Modern Europe, 1789-Present

Asa Briggs,Patricia Clavin

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317868484
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Geschichte
• Sous-sujet: Weltgeschichte

Now covering the whole of Europe from the French Revolution to the present day, this major new edition has been completely revised and brought up-to-date. The approach embraces the whole continent from both national and regional perspectives, and combines political survey with grass roots 'people' history. Bringing this history vividly to life, the authors use a very broad range of sources including memoirs, archives, letters, songs and newspapers. In particular, there is new treatment of the following themes:

• Religion and the modern Papacy
• Immigration in Europe and relationships between minority and majority groups
• UNESCO
• The European Bill of Rights
• The seeds of conflict in Bosnia and Croatia
• Europe's relations with the wider world, with particular attention to the Middle East and Japan.

Chapter 1

REVOLUTION AND EMPIRE: EXPERIENCE AND IMPACT, 1789–1815

___________

CHANGE AND REVOLUTION: OLD AND NEW

There was so much change, most of it unprecedented, during the second half of the eighteenth century that both then and since most people have regarded this period in human history as the great divide between past and present. This, they have said, was the true beginning of ‘modern times’. Looking backwards, the French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the shrewdest of political and social commentators, could ‘find no parallel’ in history. ‘The past [had] ceased to throw its light upon the future.’

In the early twenty-first century, after the world has experienced further bursts of unprecedented change, much of it packed into the last 30 years, such a view of late-eighteenth-century change can be challenged. With the help of hindsight we can now identify continuities in thought, behaviour and institutions. The past did influence the future. We have also introduced the terms ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-industrial’ into our vocabulary to widen the perspectives. Yet the word ‘revolution’ still carries with it dramatic force. And this is true whether it is applied to late-eighteenth-century politics and society in France, in population by far the largest state in Europe (27 million in 1789, seven million more than in 1700), or to industrialization in Britain, a country with a third the population of France but with an unprecedented burst of economic growth in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

The word ‘revolution’ has been applied also to what happened in America following the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 (the year of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and of a large new James Watt steam engine, named not inappropriately ‘Parliament Engine’). During the American War Frenchmen, including members of the French nobility, fought the British on American soil. The winning of American independence, a victory in which France shared, although at burdening financial cost, in effect bankruptcy, humiliated Britain, but it did not hold back striking industrial growth. As for the American political changes, some American historians have claimed that ‘in the modern sense of the word it was hardly a revolution at all’.¹ There was, however, a new republic, and with it a commitment of the American people to the ‘pursuit of happiness’. There was also the authority of a written constitution, drafted at Philadelphia in 1787.

Historians can learn much from changes in the meaning of words, indeed from the history of language as a whole. Originally the word ‘revolution’ had been an astronomical term applied to the regular round of the stars in their courses; and even after it came to be employed in political discussion during the seventeenth century it was usually implied that as a result of revolution the proper order of things, perverted by men in power, would be restored. You would move back to where you began. It was Tocqueville again who wrote of the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 that ‘one might have believed that the aim of the coming revolution was not the overthrow of the old regime but its restoration’. Nonetheless, after 1789 the word ‘revolution’ never meant quite the same again.

Whatever continuities there were between pre-revolutionary Europe and Europe after 1789 there was a very special sense of newness. Maximilien-Isidore Robespierre, revolutionary of revolutionaries, wrote to his brother in the summer of 1789 that France had produced ‘in a few days greater events than the whole previous history of mankind’, while across the Channel the leader of the English Whigs, Charles James Fox, described the fall of the Bastille as ‘much the greatest event that ever happened in the history of the world’. In the new world of industry the pioneering English potter Josiah Wedgwood believed that ‘the wonderful revolution’ had ‘thrown the world off its hinges’, and in the old world of the Muses poets as different as William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge joined in the chorus, along with Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller in Germany. For William Wordsworth, aged 19, this was

… a time when Europe was rejoiced,

France standing on the top of golden hours

And human nature seeming born again.

What could be newer than that?

The leading ideological opponent of the Revolution, Edmund Burke, born in Ireland, clearly appreciated the newness of what had happened as much as the revolutionaries themselves and those who sympathized with them. As early as 1790 he described the Revolution as a ‘novelty’, a deliberate break with history, not its culmination. For him it had nothing in common, therefore, with the ‘glorious’ English Revolution of 1688, the centenary of which had been celebrated in London just before the French revolution began. Nor had it much in common, he believed, with the American Revolution. Unlike foreign sympathizers with the French Revolution, many of whom, like Coleridge and Wordsworth, changed their minds about it later in the light of later events in France, Burke from the start saw pattern in the events: revolution was a cycle, not a sequence. It began with anti-absolutist abstractions and it would end with revolutionary absolutism and war.

