Europe: A History (138 page)

the influence of a nation that … has reduced the art of living to the simple notions of liberty and equality—notions endowed with irresistible charm for the human heart, and propagated in all the countries of the world—the influence of such a nation will undoubtedly conquer the whole of Europe for Truth, Moderation and Justice, not immediately perhaps, not in a single day …

This was the sort of sentiment which has inspired the label of ‘Europe’s first Revolution’ in place of something that was exclusively French.
¹

Foreigners shared the same vivid sense of involvement. A young English enthusiast, later to repent, was to write ecstatically: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’
An elder statesman could bewail: ‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.’ ‘Here and now’, remarked the leading writer of the age having watched the Battle of Valmy, ‘a new era in the world begins.’
²
Historians, whether for or against, have invariably resorted to strong words. Thomas Carlyle, appalled by what he dubbed ‘sansculottism’, called the French Revolution ‘the frightfullest thing ever born of Time’.
³
Jules Michelet, harbouring the opposite feelings, began: ‘I define the Revolution: the advent of the Law, the resurrection of Right, and the reaction of Justice.’
⁴

Map 20.
Europe, 1810

The French Revolution plunged Europe into the most profound and protracted crisis which it had ever known. It consumed an entire generation in its tumults, its wars, its disturbing innovations. From the epicentre in Paris, it sent shock waves into the furthest recesses of the Continent. From the shores of Portugal to the depths of Russia, from Scandinavia to Italy, the shocks were followed by soldiers in bright uniforms with a blue, white and red cockade in their hats, and with ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ on their lips. For its partisans, the Revolution promised liberation from the traditional oppressions enshrined in monarchy, nobility, and organized religion. For its opponents, it was synonymous with the dark forces of mob rule and terror. For France, it spelt the start of a modern national identity. For Europe as a whole, it provided an object lesson in the danger of replacing one form of tyranny with another. It began with hopes of limited peaceful change; ‘it ended amidst promises of resistance to any form of change whatsoever’. In the short run, it met defeat; in the long run, in the realm of social and political ideas, it made, and continues to make, a major and a lasting contribution.

The pageant of the Revolution contains personalities and clichés that are known to every European schoolchild. The central parade of revolutionary leaders—Mirabeau, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and Bonaparte—is complemented by the long line of their opponents and victims: by scenes of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette on the scaffold, of Charlotte Corday, the peasant girl who murdered Marat in his bath ‘to save a hundred thousand men’: of the
émigré
Duc d’Enghien, seized and executed on Bonaparte’s orders. It is surrounded by a host of auxiliary figures of colour and enterprise—by radical Tom Paine, the exiled English philosopher who ‘saw Revolution on two continents’, by the inimitable Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord,
ci-devant
bishop, ‘the irreverend Reverend of Autun’, survivor supreme; by Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, the ice-cold prosecutor-general. In every European country it is accompanied by a vast gallery of heroes and villains, ranged for or against—in Britain by Nelson dying on the deck of HMS
Victory
, in Germany by Scharnhost and Gneisenau, in Austria by the patriot-martyr Andreas Hofer, in Poland by the noble Marshal Poniatowski riding his white horse to a watery grave, in Russia by the indomitable Kutuzov trudging doggedly through the snow. In European art and literature it is enriched by a series of unforgettable tableaux in words and paint, from Goya’s
Desastres de la Guerra
or David’s portraits of Napoleon to Stendhal’s
La Chartreuse de Parme
,
Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
, Mickiewicz’s
Pan Tadeusz
, or Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
.

Any account of the revolutionary era must look successively at the causes, at the revolutionary events themselves, and at the consequences. Every chronological narrative must begin with the prelude of pre-revolutionary ferment. It must examine how moderate demands led to extreme changes, and how the conflict in France led to Continental wars. The crisis starts with the first waning of the Enlightenment in the 1770s, and closes with the Congress of Vienna which opened in 1814.

Prelude

The causes of the French Revolution are thé subject of endless debate. One can distinguish the setting (which sometimes threatens to become the whole of previous history), the profound causes, or deep-laid sources of instability, and the immediate events or ‘sparks’ which ignited the barrel. The setting, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, consisted of a generalized but deepening climate of unease right across Europe. The changes that generated the unease were not concentrated in France; but France was both a participant and a witness. France, facing political paralysis and financial stress, proved less capable of standing the stresses than her neighbours. ‘The revolution [was] imminent in almost all of Europe. It broke out in France, because there the Ancien Regime was more worn out, more detested, and more easily destroyed than elsewhere.’
⁵

On the political front, the major earthquake occurred across the Atlantic. Great Britain, which the
philosophes
had always regarded as the most stable and moderate of countries, was plunged into a war with its American colonists who, with French help, determined to break free of British rule. But the War of American Independence (1776–83) had important repercussions in Europe. For one thing, it pushed France’s financial crisis towards the brink. It also made Frenchmen, and others, consider their own predicament: if poor old bumbling George III was to be classed as a tyrant, how should one classify the other monarchs of Europe? If the Americans could rebel against a
3d
. duty on tea, what possible justification could there be for the massive imposts under which most Europeans groaned? If the USA had to be created because Americans had no representation in the British Parliament, what should all those Europeans think whose countries did not even possess a parliament? American constitutional thought was magnificently simple and universally relevant:

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable: that all men are created equal and independent, that from their equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
⁶

Europe’s participation in the American Revolution is formally acknowledged with statues and monuments. The American factor in Europe’s Revolution is not always acknowledged so readily. But in the dozen years which separated the
Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 from the inauguration of the first President, George Washington, on 29 April 1789, it was the creation of the USA which brought debates about modern government to a head.

