A Short History of Europe, 1600-1815

Search for a Reasonable World

Lisa Rosner, John Theibault

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780765603272
• eBook ISBN: 9781317477914
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

A concise survey that introduces readers to the people, ideas, and conflicts in European history from the Thirty Years' War to the Napoleonic Era. The authors draw on gender studies, environmental history, anthropology and cultural history to frame the essential argument of the work.

Chapter One

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Introduction: Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

 

 

 

On a frosty January afternoon in 1649, Charles I, King of England, mounted a scaffold in a small square near Whitehall palace in London. For the previous three weeks he had been subjected to a public trial under the authority of the English Parliament and had been found guilty of being a “Tyrant, a Traitor, a Murderer, and a Public Enemy to the Commonwealth of England.” The sentence for his crime was “death, by the severing of his head from his body.” A crowd of spectators filled the square, the adjoining streets, and the roofs of the surrounding buildings. The king gave a short speech, audible only to those onstage; then he prayed and signaled to the executioner when his prayers were finished. His last word was “Remember!”; his executioner’s last words to him, as he laid his head on the block, were “an’ it please Your Majesty.” At the signal, the executioner’s axe fell and severed the head from the body. The crowd let out “such a groan,” one observer reported, “as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again.”¹

Nearly a century and a half later, on a cold, gray morning in January 1793, another king, Louis XVI of France, mounted a scaffold on the newly renamed Place de la Revolution in France. Like Charles, Louis had been put on public trial, in his case by the National Convention, and had been found guilty of treason against the French nation. At the signal, the guillotine blade fell and severed the head from the body. At first, there was silence. Then some voices in the crowd took up the chant of “Vive la République!” “Long Live the Republic.”

These two stories of executed kings frame the chronological period covered in this survey of European history and highlight many of its themes. First, of course, they point out that monarchy, government by kings, was the normal form of government in the era, and that much of the political history of the era must be written in terms of the successes and failures of kings. But the fates of Charles I and Louis XVI were distinctive, even given that fact. Monarchs had been killed before and since, defeated in battle, deposed by rivals for the throne, assassinated by enemies and madmen. But these executions were not the ordinary products of the often bloody history of the European monarchy, inflicted by other princes who wished to claim for themselves the thrones of England or France. Instead, they were carried out by men who considered themselves to be the true representatives of the nation, justified in bringing “their Sovereign lord to public trial” for treason against his own country. These two cases—the only two such executions in European history—demonstrate the struggles over political authority that dominated the era. By what right, wrote one of Charles’s supporters on the eve of his trial, did Parliament presume to try the king? Under whose jurisdiction would he fall? Who would be his peers to pass judgment? “Never was such damnable doctrine vented before in the world … it being contrary to the law of Nature, the custom of Nations, and the sacred Scriptures.”² There was similar outcry against the imprisonment of Louis XVI. Reacting to the news of the execution, the French minister Talleyrand commented, “Since the leaders of the Jacobins down to the most honest citizens defer to the head-cutters, there is today nothing but a chain of villainy and lies, of which the first link is lost in filth.” But the supporters of Parliament and of the national assembly had their own political principles. In the trial against Charles I, the prosecutor said, they “pronounced sentence not only against one tyrant, but against tyranny itself.”³ And Robespierre, pronouncing sentence in turn against Louis XVI, wrote, “I do not recognize a humanity that massacres the people and pardons despots.” How had such different, contradictory political principles evolved within each country? And could such opposing definitions of nation, and commonwealth, and body politic, of treason and tyranny, ever be reconciled?

While highlighting these questions that unite the period, the two executions also point up the changes that took place in the 150 years separating them. The conflict between Charles and his Parliament was religious as much as it was political: both the king and his executioners were sure that they were acting in accordance with God’s will. By 1793 neither Louis nor the National Convention had the same conviction that God’s hand was omnipresent in determining the fate of nations. Louis XVI’s own reflections on his dilemma did not focus on religion, but indicated that a king “ought to devote himself entirely to the happiness of his fellow citizens … that he cannot promote the happiness of the nation but by reigning according to the laws; yet at the same time that a King cannot enforce those laws and do the good his heart prompts unless he be possessed of the necessary authority.” It is not that religion “declined” or became unimportant for large segments of the population (although certainly more people would have been willing to claim that in 1793 than in 1649); but the particular urgency with which religious issues fused with political issues in the early seventeenth century had indeed declined notably by the end of the eighteenth century. How that happened is one of the themes of this book.

