IB History-Absolutism and Enlightenment

Habsburgs

After her death in 1780, Joseph tried to finish her work of reform. The educational system had been consolidated throughout the monarchy. For the University of Vienna, no longer under the influence of the church, Joseph tried to find the best scholars and scientists. The judiciary and the executive had already been separated at the top; Joseph extended this process to the lower administrative levels. In 1786 the Universal Code of Civil Law was issued. Under Maria Theresa the physician Gerard van Swieten had organized a public health service, and in Joseph's time the General Hospital in Vienna was considered one of the best equipped in Europe. The monarchy's finances were balanced. The reorganization of the army secured Joseph's position in Europe. He ordered the abolition of serfdom; by the Edict of Toleration he established religious equality before the law, and he granted freedom of the press. The emancipation of the Jews within a short time endowed cultural life with new vitality. The artistic life of Vienna rose to new heights when the Burgtheater became the German National Theater. By transferring the management of the theatres to the actors, Joseph introduced an artistically fruitful concept. Joseph's conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, however, posed more difficult problems. He established national training colleges for priests and deprived the bishops of their authority and limited their communications with the Pope. The power of the church was even more affected by the dissolution of more than 700 monasteries not engaged in such useful activities as teaching or hospital work. The 36,000 monks forced to leave their orders were given an annuity or money to return home; those so returning could continue as secular priests. Some measures intended to forestall a relapse into monasticism, such as the foundation of new parishes, bore good results. The Emperor's impatience in turning the monks out of the monasteries, however, caused many works of art to be destroyed. At the climax of the crisis, Pope Pius VI visited the Emperor in Vienna, but the visit changed nothing; nor did a later journey by Joseph to Rome. Joseph's passionate zeal to change everything and to force a new form of life on his subjects met with embittered resistance, chiefly in such strongly traditional countries as the Austrian Netherlands and Hungary. Failure in foreign affairs In foreign policy, Joseph had obtained some success even as co-regent with his mother. When a civil war occurred in Poland under King Stanisław II Poniatowski, the lover of Catherine II the Great of Russia who was completely dependent on Russia, Joseph met with Poland's third neighbour, King Frederick the Great of Prussia, to plan the partition of Poland, with each neighbour taking a part of the country and the remaining part to be given a last chance at independence. Frederick took what was later West Prussia, Austria took Galicia, and Catherine took as much border territory as she thought necessary. In a later treaty with Turkey, Joseph annexed Bukovina to his country. To obtain a personal view of the situation in eastern and western Europe, Joseph visited France, where he was enthusiastically received by the intellectual elite, and then also visited Catherine of Russia. The banquets given in his honour in Paris could not conceal the truth from him: France was headed for catastrophe. His Russian visit gave him the impression of a state retarded in its development compared with the West, but the loyalty of its enormous population to Catherine and her nearly unlimited power seemed to make her the best ally for political manoeuvres in Europe. After his mother's death, Joseph had involved himself fruitlessly in 1784 in an attempt to force the Dutch to lift their blockade to secure a passage to the sea for the Austrian Netherlands. The Emperor hoped for more success with his unusual plan of exchanging the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria. The Wittelsbach dynasty had been extinguished in Bavaria, and the heir, the count palatine Charles Joseph, was in favour of moving from Munich to Brussels. But Joseph left Prussia out of his calculations. Frederick protested, and his troops marched into Bohemia. The threat of war ended without a battle being fought, for in 1785 Frederick had formed the Fürstenbund (Princes' League) against Joseph to prevent the exchange. Deeply disappointed, Joseph now saw his only hope in Catherine. Though he was in bad health, he decided to visit her again; the Austrian Netherlanders and Hungarians, enraged at his reforms, resisted the move. Both publicly and secretly Catherine proposed a complete sharing of power in the east and southeast. Joseph signed an alliance giving her a free hand for her far-reaching plans and the conquest of Constantinople and the Dardanelles and assuring Austria of substantial territorial gains. When Catherine declared war on Turkey sooner than expected, Joseph raised an army of 250,000 men. Yet, despite careful preparations, the organization of this large army was weak. Revolutionary unrest in the Austrian Netherlands and Hungary grew in the belief that preoccupation with the war would prevent the Emperor from taking on the revolutionaries as well. Joseph spent several months with his army; but both his illness and the domestic crisis made progress dangerous, and he had to return to Vienna before a victory could be won. There the Emperor attempted to establish peace in the Austrian Netherlands by delaying negotiations, but he failed in this as he did in Hungary, where his refusal to be crowned had deprived him of a legal foundation for his reign. In Hungary topographical surveys and the replacing of Latin by German as the official legal language drove the Hungarian gentry into opposition, and in the Austrian Netherlands immigrants who had fled from Holland opened hostilities against the occupation forces, and finally the country declared its independence. Friedrich Schreyvogl Legacy of Joseph II Joseph and his reign have generated much discussion among historians. Generally, he is presented as the representative enlightened absolutist—that is to say, the most typical of those 18th-century monarchs who applied the principles of the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment to the problems of government and society. In his religious reforms, he endorsed the principles that a person's beliefs are his own business and that no one should be compelled to worship in ways that violate his conscience. In his social reforms, he sought the greatest good for the greatest number and so tried to alleviate the plight of the peasantry and foster prosperity for all. In his administrative reforms, he tried to rationalize government so that it could perform as effectively and sensibly as possible, and he sought to achieve not only equal treatment for his subjects but equal opportunity as well. But many scholars dispute these claims. They argue that Joseph fostered freedom of expression only when that expression did not criticize him; when it did, he introduced repression just as harsh as any other monarch of the time. His social and religious reforms were less concerned with creating a just society than with extracting the greatest amount of taxes and the greatest number of military recruits from his people in the most efficient manner possible. Prosperity in his mind was good only because it meant increased revenue for the state. Finally, they contend that his administrative reforms served primarily to level the cultural and historical differences among his crown lands without consideration for the traditions and customs of the people who populated them. The debate among scholars promoting these positions and their variations will continue for some time. It can be said, however, that Joseph's legacy was profound in the monarchy's later history. His policies set the tone for church-state relations from his reign onward, and his reforms in serf-lord relations alleviated the worst conditions in the countryside and would be completed by the final abolition of serfdom in 1848. Perhaps the one criticism that will stand in all schools is that Joseph tried to do too much too quickly and so died a deeply disappointed man.

Literature

Because a successive covenant cannot override a prior one, the subjects cannot (lawfully) change the form of government. Because the covenant forming the commonwealth results from subjects giving to the sovereign the right to act for them, the sovereign cannot possibly breach the covenant; and therefore the subjects can never argue to be freed from the covenant because of the actions of the sovereign. The sovereign exists because the majority has consented to his rule; the minority have agreed to abide by this arrangement and must then assent to the sovereign's actions. Every subject is author of the acts of the sovereign: hence the sovereign cannot injure any of his subjects and cannot be accused of injustice. Following this, the sovereign cannot justly be put to death by the subjects. The purpose of the commonwealth is peace, and the sovereign has the right to do whatever he thinks necessary for the preserving of peace and security and prevention of discord. Therefore, the sovereign may judge what opinions and doctrines are averse, who shall be allowed to speak to multitudes, and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they are published. To prescribe the rules of civil law and property. To be judge in all cases. To make war and peace as he sees fit and to command the army. To choose counsellors, ministers, magistrates and officers. To reward with riches and honour or to punish with corpor Hobbes begins his treatise on politics with an account of human nature. He presents an image of man as matter in motion, attempting to show through example how everything about humanity can be explained materialistically, that is, without recourse to an incorporeal, immaterial soul or a faculty for understanding ideas that are external to the human mind. Life is but a motion of limbs. For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer?[9] Among Locke's political works he is most famous for The Second Treatise of Government in which he argues that sovereignty resides in the people and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights and the social contract. He is also famous for calling for the separation of Church and State in his Letter Concerning Toleration. Much of Locke's work is characterized by opposition to authoritarianism. This is apparent both on the level of the individual person and on the level of institutions such as government and church. For the individual, Locke wants each of us to use reason to search after truth rather than simply accept the opinion of authorities or be subject to superstition. He wants us to proportion assent to propositions to the evidence for them. On the level of institutions it becomes important to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate functions of institutions and to make the corresponding distinction for the uses of force by these institutions. Locke believes that using reason to try to grasp the truth, and determine the legitimate functions of institutions will optimize human flourishing for the individual and society both in respect to its material and spiritual welfare. This in turn, amounts to following natural law and the fulfillment of the divine purpose for humanity.

Foreign Policy

Between the death of Peter the Great and that of Catherine, Russian foreign policy still pursued the traditional goals of expansion against Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. But Russia found that these goals increasingly involved it with the states of central and western Europe. In the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735) Russian forces were allied with those of Austria. The Russians and Austrians then became allies in a new war against the Turks from 1735 to 1739. Though the Russians invaded the Crimea successfully, their territorial gains were limited to Azov. The Austrians failed to cooperate in an invasion of the Danubian principalities and made it clear that they did not relish a Russian advance toward the Habsburg frontiers. Prussian influence, which was anti- Austrian, manifested itself with the designation of the German grandson of Peter the Great (the future Peter III) as heir and with the selection of the German Catherine, whose father was a Prussian general. The Russians remained loyal to Austria and fought the Prussians in the Seven Years' War. Russian forces invaded East Prussia and in 1760 entered Berlin; the accession of the pro-Prussian Peter III early in 1762 led the Russians to change sides and join the Prussians briefly against the Austrians and the French. When Catherine, on her accession, withdrew Russian forces, Russia was excluded from the peace conferences of 1763. In foreign policy Catherine the Great was vigorous and unscrupulous in pursuing Russia's traditional goals. When the throne of Poland fell vacant, Catherine secured the election of her former lover, Stanislas Poniatowski, who became Stanislas II (r. 1764-1795). Frederick the Great then joined with Catherine in a campaign to win rights for the Lutheran and Orthodox minorities in Catholic Poland. One party of Polish nobles, offended at foreign intervention, secured the aid of France and Austria, which adopted the stratagem of pressing Turkey into war with Russia to distract Catherine from Poland. In the Russo-Turkish War (1768-1774) the Russian Baltic fleet sailed into the Mediterranean and destroyed the Turkish fleet in the Aegean (1770). While Russians and Turks were discussing peace terms, Frederick the Great concluded that Russia's success with the Turks might lead it to seize most of Poland unless he acted quickly; he therefore arranged the first partition of Poland (1772), which lost to Russia, Prussia, and Austria almost one third of its territory and one half of its population. Russia received a substantial area of what became Belorussia, or White Russia. Two years later, in the treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, Catherine annexed much of the formerly Turkish stretch of the Black Sea coast; the Crimea was separated from the Ottoman Empire and annexed by Russia in 1783. She also obtained something the Russians had long coveted—freedom of navigation on the Black Sea and the right of passage through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. Now Catherine began to dream of expelling the Turks from Europe and reviving the Byzantine Empire under Russian protection. She had her younger grandson christened Constantine and imported Greek-speaking nurses to train him in the language. She also proposed to set up a kingdom of Dacia (the Roman name for "Romania"). By way of preparation, in 1783 Catherine built a naval base at Sebastopol in the newly annexed Crimea. To achieve these grandiose designs, Catherine sought the consent of Austria and took Joseph II on a boat tour of the recently acquired territories of the Russian southwest. However, in a Second Russo-Turkish War (1787-1791) Catherine's Austrian allies again provided feeble assistance and soon became embroiled in a conflict of interest with Russia over the European lands of the sultan. In the end Catherine contented herself with acquiring the remaining Turkish lands along the northern coast of the Black Sea. Before her death Catherine participated in two more partitions of Poland. The second partition came as the result of a Polish constitutional movement, supported by the Prussians in opposition to Russian interests. Catherine intervened on the pretext of defending the established order in Poland and fighting revolution. In 1793 both the Russians and Prussians took large slices of Polish territory. An attempted Polish revolution was followed by the third partition, in 1795, by which Poland disappeared from the map. This time Austria joined the other two powers and obtained Krakow; Prussia got Warsaw, and Russia got Lithuania and other Baltic and east Polish lands. The spectacular successes of Catherine meant the transfer to Russia of millions of people—Poles, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Tatars—who hated the Russians, and it left a legacy of instability and insecurity. It also meant that Russia had destroyed the useful buffers of the Polish and Tatar states, and now had common frontiers with its potential enemies, Prussia and Austria.

Austrian Successions

Britain and France collaborated in the 1720s and 1730s because both Walpole and Fleury sought stability abroad to promote economic recovery at home. The partnership, however, collapsed over the competition between the two Atlantic powers for commerce and empire. Neither Walpole nor Fleury could prevent the worldwide war between Britain and the Bourbon monarchies that broke out in 1739 and that lasted, with intervals of peace, until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. This "Second Hundred Years' War" had, in fact, already begun half a century earlier, in the days of Louis XIV. The Utrecht settlement of 1713 had not fully settled the rivalry between Britain and France (and France's Bourbon partner, Spain). Thus the war of 1739 was as much the renewal of an old struggle as the onset of a new one. The specific issue behind the crisis of 1739 was the comparatively minor question of British disappointment over the results of the Asiento privilege. As the South Sea Company discovered, the Asiento gave Britain only a token share in the trade of the Spanish American colonies. What British captains could not get legitimately they got by smuggling, and Spain retaliated with a coast guard patrol in American waters to ward off smugglers. British merchants complained of the rough treatment handed out by the Spanish guards, and in 1736 they exhibited to Parliament a Captain Robert Jenkins (fl. 1731-1738), who claimed that Spanish brutality had cost him an ear, which he duly produced, preserved in salt and cotton batting. Asked to state his reaction on losing the ear, he replied, "I commended my soul to God and my cause to my country." In October, to the joyful pealing of church bells, Britain began the War of Jenkins's Ear against Spain. The British fleet lost the opening campaign in the Caribbean, and France showed every sign of coming to Spain's assistance. In 1740 a chain of events linked the colonial war to the great European conflict over the Austrian succession. On the death of Charles VI in 1740, the Habsburg dominions passed to his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Maria Theresa (r. 1740-1780). The German princes ignored the Pragmatic Sanction guaranteeing her succession and looked forward to partitioning the Habsburg inheritance. The elector of Bavaria, a cousin of the Habsburgs, also hoped to be elected Holy Roman emperor. The first of the German princes to strike, however, was Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786), who had just inherited the Prussian throne. In December 1740 Frederick suddenly invaded the Habsburg province of Silesia. In the ensuing War of the Austrian Succession, England and Austria were ranged against France, Spain, Prussia, and Bavaria. The Prussian army astounded Europe by its long night marches, sudden flank attacks, and other surprise tactics quite different from the usual deliberate warfare of sieges. Frederick, however, antagonized his allies by repeatedly deserting them to make secret peace arrangements with Austria. And he did little to support the imperial aspirations of the Bavarian elector, who enjoyed only a brief tenure as Emperor Charles VII. The Anglo-Austrian alliance worked no better than the Franco-Prussian one. Many of the English felt that George II was betraying their interests by entangling them in the Austrian succession and other German problems. Nevertheless, British preference for the Hanoverians over the Stuarts was evident when Bonnie Prince Charles, grandson of the deposed James II, secured French backing and landed in Britain in 1745. He won significant recruits only among the Highlanders of Scotland, where he was thoroughly defeated at Culloden in 1746. In central Europe, the war was a decisive step in the rise of Prussia to the first rank of powers. The new province of Silesia brought not only a large increase in the Prussian population but also an important textile industry and large deposits of coal and iron. Maria Theresa got scant compensation for the loss of Silesia; although her husband, Francis, won recognition as Holy Roman emperor, she had to surrender Parma and some other territorial crumbs in northern Italy to Philip, the second son of Elizabeth Farnese. The peace made in 1748 at Aix-la-Chapelle lasted only eight years. Then the Seven Years' War of 17561763 broke out, caused partly by old issues left unsettled at Aix-la-Chapelle and partly by new grievances arising from the War of the Austrian Succession. In southern India the English and French East India companies fought each other by taking sides in the rivalries of native princes. By 1751 the energetic French administrator Joseph Dupleix (1697-1763) had won the initial round in the battle for supremacy in the Indian subcontinent. Then the English, led by the equally energetic Robert Clive (1725-1774), seized the initiative. In 1754 Dupleix was called home by the directors of the French company, who were unwilling to commit costly resources to his aggressive policy. In North America English colonists from the Atlantic seaboard had already staked out claims to the rich wilderness between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. But the French, equally intent on mastering the area, moved first and established a string of forts in western Pennsylvania from Presque Isle (later Erie) south to Fort Duquesne (later Pittsburgh). In 1754 a force of Virginians under a youthful George Washington (1732-1799) tried unsuccessfully to dislodge the French from Fort Duquesne, initiating a war that would end in a British victory.

