The king, not knowing what to do, accepted the new situation in Paris. He recognized a citizens’ committee, which had formed there, as the new municipal govern- ment. He sent away the troops that he had summoned and commanded the recalcitrants among nobles and clergy to join in the National Assembly. In Paris and other cities a new national guard was established to keep order. The Assembly appointed the Marquis de Lafayette, “the hero of two worlds,” to command the guard in Paris. For insignia Lafayette combined the colors of the city of Paris, red and blue, with the white of the house of Bourbon. The French tricolor, emblem of the Revolution and the new sovereign nation, thus originated in this symbolic fusion of the old and new.

In the rural districts matters went from bad to worse. Vague insecurity rose to the proportions of a general panic in the Great Fear of 1789, which spread over the country late in July in the wake of travelers, postal couriers, and others. The cry was relayed from point to point that “the brigands were

coming.” Peasants, armed to protect their homes and crops and gathered together and work- ing upon each other’s feelings, turned their attention to the manor houses, burning them in some cases and in others simply destroying the manorial archives in which fees and dues

The Great Fear of 1789

THE TENNIS COURT OATH by Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)

This famous picture portrays the momentous decision by members of the Third Estate to con- tinue meeting as the National Assembly of France until they had written a new constitution. The deputies swore their oath at an indoor tennis court because the king had closed the hall in which they had been holding their sessions. (RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 374pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 374 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

375

were recorded. The Great Fear became part of a general agrarian insurrection, in which peasants, far from being motivated by wild alarms, knew perfectly well what they were doing. They intended to destroy the manorial regime by force.

The Initial Reforms of the National Assembly

The Assembly at Versailles could restore social order only by meeting the demands of the peasants, but to wipe out all manorial payments would deprive the landed aristocracy of much of its income; and many bourgeois also owned manors. There was therefore much perplexity. A small group of deputies prepared a surprise move in the Assembly, choosing an evening session from which many would be absent. Hence came the “night of August 4.” A few liberal noblemen, by prearrangement, arose and surrendered their hunting rights, their banalités, their rights in manorial courts, and feudal and seigneurial privileges gen- erally. What was left of serfdom and all personal servitude was declared ended. Tithes were abolished. Other deputies repudiated the special privileges of their provinces. All personal tax privileges were given up. On the main matter, the dues arising from “eminent property” in the manors, a compromise was adopted. These dues were all abolished but compensation was to be paid by the peasants to the former owners. The compensation was in most cases never paid. Eventually, in 1793, in the radical phase of the Revolution, the provision for compensation was repealed. In the end French peasant landowners rid them- selves of their manorial obligations without cost to themselves. This was in contrast to what later happened in most other countries, where peasants, when liberated from mano- rial obligations, either lost part of their land or were burdened with installment payments lasting many years.

In a decree summarizing the resolutions of August 4 the Assembly declared fl atly that “feudalism is abolished.” With legal privilege replaced by legal equality, it proceeded to map the principles of the new order. On August 26, 1789, it issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

The Declaration of 1789 consisted of 17 articles that affi rmed the gen- eral principles of the new state, which were essentially the rule of law, the equality of individual citizenship, and the collective national sovereignty of the people. “Men are born and remain,” declared Article I, “free and equal in rights.” Man’s natural rights were held to be “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” Freedom of thought and religion was guaranteed; no one might be arrested or punished except by process of law; all persons were declared eligible for any public offi ce for which they met the requirements. Liberty was defi ned as the freedom to do anything not injurious to others, which in turn was to be determined only by law. Law must fall equally upon all persons. Law was the expression of the gen- eral will, to be made by all citizens or their representatives. The only sovereign was the nation itself, and all public offi cials and armed forces acted only in its name. Taxes might be raised only by common consent, all public servants were accountable for their conduct in offi ce, and the powers of government were to be separated among different branches. Finally, the state might for public purposes, and under law, confi scate the property of pri- vate persons, but only with fair compensation. The Declaration, printed in thousands of leafl ets, pamphlets, and books, read aloud in public places, or framed and hung on walls, became the catechism of the Revolution in France. When translated into other languages it soon carried the same message to all of Europe. Thomas Paine’s book The Rights of Man, published in 1791 to defend the French Revolution, gave the phrase a powerful impact in English.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 375pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 375 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution376

The “rights of man” had become a motto or watchword for potentially revolutionary ideas well before 1789. The thinkers of the Enlightenment had used it, and during the American Revolution even Alexander Hamilton had spoken of “the sacred rights of man” with enthusiasm. “Man” in this sense was meant to apply abstractly to the rights of all people, regardless of nationality, race, or sex. In French as in English the word “man” was used to designate all human beings, and the Declaration of 1789 was not intended to refer to males alone. In German, for example, where a distinction is made between Mensch as a human being and Mann as an adult male, the “rights of man” was always translated as Menschenrechte. Similarly the word “citizen” in its general sense applied to women, as is shown by the frequency of the feminine citoyenne during the Revolution, in which a great many women were very active. But when it came to the exercise of specifi c legal rights the Revolutionaries went no farther than contemporary opinion. Thus they assigned the right to vote and hold offi ce only to men, and in most matters of property, family law, and edu-

cation it was the boys and men who benefi ted most. Very few persons at the time argued for full legal and political equality between the sexes.

One of them, however, was Olympe de Gouges, a woman who had gained prominence as a writer for the theater and who in 1791 published

The Rights of Woman

The capture of the Bastille—the prison-fortress that became a symbol of Old Regime repression—marked the dramatic entry of the Parisian crowd into the rapidly evolving Revolution. Violence in the streets of Paris in July 1789 saved the National Assembly from the king’s intention to dissolve it. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 376pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 376 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

377

The Rights of Woman. Following the offi cial Declaration in each of its 17 articles, she applied them to women explicitly in each case, and she asserted also, in addition, the right of women to divorce under certain conditions, to the control of property in marriage, and for equal access with men to higher education and to civilian careers and public employ- ment. Mary Wollstonecraft in England published a similar Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. In France some of the secondary fi gures in the Revolution, and some of the teachers in boys’ schools, thought that women should have greater opportunities at least in education. And there were in fact a few reforms that improved the social rights of women. The revolutionary government redefi ned marriage as a civil contract and legalized divorce in 1792, thereby enabling women to leave abusive or unhappy marriages (until divorce was banned again in 1816). Inheritance laws were also changed in ways that gave women the legal right to equal inheritance of their family’s property.

But among the leaders of the Revolution, only Condorcet argued for legal equality of the sexes. Intent on political change, the revolutionaries thought that politics, government, law, and war were a masculine business, for which only boys and young men needed to be educated or prepared. The Revolu- tion generally reduced or restricted the cultural and political infl uence that some women had exercised in the elite circles of Old Regime society. The new political order, as most revolutionaries defi ned it, was to develop through “manly” opposition to the “feminine” corruptions of the Old Regime court and social hierarchies. “Women are disposed . . . to an over-excitation which would be deadly in public affairs,” one revolutionary deputy argued in a typical justifi cation for excluding women from government institutions. Such assump- tions led to restrictions on the rights of women to petition or gather in political meetings; fi nally, in 1793, the revolutionary government closed all women’s political clubs—even though many women had been among the Revolution’s earliest and most active supporters.

Shortly after adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man the Revolutionary leadership fell into multiple factions. In September 1789 the Assembly began the actual planning of the new government. Some wanted a strong veto power for the king and a leg- islative body in two houses, as in England. Others, the “patriots,” wanted only a delaying veto for the king and a legislative body of one chamber. Here again, it was suspicion of the nobles that proved decisive. The “patriots” were afraid that an upper chamber would bring

Exclusion of women

Although women gained some new rights during the French Revolution, they were denied the right to vote or to hold public offi ce; and women’s political clubs were eventually disbanded. Olympe de Gouges, who is portrayed here in a later engraving, challenged such exclusions in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) and other writings, thereby provoking strong opposition from revolutionary leaders. She was charged with sedition and put to death during the Terror in 1793. (Kean Collection/Getty Images)

42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 377pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 377 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution378

back the nobility as a collective force, and they were afraid to make the king constitution- ally strong by giving him a full veto, because they believed him to be in sympathy with the nobles. His brother, the Count of Artois, followed by many aristocrats, had already emigrated to foreign parts and, along with these other émigrés, was preparing to agitate against the Revolution with all the governments of Europe. The patriot party would con- cede nothing; the more conservative party could gain nothing. The debate was interrupted again, as in July, by insurrection and violence. On October 4, a crowd of market women and revolutionary militants, followed by the revolutionary Paris national guard, took the

A WOMAN OF THE REVOLUTION by Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)

David’s portrait of a lower-class French woman in 1795 suggests the determination of the women who joined the revolutionary Parisian crowds and clubs during the French Revolution; and the painting affi rms in a more general way the revolutionary challenge to traditional social and legal privileges. (Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 378pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 378 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

379

road from Paris to Versailles. Besieging and invading the château, they forced Louis XVI and his family to take up residence in Paris, where he could be watched. The National Assembly also moved to Paris, where it too soon fell under the infl uence of radical ele- ments in the city. The champions of a one-chamber legislative body and of a suspensive veto for the king won out.

The more conservative revolutionaries, if such they may be called, disillusioned at see- ing constitutional questions settled by mobs, began to drop out of the Assembly. Men who on June 20 had bravely sworn the Oath of the Tennis Court now felt that the Revolution was falling into unworthy hands. Some even emigrated, forming a second wave of émigrés that would have nothing to do with the fi rst. The counterrevolution gathered strength.

