Foundations of modern Europe; twelve lectures delivered in the University of London

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Preface

THE present work attempts to give a short sketch of the main facts and tendencies of European history that, from the year 1756 onwards, have contributed to the making of the present state of politics and civilization. It has grown out of a series of public lectures which the author delivered at the request of the University of London in the central hall of the University, in South Kensington, London, during the Lent term of 1903. The author is fully aware of the mass and apparent unwieldiness of the innumerable details known about the period, which, it would appear, it is almost an insolence to attempt to describe in a small book of a couple of hundred pages. Yet it may be urged that in history, as well as in nature, the greater the extent of movements and phenomena in general, the more readily must they yield to certain general formulation. There is no Kepler's law for the movements of tiny leaves falling in autumn ; but we have long known the laws regulating the movements of the planets. The events of history from 1756 to 181 5 are so vast and so plastic, that on that very account they can more easily be treated and summarized than could, for instance, the incoherent and meaningless facts of the history of some negro state in Africa.

Throughout the lectures (and the present work) the main object was to indicate not only the body of the vi PREFACE

general facts, but more particularly their soul, their meaning. In that, very probably, the author has frequently been mistaken ; just as he cannot help stating, that other writers on the same period have not always been successful in reading aright the drift or the causes of modern history. The author craves permission to assure the reader that he has not only carefully read a considerable number of the original " sources " bearing on the period from 1756 to 1871, but also that he has tried to acquire an intimate and personal acquaintance with the nations whose modern history he has endeavoured to trace. An acquaintance ever so intimate with the life and language of each of the leading modern nations is, by itself, no guarantee for a correct insight into their history and civilization. Yet, on the other hand, we cannot but state in rather uncompromising terms that no amount of patient research in archives or books can ever be held to replace that living knowledge of nations which a lengthy sojourn in the different countries, rendered more instructive by the fight for life in those countries, can alone convey. To write the history of a country not only neatly or eruditely, but well, one must love that country, one must have much suffered and much enjoyed in that country. History ought indeed to be written quellengerecht (from and in keeping with the sources), as the Germans call it ; however, it is usually overlooked that the most abundant as well as safest historical " source " is to be found in that very personal acquaintance with five to six essentially different types of modern national civilization, which it is somewhat difficult to acquire in the silent vaults of archives alone.

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The author takes this opportunity to thank the numerous ladies and gentlemen who have honoured him with their attendance, for their patience and kindness. A Hungarian is, as a rule, sure of sympathy in Great Britain ; yet the spirit of absolute fairness with which the audience received many an opinion running counter to some of the best cherished national views of history, was very much more than could be expected in many another country. May the readers of this book extend the same fairness to views prompted neither by malice, nor, it is hoped, by inexcusable ignorance.

EMIL REICH.

London,

33, St. Luke's Road, W.,

Contents

LECTURE PAGE

I. The War of American Independence, i 763-1 783 1

II. The French Revolution. — I .... 26

II

THE French Revolution is undoubtedly the most important event of modern history. As we cannot distinctly trace its origin, so we cannot clearly point out its termination in time or space ; for like a great wave in agitated seas it is still spreading to countries that in the eighteenth century took no notice of it ; and as a matter of fact it seems more adequate to consider the French Revolution as only one part of an immense European revolution which assumed a political and aggressive form in France, while in Germany it was clothed in forms literary and philosophical. It is more than a coincidence that the vast revolutionary upheaval in France culminated in the immense personality of Napoleon ; while in Germany the equally vast intellectual stir culminated in the Jupiter of German thought — Goethe.

The uniqueness and grandeur of the French Revolution are alone sufficient to render an explanation exceedingly difficult, more especially when we attempt, as we should, to give a specific explanation.

It has been customary to account for historical facts by general ethical remarks on human nature, or on the temper of the French, of the German, or the English. However, the very generality of these explanations deprives them of any real value.