Equally striking was the result of the executions on the constitution of their respective governments. For though Parliament, on the death of Charles I, proclaimed a republic (a state ruled not by a king, but by “the people”), it lasted only four years before it was replaced by a quasimilitary governorship under the authority of Charles’s sternest opponent, Oliver Cromwell. On Cromwell’s death, only the restoration of the monarchy had widespread support, and Charles’s son, Charles II, returned to assume the crown amidst nearly universal rejoicing. The king was dead, but Charles II was greeted with the traditional acclamation of “Long Live the King,” and in later years the eleven-year period between the death of Charles I and the restoration of Charles II came to be considered no more than a temporary gap, an “interregnum” (between the reigns) in the otherwise unbroken royal succession. In contrast, the execution of Louis XVI very quickly came to be seen as the end of the old order, the destruction of the “ancien régime”: “The king is dead,” proclaimed the crowd who witnessed it; “Long Live the Republic.” What had occurred in the intervening 150 years to make two such similar deaths be interpreted so differently? Why was the first seen as a minor interruption, a blip on the screen which otherwise registered a straight line, while the second was perceived as a political event of seismic proportions, a political earthquake well off the existing scale?

Other similarities and differences highlight additional themes of this text. The public trials and public executions, the pronouncements of the prosecutors and response of the crowd, all demonstrate the creation of a public sphere for public events, distinct from the purely private sphere of personal affairs. The execution of Charles I widened public debate to encompass a whole set of public discussions on the nature of government and on ownership of property. By the time of Louis’s execution, the discussion had broadened to include the nature of mankind, the origin of governments, the authority of fathers over children, and the relationships between men and women. It had broadened, too, to encompass a much wider social spectrum. The members of the National Convention who presumed to put their king on trial in 1793 were only a fraction of the educated public who presumed to form their own opinions of the trial from books and newspapers, as the “crowd” witnessing the execution formed only a fraction of the population of the lower orders intent on entering the arena of political action. Both executions sparked radical as well as conservative responses, calls for overturning the existing order as well as appeals for preservation of tradition. Where did the division of public sphere and private life come from? Why did it seem so much harder to change the social than the political order? Why could a nation depose a king, as the political theorist Mary Wollstonecraft asked, and not redress the inequity in the education of brothers and sisters?

A final theme highlighted by the executions and discussed in this text is the ongoing competition for power among European nations. The execution of Charles I was a local affair, of little concern outside of his own kingdoms. In contrast, the execution of Louis XVI became part of an international conflict that involved much of Europe for the succeeding twelve years. The countries that we associate with Europe today—Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, the German states—had once been collections of sovereignties bound together primarily through their allegiances to the families who ruled them. By the end of the eighteenth century they had become nations, whose jurisdictions reached far beyond the borders of Europe to include what they called the New World as well as much of Asia and Africa. The ideas that shaped the execution of Louis XVI were spread around the globe together with the conflict it engendered. When France sneezes, wrote one commentator, the rest of the world catches cold. How could the execution of one man come to have such an impact? How did the European world become the world itself? And how could ideas and institutions, conceived in one part of the globe, shape and be shaped by their transplantation to new environments?

The Search for a Reasonable World

In this text, we will address these questions as we trace the history of Europe from the early seventeenth century through the early nineteenth. Our interpretation will be based on the notion that the century and a half prior to 1600 had posed a number of intractable problems, for which competing solutions were put forward. We have called the process of finding solutions the “search for a reasonable world” because “reason” became a powerful idea for justifying many of the solutions, but also because at no time did it seem that the “search” had been completed. We will follow political developments to see how kingdoms became nations and government by lords became government by the state. We will trace the path of diplomatic history to see how Europe expanded to include the world and countries became Great Powers. We will examine intellectual history to see the pursuit of truth and certainty in philosophy, in science, and in political theory. We will follow the creation of the public sphere, the relegation of women to the merely private, and women’s struggle against it; we will follow, too, the rise of commercial culture and the economic expansion that made it possible. We will analyze the calls for reform and revolution in the late eighteenth century and their culmination in the French Revolution and Napoleon.