But those who wanted still to go forward, and they were many, began to organize in clubs. Most important of all was the Society of Friends of the Constitution, called the Jacobin club for short, since it met in an old Jacobin monastery in Paris. The dues were at fi rst so high that only wealthier persons could belong; the dues were later lowered but never enough to include people of the poorest classes, who therefore formed clubs of their own. The most advanced members of the Assembly were Jacobins, who used the club as a caucus in which to discuss their policies and develop their plans. They remained a middle-class group even during the later and more radical phase of the Revolution, and numerous women participated in their meetings. Madame Rosalie Jullien, for example, who was as dedicated a revolutionary as her husband and son, attended a meeting of the Paris Jacobin club on August 5, 1792. Tell your friends in the provinces, she wrote to her husband, that these Jacobins are “the fl ower of the Paris bour- geoisie, to judge by the fancy jackets they wear. There were also two or three hundred women present, dressed as if for the theater, who made an impression by their proud atti- tude and forceful speech.”

Constitutional Changes

In the two years from October 1789 to September 1791 the National Assembly (or the Constituent Assembly, as it had come to be called because it was preparing a constitution) continued its work of simultaneously governing the country, devising a written constitu- tion, and destroying in detail the institutions of the Old Regime. The Assembly soon discarded most of the political and legal institutions that had governed French affairs for centuries—the old monarchical ministries, the organization of government bureaus, the taxes and tax exemptions, the private ownership of government positions, the titles of nobility, the parlements, the hundreds of regional systems of law, the internal tariffs, the provinces, and the urban municipalities. Contemporaries such as Edmund Burke were appalled at the thoroughness with which the French seemed determined to eradicate their national institutions. Why, asked Burke, should the French fanatics cut to pieces the living body of Normandy or Provence? The truth is that the provinces, like everything else, formed part of the whole system of special privilege and unequal rights. All had to disap- pear if the hope of equal citizenship under national sovereignty was to be attained. In place of the provinces the Constituent Assembly divided France into 83 equal “departments.” In place of the old towns, with their quaint old magistrates, it introduced a uniform municipal organization, all towns henceforth having the same form of government, varying only according to size. All local offi cials, even prosecuting attorneys and tax collectors, were elected locally. Administratively the country was decentralized in reaction against the bureaucracy of the Old Regime. No one outside Paris now really acted for the central

The Jacobins

42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 379pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 379 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution380

government, and local communities enforced the national legislation, or declined to enforce it, as they chose. This proved ruinous when war came, and although the “departments” cre- ated by the Constituent Assembly still exist, it became common in France after the Revolu- tion, as it was before, to keep local offi cials under strong control by ministers in Paris.

Under the constitution that was prepared, sometimes called the Constitution of 1791 because it went into effect at that date, the sovereign power of the nation was to be exer-

cised by a unicameral elected assembly called the Legislative Assembly. The king was given only a suspensive veto power by which legislation desired by the Assembly could be postponed. In general, the executive branch, that is, king and ministers, was kept weak, partly in reaction against “ministerial despotism,” partly from a well-founded distrust of Louis XVI.

In June 1791 Louis attempted to escape from the kingdom, join with émigré noblemen abroad, and seek help from foreign powers. He left behind him a written message in which he explicitly repudiated the Revolution. Arrested at Varennes in eastern France, he was brought back to Paris and forced to accept his status as a constitutional monarch. The hos- tile attitude of Louis XVI greatly disoriented the Revolution, for it made impossible the creation of a strong executive power and left the country to be ruled by a debating society, which under revolutionary conditions contained more than the usual number of hotheads.

Not all this machinery of state was democratic. As noted above, women did not receive the right to vote or hold public offi ce; and in the granting of political rights to men the abstract principles of the great Declaration were seriously modifi ed for practi- cal reasons. Because most people were illiterate, it was thought that they could have no reasonable political views; and it was assumed that persons such as domestic servants or shop assistants would merely follow the political views of their employers. The Con- stituent Assembly therefore distinguished in the new constitution between “active” and “passive” citizens. Both had the same civil rights, but only active citizens had the right to vote. These active citizens chose “electors” on the basis of one elector for every hundred

The Constitution of 1791

The three men at an anvil are a noble, a cleric, and a commoner hammering out a new constitu- tion together. At the beginning of the Revolution, most people expected the three estates to frat- ernize in the redefi ned French nation. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 380pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 380 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

381

active citizens. The electors convened in the chief town of their new “department” and there chose deputies to the national legislature as well as certain local offi cials. Males over 25 years of age, and wealthy enough to pay a small direct tax, qualifi ed as “active” citizens; well over half the adult male population could so qualify. Of these, men paying a somewhat higher tax qualifi ed as “electors”; even so, almost half the adult males qualifi ed for this role. In practice, what limited the number of available electors was that, to function as such, a man had to have enough education, interest, and leisure to attend an electoral assembly at a distance from home and remain in attendance for several days. In any case, only about 50,000 persons served as electors in 1790–1791 because a proportion of one for every hundred active citizens yielded that fi gure.

Economic and Cultural Policies

Economic policies favored the middle rather than the lowest classes. The public debt had precipitated the Revolution, but the revolutionary leaders, even the most extreme Jacobins, never disowned the debt of the Old Regime. The reason is that the bourgeois class, on the whole, were the people to whom the money was owed. To secure the debt, and to pay current expenses of government, because tax collections had become very sporadic, the Constituent Assembly as early as November 1789 resorted to a device by no means new in Europe, though never before used on so extensive a scale. It confi scated all the property of the church. Against this property, it issued negotiable instruments called assignats, fi rst regarded as bonds and issued only in large denominations, later regarded as currency and issued in small bills. Holders of assignats could use them, or any money, to buy parcels of the former church lands. None of the con- fi scated land was given away; all was in fact sold, because the interest of the government was fi scal rather than social. The peasants, even when they had the money, could not easily buy land because the lands were sold at distant auctions or in large undivided blocks. The peasants were disgruntled, though they did acquire a good deal of the former church lands through middlemen. Peasant landowners were likewise expected, until 1793, to pay com- pensation for many of their old manorial fees. And the landless peasants actively opposed some of the revolutionary changes when the government, with its modern ideas, encour- aged the dividing up of the village commons and extinction of various collective village rights in the interest of individual private property.

The revolutionary leadership favored free economic individualism. It had had enough, under the Old Regime, of government regulation over the sale or quality of goods and of privileged companies and other economic monopolies. Reforming economic thought at the time in France and in Britain, where Adam Smith had published his epoch-making Wealth of Nations in 1776, held that organized special interests were bad for society and that all prices and wages should be determined by free arrangement between the individuals con- cerned. The more prominent leaders of the French Revolution believed fi rmly in this free- dom from control. The Constituent Assembly thus abolished the guilds, which were mainly monopolistic organizations of small businessmen or master craftsmen, interested in keep- ing up prices for certain goods or services and averse to new machinery or new methods.

There was also in France what we would now call an organized labor movement. Because the masterships in the guilds were practically hereditary (as a form of property and privilege), the journeymen had formed their own associations, or trade unions, called compagnonnages, outside the guilds. Many trades were so organized—the carpenters, plas- terers, paper workers, hatters, saddlers, cutlers, nail makers, carters, tanners, locksmiths,

Assignats

42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 381pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 381 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution382

and glassworkers. Some were organized nationally; some, only locally. All these journey- men’s unions had been illegal under the Old Regime, but they had fl ourished nevertheless. They collected dues and maintained offi cers. They often dealt collectively with the guild masters or other employers, requiring the payment of a stipulated wage or change of work- ing conditions. Sometimes they even imposed closed shops. Organized strikes were quite common. The labor troubles of 1789 continued on into the Revolution. Business fell off in

the atmosphere of disorder. In 1791 there was another wave of strikes. The Assembly, in the Le Chapelier law of that year, renewed the old prohibitions of the compagnonnages. The same law restated the abolition of the guilds and forbade the organization of special economic interests of any kind. All trades, it declared, were free for all to enter. All persons, without belonging

to any organization, had the right to work at any occupation or business they might choose. All wages were to be settled privately by the worker and his or her employer. This was not at all what the workers, at that time or any other, really wanted. Nevertheless the provisions of the Le Chapelier law remained a part of French law for three-quarters of a century. The embryonic trade unions continued to exist secretly, though with more diffi culty than under the hit-and-miss law enforcement of the Old Regime.

Meanwhile, revolutionary activists set about transforming the symbols, rituals, dress, and holidays of Old Regime society. Seeking to break from the hierarchies and privileges of the past, they developed a new political culture that would be symbolized by a new tricolor fl ag, new forms of democratic language, new clothing, new festivals, and new public monu- ments. The art and imagery of the traditional monarchy and church rapidly disappeared from public life. Great festivals of national unity were organized, beginning with the famous

“Festival of the Federation,” which brought together a vast crowd in Paris to mark the fi rst anniversary of the assault on the Bastille (July 14, 1790), to celebrate the new liberties of the French people and to create new rituals for what would eventually become the French national holiday.

Banning labor organizations

A revolutionary political culture

The revolutionary government used paper money to fi nance its policies. The notes were called assignats because they were assigned to, or secured by, real estate confi scated during the Revolution, mostly from the church. Infl ation rose rapidly after 1794, so that even notes with denominations as high as 10,000 livres, as shown in this picture, became worthless. The assignats were therefore abolished, and a new, more stable French currency came into use in 1796. (Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 382pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 382 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

383

Supporters of the Revolution planted “liberty trees” in towns throughout France, and they began to wear “liberty caps” and tricolor cockades to show their political allegiances. Later revolutionary governments encouraged new artwork in which the nation came to be represented by a female symbol of liberty, Marianne. Statues of Marianne offered alter- natives to traditional Catholic icons of the Virgin Mary and gave illiterate persons new visual images by which they could understand that national sovereignty and liberty had replaced the king and church at the symbolic center of French political life. A profusion of revolutionary plays, novels, and songs conveyed the same message. By promoting the new political ideas and symbols in every sphere of daily life, the French Revolution created a new national identity and “nationalized” the French people through the use of cultural ritu- als that would later become common in other national movements of the modern world.

The Quarrel with the Church

Most fatefully of all, the Constituent Assembly quarreled with the Catholic Church. The confi scation of church properties came as a shock to the clergy. The village priests, whose support had made possible the revolt of the Third Estate, now found that the very buildings in which they worshipped with their parishioners on Sunday belonged to the “nation.” The loss of income-producing properties undercut the religious orders and ruined the schools, in which thousands of boys had received free education before the Revolution. Yet it was not on the question of material wealth that the church and the Revolution came to blows. Members of the Constituent Assembly took the view of the church that the great monar- chies had taken before them. The idea of separation of church and state was far from their minds. They regarded the church as a form of public authority and as such subordinate to the sovereign power. They frankly argued that the poor needed religion if they were to respect the property of the more wealthy. In any case, having deprived the church of its own income, they had to provide for its maintenance. For the schools many generous and democratic projects of state-sponsored education were drawn up, though under the trou- bled conditions of the times little was accomplished. For the clergy the new program was mapped out in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790.

This document went far toward setting up a French national church. Under its provisions the parish priests and bishops were elected, the latter by the same 50,000 electors who chose other important public offi cials. Protestants, Jews, and agnostics could legally take part in the elections, purely on the ground of citizenship and property qualifi cations. Archbishoprics were abolished, and all the borders of existing bishoprics were redrawn. The number of dioceses was reduced from over 130 to 83, so that one would be coterminous with each department. Bishops were allowed merely to notify the pope of their elevation; they were forbidden to acknowl- edge any papal authority on their assumption of offi ce, and no papal letter or decree was to be published or enforced in France except with government permission. All clergy received salaries from the state; the average income of bishops was somewhat reduced and that of parish clergymen was raised. Sinecures, plural holdings, and other abuses by which the church had supported noble families were done away with. The Constituent Assembly (independently of the Civil Constitution) also prohibited the taking of religious vows and dissolved all monastic houses.

Some of these church reforms were not in principle alarmingly new, because before the Revolution the civil authority of the king had designated the French bishops and passed judgement on the admission of papal documents into France. French bishops, in the old

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy

42. The Revolution and the Reorganization of France

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 383pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 383 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution384

spirit of the “Gallican liberties,” had traditionally resisted papal power in France. Many were now willing to accept something like the Civil Constitution if allowed to produce it on their own authority. The Assembly refused to concede so much jurisdiction to the Gallican Church and applied instead to the pope, hoping to force its plans upon the French clergy by invoking the authority of the Vatican. But the Vatican pronounced the Civil Constitution a wanton usurpation of power over the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the pope also went further, condemning the whole Revolution and all its works. The Constitu- ent Assembly retorted by requiring all French clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the constitution, including the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Half took the oath and half refused it, the latter half including all but seven of the bishops. One of the seven willing to accept the new arrangements was Talleyrand, soon to be famous as foreign minister of numerous French governments.

There were now two churches in France, one clandestine, the other offi cial, one main- tained by voluntary offerings or by funds smuggled in from abroad, the other fi nanced and sponsored by the government. The former, comprising the nonjuring, unsworn, or “refrac- tory” clergy, turned violently counterrevolutionary. To protect themselves from the Revolu- tion they insisted, with an emphasis quite new in France, on the universal religious supremacy of the Roman pontiff. They denounced the “constitutional” clergy as schismatics who spurned the pope and as mere careerists willing to hold jobs on the government’s terms. The constitutional clergy, those taking the oath and upholding the Civil Constitution, considered themselves to be patriots and defenders of the universal rights of man; and they insisted that the Gallican Church had always enjoyed a degree of liberty from Rome. The Catholic laity were terrifi ed and puzzled. Many were suffi ciently attached to the Revolution to prefer the constitutional clergy but to do so meant to defy the pope, and Catholics who persisted in defying the pope were on the whole those least zealous in their religion. The constitutional clergy therefore stood on shaky foundations. Many of their followers, under stress of the times, eventually turned against Christianity itself.

Good Catholics tended to favor the “refractory” clergy. The outstand- ing example was the king himself. He personally used the services of refrac- tory priests, and thus gave a new reason for the revolutionaries to distrust him. Whatever chance there was that Louis XVI might go along with the

“Constitutional” and “refractory” clergy

The revolutionaries created rituals and symbols to celebrate the new nation they were trying to establish. The great festival of the Federation in Paris on July 14, 1790, assembled the king, the National Guard, and a huge crowd in a symbolic expression of the national unity and national liberties that the new political institutions were supposed to protect. (Bridgeman- Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 384pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 384 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

38543. The Revolution and Europe: The War and the “Second” Revolution, 1792

Revolution now disappeared, for he concluded that he could do so only by endangering his immortal soul. Former aristocrats also naturally preferred the refractory clergy. They now put aside the Voltairean levities of the Age of Enlightenment, and the “best people” began to exhibit a new piety in religious matters. The peasants, who found little in the Revolu- tion to interest them after their own insurrection of 1789 and the consequent abolition of the manorial regime, also favored the old-fashioned or refractory clergy. Much the same was true of the urban working-class families, in which both men and women might shout against priests and yet want to be sure that their marriages were valid and their children were properly baptized. The Constituent Assembly, and its successors, could never fi nally decide what to do. Sometimes they shut their eyes at the intrigues of refractory clergy, in which case the constitutional clergy then became fearful. Sometimes they hunted out and persecuted the refractories; in that case they only stirred the passions of the most devoutly religious persons and social groups.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy has been called the greatest tactical blunder of the Revolution. Certainly its consequences were unfortunate in the extreme, and they spread to much of Europe. In the nineteenth century the Catholic Church became offi cially anti- democratic and antiliberal; and democrats and liberals in most cases became outspokenly anticlerical. The main benefi ciary was the papacy. The French Catholic Church, which had clung for ages to its Gallican liberties, was thrown by the Revolution into the arms of the pope. Even Napoleon, when he healed the religious schism a decade later, acknowl- edged powers in the papacy that had never been acknowledged by the French kings. These were steps in the process, leading through the proclamation of papal infallibility in 1870, by which the affairs of the modern Catholic Church became increasingly centralized at the Vatican.

With the proclamation of the constitution in September 1791, the Constituent Assem- bly disbanded. Before dissolving, it ruled that none of its members might sit in the forth- coming Legislative Assembly. This body was therefore made up of men who still wished to make their mark in the Revolution. The new regime went into effect in October 1791. It was a constitutional monarchy in which a unicameral Legislative Assembly confronted a king unconverted to the new order. Designed as a permanent system for the modern governance of France and for the protection of the rights of man, it was to collapse in 10 months, in August 1792, as a result of popular insurrection four months after France became involved in war. A group of Jacobins, known as Girondins, for a time became the left or advanced party of the Revolution and in the Legislative Assembly they led France into war.

43. THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE: THE WAR AND THE “SECOND” REVOLUTION, 1792

The International Impact of the Revolution

The European governments were long reluctant to become involved with France. They were under considerable pressure. On the one hand, pro-French and pro-revolutionary groups appeared immediately in many quarters. The doctrines of the French Revolution, as of the American, were highly exportable: they took the form of a universal philosophy, proclaiming the rights of man regardless of time or place, race or nation. Moreover, depending on what one was looking for, one might see in the fi rst disturbances in France a revolt of either the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the common people, or the entire nation. In Poland those who were trying to reorganize the country against further partition hailed the

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 385pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 385 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution386

French example. The Hungarian landlords pointed to it in their reaction against Joseph II. In England, for a time, those who controlled Parliament complacently believed that the French were attempting to imitate them.

But it was the excluded classes of European society who were most inspired. The hard-pressed Silesian weavers were said to hope that “the French would come.” Strikes broke out at Hamburg, and peasants rebelled elsewhere. One English diplomat found that even the Prussian army had “a strong taint of democracy among offi cers and men.” In England the newly

developing “radicals,” men like Thomas Paine and Dr. Richard Price, who wished a thor- ough overhauling of Parliament and the established church, entered into correspondence with the Assembly in Paris. Business leaders of importance, including Watt and Boulton, the pioneers of the steam engine, were likewise pro-French because they had no representation in the House of Commons. The Irish too were excited and presently revolted. Everywhere the young were aroused, the young Hegel in Germany or in England the young Wordsworth, who later recalled the sense of a new era that had captivated so many spirits in 1789:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

On the other hand the anti-Revolutionary movement gathered strength. Edmund Burke, frightened by the French proclivities of English radicals, published as early as 1790 his Refl ections on the Revolution in France. For France, he predicted anarchy and dictatorship. For England, he sternly advised the English to accept a slow adaptation of their own English liber-

ties. For all the world, he denounced a political philosophy that rested on abstract prin- ciples of right and wrong, declaring that every people must be shaped by its own national circumstances, national history, and national character. He drew an eloquent reply and a defense of France from Thomas Paine in the Rights of Man—an infl uential book that argued for the universality of inalienable human rights. Burke soon began to preach the necessity of war, urging a kind of ideological struggle against French barbarism and vio- lence. His Refl ections was translated and read throughout Europe, becoming in the long run an important work in the emergence of modern conservative thought. In the short run it fell on willing ears. The king of Sweden, Gustavus III, offered to lead a monarchist crusade. In Russia Empress Catherine was appalled; she forbade further translations of her erstwhile friend Voltaire, she called the French “vile riffraff” and “brutish cannibals,” and she packed off to Siberia a Russian named Radischev, who in his Voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow pointed out the evils of serfdom. The terrors were heightened by plaintive messages from Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and by the angry émigrés who were constantly leaving France and who were led as early as July 1789 by the king’s own brother, the Count of Artois. The fi rst émigrés were almost all nobles, and they settled in various parts of Europe where they could use their international aristocratic connections to preach a kind of holy war against the evils of revolution. They bemoaned the sad plight of the king, but what they most wanted was to get back their manorial incomes and other rights. Extremists among the émigrés even hinted that Louis XVI himself was a dangerous revolutionary and much preferred his brother, the unyielding Count of Artois.

In short, Europe was soon split by a division that overran all frontiers. The same was true also in the wider Atlantic world. In the United States the rising party of Jefferson was branded as Jacobin and pro-French, that of Hamilton as aristocratic and pro-British, while pro-revolutionary and anti-revolutionary groups fell into violent confl icts within the French Caribbean colony at Saint-Domingue. A new interest in independence began to

Inspiration of the Revolution

Anti-Revolutionary sentiment

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 386pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 386 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

387

spread among some Latin Americans, including the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who became a general in the French army. In all countries of the European world, though least of all in eastern and southern Europe, there were revolutionary or pro-French ele- ments that were feared by their own governments. In all countries, including France, there were implacable enemies of the French Revolution. In all countries there were people whose political ideas and local confl icts increasingly expressed their strong support or deep hostility for the revolutionary changes in France. There had been no such situa- tion since the Protestant Reformation, nor was there anything like it again until after the Russian Revolution of the twentieth century.

The Coming of the War, April 1792

Yet the European governments were slow to move. Catherine had no intention of becom- ing involved in western Europe. She only wished to involve her neighbors. William Pitt, the British prime minister, resisted the war cries of Burke. Pitt had failed to carry a plan for reform of Parliament and was now concentrating on a policy of orderly fi nance and systematic economy. His domestic program would be ruined by war. He insisted that the internal affairs of France were of no concern to the British government. The key position was occupied by the Habsburg emperor, Leopold II, brother to the French queen. Leopold at fi rst answered Marie Antoinette’s pleas for help by telling her to adjust herself to con- ditions in France. He resisted the furious demands of the émigrés, whom he understood perfectly, having inherited from Joseph II a fractious aristocracy himself.

Still, the new French government was a disturbing phenomenon. It openly encouraged malcontents all over Europe. It showed a tendency to settle international affairs by unilat- eral action. For example, it annexed Avignon at the request of local revolutionaries but without the consent of its historic sovereign, the pope. Or again, in Alsace there had been much overlapping jurisdiction between France and Germany ever since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 (see maps, pp. 144–145, 184, 327). The Constituent Assembly abol- ished traditional manorial dues in Alsace as elsewhere in France. To German princes who had long held rights to these payments in Alsace the Assembly offered compensation, but it did not ask their consent. Moreover, after the arrest of Louis XVI at Varennes, after his attempted fl ight in June 1791, it became impossible to deny that the French king and queen were prisoners of the revolutionaries.

In August 1791 Leopold met with the king of Prussia at Pillnitz in Saxony. The resulting Declaration of Pillnitz rested on a famous if: Leopold would take military steps to restore order in France if all the other powers would join him. Knowing the attitude of Pitt, he believed that such an agreement could never materialize. His aim was mainly to rid himself of the French émigrés, but the émigrés perversely received the Declaration with delight. They used it as an open threat to their enemies in France, announcing that they would soon return alongside the forces of civilized Europe to punish the guilty and right the wrongs that had been done to them.

In France the upholders of the Revolution were alarmed. They were ignorant of what Leopold really meant and took the dire menaces of the émigrés at their face value. The Declaration of Pillnitz, far from cowing the French, enraged them against all the crowned heads of Europe. It gave a political advantage to the then dominant faction of Jacobins, known to history as the Girondins. These included the philosophe Condorcet, the humanitarian lawyer Brissot, and the civil servant Roland and his more famous wife, Madame Roland, whose house became a kind of headquarters for the group. They attracted many foreigners also, such as Thomas Paine and the German Anacharsis Cloots, the

The Declaration of Pillnitz

43. The Revolution and Europe: The War and the “Second” Revolution, 1792

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 387pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 387 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution388

“representative of the human race.” In December 1791 a deputation of English radicals, led by James Watt, son of the inventor of the steam engine, received a wild ovation at the Paris Jacobin club.

The Girondins became the party of international revolution. They declared that the Revolution could never be secure in France until it spread to the world. In their view, once

war had come, the peoples of states at war with France would not support their own governments. There was reason for this belief, because revolu- tionary elements antedating the French Revolution already existed in both the Dutch and the Austrian Netherlands, and to a lesser degree in parts of

Switzerland, Poland, and elsewhere. Some Girondins therefore contemplated a war in which French armies should enter neighboring countries, unite with local revolutionaries, overthrow the established governments, and set up a federation of republics. War was also favored by a very different group, led by Lafayette, which wished to curb the Revolution by holding it at the moderate political limits of constitutional monarchy. This group mis- takenly believed that war might restore the much damaged popularity of Louis XVI, unite the country under the new government, and make it possible to put down the continuing Jacobin agitation. As the war spirit boiled up in France, the Emperor Leopold II died. He was succeeded by Francis II, a man much more inclined than Leopold to yield to the clamors of the old aristocracy. Francis resumed negotiations with Prussia. In France all who dreaded a return of the Old Regime listened more readily to the Girondins. Among the Jacobins as a whole, only a few, generally a handful of radical democrats, opposed the war. On April 20, 1792, without serious opposition, the Assembly declared war on “the king of Hungary and Bohemia,” that is, the Austrian monarchy.

The “Second” Revolution: August 10, 1792

The war intensifi ed the existing unrest and dissatisfaction of the unpropertied classes. Both peasants and urban workers felt that the Constituent and the Legislative Assembly had served the propertied interests and had done little for them. Peasants were dissatisfi ed with the inadequate measures taken to facilitate land distribution; workers felt especially the pinch of soaring prices, which by 1792 had greatly risen. Gold had been taken out of the country by the émigrés; paper money, the assignats, was almost the sole currency, and

the future of the government was so uncertain that it steadily lost value. Peasants concealed their food products rather than sell them for depreciat- ing paper. Actual scarcity combined with the falling value of money to drive up the cost of living. The lowest income groups suffered the most. But dis- satisfi ed though they were, when the war began they were threatened with a

return of the émigrés and a vindictive restoration of the Old Regime, which at least for the peasants would be the worst of all possible eventualities. The working classes—peasants, artisans, mechanics, shopkeepers, wage workers—rallied to the Revolution but not to the revolutionary government in power. The Legislative Assembly and the constitutional mon- archy lacked the confi dence of large elements of the population.

In addition, the war at fi rst went very unfavorably for the French. Prussia joined imme- diately with Austria, and by the summer of 1792 the two powers were on the point of invad- ing France. They issued a proclamation to the French people, the Brunswick Manifesto of July 25 declaring that if any harm befell the French king and queen the Austro-Prussian forces, upon their arrival in Paris, would exact the most severe retribution from the inhabit- ants of that city. Such menaces, compounding the military emergency, only played into the

France goes to war

Economic dissatisfaction

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 388pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 388 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

38944. The Emergency Republic, 1792–1795: The Terror

hands of the most violent activists. Masses of the French people, roused and guided by a more radical faction of Jacobin leaders, notably Robespierre, Danton, and the vitriolic jour- nalist Marat, burst out in a passion of patriotic excitement. They turned against the king because he was identifi ed with the foreign powers at war with France and also because, in France itself, those who still supported him were using the monarchy as defense against the lower classes. Republicanism in France was partly a rather sudden historical accident, in that France was at war under a king who could not be trusted, and partly a kind of popular lower-class movement against the traditional nobility, in which, however, many bourgeois revolutionaries shared.

Feeling ran high during the summer of 1792. Recruits streamed into Paris from all quarters on their way to the frontiers. One detachment, from Marseilles, brought with them a new marching song, known ever since as the Marseillaise, a fi erce call to war upon tyranny. The transient provincials stirred up the agitation in Paris. On August 10, 1792, the working-class quarters of the city rose in revolt, supported by the recruits from Marseilles and elsewhere. They stormed the Tuileries against resistance by the Swiss Guard, many of whom were massacred, and seized and imprisoned the king and the royal family. A revolution- ary municipal government, or “Commune,” was set up in Paris. Usurping the powers of the Legislative Assembly, it forced the abrogation of the constitution and the election, by universal male suffrage, of a Constitutional Convention that was to govern France and prepare a new and more democratic constitution. The very word Convention was used in recollection of the American Constitutional Convention in 1787. Meanwhile hysteria, anarchy, and terror reigned in Paris; mobs of insurrectionary volunteers, declaring that they would not fi ght enemies on the frontiers until they had disposed of enemies in Paris, dragged about 1,100 persons—common criminals, refractory priests, and other alleged counterrevolutionaries—from the prisons of the city and killed them after drumhead trials, in brutal executions known as the “September massacres.”

For nearly three years, since October 1789, there had been an abatement of popular violence. Now the coming of the war and the dissatisfaction of the lower classes with the recent course of events had led to new explosions. The insurrection of August 10, 1792, the “second” French Revolution, initiated the most radical and violent phase of the Revolution.