For the historian proper, the problem of the French Revolution stands thus : how are we to account for the outbreak of that Revolution under Louis XVI., considering that the long reign of Louis XV. (171 5-1 774) was to all intents and purposes a far more likely time for a revolution in France ?

Under Louis XV. the French people had an ever increasing number of motives to criticise, to fall foul of, to attack, and finally to subvert the government. Many of those abuses were removed under Louis XVI. ; in fact, the government of Louis XVI. under Turgot, Necker, even Calonne, worked heroically at the removal of the worst abuses of the old French monarchy.

Moreover, the foreign policy of Louis XVI. was, in comparison with that of Louis XV., a most brilliant advance. Louis XV. was mortally humiliated by England in the Peace of 1763. England was mortally humiliated in turn by Louis XVI. in the Peace of 1783^ Vergennes, at the head of foreign policy in France under Louis XVI., was in the highest degree successful, and yet the people, far from acknowledging the good intentions of the government at home, and its great successes abroad, continued to be dissatisfied, and finally broke out in the ever famous Revolution of 1789. Unless we can account for this specific date, or at any rate for the connection of the Revolution with Louis XVI.'s reign, we have fulfilled but very poorly our real task as historian.

If now we view the well-known works of Taine, Tocqueville, Sybel, Buckle, Sorel, and others, on the French Revolution, we shall at once see that neither the apparently scientific and cold analysis of Taine, nor the philosophical reflections of Tocqueville, neither the laborious arguments of the learned German professor, nor the dignified diplomatic phrases of Sorel, have in reality advanced our insight into the causes of the French Revolution.

After all these, and similar authors, we still fail to see (i) why the French Revolution broke out under Louis XVI. and not before, and (2) why it at once assumed dimensions so colossal, so intense, as to dwarf any other historical movement, such as the Renaissance or the Reformation, into comparative insignificance.

The sober truth is, we do not understand the French Revolution. Auerbach once said that most people were not yet " Goethe reif" {i.e. ripe for the understanding of Goethe). We must confess that we are not yet " Revolution-ripe " ; and that, in spite of the serious and philosophical studies devoted to that Revolution, the best part of our knowledge of that great event is probably still contained in the classical witticism of Boerne : " One man alone could have prevented the French Revolution — Adam — if he had drowned himself before his marriage."

While acknowledging the exceeding difficulty of accounting for the French Revolution, we may yet try to point out one or two of the circumstances hitherto unnoticed or neglected as the precursors, if not the specific causes of the French Revolution.

It is well known that the prevalent opinion ascribes the French Revolution to the intolerable anarchy and oppression degrading the people of France under the ancien regime.

Works, such as the books of the famous Arthur

Young, who travelled through France shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, are quoted to prove the utter misery of the peasantry and smaller bourgeoisie (middle classes), and the wretched decadence of the nobility. However, it has long been proved that Arthur Young had been completely taken in by the most artful of innocents in Europe, i.e. by the peasantry of France. It is indeed somewhat grotesque to assume, as Arthur Young did, that any peasant would reveal to him what he as a rule does not even communicate to his wife, that is, all the details of his household and farm.

We now positively know that in districts of France where the people were stated (by Arthur Young) to have been utterly poor, they had during that time made extensive purchases of land and farms. The economic history of peasants cannot be written from their own oral statements. It must be looked for in acts of notaries and other legal documents.

The alleged misery of the people under the ancien regime was, it is now admitted, very much less severe under Louis XVI. than under Louis XV. On the other hand, we have positive knowledge (not only from the well-known discourse of Savaron) that the people under Louis XIII. (1614) were literally crushed down by the most abject misery.

It is true that Savaron said to Louis XIII. : " Que diriez-vous, sire, si vous aviez vu dans vos pays de Guyenne et d'Auvergne les hommes paitre l'herbe a la maniere de betes ? " 1 Yet the (Catholic) people never rose under Louis XIII.