Tom Paine (1737–1809), a Norfolk Quaker from Thetford, was the living link between Europe and America. ‘Radical Tom’ devoted himself to the American cause after being outlawed from England. His
Common Sense
(1776) was the most effective tract of the American Revolution; his
The Rights of Man
(1791) was to be one of the most radical responses to the French Revolution. He was to sit in the French Convention, and to escape the guillotine by a whisker. His
The Age of Reason
(1793), a deist tract written in firebrand prose, caused a scandal. ‘My country is the world,’ he wrote, ‘and my religion is to do good.’

In Eastern Europe, the three great empires were digesting the first Partition of Poland (see Chapter VIII). There was relief that war had been avoided; but the clouds of propaganda could not conceal the facts of violence. What is more, in Poland-Lithuania itself the Partition only inflamed resentments against Russian hegemony. The strains of Polish Enlightenment were leading inexorably to a confrontation with the Tsarina. The Russian sphere of influence was moving in parallel with that of France towards a collision between the ‘tyrants’ and the ‘friends of liberty’. It was no accident that the revolutionary era would eventually culminate in a titanic clash between France and Russia.

Beyond or beneath everyday politics, there were indications that deep forces invisible on the ordered surface of late eighteenth-century Europe were somehow getting out of control. One source of anxiety was technological: the appearance of power-driven machines with immense destructive as well as constructive potential. The second source was social: a growing awareness of ‘the masses’, the realization that the teeming millions, largely excluded from polite society, might take their fate into their own hands. The third source was intellectual: a rising concern both in literature and in philosophy with the irrational in human conduct. Historians are pressed to decide whether these developments were related phenomena: whether the so-called Industrial Revolution, the collectivist strand in social thought, and the beginnings of Romanticism were connected parts of one coherent process or not; whether they were causes of the revolutionary upheaval, or merely its companions and contributors.

The Industrial Revolution
is a blanket term which is widely used to describe a range of technological and organizational changes that were considerably wider than the single best-known element: the invention of power-driven machinery. What is more, the term has come to refer, after immense historical debates, to merely one stage in a still more complex chain of changes—now called ‘Modernization’—that did not begin to have its full effect until the following century (see pp. 764–82). Even so, there are a dozen elements of ‘proto-industrialization’ that must be taken into consideration; they include farming, mobile labour, steam power, machines, mines, metallurgy, factories, towns, communications, finance, and demography.

Scientific farming was one of the obsessions of the Enlightenment, and of the physiocrats in particular. From its initial, rationalizing stage, it progressed to the point where horse-driven (though not yet power-driven) machinery was creating the potential for greatly accelerated production. An English farmer from Hungerford, Jethro Tull (1674–1741), had advertised a machine-drill in his
Horse-Hoeing Husbandry
, published as long ago as 1703; the steel-tipped Rotherham ploughshare came on to the market in 1803. Over the intervening century, agricultural experimentation had raged. But progress was painfully slow, the average level of agricultural production was dictated, not by the tempo of innovations, but by the pace of the average farmer,
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As farms increased their food production, more people could be fed from the produce of the same land. Men once used to work the fields could be released for other forms of employment. The rise in agricultural efficiency aided a rise in the birth rate, and stood to create a pool of surplus labour, at least in those countries where peasants were free to leave the land. Yet a supply of unskilled peasants provided only half an answer. Industry was to need skills as well as manpower. The most favoured locations would be found where artisan traditions were most developed.

Steam-power had been known since antiquity. But it had never been given any practical application until it was harnessed in 1711 by Thomas Newcomen (1663–1729) to a clumsy great engine for pumping flood-water from a mine in Devon. The steam-engine was immensely improved by James Watt (1736–1819), a Scots instrument-maker from Glasgow, who in 1763 was called in to repair a model of Newcomen’s monster, and perfected the condenser. From then on, the different sorts of machinery to which the motive power of steam could be applied seemed limitless.

Machinery had been used ever since the water-mill and the printing-press. In the hands of the eighteenth-century clock-makers it had reached a high level of precision. But the prospect of a power source far more forceful than hand, water, or spring inspired a rash of inventions, all initially in the realm of textiles. Three Lancashire men, James Hargreaves (1720–78) of Blackburn, Richard Arkwright (1732–92) of Preston, and Samuel Crompton (1753–1827) of Hall’ith’ Wood, Bolton, built respectively the spinning jenny (1767), the spinning frame (1768), and the spinning mule (1779). The jenny was suitable only for hand use in cottages; the frame and mule proved suitable for steam traction in factories. A new level of sophistication was reached in France with the silk loom (1804) of
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.