The Revolution hinged (Wedgwood’s word) on far more than the fate of a well-intentioned king, Louis XVI, who had ascended the throne of France in 1774. Yet it was only after the creation of a new French republic in September 1792 and the guillotining of the King on 21 January 1793 that revolutionary novelty was fully and self-consciously proclaimed to the world in a new republican calendar which was adopted by the National Convention on 5 October 1793, two weeks before the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette. Year I was now stated to have begun on 22 September 1792, and in future within each year the months still were to be redivided also. There were still to be 12 of them, but they were now all to be of thirty days.

Their ‘republican’ names, originally designated as ‘first’, ‘second’ and so on, like the names of streets in the grid pattern of American cities, were subsequently chosen by a specially appointed Commission neither from history nor from myth but from nature, nature as peasants, not as the bourgeoisie, were thought to understand it. The first, Vendémiaire, was the month of the vintage, the last, Fructidor, the month of fruit. The second, Brumaire, was the month of mist. Germinal was the month of seeding, Floréal the month of blossom, and Thermidor, the tenth month, the month of heat. Each month was divided into three décades, each of ten days. The Christian Sunday totally disappeared, as did Christian holy days. A new cult of Reason, grounded in eighteenth-century philosophy, displaced Christianity. The five days left over after the reorganization of the months were republican festival days dedicated to Virtue, Talent, Labour, Ideas and Rewards. In leap years the extra day, now to be the last day of the year, was to be called Revolution Day.

The calendar itself lasted only until 1805, ten years before the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, born in the island of Corsica in 1769, who rose to power in revolutionary France as a soldier. He had begun his political career in 1799 as First Consul, a republican title with classical echoes, and five years later he crowned himself hereditary Emperor in a religious ceremony with the Pope in attendance. Christianity had not disappeared. Nor had industrialization disposed of an hierarchical order in Britain, despite the fact that British industrialists, like French revolutionaries, were fascinated by the concept of ‘newness’ and charged the word ‘invention’ with magnetic force. Matthew Boulton, James Watt’s partner, took pride in dealing in ‘novelties’ before he sold steam power; and Birmingham, his city, which had no counterpart in France, was later said to represent, as other new industrial cities did, a system of life constructed according to ‘wholly new principles’.

It was the spread of industrialization rather than the appearance of a revolutionary calendar in France that changed for ever the sense of time. The lives of the workers, who included children, were now regulated by the factory hooter. Work started early and went on late. Monday was called Saint Monday because it was a day when, in face of tough discipline, as tough as that in Napoleon’s armies, workers might take a day off. In a further phase of industrialization there were to be battles between employers and workers about hours as well as wages. More generally ‘time frameworks’ were to change too. Faster coaches pulled by horses introduced ‘time tables’ before the age of the steam locomotive and the use of standard railway time. Foreigners often complained of the English mania for ‘saving time’. Yet speed was to attract people in most countries, whatever their history.

Critics of what came to be called ‘the industrial revolution’ objected to the power of the machine and the monotonous routines of industrial labour, while critics of the French Revolution believed that what was happening throughout the revolutionary sequence or cycle that ended with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 could better be explained in terms of nature than of history – or, as later critics were to do, of theatre. They compared it with a storm or more dramatically with a torrent or a stream of lava, and it was with relief, therefore, if with premature confidence, that the Quarterly Review in London in 1814 could claim that ‘the volcano is now extinguished; and we may approach the crater with perfect security’. That was before the final historical twist when Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba and lived to fight again.

In this respect political change in France was completely different from the economic and industrial change in Britain to which the label ‘industrial revolution’ was first attached in 1827 by a French economist, Adolphe Blanqui. Comparing the social and political changes that had happened in France during the 1780s and 1790s with the social and economic changes that took place in Britain, he could point to Georges Jacques Danton on one side of the Channel and Watt on the other. A French historian of a later generation, Paul Mantoux, writing in 1906, spoke of what happened in Britain in the late-eighteenth century as ‘one of the most important moments in modern history, the consequences of which have affected the whole civilized world and are still transforming it and shaping it under our eyes’.²

Blanqui was living at a time when most knowledgeable Europeans were arguing that it was the economic strength of Britain, based on the exploitation of coal and iron, the invention of new machinery and the harnessing of new forms of power, that had accounted for victory in the long wars against the French Revolution and Napoleon which had lasted with short breaks from 1793 to 1815. Some Englishmen disagreed. They attributed success not to industrial – or financial – strength but to ‘moral strength’, to Protestantism, or, in Burkean language, to the excellence of an institutional ‘inheritance’ of parliamentary monarchy and the rule of law. Two systems were thus being compared – the British, which appealed to history, and the French, which in the course of revolution had tried to dispose of it. Yet even within this interpretation, which purported to explain why ‘free born Englishmen’ had not staged a political revolution, it was relevant to ask why there had been no industrial revolution in France.