1 " What would you say, Sire, if you had seen in your territories of Guyenne and Auvergne, men eating grass like beasts? "

The circumstance above alluded to as probably one of the preparatory causes of the French Revolution is the startling homogeneity of the French people. In modern times, more especially in America, we are so used to the phenomenon of millions of people conforming to one and the same standard of religion, opinions, dress, and manners, that we easily forget that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such homogeneous masses were by far the exception. In the seventeenth century a Provencal or a Breton would have taken it almost as an insult to be called a Frenchman. In the seventeenth century, previous to 1685 (Revocation of the Edict of Nantes), there was in France a very considerable number of Huguenots, that is, people who had, besides the language, very little in common with the rest of Catholic France. Nay, within Catholic France the Jansenists formed a most distinct, and most characteristically differentiated, group of people. In various provinces there still pulsated an autonomous life of their own, and the social strata were still so separated from one another as to make the bourgeois practically an impossibility in the refined drawing-rooms of the aristocracy or the court.

France was in the seventeenth century very far from being a homogeneous nation. The complaint of one class or one group found no echo in that of another group, and could thus acquire no momentum of political importance. Complaints (doleances) such as were submitted by the whole of France in 1 788-1 789, were of frequent occurrence, even in the seventeenth century ; but the complaints of one province, or sect, or class met with so little encouragement on the part of other provinces, sects, or classes, that they invariably ended in sheer indifference and neglect. When, on the other hand, we regard France under Louis XVI. we are struck with a most remarkable homogeneity of the people.

The Huguenots had been expelled in 1685 ; the Jansenists suppressed by the Bull Unigenitus, 1713. The autonomous rights and local political life of various provinces had been levelled out by the great centralizations of Colbert, Louvois, and the other great ministers of Louis XIV., and the bourgeoisie under Louis XV. had penetrated into most of the aristocratic salons. The bourgeois furnished the great types of the stage, they monopolized nearly the whole intellect of France, and claimed successfully the recognition of social equality.

This homogeneity then had caused the mental attitude of most Frenchmen to be the same, at least with regard to certain fundamental principles of politics, philosophy, and society. This homogeneity must, we take it, be admitted as the first and indispensable condition of the great event called the French Revolution. For what do we find ? As soon as clever or important thoughts on politics were published in Paris, whether in pamphlet form, in a book, or in a discourse (whether it was Turgot, Necker, Condorcet, the Abbe Sieyes, or some provincial municipality), the rest of France, or certainly the majority of Frenchmen, at once took it up, discussed it, refuted it, accepted it ; in short, intensely interested themselves in it. This was a new phenomenon.

The obscure official in the Dauphine, whose political reflections would have fallen stillborn from the press thirty years before, was now, in the eighties of the eighteenth century, sure of a hearing, of an audience, of a general discussion. So great and intense was that growing homogeneity that it extended even to common human sentiments. From July 27th to August 1st, 1789, happened what is commonly called La grande penr. Suddenly, in a most inexplicable manner, the rural population of the whole of France was smitten with a most mysterious fear — with a common physical fear of brigands, robbers, and burglars, who were expected to roam over the whole of France, sacking and pillaging everything they could lay hands on. The fear was pure imagination ; there were no brigands, no burglars. The graiide pear unmistakably proves that in addition to and beyond the mental homogeneity of the people, there was a homogeneity of sentiments, of sensation. People thought the same way and felt the same way; nothing was more natural than that they should act the same way. For the first time in French history the French became conscious of their unity, as a people, and of their strength. Once the French people became conscious of their strength it was only too natural that they should attempt to assert their rights against the crown.

