The hundred and thirty years between 1789 and 1918 have traditionally been, and can still be, sensibly divided into phases with clear chronological markers. They begin with a quarter-century of great upheavals and wars; then, in 1815, there opened a period of peace—at least between the great powers—lasting until 1854, fraying though its fabric begins to look towards the end. There followed two decades of upheaval, war, and state-making, before a second great peace from 1871 to 1914, during which only disputes over the fate of the Ottoman empire seemed likely to bring about war between the European powers (though in 1904 a Russo-Japanese war announced that a new political world was already being born). After that came the descent to 1914, and the beginning of the greatest European war ever. It turned into the First World War and ended (though not quite completely) in 1918. By then European history was no longer a self-contained entity and already could be understood only in a world-wide context. Though 1789 had opened an era, 1918 did not close one.
The Myth of Revolution
What Frenchmen did in 1789, intentionally or willy-nilly, still
Makes that year memorable. It made later men—and some of their contemporaries — see them as makers of a new age. From that flowed huge consequences, new ways of thinking of what revolution might mean, for good and ill, and a new sense of public possibilities —hopeful or fearful. Whether the French ‘Revolution’, whose roots lay in a fairly typical eighteenth-century response by privileged elites to an innovating government, was, in essence, simply the logical consequence of a breakdown in the working of an ancien regime, or the overflowing of tendencies inherent in French culture and society, or a series of episodes managed or engineered, or an eruption of irrepressible forces, has been long debated and is almost infinitely discussible. What is clear is that, besides furnishing grounds for ever-renewed debate, what happened in 1789 determined much of Europe’s history for the next century. It came to be seen as the beginning of an age of revolution par excellence. The next few years supplied most of the psychic energy driving European politics for the whole nineteenth century.
That century was haunted by the idea of revolution. Ambiguity explains much of its power over men’s minds. Objectively, there were many political events between 1789 and 1918 to which the name ‘revolution’ could be, and has been, given. Many of them were acknowledged to be changes not only big in consequences, but dramatic enough to appear to be — and sometimes actually to be—true ruptures with the past, even sometimes engineered, rather than organic growths emerging from it. Some of those revolutions could be measured very precisely by, for example, changes in political language and institutions. Democracy, a term of opprobrium in 1789, was by i9i8 a shibboleth of the victors in the greatest war in history. Absolute tended to give way to constitutional rule; monarchies turned into republics. Major steps could be calibrated in some countries by the extension of the franchise. Such changes were not always violent; they could be peaceful or at least bloodless, even when coercive. But their scope was always striking.
One conspicuous revolutionary change always tending to violence, none the less, was the emergence of national states. In 1789 Portugal had been the only country in Europe where government and language were more or less coterminous; only two or three monarchies (those of England, Spain, and France) could then plausibly be called national institutions. A hundred and thirty years later, there was not a state in Europe which did not invoke the principle of nationality in its support (while often at the same time vigorously resisting the claims of other nationalities conscious of oppression). Such changes had of course been shaped by others external to politics — in demography, economic development, technology, communications — which were equally revolutionary to those who lived through them. For many little German towns and localities, some of them statelets in 1789, true revolution began not with any of the great dates of German nation-building, but with the arrival of the first railway or the opening of the first steam-powered (or even water-driven) factory. In Russia the final abolition of bonded labour in Europe by the emancipation decree of 1861 at last ended the Middle Ages as a going concern—a revolution, indeed, even if not one in political forms. A general, century-long acceleration of change was continuous and very often upsetting to men and women who found the world of their old age — or even middle life — strangely unlike that into which they had been born.