Constitution

Constitution of 1791, French constitution created by the National Assembly during the French Revolution. It retained the monarchy, but sovereignty effectively resided in the Legislative Assembly, which was elected by a system of indirect voting. The franchise was restricted to "active" citizens who paid a minimal sum in taxes; about two-thirds of adult men had the right to vote for electors and to choose certain local officials directly. The constitution lasted less than a year. This article was most recently revised and updated by Heather Campbell. Sponsored by Advertising Partner Sponsored Video Watch to learn more LEARN MORE constitution Introduction Theories about constitutions Features of constitutional government The practice of constitutional government Fast Facts 2-Min Summary Related Content Media Images More More Articles On This Topic Additional Reading Contributors Article History HomePolitics, Law & GovernmentLaw, Crime & Punishmentconstitutionpolitics and lawPrint Cite Share MoreBy Herbert John Spiro • Edit HistoryConstitution of the United States of AmericaSee all mediaKey People: Oliver Cromwell John Adams Napoleon III Josip Broz Tito Karl August von HardenbergRelated Topics: Constitution of the United States of America constitutional engineering amendment ratification mixed constitution...(Show more)See all related content → constitution, the body of doctrines and practices that form the fundamental organizing principle of a political state. In some cases, such as the United States, the constitution is a specific written document. In others, such as the United Kingdom, it is a collection of documents, statutes, and traditional practices that are generally accepted as governing political matters. States that have a written constitution may also have a body of traditional or customary practices that may or may not be considered to be of constitutional standing. Virtually every state claims to have a constitution, but not every government conducts itself in a consistently constitutional manner. The general idea of a constitution and of constitutionalism originated with the ancient Greeks and especially in the systematic, theoretical, normative, and descriptive writings of Aristotle. In his Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, Constitution of Athens, and other works, Aristotle used the Greek word for constitution (politeia) in several different senses. The simplest and most neutral of these was "the arrangement of the offices in a polis" (state). In this purely descriptive sense of the word, every state has a constitution, no matter how badly or erratically governed it may be. This article deals with the theories and classical conceptions of constitutions as well as the features and practice of constitutional government throughout the world. For specific discussion of the U.S. Constitution, see Constitution of the United States of America. Theories about constitutions Aristotle's classification of the "forms of government" was intended as a classification of constitutions, both good and bad. Under good constitutions—monarchy, aristocracy, and the mixed kind to which Aristotle applied the same term politeia—one person, a few individuals, or the many rule in the interest of the whole polis. Under the bad constitutions—tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy—the tyrant, the rich oligarchs, or the poor dēmos, or people, rule in their own interest alone. Aristotle regarded the mixed constitution as the best arrangement of offices in the polis. Such a politeia would contain monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements. Its citizens, after learning to obey, were to be given opportunities to participate in ruling. This was a privilege only of citizens, however, since neither noncitizens nor slaves would have been admitted by Aristotle or his contemporaries in the Greek city-states. Aristotle regarded some humans as natural slaves, a point on which later Roman philosophers, especially the Stoics and jurists, disagreed with him. Although slavery was at least as widespread in Rome as in Greece, Roman law generally recognized a basic equality among all humans. This was because, the Stoics argued, all humans are endowed by nature with a spark of reason by means of which they can perceive a universal natural law that governs all the world and can bring their behaviour into harmony with it. Roman law thus added to Aristotelian notions of constitutionalism the concepts of a generalized equality, a universal regularity, and a hierarchy of types of laws. Aristotle had already drawn a distinction between the constitution (politeia), the laws (nomoi), and something more ephemeral that corresponds to what could be described as day-to-day policies (psēphismata). The latter might be based upon the votes cast by the citizens in their assembly and might be subject to frequent changes, but nomoi, or laws, were meant to last longer. The Romans conceived of the all-encompassing rational law of nature as the eternal framework to which constitutions, laws, and policies should conform—the constitution of the universe. Influence of the church Christianity endowed this universal constitution with a clearly monarchical cast. The Christian God, it came to be argued, was the sole ruler of the universe, and his laws were to be obeyed. Christians were under an obligation to try to constitute their earthly cities on the model of the City of God. Both the church and the secular authorities with whom the church came into conflict in the course of the Middle Ages needed clearly defined arrangements of offices, functions, and jurisdictions. Medieval constitutions, whether of church or state, were considered legitimate because they were believed to be ordained of God or tradition or both. Confirmation by officers of the Christian Church was regarded as a prerequisite of the legitimacy of secular rulers. Coronation ceremonies were incomplete without a bishop's participation. The Holy Roman emperor travelled to Rome in order to receive his crown from the pope. Oaths, including the coronation oaths of rulers, could be sworn only in the presence of the clergy because oaths constituted promises to God and invoked divine punishment for violations. Even in an imposition of a new constitutional order, novelty could always be legitimized by reference to an alleged return to a more or less fictitious "ancient constitution." It was only in Italy during the Renaissance and in England after the Reformation that the "great modern fallacy" (as the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt called it) was established, according to which citizens could rationally and deliberately adopt a new constitution to meet their needs. The social contract The theoretical foundations of modern constitutionalism were laid down in the great works on the social contract, especially those of the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the 17th century and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th. As a result of the Reformation the basis of divinely sanctioned contractual relations was broken up. The Holy Roman Empire was torn apart by the wars of the Reformation. Henry VIII made the Church of England independent of Rome. In these circumstances, it became necessary to search for a new basis of order and stability, loyalty and obedience. In their search, political theorists—and especially the Protestants among them—turned to the old biblical concept of a covenant or contract, such as the one between God and Abraham and the Israelites of the Old Testament. In a sense, the secular theorists of the social contract almost reversed the process of choice. Instead of God choosing his people, a people through its representatives was now looked upon as choosing its governors, or its mode of governance, under God, by means of a social contract or constitution. According to modern theories of the social contract, the political unit is nevertheless established as in the biblical model by means of a promise or promises. Thomas Hobbes's state, or "Leviathan," comes into being when its individual members renounce their powers to execute the laws of nature, each for himself, and promise to turn these powers over to the sovereign—which is created as a result of this act—and to obey thenceforth the laws made by this sovereign. These laws enjoy authority because individual members of society are in effect their co-authors. According to Locke, individuals promise to agree to accept the judgments of a common judge (the legislature) when they accede to the compact that establishes civil society. After this (in one interpretation of Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government), another set of promises is made—between the members of the civil society, on the one hand, and the government, on the other. The government promises to execute its trust faithfully, leaving to the people the right to rebel in case the government breaks the terms of the contract, or, in other words, violates the constitution. Subsequent generations accept the terms of the compact by accepting the inheritance of private property that is created and protected by the compact. Anyone who rejects the constitution must leave the territory of the political unit and go in vacuis locis, or "empty places"—America, in Locke's time. In his Letters on Toleration, Locke characteristically excluded atheists from religious toleration because they could be expected either not to take the original contractual oath or not to be bound by the divine sanctions invoked for its violation. For Rousseau, too, the willingness to subject oneself to the "general will" to which only the popular sovereign can give expression is the essential ingredient of the social contract. In taking this position, Rousseau may have been influenced by the experience of his native Geneva. The Swiss Confederation is still referred to officially, in German, as an Eidgenossenschaft, a term best translated as "fellowship of the oath." Hobbes on sovereignty Hobbes's main contribution to constitutionalism lies in his radical rationalism. Individuals, according to Hobbes, come together out of the state of nature, which is a state of disorder and war, because their reason tells them that they can best ensure their self-preservation by giving all power to a sovereign. The sovereign may consist of a single person, an assembly, or the whole body of citizens; but regardless of its form, all the powers of sovereignty have to be combined and concentrated in it. Hobbes held that any division of these powers destroyed the sovereign and thereby returned the members of the commonwealth to the state of nature, in which the condition of man is ". . . solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes therefore preferred the singular sovereign since he was less likely than an assembly or than the whole body of citizens to become internally or functionally divided. The individual should retain only his natural rights, which he cannot surrender into the common pool of sovereign powers. These rights include the right against self-incrimination, the right to purchase a substitute for compulsory military service, and the right to act freely in instances in which the laws are silent. Locke attempted to provide firm assurance of the individual's natural rights, partly by assigning separate though coordinated powers to the monarch and Parliament and partly by reserving the right of revolution against a government that had become unconstitutionally oppressive. Locke did not use the word sovereignty. In this as in other respects, he remained within the English constitutional tradition, which had eschewed the concentration of all powers in a single organ of government. The closest that English constitutionalists came to identifying the centre of sovereign power was in the phrase, used frequently from the 16th century onward, the king (or queen) in Parliament. Rousseau and the general will Whereas Hobbes created his unitary sovereign through the mechanism of individual and unilateral promises and whereas Locke prevented excessive concentration of power by requiring the cooperation of different organs of government for the accomplishment of different purposes, Rousseau merged all individual citizens into an all-powerful sovereign whose main purpose was the expression of the general will. By definition, the general will can never be wrong; for when something contrary to the general interest is expressed, it is defined as the mere "will of all" and cannot have emanated from the sovereign. In order to guarantee the legitimacy of government and laws, Rousseau would have enforced universal participation in order to "force men to be free," as he paradoxically phrased it. In common with Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau required the assent of all to the original social contract. He required smaller majorities for the adoption of laws of lesser importance than the constitution itself. His main concern was to provide for legitimacy through universal participation in legislation, whereas Locke and Hobbes were more concerned to provide constitutional stability through consent. As a result, Rousseau's thought appears to be more democratic than that of his English predecessors. He has even been accused of laying the philosophical foundations of "totalitarian democracy," for the state he describes in The Social Contract would be subject, at the dictates of its universal and unanimous sovereign, to sudden changes, or even transformations, of its constitution. In the political thought of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau may be found theoretical consideration of the practical issues that were to confront the authors of the American and French constitutions. The influence of theories of the social contract, especially as they relate to the issues of natural rights and the proper functions of government, pervades the constitution making of the revolutionary era that began with the American Revolution and is indeed enshrined in the great political manifestos of the time, the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The constitutional experience of these two countries, and, of course, of England, had great influence on liberal thought in Europe and other parts of the world during the 19th century and found expression in the constitutions that were demanded of the European monarchies. The extent to which the ideal of constitutional democracy has become entwined with the practice of constitutional government will be apparent from the examination in the following section of the main features of constitutional government. Features of constitutional government Virtually all contemporary governments have constitutions, but possession and publication of a constitution does not make a government constitutional. Constitutional government in fact comprises the following elements. Procedural stability Certain fundamental procedures must not be subject to frequent or arbitrary change. Citizens must know the basic rules according to which politics are conducted. Stable procedures of government provide citizens with adequate knowledge of the probable consequences of their actions. By contrast, under many nonconstitutional regimes, such as Hitler's in Germany and Stalin's in the Soviet Union, individuals, including high government officials, never knew from one day to the next whether the whim of the dictator's will would not turn today's hero into tomorrow's public enemy. Accountability Under constitutional government, those who govern are regularly accountable to at least a portion of the governed. In a constitutional democracy, this accountability is owed to the electorate by all persons in government. Accountability can be enforced through a great variety of regular procedures, including elections, systems of promotion and discipline, fiscal accounting, recall, and referendum. In constitutional democracies, the accountability of government officials to the citizenry makes possible the citizens' responsibility for the acts of government. The most obvious example of this two-directional flow of responsibility and accountability is the electoral process. A member of the legislature or the head of government is elected by adult citizens and is thereby invested with authority and power in order that he may try to achieve those goals to which he committed himself in his program. At the end of his term of office, the electorate has the opportunity to judge his performance and to reelect him or dismiss him from office. The official has thus rendered his account and has been held accountable. Representation Those in office must conduct themselves as the representatives of their constituents. To represent means to be present on behalf of someone else who is absent. Elections, of course, are not the only means of securing representation or of ensuring the representativeness of a government. Hereditary medieval kings considered themselves, and were generally considered by their subjects, to be representatives of their societies. Of the social contract theorists only Rousseau denied the feasibility of representation for purposes of legislation. The elected status of officeholders is sometimes considered no guarantee that they will be "existentially representative" of their constituents, unless they share with the latter certain other vital characteristics such as race, religion, sex, or age. The problems of representation are in fact more closely related to democratic than to constitutionalist criteria of government: a regime that would be considered quite unrepresentative by modern standards could still be regarded as constitutional so long as it provided procedural stability and the accountability of officeholders to some but not all of the governed and so long as the governors were representative of the best or the most important elements in the body politic. Division of power Constitutional government requires a division of power among several organs of the body politic. Preconstitutionalist governments, such as the absolute monarchies of Europe in the 18th century, frequently concentrated all power in the hands of a single person. The same has been true in modern dictatorships such as Hitler's in Germany. Constitutionalism, on the other hand, by dividing power—between, for example, local and central government and between the legislature, executive, and judiciary—ensures the presence of restraints and "checks and balances" in the political system. Citizens are thus able to influence policy by resort to any of several branches of government. Openness and disclosure Democracy rests upon popular participation in government, constitutionalism upon disclosure of and openness about the affairs of government. In this sense, constitutionalism is a prerequisite of successful democracy, since the people cannot participate rationally in government unless they are adequately informed of its workings. Originally, because they were concerned with secrets of state, bureaucracies surrounded their activities with a veil of secrecy. The ruler himself always retained full access to administrative secrets and often to the private affairs of his subjects, into which bureaucrats such as tax collectors and the police could legally pry. But when both administrators and rulers were subjected to constitutional restraints, it became necessary that they disclose the content of their official activities to the public to which they owed accountability. This explains the provision contained in most constitutions obliging the legislature to publish a record of its debates. READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC constitutional law: Constitutions and constitutional law In the broadest sense a constitution is a body of rules governing the affairs of an organized group. A parliament, a church... Constitutionality Written constitutions normally provide the standard by which the legitimacy of governmental actions is judged. In the United States, the practice of the judicial review of congressional legislation for its constitutionality—that is, for its conformity with the U.S. Constitution—though not explicitly provided for by the Constitution, developed in the early years of the republic. More recently, other written constitutions, including the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy's republican constitution, provided explicitly for judicial review of the constitutionality of parliamentary legislation. This does not necessarily mean that a constitution is regarded as being prior and superior to all law. Although several European countries, including France and Italy, adopted new constitutions after World War II, they kept in force their codes of civil law, which had been legislated in the 19th century; and the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizens certain substantive and procedural rights to which they deemed themselves entitled as subjects of the British crown under the ancient English common law. Despite the greater antiquity of law codes, however, portions of them have been revised from time to time in order to eliminate conflicts between the law and certain constitutional norms that are regarded as superior. Parts of German family law and of the criminal code, for example, were revised in order to bring them into conformity with the constitutional provisions regarding the equality of persons irrespective of sex and with the individual's constitutionally guaranteed right to the free development of his personality. Conflicting interests or parties are, of course, likely to place different interpretations on particular provisions of a constitution, and means, therefore, have to be provided for the resolution of such conflicts. The constitution itself may establish an institution, the task of which is to interpret and clarify the terms of that constitution. In the American system, the Supreme Court is generally regarded as the authoritative interpreter of the Constitution. But the Supreme Court cannot be regarded as the "final" interpreter of the meaning of the Constitution for a number of reasons. The court can always reverse itself, as it has done before. The president can gradually change the interpretative outlook of the court through the nomination of new justices, and the Congress can exert a more negative influence by refusing to confirm presidential nominations of justices. Provision was made in the constitution of the Fifth French Republic for the interpretation of certain constitutional matters by a Constitutional Council. Soon after the French electorate, in a referendum in 1958, had voted to accept the Constitution, a controversy erupted in France over the question of whether the president of the republic could submit to popular referendum issues not involving constitutional amendments but on which parliament had taken a position at odds with the president's. The Constitution itself seemed to provide that the Constitutional Council could rule definitively on this question, but Pres. Charles de Gaulle chose to ignore its ruling, which was unfavourable to himself. As a result, the Constitutional Council lost authority as the final interpreter of the meaning of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. It may thus be seen that because of the inherent difficulties in assessing the intentions of the authors of a constitution and because of the possibility that the executive or legislative branch of government may be able to ignore, override, or influence its findings, it is difficult to ensure constitutional government merely by setting up an institution whose purpose is constitutional interpretation. Constitutional change Written constitutions are not only likely to give rise to greater problems of interpretation than unwritten ones, but they are also harder to change. Unwritten constitutions tend to change gradually, continually, and often imperceptibly, in response to changing needs. But when a constitution lays down exact procedures for the election of the president, for relations between the executive and legislative branches, or for defining whether a particular governmental function is to be performed by the federal government or a member state, then the only constitutional way to change these procedures is by means of the procedure provided by the constitution itself for its own amendment. Any attempt to effect change by means of judicial review or interpretation is unconstitutional, unless, of course, the constitution provides that a body (such as the U.S. Supreme Court) may change, rather than interpret, the constitution. Many constitutional documents make no clear distinction between that which is to be regarded as constitutional, fundamental, and organic, on the one hand, and that which is merely legislative, circumstantial, and more or less transitory, on the other. The constitution of the German Weimar Republic could be amended by as little as four-ninths of the membership of the Reichstag, without any requirement for subsequent ratification by the states, by constitutional conventions, or by referendum. Although Hitler never explicitly abrogated the Weimar Constitution, he was able to replace the procedural and institutional stability that it had sought to establish with a condition of almost total procedural and institutional flux. A similar situation prevailed in the Soviet Union under the rule of Stalin. But Stalin took great trouble and some pride in having a constitution bearing his name adopted in 1936. The Stalin constitution continued, together with the Rules of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to serve as the formal framework of government until the ratification of a new, though rather similar, constitution in 1977. The procedures established by these documents, however, were not able to provide Soviet citizens and politicians with reliable knowledge of the rules of the political process from one year to the next or with guidance as to which institutions and practices they were to consider fundamental or virtually sacrosanct and which they could safely criticize. As a result, changes in the personnel and policies of the Soviet Union and of similar Communist regimes were rarely brought about smoothly and frequently required the use of violence. Constitutional stability If one distinguishes between stability and stagnation on the one hand and between flexibility and flux on the other, then one can consider those constitutional systems most successful that combine procedural stability with substantive flexibility—that is, that preserve the same general rules of political procedure from one generation to the next while at the same time facilitating adaptation to changing circumstances. By reference to such criteria, those written constitutions have achieved the greatest success that are comparatively short; that confine themselves in the main to matters of procedure (including their own amendment) rather than matters of substance; that, to the extent that they contain substantive provisions at all, keep these rather vague and generalized; and that contain procedures that are congruent with popular political experience and know-how. These general characteristics appear to be more important in making for stability than such particular arrangements as the relations between various organs and levels of government or the powers, functions, and terms of tenure of different officers of state. There is little evidence to support the thesis that a high level of citizen participation necessarily contributes to the stability of constitutional government. On the contrary, the English political economist Walter Bagehot, who in 1867 wrote a classic analysis of the English constitution (The English Constitution), stressed the "deferential" character of the English people, who were quite happy to leave government in the hands of the governing class. Much more important than formal citizen behaviour, such as electoral participation, are informal attitudes and practices and the extent to which they are congruent with the formal prescriptions and proscriptions of the constitution itself. Constitutional government cannot survive effectively in situations in which the constitution prescribes a pattern of behaviour or of conducting affairs that is alien to the customs and way of thinking of the people. When, as happened in many developing countries in the decades after World War II, a new and alien kind of constitutional democracy is imposed or adopted, a gap may soon develop between constitutionally prescribed and actual governmental practice. This in turn renders the government susceptible to attack by opposition groups. Such attack is especially easy to mount in situations in which a constitution has a heavy and detailed substantive content, when, for example, it guarantees the right to gainful employment or the right to a university education for all qualified candidates. In the event of the government being unable to fulfill its commitment, the opposition is able to call the constitution a mere scrap of paper and to demand its improvement or even its complete replacement. Such tactics often have succeeded, but they ignore the dual strategic function of the constitution. It is meant not only to arrange the offices of the state, in Aristotle's sense, but also to state the goals toward which the authors and ratifiers of the constitution want their community to move. The practice of constitutional government Great Britain It is accepted constitutional theory that Parliament (the House of Commons and the House of Lords acting with the assent of the monarch) can do anything it wants to, including abolish itself. The interesting aspect of British government is that, despite the absence of restraints such as judicial review, acts that would be considered unconstitutional in the presence of a written constitution are attempted very rarely, certainly less often than in the United States. The English constitution and the English common law grew up together, very gradually, more as the result of the accretion of custom than through deliberate, rational legislation by some "sovereign" lawgiver. Parliament grew out of the Curia Regis, the King's Council, in which the monarch originally consulted with the great magnates of the realm and later with commoners who represented the boroughs and the shires. Parliament was, and is, a place in which to debate specific issues of disagreement between, initially, the crown, on the one hand, and the Lords and Commons, on the other. The conflicts were settled in Parliament so that its original main function was that of a court—it was in fact known as "the High Court of Parliament" as late as the 16th century. The locus of power in the English constitution shifted gradually as a result of changes in the groups whose consent the government required in order to be effective. In feudal times, the consent of the great landowning noblemen was needed. Later, the cooperation of commoners willing to grant revenue to the crown—that is, to pay taxes—was sought. The crown itself, meanwhile, was increasingly institutionalized, and the distinction was drawn ever more clearly between the private and public capacities of the king. During the course of the 18th century, effective government passed more and more into the hands of the king's first minister and his cabinet, all of them members of one of the two houses of Parliament. Before this development, the king's ministers depended upon their royal master's confidence to continue in office. Henceforward they depended upon the confidence of the House of Lords and especially the House of Commons, which had to vote the money without which the king's government could not be carried on. In this way the parlay that was originally between the monarch and the houses of Parliament was now struck between the ministry and its supporters, on the one hand, and opposing members of Parliament, on the other. Parliamentary factions were slowly consolidated into parliamentary parties, and these parties reached out for support into the population at large by means of the franchise, which was repeatedly enlarged in the course of the 19th century and eventually extended to women and then to 18-year-olds in the 20th. Until the early 21st century, a prime minister who lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons could either resign to let the leader of the opposition form a new government or ask the monarch to dissolve Parliament and call for new elections. Following adoption of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act (2011), however, monarchs could no longer dissolve Parliament upon the request of the prime minister, and general elections were permanently scheduled to take place on the first Thursday in May in every fifth year, beginning in May 2015. (Early elections could still take place if agreed to by at least two-thirds of the House of Commons or if a motion of no confidence is adopted and no new government is formed within 14 days.) Relations between, and the relative powers of, the House of Lords and the House of Commons have been repeatedly redefined to the disadvantage of the House of Lords by acts of Parliament, to such an extent that the Lords retain only a weak suspensory veto. All such fundamental constitutional changes have occurred either informally and without any kind of legislation at all or as a result of the same legislative procedures employed to pass any other ordinary circumstantial bill. United States The U.S. Constitution is not only replete with phrases taken from the British constitutional vocabulary, but in several respects, it also represents a codification of its authors' understanding of the English constitution, to which they added ingenious federalist inventions and the formal amending procedure itself. Despite the availability of this procedure, however, many if not most of the fundamental changes in American constitutional practice have not been effected by formal amendments. The Constitution still does not mention political parties or the president's cabinet. Nor was the Constitution changed in order to bring about or to sanction the fundamentally altered relations between the executive and the Congress, between the Senate and the House, and between the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive. The presence of a constitutional document, however, has made American politics more consciously "constitutionalist," at least in the sense that politicians in the United States take more frequent recourse than their British counterparts to legalistic argumentation and to actual constitutional litigation. The United States, moreover, is denied the kind of flexibility illustrated by the postponement of British parliamentary elections during World War II since the Constitution explicitly provides the dates for congressional and presidential elections. It is one of the remarkable facts of American constitutional history that the constitutional timetable for elections has always been observed, even during external war and the Civil War of the 19th century. Europe France, Germany, and Italy, as well as most non-European countries influenced by continental concepts of constitutionalism, have no record of unbroken constitutional fidelity similar to that found in Britain and the U.S. Because of the highly substantive and ideological content of most French constitutions, the best way to change them has been to replace them altogether with a new, ideologically different document. Only the constitution of the Third Republic (established in 1870) was exceptional in this respect, since it consisted of very short, highly procedural organic laws, which served France well for 70 years, until the German invasion of 1940. The main political problem attributed to the constitution of the Third Republic was the instability of cabinets. The negative majorities that voted "no confidence" in a cabinet usually could not stay together for the positive purpose of confirming a new cabinet. The constitution of the Fourth Republic (1946-58) made the overthrow of governments by the National Assembly more difficult. In fact, however, the life of the average cabinet in the Fourth Republic was even shorter than in the Third, and French government became virtually paralyzed when it had to deal with the problems raised by the Algerian independence movement. To avert a military takeover, General de Gaulle was given wide discretion in 1958 in the formulation of a new constitution, which was overwhelmingly accepted in a referendum. The constitution of the Fifth French Republic gives the president of the Republic the power to dissolve Parliament and the means of circumventing a hostile National Assembly through the referendum. Since 1958, French cabinets have been very stable indeed, and the constitution proved resilient during the "revolution of 1968." Germany, which was unified as a national state only in 1871, established its first democratic constitution in 1919, after its defeat in World War I. Although some of the greatest German jurists and social scientists of the time participated in writing the Weimar Constitution, it has been adjudged a failure. Political parties became highly fragmented, a phenomenon that was explained partly by an extremely democratic electoral law (not a part of the constitution) providing for proportional representation. Some of the parties of the right, such as Hitler's Nazis, and of the left, such as the Communists, were opposed to the constitutional order and used violence in their efforts to overthrow the Republic. To deal with these threats, the President used his constitutional emergency powers under which he could suspend civil rights in member states of the federal system. Several chancellors (the German equivalent of a prime minister) stayed in office after the President had dissolved a Parliament in which the chancellor lacked a supporting majority. They continued to govern with the help of presidential emergency powers and by legislating on the basis of powers previously delegated to them by Parliament. When a new constitution was drafted for the Western zones of occupation after World War II, every effort was made to correct those constitutional errors to which the failure of the Weimar Republic was attributed. Under the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, Parliament cannot delegate its legislative function to the chancellor, and civil rights cannot be suspended without continuous parliamentary surveillance. The president has been turned into a figurehead on the model of the French presidents of the Third and Fourth Republics, and Parliament cannot overthrow a chancellor and his cabinet unless it first elects a successor with the vote of a majority of its members. Negative majorities cannot paralyze government unless they can agree on alternative policies and personnel. The extreme form of proportional representation used before Hitler came to power was replaced by a mixed electoral system under which half the members of the Bundestag (the lower house of the legislature) are elected from party lists by proportional representation, while the other half are elected in single member constituencies. In order to benefit from proportional representation, a party must obtain at least 5 percent of the votes cast. As a result, the number of parties steadily contracted during the first two decades of the Federal Republic and extremist parties were kept out of Parliament. Cabinets have been very stable, and the provision for the "constructive vote of no confidence" was invoked for the first time only in 1982. Latin America, Africa, and Asia The experience of constitutional government in continental Europe exerted great influence on the newly independent former colonies of Europe in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. In the early years of their independence from Spain, most Latin-American countries adopted constitutions similar to that of the United States. But since they lacked the background that produced the American Constitution, including English common law, most of their efforts at constitutional engineering were unsuccessful. In Asia and Africa and in the Caribbean, many former colonies of Great Britain, such as India, Nigeria, Zambia, and Jamaica, have been comparatively more successful in the operation of constitutional government than former colonies of the continental European countries (e.g., Indonesia, Congo, and Haiti). The British usually left a modified and simplified version of their own constitution upon granting independence to their former subjects, some of whom they had previously trained in the complicated operating procedures of the British constitution. British parliamentary procedure proved sufficiently adaptable to remain in use for some time after the departure of the British themselves. France's former colonies in Africa, because they achieved independence after the founding of the Fifth Republic, modeled their new constitutions upon General de Gaulle's, partly because this enhanced the power of the leaders under whom independence had been achieved. French Revolution Introduction & Top Questions Origins of the Revolution Aristocratic revolt, 1787-89 Events of 1789 The new regime Counterrevolution, regicide, and the Reign of Terror The Directory and revolutionary expansion Fast Facts 2-Min Summary Top Questions Facts & Related Content Media Videos Images More Additional Reading More Articles On This Topic Contributors Article History HomeWorld HistoryWars, Battles & Armed ConflictsFrench Revolution1787-1799Print Cite Share MoreAlternate titles: Revolution of 1789By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica • Edit HistoryLouis XVI: execution by guillotineSee all mediaDate: 1787 - 1799Location: FranceParticipants: bourgeoisie Montagnard peasant philosophe sansculotteMajor Events: Coup of 18-19 Brumaire Civil Constitution of the Clergy French Revolutionary wars Reign of Terror Thermidorian Reaction...(Show more)Key People: Marie-Thérèse-Louise de Savoie-Carignan, princesse de Lamballe Louis XVI Marie-Antoinette Napoleon I Maximilien Robespierre...(Show more)See all related content →Top QuestionsWhat was the French Revolution?Why did the French Revolution happen?Why did the French Revolution lead to war with other nations?How did the French Revolution succeed? French Revolution, also called Revolution of 1789, revolutionary movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and reached its first climax there in 1789—hence the conventional term "Revolution of 1789," denoting the end of the ancien régime in France and serving also to distinguish that event from the later French revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Origins of the Revolution The French Revolution had general causes common to all the revolutions of the West at the end of the 18th century and particular causes that explain why it was by far the most violent and the most universally significant of these revolutions. The first of the general causes was the social structure of the West. The feudal regime had been weakened step-by-step and had already disappeared in parts of Europe. The increasingly numerous and prosperous elite of wealthy commoners—merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, often called the bourgeoisie—aspired to political power in those countries where it did not already possess it. The peasants, many of whom owned land, had attained an improved standard of living and education and wanted to get rid of the last vestiges of feudalism so as to acquire the full rights of landowners and to be free to increase their holdings. Furthermore, from about 1730, higher standards of living had reduced the mortality rate among adults considerably. This, together with other factors, had led to an increase in the population of Europe unprecedented for several centuries: it doubled between 1715 and 1800. For France, which with 26 million inhabitants in 1789 was the most populated country of Europe, the problem was most acute. BRITANNICA QUIZ Plots and Revolutions Quiz Plots and revolutions can take many different forms. Unravel the intrigue with this quiz. A larger population created a greater demand for food and consumer goods. The discovery of new gold mines in Brazil had led to a general rise in prices throughout the West from about 1730, indicating a prosperous economic situation. From about 1770, this trend slackened, and economic crises, provoking alarm and even revolt, became frequent. Arguments for social reform began to be advanced. The philosophes—intellectuals whose writings inspired these arguments—were certainly influenced by 17th-century theorists such as René Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza and John Locke, but they came to very different conclusions about political, social, and economic matters. A revolution seemed necessary to apply the ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This Enlightenment was spread among the educated classes by the many "societies of thought" that were founded at that time: masonic lodges, agricultural societies, and reading rooms. It is uncertain, however, whether revolution would have come without the added presence of a political crisis. Faced with the heavy expenditure that the wars of the 18th century entailed, the rulers of Europe sought to raise money by taxing the nobles and clergy, who in most countries had hitherto been exempt, To justify this, the rulers likewise invoked the arguments of advanced thinkers by adopting the role of "enlightened despots." This provoked reaction throughout Europe from the privileged bodies, diets. and estates. In North America this backlash caused the American Revolution, which began with the refusal to pay a tax imposed by the king of Great Britain. Monarchs tried to stop this reaction of the aristocracy, and both rulers and the privileged classes sought allies among the nonprivileged bourgeois and the peasants. Although scholarly debate continues about the exact causes of the Revolution, the following reasons are commonly adduced: (1) the bourgeoisie resented its exclusion from political power and positions of honour; (2) the peasants were acutely aware of their situation and were less and less willing to support the anachronistic and burdensome feudal system; (3) the philosophes had been read more widely in France than anywhere else; (4) French participation in the American Revolution had driven the government to the brink of bankruptcy; (5) France was the most populous country in Europe, and crop failures in much of the country in 1788, coming on top of a long period of economic difficulties, compounded existing restlessness; and (6) the French monarchy, no longer seen as divinely ordained, was unable to adapt to the political and societal pressures that were being exerted on it.

Catherine the Great

Despite Catherine's personal weaknesses, she was above all a ruler. Truly dedicated to her adopted country, she intended to make Russia a prosperous and powerful state. Since her early days in Russia she had dreamed of establishing a reign of order and justice, of spreading education, creating a court to rival Versailles, and developing a national culture that would be more than an imitation of French models. Her projects obviously were too numerous to carry out, even if she could have given her full attention to them. Her most pressing practical problem, however, was to replenish the state treasury, which was empty when Elizabeth died; this she did in 1762 by secularizing the property of the clergy, who owned one-third of the land and serfs in Russia. The Russian clergy was reduced to a group of state-paid functionaries, losing what little power had been left to it by the reforms of Peter the Great. Since her coup d'etat and Peter's suspicious death demanded both discretion and stability in her dealings with other nations, she continued to preserve friendly relations with Prussia, Russia's old enemy, as well as with the country's traditional allies, France and Austria. In 1764 she resolved the problem of Poland, a kingdom lacking definite boundaries and coveted by three neighbouring powers, by installing one of her old lovers, Stanisław Poniatowski, a weak man entirely devoted to her, as king of Poland. Her attempts at reform, however, were less than satisfying. A disciple of the English and French liberal philosophers, she saw very quickly that the reforms advocated by Montesquieu or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which were difficult enough to put into practice in Europe, did not at all correspond to the realities of an anarchic and backward Russia. In 1767 she convened a commission composed of delegates from all the provinces and from all social classes (except the serfs) for the purpose of ascertaining the true wishes of her people and framing a constitution. The debates went on for months and came to nothing. Catherine's Instruction to the commission was a draft of a constitution and a code of laws. It was considered too liberal for publication in France and remained a dead letter in Russia. Frustrated in her attempts at reform, Catherine seized the pretext of war with Turkey in 1768 to change her policy; henceforth, emphasis would be placed above all on national grandeur. Since the reign of Peter the Great, the Ottoman Empire had been the traditional enemy of Russia; inevitably, the war fired the patriotism and zeal of Catherine's subjects. Although the naval victory at Çeşme in 1770 brought military glory to the empress, Turkey had not yet been defeated and continued fighting. At that point, Russia encountered unforeseen difficulties. Expansion of Russia, 1300-1796Map of Russian expansion from 1300 to 1796.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. First, a terrible plague broke out in Moscow; along with the hardships imposed by the war, it created a climate of disaffection and popular agitation. In 1773 Yemelyan Pugachov, a former officer of the Don Cossacks, pretending to be the dead emperor Peter III, incited the greatest uprising of Russian history prior to the revolution of 1917. Starting in the Ural region, the movement spread rapidly through the vast southeastern provinces, and in June 1774 Pugachov's Cossack troops prepared to march on Moscow. At this point, the war with Turkey ended in a Russian victory, and Catherine sent her crack troops to crush the rebellion. Defeated and captured, Pugachov was beheaded in 1775, but the terror and chaos he inspired were not soon forgotten. Catherine now realized that for her the people were more to be feared than pitied, and that, rather than freeing them, she must tighten their bonds. Before her accession to power, Catherine had planned to emancipate the serfs, on whom the economy of Russia, which was 95 percent agricultural, was based. The serf was the property of the master, and the fortune of a noble was evaluated not in lands but in the "souls" he owned. When confronted with the realities of power, however, Catherine saw very quickly that emancipation of the serfs would never be tolerated by the owners, whom she depended upon for support, and who would throw the country into disorder once they lost their own means of support. Reconciling herself to an unavoidable evil without much difficulty, Catherine turned her attention to organizing and strengthening a system that she herself had condemned as inhuman. She imposed serfdom on the Ukrainians who had until then been free. By distributing the so-called crown lands to her favourites and ministers, she worsened the lot of the peasants, who had enjoyed a certain autonomy. At the end of her reign, there was scarcely a free peasant left in Russia, and, because of more systematized control, the condition of the serf was worse than it had been before Catherine's rule. Thus, 95 percent of the Russian people did not in any way benefit directly from the achievements of Catherine's reign. Rather, their forced labour financed the immense expenditures required for her ever-growing economic, military, and cultural projects. In these undertakings, at least, she proved herself to be a good administrator and could claim that the blood and sweat of the people had not been wasted. Influence of Grigory Potemkin In 1774, the year of Russia's defeat of Turkey, Grigory Potemkin, who had distinguished himself in the war, became Catherine's lover, and a brilliant career began for this official of the minor nobility, whose intelligence and abilities were equalled only by his ambition. He was to be the only one of Catherine's favourites to play an extensive political role. Ordinarily, the empress did not mix business and pleasure; her ministers were almost always selected for their abilities. In Potemkin she found an extraordinary man whom she could love and respect and with whom she could share her power. As minister he had unlimited powers, even after the end of their liaison, which lasted only two years. Potemkin must be given part of the credit for the somewhat extravagant splendour of Catherine's reign. He had a conception of grandeur that escaped the rather pedestrian German princess, and he understood the effect it produced on the people. A great dreamer, he was avid for territories to conquer and provinces to populate; an experienced diplomat with a knowledge of Russia that Catherine had not yet acquired and as audacious as Catherine was methodical, Potemkin was treated as an equal by the empress up to the time of his death in 1791. They complemented and understood each other, and the ambitious minister expressed his respect for his sovereign through complete devotion to her interests. Grigory PotemkinGrigory Potemkin, engraving by James Walker, 1789, after a portrait by Johann Baptist Lampi.Reproduced by courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co., Ltd. The annexation of Crimea from the Turks in 1783 was Potemkin's work. Through that annexation and the acquisition of the territories of the Crimean khanate, which extended from the Caucasus Mountains to the Bug River in southwestern Russia, Russia held the north shore of the Black Sea and was in a position to threaten the existence of the Ottoman Empire and to establish a foothold in the Mediterranean. Catherine also sought to renew the alliance with Austria, Turkey's neighbour and enemy, and renounced the alliance with Prussia and England, who were alarmed by Russian ambitions. Yet, during Catherine's reign, the country did not become involved in a European war, because the empress scrupulously adhered to the territorial agreements she had concluded with several western European nations. Russian EmpireMap of Russian expansion in Asia, 1533-1894.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Catherine's glorification reached its climax in a voyage to Crimea arranged by Potemkin in 1787. In a festive Arabian Nights atmosphere, the empress crossed the country to take possession of her new provinces; the emperor of Austria, the king of Poland, and innumerable diplomats came to honour her and to enjoy the splendours of what became known as "Cleopatra's fleet" because Catherine and her court traveled partly by water. She dedicated new towns bearing her name and announced that she ultimately intended to proceed to Constantinople. Catherine IICatherine II, oil on canvas by Dmitry Levitsky, 1782.Fine Art Images/Heritage-Images Effects of the French Revolution Catherine, like all the crowned heads of Europe, felt seriously threatened by the French Revolution. The divine right of royalty and the aristocracy was being questioned, and Catherine, although a "friend of the Enlightenment," had no intention of relinquishing her own privileges: "I am an aristocrat, it is my profession." In 1790 the writer A.N. Radishchev, who attempted to publish a work openly critical of the abuses of serfdom, was tried, condemned to death, then pardoned and exiled. Ironically, the sentiments Radishchev expressed were very similar to Catherine's Instruction of 1767. Next, Poland, encouraged by the example of France, began agitating for a liberal constitution. In 1792, under the pretext of forestalling the threat of revolution, Catherine sent in troops and the next year annexed most of western Ukraine, while Prussia helped itself to large territories of western Poland. After the national uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko in 1794, Catherine wiped Poland off the map of Europe by dividing it between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795. Partitions of Poland, 1772-95Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Catherine's last years were darkened by the execution of Louis XVI, the advance of the revolutionary armies, and the spread of radical ideas. The empress realized, moreover, that she had no suitable successor. She considered her son Paul an incompetent and unbalanced man; her grandson Alexander was too young yet to rule. Legacy of Catherine the Great Russians continue to admire Catherine, the German, the usurper and profligate, and regard her as a source of national pride. Non-Russian opinion of Catherine is less favourable. Because Russia under her rule grew strong enough to threaten the other great powers, and because she was in fact a harsh and unscrupulous ruler, she figured in the Western imagination as the incarnation of the immense, backward, yet forbidding country she ruled. One of Catherine's principal glories is to have been a woman who, just as Elizabeth I of England and Queen Victoria gave their names to periods of history, became synonymous with a decisive epoch in the development of her country. At the end of Catherine's reign, Russia had expanded westward and southward over an area of more than 200,000 square miles, and the Russian rulers' ancient dream of access to the Bosporus Strait (connecting the Black Sea with the Aegean) had become an attainable goal. At the end of her reign Catherine claimed that she had reorganized 29 provinces under her administrative reform plan. An uninhibited spender, she invested funds in many projects. More than a hundred new towns were built; old ones were expanded and renovated. As commodities were plentiful, trade expanded and communications developed. These achievements, together with the glory of military victories and the fame of a brilliant court, to which the greatest minds of Europe were drawn, have won her a distinguished place in history. BRITANNICA QUIZ Emperors and Empresses from Around the (Non-Roman) World Quiz You may know the emperors of ancient Rome, but do you know emperors and empresses from China, Russia, the Holy Roman Empire, and elsewhere? Take this quiz to find out. Catherine's critics acknowledge her energy and administrative ability but point out that the achievements of her reign were as much due to her associates and to the unaided, historical development of Russian society as to the merits of the empress. And when they judge Catherine the woman, they treat her severely. Her private life was admittedly not exemplary. She had young lovers up to the time of her unexpected death from a stroke at the age of 67. After the end of her liaison with Potemkin, who perhaps was her morganatic husband, the official favourite changed at least a dozen times; she chose handsome and insignificant young men, who were only, as one of them himself said, "kept girls." Although in reality devoted to power above all else, she dreamed endlessly of the joys of a shared love, but her position isolated her. She did not love her son Paul, the legitimate heir, whose throne she occupied. On the other hand, she adored her grandsons, particularly the eldest, Alexander, whom she wished to succeed her. In her friendships she was loyal and generous and usually showed mercy toward her enemies. Yet it cannot be denied that she was also egotistical, pretentious, and extremely domineering, above all a woman of action, capable of being ruthless when her own interest or that of the state was at stake. As she grew older she also became extremely vain: there was some excuse, as the most distinguished minds of Europe heaped flatteries on her that even she ultimately found exaggerated. A friend of Voltaire and Denis Diderot, she carried on an extensive correspondence with most of the important personages of her time. She was a patron of literature and a promoter of Russian culture; she herself wrote, established literary reviews, encouraged the sciences, and founded schools. Her interests and enthusiasms ranged from construction projects to lawmaking and the collection of art objects; she touched on everything, not always happily but always passionately. She was a woman of elemental energy and intellectual curiosity, desiring to create as well as to control.

French Economy and Society

France was large and rich and experienced a slow economic and demographic recovery in the first decades following the death of Louis XIV in 1715.[12] Birth rates were high and the infant mortality rate was in steady decline. The overall mortality rate in France fell from an average of 400 deaths per 10,000 people in 1750, to 328 in 1790, and 298 per 10,000 in 1800.[13] Monetary confidence was briefly eroded by the disastrous paper money "System" introduced by John Law from 1716 to 1720. Law, as Controller General of Finances, established France's first central bank, the Banque Royale, initially founded as a private entity by Law in 1716 and nationalized in 1718.[14][15] The bank was entrusted with paying down the enormous debt accumulated through Louis XIV's wars and stimulating the moribund French economy. Initially a great success, the bank's pursuit of French monopolies led it to land speculation in Louisiana through the Mississippi Company, forming an economic bubble in the process that eventually burst in 1720.[16] The collapse of the Banque Royale in the crisis and the paper currency which it issued left a deep suspicion of the idea of a central bank; it was not until 80 years later that Napoleon established the Bank of France.[17] In 1726, under Louis XV's minister Cardinal Fleury, a system of monetary stability was put in place, leading to a strict conversion rate between gold and silver, and set values for the coins in circulation in France.[18] The amount of gold in circulation in the kingdom rose from 731 million livres in 1715 to 2 billion in 1788 as economic activity accelerated.[13] A view of the port of Bordeaux in 1759 The international commercial centers of the country were based in Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, and Bordeaux. Nantes and Bordeaux saw phenomenal growth due to an increase of trade with Spain and Portugal. Trade between France and her Caribbean colonies (Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique) grew ten-fold between 1715 and 1789, with Saint Domingue the single richest territory in the world by 1789.[13][19] Much of the lucrative imports from the Caribbean were re-exported to other European countries. By the late 1780s, 87% of the sugar, 95% of the coffee, and 76% of the indigo imported to Bordeaux from the Caribbean was being re-exported.[20] Cádiz was the commercial hub for export of French printed fabrics to India, the Americas and the Antilles (coffee, sugar, tobacco, American cotton), and Africa (the slave trade), centered in Nantes.[21] The value of this export activity amounted to nearly 25% of the French national income by 1789.[13] Industry continued to expand, averaging 2% growth per year from the 1740s onwards and accelerating in the last decades before the Revolution.[13] The most dynamic industries of the period were mines, metallurgy, and textiles (in particularly printed fabrics, such as those made by Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf). The advancements in these areas were often due to British inventors. For example, it was John Kay's invention of the flying shuttle that revolutionized the textile industry, and it was James Watt's steam engine that changed the industry as the French had known it. Capital remained difficult to raise for commercial ventures, however, and the state remained highly mercantilistic, protectionist, and interventionist in the domestic economy, often setting requirements for production quality and industrial standards, and limiting industries to certain cities. In 1749, a new tax, modeled on the "dixième" and called the "vingtième" (or "one-twentieth"), was enacted to reduce the royal deficit. This tax continued until the end of the ancien régime. It was based solely on revenues, requiring 5% of net earnings from land, property, commerce, industry and from official offices, and was meant to touch all citizens regardless of status. However, the clergy, the regions with "pays d'état" and the parlements protested; the clergy won exemption, the "pays d'état" won reduced rates, and the parlements halted new income statements, effectively making the "vingtième" a far less efficient tax than it was designed to be. The financial needs of the Seven Years' War led to a second (1756-1780), and then a third (1760-1763), "vingtième" being created. In 1754, the "vingtième" produced 11.7 million livres.[22] Improvements in communication, like an expanding network of roads and canals, and the diligence stagecoach services which by the 1780s had sharply reduced travel times between Paris and the provincial cities, went a long way towards expanding trade within France. However, most French markets were overwhelmingly local in character (by 1789 only 30% of agricultural produce was being sold in a place other than where it was produced). Price discrepancies between regions and heavy internal customs barriers, which made for exorbitant transportation costs, meant that a unified national market like that of Britain was still far off.[13] On the eve of the Revolution, a shipment of goods travelling from Lorraine to the Mediterranean coast would have been stopped 21 times and incurred 34 different duties.[23] Agriculture[edit] Starting in the late 1730s and early 1740s, and continuing for the next 30 years, France's population and economy underwent expansion. Rising prices, particularly for agricultural products, were extremely profitable for large landholders. Artisans and tenant farmers also saw wage increases but on the whole, they benefited less from the growing economy. The ownership share of the peasantry remained largely the same as it had in the previous century, with around 1/3 of arable land in the hands of peasant smallholders in 1789.[13] A newer trend was the amount of land which came into the hands of bourgeois owners during the 18th century: fully 1/3 of the arable land in France by 1789.[13] The stability of land ownership made it a very attractive investment for the bourgeois, as did the social prestige which it brought.[24] Pivotal developments in agriculture such as modern techniques of crop rotation and the use of fertilizers, which were modeled on successes in Britain and Italy, began to be introduced in parts of France. It would, however, take generations for these reforms to spread throughout all of France. In northern France the three-field system of crop rotation still prevailed, and in the south the two-field system.[13] Under such methods, farmers left either one third or half of their arable land vacant as fallow every year to restore fertility in cycles. This was both a considerable waste of land at any one time which might otherwise have been cultivated, and an inferior way of restoring fertility compared to planting restorative fodder crops.[25] Farming of recent New World crops, including maize (corn) and potatoes, continued to expand and provided an important supplement to the diet. However, the spread of these crops was geographically limited (potatoes to Alsace and Lorraine, and maize in the more temperate south of France), with the bulk of the population over-reliant on wheat for subsistence.[26] From the late 1760s onwards harsher weather caused consistently poor wheat harvests (there were only three between 1770 and 1789 which were deemed sufficient).[27] The hardship bad harvests caused mainly affected the small proprietors and peasants who constituted the bulk of French farmers; large land owners continued to prosper from rising land prices and strong demand. Bread shortages could cause steep price rises, which in turn might lead to mass disruption and rioting. The average wage earner in France, during periods of abundance, might spend as much as 70% of his income on bread alone. During shortages, when prices could rise by as much as 100%, the threat of destitution increased dramatically for French families.[28] The French government experimented unsuccessfully with regulating the grain market, lifting price controls in the late 1760s, re-imposing them in the early 1770s, then lifting them again in 1775. Abandoning price controls in 1775, after a bad harvest the previous year, caused grain prices to skyrocket by 50% in Paris; the rioting which erupted as a result (known as the Flour War), engulfed much of northeastern France and had to be put down with force.[29] Slave trade[edit] Main articles: Atlantic slave trade and Slavery in the British and French Caribbean The slaving interest was based in Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Le Havre during the years 1763 to 1792. The 'négriers' were merchants who specialized in funding and directing cargoes of black captives to the Caribbean colonies, which had high death rates and needed a continuous fresh supply. The négriers intermarried with each other's families; most were Protestants. Their derogatory and patronizing approach toward blacks immunized them from moral criticism. They strongly opposed to the application of the Declaration of Rights of Man to blacks. While they ridiculed the slaves as dirty and savage, they often took a black mistress. The French government paid a bounty on each captive sold to the colonies, which made the business profitable and patriotic. They vigorously defended their business against the abolition movement of 1789.[30] 1770-1789[edit] The agricultural and climatic problems of the 1770s and 1780s led to an important increase in poverty: in some cities in the north, historians have estimated the poor as reaching upwards of 20% of the urban population. Displacement and criminality, mainly theft, also increased, and the growth of groups of mendicants and bandits became a problem. Overall about one third of the French population lived in poverty, approximately 8 million people. This could rise by several million during bad harvests and the resulting economic crises.[31] Although nobles, bourgeoisie, and wealthy landholders saw their revenues affected by the depression, the hardest-hit in this period were the working class and the peasants. While their tax burden to the state had generally decreased in this period, feudal and seigneurial dues had increased.[32] Louis XVI distributing money to the poor of Versailles, during the brutal winter of 1788 In these last decades of the century, French industries continued to develop. Mechanization was introduced, factories were created, and monopolies became more common. However, this growth was complicated by competition from England in the textiles and cotton industries. The competitive disadvantage of French manufactures was sorely demonstrated after the 1786 Anglo-French commercial treaty opened the French market to British goods beginning in mid-1787.[33] The cheaper and superior quality British products undercut domestic manufactures, and contributed to the severe industrial depression underway in France by 1788.[34] The depression was worsened by a catastrophic harvest failure during the summer of 1788, which reverberated across the economy. As peasants and wage earners were forced to spend higher proportions of their income on bread, demand for manufactured goods evaporated.[35] The American War of Independence had led to a reduction of trade (cotton and slaves), but by the 1780s Franco-American trade was stronger than before. Similarly, the Antilles represented the major source for European sugar and coffee, and it was a huge importer of slaves through Nantes. Paris became France's center of international banking and stock trades, in these last decades (like Amsterdam and London), and the Caisse d'Escompte was founded in 1776. Paper money was re-introduced, denominated in livres; these were issued until 1793. The later years of Louis XV's reign saw some economic setbacks. While the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763, led to an increase in the royal debt and the loss of nearly all of France's North American possessions, it was not until 1775 that the French economy began truly to enter a state of crisis. An extended reduction in agricultural prices over the previous twelve years, with dramatic crashes in 1777 and 1786, and further complicated by climatic events such as the disastrous winters of 1785-1789 contributed to the problem. With the government deeply in debt, King Louis XVI was forced to permit the radical reforms of Turgot and Malesherbes. However, the nobles' disaffection led to Turgot's dismissal and Malesherbes' resignation 1776. Jacques Necker replaced them. Louis supported the American Revolution in 1778, but the Treaty of Paris (1783) yielded the French little, excepting an addition to the country's enormous debt. The government was forced to increase taxes, including the "vingtième." Necker had resigned in 1781, to be replaced temporarily by Calonne and Brienne, but he was restored to power in 1788.[36]

Reforming the Church

In 1789, the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution, Catholicism was the official religion of the French state. The French Catholic Church, known as the Gallican Church, recognised the authority of the pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church but had negotiated certain liberties that privileged the authority of the French monarch, giving it a distinct national identity characterised by considerable autonomy. France's population of 28 million was almost entirely Catholic, with full membership of the state denied to Protestant and Jewish minorities. Being French effectively meant being Catholic. Yet, by 1794, France's churches and religious orders were closed down and religious worship suppressed. How did it come to this? What did revolutionaries hope to achieve? And why did Napoleon set out to reverse the situation? The Decline of Catholicism? Historians are divided over the strength of Catholicism in late eighteenth-century France. Some suggest that it was still flourishing after the efforts of the Council of Trent (1545-63) to reform and revitalise the Church, as witnessed by its well-educated clergy, numerous and varied religious orders, and renewed forms of worship. Others trace a period of decline, with a small but noticeable decrease in religious observance in the decades before the Revolution. Regional studies of religious belief and practice reveal significant differences between urban and provincial France, between elites and the rest of the population, and, to a lesser degree, between men and women. What is clear, however, is that the eighteenth-century Church was attracting growing criticism from the philosophes, the intellectuals of the Enlightenment who systematically questioned every aspect of French government and society. The Enlightenment quest to promote reason as the basis for legitimacy and progress found little to praise in the Church. While the philosophes appreciated the value of religion in promoting moral and social order, the Church itself was condemned for its power and influence. The scandal surrounding the divisive theological movement of Jansenism, exacerbated by the heavy-handed treatment of its followers earlier in the century, furnished one reason for attacking the Church's authority and its close links with the monarchy. France's lack of toleration for religious minorities provided another. Although the philosophe Voltaire managed some praise for the young nuns who devoted their lives to caring for the sick and poor, the clergy were seen as less useful. The writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier complained in 1782 that Paris was 'full of priests and tonsured clerics who serve neither the church nor the state' and who were occupied with nothing but 'useless and trifling' matters. Criticism was specifically directed at monasteries where monks and nuns spent their days in prayer, much to the ire of philosophes who thought they should instead be reproducing for the good of the nation. The solemn vows taken by these men and women, binding them to the religious state for life, also led to concerns about individual liberty. Denis Diderot railed against the lifelong nature of these vows, warning about decisions taken too young in life and, in his novel La Religieuse (The Nun), raising the spectre of a young woman forced to be a nun against her will. Although most philosophes promoted reform rather than destruction, their comments gave encouragement to a growing anticlericalism whose spite was sharpened by resentment of the Church's wealth. The Church's revenue in 1789 was estimated at an immense - and possibly exaggerated - 150 million livres. It owned around six per cent of land throughout France, and its abbeys, churches, monasteries and convents, as well as the schools, hospitals and other institutions it operated, formed a visible reminder of the Church's dominance in French society. The Church was also permitted to collect the tithe, worth a nominal one-tenth of agricultural production, and was exempt from direct taxation on its earnings. This prosperity caused considerable discontent, best illustrated in the cahiers de doléances, or 'statements of grievances', sent from throughout the kingdom to be discussed at the meeting of the Estates-General in May 1789. Calls for the reform or abolition of the tithe and for the limitation of Church property were joined by complaints from parish priests who, excluded from the wealth bestowed upon the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy, often struggled to get by. When crowds began to gather in Paris on 13 July 1789, the religious house of Saint-Lazare and its neighbouring convent were among the first places searched for supplies and weapons. The Catholic Church may have been the church of the majority of the French people, but its wealth and perceived abuses meant that it did not always have their trust. The Nationalisation of Property On the eve of the Revolution, the French state was on the verge of bankruptcy. Repeated attempts at financial reform had floundered but the Revolution opened the way for a new approach that, from the beginning, involved the Church. On 4 August 1789, when the remains of France's feudal past were abolished in a night of sweeping reforms, the clergy agreed to give up the tithe and allow the state to take over its funding. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, adopted on 26 August, made no recognition of the special position of the Catholic Church. With all authority located henceforth within the nation, the Church now found itself open - and vulnerable - to further reform. On 2 November 1789, France's new National Assembly, known as the Constituent Assembly, passed a decree that placed all Church property 'at the disposition of the nation'. Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun and one of the few clerics to support the measure, argued that all Church property rightfully belonged to the nation and that its return, by helping to bring about a better society, should therefore be viewed as a 'religious act'. Despite clerical support for the Revolution itself, this decree became the first in a series that targeted the Church in a way that soon cast doubt on the Revolution's motives. On 29 October 1789, just days before the nationalisation of Church property, the Assembly heard that two women in a nearby convent were being forced into the religious life. A proposal was immediately made to halt the taking of solemn vows. Not only did this development associate the Church with the scheming and corruption featured in the anticlerical literature of the eighteenth century, but it prepared the way for the closure of France's monasteries and the departure of their inhabitants, decreed on 13 February 1790. It was hoped that the quick sale of monasteries and their contents would help stabilise the nation's finances. The announcement was met with thousands of letters of protest. The new French state had not only taken control of the Church's revenue and property, but, through such radical intervention, seemed to be redrawing the boundaries between church and state. Growing Suspicion Charged with the Church's financial administration, the Assembly now took the opportunity to reorganise it. On 12 July 1790 the Assembly approved the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a constitution whose very name reflected the state's new control of Church affairs. Among the constitution's reforms, dioceses were redrawn in line with state administrative divisions, clergy were to be paid by the state according to a new salary scale, and priests and bishops were to be elected by citizens. The pope's refusal to approve the Constitution, together with growing criticism from conservative members of the Assembly, began to cast doubt on the Church's support. In an attempt to resolve the issue, the Assembly decreed on 27 November 1790 that all clergy must take a public oath of loyalty to the Constitution or surrender their salary and position. As Nigel Aston has suggested, this oath became 'a referendum on whether one's first loyalties were to Catholicism or to the Revolution'. Figures varied considerably between regions, but over 50 per cent of parish clergy swore their loyalty to the Constitution. For others the oath presented a grave matter of conscience eased only on 13 April 1791 when the pope, who had been hesitating, issued his condemnation. Those who took the oath became known as 'jurors', while those who refused were labelled 'non-jurors' or 'refractory priests'. A growing number fled overseas, joining those nobles and clergy who had already emigrated rather than live under the revolutionary regime. The French population gradually split between those who supported the 'Constitutional Church' and those who remained loyal to refractory priests, initially allowed to continue practising. Rather than confirming the allegiance of French clergy to a state-operated church, the oath had put before them a decision that, by forcing them to choose between the Constitutional Church and Rome, would cause a schism among French Catholics for the next decade and generate hostility towards the Revolution and its aims. Meanwhile, support for the refractory Church became increasingly associated with counter-revolution. Émigré priests and bishops preached against the Revolution from abroad, while the refractories that remained became a focal point for broader resentment of the Revolution. The suspicion with which many people viewed constitutional priests, especially in parts of regional France, helped create popular support for the counterrevolutionary cause. This association had immediate implications. In the first week of April 1791, the sisters of a Parisian religious congregation were attacked by crowds of women who accused them of teaching 'false principles' to children and plotting counter-revolution with refractory priests. Such sentiments found official expression in the debates of the 'Legislative Assembly', formed in October 1791 and determined to carry through the policies of the early Revolution. In November it stopped the pensions of refractory priests and prohibited their use of religious buildings. On 6 April 1792 it banned all forms of religious dress, seeking to abolish this visible reminder of the ancien régime and force people to see priests as 'citizens like any others'. France's declaration of war on Austria on 20 April 1792 and its early losses cast further suspicion on refractory clergy and their followers, now suspected of plotting with the enemy. The fall of the monarchy on 10 August provided added impetus for the destruction of anything connected with the ancien régime. The Assembly suppressed all remaining religious orders, including those staffing schools and hospitals, and ordered remaining non-jurors to leave or be arrested and deported. Concern peaked on 2 September when news arrived that the fortress-town of Verdun near Paris had fallen to the allied Prussian forces. Parisians, imagining that imprisoned counter-revolutionaries were preparing to break out and join the enemy, dispensed their own preventative justice when they descended on the city's prisons and, over the course of several days, slaughtered over 1200 prisoners, including at least 200 priests. The September Massacres made clear the distrust that would prevent any accommodation between the Church and the new Republic proclaimed on 22 September 1792. The new Republican government, known as the Convention, responded to growing civil unrest and the ongoing overseas threat with the Reign of Terror. The Revolutionary Tribunal, established on 10 March 1793, aimed to demonstrate that persons of danger to the Republic were being identified and punished. Laws of September 1793 and June 1794 targeting 'enemies of liberty' and 'enemies of the people' saw mounting numbers of priests and nuns arrested and placed on trial. Their charges included not only counter-revolution but 'fanaticism' and possession of items used in the celebration of mass, again demonstrating the suspicion now attached to religious worship. Only a small percentage were guillotined, but their trials - designed to set an example - instead garnered further support for counterrevolutionary forces in the Vendée and other parts of western France and drove religious practice underground. Revolutionary Religion Although the Constitutional Church had been permitted to continue its work, the Convention now considered Catholicism in any form suspicious. Its association with ancien régime France, its adherence to values not of the Revolution's making, and the private nature of worship seemed incompatible with the values of the Republic. From here sprung a movement referred to as 'dechristianisation', which aimed to excise religion from French society. Constitutional priests were advised to abandon the priesthood and were encouraged - or in some cases forced - to marry. Any priest that continued to practise, whether constitutional or refractory, now faced arrest and deportation. In October 1793, public worship was forbidden and over the next few months all visible signs of Christianity were removed, a policy pursued with particular enthusiasm by revolutionary armies eager to seek revenge on the institution that harboured so many counter-revolutionaries. Church bells were pulled down and melted, ostensibly to help the war effort, crosses were taken from churches and cemeteries, and statues, relics and works of art were seized and sometimes destroyed. Such iconoclasm caused considerable concern at official levels, not least because of the destruction wrought on France's artistic and cultural heritage. On 23 November 1793, churches were closed, to be converted into warehouses, manufacturing works or even stables. Streets and other public places bearing the names of saints were given new, often Republicanthemed names, and time itself was recast to further repudiate France's Christian past. The Revolutionary calendar started with the advent of the French Republic (Year 1). The names of its months reflected the seasons and its ten-day week eliminated Sunday as a day of rest and worship. Although such measures were unevenly applied, and in many cases met with considerable local opposition, they reinforced the message that Christianity had no place in the Republic. The revolutionary government had learnt, however, that when destroying the past, it was wise to have something to put in its place. The creation of the Republic in 1792 had given rise to ceremonies and festivals that aimed to make a religion of the Revolution itself, commemorating revolutionary martyrs as its saints and venerating the tricolour cockade and red liberty cap as its sacred symbols. Prominent among such revolutionary 'cults', as they were known, was the Cult of Reason which recognised no god but instead worshiped the goddess of reason in the former churches, now known as 'temples of reason'. Robespierre, wary of atheism and the political forces behind certain cults, introduced on 7 May 1794 the Cult of the Supreme Being, which he envisaged as a new state religion. Its recognition of a supreme deity would, it was hoped, attract and harness the persistent desire for religious belief and worship among French men and women while its proclamation of the soul's immortality would encourage moral behaviour of the type that would ensure a stable and virtuous Republic. But the Festival of the Supreme Being, held on 8 June 1794 throughout France and presided over in Paris by Robespierre, provided little beyond spectacle and, like other cults, it attracted minimal interest outside urban centres. Catholicism had been squeezed out of the Republic, but alternatives imposed from above failed to catch on. The fall of Robespierre in July 1794 brought a thaw towards religious practice. Dechristianisation had forced religious observance into the privacy of the home. With the emigration and abdication of so many priests, and the disruption of regular forms of worship, the laity had become accustomed to taking over services, even performing 'white masses' when there was no priest available. The Convention, anxious to achieve some form of stability, recognised that somehow it would have to accommodate this private worship. It did so by announcing on 21 February 1795 the formal separation of Church and State. Churches were reopened, refractory priests were released from jail, and both constitutional and refractory priests were permitted to practise on the condition that they promised to respect the laws of the Republic. Yet complete separation proved impossible. Religion was still considered a threat and subsequent decrees sought to monitor worship and ban outward signs of religion, such as statues or religious dress, from the public eye. Royalist uprisings led to the reapplication of earlier laws concerning refractory priests, as did the coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797), which saw thousands of refractory priests arrested yet again. Like earlier governments, the Directory (November 1795-99) tried introducing alternatives to Catholicism, notably in the new cult of Theophilanthropy. Yet again, these failed to gain popular support. The Directory instead witnessed a religious revival in which Catholic men - and especially women - played an important role in re-establishing their faith around the wreckage left by the Revolution. Any new regime would have to acknowledge this revival and, if it wanted to ensure the loyalty of France's Catholics, make a place for a Church that could bridge the divisions, confusion, pain, and bitterness of the previous decade. The Return of the Catholic Church Napoleon came to power in 1799 ready to accommodate the continued presence of religious belief and practice in French society, not least in order to dampen counter-revolutionary opposition. Writings from his youth show that Napoleon had little time for religion but, much like the philosophes, he saw its uses for society. He also appreciated its costsaving benefits, demonstrated by the state-sponsored re-establishment of religious congregations to run hospitals and schools. Above all, Napoleon recognised that if relations were mended with the Church, it could be used to promote and consolidate his rule throughout France. Ignoring objections from revolutionary opponents of the Church, Napoleon set about formalising its place in France in a way designed to ensure that loyal membership of the Church and the state were no longer mutually exclusive. At 2am on 16 July 1801 France signed with Rome a document known as the Concordat, the product of eight months of gruelling negotiations. Catholicism was henceforth to be recognised only as 'the religion of the vast majority of French citizens', a description that denied the Church any privileged place within the state, and the Church was to give up all claims to property lost during the Revolution. The Concordat's most dramatic step, however, was to bring the Church under the authority of the state. In measures that recalled the Civil Constitution of 1790, all clergy were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the government, their salaries were to be paid by the state, and dioceses were again redrawn and aligned with administrative divisions. In addition, all bishops were to be appointed by Napoleon, further minimising Rome's authority. This trend was confirmed in 1802 with the addition to the Concordat of the 'Organic Articles', 27 articles developed and announced without consultation with Rome. Article One, requiring that all instructions from Rome be approved by the government, suggested that in this new relationship, papal authority meant little. Napoleon's Church, like the Gallican Church of the ancien régime, had its own national identity. Somewhat predictably, relations with Rome soon deteriorated, culminating in what Geoffrey Ellis has described as 'one of the most extraordinary conflicts between temporal power and spiritual authority history has ever known'. Napoleon increasingly sought to associate his personal rule with the Church, insisting on the pope's attendance at his coronation ceremony in Paris in 1804, introducing a feast day for the rediscovered 'Saint Napoleon', and using the Imperial Catechism, recited by children at Sunday School, to suggest that his reign was authorised by God himself. Yet even as he did so, Napoleon's disdain for Rome became ever more apparent. Not only did he export revolutionary policy concerning religion by closing down monasteries and seizing Church property, but he introduced the Concordat in conquered territories, bringing the Catholic Church in other countries under his rule. Napoleon's occupation of Rome in 1808 brought the relationship to breaking point and led to the Pope's decision to excommunicate him. In retaliation, Napoleon had the pope arrested and later taken to France as his prisoner where he remained until 1814. A new concordat, signed at Fontainebleau in 1813, attempted to 'put an end to the differences' between the two, but this also failed. By making the French Church, as well as its spiritual head, so subservient to state authority, Napoleon had created tensions that served over the course of his reign to further divide its members and increase their loyalty to Rome. Conclusion The wholesale destruction of Catholicism had been far from the minds of the nation's representatives in 1789, but financial concerns, when combined with external and internal threats, eventually made a full-scale attack on the Church and all connected with it a necessity for a Revolution that demanded absolute loyalty. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett see the French Revolution as 'a watershed for Catholicism not just in France but in Europe more generally'. The French Revolution saw the Gallican Church transformed from an autonomous institution that wielded significant influence to one that was reformed, abolished, and resurrected by the state. In this extension of state control, as well as in the targeted destruction of the Church and religious practice, the Revolution represents a key development in the secularisation that would stretch across Europe. But both revolutionary governments and Napoleon were unprepared for the resentment that met state incursion into spiritual matters and the turn to Rome that followed it. The removal of Catholic institutions and their personnel simply forced religious worship into the private sphere and increased the involvement of the laity, trends that would also mark the religious revival that took place in France in the nineteenth century. The consequences of this drastic experiment in the transformation of church-state relations would reverberate in France until the 1905 separation of church and state and are still felt today as states continue to negotiate the sensitive relationship between church, state and religious belief.

Economics

In terms of economic order,Napoleon was successful in slowing inflation, which is the increase in the price of goods and when it takes more money to purchase a product than it did before. King Louis XVI had done quite a number on France's budget, having thrust the country into tremendous debt, so Napoleon also took on the task of balancing the budget and paying off that debt. He also created a National Bank and sold Louisiana territory to the United States, who was more than happy to expand its borders From a social aspect, Napoleon welcomed the nobles - who comprised the higher ranking Estates of the country - back on an agreement of good behavior. Officials were also promoted based on their merit, meaning whether or not they deserved it by the acts they performed or the skills they demonstrated, versus because of their nobility. Finally, he set up a series of Lycees, which today would be considered public schools. By way of religious order, Napoleon and then-Pope Pius VII signed an agreement in 1801 known as the Concordat, which established two major principles: one, that there would be a reconciliation between the Catholics and the French revolutionaries, who had grown wary of each other throughout the Revolution. It also maintained that the Roman Catholic church would be the predominant one of France, but allowed for freedom of religion. The Concordat also stipulated that the Pope would lose any and all political control. Regarding legal order, Napoleon established the Napoleonic Code of Laws, many of which are still in use today. This new code distinguished between various forms of law, such as civil, criminal, family, and property, to name just a few. The Napoleonic Code also promoted equality under the law and also made it so that no "secret" laws could be enforced; the public had to know about what was legal and what was not legal, so transparency was something that he encouraged. This Code was adopted in 1804.

Agricultural Improvements

New Agricultural Practices. The Agricultural Revolution, the unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries, was linked to such new agricultural practices as crop rotation, selective breeding, and a more productive use of arable land.