The crown, unfortunately, was then held by two persons, neither of whom had by nature or education the power to wield or to articulate the wishes of the people. King Louis XVI. was limited in mind, small in character, and indifferent in temper. Nothing characterizes him better than the famous entry in his diary on the day of the taking of the Bastille, that is, on the day when the most formidable onslaught on French monarchical institutions was made. Rien> "Nothing," was the entry in the King's diary for that day. As to Marie Antoinette, she was an Austrian proper, that is, a woman endowed with many charms, but none of a serious character. Often, indeed, it may be said that she was possessed of deficiencies that had no corresponding virtues, and her very advantages were devoid of efficiency. She was pleasure-loving, undiscerning, hare-brained ; she repelled all the men of importance, and loved to pass her time in the presence of mediocrities. Personally virtuous, she yet had none of the powers of female virtue. She resisted her passion for Fersen, the Swedish chevalier, and yet did not know how to make use of Fersen in critical moments. The powers of the French nation set in motion by the homogeneity mentioned above, could therefore be neither controlled nor guided by the King or the Queen. Moreover, the extreme prodigality of the Queen (she permitted Calonne to buy her St. Cloud and Rambouillet for a sum of about twenty million francs, at a time when the French finances were in the lowest possible condition) was not likely to endear her to an exceedingly thrifty people like the French ; and when in August, 1786, the famous necklace trial was practically decided against her, her prestige had suffered an irremediable loss.

The extraordinary circumstances so characteristic of the year 1789 had, it is true, given rise to an extraordinary man, who, as many have supposed, might have staved off the worst features of the French Revolution. That man was Mirabeau. He came of a high aristocratic family ; but both through his genius and his failings, he had long unlearned the prejudices and reactionary ideas of the French nobility. His was a temper both passionate in sentiment and cool in judgment. His insight into the political structure of the leading states of his time ; his knowledge of the great issues of international policy ; his acquaintance with all the leading men of his age, and, more than anything else, his power of focussing and generalizing huge clusters of facts, endowed him with a superiority that nobody could rival in his lifetime, and few have equalled after him. In practical politics, however, he suffered from a bad private reputation, from sordid indebtedness to innumerable creditors, and also from debauches that weakened both his bodily health and his prestige, so that even his marvellous oratory and political insight won for him more admiration than actual influence.

To say that Mirabeau might have warded or staved off the worst consequences of the French Revolution is probably an overstatement. On the other hand, it is certain that he alone amongst practical statesmen was the first to foresee the stages of the Revolution, and its final development into an empire ruled by an omnipotent Caesar. Finally, the early and premature death of Mirabeau (179 1) deprived France of the man who was then her only possible leader, and so the fierce powers of the Revolution swept over the country and over Europe, without meeting any serious force that could control them.

Calonne, after having convoked the nobility in 1787, convinced himself and the King that the dissatisfaction of the nation, as well as the evils of the state, could be remedied only by the convocation of all the orders; accordingly in December, 1788, all the three orders, the nobility, clergy, and Tiers-Etat (Third Estate), or bourgeoisie, were convened, to meet in a common assembly for the purpose of healing the wounds of the country. From January to April, 1789, the people of France, meeting in innumerable local assemblies, drew up their famous cahiers de doleances (lists of grievances), in which they criticised in the most sincere and audacious manner the abuses then prevalent, together with the persons then governing France. By an indirect method of election, over a thousand deputies or representatives were sent up to the capital, and thus the first genuine Parliament since 16 14 was opened on May 5th at Versailles ; the frivolous King deciding for Versailles on account of the hunting parties in which he was there indulging.

The two superior orders, the nobility and the higher clergy, at first refused to join the Tiers-Etat, but the determined attitude of Mirabeau and the members of the Tiers-Etat in the end prevailed upon the nobility and higher clergy, and on June 27th, 1789, the three orders met in one and the same room, and constituted themselves as the Assemblee Nationale. That famous Assemblee has long been called the Assemblee Constituante.

