Freedom and Organisation, 1814-1914

Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135642518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

'The purpose of this book is to trace the opposition and interaction of two main causes of change in the Nineteenth century: the belief in freedom which was common to Liberals and Radicals, and the necessity for organization which arose through industrial and scientific technique.' - Bertrand Russell
A revealing account by one of the twentieth century's greatest minds, charting the struggle between two determining forces in nineteenth century history: freedom and control.
Russell's text sweeps from the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna to the lead up to the First World War. It is full of lively portraits, including Malthus, Mill, Bentham and Marx. Russell examines the founding of democracy in America and the struggle with slavery, and brings to life the ideas of Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln.

PART I

THE PRINCIPLE OF LEGITIMACY

A Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte

… I know

Too late, since thou and France are in the dust,
That virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time.

SHELLEY

CHAPTER I

Napoleon's Successors

IDEALISM is the offspring of suffering and hope, and therefore reaches its maximum when a period of misfortune is nearing its visible termination. At the end of a great war, men's hopes fasten upon one among the victors as a possible champion of their idealistic aims. After the fall of Napoleon, this role was offered by popular acclamation to the Tsar Alexander, and was by him accepted with alacrity. It must be said that his competitors for ethical supremacy were not morally very formidable. They were, among sovereigns, the Emperor Francis of Austria, Frederick William of Prussia, the Prince Regent, and Louis XVIII; among statesmen, Metternich, Castlereagh, and Talleyrand.

Of these men, Francis had been the last of the Holy Roman Emperors, a title which had descended to him from Charlemagne, and of which he had been deprived by Napoleon, who considered himself the true heir of that barbarian conqueror. Francis had become accustomed to defeat by Napoleon, and had at last given his daughter Marie Louise to be the wife of the “Corsican upstart,” hoping thereby to break him of the habit of making war on Austria. When, after the Russian disaster of 1812, Napoleon began to seem no longer invincible, Francis was the last of the great monarchs to join the coalition against him. Throughout all the years of trouble, Austria had always been willing to profit by any bargain that Napoleon cared to propose, and as the result of a policy that aimed at expediency rather than heroism, the Austrian army, though large, had distinguished itself less than that of Prussia in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814. This policy was due, not to Francis, but to his minister, Metternich, who, having entered the service of his Emperor at an early age, was left in charge of foreign affairs as soon as he had taken well to heart that all change was unwelcome to his master. Relieved of external responsibility, Francis was free to concentrate upon the more congenial task of regulating the internal administration of his Empire. The judicial system was so centralized that the details of the most trivial prosecutions came to his notice, and, having a taste for such matters, he interested himself even in the conduct of executions. He rarely revised a sentence, and never exercised the prerogative of mercy. In his closest associates he inspired no affection, and to the rest of the world he was practically unknown.

Frederick William, though his troops had distinguished themselves, had won even less personal respect than the Emperor of Austria. While Austria was being battered in 1805, Prussia remained a vacillating spectator, to be crushed in the following year at Jena, where all the prestige derived from Frederick the Great was dissipated in a day. The poor king was compelled to take refuge in the extreme eastern corner of his dominions, and when, in 1807, Alexander and Napoleon made friends at Tilsit, he sent his beautiful Queen to intercede for him with the two Emperors. Napoleon was unmoved, but the gallant Alexander liked to think of himself as the champion of beauty in distress. The result was a treaty in which Napoleon declared that, out of deference to the wishes of Alexander, he permitted Frederick William to retain a portion of his former kingdom. Frederick William's gratitude to Alexander was warm and lasting, but to the very end he continued to be unreliable, owing to his hesitating temperament, and thereby earned the contempt even of his closest allies.

George III, after losing the American Colonies and forbidding Pitt to introduce Catholic Emancipation, had been belatedly certified as insane, but was still King of England. His functions were executed by the Prince Regent, an elderly beau, much ashamed of his corpulence, but too greedy to take any steps to cure it. Politically, the Prince Regent stood for all that was most reactionary; privately, for all that was most despicable. His treatment of his wife had been such that he was hissed when he appeared in the streets of London; his manners, to which the English Court had grown accustomed, were such as foreign ladies found unendurable. Throughout his whole life, so far as is known he never succeeded in acquiring the respect of any single human being.

Louis XVIII, whom united Europe restored to the throne of his ancestors, and on whose behalf, in a sense, the twenty-two years of warfare had been waged, had few vices but still fewer virtues. He was old, fat, and gouty, practically a stranger to France, which he had left as a young man nearly a quarter of a century ago. He was not without shrewdness, and he was more good-natured than most of his friends. But he had spent the years of his exile among the enemies of France, hoping for the defeat of his country as the only means to his own restoration. His entourage consisted of princes and aristocrats who had fled from the Revolution, and who knew nothing of the France created by the Convention and Napoleon. As the protégé of foreign enemies, he could hardly be respected in his own country, and foreign governments, while they placed him on the throne, did so because his weakness gave them hopes of that security of which they had been robbed by Napoleon's strength.