44. THE EMERGENCY REPUBLIC, 1792–1795: THE TERROR

The National Convention

The National Convention met on September 20, 1792; it was to sit for three years. It imme- diately proclaimed the beginning of a new era: Year I of the French Republic. The disor- ganized French armies, also on September 20, won a great moral victory in the “cannonade of Valmy,” a battle that was hardly more than an artillery duel, but which induced the Prussian commander to give up his march on Paris. The French soon occupied Belgium (the Austrian Netherlands), the Savoy region near the Swiss-Italian border (which belonged to the king of Sardinia, who had joined with the Austrians), and Mainz and other cities on the German Left Bank of the Rhine. Revolutionary sympathizers in these places appealed for French aid. The National Convention decreed assistance to “all peoples wishing to recover their

Agitation and violence in Paris

Spread of the Revolution

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 389pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 389 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution390

liberty.” It also ordered that French generals, in the occupied areas, should dissolve the old governments; confi scate government and church property; abolish tithes, hunting rights, and seigneurial dues; and set up provisional administrations. Thus revolution spread in the wake of the successful French armies.

The British and Dutch now prepared to resist. Pitt, still insisting that the French might have any domestic regime that they chose, declared that Great Britain could not tolerate the French occupation of Belgium. The British and Dutch began conversations with Prussia and Austria, and the French declared war on them on February 1, 1793. Within a few weeks the Republic had annexed Savoy and Nice, as well as Belgium, and had much of the German Rhineland under its military government (see map, p. 404). Meanwhile, in eastern Europe, while denouncing the rapacity of the French Jacobins, the rulers of Russia and Prussia, as we have seen, came to an arrangement of their own, each appropriating a por- tion of Poland in the second partition in January 1793. The Austrians, excluded from this second partition, became anxious about their interests in eastern Europe. The infant French Republic, now at war with all Europe, was saved by the weakness of the Coalition, for Britain and Holland had no land forces of consequence and Prussia and Austria were too jealous of each other, and too preoccupied with Poland, to commit the bulk of their armies against France.

In the Convention all the leaders were Jacobins, but the Jacobins were again splitting. The Girondins were no longer the most advanced revolu- tionary group as they had been in the Legislative Assembly. Beside the Girondins appeared a new group, whose members preferred to sit in the

highest seats in the hall, and therefore were dubbed the “Mountain” in the political lan- guage of the day. The leading Girondins came from the great provincial cities; the leading Montagnards, though mostly of provincial birth, represented Paris and owed most of their political strength to the radical and popular elements in that city.

These popular revolutionists, outside the Convention, proudly called themselves “sans-culottes,” because they wore the workingman’s long trousers, not the knee breeches or culottes of the middle and upper classes. They were the working class of a preindustrial age, shopkeepers and shop assistants, skilled artisans in various trades, including some who were owners of small manufacturing or handicraft enterprises. For two years their militancy and their activism pressed the Revolution forward. They demanded a broader equality that would be meaningful for people like themselves, they called for a mighty effort against foreign powers that presumed to intervene in the French Revolution, and they denounced the now deposed king and queen (correctly enough) for collusion with the Austrian enemy. The sans-culottes feared that the Convention might be too moderate. They favored direct democracy in their neighborhood clubs and assemblies, together with a mass rising if necessary against the Convention itself. The Girondins in the Convention began to dismiss these popular militants as anarchists. The group known as the Mountain was more willing to work with them, so long at least as the emergency lasted.

The Convention put Louis XVI on trial for treason in December 1792. On January 15 it unanimously pronounced him guilty, but on the next day, out of 721 deputies present, only 361 voted for immediate execution, a majority of one. Louis XVI died on the guillotine forthwith. The 361 deputies were henceforth branded for life as regicides; never could they allow, in safety to themselves, a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in

France. The other 360 deputies were not similarly compromised; their rivals called them Girondins, “moderatists,” or counterrevolutionaries. All who still wanted more from the

The Jacobins split

The execution of the king

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 390pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 390 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

391

Revolution, or who feared that the slightest wavering would bring the Allies and the émi- grés into France, now looked to the Mountain wing of the Jacobins.

Background to the Terror

In April 1793 the most prominent French general, Dumouriez, who had won the victo- ries in Belgium fi ve months before, defected to Austria. The Allied armies now drove the French from Belgium and again threatened to invade France. Counterrevolutionaries in France exulted. From the revolutionaries went up the cry, “We are betrayed!” Prices con- tinued to rise, the currency fell, food was harder to obtain, and the working classes were increasingly restless. The sans-culottes demanded price controls, currency controls, ration- ing, legislation against the hoarding of food, and requisitioning to enforce the circulation of goods. They denounced bourgeois traders as profi teers and exploiters of the people. While the Girondins resisted, the Mountain went along with the sans-culottes, partly from sympathy with their ideas, partly to win mass support for the war, and partly as a maneu- ver against the Girondins. On May 31, 1793, the Commune of Paris, under pressure from the sans-culottes assembled a host of demonstrators and insurrectionists who invaded the Convention and forced the arrest of the Girondin leaders. Other Girondins fl ed into hiding, including Condorcet, who wrote his famous book, Progress of the Human Mind, before he was captured and put in prison, where he soon died.

The Mountain now ruled in the Convention, but the Convention itself ruled very little. Not only were the foreign armies and the émigrés bent on destroying the Convention as a band of regicides and social incendiaries, but the authority of the Convention was also widely repudiated within France itself. In the west, in the Vendée, the peasants had revolted against military conscription; they were worked upon by refractory priests, British agents, and royalist emissaries of the Count of Artois. The great provincial cities, Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and others, had also rebelled, especially after the fugitive Girondins reached them. These “federalist” rebels demanded a more “federal” or decentralized republic. Like the Vendéans, with whom they had no connection, they objected to the ascendancy of Paris, having been accustomed to more regional independence under the Old Regime. These rebellions became counterrevolutionary, because all sorts of foreign- ers, royalists, émigrés, and clericals streamed in to assist them.

The Convention had to defend itself against extremists of the Left as well. To the genuine mass action of the sans-culottes were now added the voices of even more excited militants called enragés. Various organizers, enthusiasts, agitators, and neighborhood politicians declared that parlia- mentary methods were useless. Generally they were men outside the Convention—and also women, for women were particularly sensitive to the crisis of food shortage and soar- ing prices, and an organization of Revolutionary Republican Women helped to mobilize the sans-culottes in 1793 (until the suppression of women’s political clubs). All such activ- ists worked through units of local government in Paris and elsewhere as well as in thou- sands of “popular societies” and provincial clubs throughout the whole country. They also formed “revolutionary armies,” semimilitary bands that scoured the rural areas for food, denounced suspects, and preached revolution.

As for the Convention, while it cannot be said to have had any commanding leaders, the program it followed for about a year was on the whole that of Maximil- ien Robespierre, himself a Jacobin but not one to go along forever with popular revolution or anarchy. Robespierre is one of the most argued about

The Convention under attack

Robespierre

44. The Emergency Republic, 1792–1795: The Terror

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 391pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 391 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution392

and least understood fi gures in history. Persons accustomed to stable conditions dismiss him with a shudder as a bloodthirsty fanatic, dictator, and demagogue. Others have consid- ered him an idealist, a visionary, and an ardent patriot whose goals and ideals were at least avowedly democratic. All agree on his personal honesty and integrity and on his revolu- tionary zeal. He was by origin a lawyer from northern France, educated with the aid of scholarships in Paris. He had been elected in 1789 to sit for the Third Estate in the Estates General, and in the ensuing Constituent Assembly played a minor role, though calling attention to himself by his views against capital punishment and in favor of universal suf- frage. During the time of the Legislative Assembly, in 1791–1792, he continued to agitate for democracy and vainly pleaded against the declaration of war. In the Convention, elected in September 1792, he sat for a Paris constituency. He became a prominent mem- ber of the Mountain and welcomed the purge of the Girondins. He had always kept free of the bribery and graft in which some others became involved and for this reason was known as the Incorruptible. He was a great believer in the importance of “virtue,” a term that the philosophes had used in a specialized way. Both Montesquieu and Rousseau, for example,

A wave of popular violence in Paris in 1792 led to the fall of the monarchy and the procla- mation of a new French republic. Angry crowds pulled down the symbols of the old regime, including this statue of Louis XIV. (akg-images/Newscom)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 392pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 392 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

393

had held that republics depended upon virtue, or unselfi sh public spirit and civic zeal, to which was added, under Rousseauist infl uence, a somewhat sentimentalized idea of personal uprightness and purity of life. Robespierre was determined, in 1793 and 1794, to bring about a democratic republic made up of good, virtuous, and honest citizens.

The P rogram of the Convention, 1793–1794: The Terror

The program of the Convention, which Robespierre helped to form, was to repress anar- chy, civil strife, and counterrevolution at home and to win the war by a great national mobilization of the country’s people and resources. It would prepare a democratic consti- tution and initiate legislation for the lower classes, but it would not yield to the Paris Com- mune and other agencies of direct revolutionary action. To conduct the government, the Convention granted wide powers to a Committee of Public Safety, a group of 12 members of the Convention who were reelected every month. Robespierre was an infl uential mem- ber; others were the youthful St. Just, the militant lawyer Couthon, and the army offi cer Carnot, “organizer of victory.”

To repress the “counterrevolution,” the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety set up what is popularly known as the “Reign of Terror.” Revolutionary courts were instituted as an alternative to the lynch law of the September massacres. A Committee of General Security was created as a kind of supreme political police. Designed to protect the Revolutionary Republic from its internal enemies, the Terror struck at those who were in league against the Republic and at those who were merely suspected of hostile activities. Its victims ranged from Marie Antoinette and other royalists to numerous early supporters of the Revolution, including the Girondin leaders and women such as Olympe de Gouges. Before the year 1793–1794 was over, some of the old Jacobins of the Mountain who had helped inaugurate the Terror also went to the guillotine.