Neither the King nor the Queen, let alone the numerous members of the Court, was able or even willing to see the immense significance of the new assembly. The King, a Philistine to the backbone ; the Queen, a girlish woman without any notion of politics, neither could nor would see that France had entered on an entirely new period of her history. It is probably injudicious to blame the royal couple for their shortsightedness, when we consider that one of the broadest and deepest minds of the United Kingdom — Edmund Burke — was utterly unable to view the events happening in France in their right historical perspective. A glance at Burke will readily induce us to absolve Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. Burke, far from appreciating the immense significance of the French Revolution, devoted all his unrivalled power of oratory to a wholesale condemnation of that great event. Under these circumstances we need not wonder that Louis XVI. so utterly misread the spirit of his time that, on the nth July, he dismissed the most popular of Ministers — Necker — and that on the 14th July the French demolished the Bastille, that symbol of absolutistic regime. The King was more than ever incapable of appreciating an event which threw all the liberal minds of Europe, including England, into a state of frenzied joy. But what the great philosopher of England and the small King of France were unable to see, several leading members of the French aristocracy were only too ready to acknowledge, and on the night of August 4th, 1789, the Due de Noailles and the Due d'Aiguillon spontaneously proposed a wholesale abolition of all the ancient rights and privileges of the nobility. Thus the ancien regime was, under the pressure of the spirit of the times, abolished by its very devotees.

In August, September, and October the Assemble proceeded to lay down in the most explicit, not to say doctrinaire, manner, the general principles governing the relation of the individual to the state. All the ideas of Rousseau, moderated by the practical wisdom of Mirabeau, were applied to build up, on the ruins of the ancient state, a commonwealth based on the equality of citizens before the law, on the absence of all castes, on the absence of religious intolerance, and finally on the destruction of those local provincialisms which had long prevented the French nation from blending into one homogeneous mass of equal citizens.

So far (1789- 1 790) the worst enemies of the French cannot but admit that the French Revolution had kept within bounds, threatening nowise her neighbours or the other powers of Europe. The French Government had declared, that nothing was more removed from their minds than a policy of aggression, more particularly towards Prussia and England ; the most explicit assurances were given that France desired neither the territories on the left bank of the Rhine, nor Belgium. However, the great powers were unable to rise to a clear and impartial view of the French Revolution, and were convinced that France would share the fate of Poland, i.e. partition at the hands of her neighbours. The great powers, we say, were determined to force a war upon France. For, this is the historical fate of France, that any great French movement or event will inevitably rouse the apprehension, interest, or admiration of the rest of Europe to a greater extent than events happening in any other country. Nor is this circumstance difficult to explain. If, on a map of Europe, we place one point of the compass in the centre of France, say at Bourges, and the other point at Edinburgh, and then draw a circle round Bourges, we shall find that the greatest enemies and rivals of

France are all at equal distances from Bourges — such as England, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Madrid. This central position of France rendered any such event as the French Revolution of the highest importance to her neighbours, and a revolution spreading in what was then the centre of Europe could not but affect the other great powers in the most direct fashion : and this (in addition to the undoubtedly moral and literary conquests that the French and French literature had made all over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) accounts for the fact that Europe took an infinitely greater interest in the French Revolution than it had taken in the great Civil War in England (1642-165 1), or in the Dutch revolt (1 566-1648). It was thus only a matter of expediency when the great powers determined to begin their actual invasion of France.

The Declaration of Pillnitz, in August, 1791, was only a stage thunder. In the spring of 1792 the Austrians, and in August, 1792, the Prussians also, invaded France. The latter campaign is known by the name of the " Cannonade of Valmy," where the Prince of Brunswick, at the head of a considerable Austro- Prussian army, gave a half-hearted battle to the French under Dumouriez (in September, 1792), and finding himself unable to break the ranks of the French, retired into Germany.

Amongst the spectators present at that campaign was Goethe. In the evening, after the cannonade, Goethe, on being asked what he thought of the events of the day, answered : " Gentlemen, from this place and from to-day a new epoch of world-history is begun, and you may say that you have assisted at it." (" Hier und heute geht erne neue Epoche der Weltgeschichte aus, und ihr konnet sagen, ihr seid dabei gewesen.")