The War

Napoleonic Wars, series of wars between Napoleonic France and shifting alliances of other European powers that produced a brief French hegemony over most of Europe. Along with the French Revolutionary wars, the Napoleonic Wars constitute a 23-year period of recurrent conflict that concluded only with the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon's second abdication on June 22, 1815. Napoleon I: First EmpireThe greatest extent of Napoleon I's First Empire (1812).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. When the coup of 18-19 Brumaire (November 9-10, 1799) brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power, the Second Coalition against France was beginning to break up. In Holland a capitulation had been signed for the withdrawal of the Anglo-Russian expeditionary force. Although the Russo-Austrian forces in Italy had won a series of victories, the course of the campaign in Switzerland had reflected growing differences between Austria and Russia. Despite Russia's subsequent abandonment of the common cause and France's recovery of control over Holland and Switzerland, the British government paid no serious attention to Bonaparte's proposals for peace in December 1799. On the one hand the regime in France had yet to prove itself and on the other it was expected that the Austrians would make further gains. Napoleon IFirst Consul Bonaparte, oil on canvas by Antoine-Jean Gros, c. 1802; National Museum of the Legion of Honor, Paris.Photos.com/Getty Images Plus BRITANNICA QUIZ History: Fact or Fiction? Get hooked on history as this quiz sorts out the past. Find out who really invented movable type, who Winston Churchill called "Mum," and when the first sonic boom was heard. The defeat of Austria, 1800-01 Though Bonaparte had to embark on the campaigns of 1800 with inadequate forces and funds, the weaknesses of allied strategy went far to offset the disadvantages under which he laboured. Austria had decided on an equal division of its strength by maintaining armies of approximately 100,000 men in both the German and Italian theatres. Instead of reinforcing Austrian strength in northern Italy, where there was most hope of success, the British government spent its efforts in limited and isolated enterprises, among them an expedition of 6,000 men to capture Belle-Île off the Brittany coast and another of 5,000 to join the 6,000 already on the Balearic Island of Minorca. When in June these two forces were diverted to cooperate with the Austrians they arrived off the Italian coast too late to be of use. Napoleon and his generals, detail of The Trophy of the 4th Dragoons, oil on canvas by Édouard Detaille, 1898; in the Musée de l'Armée, Paris. Dagli Orti—Musée de L'Armée Paris/The Art Archive Bonaparte's plan was to treat Italy as a secondary theatre and to seek a decisive victory in Germany. It proved impossible to increase Victor Moreau's Army of the Rhine to more than 120,000—too small a margin of superiority to guarantee the success required. Nevertheless, Bonaparte was busy with the creation of an army of reserve which was to be concentrated around Dijon and was destined to act under his command in Italy. Until he had engaged this force in the south, Bonaparte would be able, should the need arise, to take it to Moreau's assistance. In Italy André Masséna's 30,000-40,000 outnumbered troops were to face the Austrians in the Apennines and in the Maritime Alps until the army of reserve, marching to the south of the Army of the Rhine, should cross the Alps, fall upon the Austrians' lines of communication, cut off their retreat from Piedmont, and bring them to battle. Bonaparte had hoped that Moreau would mass the Army of the Rhine in Switzerland and cross the river at Schaffhausen to turn the Austrian left in strength and obtain a decisive victory before dispatching some of his army to join the force descending on the rear of the Austrians in Italy. Moreau, however, preferred to cross the Rhine at intervals over a distance of 60 miles (approximately 100 km) and to encounter the Austrians before concentrating his own forces. André Masséna, duc de RivoliAndré Masséna, duc de Rivoli, lithograph by François-Séraphin Delpech, after a portrait by Nicolas-Eustache Maurin, 19th century.Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris The Marengo campaign Moreau did not begin his offensive until April 25, 1800, when Bonaparte was issuing the preliminary orders for the crossing of the Alps by the army of reserve. The urgency of the situation in the south, where Masséna was besieged in Genoa on April 21 and Louis-Gabriel Suchet had fallen back to the line of the Var, made it necessary to send the army of reserve, now en route for Geneva, over a pass further to the west than had been originally intended. An ill-provisioned force of 35,000 men and 40 cannons began transiting the Great Saint Bernard Pass on the night of May 14-15 and completed it on May 25. Moreau, who had been asked to send 25,000 men via the Saint Gotthard Pass, released 15,000, but only 10,000 of them joined Bonaparte's army on June 1, a day before the French occupied Milan and its extensive magazines. Marshal Suchet, detail of a portrait by Paulin-Guérin; in the National Museum of the Chateau of Versailles Giraudon/Art Resource, New York When Masséna surrendered Genoa on June 4 and sent his forces to join Suchet's, Bonaparte's presence in the Austrian rear robbed that success of its significance. The collapse of the Austrian offensive enabled Suchet's troops to inflict serious losses in what fast became the Austrian rear as Michael Friedrich von Melas turned to meet the army of reserve. A number of oversights in the execution of Bonaparte's strategy just before the Battle of Marengo (June 14) came close to causing his destruction, for they enabled Melas to concentrate 30,000 men and more than 100 guns for an attack on Bonaparte's 22,000 men and 14 guns. Bonaparte had had to yield ground, but French general Louis Desaix, responding to a hurried summons, returned to assault the Austrian vanguard with 6,000 men and 6 or 8 cannon. François-Christophe Kellermann's cavalry charge against the Austrian flank completed the transformation of near defeat into a victory, but Desaix was killed in action. NAPOLEONIC WARS EVENTS keyboard_arrow_left Battle of Lodi May 10, 1796 Battle of the Pyramids July 21, 1798 Battle of the Nile August 1, 1798 War of the Oranges April 1801 - June 1801 Battle of Copenhagen April 2, 1801 Treaty of Amiens March 27, 1802 Battle of Ulm September 25, 1805 - October 20, 1805 Battle of Trafalgar October 21, 1805 Battle of Austerlitz December 2, 1805 Battle of Santo Domingo February 6, 1806 Battle of Jena October 14, 1806 Battle of Eylau February 7, 1807 - February 8, 1807 Battle of Friedland June 14, 1807 Battle of Copenhagen August 15, 1807 - September 7, 1807 Dos de Mayo Uprising May 2, 1808 Peninsular War May 5, 1808 - March 1814 Battle of Wagram July 5, 1809 - July 6, 1809 Battle of Grand Port August 22, 1810 - August 29, 1810 Siege of Badajoz March 16, 1812 - April 6, 1812 Battle of Smolensk August 16, 1812 - August 18, 1812 Battle of Dresden August 26, 1813 - August 27, 1813 Battle of Leipzig October 16, 1813 - October 19, 1813 Battle of Toulouse April 10, 1814 Battle of Waterloo June 18, 1815 keyboard_arrow_right 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 On June 15, 1800, Melas concluded a capitulation: the Austrians were to evacuate northern Italy west of the Mincio, though remaining in Tuscany and the Papal Legations. In exchange, the Austrians received free passage of their troops to Mantua. While Bonaparte lacked the strength in Italy to impose more stringent terms, the Holy Roman emperor Francis II contracted a fresh agreement with Great Britain on June 20. Malta, which Bonaparte had offered to the Russian emperor Paul three months earlier, fell to the British in September. The Danube campaign and Hohenlinden Moreau's principal columns, having reached the Rhine at Strasbourg, Breisach, and Basel, completed the crossing on May 1, 1800, and advanced along the south bank of the Danube. On May 3 French general Claude Jacques Lecourbe took Stockach, while Moreau defeated Paul Kray at Engen. After a further reverse at Messkirch, the Austrians withdrew, reaching Ulm on May 11. Having lost his advantage in numbers through the dispatch of the contingent to Italy, Moreau rejected a direct attack on the strong positions at Ulm in favour of a turning movement on the right. On June 19 he forced the passage of the Danube between Höchstädt and Donauwörth, thereby compelling Kray to evacuate Ulm. The French entered Munich nine days later and had pushed Kray's demoralized army back upon the Inn before hostilities were suspended, on July 15, by the armistice of Parsdorf. Victor Moreau, lithograph, c. 1830. Photos.com/Jupiterimages At the end of the armistice both sides had armies of approximately 100,000 between the Danube and Tirol. While a Franco-Dutch force of 16,000 from the Army of the Main protected Moreau's left wing, 20,000 Austrians in Tirol covered his opponent's left flank. The Austrians forestalled Moreau's impending offensive on the Inn by launching theirs on November 27, 1800. Moreau withdrew to muster his dispersed forces to meet an attempt to outflank him, and in the Battle of Hohenlinden (December 3) the mobility of the French enabled him to rout the Austrian columns, which lost 14,000 men and 80 cannon. Many thousands more were taken prisoner in a vigorous pursuit. By the armistice of Steyr (December 25) the Austrians agreed to negotiate for peace without Great Britain. In Italy the French, in contravention of the armistice, had occupied Tuscany in October 1800 on the grounds of British activity at Livorno. On the Mincio front French general Jacques Macdonald arrived from Chur by a bold crossing of the Splügen Pass with 14,000 men to strengthen Guillaume Brune. Brune then moved against the outnumbered Austrians late in December. Having abandoned the Adige (January 1, 1801) and the Brenta (January 11), the Austrians were ready to sign the armistice of Treviso (January 15). The Peace of Lunéville and the Italian settlement The Franco-Austrian peace of Lunéville was signed on February 9, 1801. For the most part it repeated the Treaty of Campo Formio (1797). The French frontier was to be advanced to the Rhine, with the proviso that the rulers thus dispossessed should be compensated from ecclesiastical territory in Germany. Compensation was also to be found for the Habsburg grand duke Ferdinand III of Tuscany, who was also to be dispossessed. The Dutch, Helvetic, Cisalpine, and Ligurian republics were recognized by Austria. Joachim Murat, lithograph, c. 1830. Photos.com/Jupiterimages The Neapolitans, who had meanwhile invaded Tuscany, were driven back by Joachim Murat's force of 26,000. The Armistice of Foligno (February 18, 1801), which forced the Neopolitans to evacuate the Papal States, was followed by the Peace of Florence (March 28), whereby Naples lost little territory but undertook to exclude British and Turkish trade. On March 21, 1801, the Treaty of Aranjuez was concluded between Bonaparte and Charles IV of Spain (who in October 1800 had restored Louisiana to France). Under its terms, Tuscany was erected into the Kingdom of Etruria for Charles IV's son-in-law, Louis of Bourbon-Parma, and Parma, to which the latter renounced his claim as heir apparent, passed under French administration. Abandoned by the Austrians, Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia could do nothing against the continuing French occupation of Piedmont. Great Britain, France, and the neutrals, 1800-02 The British, in pursuit of their primarily maritime, colonial, and commercial interests in the wars, claimed to have been serving the common cause and had moreover applied their profits to subsidizing the Continental armies, but they had adopted means that offended neutral states and former allies alike. Through their blockade, the British could virtually dictate the terms of European sea trade. When granting licenses for merchant shipping to enter the ports of France and France's associates, they admitted neutrals only when there were not enough British ships to carry all the colonial produce of which they now controlled the sources. Moreover, the British maintained that a neutral flag did not cover an enemy's goods and that these might be seized when destined for a port only blockaded on paper. Iron, hemp, timber, pitch, and corn (maize) were at all times to be regarded as contraband of war, and neutral ships were liable to search even when under convoy. The League of Armed Neutrality Offended by the British capture of Malta after Bonaparte had presented the island to him, the Russian emperor Paul, in November 1800 placed an embargo on British ships in Russian ports. On December 16 Russia, Sweden, and Denmark renewed that League of Armed Neutrality which they had first made in 1780, during the American Revolution. The Danes occupied Hamburg, which had become the main entrepôt for Anglo-German trade after the French invasion of Holland, while the Prussians, who joined the League on December 18, invaded Hanover. PaulPaul, detail of a portrait attributed to J. Voille, c. 1800; in the collection of Mrs. Merriweather Post, Hillwood, Washington, D.C.Courtesy of Hillwood, Washington, D.C. BRITANNICA QUIZ History: Fact or Fiction? Get hooked on history as this quiz sorts out the past. Find out who really invented movable type, who Winston Churchill called "Mum," and when the first sonic boom was heard. Germany and the Baltic States had witnessed much of the expansion of British trade during the previous decade of war, British exports to Bremen and Hamburg having risen 600 percent between 1792 and 1800. The closing of the Baltic Sea and of the German ports and rivers thus struck the most damaging blow at Great Britain's commerce and war economy. Furthermore, the Baltic States and Germany also supplied most of the materials for British shipbuilding and were the main source of the imports of grain, supplying 5-16 percent of British consumption. As the harvests of 1799 and 1800 were poor, the interruption in shipments was soon felt in a bread shortage. The assassination of the emperor Paul (March 1801) removed the chief author of the League at a moment when its members had to reckon with British reprisals. A fleet including 18 ships of the line under Sir Hyde Parker had left Great Yarmouth for the Baltic on March 12. On April 2 Horatio Nelson led a vanguard of 12 ships of the line and frigates into Copenhagen harbour. Shore batteries opened fire but, despite orders to retire and the grounding of three of his ships, Nelson continued the Battle of Copenhagen until he had overcome the stubborn resistance of the vessels and hulks anchored there. The Danes agreed to an armistice and made peace on May 28. Sweden had already done so on May 18, and an Anglo-Russian convention followed on June 17. The League was thus dissolved and its forces withdrawn from Hanover, Hamburg, and Lübeck; in return the British modified their maritime claims. The new Russian emperor, Alexander I, moreover gave up the demand for Malta. Nelson, HoratioHoratio Nelson, colour print by George Baxter, 1853; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Miss Bella Mabury for the Paul Rodman Mabury Collection (M.46.7.7), www.lacma.org The Anglo-Turkish conquest of Egypt British sea power made possible a further success in the course of the year 1801: the defeat of the army that Bonaparte had left in Egypt in 1799. An expeditionary force of 18,000 under Sir Ralph Abercromby was landed at Aboukir (Abū Qīr) in March, the Turks sent 25,000 to the theatre, and 6,000 sepoys from India arrived via the Red Sea. The 13,000 French in Cairo surrendered on June 28 and the 5,000 in Alexandria on August 30. Nelson's attack on the flotilla at Boulogne (August 15-16), however, met with failure. Abercromby, RalphSir Ralph Abercromby.Photos.com/Jupiterimages The interval of peace, 1802-03 Meanwhile the British economy was suffering from severe strain. Gold payments rose steeply in 1800 and 1801, for in addition to disbursing £5,600,000 in subsidies and £2,800,000 in their own military expenses in Europe during these two years, the British spent an estimated £19,000,000 on grain imports. The price of wheat had risen to 156 shillings per quarter by March 1, 1801. It fell to 129 shillings in June and to 75 shillings in December. The Treaty of Amiens The British government had opened negotiations with France on February 21, 1801. William Pitt, whose place as prime minister had been taken by Henry Addington, approved of this overture not so much because of the collapse of Austria as because of the danger presented by the League of Armed Neutrality. The preliminaries having been concluded on October 1, 1801, the Treaty of Amiens was signed on March 27, 1802. Notwithstanding their reverses overseas, the French recovered all their colonies. The British kept Ceylon (now Sri Lanka, taken from the Dutch) and Trinidad (taken from the Spaniards) but restored Minorca to Spain and Cochin (now Kochi), the Cape of Good Hope, and the Spice Islands (Moluccas) to Holland. France agreed to the evacuation of Naples and the Papal States and to the return of Egypt to Turkey. The British undertook to leave Malta within three months. The island was to be handed back to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, with its neutrality guaranteed by the powers. It was agreed that "an adequate compensation" should be found in Germany for the prince of Orange, William V, who had lost his position in the Netherlands. Though Bonaparte had already ignored his undertaking in the Treaty of Lunéville to observe the independence of the neighbouring republics, the Treaty of Amiens made no reference to nonintervention in their affairs. When later the British government complained that French troops remained in Holland and northern Italy in violation of the Treaty of Lunéville, Bonaparte replied that this was the business of the signatories to that treaty and that he desired "the Treaty of Amiens and nothing but that." France had asked for British recognition of the Italian republics, but in the absence of compensation for the king of Sardinia this was withheld. Redispositions in Europe Representatives of the Cisalpine Republic, summoned to Lyons at the end of 1801 to remodel their constitution, invited Bonaparte in January 1802 to accept the presidency of the republic. It was henceforth to be known as the Italian Republic. Similar arrangements were subsequently made in the Ligurian Republic and in Lucca. Piedmont was brought under direct French rule in September 1802. READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC United Kingdom: The Napoleonic Wars The Napoleonic Wars were massive in their geographic scope, ranging, as far as Britain was concerned, over all of the five... In Germany the compensation of the rulers dispossessed by the French was settled by the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (Principal Decree of the Imperial Deputation) of February 1803. French and, to a lesser extent, Russian influence marked the negotiations by which the ecclesiastical principalities and all but six of the imperial cities were distributed among the displaced princes and the larger German states. The church in Germany lost nearly 2,500,000 subjects, while Prussia gained nearly 400,000. Bavaria's losses on the left bank of the Rhine were more than compensated by the acquisition of bishoprics and imperial cities to the east; Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Kassel, and Salzburg became electorates. Austria gained some territory but was in effect weakened, since the new settlement not only left the Reich feebler but also lessened the emperor's voice in its affairs. The coming of peace accelerated Bonaparte's reorganization of French institutions and overhaul of governmental machinery. His achievement in this field provided the model for countries under French occupation during the following decade. Economic aspects of the wars France had a population of 27,350,000 in 1801 as opposed to Great Britain's 10,942,146 and had gained much territory in the warfare since 1792. However, a significant advance in economic strength was to enable Great Britain to wage war against this formidable adversary and to achieve the "miracles of credit" whereby foreign military assistance could be subsidized. The French, whose manufactures progressed less dramatically than the British and whose seaborne trade had been strangled, found it impossible to raise funds commensurate with their aggressive policy in Europe, so that Napoleon had to rely on the spoils of conquest to supplement the deficiencies of French finance. Many of the figures for British overseas trade during the period represent official values based on a scale of prices current in the 1690s, regardless of market value. Useful only for comparison, the official scale shows that exports rose from £20,000,000 in 1790 to £53,500,000 in 1814, increasing by 75 percent between 1790 and 1801 and by 51 percent between 1801 and 1814. The total expenditure of the British government in 1793 was £30,590,000, of which war services amounted to £10,340,000 (nearly twice the figure for peacetime); in 1814 these sums had increased to £163,790,000 and £69,070,000 respectively. The steep rise in national income made this possible both by providing immediate revenue and by supplying the funds from which investors lent to the state, whose debts rose from £230,000,000 at the beginning of 1793 to £507,000,000 in 1802 and to £900,000,000 in 1815. For the period as a whole, 35 percent of the addition to the country's expenditure caused by the war was met from current revenue, and between 1802 and 1813 the proportion of total net governmental income derived from borrowing was never more than 54.7 percent. Great Britain had superior banking services, could suspend payments in gold at home, and was preponderant in the European money market. France by contrast was financially hampered by a national economy and financial machinery ill-constituted to produce government credit, by the virtual impossibility of inflating the metallic currency, and by potential investors' lack of confidence in the regime. The deliberate obscurity of Napoleon's budgetary system makes it difficult to ascertain the exact state of government finances. Among the privy funds that he amassed were (1) the trésor de l'armée (treasury of the army), formed by Austrian and Prussian war contributions and estimated to have furnished 743,000,000 francs between 1805 and 1810; and (2) the domaine extraordinaire of January 1810, largely composed of the territories which Napoleon had retained in the satellite states. These hidden sources of income met some part of French expenditure, and foreign states made further contributions of money as well as troops and supplies, but the disparity between French and British financial resources remains clear. In 1813, when French expenditure was in the region of £40,000,000, the British government was able to borrow £105,000,000 of the £174,000,000 that it spent. Napoleon's economic ideas owed much to the outmoded mercantilist school. He hoped to destroy Great Britain's capacity to make war by closing the European markets to British trade. Yet, when at last he was in a position to do so, the military strength whereby he had enforced his will on Europe was so strained that the Continental powers could break the boycott prematurely and resume hostilities against his widely dispersed armies. Imported grain provided no more than 5 percent of Great Britain's consumption in normal years and is estimated never to have exceeded 16 percent, though in such periods as 1800-01 and 1811-12 home production of grain fell short of normal demand by 40 percent. There is no evidence that Napoleon ever considered withholding grain from Great Britain in an attempt to force withdrawal from the war: when he did suspend shipments, as in 1811-12, it was because grain was scarce in Europe. At other times his mercantilist views led him to export French grain to Great Britain, provided that France received cash, not goods, in return. For the mercantile marine France had had more than 2,000 ships employed in European and colonial trade by 1792 but possessed only 200 ships of 200 tons or more by 1800, while British strength rose by one-third in ten years to number 19,772 vessels (2,037,000 tons) in 1802 and was to reach 21,869 ships (2,447,831 tons) in 1815. Maritime supremacy enabled the British to dominate the colonial reexport trade (coffee, tea, sugar, spices, cotton and dyes) to the great advantage of their national economy. French and British armed forces Napoleon's army and method of warfare In France the law of 10 Fructidor year VI (September 5, 1798), had replaced the levies of the Revolution by a regular method of conscription which, with a few modifications, remained in force until 1815. Of the 5,692,164 men belonging to the 18 classes affected by this law, 2,716,567 were called up and 2,022,201 actually incorporated in the army. Troops levied in the 12 years 1800-11, of whom slightly more than 75 percent came from areas French in 1792, accounted for no more than 50 percent of those mobilized between 1798 and 1815. Between the peace of Lunéville and the campaign of 1805, Napoleon formed the best of the armies that he was to lead. Approximately half of its effectives had already seen active service and there had been ample opportunity to absorb recruits into it and to accustom it to maneuvers en masse. No changes were made in tactics or battle formation and the infantry continued to use the Règlement concernant l'exercise et les maneuvers de l'infanterie (Manual for the Training and Maneuvers of Infantry) of 1791. It was by the overall organization of his army and the direction of its movements that Napoleon brought a new form to warfare with the campaign in 1805, in which for the first time 200,000 men employed in divisions and corps were coordinated to a single purpose under one leader. In 1800 the practice had been adopted of forming groups of several divisions under the command of a senior general, but it was with the formation of the Armée des Côtes, or Coastal Army, on the Channel coast that Napoleon introduced the army corps as the definitive basis of army organization. Each corps was given a separate staff and administrative services and was composed ordinarily of three infantry divisions and a division of light cavalry. Separate from the army corps was the cavalry reserve of two divisions of cuirassiers (heavy cavalry) and three or four divisions of dragoons, each with a mobile battery of horse artillery. Louis-Alexandre Berthier, undated lithograph. Photos.com/Jupiterimages The organization of an appropriate general staff, transport, artillery, and rear services was also undertaken. Napoleon's possession of a general staff, however, did not imply the circumstances associated with the term in later usage. Its chief, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, and the rest of its personnel were required not to think or to act independently but to communicate effectively between Napoleon and his corps commanders. There was no real training for staff work, and the staff officers were chosen haphazardly, as Napoleon reserved the control of a campaign to himself (though he allowed his corps commanders much freedom in the execution of his orders). He was content to employ largely second-rate men who were not always adequate to the parts allotted to them under his supervision and who were to show still more serious deficiencies when they became theatre commanders. Sponsored by MINI The MINI Countryman Untamed Everyone needs to be let off their leash sometimes. Get in the 2023 MINI Untamed Edition, and get wild. LEARN MORE Since he lacked the means to provide for more systematic methods, Napoleon's campaigns had to yield prompt and decisive results. The virtual abandonment of traditional lines of communication in favour of an independent "line of operations" directed against the enemy army and based on a convenient centre for immediate rear services, together with the reduction of supply trains to a minimum, conferred great strategic benefits so long as victory was soon obtained. The system, however, was not amenable to prolonged campaigning or to the conduct of a successful retreat, in which the army would quickly exhaust its supplies, since its customary measures of pillage and forced requisition were less efficient than the more normal organized raising of supplies for payment. Nor could the system be easily applied in comparatively unproductive areas or over great distances—perfected in western Europe and in northern Italy, it was far less practicable in the east. Napoleon did not prescribe the infantry formations to be used by his corps commanders, whose varying combinations were often ineffective and wasteful of manpower, especially in the frontal attacks that he favoured in his later battles. He made no attempt of any consequence to introduce the two-rank firing that the British used to such advantage against opponents whose ranks were at least three deep. He put great emphasis on his cavalry, which screened the movements of army corps, intervened at crucial moments in battle and conducted the vigorous pursuits so profitable after a victorious engagement. With a remarkable grasp of the strategic implications of a situation, Napoleon was preeminent in disposing his army corps to discover the whereabouts of enemy forces, to head them off from retreat, to obstruct their concentration, and to bring them to battle. Mobility and the careful dispersal of semi-independent army corps so as to control an extensive area were often decisive factors in Napoleon's campaigns. British military and naval strength The British regular army had been employed predominantly in colonial warfare, for which it had been freed by calling up the militia to supplement home defense. Even so the demand for men had outrun the supply of volunteers, and in July 1799 the government had begun paying a bounty to militiamen who would volunteer for service with the regular army. The strength of the latter was reduced to 95,800 after the Peace of Amiens. Inevitably the British attached primary importance to their navy. In 1803, whereas the French had 23 ships of the line and 25 frigates and could call upon the Dutch Republic's 15 capital ships (of which, however, only 5 were in commission), the British had 34 ships of the line and 86 frigates in service and 77 ships of the line and 49 frigates in reserve. At the close of the war the British had 240 ships of the line and 317 frigates against the French 103 and 55. HMS VictoryHMS Victory, detail of an oil painting attributed to Monamy Swaine, c. 1792.Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Eng. The Third and Fourth Coalitions, 1803-07 The British rupture of the peace Among the causes of the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens was Napoleon's refusal to make a trade treaty with Great Britain. Excluded from France and the countries under French control, British merchants and manufacturers found peace no more profitable than war. The British government, having shown its good faith by abolishing the wartime income tax and by considerably reducing naval and military expenditure, found ample pretexts for dissatisfaction in Napoleon's uncompromising treatment of the dependent territories. The provocative report by Horace-François-Bastien Sébastiani, published in Napoleon's official press organ Le Moniteur Universel on January 30, 1803, which declared that 6,000 men could reconquer Egypt, gave fresh cause for dispute. Claiming that the treaty of Amiens was not being carried out, Addington's government decided to retain Malta in defiance of the treaty, thus supplying the technical casus belli. To obtain an initial advantage, Great Britain declared war on May 18, 1803. The French thereupon occupied Hanover and Naples, closing Hamburg and Bremen to British trade but failing to occupy Sicily. Both Hanover and Naples, together with Holland, were charged with the support of their French garrisons, 78,000 strong. The French treasury drew on the revenues of northern Italy, received yearly subsidies of 84,000,000 francs from Spain and Portugal and obtained $11,250,000 outright from the sale of Louisiana to the United States in May 1803. Spanish subsidies to France led Great Britain in October 1804 to seize bullion ships en route for Spain, thus provoking the hostilities which lasted until 1808. Louisiana PurchaseEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Louisiana PurchaseCession of Louisiana by Constantino Brumidi. François, marquis de Barbé-Marbois (standing), French minister of the treasury, showing a map to U.S. minister Robert Livingston (right) and U.S. minister plenipotentiary James Monroe (centre).Architect of the Capitol At the end of 1803 Napoleon gave the title Armée d'Angleterre (Army of England) to his forces assembled around Boulogne. Later, when he had successfully turned this army against the Continental powers, he could claim that such had been his original purpose. He had, however, made extensive preparations for the invasion of England, and the army maintained on the Channel coast numbered more than 100,000. He had envisaged a crossing of the Channel en masse, to be completed before British naval forces had time to intervene against his lightly armed invasion craft, but it soon became apparent that there could be no question of getting the invasion fleet to sea quickly enough for that. The Channel therefore had first to be cleared of British warships, and Napoleon prescribed a policy for the French fleet which he hoped would draw British naval strength away from home waters. The formation of the Third Coalition Napoleon seems not to have felt apprehensive at the prospect of a third coalition against France, for he pursued courses which could only encourage its formation. In June 1804, shortly after Pitt had replaced Addington, the British government, which had been considering the terms on which to seek an alliance with Russia and Sweden, received proposals for an Anglo-Russian agreement. Austria could at first respond to Russian overtures only by accepting the promise (November 1804) of Russian help against a French attack; Sweden signed an alliance with Great Britain in December 1804 and with Russia early in 1805; but it was not until April 11, 1805, that Great Britain and Russia provisionally concluded a treaty envisaging a European league to compel France to evacuate Italy and Hanover, to restore independence to Holland and Switzerland and to reinstate the king of Sardinia in Piedmont. The British offered an annual subsidy of £1,250,000 for every 100,000 troops that their allies employed in the field. The French empire had been proclaimed in May 1804 and Napoleon had been crowned emperor in December. He next transformed the Italian republic into the kingdom of Italy—with himself as king—in March 1805, and soon afterward Liguria was annexed to the French empire. The Holy Roman emperor Francis II, in view of the diminution of Habsburg influence in Germany, had already assumed the additional style of emperor of Austria in August 1804. Francis was now so much affronted by Napoleon's actions in Italy that on August 9, 1805, he adhered to the Anglo-Russian alliance, which had been finally ratified on July 28. François Gérard: Napoleon in His Imperial RobesNapoleon in His Imperial Robes, oil on canvas by François Gérard, 1805; in the National Museum of Versailles and Trianons.Photos.com/Thinkstock Napoleon was not without support against this coalition: Bavaria (which joined France on August 25, 1805), Baden (September 5), and Württemberg (October 5) were normally opposed to Austria, and their desire to absorb adjacent Habsburg domains encouraged them to range themselves with France. Moreover, Prussia's neutrality favoured the French by blocking the route that a Russo-Swedish force, accompanied by a British contingent, could have taken from Stralsund to attack the French in northern Germany and the Netherlands. Prussian coolness toward the coalition later delayed the march of Russian armies to support the Austrians in Bavaria. Ulm, Austerlitz, and the Peace of Pressburg The Austrians, who had hesitated to join the coalition, now rushed into hostilities with such speed that they enabled Napoleon to deal with their main army before the Russians had come to their support. Employing heavily superior forces under the Archduke Charles in northern Italy against the French under Masséna (who was to conduct a defensive campaign on the Adige) and keeping a further 25,000 under the Archduke John in Tirol, the Austrians prejudiced their chance of success in the main theatre of war, Bavaria. On September 8, 1805, fewer than 80,000 Austrians under Karl Mack crossed the Inn, whereupon the much smaller Bavarian army withdrew safely northward to Würzburg. Though Napoleon had begun to move 176,000 men toward central Europe in the last days of August, Mack did not even wait for the first Russian army to join him. While respect for Prussia's neutrality delayed the arrival of the second Russian army until November, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte's Frenchmen from Hanover marched southward across Prussian Ansbach without Prussia's permission. Charles, ArchdukeArchduke Charles, statue on the Heldenplatz, Vienna.© edobric/Shutterstock.com Napoleon's first orders had directed the French forces in Hanover on Würzburg, Auguste-Frédéric-Louis Viesse de Marmont's corps in Holland on Mainz, and the Army of England, henceforth renamed the Grande Armée, on lower Alsace. When he learned that Mack was in the Black Forest, he swung his own army to its left, began crossing the Rhine on September 25, and passed through Württemberg and Franconia in columns which converged on Mack's rear. Mack had grouped his forces around Ulm and awoke too late to his danger. Napoleon's forces began crossing the Danube around Donauwörth, 50 miles (80 km) downstream from Ulm, on October 7, 1805. Uncertain of the Austrians' latest positions, Napoleon now extended his front along the Lech River, detaching one corps toward Munich to contain the Russians should they appear. Despite bad weather, shortage of supplies and clumsiness on the part of some of Napoleon's subordinates in the course of Mack's encirclement, the Battle of Ulm was a spectacular French victory. The mass of Mack's army was taken prisoner at or soon after his capitulation at Ulm, concluded on October 20. So vigorous was the pursuit of the escaping Austrians that only one division was able to join the Russians under Mikhail Kutuzov, who reached the Inn in mid-October with fewer than 40,000 men and who now retired as Napoleon advanced. Leaving Michel Ney to drive the Archduke John from Tirol, Napoleon entered Vienna on November 13. The Archduke Charles, having gained some ground on Masséna in Italy, was recalled to Austria but came too late to defend Vienna and withdrew into Hungary. Murat had gained the passage of the Danube near Vienna by subterfuge, and the French continued to pursue the Russians, who fell back to Olmütz (Olomouc). Napoleon was constrained to suspend his advance at Brünn (Brno), since Kutuzov had been joined by the second Russian army. Moreover, Frederick William III of Prussia, indignant at Bernadotte's violation of Prussian neutrality, was now threatening to intervene in favour of the allies and could have settled the issue if he had promptly sent his army of 180,000 men into the struggle. Great Britain, however, had been offended at Prussia's desire to occupy Hanover and so had not offered money for Prussian or other North German forces. British coolness, together with the influence of the pro-French party in Berlin and Napoleon's procrastination of discussions with the Prussian envoy, Christian, count von Haugwitz, kept Prussia out of the field while Napoleon settled accounts with Russia and Austria. In the Battle of Austerlitz (December 2, 1805) the allies lost approximately 26,000 of their 87,000 men and 180 guns, and the French between 7,000 and 8,000 of their 73,000 men. Francis of Austria signed an armistice with Napoleon on December 6, and Alexander withdrew his broken army to Russia under a truce. The peace treaty between France and Austria was signed at Pressburg (Bratislava) on December 26, 1805. Austria had to cede Venetia, Istria, and Dalmatia to Napoleon as king of Italy. Tirol, Vorarlberg, and several smaller territories were ceded to Bavaria, whose elector, Maximilian Joseph, was now to be recognized as a king. Other territories were granted to Württemberg and to Baden, which became a kingdom and a grand duchy respectively. Würzburg was ceded by Bavaria to Ferdinand of Salzburg (the former grand duke of Tuscany), who in turn ceded Salzburg to Francis of Austria. Trafalgar and Italy The war at sea culminated in the Battle of Trafalgar, on October 21, 1805. On September 14, Napoleon had instructed Adm. Pierre-Charles-Jean-Baptiste-Silvestre de Villeneuve at Cádiz to enter the Mediterranean and to hold some of the coalition's forces in Italy by attacking Naples while the French army marched to the Danube. On October 19-20, Villeneuve left harbour with 33 ships of the line, his Spanish vessels mingled with the French. Nelson met him off Cape Trafalgar with 27 ships. The French and Spanish lost 19 ships on the day of the battle, and 4 more were captured early in November; the British lost none in the battle or in the storm which followed. Nelson and 448 British were killed and an additional 1,200 were wounded. French and Spanish casualties numbered about 4,400 killed, 2,500 wounded, and 7,000 captured, including Villeneuve. The immediate result was to frustrate French plans for a diversion against Naples, and there could be no return to plans for an invasion of England. Trafalgar, Battle ofAdm. Horatio Nelson on the deck of the HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages The Anglo-Russian force that landed at Naples in November 1805 arrived long after Napoleon had withdrawn his troops from the south to strengthen his defenses on the Mincio and too late to affect the outcome of the year's campaigns. The Neapolitans welcomed it and joined the coalition, but the French forced the allies to withdraw to Corfu and Sicily (Reggio, on the mainland, remained in British hands until February 17, 1808). Napoleon's brother Joseph was proclaimed king of Naples on March 30, 1806, in place of the Bourbon Ferdinand IV (whose deposition Napoleon had announced in December 1805). With the occupation of the Papal States the whole of Italy was under French control. Bonaparte, JosephJoseph Bonaparte.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages

Law and Justice

Of all the institutions of the Old Regime, the justice system was criticized the most harshly and the most justifiably. French justice under the Old Regime was marked by the large number of courts, the overlapping of their jurisdictions, the slowness and the cost of proceedings, the harshness of the criminal procedure, the cruelty of the punishments and the severity of the sentences for ordinary people, a severity that contrasted with the extreme clemency shown to the privileged classes. There was generally little love for judges and prosecutors, due to the fact that they defended a system that favoured their own interests but which the majority of people rejected. Only lawyers drawn from the middle or the lower bourgeoisie acknowledged the need for judicial reform. A violent campaign in favour of reorganizing the justice system had convulsed the country since 1760. Montesquieu had earlier addressed strong criticisms against the organization of the judiciary. But it was Voltaire who in his writings brought the most violent blows against the judicial edifice of the Old Regime. Moreover, the movement for reform was not exclusively French. Even the most important works in favour of the reorganization of the judiciary were published abroad, in England and Italy. Thus, Beccaria's treatise On Crimes and Punishments was published in Italian in 1764 before being translated into French in 1766. Following this campaign, the royal power carried out an initial reform in abolishing the "preparatory question" (question préparatoire) on 24 August 1780. This was a form of torture that accused persons were forced to undergo in order to extract confessions from them. However, the "preliminary question" (question préalable) - a form of torture designed to obtain from those who had been convicted the names of their accomplices - continued to exist, as did many other criminal law practices that seem unworthy of the Age of Enlightenment. In 1788, in a final attempt by the Old Regime to reform itself, Lamoignon, the Keeper of the Seals, brought in several improvements to criminal procedure: interrogation on the accused's stool (sur la sellette) was abolished; judgments of the sovereign courts henceforth had to be supported with reasons; and the preliminary question (question préalable) was also finally abolished. Accused who won acquittal were now required to be compensated for their imprisonment. In reality, however, this edict was not implemented. Nevertheless, the courts themselves were taking account of their increasing unpopularity. They thus attempted to make some gestures toward public opinion. The court of the Châtelet in Paris inquired among lawyers on the reforms to introduce to the justice system, the high judicial court (Parlement) of Paris established a committee to study reform of the justice system, and lawyers in Marseille drafted a program for the reorganization of the justice system. However, these projects were very timid in light of the multitude of complaints and projects to be found in the records of the Estates General of 1789. The wishes expressed in these records relate to the general organization of the justice system; others relate more specifically to criminal justice; and yet others refer only to civil justice. In the case of criminal justice, there were many projects based on the large numbers of works on the subject published in the preceding years. The records demand serious guarantees of individual liberty and request that no individual should be arrested or forced to appear before a judge, except when the individual was caught in flagrante delicto or identified by public outcry, and that any individual who was arrested be examined within twenty-four hours. The records also demand that all accused be assisted by counsel designated by the authorities or selected by the accused, that accused persons not be required to swear an oath, that the hearing of and judgment in criminal cases be public and that reasons be given for judgments with a precise reference to the laws relied upon. Naturally, the records also demand the abolition of torture, the moderation of sentences to make them proportionate to the offences and the elimination of barbaric forms of torture that had been added to the death penalty. They also demand that the conviction of an individual no longer involve dishonouring all his relatives and that prisons be improved, underground dungeons be abolished and interrogation on the accused's stool be abolished. Thus, the records contained a full program of criminal legislation. It was during its first sittings that the Constituent National Assembly decided to give France a new judicial organization. On 17 August 1789, Nicolas Bergasse presented on behalf of the Committee on the Constitution a report on what he called the "judicial power". After summarizing the complaints echoed in the records of the Estates General, he proposed a new organization of the justice system on the following basis: a justice of the peace in each canton, intermediate courts, a court of justice for each province and the abolition of courts of exception. He demanded guarantees of individual liberty on the model of the British habeas corpus, the publication of accusations and proceedings, the introduction of juries, less harsh sentences and improvements in policing. However, the Assembly was at that time debating the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It postponed the Bergasse project after noting its main principles, which it enshrined in articles 7, 8 and 9 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. On 10 September 1789, at the express request of the Paris Commune, the Constituent Assembly instructed a seven-member commission to submit a proposal for the immediate reform of the criminal law. Jacques Guillaume Thouret was appointed chairman of the commission. The report was adopted more or less in its entirety and became law on 10 October 1789. The law in question established a whole series of provisional measures designed to increase protection for accused persons. Prominent citizens were immediately assigned to the judges in each town. Every accused was required to be brought before a judge within twenty-four hours. Judgments were rendered publicly. Accused persons were assisted by a lawyer, not only during the judgment but also during all the proceedings. Interrogation on the accused's stool, the tortures of the preparatory and preliminary questions, the oath that the accused were required to swear were naturally abolished. The Constituent Assembly supplemented these provisional measures again when it decided on 21 January 1790, on a motion by Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, that the same offences should be punished by the same sentences, that these sentences would not have any consequences for the families of those convicted, that property could not be ordered to be seized and that the bodies of those who had been tortured would be handed over to their families, if the families so requested, for regular burial. During this period, the Constituent Assembly drafted projects for the complete reform of the organization of the courts. On 24 March 1790, the Assembly decided that the judicial apparatus should be completely restructured and began at once to discuss three main projects, those proposed by Thouret, Adrien Duport and Sieyès. The law of 16 August 1790 respecting the reorganization of the justice system in general and especially the civil justice system, contained the essence of the Constituent Assembly's work relating to the courts. It was supplemented by a number of other laws, including that dated 16 September 1791 on criminal justice, and by the Penal Code dated 25 September 1791. Some of the interventions made by Bergasse, Duport and Thouret on the reform of the justice system remain relevant to this day in many respects. Yet, despite their undoubted importance, these texts are known only to a few specialists and have not been translated into English. It therefore seemed useful to make them accessible to a much wider number. We therefore publish here, in French and in English, reflections whose interest has not been eroded by the passage of time.