The sway over the minds of men exercised by the idea of revolution in the nineteenth century is none the less as much a matter of subjective, symbolic, and mythological as of positive facts. In the great French Revolution itself the word ‘revolution’ first began to be used in new senses. Its connotations were later extended still further and it became one of the great metaphors of the last, mature era of a self-contained European culture. It was a telling symptom that the word soon began to be capitalized in print and used without local qualification. It was hypostasized, and became an abstraction, though its origins lay in very concrete, actual, specific situations. This was easy while there were men about who had lived through the 1790s. Half a century after 1789, Carlyle noted that the French Revolution was still not complete; just over ten years later, Tocqueville thought that the same, continuing revolution was unrolling, still going on, unfinished, though men’s fortunes and passions ebbed and flowed. Thiers, the leader of the French opposition at the beginning of the revolutionary year 1848, assured his countrymen that even if it were to pass out of the hands of the moderate revolutionaries, he would never abandon the cause of the revolution. Even much later in the century, John Morley, a politician too moderate to be called a radical anywhere except in England, still felt that ‘everywhere we discern the hand and hearken to the tread of the Revolution’.
The myth of revolution probably inspired as many as it frightened. The young authors of The Communist Manifesto gloated in 1848 over the spectre of communism haunting Europe; their ideals were rooted in aspirations many felt had been thwarted between 1789 and 1815, and which many believed were still to have their day. The myth was also an intellectual convenience. Whether it was believed that irresistible forces were working to assure that revolution was inevitable, or that propaganda and organization could bring it about—and whether people viewed the outcome as desirable or horrific — the idea that the central issue of politics was to be for or against the revolution was a great simplifier; it provided a way of seeing, understanding, explaining things otherwise difficult or unintelligible. It accommodated other appealing notions too, justifying and provoking the invention of histories, belief in conspiracies, and secret associations. The nineteenth century was the heyday of hidden explanations and plot theories, for there were overt grounds for alarm aplenty. The conscious imitation, invocation, even re-enactment of the events of the 1790s provided the stock-in-trade of French politicians of the left throughout the century. In the greatest urban rising of the age, the Paris Commune of 1871, memory fatally dogged the language and imagination of revolutionaries and conservatives alike. Revolutionary—or self-proclaimed revolutionary—organizations proliferated, from the Carbonari to the First International, from the semi-criminal bandits of the Ottoman Balkans to the Serbian Black Hand. The nineteenth century created the international terrorist, though not the ideology of cosmopolitan radicalism which justified him; that, like so much else that was new, had taken shape in the 1790s.
The First Act, 1789-1815
France had been the great power of western Europe, and often the greatest, since the days of Louis XIV. What happened there in 1789 and thereafter was bound to be important elsewhere. A big population gave her great military potential. Whatever changed inside the country, therefore, the outcome was likely to matter in the international struggle for power. In addition, France was a great cultural force. People looked to her to find out what Europe should be thinking about. The eighteenth century was even at the time called the siecle frangaise, and more than merely the self-approbation of what Frenchmen came to call ‘the great nation’ justifies the phrase; French language, manners, style, even fashion, enjoyed an ascendancy never again to be so widespread or so penetrating.
Yet the events of 1789 began in a deceivingly domestic way, and not with innovation but with a deliberate recourse to the past. The spectre that haunted Frenchmen that year was not one of revolution but of national bankruptcy. The monarchy was financially in sad straits. After a long series of failures to deal with a huge deficit, the royal ministers had turned to historical revivalism. The last of several historical revenants to be hopefully disinterred for a rerun was the Estates-General. This ancient body had not met since 1614 and was summoned in its historic form, with ‘deputies’ from the three Estates of the realm, the three great embodiments of the corporate idea of society, clergy, nobles, and commons. They were helped by an unprecedentedly wide consultation of Frenchmen (and a few Frenchwomen) whose views on France’s problems had been sought through a system of written commentaries (the cahiers). The choice of deputies, though indirect, involved ultimately something like universal male suffrage. A galvanic impulse was thus given to political awareness of an unprecedented kind.
The overwhelming tendency of the cahiers and the elections shows that most Frenchmen did not anticipate, far less want, what eventually came about. They believed that the traditional framework could provide what they wanted—though many of their hopes and ambitions were contradictory and incompatible with one another. But when the Estates-General met in May 1789 amid popular excitement heightened by hard times, some quickly saw that in itself it embodied too much history which blocked the way to doing what had been hoped of it. Some of the most vociferous noble deputies saw the Estates-General as one more chance to thwart reforming government. The roturier Third-Estate deputies soon discovered that the historic constitution of France might not, after all, allow them to be part of the elite which was to decide the future of France, as they had supposed their wealth, standing, and lumieres would do. The conflict with the legally privileged which ensued led to the emergence of a political idea new to France and a crucial revolutionary engine, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the nation.
