representatives of the different classes of the realm into consultation
upon the perplexities of defective income and excessive expenditure.
In 1789 the States General, a gathering of the nobles, clergy and
commons, roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the British
Parliament, was called together at Versailles. It had not assembled
since 1610. For all that time France had been an absolute monarchy.
Now the people found a means of expressing their long fermenting
discontent. Disputes immediately broke out between the three estates,
due to the resolve of the Third Estate, the Commons, to control the
Assembly. The Commons got the better of these disputes and the States
General became a National Assembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown
in order, as the British Parliament kept the British crown in order.
The king (Louis XVI) prepared for a struggle and brought up troops from
the provinces. Whereupon Paris and France revolted.
The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The grim-looking
prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris, and the
insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. In the east and
north-west provinces many chateaux belonging to the nobility were burnt
by the peasants, their title-deeds carefully destroyed, and the owners
murdered or driven away. In a month the ancient and decayed system of
the aristocratic order had collapsed. Many of the leading princes and
courtiers of the queen’s party fled abroad. A provisional city
government was set up in Paris and in most of the other large cities,
and a new armed force, the National Guard, a force designed primarily
and plainly to resist the forces of the crown, was brought into
existence by these municipal bodies. The National Assembly found
itself called upon to create a new political and social system for a
new age.
It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the utmost.
It made a great sweep of the chief injustices of the absolutist regime;
it abolished tax exemptions, serfdom, aristocratic titles and
privileges and sought to establish a constitutional monarchy in Paris.
The king abandoned Versailles and its splendours and kept a diminished
state in the palace of the Tuileries in Paris.
For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might struggle
through to an effective modernized government. Much of its work was
sound and still endures, if much was experimental and had to be undone.
Much was ineffective. There was a clearing up of the penal code;
torture, arbitrary imprisonment and persecutions for heresy were
abolished. The ancient provinces of France, Normandy, Burgundy and the
like gave place to eighty departments. Promotion to the highest ranks
in the army was laid open to men of every class. An excellent and
simple system of law courts was set up, but its value was much vitiated
by having the judges appointed by popular election for short periods of
time. This made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the
judges, like the members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the
gallery. And the whole vast property of the church was seized and
administered by the state; religious establishments not engaged in
education or works of charity were broken up, and the salaries of the
clergy made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad
thing for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously
underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addition
the choice of priests and bishops was made elective, which struck at
the very root idea of the Roman Church, which centred everything upon
the Pope, and in which all authority is from above downward.
Practically the National Assembly wanted at one blow to make the church
in France Protestant, in organization if not in doctrine. Everywhere
there were disputes and conflicts between the state priests created by
the National Assembly and the recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who
were loyal to Rome.
In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in France was brought
to an abrupt end by the action of the king and queen, working in
concert with their aristocratic and monarchist friends abroad. Foreign
armies gathered on the Eastern frontier and one night in June the king
and queen and their children slipped away from the Tuileries and fled
to join the foreigners and the aristocratic exiles. They were caught
at Varennes and brought back to Paris, and an France flamed up into a
passion of patriotic republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open
war with Austria and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and
executed (January, 1793) on the model already set by England, for
treason to his people.
And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French people.
There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and the Republic.
There was to be an end to compromise at home and abroad; at home
royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out; abroad
France was to be the protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All
Europe, all the world, was to become Republican. The youth of France
poured into the Republican armies; a new and wonderful song spread
through the land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the
Marseillaise. Before that chant and the leaping columns of French
bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies
rolled back; before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far
beyond the utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on
foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they had
raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland. Then the
French Government did an unwise thing. It had been exasperated by the
expulsion of its representative from England upon the execution of
Louis, and it declared war against England. It was an unwise thing to
do, because the revolution which had given France a new enthusiastic
infantry and a brilliant artillery released from its aristocratic
officers and many cramping conditions had destroyed the discipline of
the navy, and the English were supreme upon the sea. And this
provocation united all England against France, whereas there had been
at first a very considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in
sympathy with the revolution.
THE TRIAL OF LOUIS XVI
THE TRIAL OF LOUIS XVI
_(From a print in the British Museum)_
Of the fight that France made in the next few years against a European
coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the Austrians for
ever out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic. The Dutch fleet,
frozen in the Texel, surrendered to a handful of cavalry without firing
its guns. For some time the French thrust towards Italy was hung up,
and it was only in 1796 that a new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the
ragged and hungry republican armies in triumph across Piedmont to
Mantua and Verona. Says C. F. Atkinson, [1] “What astonished the
Allies most of all was the number and the velocity of the Republicans.
These improvised armies had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were
unprocurable for want of money, untransportable for want of the
enormous number of wagons that would have been required, and also
unnecessary, for the discomfort that would have caused wholesale
desertion in professional armies was cheerfully borne by the men of
1793- 94. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size could not be
carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar with ‘living on
the country.’ Thus 1793 saw the birth of the modern system of
war—rapidity of movement, full development of national strength,
bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious manœuvring, small
professional armies, tents and full rations, and chicane. The first
represented the decision-compelling spirit, the second the spirit of
risking little to gain a little ... .”
And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the
Marseillaise and fighting for _la France_, manifestly never quite clear
in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the countries
into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending
itself in a far less glorious fashion. The revolution was now under
the sway of a fanatical leader, Robespierre. This man is difficult to
judge; he was a man of poor physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But
he had that most necessary gift for power, faith. He set himself to
save the Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it could be saved
by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to save the
Republic. The living spirit of the Republic, it seemed, had sprung
from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king. There
were insurrections; one in the west, in the district of La Vendée,
where the people rose against the conscription and against the
dispossession of the orthodox clergy, and were led by noblemen and
priests; one in the south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the
royalists of Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To
which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing
royalists.
The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering
began. The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood.
The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre’s antagonists were
guillotined, atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were
guillotined; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine
chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre
lived, it seemed, on blood; and needed more and more, as an opium-taker
needs more and more opium.
THE EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, QUEEN OF FRANCE, OCTOBER 16, 1793
THE EXECUTION OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, QUEEN OF FRANCE, OCTOBER 16, 1793
_(From a print in the British Museum)_
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was overthrown and
guillotined. He was succeeded by a Directory of five men which carried
on the war of defence abroad and held France together at home for five
years. Their reign formed a curious interlude in this history of
violent changes. They took things as they found them. The
propagandist zeal of the revolution carried the French armies into
Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, south Germany and north Italy.
Everywhere kings were expelled and republics set up. But such
propagandist zeal as animated the Directorate did not prevent the
looting of the treasures of the liberated peoples to relieve the
financial embarrassment of the French Government. Their wars became
less and less the holy wars of freedom, and more and more like the
aggressive wars of the ancient regime. The last feature of Grand
Monarchy that France was disposed to discard was her tradition of
foreign policy. One discovers it still as vigorous under the
Directorate as if there had been no revolution.
Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied in its
intensest form this national egotism of the French. He gave that
country ten years of glory and the humiliation of a final defeat. This
was that same Napoleon Bonaparte who had led the armies of the
Directory to victory in Italy.
Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been scheming and
working for self-advancement. Gradually he clambered to supreme power.
He was a man of severely limited understanding but of ruthless
directness and great energy. He had begun life as an extremist of the
school of Robespierre; he owed his first promotion to that side; but he
had no real grasp of the new forces that were working in Europe. His
utmost political imagination carried him to a belated and tawdry
attempt to restore the Western Empire. He tried to destroy the remains
of the old Holy Roman Empire, intending to replace it by a new one
centring upon Paris. The Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman
Emperor and became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his
French wife in order to marry an Austrian princess.
He became practically monarch of France as First Consul in 1799, and he
made himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct imitation of
Charlemagne. He was crowned by the Pope in Paris, taking the crown
from the Pope and putting it upon his own head himself as Charlemagne
had directed. His son was crowned King of Rome.
For some years Napoleon’s reign was a career of victory. He conquered
most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria, and dominated
all Europe west of Russia. But he never won the command of the sea
from the British and his fleets sustained a conclusive defeat inflicted
by the British Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar (1805). Spain rose against
him in 1808 and a British army under Wellington thrust the French
armies slowly northward out of the peninsula. In 1811 Napoleon came
into conflict with the Tsar Alexander I, and in 1812 he invaded Russia
with a great conglomerate army of 600,000 men, that was defeated and
largely destroyed by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany rose
against him, Sweden turned against him. The French armies were beaten
back and at Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated (1814). He was exiled to
Elba, returned to France for one last effort in 1815 and was defeated
by the allied British, Belgians and Prussians at Waterloo. He died a
British prisoner at St. Helena in 1821.
The forces released by the French revolution were wasted and finished.
A great Congress of the victorious allies met at Vienna to restore as
far as possible the state of affairs that the great storm had rent to
pieces. For nearly forty years a sort of peace, a peace of exhausted
effort, was maintained in Europe.
[1] In his article, “French Revolutionary Wars,” in the Encyclopædia
Britannica.
LVI
THE UNEASY PEACE IN EUROPE THAT FOLLOWED THE FALL OF NAPOLEON
Two main causes prevented that period from being a complete social and
international peace, and prepared the way for the cycle of wars between
1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency of the royal courts
concerned, towards the restoration of unfair privilege and interference
with freedom of thought and writing and teaching. The second was the
impossible system of boundaries drawn by the diplomatists of Vienna.
The inherent disposition of monarchy to march back towards past
conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain. Here
even the Inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic the Spanish
colonies had followed the example of the United States and revolted
against the European Great Power System, when Napoleon set his brother
Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1810. The George Washington of South
America was General Bolivar. Spain was unable to suppress this revolt,
it dragged on much as the United States War of Independence had dragged
on, and at last the suggestion was made by Austria, in accordance with
the spirit of the Holy Alliance, that the European monarch should
assist Spain in this struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe,
but it was the prompt action of President Monroe of the United States
in 1823 which conclusively warned off this projected monarchist
restoration. He announced that the United States would regard any
extension of the European system in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile
act. Thus arose the Monroe Doctrine, the doctrine that there must be
no extension of extra- American government in America, which has kept
the Great Power system out of America for nearly a hundred years and
permitted the new states of Spanish America to work out their destinies
along their own lines.
But if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at least, under
the protection of the Concert of Europe, do what it chose in Europe. A
popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by a French army in 1823,
with a mandate from a European congress, and simultaneously Austria
suppressed a revolution in Naples.
In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by Charles X. Charles set
himself to destroy the liberty of the press and universities, and to
restore absolute government; the sum of a billion francs was voted to
compensate the nobles for the chateau burnings and sequestrations of
1789. In 1830 Paris rose against this embodiment of the ancient
regime, and replaced him by Louis Philippe, the son of that Philip,
Duke of Orleans, who was executed during the Terror. The other
continental monarchies, in face of the open approval of the revolution
by Great Britain and a strong liberal ferment in Germany and Austria,
did not interfere in this affair. After all, France was still a
monarchy. This man Louis Philippe (1830-48) remained the
constitutional King of France for eighteen years.
Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress of Vienna,
which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings of the monarchists.
The stresses that arose from the unscientific boundaries planned by the
diplomatists at Vienna gathered force more deliberately, but they were
even more dangerous to the peace of mankind. It is extraordinarily
inconvenient to administer together the affairs of peoples speaking
different languages and so reading different literatures and having
different general ideas, especially if those differences are
exacerbated by religious disputes. Only some strong mutual interest,
such as the common defensive needs of the Swiss mountaineers, can
justify a close linking of peoples of dissimilar languages and faiths;
and even in Switzerland there is the utmost local autonomy. When, as in
Macedonia, populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and
districts, the cantonal system is imperatively needed. But if the
reader will look at the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna drew
it, he will see that this gathering seems almost as if it had planned
the maximum of local exasperation.
It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite needlessly, it lumped together
the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking Catholics of the old
Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and set up a kingdom of the
Netherlands. It handed over not merely the old republic of Venice, but
all of North Italy as far as Milan to the German-speaking Austrians.
French-speaking Savoy it combined with pieces of Italy to restore the
kingdom of Sardinia. Austria and Hungary, already a sufficiently
explosive mixture of discordant nationalities, Germans, Hungarians,
Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Roumanians, and now Italians, was made
still more impossible by confirming Austria’s Polish acquisitions of
1772 and 1795. The Catholic and republican-spirited Polish people were
chiefly given over to the less civilized rule of the Greek-orthodox
Tsar, but important districts went to Protestant Prussia. The Tsar was
also confirmed in his acquisition of the entirely alien Finns. The
very dissimilar Norwegian and Swedish peoples were bound together under
one king. Germany, the reader will see, was left in a particularly
dangerous state of muddle. Prussia and Austria were both partly in and
partly out of a German confederation, which included a multitude of
minor states. The King of Denmark came into the German confederation
by virtue of certain German-speaking possessions in Holstein.
Luxembourg was included in the German confederation, though its ruler
was also King of the Netherlands, and though many of its peoples talked
French.
Here was a complete disregard of the fact that the people who talk
German and base their ideas on German literature, the people who talk
Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature, and the people who
talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature, will all be far
better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to the rest of mankind
if they conduct their own affairs in their own idiom within the
ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder that one of the most
popular songs in Germany during this period declared that wherever the
German tongue was spoken, there was the German Fatherland!
PORTRAIT OF NAPOLEON (CORONATION)
PORTRAIT OF NAPOLEON (CORONATION)
_(From a print in the British Museum)_
In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the current revolution
in France, revolted against its Dutch association in the kingdom of the
Netherlands. The powers, terrified at the possibilities of a republic
or of annexation to France, hurried in to pacify this situation, and
gave the Belgians a monarch, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. There
were also ineffectual revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a much
more serious one in Russian Poland. A republican government held out
in Warsaw for a year against Nicholas I (who succeeded Alexander in
1825), and was then stamped out of existence with great violence and
cruelty. The Polish language was banned, and the Greek Orthodox church
was substituted for the Roman Catholic as the state religion ....
Map: Europe after the Congress of Vienna
In 1821 there was an insurrection of the Greeks against the Turks. For
six years they fought a desperate war, while the governments of Europe
looked on. Liberal opinion protested against this inactivity;
volunteers from every European country joined the insurgents, and at
last Britain, France and Russia took joint action. The Turkish fleet
was destroyed by the French and English at the battle of Navarino
(1827), and the Tsar invaded Turkey. By the treaty of Adrianople
(1829) Greece was declared free, but she was not permitted to resume
her ancient republican traditions. A German king was found for Greece,
one Prince Otto of Bavaria, and Christian governors were set up in the
Danubian provinces (which are now Roumania) and Serbia (a part of the
Jugo-Slav region). Much blood had still to run however before the Turk
was altogether expelled from these lands.
LVII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the opening
years of the nineteenth century, while these conflicts of the powers
and princes were going on in Europe, and the patchwork of the treaty of
Westphalia (1648) was changing kaleidoscopically into the patchwork of
the treaty of Vienna (1815), and while the sailing ship was spreading
European influence throughout the world, a steady growth of knowledge
and a general clearing up of men’s ideas about the world in which they
lived was in progress in the European and Europeanized world.
It went on disconnected from political life, and producing throughout
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no striking immediate results
in political life. Nor was it affecting popular thought very
profoundly during this period. These reactions were to come later, and
only in their full force in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
It was a process that went on chiefly in a small world of prosperous
and independent-spirited people. Without what the English call the
“private gentleman,” the scientific process could not have begun in
Greece, and could not have been renewed in Europe. The universities
played a part but not a leading part in the philosophical and
scientific thought of this period. Endowed learning is apt to be timid
and conservative learning, lacking in initiative and resistent to
innovation, unless it has the spur of contact with independent minds.
We have already noted the formation of the Royal Society in 1662 and
its work in realizing the dream of Bacon’s _New Atlantis_. Throughout
the eighteenth century there was much clearing up of general ideas
about matter and motion, much mathematical advance, a systematic
development of the use of optical glass in microscope and telescope, a
renewed energy in classificatory natural history, a great revival of
anatomical science. The science of geology—foreshadowed by Aristotle
and anticipated by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)—began its great task
of interpreting the Record of the Rocks.
EARLY ROLLING STOCK ON THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER RAILWAY IN THE
FIRST DAYS OF THE RAILWAY
EARLY ROLLING STOCK ON THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER RAILWAY IN THE
FIRST DAYS OF THE RAILWAY
The progress of physical science reacted upon metallurgy. Improved
metallurgy, affording the possibility of a larger and bolder handling
of masses of metal and other materials, reacted upon practical
inventions. Machinery on a new scale and in a new abundance appeared
to revolutionize industry.
In 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt engine to transport and made the
first locomotive. In 1825 the first railway, between Stockton and
Darlington, was opened, and Stephenson’s “Rocket,” with a thirteen-ton
train, got up to a speed of forty-four miles per hour. From 1830
onward railways multiplied. By the middle of the century a network of
railways had spread all over Europe.