The Restoration

On 4 April 1660, Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda, in which he made several promises in relation to the reclamation of the crown of England. Whilst he did this, Monck organised the Convention Parliament, which met for the first time on 25 April. On 8 May it proclaimed that King Charles II had been the lawful monarch since the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649.[7] Historian Tim Harris describes it: "Constitutionally, it was as if the last nineteen years had never happened."[8] Charles returned from exile, leaving the Hague on 23 May and landing at Dover on 25 May.[9] He entered London on 29 May 1660, his 30th birthday. To celebrate His Majesty's Return to his Parliament, 29 May was made a public holiday, popularly known as Oak Apple Day.[10] He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661.[9]After Richard Cromwell, Lord Protector from 1658 to 1659, ceded power to the Rump Parliament, Charles Fleetwood and John Lambert then dominated government for a year. On 20 October 1659 George Monck, the governor of Scotland under the Cromwells, marched south with his army from Scotland to oppose Fleetwood and Lambert. Lambert's army began to desert him, and he returned to London almost alone whilst Monck marched to London unopposed. The Presbyterian members, excluded in Pride's Purge of 1648, were recalled, and on 24 December the army restored the Long Parliament.[4]The Restoration and Charles' coronation mark a reversal of the stringent Puritan morality, "as though the pendulum [of England's morality] swung from repression to licence more or less overnight".[27] Theatres reopened after having been closed during the protectorship, Puritanism lost its momentum, and bawdy comedy became a recognisable genre. In addition, women were allowed to perform on the commercial stage as professional actresses for the first time. In Scotland, the bishops returned as the Episcopacy was reinstated. To celebrate the occasion and cement their diplomatic relations, the Dutch Republic presented Charles with the Dutch Gift, a fine collection of old master paintings, classical sculptures, furniture, and a yacht. Literature[edit] Main article: Restoration literature Restoration literature includes the roughly homogenous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of King Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news become a commodity, the essay develop into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual criticism.[28] Style[edit] Main article: Restoration style The return of the king and his court from exile led to the replacement of the Puritan severity of the Cromwellian style with a taste for magnificence and opulence and to the introduction of Dutch and French artistic influences. These are evident in furniture in the use of floral marquetry, walnut instead of oak, twisted turned supports and legs, exotic veneers, cane seats and backs on chairs, sumptuous tapestry and velvet upholstery and ornate carved and gilded scrolling bases for cabinets.[29] Similar shifts appear in prose style.[30] Comedy[edit] Main article: Restoration comedy Comedy, especially bawdy comedy, flourished, and a favourite setting was the bed-chamber.[31] Indeed, sexually explicit language was encouraged by the king personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian George Norman Clark argues: The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper....The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.[32] The socially diverse audiences included both aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on, and a substantial middle-class segment.[33] These playgoers were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, by crowded and bustling plots, by the introduction of the first professional actresses, and by the rise of the first celebrity actors. This period saw the first professional female playwright, Aphra Behn.[34] Spectacular[edit] Main article: Restoration spectacular This naval battle was one of the sets for Elkanah Settle's Empress of Morocco (1673) at the theatre in Dorset Garden. The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged machine play, hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted.[35] Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". However, the variety of them is so untidy that most theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre at all.[36] Only a handful of works of this period are usually accorded the term "opera", as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel Pepys.[37] The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco such as John Dryden's Albion and Albanius would leave a company in serious debt, while blockbusters like Thomas Shadwell's Psyche or Dryden's King Arthur would put it comfortably in the black for a long time.[38]

Popular Uprisings

Reaction to Necker's dismissal was immediate. On July 12 and 13 the Parisian electors formed a new municipal government and a new militia, the National Guard, both loyal to the National Assembly. Paris was forging the weapons that made it the leader of the Revolution. Crowds were roaming the streets, demanding cheaper bread and parading busts of Necker draped in black. On July 14 they broke into government buildings in search of arms. They found one arsenal in the Invalides, the great military hospital, and they hoped to find another in the Bastille, a fortress-prison in the eastern part of the city. An armed group several hundred strong stormed the Bastille, killing part of the garrison and suffering many casualties themselves. The legend, cherished by defenders of the Old Regime, that participants in the assault were simply "rabble" or a "mob" is untrue. An official list of participants compiled some time after the event showed that most were neighborhood merchants and artisans, especially woodworkers. The fall of the Bastille was of enormous symbolic significance. Though there were only seven prisoners to be released, all of whom deserved to be in prison, an aroused people had demonstrated what it could accomplish. The capture and subsequent demolition of the Bastille did much to ensure the destruction of the Old Regime, as rioting spread throughout France in July 1789. Thus the Fourteenth of July became the great French national holiday, the counterpart of the American Fourth of July. Parts of the countryside, meantime, were experiencing the Great Fear, an extraordinary attack of mass delusion. From village to village word spread that "brigands" were coming, aristocratic hirelings who would destroy the now ripe crops and force the National Assembly to preserve the status quo. There were in fact no bands of brigands, only an occasional starving farmhand and, on some occasions, foraging national guardsmen trying to steal food. But the peasants in several districts went berserk, grabbing hoes and pitchforks, anything resembling a weapon, and driving many of the nobility to flight and ultimately to emigration. They attacked châteaux and broke into other buildings that might house a hoard of grain or the hated documents justifying collection of manorial dues. Some nobles voluntarily gave the peasants what they wanted; others saw their barns and archives burnt; a few were lynched. The October Days, the last crisis of a tumultuous year, again demonstrated the impotence of Louis XVI and the power of his aroused subjects. The harvest of 1789 had been good, but a drought crippled the operation of watermills for grinding flour from the wheat. Thus, as autumn drew on, Parisians still lined up for bread and still looked suspiciously at the royal troops stationed near their city. Rumors of the queen's behavior at Versailles further incensed them: Marie Antoinette made a dramatic appearance at a banquet of royal officers, clutching the heir to the throne in her arms, striking the pose that her mother, Maria Theresa, had employed to win the support of the Hungarians in the 1740s. And on hearing that the people had no bread, she was reported to have remarked callously, "Let them eat cake." This story was false, but it was repeated in the lively new Paris papers that delighted in denouncing the queen. The climax came on October 5, when an array of determined marketwomen and fishwives, neatly dressed milliners, and even middle-class "ladies with hats" marched from Paris to Versailles in the rain to demand bread. They disrupted the National Assembly and penetrated the palace, where they might have lynched Marie Antoinette if she had not taken refuge with the king. The next day the women marched back to Paris, escorting the royal family, who took up residence in the Tuileries Palace. More important, the National Assembly also moved to Paris.

Napoleons Fall

The British had been the first to resist Napoleon successfully, at Trafalgar and on the economic battlefields of the Continental System. Then had come Spanish resistance, followed by Russian. Now in 1813 almost every nation in Europe joined the final coalition against the French. Napoleon raised a new army, but he could not so readily replace the equipment lost in Russia. In October 1813 he lost the "Battle of the Nations," fought at Leipzig in Germany, necessitating his retreat into France. The German troops in his army were deserting, the Confederation of the Rhine collapsed, Italian support was increasingly unreliable, and the mystique of Napoleon was blighted. By April 1814 the well-organized forces of the coalition occupied Paris. Faced also with mounting unrest and conspiracy at home, the emperor abdicated when his marshals refused to continue the war. Napoleon was sent into exile as ruler of the island of Elba, off the western coast of Italy. The statesmen of the victorious coalition gathered in the Congress of Vienna to draw up the terms of peace. The Bourbons returned to France in the person of Louis XVIII, a younger brother of Louis XVI. Realizing that he could not revive the Old Regime intact, the new king issued the Charter of 1814 establishing a constitutional monarchy. Then, on March 1, 1815, Napoleon pulled his last surprise: He landed on the Mediterranean coast of France. For a hundred days, from March 20, when Napoleon reentered Paris, the French empire was reborn. Once again the emperor rallied the French people, this time by promising a truly liberal regime with a real parliament and genuine elections. He never had time, however, to show whether his promise was sincere, for on June 18 the British under Sir Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852), the duke of Wellington, and the Prussians under General Gebhard von Blucher (1742-1819) delivered the final blow at Waterloo, near Brussels. Again Napoleon was sent into exile, this time to the remote British island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. There in 1821 he died, perhaps from arsenic poisoning. Bonapartism, however, did not die with him. A Napoleonic legend arose, glossing over the faults and failures of the emperor, depicting him as a champion of liberalism and patriotism, and paving the way for the advent of another Napoleon in 1848.

Prussia

The Kingdom of Prussia was still recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War and poor in natural resources. Its territory was disjointed, stretching 1,200 km (750 mi) from the lands of the Duchy of Prussia on the south-east coast of the Baltic Sea to the Hohenzollern heartland of Brandenburg, with the exclaves of Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg in the Rhineland. In 1708 about one third of the population of East-Prussia died during Great Northern War plague outbreak.[16] The bubonic plague reached Prenzlau in August 1710 but receded before it could reach the capital Berlin, which was only 80 km (50 mi) away. The Great Northern War was the first major conflict in which the Kingdom of Prussia was involved. Starting in 1700, the Great Northern War involved a coalition led by Tsarist Russia against the dominant North European power at the time, the Swedish Empire. Frederick William in 1705 tried to get Prussia involved in the war, stating it "best Prussia has her own army and make her own decisions."[17] His views, however, were not considered acceptable by those in power. It was not until 1713 that Frederick William gained full royal powers.[17] Therefore, in 1715, Prussia, led by Frederick William, joined the coalition for various reasons,[17] including the danger of being attacked from both her rear and the sea; her claims on Pomerania; and the fact that if she stood aside and Sweden lost, she would not get a share of the territory.[5][17] Prussia only participated in one battle, the Battle of Stresow on the island of Rügen, as the war had already been practically decided in the 1709 Battle of Poltava. In the Treaty of Stockholm Prussia gained all of Swedish Pomerania east of the river Oder. Sweden would however keep Vorpommern until 1815. The Great Northern War not only marked the end of the Swedish Empire but also elevated Prussia and Russia at the expense of the demising Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as new powers in Europe.[18] The Great Elector had incorporated the Junkers, the landed aristocracy, into the empire's bureaucracy and military machine, giving them a vested interest in the Prussian Army and compulsory education.[19] King Frederick William I inaugurated the Prussian compulsory system in 1717.[19] 1740-1762: Silesian Wars[edit] Main article: Silesian Wars Prussian territorial acquisitions in the 18th century In 1740 King Frederick II (Frederick the Great) came to the throne. Using the pretext of a 1537 treaty (vetoed by Emperor Ferdinand I) by which parts of Silesia were to pass to Brandenburg after the extinction of its ruling Piast dynasty, Frederick invaded Silesia, thereby beginning the War of the Austrian Succession. After rapidly occupying Silesia, Frederick offered to protect Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria if the province were turned over to him. The offer was rejected, but Austria faced several other opponents, and Frederick was eventually able to gain formal cession with the Treaty of Berlin in 1742. To the surprise of many, Austria managed to renew the war successfully. In 1744 Frederick invaded again to forestall reprisals and to claim, this time, the province of Bohemia. He failed, but French pressure on Austria's ally Great Britain led to a series of treaties and compromises, culminating in the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that restored peace and left Prussia in possession of most of Silesia. Attack of the Prussian infantry at the Battle of Hohenfriedberg in 1745 Humiliated by the cession of Silesia, Austria worked to secure an alliance with France and Russia (the "Diplomatic Revolution"), while Prussia drifted into Great Britain's camp forming the Anglo-Prussian Alliance. When Frederick preemptively invaded Saxony and Bohemia over the course of a few months in 1756-1757, he began a Third Silesian War and initiated the Seven Years' War. This war was a desperate struggle for the Prussian Army, and the fact that it managed to fight much of Europe to a draw bears witness to Frederick's military skills. Facing Austria, Russia, France, and Sweden simultaneously, and with only Hanover (and the non-continental British) as notable allies, Frederick managed to prevent serious invasion until October 1760, when the Russian army briefly occupied Berlin and Königsberg. The situation became progressively grimmer, however, until the death in 1762 of Empress Elizabeth of Russia (Miracle of the House of Brandenburg). The accession of the Prussophile Peter III relieved the pressure on the eastern front. Sweden also exited the war at about the same time. Defeating the Austrian army at the Battle of Burkersdorf and relying on continuing British success against France in the war's colonial theatres, Prussia was finally able to force a status quo ante bellum on the continent. This result confirmed Prussia's major role within the German states and established the country as a European great power. Frederick, appalled by the near-defeat of Prussia, lived out his days as a much more peaceable ruler.

Divine Right Monarchy

The belief that a monarch's power derives from God and represents Him on earth.

Background of the American revolt

The breach between the colonies and Britain first became serious after the Seven Years' War, when Britain began to interfere more directly and frequently in colonial matters. By 1763 the colonies had become accustomed to regulating their own affairs, though the acts of their assemblies remained subject to the veto of royally appointed governors or of the king himself. The vast territories acquired in 1763 in Canada and west of the Allegheny Mountains brought Britain added opportunities for profitable exploitation and added responsibilities for government and defense. When an uprising of Indians under Pontiac (c. 1720-1769) threatened frontier posts in the area of the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes, colonial militias failed to take effective action, and British regulars were brought in. The continuing threat prompted the royal proclamation of October 1763 forbidding "all our loving subjects" to settle west of a line running along the summit of the Alleghenies. To His Majesty's "loving subjects" in the seaboard colonies, however, the proclamation seemed deliberately designed to exclude them from the riches of the West. The colonies resented still more keenly the attempt by Parliament to raise revenue in North America. The British government had very strong arguments for increasing colonial taxes: The national debt had almost doubled during the Seven Years' War; the colonies' reluctance to recruit soldiers and raise taxes themselves had increased the cost of the war to British taxpayers; now the mother country faced continued expense in protecting the frontier. Surely the Americans would admit the reasonableness of the case for higher taxes, the members of Parliament thought. That, however, was precisely what the Americans did not admit. The first of the new revenue measures, the Sugar Act of 1764, alarmed the merchants of the eastern seaboard because the customs officers actually undertook to collect duties on molasses, sugar, and other imports. Here was a threat to the colonial economy, for the import duties had to be paid out of the colonies' meager supply of coins. The second revenue measure, the Stamp Act of 1765, imposed levies on a wide variety of items, including legal and commercial papers, liquor licenses, playing cards, dice, newspapers, calendars, and academic degrees. These duties further drained the supply of coins. The revenue measures touched off a major controversy. Indignant merchants in the New World boycotted all imports rather than pay the duties, and in October 1765 delegates from nine of the colonies met in New York City as the Stamp Act Congress. The Congress, complaining that the new duties had "a manifest tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonists," proclaimed the principle that there was to be no taxation without representation. Britain surrendered on the practical issue, but did not yield on the principle. The appeals of London merchants, nearly ruined by the American boycott against British goods, brought about the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1765. In 1766, however, Parliament passed a Declaratory Act asserting that the king and Parliament could indeed make such laws affecting the colonies. For the next decade Britain adhered firmly to the principles of the Declaratory Act, and colonial radicals just as firmly repeated their opposition to taxation without representation. Parliament again tried to raise revenue, this time by the Townshend duties (1767) on colonial imports of tea, paper, paint, and lead. Again the merchants of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston organized boycotts. In 1770 Lord North's cabinet withdrew the Townshend duties except for a three-penny tariff on a pound of tea. Three years later the English East India Company attempted to sell surplus tea in North America, hoping to overcome American opposition to the hated duty by making the retail price of East India tea, duty included, far cheaper than that of Dutch tea smuggled by the colonists. The result was the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, to the cheers of spectators lining the waterfront, a group of Bostonians who had a large financial stake in smuggled tea disguised themselves as Native Americans, boarded three East India ships, and dumped chests of tea worth thousands of pounds into the harbor. Britain answered defiance with force and the colonists met force with resistance. The Quebec Act (1774), incorporating the lands beyond the Alleghenies into Canada, bolted the door to the westward expansion of colonial frontiers. The Intolerable Acts (1774)—so called because taken together the colonists found them intolerable—closed the port of Boston to trade and suspended elections in Massachusetts. At Lexington and Concord in April 1775 the farmers of Massachusetts fired the opening shots of what became the War of Independence. At Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, delegates to a Continental Congress formally declared thirteen of the American mainland colonies independent of Great Britain.

Forging a New regime

The outlines of the new regime were already starting to take shape before the October Days. The Great Fear prompted the National Assembly to abolish in law what the peasants were destroying in fact. On the evening of August 4, 1789, the deputies voted that taxation would be paid by all inhabitants of the kingdom in proportion to their revenues, and that public expenses would be borne equally by all. The clergy also gave up tithes, and the liberal minority of the second estate surrendered the nobility's game preserves and manorial dues and courts. The Assembly abolished the remnants of serfdom, forbade the sale of justice or of judicial office, and decreed that "all citizens, without distinction of birth, can be admitted to all ecclesiastical, civil, and military posts and dignities." The Old Regime was dead. Three weeks later, on August 26, the National Assembly formulated the Declaration of the Rights of Man. "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights," it asserted. "These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression." It called property "an inviolable and sacred right," and liberty "the exercise of the natural rights of each man" within the limits "determined by law." "Law," the Declaration stated, "is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part, in person or by their representatives, in its formation." Further, "Any society in which the guarantee of rights is not assured or the separation of powers not determined has no constitution.' The Declaration of the Rights of Man mirrored the economic and political attitudes of the middle class, though it was also attractive to many aristocrats. It insisted on the sanctity of property, and it proclaimed that "social distinctions may be based only on usefulness," thus implying that some social distinctions were to be expected. It incorporated the key phrases of the philosophes: natural rights, general will, and separation of powers. The National Assembly made a resounding statement of the ideals of the Enlightenment; yet, as the subsequent history of the Revolution demonstrated, it found no formula by which to translate these ideals into practice. The economic legislation of the National Assembly provided a case in point. Belief in the theory of equal taxation did not solve urgent financial problems, for the new and just land tax imposed by the deputies could not be collected. Tax collectors had vanished in the general liquidation of the Old Regime, and peasants now assumed that they owed the government nothing. Once again, the French state borrowed until its credit was exhausted, and then, in desperation, the National Assembly ordered the confiscation of church lands (November 1789). The government thus acquired assets worth at least 2 billion livres. On the basis of this collateral it issued assignats, paper notes used to pay the government's debts, which temporarily eased the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the Revolution repeated the mistake of John Law at the time of the Mississippi Bubble: It did not know when to stop. As the state sold parcels of confiscated land—that is, as it reduced the collateral securing its paper money—it was expected to destroy the same amount of assignats. But the temptation not to reduce the number of assignats proved too great to resist, and inflation resulted. The assignats, progressively losing their solid backing, depreciated until in 1795 they were worth less than 5 percent of their face value. The state sold at auction the property seized from the church and from aristocratic émigrés (those who had left the country). Some peasants profited by the opportunity to enlarge their holdings, and many bourgeois also bought up land, sometimes as a short-term speculation. The poor and landless, however, gained nothing, since they could not afford to buy, and the National Assembly made no move to help them. Following laissez-faire doctrines, the Assembly abolished the guilds and the tariffs and tolls on trade within France. And deeming the few simple organizations of labor unnatural restrictions on economic freedom, it abolished them, too. In June 1791, after an outbreak of strikes, it passed the Loi de Chapelier, banning strikes, labor unions, and many guilds.

Stuart England

The royal dynasty of Scotland, and then from 1603-1714 of England.The Stuart era began when James I, who was also James VI of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth I. The last Tudor queen had died childless in 1603. James's ascension to the throne conjoined the two long-warring nations of England and Scotland. The Stuart period witnessed intense religious and political conflicts, which shifted power from the monarchy to Parliament. Meanwhile, discoveries and innovations transformed science, architecture and everyday life.

