Europe: A History (128 page)
France of the eighteenth century was entirely the child of Louis XTV’s great but flawed experiment. The intellectual ferment of the French Enlightenment was a natural reaction against the political and social immobility of the Ancien Régime which Louis had created. Both external and internal policy were devoted to the maintenance of the status quo in all spheres. The innate conservatism of the system was bolstered by the initial shock of John Law’s risky projects, which seemed to discredit the very notion of change and reform. It was solidified by the minority (1715–23) of Louis XV, when the reins of government were held by a polished but debauched Regent, the Due d’Orléans, and by the young king’s long subordination to his elderly tutor André, Cardinal de Fleury (1653–1743). The Regent rashly restored the Parlement’s right of remonstration against royal decrees—a classic recipe for endless mischief without responsibility. The Cardinal supervised an era of competent stability, marked only by diplomatic crises and a violent resurgence of the controversy over Jansenism. The personal reign of Louis XV (1723–74), who paid more attention to hunting women and stags than to governing the country, was one of debilitating stagnation. The perpetual financial crisis, fuelled by recurrent wars, turned the clashes between court and Parlement into ?
routine spectacle. The religious feuds between the ultramontanes, Gallicans, and Jansenists, which culminated in 1764 with the expulsion of the Jesuits, degenerated into a ritual round of spite and obscurantism. The chasm between court and people yawned ever wider. The most memorable personality of the age must surely be that of Jeanne Poisson, Mme de Pompadour (1721–64)—intelligent, influential, and totally helpless. She did what she could to relieve the King’s unspeakable boredom, and is credited with that most telling of remarks, ‘Après nous le déluge’,
[
CORSICA
] [
DESSEIN
]
Louis XVI no doubt looked forward to a reign as long and as boring as that of his grandfather. He even saw the need for reform. But he was the first prisoner of the Ancien Régime. On the day that the Deluge broke, on 14 July 1789, his diary contained the entry which his grandfather had always used on days when there was no hunting—’Rien’ (nothing).
In the British Isles the capital event of the period, the founding of the United Kingdom (1707), occurred as the culmination of complicated religious, dynastic, constitutional, and international conflicts. The Restoration of the Stuarts after the Civil War had ushered in an uneasy stand-off, and the reign of Charles II (d. 1685) survived two Dutch wars, the fraudulent Popish Plot of 1679, and two rebellions of Scottish Covenanters. Like his father, the King submitted unwillingly to government through Parliaments and did his best to circumvent them. His religious policy steered a middle course between the extreme Protestant and Catholic factions. The return of the Anglican supremacy put limits on toleration. It was characterized in England by the Clarendon Code and Test Acts and in Ireland and Scotland by the reimposition of episcopacy. In foreign policy there was great dissension over fighting the Dutch on commercial grounds or supporting them on religious and strategic grounds.
[
LLOYD’S
]
CORSICA
I
T
is a moot point whether Napoleon Bonaparte was born a subject of the King of France. His elder brother, Joseph, was certainly not. The island of Corsica was sold to Louis XV by the Republic of Genoa in a deal that was not confirmed by the island’s assembly until September 1770, when Napoleon was one year old. Napoleon’s father had served as secretary to Pasquale Paoli, who had led the revolt against Genoa and who would lead another against the rule of the Jacobin Convention, before dying in England.
Corsica had a long history of self-government, the
terra di commune
, going back to the eleventh century. It survived under Pisan, Genoan, and French royal suzerainty, until suppressed by the French Republic.
Since 1793, Corse has been incorporated into metropolitan France as Département 90; but its individual character is very marked, and local separatism has always been present. The regional law of 1982 returned a measure of autonomy, but not enough to eliminate anti-French terrorism. The illegal Corsican National Liberation Front can be compared to the ETA of the Basque provinces in Spain or to the IRA in Northern Ireland.
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Despite a widespread stereotype, terrorist-style nationalism is not confined to Eastern Europe or the Balkans.
