A Little History of the World (36 page)
Read A Little History of the World Online
Authors: E. H. Gombrich,Clifford Harper
Now, since 1740, Prussia had been under the rule of its third king, Frederick II, who was a member of the Hohenzollern family. Known as Frederick the Great, he was without doubt one of the most cultivated men of his age. He was on friendly terms with a number of Frenchmen who preached the ideas of the Enlightenment in their writings, and he himself wrote much on the subject in French. For although he was king of Prussia he scorned the German language and customs
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which, as a result of the Thirty Years War, were in a very poor state. His aim and his duty, as he saw it, was to make Prussia a model state and in so doing demonstrate the value of the thinking of his friends in France. He liked to say that he saw himself as the first servant of the state: the butler, as it were, rather than the owner. And in that role he concerned himself with every detail of his project of putting the new ideas into practice. One of the first things he did was to abolish the barbaric practice of torture. He also relieved the peasants of some of the heavier duties to their landlords. And he was always particularly concerned that all his subjects, from the poorest to the mightiest, should receive equal justice. A rare thing in those days.
But, above all, Frederick wanted to make Prussia the mightiest of all the German states, and destroy Austria’s imperial power. He didn’t foresee any difficulty in this. Austria was ruled by a woman, the Empress Maria Theresa. When she came to the throne in 1740, aged only twenty-three, Frederick thought it a suitable moment to remove one of the empire’s possessions. So he took his well-trained army to the province of Silesia and seized it. From that time on he would spend most of the rest of his life fighting the empress of Austria. The state of his army was always of the utmost importance to him. He drilled his troops unremittingly until he had the best army in the world.
But Maria Theresa was a far more formidable opponent than he had first thought, although no warmonger at heart. She was deeply religious, and first and foremost a mother. She had sixteen children in all. Although Frederick was her enemy, she followed his example in introducing many of his reforms in Austria as well. Like him, she abolished torture, made the peasants’ lives easier, and took a special interest in establishing good education throughout the land. She genuinely saw herself as a mother to her people, and never pretended to know all the answers herself. She chose the ablest people to be her advisers, among them men quite capable of holding their own against Frederick during the long wars, not only on the battlefield, but also as envoys to all the courts of Europe, where they won sympathy for her cause. Even France, which for centuries had taken sides against the empire, was eventually won over, after which Maria Theresa gave her daughter Marie Antoinette in marriage to the future King Louis XVI of France, as a pledge of their new friendship.
Frederick now found himself surrounded by enemies on all sides: Austria, France, Sweden and Russia, now a vast and mighty empire. Without waiting for them to declare war on him, he occupied Saxony, which was also hostile. He then went on to wage a bitter war that lasted seven long years, in which his only support came from the British. But his perseverance paid off, for despite the superior strength of his enemies, not only did he not lose the war, he even managed to hold on to Silesia.
From 1765 Maria Theresa ceased to rule Austria alone. Her son Joseph ruled with her and succeeded her after her death as Emperor Joseph II. He was an even more zealous fighter for the ideas of the Enlightenment than either Frederick or his mother. Tolerance, reason and humanity were all that mattered to him. He abolished the death sentence and peasant serfdom. Protestants were once again allowed to worship freely, and although a good Catholic himself, he confiscated some of the lands and wealth of the Catholic Church. He was an invalid and, knowing that he might not have long to rule, he did everything with such zeal, such impatience and such haste that it was often all too quick, too unexpected and altogether too much for his subordinates to endure. He had many admirers, but his people loved him less than they loved his more cautious and pious mother.
At the same time as Austria and Germany were witnessing the triumph of the ideas of the Enlightenment, in America the inhabitants of many British colonies were refusing to be British subjects any longer, or to pay taxes to Britain. In their fight for independence they were led by Benjamin Franklin, an ordinary citizen who spent much of his time studying the natural sciences, in the course of which he invented the lightning conductor. He was a plain and upright man, energetic and hard-working. Under his leadership and that of another American, George Washington, the British colonies and trading ports organised themselves into a confederation and, after a long struggle, drove the British soldiers from their shores. Now they too could adopt the principles of the new way of thinking. In 1776 they declared the sacred rights of all men to liberty and equality to be the founding principles of their new state. But for the negro slaves on their plantations, life simply went on as before.
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But if a noble landowner happened to leave the palace and go home to his estate, it was even worse for the peasants. For he and his attendants would rampage across the land after hares and foxes, their horses’ hooves trampling the carefully tended fields. And woe betide the peasant who protested! He would be lucky to escape with a few blows across the face from his lord’s riding whip, for a noble landowner was also his peasant’s judge and could punish him as he pleased. A landowner who enjoyed the king’s favour could obtain a note from him which simply said: ‘Mr is to be imprisoned. Signed: King Louis XV.’ The nobleman wrote in the name himself, so that anyone who displeased him for any reason whatsoever was simply made to disappear.