Enlightened Absolutism

a system in which rulers tried to govern by Enlightenment principles while maintaining their full royal powers

Beginning of Romanticism

he fundamental Romantic purpose was to grasp and render the many kinds of experience that Classicism had neglected or had stylized. Romanticism was the first upsurge of realism—exploratory and imaginative as to subject matter and inventive as to forms and techniques. The exploration of reality surveyed both the external world of peoples and places and the internal world of man. The Scottish and medieval novels of Sir Walter Scott, beginning with Waverley in 1814, illustrate the range of the new curiosity, for Scotland was a "wild" place, outside the centres of civilization, and the Middle Ages were similarly "barbarous" and distant in time. When Byron or Chateaubriand went to the Middle East or Goethe to Italy, it was not in the tradition of gentlemen's tourism; it was in the spirit of the cultural explorer. Byron, for one, by using "the Isles of Greece" and the Mediterranean as settings for his wildly popular narrative poems, was developing in the Western mind a new interest, a new sense that the "exotic" was as real, as important, as Paris or London. In all these writers, factual detail is essential to the new sort of effect: the scenery is observably true, and so is the history, given through local colour. As Byron said when criticized: "I don't care two lumps of sugar for my poetry, but my costume is correct." Blake, 20 years earlier, had taken a stand against Sir Joshua Reynold's academic doctrine that the highest form of painting depicted the broadest general truth. Said Blake: "To particularize is the only merit." Particulars, moreover, are all equally proper for the artist; the use he makes of them is what matters. When Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to revivify English poetry, they hit upon two divergent kinds of subject: Coleridge took superstition and the folk tale and wrote "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in the form of an old ballad; Wordsworth took the modern street ballad—a kind of rhymed newspaper—and produced his versified incidents of common life in common speech. In France, where the division of the vocabulary into "noble" and "common" (i.e., unfit for poetry) had been made and recorded in dictionaries, the Romantics led by Hugo used the prohibited words whenever they saw fit. Hugo's verse drama Hernani (1830) created a scandal in the audience when the heroine was heard to speak of her handkerchief and when a character did not use a roundabout phrase about "the march of the hours" to say: "It is midnight." The importance of such details can hardly be exaggerated and can perhaps be best understood by recalling what the rediscovery of Shakespeare meant to the Romantics. His rise from grudging esteem, even in England, to European idolatry by 1830 had a significance beyond the one already mentioned of serving to put down French classical tragedy and, with it, French cultural tyranny. The German scholar, critic, and playwright Lessing was among the first to use Shakespeare for that purpose, but the arguments in his theatre reviews, called Hamburgische Dramaturgie, sprang from critical genius and not mere national resentment. Shakespeare spelled freedom from narrow conventions—the set verse form in couplets, the lofty language and long declamations, the adherence to verse throughout, the exclusion of low characters, comic effects, and violent action—or, in a word, from royal and artistic etiquette. What the rediscovery and idolization of Shakespeare meant (and not to poets and playwrights alone—witness his enormous influence on Berlioz) was the right of the artist to adapt or invent forms to suit contents, to use words formerly excluded from poetic diction, loosen the joints of grammar and metric (or the canons of any art), follow the promptings of his spirit (tragic or gay, vulgar or mysterious, but in any case venturesome), and see where this emancipation from artificial rules led the muse. There was danger in freedom, as always; the conventions ensure safety. The aim of the Romantic genius, however, was not to play safe or even to succeed; it was to explore and invent, multiply modes of feeling and truth, and thereby breathe new life into a dead or dying culture. The motto was not common sense but courage. This resolve explains why the men who came to worship Shakespeare also rediscovered Rabelais and Villon and revalued Spinoza, the lone dissenter who had revered a God pervading the cosmos; Benvenuto Cellini, the fearless artist at grips with the principalities and powers; and "Rameau's Nephew," the ambiguous hero of Diderot's posthumous dialogue, a strange figure disturbingly in touch with the dark forces of the creative unconscious. Drama With so much feeling astir and so many novel ideas being agitated, it might seem logical to expect a flourishing school of Romantic drama. Yet only a few isolated works, more interesting than irreplaceable, compose the dramatic output of the Romanticists—Shelley's Cenci, Byron's Manfred, and Kleist's brilliant pieces in several genres. Ironically, Shakespeare's new role as emancipator had a curiously paralyzing effect on the theatre down to the middle of the century and beyond. In England, poet after poet tried his hand at poetic drama, only to fail from too anxious a desire to be Shakespearean. On the Continent, various misconceptions about him and old habits of Classical tragedy prevented a new drama from coming to life. Victor Hugo's plays contained brilliant verse, and their form influenced grand opera (Wagner's no less than Verdi's), but the fact remained: the dramatic quality could be found everywhere in Romanticist art except on the stage. Reflection on this point suggests that, quite apart from Shakespeare, the very concern of the Romantics with exploring the inner and outer worlds simultaneously hampered the playwright. Perhaps great drama requires that one or the other world be taken as settled so that conflict, which is the essence of drama, develops between a strong new force and a solid resistance. Be that as it may, the Romantics found themselves in an age when both inner and outer worlds were in flux and from that double uncertainty derived their creative impetus. Painting This generality holds for the painters as well; their "reality," too, was by no means "given," so that the notation of fresh detail and the study of new means to transmute the visible into art occupied all those who came after David. Goya led the way in Spain by depicting the vulgarity of court figures and the horrors of the Peninsular War. In England, Constable painted country scenes with a vividness at first unacceptable to connoisseurs. He had to argue with his patron, Sir George Beaumont, about the actual colour of grass. To prove that it was not of the conventional brownish tint used by academicians, he seized a violin, ran out of the room with it, and laid it on the lawn, forcing the unaccustomed eye to perceive the difference between chlorophyll and old varnish. At the same time, Géricault astonished the Parisians by painting, in harrowing detail, The Raft of the Medusa, not an antique and noble subject but a recent event: the survivors of a shipwreck adrift and starving on a raft. The young Delacroix was emboldened by the example and, inspired also by the work of his English friend Bonington, began to paint contemporary scenes of vivid realism—e.g., the Turkish massacre of the Greek peasants at Chios. Later, Delacroix was to visit Morocco (exoticism again) and to discover there the secret of coloured shadows and other pre-Impressionist techniques. His English counterpart, J.M.W. Turner, was pursuing the same goal of realistic truth, though along a different path that nonetheless also led to Impressionism—and beyond. When asked one day why he had pasted a scrap of black paper on a portion of his canvas, he replied that ordinary pigment was not black enough. And he added: "If I could find something even blacker, I would use that." Sculpture and architecture No similar transformations of the visual occurred in sculpture or architecture. Canova and Thorvaldsen continued to produce figures and busts on Neoclassical lines; and only Barye, the great sculptor of animals, and Rude, the creator of the Marseillaise panel on the Arc de Triomphe, showed any signs of the new passions. As for architecture, it may have been the love of history that prevented distinctive work. Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc did grasp the principles of what a new style should be, the former's love of Gothic reinstating the merit of framework construction and the latter's breadth of vision as a restorer leading him to predict that iron construction would one day pass from mere utility to high art. It was actually in railway construction that the seeds of a new architecture were sown. Tunnels and bridges and terminals were needed as early as the mid-1830s, and unassuming engineers such as the Brunels and Robert Stephenson set to work to design them. All they had for solving the new and awkward problems of topography, speed, and cost were the ideas they drew from machinery and the vulgar materials, chiefly wood and iron, that they had learned how to handle in industry. The results were often remarkable, and they remained to inspire the makers of 20th-century steel and concrete architecture. Music It may seem as if the art of music by its nature would not lend itself to the exploration and expression of reality characteristic of Romanticism, but that is not so. True, music does not tell stories or paint pictures, but it stirs feelings and evokes moods, through both of which various kinds of reality can be suggested or expressed. It was in the rationalist 18th century that musicians rather mechanically attempted to reproduce stories and subjects in sound. These literal renderings naturally failed, and the Romanticists profited from the error. Their discovery of new realms of experience proved communicable in the first place because they were in touch with the spirit of renovation, particularly through poetry. What Goethe meant to Beethoven and Berlioz and what German folk tales and contemporary lyricists meant to Weber, Schumann, and Schubert are familiar to all who are acquainted with the music of these men. There is, of course, no way to demonstrate that Beethoven's Egmont music—or, indeed, its overture alone—corresponds to Goethe's drama and thereby enlarges the hearer's consciousness of it; but it cannot be an accident or an aberration that the greatest composers of the period employed the resources of their art for the creation of works expressly related to such lyrical and dramatic subjects. Similarly, the love of nature stirred Beethoven, Weber, and Berlioz, and here too the correspondence is felt and persuades the fit listener that his own experience is being expanded. The words of the creators themselves record this new comprehensiveness. Beethoven referred to his activity of mingled contemplation and composition as dichten, making a poem; and Berlioz tells in his Mémoires of the impetus given to his genius by the music of Beethoven and Weber, by the poetry of Goethe and Shakespeare, and not least by the spectacle of nature. Nor did the public that ultimately understood their works gainsay their claims. It must be added that the Romantic musicians—including Chopin, Mendelssohn, Glinka, and Liszt—had at their disposal greatly improved instruments. The beginning of the 19th century produced the modern piano, of greater range and dynamics than theretofore, and made all wind instruments more exact and powerful by the use of keys and valves. The modern full orchestra was the result. Berlioz, whose classic treatise on instrumentation and orchestration helped to give it definitive form, was also the first to exploit its resources to the full, in the Symphonie fantastique of 1830. This work, besides its technical significance just mentioned, can also be regarded as uniting the characteristics of Romanticism in music: it is both lyrical and dramatic, and, although it makes use of a "story," that use is not to describe the scenes but to connect them; its slow movement is a "nature poem" in the Beethovenian manner; the second, fourth, and fifth movements include "realistic" detail of the most vivid kind; and the opening one is an introspective reverie. Self-analysis In this Romantic investigation of the self, some critics have seen little more than excessive ego or, in modern terms, a tiresome narcissism. No doubt certain Romantic works arouse boredom or disgust with hairsplitting analysis. The boredom, however, is often due to the fact that after a hundred years the discoveries have staled. When fresh, they came as a revelation; in the works of the great poets and novelists, in Hazlitt's essays and Jean Paul's fictions, and the irony of Byron's letters or Heine's journalism, the truth has not grown dim or platitudinous. It was in any case desirable that this extensive analysis of the self should be attempted then, for only an age in which individualism was both theoretical and passionate could see the logic of the undertaking and act upon it. The logic was this: given the autonomous and unique individual, a search by himself into his moods, motives, fears, and loves must bring forth data otherwise unobtainable. Add these results together, and one has a repertoire of clues to the inner life of mankind as a whole. For the uniqueness of each individual is bounded by traits he shares with his fellows, and this common element enables the psychologist to connect and organize the reports of the self-searchers. It is on this hypothesis, incidentally, that the demand for originality in art has continued unabated since the Romanticists. Forget the "model," for there is no such thing; avoid conformity; discover your true self, the buried child; be authentic and sincere—these precepts, which still govern art and criticism, are the legacy of Romantic individualism. Introspection naturally implies an inner life worth looking into, and most Romantic artists brought forth extraordinary findings. They form the groundwork of modern thought. One cannot easily imagine Freud or Joyce, much less the degree of self-consciousness shared by Westerners today, without the deliverances of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Leopardi, Stendhal, Constant, Sainte-Beuve, Heine, and innumerable other writers of the early 19th century. And towering above them as the creator of the prototype of Romantic introspection is Goethe with his Faust. Faust was the figure in which a whole age recognized its mind and soul; and the adjective Faustian, as Spengler's use of it makes clear, still describes tendencies at work in culture today. The principal one, already mentioned, self-consciousness—the identity crisis—remains. The belief, moreover, that movement, activity, is better than repose and that striving is better than achieving is clearly the great postulate of contemporary civilization. Faust himself ends by giving his life to practical works in behalf of his fellow man; however, he sets himself on that path only after a slow and deep analysis of his divided soul, which has been ruled in turn by despair, lust, superstition and the forces of the unconscious, the love of innocence, the conviction of sin and crime, the horrors of hypocrisy and conventional life, the temptations of wealth and power, the disgust with pedantry and established religion, and the yearning for infinite knowledge, in the hopes of attaining by it wisdom and peace. Faust, in short, traverses the whole cosmos, made up of the inner and outer worlds, to find in the act of self-dedication to humanity the justification of his existence. Early 19th-century social and political thought The Romantics who studied society through the novel or discoursed about it in essays and pamphlets were no less devoted to this "cause of humanity," but they arrived at politically different conclusions from Goethe's and from one another's. Scott and Disraeli were forerunners of Tory democracy as Burke was of liberal conservatism. Dickens, a passionate humanitarian, stirred the masses with his examples of the law's stupid cruelty, but he proposed no agency of betterment, content to despise Parliament, the law courts, and the complacency of the wealthy. Balzac wrote his huge array of novels as a "social zoology" that was to show what a bloody jungle society becomes without the church and the monarchy to restrain human passions. Stendhal noted the same reality but was more concerned with the free play of individual genius; he resigned himself to the social struggle, provided not too many stupid individuals ran the inevitably heavy-handed regimes. Freedom might be found by the happy few through the loopholes of a mixed government such as England's, whereas in the ostensibly free United States there was no protection against social pressure and no likelihood of genius in art or in politics. The great authority on American democracy was Tocqueville, whose astonishing survey in two volumes contained many true predictions and is still packed with useful lessons. Tocqueville confirmed Stendhal's low estimate of freedom of thought in America, but he foresaw in the United States the first example of a type of democracy that would surely overtake the Western world. He found in such a future many good things and many defects; he predicted a day when slavery would threaten disaster to America; he foretold what kind of poetry a democracy would produce and delineated the art of Walt Whitman; he apprehended the complication of laws and the declining quality of justice; but he was reconciled to what must be. Postrevolutionary thinking What lay behind all 19th-century writings on politics and society was the shadow of the French Revolution. In the 1790s the revolution had aroused Burke to write his famous Reflections and Joseph de Maistre his Considérations sur la France. They differed on many points, but what both saw, like their successors, was that revolution was self-perpetuating. There is no way to stop it because liberty and equality can be endlessly claimed by group after group that feels deprived or degraded. And the idea that these principles are universally applicable removes any braking power that national tradition or circumstance might afford. Proof that the revolution marched on, slow or fast, could be read (as it still can be) in every issue of the daily paper since 1789. In the early 19th century the greatest pressure came from the liberals, whether students, bankers, manufacturers, or workmen enlisted in their cause. They wanted written constitutions, an extension of the suffrage, civil rights, a free-market economy, and from time to time wars of national liberation or aggrandizement in the name of cultural and linguistic unity. For example, all the intellect of western Europe sided with Greece in the 1820s when it began its war of emancipation from Turkey. Byron himself died at Missolonghi while helping the Greeks. Poets wrote odes that musicians set to music, and painters painted scenes of war. Between this liberalism and the nationalism that sought freedom from foreign rule the line could not be clearly drawn. In Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and South America, revolt in the name of liberty was endemic until the middle of the century. Only England escaped by a timely reform of Parliament in 1832, but it averted revolution only by a hair's breadth, after protracted threats of civil war and many violent incidents expressing the same animus as elsewhere. Meanwhile, the first disturbances resulting from machine industry—sabotage, strikes, and conspiracies (for trade unions were generally held illegal)—reinforced the revolutionary momentum, not only in fact but also in theory. As early as 1810 the business cycle, the doctrine of the exploitation of the worker, and the degradation of life in industrial societies had been noted and discussed. By 1825 the writings of the count de Saint-Simon, which proposed a reorganization of society to cure these evils, had won adherents; by 1830 the Saint-Simonians were an acknowledged party with sympathizers abroad, and by 1832 the words socialism and socialist were in use. The Saint-Simonian doctrine proposed a benevolent dictatorship of industrialists and scientists to remove the inequities of the free-for-all liberal system. Other reformers, such as the practical Robert Owen, who organized successful communities in Scotland and the United States, depended on a strong leader using ad hoc methods. Still others, such as Leroux and Cabet, were communists of divergent kinds seeking to carry out elaborate blueprints of the perfect state. Proudhon denounced the state, as such, and all private property. As a philosophical anarchist, he wished to substitute free association and contract for all legal compulsions. In England, the school of Bentham and Mill—utilitarians or philosophical radicals—attacked existing institutions in the name of the greatest good of the greatest number, and by their arguments they succeeded in reforming the top-heavy legal system. Without doctrine but moved by a similar sense of wrong, Thomas Carlyle fought the utilitarians for their materialistic expediency and himself sought light on the common problem by pondering the lessons of the French Revolution and publishing in 1837 what is still the greatest account of its catastrophic course. Later, Carlyle gave in Past and Present a suggestive picture of what he deemed a true community: quasi-medieval, based on the Faustian joy of work, and relying for its cohesion on its leader's genius and strength of soul. In the Germanies, repeated outbreaks changed little the system imposed from Vienna by Metternich—censorship, spying on students and intellectuals, repression of group activities at the first sign of political or social advocacy. This drove original thought underground or abroad in the persons of refugees such as the poet Heine and later Karl Marx. At home, the prevailing mood was despair. Max Stirner in his book The Ego and His Own (1845) recommended, instead of social reform, a ruthless individualism that should seek satisfaction by any means and at whatever risk. A small group of other individualists, Die Freien ("The Free"), found that satisfaction of the ego through total disillusion and radical repudiation: nothing is true or good—the state is a monster, society sheer hypocrisy, religion a fraud, for God is dead (1840). Elsewhere the struggle went on, taking shape as reform or revolt as occasion arose. In Italy and France, secret societies carried on propaganda for programs that might be liberal, nationalist, or socialist, but all revolutionary. One irony about the socialists is that the tag that has clung to them is utopian. It suggests purely theoretical notions, whereas the historical fact is that a great many were tried out in practice, and some lasted for a considerable time. As in Carlyle's book, the force of character of one man (Owen was a striking example) usually proved to be the efficient cause of success. Throughout this social theorizing, whatever the means or ends proposed, two assumptions hold: one is that individuals have a duty to change European society, to purge it of its evils; the other is that individuals can change society—they need only come together and decide what form the change shall take. These axioms by themselves, without the memory of 1789, were enough to keep alive in European culture the hope and the threat of continuing revolution. The principle of evolution Yet it should not be imagined that revolution by force or radical remodeling inspired every thinking European. Even if liberals and reactionaries were still ready to take to the barricades to achieve their ends, the conservatives were not, except in self-defense. The conservative philosophy, stemming from Burke and reinforced by modern historical studies, maintained the contrary principle of evolution. Evolution indeed swayed as many 19th-century minds as its rival, and it was sometimes the same minds. Evolution was the belief that lasting and beneficial change comes about by slow and small degrees. It is often imperceptible and therefore congenial to human habits. It breaks no heads and spills no blood; it is natural, organic. The idea of evolution is patterned on biology—the slow growth and decay of living things. More than that, evolution in the zoological sense of "descent with modification" had been a recognized speculation among men of science since 1750, when Buffon included it in his Histoire naturelle. Lamarck had elaborated the idea at the turn of the 18th century, while Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, had by 1796 worked out for himself a compendious theory of similar import. In 1830-33 the geologist Lyell, setting forth the corresponding notion that changes in the Earth take place through the operation of constant and not cataclysmic causes, devoted a chapter to Lamarckian biology—to the evolution of species by imperceptible steps. As if these teachings were not enough to implant a form of thought, the revival of interest in history made easy and obvious the transition from the world of nature to that of man. It seemed logical to think of both as evolutions and even to liken the state to an organism. Certainly the student of institutions finds them steadily and profoundly altered by minute incidents and variations. Compared to these causes, the violent breaks made by war and revolution seem more superficial and less permanent. The evolutionary scheme encouraged several other beliefs while also furnishing fresh arguments and convenient principles. Anyone who had inherited from the previous era a faith in progress could now attach it to this new motive power, evolution. Anyone who wished to classify nations or institutions by rank could place them as he thought proper on an evolutionary scale. Anyone who resisted change or wished to speed it up could be admonished with the aid of some evolutionary yardstick. Finally, anyone who intended to write a work of history or propaganda found the organizing principle ready-made. In the first half of the 19th century, every subject of interest, from costume to the criminal law, was presented in innumerable studies as proceeding majestically at an evolutionary pace. Another way of stating the influence of this great idea is to say that the mind of Europe had experienced the "biological revolution." Whereas in the 17th century Newtonian physics and its description of the cosmos had imposed the model of mechanics and mathematics, what impressed itself on the 19th century as the universal pattern was the living organism—change and variety as against fixity and regularity. The logic of preferring "biology" to "mechanics" in an age of individualism, of realism about concrete particulars, and of passionate imagination and introspection need only be stated to be evident. Science This is not to say that the science of physics stood still during the Romanticist period. It was the time when the conservation of energy was established and the mechanical equivalent of heat demonstrated. There also prevailed the "physical" pseudo-science of phrenology, which professed to relate individual attributes to bumps and hollows in the skull and which led to the physical anthropology that defined 3, 10, 20, and 100 different races of man by the end of the century. Still, the 19th was more emphatically the century that furnished the theory of the cell (Schleiden and Schwann, 1838-39), which led ultimately to the notion of microscopic creatures responsible for putrefaction and disease and, later still, to cytology and genetics. It is noteworthy, too, that the 19th century saw the establishment of chemistry on the Daltonian hypothesis of the atom, but it was coloured by the "biological" notion of elective affinities to explain compounds. Goethe, who was an early evolutionist and the scientific expositor of the metamorphosis of plants, called his last novel of human love Elective Affinities. On the surface the poetic mind of the age seemed hostile to both science and technology. Wordsworth looks like an enemy of science when he says: "We murder to dissect" and deprecates the man who is willing to "peep and botanize upon his mother's grave." Yet reflection shows that the animus here is not so much against science in general as for the science of life and the reality of human thought and feeling. To understand this temper of the times one must remember how uncertain the intellectual status of physical science still was. Eighteenth-century philosophy had ended in materialism and skepticism. Some writers, such as d'Holbach, had reduced all phenomena to the interaction of hard and unfeeling particles; others, such as Hume, had "proved" that man can know nothing beyond his impressions and therefore can have no certainty about the truth of cause and effect, on which scientific statements depend. The Romanticist generations could neither agree that life was a concourse of unfeeling atoms nor trust the physicists' assertions based on a law of causation that the most acute thinkers had discredited. Such were the iron constraints within which the famous "crises of the soul" and conversions to religions new or old took place in the 1820s and '30s. Carlyle, Mill, Lamennais, and many others described these crises in famous autobiographical works. The choice seemed to be between a blind and meaningless universe and human life conceived as a brief, pointless exception to the mechanical play of forces. Even if the latter scheme "explained," it was vulnerable to Hume's irrefutable doubts. Early 19th-century philosophy What enabled 19th-century culture to pursue the scientific quest and regain confidence in spiritual truth was the work of the German idealist philosophers, beginning with Immanuel Kant. Kant Kant took up Hume's challenge and showed that, although we may never know "things as they are," we can know truthfully and reliably the data of experience. The reason for this certitude is that the mind imposes its categories of time and space and causation on the flowing stream and gives it shape. Science, therefore, is not a guess, nor is human knowledge a dream. Both are solid and verifiable. Indeed, certainty, according to Kant, extends as far as morals and aesthetics. The essence of morals is the commandment not to perform any act that one would not want to become a precedent for all human action and always to consider an individual as an end in himself, not as the instrument of another's purpose. The fusion in Kant of ideas stemming from Rousseau and the Enlightenment with ideas fitting the needs of the coming century (Kant died in 1804) made him the fountainhead of European philosophy for 50 years. Kant's disciples His disciples—Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer—twisted or amplified his teachings. Coleridge in England and Victor Cousin in France adapted to home use what seemed fitting. The school as a whole was known as German idealism because it relied on the distinction between the thinking subject and the perceived object; "idea" and "thing" were unlike, but idea (or the mind) played a role in shaping the reality of things, from which derived all stability and regularity in the universe. Stability was desirable as a guarantor of natural science, but in the social world it was obviously contradicted by events, especially by those since the French Revolution. By 1840 many historians had told the story of the past 50 years, and the lesson they drew from it was almost uniformly that of pessimism. Deprived of Providence and the explanation it used to supply by its "mysterious workings," history seemed neither morally rational nor humanly tolerable. The German philosopher Hegel, however, drew a different conclusion. Coming after Kant and having witnessed Napoleon's victory at Jena in 1806, he conceived the world as ruled by a new logic, no longer a logic of things static but of things in movement. He saw the forces of history in perpetual battle. Neither side wins, but the upshot of their struggle is an amalgam of their rival intentions. Hegel called the pros and the cons and their survivors thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Human affairs are ever in dialectic (dialoguing) progression. At times a "world-historical figure" (Luther, Napoleon) embodies the aspirations of the masses and gives them effect through war, revolution, or religious reformation. Yet throughout the succession of events, what is taking place is the unfolding of Spirit or Idea taking on itself the concrete forms of the real. Hegel's was another version of evolution and progress, for he foretold the extension of liberty to all men as the fulfillment of history. It is interesting to note that until 1848 or 1850 Hegel was generally considered a dangerous revolutionary, a believer in an irresistible progress that mankind must earn by blood and battle. Karl Marx, as a younger Hegelian, was to carry out Hegel's unspoken promise on a different base. Other branches of the all-powerful German philosophy deserve attention but can be spoken of only as they relate to high Romantic themes. Fichte's modification of Kant made the ego the "creator" of the world, an extreme extension or generalization of individualism. At the other extreme, but more in tune with contemporary science and art, Schelling made nature the source of all energy, from which individual consciousness takes off to become the observer of the universe. Nature is a work of art and man is, so to say, its critic, and because human consciousness results from an act of self-limitation, it perceives moral duty and feels the need to worship. Religion and its alternatives That need made itself felt ecumenically throughout Europe from the beginning of the 19th century. It had indeed been prepared by the writings of Rousseau as early as 1762 and in England by the even earlier preaching of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism. The surviving atheism and materialism of the 18th-century philosophes was in truth a greater stimulus to the religious revival of the early 19th century than anything the French Revolution had done, briefly, to replace the established religions. When in the 1800s the Roman Catholic writings of Chateaubriand and Lamennais in France, the neo-Catholic Tractarian movement in England, and the writings of Schleiermacher and his followers in Germany began to take effect, their success was due to the same conditions that made Romanticist art, German idealism, and all the "biological" analogies succeed: the great thirst caused by dry abstractions in the Age of Reason needed quenching. Religious fervour, artistic passion, and "gothic" systems of philosophy filled a void created by the previous simple and mechanical formulas. The religious revivals, Catholic or Protestant, also aimed at political ends. Their participants feared the continuation in the 19th century of secularism and wholly material plans. In every country the liberals proposed to set up in the name of tolerance ("indifference," said the Christian believers) governments that would serve exclusively practical (indeed commercial) interests. Church and state were to be separated, education was to be secular, which would really mean antireligious. National traditions would be broken, forgotten, and youth would grow into "economic man," Benthamite utilitarian man, with no intuition of unseen realities, no sensitivity to art or nature, no humility, and no inbred morals or sanction for their dictates. Scientific positivism This desire for renewed faith and passion, however, found alternative goals. One was scientific positivism; the other was the cult of art. The name positivism is the creation of Auguste Comte, a French thinker of a mathematical cast of mind who in 1824 began to supply a philosophy of the natural sciences opposed to all metaphysics. Science, according to Comte, delivers unshakable truth by limiting itself to the statement of relations among phenomena. It does not explain but describes—and that is all mankind needs to know. From the physical sciences rise the social and mental sciences in regular gradation (Comte coined the word sociology), and from these man will learn, in time, how to live in society. Having elaborated this austere system, Comte discovered the softer emotions through a woman's love, and he amended his scheme to provide a "religion of humanity" with the worship of secular saints, under a political arrangement that the sympathetic Mill nonetheless described as "the government of a beleaguered town." Comte did not attract many orthodox disciples, but the influence of his positivism was very great down to recent times. Not alone in Europe but also in South America it formed a certain type of mind that survives to this day among some scientists and many engineers.