Throughout, we will stress the contested nature of these developments. For though history textbooks are usually written when the struggles they record are over, it is important to remember that those struggles existed, that men and women living in the period 1600 to 1815 did not know, as we do, how the events they witnessed would turn out and could not, as we can, turn the page to find out what happened. Like us, they believed that there was often a right path and a wrong path in human events; they believed, too, that much depended on their choosing the right path; but most of all they believed, again like us, that the question of right and wrong was a contested one, that they faced opposition, and that they had to choose with no foreknowledge of the future. As we read the pages of their history, then, we must try to understand it as they did. If we cannot give them our knowledge of their future, let us give them our sympathetic attention.

About the Term “Early Modern”

Historians invented the term “early modern” to cover a large chronological gap. Most have argued that the “modern world” began around 1800, the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, when mass politics and rapid economic change became widespread. The Middle Ages, on the other hand, ended some time before then—depending on one’s tastes, around 1300, 1400, or 1500. What, then, to call the three to five centuries between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of the modern era? Since historians generally noted that the period between 1400 and 1800 carried the seeds of what came later, they have tended to emphasize the connection between that period and the modern world with the designation “early modern.”

That long period also can be divided into at least two chunks. The first part of the early modern era falls fairly easily under the labels “Renaissance and Reformation.” These were the two great cultural and social movements that dissolved the medieval worldview. There are any number of surveys that cover that period. But by 1600, the impetus of Renaissance and Reformation was beginning to wane. There are no neat labels for the succeeding two hundred years. The seventeenth century has been called “The Age of Crisis” or the “Age of Absolutism,” and the eighteenth, “The Enlightenment,” but historians argue about the validity of these labels even as they use them. It is important to remember that, for the men and women of the period, their own lifetime was always “the modern world.” Any labels we may give it are only for our own convenience.

Further Reading

Other works concerning roughly the same era:

Maurice Ashley, The Golden Century: Europe 1598–1715 (New York, 1969)

Raymond Birn, Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe 1648–1789 (Fort Worth, 1992)

Euan Cameron, ed., Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1999)

William Doyle, The Old European Order 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1992)

Philippe Erlanger, The Age of Courts and Kings: Manners and Morals 1558–1715 (New York, 1967)

Peter Gay and R.K. Webb, Modern Europe to 1815 (New York, 1973)

Thomas Munck, Seventeenth Century Europe: State Conflict and the Social Order in Europe, 1598–1700 (Houndsmills, England, 1990)

D.H. Pennington, Europe in the Seventeenth Century 2nd ed. (London, 1989)

Geoffrey Treasure, The Making of Modern Europe, 1648–1780 (London, 1970)

E.N. Williams, The Ancien Régime in Europe (London, 1970)

Part I

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ca. 1600–1660

Chapter Two

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The European World in 1600

Nowadays, students learn that Europe is a continent, and an aerial view of its landmass, extending from the Arctic in the north to the northern coast of the Mediterranean in the south, with the Iberian peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean in the west, seems clearly to define a single, united entity except on the eastern frontier, where the Ural mountains form an arbitrary barrier between Europe and Asia. But in fact the area known as Europe comprises two distinct geographical and climatic zones.

The southern zone is dominated by the Mediterranean, the “sea between the land.” It is arid, warm, and sunny, with wine and olives its agricultural staples. From ancient times, the human population has clustered in the thin strip of land between the coast and the mountains just behind, making ships the most efficient form of transport among human settlements. Only the most reckless of navigators—smugglers, for instance, seeking to avoid tolls levied by seaport towns—tried to sail directly across the Mediterranean, for once a ship was out of sight of land it lost all its bearings and might circle around and around forever. The subterranean wrecks found by modern divers are testimony to the dangers involved. For the most part, people and goods crept along the sho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction: Sad Stories of the Death of Kings
• Part I: ca. 1600-1660
• Part II: ca. 1660-1720
• Part III: ca. 1730-1790
• Part IV: ca. 1790-1815
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors