Every history of Europe has to start at some arbitrary date, unless of course an attempt is being made to cover everything since the emergence of Homo sapiens. But some dates are more arbitrary than others. Unfortunately, within the same period a date can mean something for one kind of human activity but very little for another. Seventeen eighty-nine, for example, has a thunderous resonance for politics but barely registers a bat’s squeak for music or the visual arts. Sixteen forty-eight is of that kind. It looks like a sensible starting point because it was in that year that the Peace of Westphalia was concluded, bringing to an end a war that had lasted thirty years and had inflicted more devastation on Europe than any previous conflict. Moreover, it settled at least two major issues, for the independence of the Dutch Republic from Spain was recognized, and the structure of German-speaking Europe was settled for a century, and a half. More important still was what lay behind those two settlements: the recognition that confessional pluralism had come to stay. Both Catholic and Protestant zealots would continue to dream dreams of the triumph of their true faiths, but the stalemate recognized in 1648 was never seriously threatened.
So this volume’s initial date can be justified, but it must also be recognized that the Westphalian settlement left as much unfinished business as it concluded. The war between Spain and France sputtered on until the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, and perhaps did not really end until the Bourbon inheritance of Spain was given international recognition in 1714. In the north and the east, the situation continued to be fluid, as Swedish supremacy was contested by first one power and then another in a confusing series of wars that did not end until the Peace of Nystad in 1721. What were to become the two dominant forces in international politics were the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ between England and France, which did not begin until 1688, and the expansion of Russia, which did not begin until 1695. If anything, the direction being taken by domestic politics was even more uncertain. It was in 1648 that the French civil wars–the Frondes–began and in 1649 that a republic was proclaimed in England, following the execution of Charles I. The very different resolutions of those conflicts had to await the beginning of Louis XIV’s ‘sole reign’ in 1661 and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 respectively.
There were loose ends in 1648 and there were to be loose ends in 1815. In the chapters that follow, the threads are spun together to provide a guide through the labyrinth that seeks to be coherent without being schematic. If there is no master-narrative of the kind advanced by Hegel or Marx–or even the Whig historians–there are certainly lines of development to be identified. In politics, the most striking of these was the relentless march of the state to hegemony. By 1815 in most parts of Europe the claims of the state to a monopoly of legislation and allegiance within its borders were established in fact if not in law. Although there was a rich multiplicity of constitutional forms, ranging from democracy to autocracy, behind them all lay the sovereignty of an abstraction–the state. Political structures unable to achieve that ‘monopoly of legitimate force’ (Max Weber) that lies at the heart of the state, such as Poland and the Holy Roman Empire, became easy prey for rivals who had read the signs of the times more accurately. Part and parcel of this development was secularization, which in Catholic countries involved the exclusion of any form of papal interference and everywhere dictated the subordination of church to state. But the blood that ran through the veins of the state was thin and tepid. To motivate its members, the transfusion of something more inspiring was needed. Increasingly, that was found in nationalism, a secular religion with the ability to unleash devotion and hatred just as fierce as anything experienced during the religious conflicts of an earlier period.
Successful states also needed to adapt to social change. Only those which succeeded in integrating their elites could flourish. This might be achieved through a court, as in Louis XIV’s Versailles project; or through a representative assembly, such as the English Parliament; or through a service nobility, as in Prussia and Russia; or through a combination of all three, as in the Habsburg Monarchy. In every case, there proved to be an inbuilt tendency to that ossification that seems to be inseparable from political institutions. Even the unusually adaptable British solution was experiencing a hardening of the arteries by 1815. Whatever their social complexion, all European states had to come to terms with the emergence of a new kind of cultural space–the public sphere. Situated between the private world of the family and the official world of the state, the public sphere was a forum in which previously isolated individuals could come together to exchange information, ideas and criticism. Whether communicating with each other at long range by subscribing to the same periodicals, or meeting face to face in a coffee-house or in one of the new voluntary associations, such as a reading club or Masonic lodge, the public acquired a collective weight far greater than the sum of its individual members. It was from the public sphere that a new source of authority emerged to challenge the opinion-makers of the old regime: public opinion. The timing of this transition naturally varied across Europe. First in the field were Britain and the Dutch Republic, for they had in common relatively high rates of literacy and urbanization and enjoyed a relatively liberal censorship regime. Mutatis mutandis, at the other extreme and at the other end of Europe, it is next to impossible to find anything resembling a public sphere or public opinion in Russia before the nineteenth century. As we shall see, when managed effectively, public opinion could be a source of extra resources and extra authority for a state. Where it was ignored, misunderstood or alienated, as it was in France, the result could be revolutionary change.