Many reasons were found. The French social system, it was argued, was more rigid, despite the development of new wealth in the eighteenth century, much of it derived from the Caribbean as was much new British wealth; it permitted the creation of new noblemen with their origins in trade, but it did not favour entrepreneurs seeking new markets for new products. Capital was easily diverted from ‘useful’ projects to ‘luxuries’. Income was spent conspicuously, not productively. Quality was preferred to quantity. Unlettered English mechanics produced machines: French artisans used their ingenuity in producing gadgets, like mechanical toys. The really large French textiles factory, which had been in existence for nearly a 100 years, produced tapestries. Manchester dealt in cotton: Lyons in silk. Wedgwood’s ‘Etruria’, centre of the Potteries, was a very different place from Sèvres, home of French porcelain, as he himself recognized. English workmen were more adaptable and more mobile: Scottish workmen were more thrifty and ambitious. Protestants accounted for only 2 to 3 per cent of the French population, and Protestant seventeenth-century exiles from France, Huguenots, had stimulated British industry. British raw materials were more accessible – coal was conveniently located near the seaports: iron could be imported as well as smelted at home. And if roads were better in France, Britain had twice as many canals in 1800 – after a canal boom which anticipated the railway boom a generation later.

Industrialization, like political revolution, is best explained in terms of complex interactions, most of them at the regional level, rather than lists of causes and effects. In fact, while most eighteenth-century British industrialization was highly regionalized, leaving large parts of the country untouched, the French economy in the 1780s included more industrial elements in it than the first historians of the industrial revolution, including their own, suggested. There were entrepreneurs in France, and there were several substantial plants, including a spinning factory at Nantes that employed 4,000 workers. At Chaillot, near Paris, steam engines were being produced. There were small industrial regions in the east, like that round Mulhouse. If French coal production was only 10 per cent of that in Britain, cast iron production was actually greater in France than in Britain during the 1780s.

There was, however, one other critical economic difference. While both countries had already benefited from what came to be called (misleadingly) ‘commercial revolutions’, based on sugar and slaves, which increased the wealth of both countries in the eighteenth century, France, unlike Britain, underwent no ‘agricultural revolution’, an equally misleading term yet a convenient label for significant improvements in farming, the most important branch of economic activity in both countries. British improvements involved more effective use of land; new techniques of food production, widely publicized; systematic rotation of crops; the use of winter crops for fodder; expansion of cereal production, crucial for a growing population of men, women, children – and horses; and more careful breeding and rearing of bigger and better livestock.

In summarizing and extolling their own achievements in industry as well as in agriculture the British preferred, before and after the French Revolution, to use the older word ‘improvement’, a fashionable word in the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, to the word ‘revolution’; and it was not until the 1880s, just before the centenary of the French Revolution was celebrated (the Eiffel Tower was its monument), that the term ‘industrial revolution’ passed into general currency in Britain.³ By then it had become obvious that there could be no reversibility in industrial change. You could no more go back from an industrial society to a pre-industrial society than you could control the movements of the stars. It was easier, indeed, to attempt political restoration after a revolution than to set the clock back economically.

By the year 1889 the French Revolution and the British industrial revolution, separate in their origins, seemed to some commentators to be directly related to each other in their consequences. Factories and barricades were part of the same stage sets. The members of a new industrial ‘proletariat’ (in reality a divided, not united, labour force, divided by religion as well as by occupation) were thought of as carriers of continuing revolution. Particularly in the judgement of socialists, like German-born Karl Marx, the bourgeois revolution against feudalism as he saw it, which had been staged in France in 1789, would be followed, as industrialization extended, by proletarian revolutions that would destroy capitalism and (ultimately) usher in a ‘classless society’. Such kinds of interpretation, which were to influence French thought and action more than British, were to be challenged in the late-twentieth century in the light not only of experience, particularly the experience of rise and fall of the Soviet Union, committed to Marxist theory, but of a deeper study of the nature of the two revolutions themselves. Yet there were significant similarities about both revolutions.

The first, as we have noted, was universalism, part of the rhetoric of both. The world was invited to proclaim human rights: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of the summer of 1789 was a declaration of human rights, not just a charter for Frenchmen. It was not only France which was separating itself from the past, the world was being invited to separate itself too. Tom Paine, Burke’s most effective and best-selling critic, was made a citizen of France and represented Calais in its National Assembly. There was universalism too in the ‘industrial revolution’ which could not be confined to Britain. Meanwhile, steam power, the newest form of power in use, could be deemed as universal as the power of ideas.

Engine of Watt! unrivall’d in thy sway.

Compared with thine what is the tyrant’s power?

His might destroys, while thine creates and saves,

Thy triumphs live, like fruit and flowers.

In this case, however, not everyone found steam power so beneficent. There were, indeed, alternative universalist verses written in which steam – and machinery – figured as tyrants. The really ruthless king, steam, was served by ‘a priesthood’ who were ‘turning blood to gold’.

The second similarity was that each revolution carried with it a sense of being ‘unfinished’. This was obvious in relation to the industrial revolution, for it was inherently unlikely that techniques inve...