Past and Present

In many ways, today's Internet is simply a technologically sophisticated version of the public sphere of literate readers that was created and celebrated by the philosophes of the Enlightenment. It contains the same confusing mix of the educational, the commercial, the pleasurable. and the perverse.

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People from different social classes. The difficulties of deciphering popular culture are considerable. Most testimony comes to us from outsiders who regarded the common people as hopelessly superstitious and ignorant. Still, historical research has begun to reveal new insights. It has shown, first, that popular culture did not exist in isolation. Particularly in the countryside, market days and village festivals brought social classes together, and popular entertainments reached a wide social audience. Folktales and traditional songs resist pigeonholing as elite, middle-class, or popular culture, for they passed from one cultural world to another, being revised and reinterpreted in the process. Second, oral and literate culture overlapped. In other words, even people who could not read often had a great deal of “book knowledge”: they argued seriously about points from books and believed that books conferred authority. A group of villagers, for instance, wrote this eulogy to a deceased friend: “He read his life long, and died without ever knowing how to read.” The logic and worldview of popular culture needs to be understood on its own terms.

It remains true that the countryside, especially in less economically developed regions, was desperately poor. Life there was far more isolated than in towns. A yawning chasm separated peasants from the world of the high Enlightenment. The philosophes, well established in the summits of European society, looked at popular culture with distrust and ignorance. They saw the common people of Europe much as they did indigenous peoples of other continents. They were humanitarians, critical thinkers, and reformers; they were not democrats. The Enlightenment, while well entrenched in eighteenth-century elite culture, nonetheless involved changes that reached well beyond elite society.

WAR AND POLITICS IN ENLIGHTENMENT EUROPE

War and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century World

After 1713, western Europe remained largely at peace for a generation. In 1740, however, that peace was shattered when Frederick the Great of Prussia seized the Austrian province of Silesia (see below). In the resulting War of the Austrian Succession, France and Spain fought on the side of Prussia, hoping to reverse some of the losses they had suffered in the Treaty of Utrecht. As they had done since the 1690s, Britain and the Dutch Republic sided with Austria. Like those earlier wars, this war quickly spread beyond the frontiers of Europe. In India, the British East India Company lost control over the coastal area of Madras to its French rival; but in North America, British colonists from New England captured the important French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, hoping to put a stop to French interference with their fishing and shipping. When the war finally ended in 1748, Britain recovered Madras and returned Louisbourg to France.

Eight years later, these colonial conflicts reignited when Prussia once again attacked Austria. This time, however, Prussia allied itself with Great Britain. Austria found support from both France and Russia. In Europe, the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) ended in stalemate. In India and North America, however, the war had decisive consequences. In India, mercenary troops employed by the British East India Company joined with native allies to eliminate their French competitors. In North America (where the conflict was known as the French and Indian War), British troops captured both Louisbourg and Quebec and also drove French forces from the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which brought the Seven Years’ War to an end, France formally surrendered both Canada and India to the British. Six years later, the French East India Company was dissolved.

Enlightened Absolutism in Eastern Europe

The rulers of Prussia, Austria, and Russia who initiated these wars on the continent were among the pioneers of a new style of “enlightened absolutism” within their realms. They demonstrated their commitment to absolutist rule by centralizing their administrations, increasing taxation, creating a professional army, and tightening their control of the Church. They justified this expansion of powers, however, in the name of the enlightenment ideal of reason—as rational solutions to the problems of government.

Rulers influenced by the spirit of enlightened absolutism included Empress Maria Theresa (r. 1740-80) of Austria and her son Joseph II (r. 1765-90; from 1765 until 1780 the two were co-rulers). The two rulers created statewide systems of primary education, relaxed censorship, and instituted a more liberal criminal code for the Habsburg Empire. Joseph II was particularly energetic in challenging the power of the Church: he closed hundreds of monasteries, drastically limited the number of monks and nuns permitted to live in contemplative orders, and ordered that the education of priests be placed under government supervision (see Chapter 15).

The most emblematic enlightened absolutist, however, was Frederick II (1740-1786) of Prussia. As a young man, Frederick devoted himself to the flute and admired French culture, exasperating his military-minded father, Frederick William I. When Frederick rebelled by running away from court with a friend, his father had them apprehended and the friend was executed before Frederick’s eyes. The grisly lesson took. Although Frederick never gave up his love of music and literature, he applied himself energetically to his royal duties, earning himself the title of Frederick the Great.

Frederick raised Prussia to the status of a major power. In 1740, as soon as he became king, he mobilized his army and occupied the Austrian province of Silesia, with French support. Empress Maria Theresa, also new to the throne, counterattacked; but, despite support of Britain and Hungary, she could not recover Silesia. Eventually Frederick consolidated his gains over all the Polish territories that lay between East Prussia and Brandenburg, transforming Prussia by 1786 into a powerful, contiguous kingdom. Frederick was careful to cultivate support from the Prussian nobility, known as the Junkers. His father had recruited civil servants according to merit rather than birth, but Frederick relied on the Junkers to staff the army and his expanding administration. Frederick’s strategy worked. His nobility remained loyal, and he fashioned the most professional and efficient bureaucracy in Europe.