Such were Alexander's royal competitors for popular favour. His competitors among statesmen were abler, but hardly such as to inspire general enthusiasm. The most powerful among them, throughout the years of the Great Peace, was Metternich, who remained the ruler of Austria and almost the arbiter of Europe until he was dislodged by the revolutions of 1848, which his policy had rendered inevitable. Throughout the whole period from 1814 to 1848, he was the prop of reaction, the bugbear of liberals, and the terror of revolutionaries. His fundamental political principle was simple, that the Powers that be are ordained of God, and must therefore be supported on pain of impiety. The fact that he was the chief of the Powers that be, gave to this principle, in his eyes, a luminous self-evidence which it might otherwise not have possessed.

Born in 1773, of an ancient noble family in the Rhineland, Metternich represented a type intermediate between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His father lost a large part of his estates as a result of the invasion of Germany by French revolutionary armies, and this circumstance did nothing to increase Metternich's love of revolutions. The Austrian diplomatic service, in which his father had a meritorious but not distinguished career, was the obvious profession for the young man, and his prospects were promoted by marriage with the rich granddaughter of the famous Kaunitz, who brought about the Franco-Austrian Alliance at the time of the Seven Years’ War. Metternich had at no time any sympathy with German nationalism, or indeed with any other nationalism. States were, for him, the personal estates of monarchs, and required no other principle of cohesion. Western Germany was traditionally pro-French, and Austria, whose territory comprised Germans, Magyars, Slavs, and Italians, was the chief enemy of nationalism throughout the whole of the nineteenth century. In this respect, Metternich, like Austria, carried on the traditions of the pre-revolutionary age. The same is true of his attitude towards the Church, for, though a pious Catholic, he showed little reverence for the Pope in his temporal capacity, and was often politically anti-clerical.

There were other traits in Metternich's character, however, which make him worthy to rank as a Victorian. (When he died, Queen Victoria had been twenty-two years on the throne.) Conceit is not peculiar to any one period, but Metternich's special brand of pompous priggery belongs to the epoch between the Napoleonic wars and the great war. If we are to believe his Memoirs, he was totally devoid of ambition, and remained in public life solely from a sense of duty and the painful realization that others lacked his abilities. So persuaded was he of his own moral grandeur that he thought it must be equally obvious to others. Late in 1813, when, having at last seen which way the cat would jump, he had terminated the double game of Austria between France and Russia, he wrote to his daughter: “I am certain Napoleon thinks of me continually. I must seem to him a sort of conscience personified.” His statement of the reasons which led him to overcome his shrinking from worldly glory is most impressive:

That a public career was distasteful to me I have already mentioned. Convinced that everyone ought to be prepared to answer for the deeds of his own life; penetrated by the consciousness of the enormous difficulties of propping up a society which was falling to pieces on every side; disapproving, before the tribunal of my own conscience, of almost all the measures which I saw adopted for the salvation of the social body, undermined as it was, by the errors of the eighteenth century; lastly, too diffident to believe that my mind was of so powerful a stamp that it could improve whatever it undertook: I had determined not to appear on a stage on which the independence of my character rebelled against playing a subordinate part, though I did not consider myself capable of taking the part of a reformer.

The care with which my education had been directed to the wide field of politics had early accustomed me to contemplate its vast extent. I soon remarked that my mode of thinking of the nature and dignity of this sphere was essentially different from the point of view from which all this was regarded by the enormous majority of those who are called to play great political parts.

The great names in diplomacy, both of past times and of his own day, did not, so he tells us, inspire him with respect.

Resolved not to walk in their steps, and despairing of opening a path in harmony with my own conscience, I naturally preferred not to throw myself into those great political affairs, in which I had far more prospect of succumbing materially than of succeeding: I say materially, for I have never been afraid of failing morally. The man who enters public life has always at command a sure resource against this danger, that is—retirement.

To the onlookers, Austria, in Napoleon's day, did not seem to be playing a very glorious part. This, however, was not the way matters presented themselves in Metternich's memory. “Under the load of enormous responsibility,” he says, “I found only two points on which it seemed possible to rest, the immovable strength of character of the Emperor Francis, and my own conscience.”

From Metternich's Memoirs one would hardly be able to discover what he was like as a social being, although it was to his social arts that he owed his success. He was at no time profound; he was clever in carrying out his schemes, but scarcely exceptional in conceiving them. He was gay and pleasant; only those whom he was actively thwarting disliked him. Like most of the diplomatists of the period, but with more success than the others, he mixed politics with love affairs. Ladies from whom political secrets were to be learnt received from him attentions which they usually found irresistible. Sometimes the game was played on both sides. For many years he was on intimate terms with Napoleon's sister Caroline Murat; he learnt from her sometimes Napoleon's secrets, sometimes what Fouché thought it well for him to hear. When Austria befriended Murat in 1814, Talleyrand, in his letters to Louis XVIII, roundly accused Metternich of being influenced by love for Queen Caroline; but at first there were sound political motives for Austria's attitude, and when these motives failed the Queen's charms lost their potency. Metternich may have been sometimes outwitted in his gallantries with political ladies, but he cannot justly be accused of having ever been led astray by the heart.