The forces that created the public sphere derived most fundamentally from the expansion of Europe both at home and abroad. After the acute problems of the first half of the seventeenth century caused by war, recession, plague and famine, recovery was slow, fitful and patchy, but gradually the indicators began to point upwards: rising population, higher agricultural productivity, expanding trade and manufacturing, increasing urbanization, and a resumption of colonial expansion. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the process began to consolidate and accelerate, although still punctuated by setbacks. Of special importance were the improvements in physical communications that are discussed in the first chapter. The benefits were spread unequally. First in the queue was the state, whose appetite for more taxation to sustain the ever-increasing armed forces reached out to grasp both the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. Next came the landowners, happily taking advantage of the ‘price scissors’ that opened up between the increasing sums they received for their agricultural produce and the relatively declining cost of the manufactured goods they purchased. With the price of land trebling and the prestige attached to landownership undiminished, the enterprising could flourish mightily. A key group were the tenant farmers, to whom credit for most of the agricultural innovations of the period must be given. Also blooming were the financiers, especially those who managed to get involved in state financing, and the merchants, especially those involved in the colonial trades. Enterprising manufacturers able to work outside the restrictive practices of the guilds could enjoy a double benefit from the growth of both the labour supply and the consumer revolution that gathered strength as the eighteenth century progressed.
In short, the economic expansion of the eighteenth century produced a large and growing class of beneficiaries. Perhaps best placed to make the most of the century’s opportunities was a grandee who owned large estates rich in mineral resources, served by good communications and located in industrializing regions, and–perhaps most important of all–who was blessed with the necessary intellectual and personal qualities to become an entrepreneur. In an ideal world, he–and he would need to be a ‘he’ too, for women were subject to all manner of discrimination–would also marry into a family engaged in government finance, investment banking and overseas commerce. He would need a conscience robust enough to allow him to forget the involuntary services performed by the seven million slaves transported from Africa to the Caribbean during the course of the century. He would also be well advised to be an Englishman and thus relatively immune to the sudden visits from Nemesis in the shape of war or revolution, to which his continental colleagues were so prone, especially after 1789.
But the benefits were spread very unevenly. Geographically, there was a sharp gradient from the commercial north-west of Europe, where significant industrialization was well underway by 1815, to the underdeveloped east, where one could travel for weeks without encountering anything resembling a town and where, if material and social conditions had changed at all, they had changed for the worse. Here servitude, illiteracy, poverty and low life-expectancy were still the norm in 1815, as they had been in 1648. Even in the west the economic expansion could not absorb the rapidly growing population. The inelasticity of food production drove up prices, while the inelasticity of industry pushed down wages. The result was impoverishment for that large proportion of the population that was not self-sufficient. A new kind of poverty emerged, not a sudden affliction by famine, plague, or war but a permanent state of malnutrition and underemployment. It was also a vicious circle, for the undernourished were not so wretched as to be unable to produce the children who perpetuated their misery. They were also increasingly at the mercy of market forces, as capitalism eroded the traditional society of orders and its values.
It is tempting to adopt a rationalist teleology to chart the progress of the new values. ‘The age of reason’ or ‘the age of enlightenment’ are labels for the period so popular as to be almost clichés. But behind every cliché there must stand a core of truth. This period did indeed witness a degree of rationalism and secularization unprecedented in European history. It saw the publication of Newton’s Principia, Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, just to mention a few of the crucial texts that eroded the traditional theocentric view of the universe. Yet just as good a case could be made for calling it ‘the age of faith’, for it was marked by a number of powerful religious revivals, including Jansenism, Pietism and Methodism, and religious literature had never been more popular. Nor was there any tapering off as the eighteenth century progressed, as the great Romantic revolution demonstrated. As will be argued in Chapter 10, it makes more sense to conceptualize cultural developments not as a linear progression from faith to reason but as a dialectical encounter between a culture of feeling and a culture of reason. The most profound exploration of this existential conflict was undertaken by Goethe in Faust, the gigantic poem of more than 12,000 lines that occupied him off and on for most of his adult life and from which the following lines can serve as an epigraph for this book:
Two souls, alas, dwell within my breast, and their
Division tears my life in two.
One loves the world, it clutches her, it binds
Itself to her, clinging with furious lust;
The other longs to soar beyond the dust
Into the realm of high ancestral minds.