Over the centuries – even in the present – how have the people living in Europe developed a separate “European” identity by contrasting themselves with an external (and/or internal) “other”, defined religiously, culturally, racially, or any other way?

Ideas of Europe during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars

Martyn Thompson

Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1), January 1994

In the early days of the contemporary European Community a number of distinguished historians turned their minds to tracing the history of “Europe” as an idea. One was Denis de Rougemont, whose Idea of Europe appeared in English in 1966. The message of the study was clear: after centuries of experiment Europe was at last acquiring appropriate political shape. The past, littered with false starts, was coming to fruition. The chance that had been lost during the French Revolution and in the age of nationalisms that followed was now being offered a second time. Europe’s “moment” had come again. From being, in Edmund Burke’s words, “virtually one great state,” Europe was now on its way to becoming an actual state. But the future has played tricks on these Europeanists of the recent past. Post-communist Europe has dwarfed both the geography and many of the political, social and economic problems of the European Community. Just as the newly emerging Europe is a challenge to the politicians of the European Community, so it is a provocation to historians of ideas of Europe. At the very least it seems advisable to reconsider Europe’s historical identity.

At one point de Rougemont concluded that “To search for Europe is to build Europe! In other words, it is the search that creates her.” The observation is useful. Europe has never been a self-evident or natural geographical, cultural or political division of the world. It is something created, artificial and elusive. There have been periods in Western intellectual history when the search for Europe has been much more intense than at others. The present half-century since the World War II is certainly one such period. But so was the eighteenth century and especially the period of the French Revolution and the subsequent European wars. Indeed, it is not far-fetched to regard this earlier period as the modern “European moment,” the moment when contemporary ideas of Europe were first crystalized out of an enormously complex historical inheritance and when they began their contemporary careers in political and intellectual history. The problems nowadays uppermost on the political agendas of Europeanists bear remarkable resemblances to those that first emerged in the earlier period: the problems of European nationalisms, war and civil war, the cultural and geographical limits of Europe, the maintenance of a balance of power within Europe, and the relations between Europe and the rest of the world.

My concern is to look at the emergence of ideas of Europe, especially in Britain, France and Germany. These ideas arose in the course of various “searches” for Europe that were propelled by unparalleled threats to inherited ideas about the character and culture of the European continent. The threats are usually reduced to two: the attack on the ancien régime mounted in the name of French revolutionary ideas, and the rise of European nationalisms. Thus one influential interpretation of the idea of Europe is that it suffered something of a watering-down or even demise in the period that the idea of Europe associated with the ancien régime succumbed to the opposed forces of the cosmopolitanism of the Rights of Man and of Citizens and of the particularism of the new nationalisms, which gave precedence to individuality over universality. This account is problematic for at least two reasons: first, because the ideas of cosmopolitanism and nationalism that supposedly destroyed the Europe of the ancien régime were themselves the product of that regime and, second, because the advocates of both revolutionary cosmopolitanism and nationalist particularism seem to have had no difficulty in reconciling their ideas to a concept of Europe. As Paul Hazard pointed out long ago, the term cosmopolitan in eighteenth-century Europe more often than not came to signify “someone who thought à la francaise,” while nationalists like Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808) developed elaborate reasons why German nationalism could only serve European interests (most of Europe being originally Germanic anyway).

Both forces were clearly involved in Napoleon’s very practical attempt to build Europe by force. In 1816 Napoleon declared that his aim had been “to found a European system, a European code, a Supreme Court for all Europe; there would have been a single European people,” a “truly united nation, and everybody, no matter where he traveled, would always have been in the common fatherland of all.” Europe, it seems, was already a historical and cultural unity. Only political unity was necessary in order to fulfill its universal, civilizing mission. Although in 1802 Napoleon had asserted that except “for a few shadings, France, Spain, England, Italy and Germany have the same traditions, the same religion, the same customs. . . Europe is but one province of the world. When we make war, we make civil war,” in 1805 he was moved to declare: “There is not enough sameness among the nations of Europe. European society needs a regeneration. There must be a superior power that dominates all the other powers, with enough authority to force them to live in harmony with one another – and France is best placed for that purpose.” Europe was to be a “federated states, or the true French Empire,” and Paris was to be Europe’s metropolis. Napoleon’s concern with Europe as the “common fatherland of all” turned out to be primarily designed for Frenchmen. As he informed the Conseil d’Etat in the early 1800s: “I want the title of French citizen to become the finest and most desirable on earth. I want every Frenchman traveling anywhere in Europe to be able to believe himself at home.” To Napoleon, then, European cosmopolitanism appears literally French.