But at court these lords were elegant, prinked, powdered and perfumed, rustling in their robes of silk and lace. Weary of the heavy pomp and splendour of Louis XIV’s time, they favoured a lighter, less formal way of speaking. Instead of their full-bottomed wigs they now wore light, white-powdered ones with a little plait at the back. No one could dance and bow better than they – unless it was their ladies, tight-laced in their corsets, the skirts of their crinolines billowing and round like giant bells. And while all these fine lords and ladies strolled in the gardens of the royal palaces, their estates decayed and the peasants starved. Yet even they sometimes tired of such an unnatural life that was all elegance and sophistication
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so they invented a new pastime. They played at Simplicity and Nature. This consisted of living in charming shepherds’ huts which they had built in the grounds of their chateaux, and giving themselves the names of shepherds and shepherdesses taken from Greek poems. What could be more natural or more simple?!
Into this bright confusion of elegance, gracefulness and over-refinement came Maria Theresa’s daughter, Marie Antoinette. She was a very young girl, barely fourteen years old, when she became the wife of the future king of France. And, of course, she thought everything was as it should be. She threw herself delightedly into all the fairy-tale masked balls and operas, she acted in plays, she was an enchanting shepherdess and thought life in the French royal palaces was altogether wonderful. Nevertheless, her elder brother, the emperor Joseph II, and her mother repeatedly warned her to live simply and to avoid stirring up further resentment among the poor with foolish extravagance and frivolity. In 1777, the emperor Joseph wrote her a long and serious letter saying: ‘Things cannot go on like this, there will be a terrible revolution if you do not do something to prevent it.’
Yet things did go on like that, for twelve more years. And the revolution when it came was all the more terrible for it. By then the court had squandered all the country’s wealth. Nothing was left with which to pay for the monstrous daily extravagances. In 1789, King Louis XVI finally decided to summon a meeting of the three estates – the nobility, the clergy and the bourgeoisie – to advise him on how to restore the country’s finances.
However, their proposals and requests did not please the king, and he told his master of ceremonies to give the order for the representatives of the estates to leave the chamber. But when he attempted to do so, the impassioned voice of a very clever man named Mirabeau was heard to call out: ‘Go and tell his majesty that we are here through the will of the people, and will not leave except at the point of a bayonet!’
No one had ever spoken to the king of France like this before. The court officials had no idea what to do. While they consulted one another, the assembled representatives of the nobility, clergy and the bougeoisie went on discussing what was to be done about the economic crisis. It was no one’s intention to overthrow the king. All they wanted to do was to introduce the sorts of reform that other states had already adopted. But although the king was a weak and indecisive man who liked nothing better than pottering about and making things – locks, in particular – he was not accustomed to taking orders, and it never occurred to him that anyone would dare to oppose him. So he called out troops to disperse the assembly of the three estates by force. The people of Paris were enraged, for they had pinned their hopes on this assembly. Crowds gathered and everyone rushed to the state prison, the Bastille, where many Enlightenment thinkers had been confined, and where a whole host of innocent people were now thought to be held. The king did not dare fire on his own subjects for fear of further increasing the fury of the mob. So the mighty fortress was stormed and its garrison killed. The mob surged through the streets of Paris in triumph, parading the liberated prisoners, although it turned out that the only people in the prison at the time were common criminals.
Meanwhile the assembled representatives had made some extraordinary decisions. They wanted the principles of the Enlightenment to be put into effect in their entirety – in particular the one which said that reason, being common to all men, meant that all men were equal and must be treated as such under the law. The assembled nobility led the way by grandly renouncing all their privileges, to everyone’s delight. Any citizen of France would have the right to any job, and each would have the same rights and the same duties in relation to the state – human rights, as these were called. Henceforth the people, it was proclaimed, would be the true rulers, and the king merely their representative.
As you can imagine, what the assembly of the estates actually meant was that the ruler was there to serve the people rather than vice versa, and that he would no longer be allowed to abuse his power. But the Parisians who read it in the press took the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people to mean something entirely different. They thought it meant that people in the streets and marketplaces, communally known as ‘the people’, would be the rulers. And when the king still refused to see reason and entered into secret negotiations with foreign courts, asking for help against his own people, a procession led by market women went out to the Palace of Versailles. They killed the guards, burst into the magnificent rooms with the wonderful chandeliers, mirrors and damask hangings, and forced the king and his wife, Marie Antoinette, together with their children and their entourage, to return to Paris where they were under the people’s control.