So began for Europe a new political age and a new legitimation for authority. Instead of quasi-judicial debate about vested interests, law, conventions, and chartered rights, political life was to be about will: what did the nation want? The bishop who preached at the mass which formally opened the sessions of the Estates-General had himself said ‘France, ta volonte suffit’. The separate Estates turned themselves into a National Assembly to write a new constitution, an incarnation of national sovereignty. Inevitably, a host of questions was for the moment ignored or postponed. Who were the true representatives and interpreters of the national will? Was there really nothing that lay outside the scope of that will? For what were the claims of the individual to count? Were they to be those of possessors of historic rights (soon stigmatized as ‘privilege’) or those of morally autonomous beings? What of the claims of God—or at least of his Church, whose ‘eldest daughter’ was France? These questions (and others) were to provide the stuff of political struggle for the rest of the Revolution. They would ensure a decade of upheaval in France and abroad, dominate the rhetoric of French politics until well into the twentieth century, and set new terms for Europe’s political thinking. In 1789 few could have guessed that. Once the conservatives (a word not yet invented) and the Crown had caved in, surely it would be simple to agree on what that will was? Plausibly, barely a month after the Estates-General first met, an English observer commented that ‘the whole business now seems over, and the revolution complete’.
New Landmarks, New Rules
Almost every revolutionary change in French institutions which was to endure came about by the end of 1791. The constitution approved in that year, though not long to survive, set several markers for the future. It embodied a special declaration of the rights of individuals, and abolished many old institutions (sovereign courts, ancient provincial divisions, privileged corporations) which had stood in the way of truly national government. Entrenched privileges of birth and status disappeared along with the old legal immunities and judicial protections. For the first time France became a unified state, explicitly based on the people (the new title of the monarch was not ‘king of France’, but ‘king of the French’). One of the deepest changes it wrought was the incorporation in the constitutional community of all Frenchmen as citizens. It implied the politicization of groups not hitherto involved in public life.
The outstanding example of political struggles driving Frenchmen far beyond anything they had asked for in the cahiers arose over religion. National community conflicted with old confessional ties. A question of allegiance was soon posed for Catholics; were they to look to Rome or the National Assembly (in which sat Protestants and Jews) for final authority in the government of the Church? For the clergy the issue of Church and State was crystallized by the imposition of oaths of civic loyalty. Almost incidentally, there followed toleration for all religions and, even, for disbelief. The magnitude of this step emerged almost unnoticed from a guarantee to individuals of freedom in the expression of their opinions — ‘meme religieuses’. Anticlericalism and anti-papalism thus re-entered the political agenda, but now in a new way, allied to a new phenomenon, political liberalism. Church and State would be a European issue throughout the next century—in Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, as well as in France.
Ideological strife sometimes reflected ideas and ambitions born of the advanced thought of the Enlightenment. So did the ending of what was referred to comprehensively and confusingly as ‘feudalism’ (feodalite) in August 1789 when suddenly and in
A few days the National Assembly transformed the land law of France and the working arrangements of thousands of communities. The huge complex of privileges, tenures, customs, and practice which regulated rural France was swept away (at least in theory). Status gave way to contract. Effectively, land became only another commodity, and French agriculture and rural society were to be left to the market and the law of freehold. This happened principally because of the fears aroused in the summer of 1789 by rural disorder. Its widespread nature and frightening violence made it one of those external motors which were to radicalize the Revolution, driving it forward, jerkily and erratically, but always faster than many of those we may now call ‘politicians’ wished. The main radicalizing centre of the Revolution, though, was Paris, whose crowds were easier to manipulate or manage than the peasants. Its excited population intimidated first the monarchy (after the king was moved there in October 1789) and then successive National Assemblies. But neither peasants nor Parisians did so much to drive France towards extremism and division as did war.