All these issues came to a head after 1685, when Charles was succeeded by his brother, James II (r. 1685–8 (1701))—a militant Catholic, an absolutist, and a client of Louis XTV. His accession was marked by two more unsuccessful rebellions—by the Duke of Argyll in Scotland and by the Duke of Monmouth in England. When the King tried to widen the toleration acts to include Catholics, the dominant Protestant and Parliamentary party in England—henceforth known as ‘Whigs’—forced a showdown on their royalist opponents—henceforth known as ‘Tories’. The spectre of civil and religious strife beckoned, though trimmers of every hue, like the Anglo-Irish Vicar of Bray, were ready to keep their positions at any cost:
When royal James possessed the throne
And Popery came in fashion,
The Penal Laws I hooted down
And signed the Declaration.
The Church of Rome I found did fit
Full well my constitution;
And I had been a Jesuit
But for the Revolution.
And this is Law that I’ll maintain,
Until my dying day, Sir!
That whatsoever King may reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!
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James put his faith in mobilizing French support, and succeeded in fleeing abroad at the second attempt.
The Protestant victory was secured by the firm action of the Dutch Stadholder, William of Orange, the husband of James’s daughter Mary, who was determined to stop England from falling into Louis’s net. Landing at Torbay on 5 November 1688 with a powerful army of mercenaries, he cleared London of English troops without resistance, and estabUshed a position of unassailable strength. Only then did he summon the Convention Parliament which was to carry out the ‘glorious’ and ‘bloodless’ revolution and to offer him the English throne jointly with his wife.
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Here was a resolution which suited all the main participants. The States General of the United Provinces, who paid for the operation, were content to see their Stadholder in a stronger position abroad than in the Netherlands. William was content to have greatly increased his resources for fighting the French. The English ‘Whigs’ were content to have a foreign king whom they could control more easily than the Stuarts.
In England, the ‘Revolution’ was confirmed by the Declaration and the Bill of Rights and by another Toleration Act (which admitted Protestant dissenters but not Catholics). It was closely allied to new constitutional arrangements which shifted the balance away from the Crown and towards Parliament. In Ireland, it was achieved by bloody conquest and the triumph of ‘King Billy’ and his ‘Orangemen’ at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 (11) July 1690.
*
It perpetuated the Protestant supremacy in a largely Catholic country. In Scotland, it was sealed by the treacherous Massacre of Glencoe (1692)—where the murder of the Catholic Clan Macdonald by the English-backed Campbells marked the onset of a war to the death between Lowlands and Highlands. Internationally, it was accompanied by the engagement of England and Scotland in the League of Augsburg, and in all subsequent coalitions against Louis XIV.
LLOYD’S
O
N
18 February 1688 the
London Gazette
mentioned a coffee-house run by Edward Lloyd in Tower Street. Shortly afterwards Lloyd launched a weekly bulletin, the precursor of
Lloyd’s List
, providing news about commerce and shipping. By so doing, he supplied both a meeting-place and an information service for all interested in the insurance business. Lloyd’s would grow into the world’s largest insurance association. Transferred to the Royal Exchange, it issued its first standardized policy in 1774. It was reorganized in 1811
[TABARD]
,
its privileges confirmed by statute in 1888. It provides the point of contact between the syndicates of ‘names’, who subscribe the capital, and the firms of ‘underwriters’, who share out the cover on every policy issued.
The insurance business sells security. Its roots can be traced to the trading cities of medieval Italy, where the principle of ‘mutuality’, or risk-sharing, was clearly understood. It was one of the preconditions for the growth of commerce. Its acceleration in the eighteenth century reflects the wider growth of security in many other spheres.
Initially, the culture of insurance was the preserve of a tiny mercantile élite,
[MERCANTE]
But it steadily extended its frontiers—first into new areas of risk, such as fire, life, accident, and health; secondly into new social constituencies; and thirdly into new, less commercialized regions of Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century, governments were beginning to ponder the benefits of universal insurance schemes; and in 1888 the German government introduced a health and pension scheme for all state employees. By the late twentieth century the concept of ‘social security’, accessible to everyone by right, was a widely accepted ideal.