Frederick supervised a series of “enlightened” social reforms: he prohibited the judicial torture of accused criminals, abolished the bribing of judges, and established a system of elementary schools. Although strongly anti-Semitic,

THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR, 1756-1763. ¦ What continents were involved in the Seven Years' War? ¦ What was the impact of naval power on the outcome of the war? ¦ What were the consequences for the colonies involved in the conflict?

He encouraged religious toleration toward Jews and declared that he would happily build a mosque in Berlin if he could find enough Muslims to fill it. On his own royal estates, he abolished capital punishment, curtailed the forced labor services of his peasantry, and granted these peasants long leases on the land they worked. He encouraged scientific forestry and the cultivation of new crops. He cleared new lands in Silesia and brought in thousands of immigrants to cultivate them. When wars ruined their farms, he supplied his peasants with new livestock and tools. But he never attempted to extend these reforms to the estates of the Prussian nobility. To have done so would have alienated the very group on whom Frederick’s rule depended.

Like Frederick, Catherine the Great of Russia (r. 1762-96) thought of herself as an enlightened ruler and she corresponded with French philosophers. Also like Frederick, she could not afford to lose the support of the Russian nobility, who had placed her on the throne after executing her husband, the weak and possibly mad Peter

III. Catherine’s efforts at enlightened reform were limited: she founded hospitals and orphanages, created an elementary school system for the children of the provincial nobility, and called a commission to examine the possibility of codifying Russian law. The commission’s radical proposals—abolition of capital punishment and judicial torture, prohibitions on the selling of serfs—were set aside, however, after a massive peasant revolt in 1773-75 led by a Cossack named Emelyan Pugachev briefly threatened Moscow itself. Catherine’s greatest achievements were gained through war and diplomacy. In 1774, she won control over the northern coast of the Black Sea after a war with the Ottoman Empire, and she also took several Ottoman provinces along the Danube River. Russia thus obtained a long-sought goal: a warm-water port for the Russian navy. In addition, Catherine succeeded in expanding Russian territory in the west, at the expense of the weaker kingdom of Poland.

The plan for Russia, Austria, and Prussia to divide Poland among them was originally proposed by Frederick the Great: Russia would abandon its Danubian provinces and receive in exchange the grain fields of eastern Poland (and between 1 and 2 million Poles); Austria would take Galicia (population 2.5 million) while Prussia would consolidate the divided lands of its kingdom by taking Poland’s coastal regions on the Baltic coast. When the agreement was finalized in 1772, Poland had lost 30 percent of its

MARIA THERESA OF AUSTRIA AND HER FAMILY. A

Formidable and capable ruler who fought to maintain Austria's dominance in central Europe against the claims of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Maria Theresa had sixteen children, including Marie Antoinette, later queen of France as wife of Louis XVI. ¦ Why did she emphasize her role as mother in a royal portrait such as this one rather than her other undeniable political skills? ¦ How does this compare to the portraits of Louis XIV or of William and Mary in Chapter 15, pages 494 and 503?

CATHERINE THE GREAT. Rumored to have ordered the assassination of Peter III, Catherine oversaw an era of expansion in what was to become the longest female reign in Russian history.

Territory and half of its population. After a second war between Russia and the Ottomans in 1788, Poland tried to reassert itself, but it was no match for the three major powers—Russia, Austria, and Prussia—and by 1795 Poland had disappeared from the map altogether.

As a political program, enlightened absolutism clearly had its limits. On the one hand, Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, and Joseph II in Austria were clearly personally inspired by the literary culture of the philosophes, and their political programs reflected Enlightenment ideas about the rational organization of state institutions. On the other hand, they were ready to abandon the humanitarian impulse of Enlightenment thought and the ideal of selfgovernment when it came to preserving their own power and the social hierarchies that sustained it.

The American Revolution

The American Revolution of 1776 provided a more fruitful opportunity for putting Enlightenment ideals into practice. Along the Atlantic seaboard, the rapidly growing British colonies chafed at rule from London. To recover some of the costs of the Seven Years’ War and to pay for the continuing costs of protecting its colonial subjects, the British Parliament imposed a series of new taxes on its American colonies. These taxes were immediately unpopular. Colonists complained that because they had no representatives in Parliament, they were being taxed without their consent—a fundamental violation of their rights as British subjects. They also complained that British restrictions on colonial trade, particularly the requirement that certain goods pass first through British ports before being shipped to the Continent, were strangling American livelihoods and making it impossible to pay even the king’s legitimate taxes.