Many thousands of people died in France at the height of the Revolution. Most deaths were in places that had openly revolted against the Convention, as in the Vendée in western France. Some resulted from acts of private vengeance. But if the Terror is understood to mean the offi cial program of the government, which at one time decreed “terror the order of the day,” the number who died in it was not large by the brutal standards of the twentieth century, in which dictatorial governments attempted to wipe out not only their political opponents but whole social classes or ethnic groups. About 40,000 persons perished in the Terror thus defi ned, and many others were temporarily imprisoned. About 8 percent of the victims of the “offi cial” Terror were nobles, but nobles as a class were not molested unless suspected of political agitation; 14 percent of the victims were classifi able as bourgeois, mainly of the rebellious southern cities; 6 percent were clergy, while no less than 70 percent were of the peasant and laboring classes. A democratic republic, founded on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, was in principle to follow the Terror after the war and the national emer- gency were over. Meanwhile, however, in 1793–1794, the Terror evolved into a kind of self- perpetuating revolutionary violence that was inhumane, expansive, irrational, and in some places a method for mass killings, as at Nantes, where 2,000 persons were loaded on barges and deliberately drowned. The Terror left long memories in France and created much of the enduring antipathy to the Revolution and to republicanism.

To conduct the government in the midst of the war emergency the Committee of Public Safety operated as a joint dictatorship and war cabinet. It prepared and guided legislation through the Convention. It gained control

The “Reign of Terror”

Victims of the “Terror”

The Committee of Public Safety

44. The Emergency Republic, 1792–1795: The Terror

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 393pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 393 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution394

over the “representatives on mission,” who were members of the Convention on duty with the armies and in the insurgent areas of France. It established the Bulletin des loix, so that all persons might know what laws they were supposed to enforce or to obey. It central- ized the administration, converting the swarm of locally elected offi cials left over from the Constituent Assembly (who were royalists in some places, wild extremists, in others) into centrally appointed “national agents” named by the Committee of Public Safety.

To win the war the Committee proclaimed the levée en masse, calling on all able- bodied men to join the army and all other French citizens to serve the revolutionary nation in whatever ways they could. It recruited scientists to work on armaments and muni- tions. The most prominent French scientists of the day, including Lagrange and Lamarck, worked for or were protected by the government of the Terror, though one, Lavoisier, “father of modern chemistry,” was guillotined in 1794 because he had been involved in tax farming before 1789. For military reasons also the Committee instituted economic controls, which at the same time met the demands of the enragés and other working-class spokesmen. The value of the assignats ceased to fall during the year of the Terror. Thus the government protected both its own purchasing power and that of the masses. It did so by controlling the export of gold, by confi scating specie and foreign currency from French citizens, to whom it paid assignats in return, and by legislation against hoarding or the withholding of goods from the market. Food and supplies for the armies, and for civilians in the towns, were raised and allocated by a system of requisitions, centralized in a Subsistence Commission under the Committee of Public Safety. A “general maximum” set ceilings for prices and wages. It helped to check infl ation during the crisis, but it did not work very well; the Committee believed, in principle, in a free market economy and lacked the technical and administrative machinery to enforce thorough controls. By 1794 it was giving freer rein to private enterprise and to the peasants to encourage production. It tried also to hold down wages and in that respect lost the adherence of many working- class leaders.

In June 1793 the Committee produced, and the Convention adopted, a republican con- stitution that provided for universal male suffrage. But the new constitution was suspended indefi nitely, and the government was declared “revolutionary until the peace,” “revolution- ary” meaning extraconstitutional or of an emergency character. In other ways the Com- mittee showed intentions of legislating on behalf of the lower economic classes. The price controls and other economic regulations answered the demands of the sans-culottes. The last of the manorial regime was done away with; the peasants were relieved of having to pay compensation for the obligations that had been abolished at the opening of the Revolution. The Committee busied itself also with social services and measures of public improvement. It issued pamphlets to teach farmers to improve their crops, selected prom- ising youths to receive instruction in useful trades, opened a military school for boys of all classes, even the humblest, and certainly intended to introduce universal elementary education.

It was also at this time, in 1794, that the National C onvention decreed the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, meaning chiefl y Saint-Domingue, the modern Haiti, the

richest of all the sugar islands in the Caribbean. Free blacks in the colonies had already received civic rights earlier in the Revolution; and the enslaved black plantation workers had in fact already liberated themselves in a mas- sive rebellion that spread across Saint-Domingue in 1791. The revolution- ary government in Paris sent new representatives to manage affairs in the

colony, but these commissioners needed the support of emancipated black fi ghters to

Slavery abolished in French colonies

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 394pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 394 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

395

suppress both the counterrevolutionary white colonists and the English forces that invaded the island in the fall of 1793. The Jacobin commissioners therefore abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue even before the National Convention acted to abolish slavery in the wider French Empire. The revolution in Saint-Domingue and the expulsion of foreign armies thus depended on increasingly autonomous black military commanders, one of whom was the once-enslaved Toussaint Louverture. In the months after the revolutionary govern- ment’s offi cial abolition of slavery, Louverture became a general in the French army that drove the Spanish and British from Saint-Domingue.

Amid the ensuing political and military confl icts Louverture became France’s governor-general in the colony, but his new government soon broke away from all French control. Under pressure from the slave-owning and commercial interests (and the European demand for sugar) the government of Napoleon in 1802 reestablished slav- ery in the French colonies and sent about 40,000 troops to reassert French authority in Saint-Domingue. The French captured Louverture and took him to France, where he died in prison. Other military leaders launched a new campaign for independence, however, and the French army was unable to defeat the armed rebellion of the mobilized black popula- tion. Most of the French troops on the island died in the fi ghting or perished of yellow fever, and the few survivors abandoned their operations late in 1803—becoming the fi rst Napoleonic army to suffer a decisive military defeat after Bonaparte had seized political power. Haitian leaders, in 1804, established an independent Republic of Haiti, which also became the Atlantic world’s fi rst postcolonial nation to abolish slavery. An unexpected consequence of the French defeat in Haiti was that Napoleon sold the remaining French possessions on the North American mainland (“Louisiana”) to the United States in 1803. Slavery was not effectively abolished in the French colonies until a later revolution in 1848.

At the climax of the Revolution within France itself, in 1793–1794, the Committee of Public Safety was determined to concentrate revolutionary initiative in itself. It had no patience with unauthorized revolutionary violence. With its own plan for a democratic program, it disapproved of the turbulent democracy of popular clubs and local assem- blies. In the fall of 1793, at the time of its prohibition of revolutionary women’s organiza- tions, the Committee arrested the leading enragés. Extreme revolutionary demands were expressed by Jacques Hébert, a journalist and offi cer of the Paris Commune. Robespierre called such people “ultra revolutionaries.” They were a large and indefi nable group and included many radical members of the Convention. They indiscriminately denounced merchants and bourgeoisie. They were the party of extreme Terror; an Hébertist brought about the mass drownings at Nantes. Believing all religion to be counterrevolutionary, they launched the movement of Dechristianization and strongly supported the creation of a new republican calendar. The Convention adopted this calendar as part of its campaign to strengthen popular allegiance to the republic and to establish a new national organization of daily life that would replace the Christian cycle of Sundays, saints’ days, and holidays such as Christmas and Easter. The new calendar thus counted years from the founding of the French Republic, divided each year into new months of 30 days each, and even abol- ished the week, which it replaced with the 10-day décade. 1

1 Though not adopted until October 1793, the revolutionary calendar dated the Year I of the French Republic from September 22, 1792. The names of the months, in order and corresponding to the seasons of the year, were Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire (autumn); Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse (winter); Germinal, Floréal, Prairial (spring); Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor (summer).

44. The Emergency Republic, 1792–1795: The Terror

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 395pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 395 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution396

Dechristianization also c ontributed to the development of the cult of reason, which sprang up all over France at the end of 1793. In Paris the Commune put on ceremonies in the cathedral of Notre Dame, in which Rea- son was impersonated by an actress who was the wife of one of the city offi -

cials. But Dechristianization was severely frowned upon by Robespierre. He believed that it would alienate the masses from the Republic and ruin such sympathy as was still felt for the Revolution abroad. The Committee of Public Safety, therefore, ordered the toleration of peaceable Catholics, and in June 1794 Robespierre introduced the cult of the Supreme Being, a deistic natural religion, in which the Republic was declared to recognize the exis- tence of God and the immortality of the soul. Robespierre hoped that both Catholics and agnostic anticlericals could become reconciled on this ground. But Catholics were now beyond reconciliation, and the freethinkers, appealing to the tradition of Voltaire, regarded Robespierre as a reactionary mystery monger and would become instrumental in bringing about his fall.

Meanwhile the Committee proceeded relentlessly against the Hébertists, whose main champions it sent to the guillotine in March 1794. The paramilitary “revolutionary armies” were suppressed. The extreme Terrorists were recalled from the provinces. The revolution- ary Paris Commune was destroyed. Robespierre fi lled the municipal offi ces of Paris with his own appointees. This Robespierrist commune disapproved of strikes and tried to hold down wages, on the plea of military necessity; it failed to win over the ex-Hébertists and working-class leaders, who became disillusioned with the Revolution and dismissed it as a movement that no longer served their interests. Probably to prevent just such a conclusion, and to avoid the appearance of deviation to the Right, Robespierre and the Committee, after liquidating the left-wing Hébertists, also liquidated certain right-wing members of the Mountain who were known as Dantonists. Danton and his followers were accused of fi nancial dishonesty and of dealing with counterrevolutionaries; the charges contained some truth but were not the main reason for the executions.