Insurance had far-reaching implications in the realm of social psychology. If chronic insecurity had encouraged traditional beliefs in religion and
[MAGIC]
,
the advance of material security was bound to have its effect on popular responses to the great imponderables of luck and death. In 1693 the Royal Society commissioned Edmund Halley to prepare a statistical report on ‘The Degrees of Mortality of Mankind’. It was worried by a recent financial disaster resulting from annuities sold without reference to age. Halley found that the only suitable data came from Breslau (now Wrocław) in Austrian Silesia, where the registration of deaths included the age of the deceased. By analysing 6,193 births and 5,869 deaths in Breslau for the years 1687–91, he was able to draw up a table, showing the age cohorts of the population, the estimated population totals in each cohort, and the annual number of deaths at each age. From this he demonstrated the principle of life expectancy and the varying probabilities of death. Halley’s ‘Breslau Table’ was the pioneer of all actuarial calculations. It robbed Providence of its monopoly on human mortality.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9, therefore, was not specially glorious nor revolutionary. It set out to save the political and religious Establishment from James’s radical proposals; and it was brought to fruition through the only successful invasion of England since 1066. Yet in subsequent generations it would spawn a powerful myth. It lay at the root of a constitutional doctrine which came to be known as ‘the English ideology’, and which postulates the absolute sovereignty of Parliament. This doctrine holds that ‘absolute despotic power’, as the jurist Blackstone put it, had been transferred from the monarch to the elected Parliament. In theory at least, it gives Parliament the power to rule with all the lofty authoritarianism that was previously enjoyed by England’s kings. In this it differs fundamentally from the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which most other European countries were to acquire from the example either of the USA or of revolutionary France, and which operates through a formal constitution governing all branches of the polity. It inevitably became the flagship not only of Protestant but also of English supremacy within Great Britain, since English MPs could always engineer a majority over the non-English members. It was destined to survive all the changes of subsequent centuries; 300 years later, it would still be offering one of the principal obstacles to Britain’s entry into a united European Community.
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Dynastic complications rendered the ultimate outcome uncertain for 25 years. From 1701, Louis XIV formally recognized the claims of James Edward Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’ or ‘James III’ (1688–1766), whilst the deaths of Mary (1694), of William III (1702), and of all 17 children of Queen Anne (r. 1702–14) rendered the Protestant Stuarts heirless. In the middle of the War of the Spanish Succession, no one needed to be reminded of the mischief which heirlessness could wreak; and the Act of Union (1707) between England and Scotland largely came about as a result of common frustration in London and Edinburgh at the welter of dynastic settlements being floated. As the price of its disbandment, the Scots Parliament was able to secure English acceptance of free trade between the two countries, English cash for settling Scotland’s huge debts, English agreement to the separate
existence of Scots law and the Presbyterian Kirk, and the unwritten promise of English armed force against the rebellious Highlands (see Appendix III, p. 1285).
Henceforth, the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’ was to be ruled by a joint Parliament at Westminster; and a new ‘British’ nationality was to be superimposed on the older nations of the islands. Modern British identity derives from this time. English traditions were to be revered. Memories of Scotland’s separate history were to be subverted. Britain entered the era of its greatest assertiveness, free from insular divisions. The choice of the Hanoverians as successors to the Stuarts, though hotly contested, was carried through. Thereafter, a monarchy which was neither English nor Scottish became a pillar of Britishness.
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[GOTHA] [MASON]
The Jacobite cause, which persisted for much of the eighteenth century, encompassed all that was lost in the events of 1688–1714. Apart from the personal fortunes of the Old Pretender and his son, Charles Edward Stuart, variously known as the ‘Young Pretender’, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, and ‘Charles III’ (1720–88), it united all the wounded feelings connected with the defeated order. It mourned the demise of the old monarchies, of English Catholicism and its European connections, of the rights of the Scots and the Irish to control their own destinies. In England it commanded the sympathy of many High Tories, and of all who wept for the fugitives and exiles. It inspired two great risings—’the Fifteen’ (1715), which saw the Jacobite armies march as far south as Lancashire, and the ‘Forty-Five’ (1745), which saw them reach Derby.