But all these schemes failed, and in a revealing conversation on St. Helena in 1816 Napoleon acknowledged they had been just dreams – the pursuit of a “chimera,” a “beau ideal” of civilization that had proved impractical in a Europe divided by nationalisms, stubbornly conservative feelings and ignorance. They were to be counted among those “ideas that aren’t ripe yet, but they are far-reaching.” Napoleon’s failure to force Europeans into exchanging their particular identities for a general, Frenchified, European identity, lends credence to the conventional view that the modern idea of Europe was born during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and that it fell victim to particularism. But this is only one part of the story and only one idea of Europe. Certainly in the wake of the revolution and Napoleon major changes did occur in European conceptions of the character of Europe, but focussing upon Napoleon has led to the neglect of very significant aspects of these changes. The very forces that Napoleon portrayed as destroying his schemes for the New Europe, were seen by others – most notably Edmund Burke – as constituting the essential fabric of Europe. From this perspective, the revolutionary new Europe meant nothing less than the destruction of Europe altogether.

The threat posed to an old Europe by the French revolutionaries was immediately apparent to most observers. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), and Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796-97) Burke constructed an image of Europe that was both familiar and controversial to his audiences. Europe was a “community” and a “commonwealth.” The wealth that the European states shared and that the revolutionaries in France and elsewhere were destroying was much more a matter of common customs, traditions and manners than it was of economics. It was a mistake, Burke thought, to view the relationships between individuals and states in purely functional, rationalist or legalistic terms. Even wars between European states had hitherto not shaken that underlying amity. Indeed, European states had been closer to one another even in war than they had been to non-European states in times of peace. Burke went on to explain why:

The cause must be sought in the similitude throughout Europe of religion, laws, and manners. At bottom, these are all the same. The writers on public law have often called this aggregate of nations a commonwealth. They had reason. It is virtually one great state having the same basis of general law, with some diversity of provincial customs and local establishments. The nations of Europe have had the very same Christian religion, agreeing in the fundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies and in the subordinate doctrines. The whole of the polity and economy of every country in Europe has been derived from the same sources. It was drawn from the old Germanic or Gothic customary, from the feudal institutions which must be considered as an emanation from that customary; and the whole has been improved and digested into system and discipline by the Roman law. From hence arose the several orders, with or without a monarch (which are called states), in every European country. . . . From all those sources arose a system of manners and of education which was nearly similar in all this quarter of the globe.

Burke’s point was that this Europe was being destroyed by the French revolutionaries. Their “new scheme of politics” was essentially anti-political, as the political had come to be understood in some circles in Europe. Since the French revolutionaries rejected all the institutional and cultural inheritances that constituted Europe in Burke’s view, they were also anti-European. But what are the main elements in Burke’s conception of Europe that emerge from all this? Europe, it seems, was a cultural unity and an historical inheritance. It was an “aggregate” of states with such similar customs, morals, laws, social structures and manners of doing politics that it might even be regarded as “virtually one great state.” This Europe supposedly dated back to the fall of the Roman Empire. From its Gothic origins in the woods of Germany, it had undergone major transformations, wars, revolutions and crises, but each had been contained within the political, legal, moral, cultural and social framework of the European system of nations. European manners had evolved, from the roughness of the Germanic woods to the politeness of commercial Europe. Even war, that source of “wrong and violence,” as Burke called it, had been tempered by European recognition that it was unavoidably “the sole source of justice amongst nations.” None of these upheavals, not even the Reformation, had posed such a grave threat to this Europe as the French Revolution had done.

Burke’s view of the Old and New Europes contained some very familiar ideas as well as some very controversial ones. The term Europe, of course, had been around for a very long time. At one stage, it had been synonymous with the political organization of Charlemagne’s kingdom, the imperium Christianum or the imperium Romanum. At another stage, it was a synonym for Charles V’s supposed intention to establish a “universal monarchy.” By the late seventeenth century Europe had become an even more complex and multifaceted experience. Louis Moreri’s Grand Dictionnaire Historique (1674) refers to this Europe as composed of a variety of different nations each with “diverse geniuses.” Nonetheless, Europe was an intellectual and cultural unity that “surpasses the other parts of the world in everything” – skill, courage, art, architecture, government, trade, riches and religion. Fontenelle’s identification in 1686 of a European “quality of mind or genius” is in much the same vein: modern Europe had at last come of age in science, philosophy, art and beauty.