By the spring of 1794 the French Republic possessed an army of 800,000 men, the largest ever raised up to that time by a European power. It was a national army represent- ing a people in arms, commanded by offi cers who had been promoted rapidly on grounds of merit and composed of troops who felt themselves to be citizens fi ghting for their own cause. Its intense political-mindedness made it the more formidable and contrasted strongly with the indifference of the opposing troops, some of whom were in fact serfs and none of whom had any sense of membership in their own political systems. The Allied govern- ments, each pursuing its own ends and still distracted by their ambitions in Poland, where

the third partition was impending, could not combine their forces against France. In June 1794 the French won the battle of Fleurus in Belgium. The Republican hosts again streamed into the Low Countries; in six months their calvary rode into Amsterdam on the ice. A revolutionary Batavian Republic soon replaced the old Dutch provinces; but the opposite was

occurring at this time in eastern Europe, where Russian and Prussian armies stamped out the attempted revolution that Kosciusko led in Poland. All Polish lands and people were fi nally merged into the eastern European empires in 1795.

Military success made the French less willing to put up with the dictatorial rule and economic regimentation of the Terror. Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety had antagonized all signifi cant parties. The working-class radicals of Paris would no lon-

ger support him, and after the death of Danton the National Convention was afraid of its own ruling committee. A group in the Convention obtained the “outlawing” of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794); he was

Revolutionary military victories

Fall of Robespierre

The Revolution and religion

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 396pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 396 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

397

guillotined with some of his associates on the following day. Many who turned against Robespierre believed they were pushing the Revolution farther forward, as in destroying the Girondins the year before. Others thought, or said, that they were stopping a dictator and a tyrant. All agreed, to absolve themselves, in heaping all blame for the recent revolu- tionary excesses upon Robespierre. The idea that Robespierre was an ogre originated more with his former colleagues than with conservatives of the time.

The Thermidorian Reaction

The fall of Robespierre stunned the country, but its effects manifested themselves during the following months as the “Thermidorian reaction.” The Terror subsided. The Conven- tion reduced the powers of the Committee of Public Safety, and it closed the Jacobin club.

The French army won a great victory at the battle of Fleurus in June 1794, thus opening the way for republican troops to enter the Low Countries and easing the external threats that had pushed the Revolution toward internal repression and the Terror. This picture shows how the French used a balloon to observe enemy forces during the battle, but the results must have been disappointing, because balloons were not thereafter used by either side. (The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY)

44. The Emergency Republic, 1792–1795: The Terror

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 397pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 397 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution398

Price controls and other regulations were removed. Infl ation resumed its course, prices again rose, and the disoriented and leaderless working classes suffered more than ever. Sporadic uprisings broke out, of which the greatest was the insurrection of Prairial in the Year III (May 1795), when a mob all but dispersed the Convention by force. Troops were called to Paris for the fi rst time since 1789. Insurrectionists in the working-class quarters threw up barricades in the streets. The army prevailed without much bloodshed, but the Convention arrested, imprisoned, or deported 10,000 of the insurgents. A few organizers were guillotined. The affair of Prairial gave a foretaste of modern social revolution.

The triumphant element after 1794 consisted mostly of the bourgeois or professional classes of the former Third Estate, which had guided the Revolution since the Constituent Assembly and had not been really unseated even during the Terror. It was not mainly a bourgeoisie of modern capitalists, eager to make a fi nancial profi t by developing new factories or

Politics and society after Thermidor

The guillotine was used during the most radical phase of the Revolution to execute persons judged to be enemies of the republic. First adopted as a more humane way of infl icting capital punishment, it became a permanent symbol of revolutionary violence, and it claimed victims from every part of the Revolution itself. This picture illustrates the execution of Robespierre and four others who were denounced as conspirators against liberty and sent to the guillotine in July 1794. (Bettmann/Corbis)

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 398pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 398 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

399

Historical Interpretations and Debates The Political and Social Signifi cance

of the French Revolution Historians have proposed numerous and often confl icting political, economic, social, and cultural explanations to describe the historical signifi cance of the French Revolution—though most agree that the Revolution contributed decisively to the emergence of modern European institutions and ideas. The infl uential interpretations of Albert Soboul and Lynn Hunt exem- plify different economic and political explanations for the historical meaning of the Revolution and suggest why the debate about the French Revolution never ends.

Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans- Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4 (1959) We need to remember that the Revolution was fundamentally a struggle between the European aristocracy and the Third Estate as a whole. In this struggle, it is hardly surprising that the French bourgeoisie should have played the leading role. The Revolutionary Government, founded upon an alliance between the Montagnard bourgeoisie and the Parisian sans-culotterie, had been given the task of defending the Revolution against the aristocracy both within France and beyond her borders. . . .

Without the Parisian sans-culotterie, the bourgeoisie could not have triumphed in so radical a fashion. . . .

The success of the popular movement . . . led to the organization of the Terror which struck such an irreparable blow to the old social order. The upper bourgeoisie of the ancien régime, founded on commercial capital and linked in some ways with the old social and political system of the feudal aristocracy, failed to survive the upheaval . . . The Terror had cleared the way for the introduction of new relationships of production. In the capitalist society born of the Revolution, industry was destined to dominate commerce: the function of commercial capital, against which the sans-culottes had fought so bitterly in the Year II, would be subordinated henceforth to the sole productive form of capital— industrial capital.

Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984) The Revolution showed how much everything depended on politics. . . . The structure of the polity changed under the impact of increasing political participation and popular mobilization; political language, political ritual, and political organization all took on new forms and meanings. . . .

Revolutionary political culture cannot be deduced from social structures, social confl icts, or the social identity of revolutionaries. Political practices were not simply the expression of “underlying” economic and social interests. Through their language, images, and daily political activities, revolutionaries worked to reconstitute society and social relations. . . .

The chief accomplishment of the French Revolution was the institution of a dramatically new political culture. The revolution did not startle its contemporaries because it laid the foundations for capitalist development or political modernization. . . . Revolution in France contributed little to economic growth or to political stabilization. What it did establish, however, was the mobilizing potential of democratic republicanism and the compelling intensity of revolutionary change. The language of national regeneration, the gestures of equality and fraternity, and the rituals of republicanism were not soon forgotten. Democracy, terror, Jacobinism, and the police state all became recurrent features of political life.

Sources: Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4 , translated by Gwynne Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 249, 260–261: Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 2, 12, 15.

44. The Emergency Republic, 1792–1795: The Terror

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 399pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 399 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution400

machinery. The political victors after Thermidor were bourgeois in an older social sense, those who had not been noble or aristocratic before 1789 yet had held secure positions under the Old Regime, many of them lawyers or offi ceholders and often drawing income from the ownership of land. There were also new elements produced by the Revolution itself, parvenus and nouveaux riches, who had made money by wartime government con- tracts or had profi ted by infl ation or by buying up former church lands at bargain prices. Such people, often joined by former aristocrats, and in reaction against Robespierrist virtue, set an extravagant and ostentatious style of living that gave a bad name to the new order. They also unleashed a “white terror” in which many ex-Jacobins were simply murdered.

But the Thermidorians, disreputable though a few of them were, had not lost faith in the Revolution. Democracy they associated with red terror and mob rule, but they still believed in individual legal rights and in a written constitution. Conditions were rather adverse, for the country was still unsettled, and although the Convention made a sepa- rate peace with Spain and Prussia, France still remained at war with Great Britain and the Habsburg Empire. But the members of the Convention were still determined to make another attempt at constitutional government. They set aside the democratic constitution written in 1793 (and never used) and produced the Constitution of the Year III, which went into effect at the end of 1795.

45. THE CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC: THE DIRECTORY, 1795–1799

The Weakness of the Directory

The fi rst formally constituted French Republic, known as the Directory, lasted only four years. It was politically weak and vulnerable because it rested on an extremely narrow social base and it presupposed certain military conquests. The new constitution applied not

only to France but also to Belgium, which was now regarded as incorpo- rated constitutionally into France, though the Habsburgs had not yet ceded these “Austrian Netherlands,” nor had the British agreed to accept French occupation. The constitution of 1795 thus committed the republic to a pro- gram of successful expansion. At the same time it restricted the politically

active class. It gave almost all adult males the vote, but they voted only for “electors.” Per- sons chosen as electors were usually men of some means, able to give their time and will- ing to take part in public life; this in effect meant men of the upper middle class, because the old nobility was disaffected. The electors chose all important department offi cials and also the members of the national Legislative Assembly, which this time was divided into two chambers. The lower chamber was called the Council of Five Hundred; the upper, composed of 250 members, the Council of Ancients—“ancients” being those over 40. The chambers chose the executive, which was called the Directory (from which the whole regime took its name) and was made up of fi ve Directors.

The government was thus constitutionally in the hands of substantial property owners, rural and urban, but its real base was narrower still. In the reaction after Thermidor many people began to consider restoring the monarchy. The Convention, to protect its own mem- bers, had ruled that two-thirds of the men initially elected to the Council of Five Hundred and Council of Ancients must be ex-members of the Convention. This interference with the freedom of the elections provoked serious disturbances in Paris, instigated mainly by royalists. The Convention, having now accustomed itself to using the army, instructed a young general named Bonaparte, who happened to be in Paris, to put down the royalist

The constitution of 1795

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 400pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 400 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

40145. The Constitutional Republic: The Directory, 1795–1799

mob. He did so with a “whiff of grapeshot.” The new constitutional republic thus made itself dependent on military protection at the outset.

The regime had enemies to both Right and Left. On the Right, undisguised royalists agitated in Paris and even in the two councils; and they were in continuous touch with the late king’s brother, the Count of Provence, whom they regarded as Louis XVIII (Louis XVI’s son, who died in prison, was counted as Louis XVII). Louis XVIII had installed himself at Verona in Italy, where he headed a propaganda agency fi nanced largely by British money. The worst obstacle to the resurgence of royalism in France was Louis XVIII himself. In 1795, on assuming the title, he had issued a Declaration of Verona, in which he announced his intention to restore the Old Regime and punish all involved in the Revolution back to 1789. It has been said, correctly enough in this connection, that the Bourbons “learned nothing and forgot nothing.” Had Louis XVIII offered in 1795 what he offered in 1814, it is quite conceivable that his partisans in France might have brought about his restoration and terminated the war. As it was, the majority of the French adhered not exactly to the republic as set up in 1795, but to any system that would shut out the Bourbons and privileged nobility, prevent a reimposition of the manorial system, and secure the new landowners, peasant and bourgeois, in the possession of the church properties that they had purchased.

The Left was made up of persons from various levels of society who still favored the more democratic ideas expressed earlier in the Revolution. Some of them thought that the fall of Robespierre had been a great misfortune. A tiny group of extremists formed the Conspiracy of Equals, organized in 1796 by “Gracchus” Babeuf. His intention was to overthrow the Directory and replace it with a dictatorial government in which private property would be abolished and equality would be decreed. For these ideas, and for his activist program, he has been regarded as a political precursor to modern communism. The Directory repressed the Conspiracy of Equals without diffi culty and guillotined Babeuf and one other. Meanwhile it did nothing to relieve the distress of the lower classes, who showed little inclination to follow Babeuf even though they suffered from the ravages of scarcity and infl ation.

The Political Crisis of 1797

In March 1797 occurred the fi rst really free election ever held in France under republican auspices. The successful candidates were for the most part constitutional monarchists or at least vaguely royalist. A change of the balance within the Five Hundred and the Ancients, in favor of royalism, seemed to be impending. This was precisely what most of the repub- licans of 1793, including the regicides, could not endure, even though they had to violate the constitution to prevent it. Nor was it endurable, for other reasons, to General Napoleon Bonaparte.

Bonaparte was born in 1769 into the minor nobility of Corsica, shortly after the annexation of Corsica to France. He had studied in French military schools and been commissioned in the Bourbon army but would never have reached high rank under the conditions of the Old Regime. In 1793 he was a fervent young Jacobin offi cer who had served the revolutionary cause by driving the British from Toulon and who was consequently made a brigadier general by the government of the Terror. In 1795, as noted, he rendered valuable service to the Convention by breaking up a demon- stration of royalists. In 1796 he received command of an army, with which, in two brilliant campaigns, he crossed the Alps and drove the Austrians from north Italy. Like other gener- als he soon became independent from the government in Paris, which was fi nancially too

Napoleon Bonaparte

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 401pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 401 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution402

harassed to pay his troops or to supply him. He lived by local requisitions in Italy, became self-supporting, and in fact made the civilian government in Paris dependent on him.

He developed a foreign policy of his own. Many Italians had become dissatisfi ed with their old governments, so that the arrival of the French republican armies threw north Italy into turmoil. The Venetian cities revolted against Venice, Bologna against the pope, Milan against Austria, and in Piedmont the Savoy monarchy was threatened by uprisings of its own subjects. Combining with some of these revolutionaries, while rejecting others, Bonaparte established a “Cisalpine” Republic in the Po Valley, modeled on the French system, with Milan as its capital. Where the Directory, on the whole, had originally meant to return Milan to the Austrians in compensation for Austrian recognition of the French conquest of Belgium, Bonaparte insisted that France hold its position in both Belgium and Italy. He therefore needed expansionist republicans in the government in Paris and was perturbed by the royalist victories in the elections of 1797.

The Austrians negotiated with Bonaparte because they had been beaten by him in battle. The British also, in conferences with the French at Lille, discussed peace in 1796 and 1797. The war had gone badly for England; a party of Whigs led by Charles James Fox had always openly disapproved it, and the pro-French and republican radicals were so active that the government suspended habeas corpus in 1794, and thereafter imprisoned political agitators at its discretion. Crops were bad and bread was scarce and costly. England too suffered from infl ation, for Pitt at fi rst fi nanced the war by extensive loans, and a good deal of gold was shipped to the Continent to fi nance the Allied armies. In February 1797 the Bank of England suspended gold payments to private citizens. Famine threatened, the populace was restless, and there were even mutinies in the fl eet. Ireland was in rebellion; the French came close to landing a republican army there, and it could be sup- posed that the next attempt might be more successful. The Austrians, Britain’s only remain- ing ally, had been routed by Bonaparte, and at the moment the British could subsidize them

no further. The British had every reason to make peace. Prospects for peace therefore seemed good in the summer of 1797, but,

as always, it would be peace upon certain conditions. It was the royalists in France that were the peace party, because a restored king could easily return

the conquests of the republic and would in any case abandon the new republics in Holland and the Po Valley. The republicans in the French government could make peace with diffi - culty, if at all. They were constitutionally bound to retain Belgium. They were losing control of their own generals. Nor could the supreme question be evaded: Was peace dear enough to

purchase by a return of the Old Regime, such as Louis XVIII had himself promised?

The c oup d’état of Fructidor (September 4, 1797) was a forceful attempt to resolve all these internal and external issues. It was the turning point for France’s constitutional republic, and it became a decisive event for

all Europe. The Directory asked for help from Bonaparte, who sent one of his generals, Augereau, to Paris. While Augereau stood by with a force of soldiers, the councils annulled most of the elections of the preceding spring. On the whole, it was the old republicans of the Convention who secured themselves in power. Their justifi cation was that they were defend- ing the revolution, keeping out Louis XVIII and the Old Regime. But to do so they had vio- lated their own constitution and quashed the fi rst free election ever held in a constitutional French republic. And they had become more than ever dependent on the army.

After the coup d’état the “Fructidorian” government broke off negotiations with England. With Austria it signed the treaty of Campo Formio on October 17, 1797, incorporating

Prospects for peace

The coup d’état of Fructidor

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 402pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 402 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

403

Bonaparte’s ideas. By the new treaty Austria recognized the French annexation of Belgium (the former Austrian Netherlands), the French right to incorporate the Left Bank of the Rhine, and the French-dominated Cisalpine Republic in Italy. In return, Bonaparte allowed the Austrians to annex Venice and most of mainland Venetia.

In the following months, under French auspices, revolutionary repub- licanism spread rapidly through much of Italy, creating new republics with classical names. The old patrician republic of Genoa turned into a Ligurian Republic on the French model. At Rome the pope was deposed from his temporal power and a Roman Republic was established. In southern Italy a Neapolitan Republic, also called Parthenopean, was set up. In Switzerland at the same time, Swiss reformers cooperated with the French to create a new Helvetic Republic.

The Left Bank of the Rhine, in the atomistic Holy Roman Empire, was occupied by a great many German princes who now had to vacate their lands. The treaty of Campo Formio provided that they be compensated by church territories in Germany east of the Rhine and that France have a hand in the redistribution. The German princes turned greedy eyes on the German bishops and abbots, and the almost 1,000-year-old empire, hardly more than a solemn political abstraction since the Peace of Westphalia, sank to the level of a land rush or real estate speculation, while France became involved in the territorial reconstruction of Germany.

Revolutionary republicanism spreads

CHRONOLOGY OF NOTABLE EVENTS, 1789–1804

May 1789 Estates General convenes at Versailles

June 1789 The Third Estate declares itself to be the National Assembly

July 1789 Crowd assaults and captures the Bastille fortress in Paris

August 1789 National Assembly issues “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” and abolishes “feudal privileges”

September 1791 New French Constitution establishes a constitutional monarchy

April 1791 France declares war on Austria and Prussia

September 1792 New National Convention meets in Paris; France becomes a republic

January 1793 King Louis XVI is executed in Paris

1793–1794 The Radical Revolution and the Reign of Terror

July 1794 Robespierre and his Jacobin allies are executed

1795–1799 Republic called “the Directory” governs France and sends armies to spread revolutionary republicanism in Europe

November 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte seizes power in a coup d’état

1799–1804 Napoleon is “First Consul” in French government called the Consulate; laws are codifi ed in Napoleonic Code

1801 Napoleon’s Concordat with the Roman Catholic Church

1803–1804 Independent Republic of Haiti is established after French forces are defeated in Saint-Domingue

1804 France becomes an empire under Emperor Napoleon I

45. The Constitutional Republic: The Directory, 1795–1799

pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 403pal85549_ch09_363-410.indd 403 03/08/13 7:45 PM03/08/13 7:45 PM

Final PDF to printer

Chapter 9 The French Revolution404

THE FRENCH REPUBLIC AND ITS SATELLITES, 1798–1799 By 1799 the French Republic had annexed Belgium (the Austrian Netherlands) and the small German bishoprics and principalities west of the Rhine, and had created, with the aid of native sympathizers, a string of lesser revolutionary republics in the Dutch Netherlands, Switzerland, and most of Italy. With the treaty of Campo Formio between France and Austria in 1797, the Holy Roman Empire began to disintegrate, for the German princes of the Left Bank of the Rhine, who were dispossessed when their territories went to France, began to be compensated with territory of the church-states of the Holy Roman Empire. These developments were car- ried further by Napoleon (see map, p. 423).

North Sea

M e d i t e r r a n e a n S e a

Adriatic Sea

Seine R.

Rh ôn

e R

.

Po R.

Rhine R.

Danube R.

B a l t i c S e a

Loire R

.

FRANCE

OTHER GERMAN STATES

A U S T R I A

CORSICA

SARDINIA