Ill

THE first period of the French Revolution, when the French people were filled with the highest ideals about liberty and community of nations, was ended in the month of June, 1791. In that fatal month the royal couple took the ill-advised measure of trying to escape from their people by a flight to Germany. The way the flight was prepared and carried out was singularly clumsy, and far from being astonished at the capture of the King by the postmaster of Varennes on the French frontier, one rather wonders that the King had not been discovered soon after leaving Paris.

He and the Queen were brought back to the capital amidst the sullen silence of an indignant nation. It now became clear that the animosity of the foreign powers was shared by the King, and that the entire nation was at the mercy of a European conspiracy. There is no nation in Europe that has, in mediaeval or modern times, ever found itself in a situation so tragic, so exasperating. From all sides of the horizon the French people felt the underground and overt attacks of the rest of Europe. In Sweden and Russia, King Gustavus III. and Catherine the Great ; in Austria and Prussia, Leopold II. and Frederick Wi]liam II. ; in England and in all other countries, threats of invasion, menaces of the most terrible kind were levelled at the people whose King had just given unmistakable proofs of treachery and cowardice, which alone are sufficient to drive a nation into despair.

Yet the French people even then, under the most trying circumstances, continued to be loyal to the King, and instead of making open war on him — as had been done in England in 1642, when King Charles I. left London — the French people, after a few weeks, intrusted Louis XVI. with the government of the country. Even then very few people seriously thought of a republic, and Louis XVI. had many a fair chance of consolidating his shaken position. However, the plans of the Powers against France became so manifest ; their intention of treating France as they had dealt with Poland in the seventies became so evident; the War Party, headed by the Girondists and General Dumouriez, became by the end of 1791 so influential, that a conflict between France on the one hand and Europe on the other was only a question of days.

The actions of the Powers, more especially of Prussia and Austria, were based on a total misconception of the resources and conditions of France. The numerous emigres (political refugees) from France had spread the belief (still shared by many historians) that the revolution in France was in reality only a local anarchy in Paris, countenanced in no wise by the bulk of the French nation. Moreover, the emigres plausibly remarked that owing to the law of 1781 the French nation was, through the emigration of the nobles, deprived of their officers — officers in the French army since 1781 being aristocrats only.

The very atrocity of the situation, however, aroused all the latent energy of the French nation, and when in September, 1792, the Prussians and Austrians advanced on the Rhine, the French, far from being cowed and discouraged, were more than ever determined to resist the unprovoked hostility of their allied enemies.

One need only read the proclamation, signed if not drawn up by the Duke of Brunswick, and dated from Coblentz, to understand the heroic resolution of the French and their determination to defend their country — even at the most painful loss in men and money. That proclamation is unique in all history, unless we compare it with the actions of Attila, Genghis Khan, or some other barbarous " Scourge of heaven." Brunswick threatened the people of France to raze Paris to the ground, and to reduce their country to a desert, unless they restored the old monarchy and abandoned all the rights of the nation acquired since May, 1789.

This atrocious document was replied to by the French by the so-called September massacres. During five days, early in September, numerous individuals, many of them innocent or invalids, were massacred in the streets, hospitals, and prisons of Paris by the mob maddened by the terror of the near extinction of France at the hands of the allies.

The horrors of those massacres can certainly not be excused ; they are, however, in keeping with the behaviour of most nations in times of unexampled popular excitement.

In the great Civil War in England the popular excitement vented itself in the wholesale execution of so-called witches and sorcerers, of whom, as Mr. Lecky says, a greater number was cruelly put to death during the great Civil War than during all the other periods of English history put together. From 1645 to 1647 over 1 50 witches were executed in the counties of Suffolk and Essex alone. The fascination of cruelty on an excited mob is a dark problem ; but at any rate we may say that Danton, who did nothing to stop the September massacres, cannot seriously be held to be the author of those misdeeds. With the blind but unerring instinct of fierce animality, the people of France, who had on the 10th August, 1792, practically deposed the King, now, in the face of extreme danger, ventured to give a practical illustration of their unprecedented resolution to keep up the unity of France both against home and foreign assailants.