The eighteenth-century Europe that was synonymous with the “republic of letters” had emerged here. It clearly drew sustenance from all those common intellectual and institutional inheritances in law, language, science, government, religion and art to which Burke referred. The dominant expression in the early eighteenth century was that mushrooming of journals, each calling themselves “European” and encouraging the other great novelty of eighteenth century intellectual life – the writing of Europe’s history. This republic of letters provided the platform for all those schemes for perpetual peace from the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1712) to Immanuel Kant (1795), schemes often purporting to be universal but quite obviously concerned first and foremost with Europe. There might be intense intellectual in-fighting and national rivalries in the republic; the French might lead in some spheres, the English and Italians in others, the Germans in still others; but Europe was a single republic, superior in every respect to all other continents and civilizations. The boundaries of this Europe might be disputed – whether Russia belonged, for example – but that there was a geographical home for the intellectually superior Europeans was not doubted. The core consisted of France, Germany, Italy and Britain. This Europe, too, was the outcome of a “search” – a search into the character and origins of European intellectual achievements. The Europe that emerged consisted of a very gifted family writ large, and this might be looked upon as reflecting the dynastic interconnections of the ruling houses, the aristocratic families, and the great patrons of the arts that linked various parts of the European whole together.

The European republic of letters was part of the Europe that Burke detected as an inheritance and defended. For all the varieties of European enlightenments and for all the discontinuities in eighteenth century social, economic, political and intellectual history, it remains true that many eighteenth-century intellectuals from Scotland to Italy and from Portugal to Russia regarded themselves as participating in a common European adventure. Central, if very general, aspects of Burke’s understanding of Europe were shared by writers as otherwise diverse as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau in France; Herder, Wieland and Friedrich von Gentz in Germany; Defoe, Gibbon and William Robertson in Britain. Montesquieu’s Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe (1727), for example, is full of references to European unity in diversity, superiority, commercial integration, political moderation, Gothic origins, and so on. Rousseau remarks in his Extract of the Project for Perpetual Peace by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1761) that the “European powers form a kind of system that unites them in the same religion, the same law of nations, ways of life, letters, and trade, in a kind of balance that is the necessary result of all this.”

What made Burke’s conception so controversial was not just his utterly uncompromising defense of the Old Europe and rejection of the revolutionary; it was also the rhetorical style of his argument. Burke’s references to the spirit of the Christian religion as one of the two main pillars of the Old Europe obviously allowed him to evoke an image of the unity of European Christendom against the infidel. Hence they served to emphasize the unity and distinctiveness of the Old Europe that Burke wished to defend. But it simultaneously allowed him to remind his readers of the destructiveness of religious schism, of the Wars of Religion, and of the divisions of Europe into varieties of Christianity. It invoked an image of the dangers of transporting religious zeal into political action and allowed him to suggest to his readers that the atheism of contemporary French revolutionaries was itself barbaric and anti-European. But at least one possibility remained for the politics of the Old Europe to be rescued from the anti-politics of the “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” England, at least, was sufficiently traditional in its political culture to act as a counter-force. Whig England – a very modern England – was sufficiently commercial, mannered and cultivated to withstand the revolutionary onslaught.

But if Whig England was being singled out here as the bastion against revolutionary philistinism, what of the rest of Europe? The cultural diversity that may well have enlivened the European republic of letters was becoming perceived as counterproductive to a politically unified Europe; it would henceforth be increasingly difficult to regard Europe, in Burke’s words, as “virtually one great state.” Several of the visions of Europe that were constructed in response to the French Revolution and that reveal conceptions of Europe that were little more than mere dreams and schemes for unity, just as Napoleon’s proved to be.