For all the optimism of 1789, France experienced something like a suspension of national government that year and it lasted well into 1790. Among other things, the fiscal system virtually broke down. One consequence was that a way out of national bankruptcy was sought by seizing the lands of the Church. This further defined views of the Revolution. It gave a stake in its success to those investing in the ecclesiastical property sold off to back the government’s credit. But land sales and a paper currency based on the credit they provided offered only a temporary respite. They could not suffice when France went to war with Austria and Prussia in 1792.
The origins of the war were complex and reflected new ideological forces in international affairs. To many Frenchmen the issue was one of preserving the Revolution—not only from foreigners but from a king and court increasingly distrusted as covert enemies of what had been done. To a few, it was also an issue of spreading the universal Rights of Man. The great nation should assert them for the good of mankind, they thought. More immediately, war suddenly and hugely enhanced the pressures on self-appointed trustees of the nation’s will. The politicians had to meet their countrymen’s demands for bread, for lower prices in a period of rocketing inflation and currency depreciation, for the hot pursuit of enemies at home, where profiteers and hoarders as well as political dissidents were stigmatized as traitors, for victory in the field, or, at the very least, for defence against the return of those who would destroy what the Revolution had achieved. In responding to such pressures, the politicians fought one another for survival, and slid or were forced into the extra-legal and extraordinary measures summed up as Terror or ‘revolutionary government’. Attempts more radical than any of the ancien regime were made to control the economy. A universal conscription hitherto unthinkable became possible. What was done helped France to survive a great crisis, created counter-revolution, and in the end wore out the Parisian revolutionaries, driving them under, in 1795, for over thirty years.
The king became a scapegoat for disaster in the first months of the war. The monarchy was overthrown in August 1792 and he was tried and executed the following year. One set of politicians was swept aside and a ‘Convention’ was elected to draw up a constitution for a republic. Another important change was that France again began to act as a great power. Revolution mobilized the nation’s strength as never before. The demonstration of what state power might become was noted by rulers elsewhere. From a crisis of self-preservation France emerged to drive Prussia and Austria to terms in 1795 and 1796. At one moment she may have had armies of 800,000 men in the field; numbers such as these were to be the foundation of the regime of an adventurer, Napoleon Bonaparte, a general who seized power in a coup d’etat in 1799. The restoration of France’s international standing can be added to the legislation and ideological achievements of 1789-91 as one of the major results of the Revolution in France.
On the other hand, the extreme aspirations of the revolutionaries in the end went unfulfilled. A new Calendar replaced the Christian one (1792 becoming Year One) but even in the offices of the bureaucracy it lasted only a few years. A ‘de-Christianization’ programme, the first to be mounted in a great state since the days of Julian the Apostate, was only briefly vigorous, though it added new venom to France’s internal quarrels and stimulated the resurgence of Catholicism. Meanwhile, the great institutional changes of 1789-91 were further entrenched and developed by Napoleon. He formally endorsed the sovereignty of the people by using plebiscites to legitimize major constitutional change (such as the inauguration in 1804 of a short-lived French empire) but also pushed centralization further. Though 1815 brought his final defeat and the restoration of a Bourbon king to France, much that was revolutionary survived. Louis XVIII’s was a parliamentary monarchy, run by bureaucrats, freed from the restraints the ancien regime had placed on their predecessors, and working through a machinery of departments and prefects still in place today.