Above all else, Metternich was an aristocrat—not of a territorial aristocracy, such as those of England and Russia, but of that type of Court aristocracy that the world owed to Louis XIV. Great affairs were for sovereigns and their ministers, who had no need to consider the interests of the vulgar. The people, for Metternich, scarcely exist, except when he is forced to contemplate with disgust the dirt and raggedness of French revolutionaries. When, later, the populace begins again to be instrusive, his instinct is to tread on it as one would on a black beetle. A very polished gentleman—almost the last before the democratic deluge.

Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, was a man of estimable private character, personally disinterested, and impartial in diplomacy. He was not brilliant, and foreigners laughed at him (as they did later at Wilson) for his ignorance of Continental geography.^* But he had sound good sense, and less predisposition to trickery than most of his contemporaries. Without being showy, he was shrewd. At the Congress of Vienna, the Austrian Government succeeded in placing its spies as housemaids in almost all the embassies, where the contents of wastepaper baskets were pieced together and sent to the police; Castlereagh, however, brought his own maidservants, and caused the secret police difficulties of which they complained bitterly in their reports. He was a man who seldom deceived others, but was himself not easy to deceive. From his correspondence one would judge him to be a man without emotions and without bias except that of his class and nation: personal likings and antipathies seem to play no part in the formation of his opinions. He had a thoroughly British suspicion of foreigners. On January 30, 1815, he writes to Lord Bathurst: “I beg you will not give any money at present to any of the Continental Powers. The poorer they are kept, the better, to keep them from quarrelling.” After Napoleon's fall, he sincerely desired peace. The Austrian Minister Gentz, speaking of the Congress of Vienna, says: “England wished for peace, peace before everything, peace—I am sorry to say it—at any price and almost on any conditions.” In foreign affairs Castlereagh had considerable merit. He was, however, an important member of one of the worst and most cruel governments with which England has ever been cursed, and deserves his full share of reprobation on this account. It is psychologically surprising that this cold precise mind succumbed finally to a form of madness leading to suicide. Greville rightly says that his “great feature was a cool and determined courage, which gave an appearance of resolution and confidence to all his actions, and inspired his friends with admiration and excessive devotion to him, and caused him to be respected by his most violent opponents.” In his correspondence as Foreign Secretary it is surprising to find with what authority he can write to ambassadors without causing resentment; even the Duke of Wellington is not above receiving instructions from him. But although, as Greville says, those who were brought into close contact with him by their work were devoted to him, his colourless personality could not inspire any wide-spread enthusiasm. This also appears from what Greville says about the news of his death: “When I got to town I met several people who had all assumed an air of melancholy, a visage de circonstance, which provoked me inexpressibly, because it was certain that they did not care; indeed, if they felt at all, it was probably rather satisfaction at an event happening than sorrow for the death of the person.” A vain man would not like to know that this was to be his epitaph, but I doubt whether Lord Castlereagh would have minded.

Of the important personages at the Congress of Vienna, the only one remaining is Talleyrand, who represented Louis XVIII and the interests of Bourbon France. Born in 1754, of a family of the highest French aristocracy, he had time, after he grew up, to enjoy the ancien régime, and always maintained afterwards that those born too late for this did not know the true delight of living. Owing to an accident in early childhood, he was debarred from the career of arms; his parents therefore destined him for the Church, and made his younger brother the heir of the family estates. He became Bishop of Autun, but no great piety was expected of aristocratic Church dignitaries, so that he was able to enjoy life in the company of dissolute, liberal-minded, and highly intelligent friends. His dislike of an ecclesiastical career, as well as his genuine convictions, made him throw in his lot with the Revolution, and support the civil constitution of the clergy. At the beginning of the Reign of Terror, however, he found it necessary to fly. He escaped to England, where the Government suspected him of being a French spy and refused to let him stay. From England he went to America, where he made many friends, the most important of whom was Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury. Finally, when the storm had abated, he returned to France.

As Napoleon's foreign minister, he at last found scope for his talents. He was not heroic, and always avoided sharp conflicts when he could; when he disagreed with Napoleon, he would submit sooner than resign office. He was never above taking a bribe for what he meant to do in any case, and in this way he amassed an enormous fortune; but there is no evidence that bribes ever influenced his policy. He had the virtues belonging to unheroic intelligence: he was good-natured, had few hatreds, disliked war, and did all he could to promote free commercial intercourse between nations. He endeavoured, but without success, to restrain Napoleon's ambition; when he failed, foreseeing Napoleon's fall, he began to intrigue with the Bourbons. At Erfurt, in 1808, when Napoleon and the Tsar Alexander met to partition the world, he warned Alexander against Napoleon, in whose service he still was. When his treachery was discovered, he was dismissed from office, but not disgraced; and as soon as Napoleon fell, he came into power again, though not for long, owing to the hostility of the clericals and ultra-royalists whom the Restoration again brought into prominence.

There were some surprising things about Talleyrand. Though a priest, he married; though an aristocrat, he married a wom...