Friedrich von Gentz began his career as a convinced Europeanist, and like many he initially supported the French Revolution. But the political experience of revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe disillusioned him. To be sure, he was the German translator of Burke’s Reflections, but he was no straight-forward disciple. He shared the opinion that Burke needed to be modified for maximum effectiveness outside England. His very Burkean essay, The French and American Revolutions Compared (1800), does something of this. It is tightly argued, systematic and analytical. It was translated into English and published in America in the same year that it first appeared in German. The intellectual trade route is fascinating: here the Irishman Burke with his very English reflections on the French and American revolutions was being interpreted for Americans by a German. If nothing else, then, the European republic of letters was still alive and well. But according to Gentz in On the State of Europe before and after the French Revolution (1801-02), precious little else was left of prerevolutionary Europe. Burke’s “virtually one great state” had effectively been destroyed. Gentz was secretary to the Congress of Vienna and the man known to some as “Europe’s Presumptive Secretary-General,” but in 1814 he wrote that the “word ‘Europe’ has come to inspire me with horror.” He had “lost all desire to be a European,” and his politics now had become “selfish” and “narrowly Austrian.” Gentz was hardly a new-style nationalist, but his sentiment may be taken to point in the direction that particular wind was blowing.

J. G. Fichte, from whom much of this wind originated, drew very different conclusions about the character of Europe at different stages in his career. One was explored in The Closed Commercial State (1800). Europe was indeed a unity, but a unity threatened by precisely that commercial life that Burke had seen as cementing European manners and morals. Fichte’s answer was to destroy European commerce by constructing self-enclosed, encapsulated, non-interacting, administrative states. European unity was to be secured by destroying European interaction in all but state-controlled intellectual affairs. The proposal subordinated politics to administration and was as anti-traditional regarding European politics as it was unrealistic. A second conclusion of Fichte was the proposal for a Europe led by a rejuvenated German state, explored in Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808). The proposal was far less impractical than the first; but it is worth recalling that it was presented by Fichte as a vision, not as an account of a European reality. It might well be seen as just one of the many schemes and dreams constructed in response to the devastation of the Old Europe by revolutionary anti-politics.

What might we conclude from all this about the European “moment” during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars? My main argument has been that the period witnessed the end of an eighteenth-century conception of Europe as a political and cultural unity, a historical and intellectual inheritance. That old conception, as represented by Burke, was a literary construction. It was an imaginative extrapolation from the European past and was designed to affect the emotions of a European readership in particular, political ways. To be sure, Burke’s intended audiences were in the first place British, and this revealed a major problem. The reception of Burke might be taken as the litmus test that revealed far greater differences than similarities between the political cultures of late-eighteenth century European states. The conceptions of Europe that were floated to replace the one that Burke represented were much less tied to the European historical past than Burke’s had been. Napoleon’s schemes were shattered in their encounter with European political practicalities. The visions of Fichte and others, by contrast, were all imaginative flights only tenuously connected to practical politics. Their visionary appeal was as ambiguous as the appeal of Burke’s Old Europe. Small wonder, perhaps, that these grand schemes for the establishment of a politically unified rather than balanced Europe found little practical echo after the Napoleonic experiment and small wonder that the attempts to restore an eighteenth-century European system of states ultimately failed, too. But three aspects of these earlier ideas of Europe survived.

The first was that it still made sense to talk of Europe as a civilization superior to all others, although the politics of Europe were firmly in the hands of separate, independent, sovereign states. There was no European mission to be translated into a nonexistent European policy. This idea of Europe finds supreme expression in G. W. F. Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. For Hegel, Europe, understood as the Germanic world, was the fourth and final stage of history, but that stage was the stage of the European nation state, not of a United States of Europe. The second, related to the first, was the idea of Europe as a commercially integrated community of interconnected states, regions, localities and peoples. This Europe received little attention during the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century. It is, however, the Europe of the European Economic Community – a Europe tied perhaps only temporarily and certainly only partially to more ambitious programs for political union during a few decades after the devastation of the World War II. The third was the continuation of Europe as a republic of letters – divorced now from any practical political implications. Europe was still an intellectual unity, a unity marked by diversity. This European literary republic finds admirable and amusing expression in Thomas Carlyle in 1838. His words echo Burke’s on the litigious and perverse natures of contemporary Europeans. Carlyle remarked:

Curious: how all Europe is but like a set of parishes of the same county; participant of the self-same influences, ever since the Crusades, and earlier; and these glorious [literary] wars of ours are but like parish-brawls, which begin in mutual ignorance, intoxication and boastful speech; which end in broken windows, damage, waste and bloody noses; and which one hopes the general good sense is now in the way towards putting down, in some measure.

In current circumstances, this Europe alone, extending far beyond the controversial geographical boundaries of the old Europe, shows every sign of flourishing.

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