Europe after the First Revolutionary Age
The Revolution had also rolled outwards under Napoleon. The map of 1815 showed a Europe politically recast. Restoration of the frontiers of 1789 was not a realistic goal. The changes registered and made at Vienna in 1814-15 confirmed radical breaks already made, and added to them. This was clearest on France’s borders. The search for effective barriers against any renewal of French imperialism led to the establishment of a Prussian glacis for Germany on the lower Rhine, the addition of new territories to the kingdom of Sardinia, and the creation of a new kingdom of the Netherlands embracing both Belgium and the Dutch provinces. Elsewhere, the quest for security brought new roles for the major continental monarchies. Austria became the policeman of Italy, her own territories enlarged by those of the former Venetian republic, with garrisons in the Duchies and Papal States. A new Germany of thirty-nine states was loosely tied together in a new form (and, soon, in a customs union) which left Austria and Prussia dominating it. The simplification was dramatic; most of the three hundred or so old small sovereign entities did not re-emerge. Further east, the status quo ante was restored with slight modifications. After three Partitions (between Prussia, Russia, and Austria) Poland had disappeared in 1797. This had been another indirect consequence of events in France which had allowed her three powerful neighbours to get on with their crimes undisturbed. Napoleonic hints of a recovered independence for the country were forgotten in 1815, which left Russia controlling most of a nominal ‘kingdom of Poland’, and Cracow with the status of a ‘Free City’ and a fig leaf of independence.
Prussia, Austria, and Russia all ruled many subjects who owed nothing historically to the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Romanov dynasties. The struggle of dynasticism and nationality was to be for the last two a crippling and major theme of their history for over a century. But, in 1815, dynasticism seemed firmly in the saddle, its strength newly recruited by the impetus given to a consolidation over a quarter of a century of state power such as eighteenth-century ‘enlightened despots’ could only have dreamed of. The state was stronger because of technical changes (which would continue to evolve, and would make it stronger still) and because of irreversible changes in ideas and institutions. The example of France, sometimes in terrorem, had shown what could be done by state power untrammelled by the privileges or ‘intermediate bodies’ of old-fashioned corporate society. Sometimes there was inspiration in defeat, such as in Prussia after Jena, the crushing blow of 1806. Modernization in such circumstances was undertaken with one eye on the need to mobilize the strength needed to offset Napoleonic superiority, and this did not mean only administrative and military reform, but the abolition of hereditary serfdom and the removal of medieval restrictions on industry and trade. In some places (the Rhineland and Italy, for example) the actual arrival of French occupation forces, followed or not, as the case might be, by French law and bureaucracy, had swept away many obstacles to a new level of intensity in government. Intelligent conservatives could see after 1815 that they had a new armoury of resources to employ in defence of conservative interests — and widespread fear of revolution did much to make even extreme conservatism tolerable to frightened peoples.
There were few countries, too, which did not in some measure show that, at the most fundamental level, the
Revolution had invented (or released) and generalized a new political life. The central idea of modern politics — that legitimacy for government is to be sought in some kind of debate and competition for the support of a public, however narrowly defined—struck at the root of the traditional order everywhere. It was impossible to resist a new drift in public affairs once the Revolution had coloured the issues of power with the key oppositions of old versus new, tradition versus will and reason, and history versus the future. All of these were implicit in the power exercised everywhere over the political imagination by the Revolution itself and the assumption (held by opponents and supporters alike) that he who was not for it must be against it.
On this new politicization was built a new world of ideas and institutions, expressed in a new public language. ‘Conservatism’ and ‘conservative’ were new words from France. ‘Liberal’, from Spain, acquired a new currency as a noun, and, in English at least, a new application as an adjective. ‘Democrat’ and ‘democracy’ began for the first time to be used by at least some in a favourable way. Above all, the great contrast of ‘left’ and ‘right’, originating in the distribution of seats in the first French National Assembly, began to mask division, consolidate political groupings, and simplify (sometimes misleadingly) political discussion in a manner which persists even today. On such abstractions, politicians built new institutions. ‘Party’ was one, though it was an idea hated by the great Jacobin leaders of France, who could not reconcile the integrity of national will and adherence to it with the practice of opposition. Even in 1830 it could only be clearly distinguished from ‘faction’ in the United Kingdom, where the idea of constitutional opposition was by then established. ‘Patriotism’ was another old idea reshaped; it became a revolutionary creed in the multinational empires. Patriotism and nationalism were to be inseparably attached to revolution in Italy, Germany, and Ottoman Europe, as, by 1815, they already were in Poland and Ireland.
World History