The Russian Campaign

ong dissociated from one another in the historiography, the campaigns of Russia (1812) and France (1814) were two intrinsically linked events that gave rise to troop and population movements of unprecedented scope for the early nineteenth century. 1812, the Russian campaign On the eve of the campaign, the Grande Armée counted 650,000 men, of whom 420,000 crossed the Neman River at nighttime between June 24-27, 1812. Prestigious and experienced, the Grande Armée was multinational, for although the French represented 40% of its troops, it also included units made up of non-nationals who had been integrated since the annexation of their country, along with contingents of "volunteers" provided by states allied with Napoleon. The Napoleonic army was also the largest army ever built. Over the course of the ensuing months, 150,000 soldiers swelled its ranks. Opposing it was the Imperial Russian Army, which was also multinational, but had less numbers. In June 1812, it totalled 622,000 men divided among three primary armies, however only 200,000 men were deployed on the Polish border at the time. In fact, French-Russian relations had continued to deteriorate since the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807, due to diverging geopolitical interests and growing rivalries in Germany, the Balkans, and Poland. When Napoleon, who was convinced that war was inevitable beginning in late 1811, chose to commence hostilities, his aim was to score a quick and decisive battle, and then quickly return against England and complete his project of European unification. But nothing would take place as expected. Even before the invasion, Alexander I and Barclay de Tolly, Minister of War and commander-in-chief of the Imperial Army, actually had the intuition that the only viable strategy against so powerful an invader was to refuse combat; to retreat while destroying everything that could be useful to the enemy, and allow him to advance into central Russia, where he would be continually weakened in the face of growing logistical problems. This plan was implemented from the beginning of the invasion, and had two major consequences: it caused serious losses within the Grande Armée, due to a lack of provisions as well as to typhus and dysentery epidemics. However, it also led to the movements of civilians who, amid the panic, abandoned their towns or villages destroyed by the enemy, and fled toward the east by the thousands, or hid in nearby forests where their survival was precarious. On August 16-18 Napoleon won a victory at Smolensk, but since the Russians had withdrawn, the battle was not decisive. On the 19th, Alexander I named Kutuzov as commander-in-chief in place of de Barclay, whose legitimacy was challenged by the army. Kutuzov, whose mission was to give battle, hastily opted for the site of Borodino (the Moskova), located 120 km from Moscow. On September 7, after more than 10 hours of combat, Napoleon apparently emerged as the victor of the encounter, as he lost only 1/5 of his engaged troops (25-28,000 men), while the Russians lost a third (40-42,000). The Russians, however, were able to resist the enemy, as the battle was not decisive: Borodino was therefore a psychological victory for them. In search of a new battle, Napoleon decided to march on Moscow, but when he arrived there on September 15, he entered a city emptied of its inhabitants: only 2-3% of the pre-war population remained, essentially the elderly, the sick, and those too poor to flee. That very evening, Moscow burned while Moscovites began their exodus toward the east (in the direction of the Urals) and the south. The fire, which was started on the order of governor-general Rostopchin and astutely attributed to the French, soon became the symbol of the martyrdom endured by the nation. While it strengthened Russian patriotism, it helped weaken the Grande Armée, which was authorized to pillage, but descended into a lack of discipline. Faced with the czar's refusal to open negotiations, Napoleon was forced to leave after one month, on October 19. He knew at the time that he had lost the war, although for his men the worst was yet to come: faced with harrassment by the cossacks, who forced them to take the same route as on their entry, the malnourished and ill-equipped men had to face the Russian winter, enduring terrible suffering. Although the army was able to escape during the crossing of the Berezina thanks to the heroic exploits of 300 members of General Éblé's bridge unit, the campaign was nevertheless terribly deadly. It is estimated that at most 15% of the soldiers crossed the Niemen River on December 13. Nearly 200-250,000 soldiers of the Grande Armée died in combat, 150,000 or even 200,000 were made prisoner, and 50-60,000 marauders and deserters, who became tutors, domestic servants or farmhands, apparently hid in Russia and survived thanks to the involvement of the local population. On the Russian side, 300,000 deaths were reported, including 175,000 who died in combat, without counting the thousands of devastated villages, and a capital reduced to ashes. The country thus paid a heavy price for its freedom. Despite the contrary opinion of a number of his advisors, Alexander I nevertheless believed that Napoleon would return sooner or later, and that it was necessary to take to the offensive and undo him once and for all. The French Campaign: Europe United in its Assault on French Territory To do this, however, Alexander I needed the support of the German states, some of which were still allied with the French emperor. The central issue of the German campaign would be to convince them to turn against Napoleon. Despite brilliant victories (Lützen, Bautzen), Napoleon suffered a tough defeat in Leipzig on October 16-18, 1813, which opened for the coalition a path toward French territory in January 1814. For the first time since the French Revolution, France was invaded from the south, east, and north. The coalition, which was structured into two primary armies, led respectively by the Austrian Schwarzenberg and the Prussian Blücher, brought together Russian, Prussian, British, Swedish, Austrian, Bavarian and Wurtembergian troops, who were as impressive in number (nearly 500,000 men, or two to three times more than the French) as they were in experience, and were opposed by young recruits of the Grande Armée known as the "Marie-Louise." During the course of January, the two coalition armies advanced without meeting resistance, one occupying the east and the other the north, to the great displeasure of the population, which was left to its fate. Taking advantage of signs of dissension between the two primary coalition armies—the Bohemian army led by the Austrian prince Schwarzenberg and the Silesian army led by the Prussian Blücher—Napoleon marked two good victories in mid-February (Champaubert, Montmirail), while in the countryside the occupier's exactions sparked a few resistance movements in response. Yet the disproportion in troops along with the determination of the czar and the weariness of the French brought about the inevitable outcome. The day after the battle of Paris on March 30, in which 18,000 soldiers were killed and wounded on either side, the coalition entered the French capital, and on April 6 Napoleon had to abdicate. The Treaty of Paris of May 1814 preserved France's 1792 borders, however in the aftermath of the Hundred Days and the defeat at Waterloo, the second Treaty of Paris (November 1815) reduced the country to its 1789 borders and imposed, in addition to a heavy war indemnity, an occupation that lasted until 1818 in the departments of the east and the north.

Russia and Peter the Great

1. Modernized Russia 2. Failed in attempts to gain a warm water port he first steps taken in this direction were the campaigns of 1695 and 1696, with the object of capturing Azov from the Crimean Tatar vassals of Turkey. On the one hand, these Azov campaigns could be seen as fulfilling Russia's commitments, undertaken during Sophia's regency, to the anti-Turkish "Holy League" of 1684 (Austria, Poland, and Venice); on the other hand, they were intended to secure the southern frontier against Tatar raids, as well as to approach the Black Sea. The first campaign ended in failure (1695), but this did not discourage Peter: he promptly built a fleet at Voronezh to sail down the Don River and in 1696 Azov was captured. To consolidate this success Taganrog was founded on the northern shore of the Don estuary, and the building of a large navy was started. The Grand Embassy (1697-98) of Peter I Having already sent some young nobles abroad to study nautical matters, Peter, in 1697, went with the so-called Grand Embassy to western Europe. The embassy comprised about 250 people, with the "grand ambassadors" Franz Lefort, Fyodor Alekseyevich Golovin, and Prokopy Voznitsyn at its head. Its chief purposes were to examine the international situation and to strengthen the anti-Turkish coalition, but it was also intended to gather information on the economic and cultural life of Europe. Travelling incognito under the name of Sgt. Pyotr Mikhaylov, Peter familiarized himself with conditions in the advanced countries of the West. For four months he studied shipbuilding, working as a ship's carpenter in the yard of the Dutch East India Company at Saardam; after that he went to Great Britain, where he continued his study of shipbuilding, working in the Royal Navy's dockyard at Deptford, and he also visited factories, arsenals, schools, and museums and even attended a session of Parliament. Meanwhile, the services of foreign experts were engaged for work in Russia. Peter IPeter I, disguised as a carpenter while traveling in western Europe (1697-98).© Photos.com/Thinkstock On the diplomatic side of the Grand Embassy, Peter conducted negotiations with the Dutch and British governments for alliances against Turkey, but the Maritime Powers did not wish to involve themselves with him because they were preoccupied with the problems that were soon to come to a crisis, for them, in the War of the Spanish Succession. The destruction of the streltsy (1698) From England, Peter went on to Austria, but, while he was negotiating in Vienna for a continuance of the anti-Turkish alliance, he received news of a fresh revolt of the streltsy in Moscow. In the summer of 1698 he was back in Moscow, where he suppressed the revolt. Hundreds of the streltsy were executed, the rest of the rebels were exiled to distant towns, and the corps of the streltsy was disbanded. The Northern War (1700-21) When it became clear that Austria, no less than the Maritime Powers, was preparing to fight for the Spanish Succession and to make peace with Turkey, Peter saw that Russia could not contemplate a war without allies against the Turks, and he abandoned his plans for pushing forward from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. By the Russo-Turkish Peace of Constantinople (Istanbul, 1700) he retained possession of Azov. He was now turning his attention to the Baltic instead, following the tradition of his predecessors. The Swedes occupied Karelia, Ingria, Estonia, and Livonia and blocked Russia's way to the Baltic coast. To dislodge them, Peter took an active part in forming the great alliance, comprising Russia, Saxony, and Denmark-Norway, which started the Northern War in 1700. This war lasted for 21 years and was Peter's main military enterprise. In planning it and in sustaining it he displayed iron willpower, extraordinary energy, and outstanding gifts of statesmanship, generalship, and diplomacy. Mobilizing all the resources of Russia for the triumph of his cause, constantly keeping himself abreast of events, and actively concerning himself with all important undertakings, often at his personal risk, he could be seen sometimes in a sailor's jacket on a warship, sometimes in an officer's uniform on the battlefield, and sometimes in a labourer's apron and gloves with an axe in a shipyard. The defeat of the Russians at Narva (1700), very early in the war, did not deter Peter and, in fact, he later described it as a blessing: "Necessity drove away sloth and forced me to work night and day." He subsequently took part in the siege that led to the Russian capture of Narva (1704) and in the battles of Lesnaya (1708) and of Poltava (1709). At Poltava, where Charles XII of Sweden suffered a catastrophic defeat, the plan of operations was Peter's own: it was his idea to transform the battlefield by works of his military engineers—the redoubts erected in the path of the Swedish troops to break their combat order, to split them into little groups, and to halt their onslaught. Peter also took part in the naval battle of Gangut (Hanko, or Hangö) in 1714, the first major Russian victory at sea. The treaties concluded by Russia in the course of the war were made under Peter's personal direction. He also travelled abroad again for diplomatic reasons—e.g., to Pomerania in 1712 and to Denmark, northern Germany, Holland, and France in 1716-17. In 1703, on the banks of the Neva River, where it flows into the Gulf of Finland, Peter began construction of the city of St. Petersburg and established it as the new capital of Russia in 1712. By the Treaty of Nystad (September 10 [August 30, O.S.], 1721) the eastern shores of the Baltic were at last ceded to Russia, Sweden was reduced to a secondary power, and the way was opened for Russian domination over Poland. In celebration of his triumph, the Senate on November 2 (October 22, O.S.), 1721, changed Peter's title from tsar to emperor (imperator) of all the Russias. The popular revolts (1705-08) The peasant serfs and the poorer urban workers had to bear the greatest hardships in wartime and moreover were intensively exploited in the course of Peter's great work for the modernization and development of Russia (see below Internal reforms). Their sufferings, combined with onerous taxation, provoked a number of revolts, the most important of which were that of Astrakhan (1705-06) and that led by Kondraty Afanasyevich Bulavin in the Don basin (1707-08). These revolts were cruelly put down. The Turkish War (1710-13) In the middle of the Northern War, when Peter might have pressed further the advantage won at Poltava, Turkey declared war on Russia. In the summer of 1711 Peter marched against the Turks through Bessarabia into Moldavia, but he was surrounded, with all his forces, on the Prut River. Obliged to sue for peace, he was fortunate to obtain very light terms from the inept Turkish negotiators, who allowed him to retire with no greater sacrifice than the retrocession of Azov. The Turkish government soon decided to renew hostilities, but the Peace of Adrianople (Edirne) was concluded in 1713, leaving Azov to the Turks. From that time on Peter's military effort was concentrated on winning his war against Sweden. The tsarevich Alexis and Catherine (to 1718) Peter had a son, the tsarevich Alexis, by his discarded wife Eudoxia. Alexis was his natural heir, but he grew up antipathetic to Peter and receptive to reactionary influences working against Peter's reforms. Peter, meanwhile, had formed a lasting liaison with a lowborn woman, the future empress Catherine I, who bore him other children and whom he married in 1712. Pressed finally to mend his ways or to become a monk in renunciation of his hereditary rights (1716), Alexis took refuge in the dominions of the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, but he was induced to return to Russia in 1718. Thereupon proceedings were brought against him on charges of high treason, and after torture he was condemned to death. He died in prison, presumably by violence, before the formal execution of the sentence. AlexisAlexis, detail of an engraving by K. Vortman after a painting by J.P. Lüdden, 1729.Novosti Press Agency The Persian campaign (1722-23) Even during the second half of the Northern War, Peter had sent exploratory missions to the East—to the Central Asian steppes in 1714, to the Caspian region in 1715, and to Khiva in 1717. The end of the war left him free to resume a more active policy on his southeastern frontier. In 1722, hearing that the Ottoman Turks would take advantage of Persia's weakness and invade the Caspian region, Peter himself invaded Persian territory. In 1723 Persia ceded the western and southern shores of the Caspian to Russia in return for military aid. BRITANNICA QUIZ History: Fact or Fiction? Get hooked on history as this quiz sorts out the past. Find out who really invented movable type, who Winston Churchill called "Mum," and when the first sonic boom was heard. Death The campaign along the parched shores of the Caspian obviously put a great strain on Peter's health, already undermined by enormous exertions and also by the excesses in which he occasionally indulged himself. In the autumn of 1724, seeing some soldiers in danger of drowning from a ship aground on a sandbank in the Gulf of Finland, he reportedly plunged himself into the icy water to help them. He became seriously ill in the winter, suffering from bladder and urinary tract problems. However, he continued to work, and it was at this time that he drew up the instructions for the expedition of Vitus Bering to Kamchatka. In January 1725 Peter began having trouble urinating. Doctors removed a litre of "putrid" urine, and a fever ensued. Days later he died, at age 52. An autopsy allegedly found that gangrene had developed around his bladder. Peter left an empire that stretched from Arkhangelsk (Archangel) on the White Sea to Mazanderan on the Caspian and from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Though he had in 1722 issued a decree reserving to himself the right to nominate his successor, he did not in fact nominate anyone. His widow, Catherine, whom he had crowned empress in 1724, succeeded him to the temporary exclusion of his grandson, the future Peter II. Internal reforms At the beginning of Peter's reign, Russia was backward by comparison with the countries of western Europe. This backwardness inhibited foreign policy and even put Russia's national independence in danger. Peter's aim, therefore, was to overtake the developed countries of western Europe as soon as possible, in order both to promote the national economy and to ensure victory in his wars for access to the seas. Breaking the resistance of the boyars, or members of the ancient landed aristocracy, and of the clergy and severely punishing all other opposition to his projects, he initiated a series of reforms that affected, in the course of 25 years, every field of the national life—administration, industry, commerce, technology, and culture. equestrian statue of Peter IPeter I, statue in St. Petersburg.AdstockRF The towns At the beginning of Peter's reign there was already some degree of economic differentiation between the various regions of Russia, and in the towns artisans were establishing small businesses, small-scale production was expanding, and industrial plants and factories were growing up, with both hired workers and serfs employed. There was thus a nascent bourgeoisie, which benefitted considerably from Peter's plans for the development of the national industry and trade. The reform of the urban administration was particularly significant. By a decree of 1699, townspeople (artisans and tradesmen) were released from subjection to the military governors of the provinces and were authorized to elect municipalities of their own, which would be subordinated to the Moscow municipality, or ratusha—the council of the great merchant community of the capital. This reform was carried further in 1720, with the establishment of a chief magistracy in St. Petersburg, to which the local town magistracies and the elected municipal officers of the towns (mayors, or burmistry; and councillors, or ratmany) were subordinated. All townspeople, meanwhile, were divided between "regulars" and "commons" (inferiors). The regulars were subdivided between two guilds—the first comprising rich merchants and members of the liberal professions (doctors, actors, and artists) and the second comprising artisans (classified according to their vocations) and small tradesmen. A merchant belonged to the first or to the second guild according to the amount of his capital, and those who were also manufacturers had special privileges, coming under the jurisdiction of the College of Manufactures and being exempt from the billeting of troops, from elective rotas of duty, and from military service. The commons were hired labourers, without the privileges of regulars. Thanks to the reforms, the economic activity and the population of the towns increased. Anyone engaged in trade was legally permitted to settle in a town and to register himself in the appropriate category, and there was a right of "free commerce for people of every rank." The provinces and the districts In order to create a more flexible system of control by the central power, Russia was territorially divided in 1708 into eight guberny, or governments, each under a governor appointed by the tsar and vested with administrative, military, and judicial authority. In 1719 these guberny were dissolved into 50 provintsy, or provinces, which in turn were subdivided into districts. The census of 1722, however, was followed by the substitution of a poll tax for the previous hearth tax, and this provoked a wave of popular discontent, against which Peter decided to distribute the army regiments (released from active service by the Peace of Nystad) in garrisons throughout the country and to make their maintenance obligatory on the local populations. Thus came into being the "regimental districts," which did not coincide with the administrative. The regimental commanders, with their own sphere of jurisdiction and their own requirements, added another layer to the already complex system of local authority. Load Next Page

Other States of Western Europe

1754: The Treaty of Pondicherry ends the Second Carnatic War and recognizes Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah as Nawab of the Carnatic. 1754: King's College is founded by a royal charter of George II of Great Britain.[22] 1754-1763: The French and Indian War, the North American chapter of the Seven Years' War, is fought in colonial North America, mostly by the French and their allies against the English and their allies. 1755: The great Lisbon earthquake destroys most of Portugal's capital and kills up to 100,000. 1755: The Dzungar Genocide depopulates much of northern Xinjiang, allowing for Han, Uighur, Khalkha Mongol, and Manchu colonization. 1755-1763: The Great Upheaval forces transfer of the French Acadian population from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. 1756-1763: The Seven Years' War is fought among European powers in various theaters around the world. 1756-1763: The Third Carnatic War is fought between the British, the French, and Mysore in India. 1757: British conquest of Bengal. Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. 1760: George III becomes King of Britain. 1761: Maratha Empire defeated at Battle of Panipat. 1762-1796: Reign of Catherine the Great of Russia. 1763: The Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years' War and Third Carnatic War. 1764: The Mughals are defeated at the Battle of Buxar. 1765: The Stamp Act is introduced into the American colonies by the British Parliament. 1765-1767: The Burmese invade Thailand and utterly destroy Attuthaya. 1765-1769: Burma under Hsinbyushin repels four invasions from Qing China, securing hegemony over the Shan states. 1766: Christian VII becomes king of Denmark. He was king of Denmark to 1808. 1766-1799: Anglo-Mysore Wars. 1767: Taksin expels Burmese invaders and reunites Thailand under an authoritarian regime. 1768-1772: War of the Bar Confederation. 1768-1774: Russo-Turkish War. 1769: Spanish missionaries establish the first of 21 missions in California. 1769-1770: James Cook explores and maps New Zealand and Australia. 1769-1773: The Bengal famine of 1770 kills one-third of the Bengal population. 1769: The French East India Company dissolves, only to be revived in 1785. 1769: French expeditions capture clove plants in Ambon, ending the VOC monopoly of the plant.[23] (to 1772) 1770-1771: Famine in Czech lands kills hundreds of thousands. 1771: The Plague Riot in Moscow. 1771: The Kalmyk Khanate dissolves as the territory becomes colonized by Russians. More than a hundred thousand Kalmyks migrate back to Qing Dzungaria. 1772: Gustav III of Sweden stages a coup d'état, becoming almost an absolute monarch.Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers 1772-1779: Maratha Empire fights Britain and Raghunathrao's forces during the First Anglo-Maratha War. 1772-1795: The Partitions of Poland end the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and erase Poland from the map for 123 years. 1773-1775: Pugachev's Rebellion, the largest peasant revolt in Russian history. 1773: East India Company starts operations in Bengal to smuggle opium into China. 1775: Russia imposes a reduction in autonomy on the Zaporizhian Cossacks of Ukraine. 1775-1782: First Anglo-Maratha War. 1775-1783: American Revolutionary War. 1776: Several Kongsi Republics are founded by Chinese settlers in the island of Borneo. They are some of the first democracies in Asia. 1776-1777: A Spanish-Portuguese War occurs over land in the South American frontiers. 1776: Illuminati founded by Adam Weishaupt. 1776: The United States Declaration of Independence is adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. 1776: Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations. 1778: James Cook becomes the first European to land on the Hawaiian Islands. 1778: Franco-American alliance signed. 1778: Spain acquires its first permanent holding in Africa from the Portuguese, which is administrated by the newly-established La Plata Viceroyalty. 1778: Vietnam is reunified for the first time in 200 years by the Tay Son brothers. 1779-1879: Xhosa Wars between British and Boer settlers and the Xhosas in the South African Republic. 1779-1783: Britain loses several islands and colonial outposts all over the world to the combined Franco-Spanish navy. 1779: Iran enters yet another period of conflict and civil war after the prosperous reign of Karim Khan Zand. 1780: Outbreak of the indigenous rebellion against Spanish colonization led by Túpac Amaru II in Peru. 1781: The city of Los Angeles is founded by Spanish settlers.George Washington 1781-1785: Serfdom is abolished in the Austrian monarchy (first step; second step in 1848). 1782: The Thonburi Kingdom of Thailand is dissolved after a palace coup. 1783: The Treaty of Paris formally ends the American Revolutionary War. 1783: Russian annexation of Crimea. 1785-1791: Imam Sheikh Mansur, a Chechen warrior and Muslim mystic, leads a coalition of Muslim Caucasian tribes from throughout the Caucasus in a holy war against Russian settlers and military bases in the Caucasus, as well as against local traditionalists, who followed the traditional customs and common law (Adat) rather than the theocratic Sharia.[24] 1785-1795: The Northwest Indian War is fought between the United States and Native Americans. 1785-1787: The Maratha-Mysore War concludes with an exchange of territories in the Deccan. 1786-1787: Mozart premieres The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni 1787: The Tuareg occupies Timbuktu until the 19th century. 1787-1792: Russo-Turkish War. 1788: First Fleet arrives in Australia 1788-1790: Russo-Swedish War (1788-1790).Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 1788-1789: A Qing attempt to reinstall an exiled Vietnamese king in northern Vietnam ends in disaster. 1789: George Washington is elected the first President of the United States; he serves until 1797. 1789-1799: French Revolution. 1789: The Liège Revolution. 1789: The Brabant Revolution. 1789: The Inconfidência Mineira, an unsuccessful separatist movement in central Brazil led by Tiradentes 1791: Suppression of the Liège Revolution by Austrian forces and re-establishment of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. 1791-1795: George Vancouver explores the world during the Vancouver Expedition. 1791-1804: The Haitian Revolution. 1791 Mozart premieres The Magic Flute 1792-1802: The French Revolutionary Wars lead into the Napoleonic Wars, which last from 1803-1815. 1792: The New York Stock & Exchange Board is founded. 1792: Polish-Russian War of 1792. 1793: Upper Canada bans slavery. 1793: The largest yellow fever epidemic in American history kills as many as 5,000 people in Philadelphia, roughly 10% of the population.[25] 1793-1796: Revolt in the Vendée against the French Republic at the time of the Revolution. 1794-1816: The Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars, which were a series of incidents between settlers and New South Wales Corps and the Aboriginal Australian clans of the Hawkesbury river in Sydney, Australia. 1795: The Marseillaise is officially adopted as the French national anthem.Napoleon at the Bridge of the Arcole 1795: The Battle of Nuʻuanu in the final days of King Kamehameha I's wars to unify the Hawaiian Islands. 1795-1796: Iran invades and devastates Georgia, prompting Russia to intervene and march on Tehran. 1796: Edward Jenner administers the first smallpox vaccination; smallpox killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year during the 18th century, including five reigning monarchs.[26] 1796: War of the First Coalition: The Battle of Montenotte marks Napoleon Bonaparte's first victory as an army commander. 1796: The British eject the Dutch from Ceylon and South Africa. 1796-1804: The White Lotus Rebellion against the Manchu dynasty in China. 1798: The Irish Rebellion fails to overthrow British rule in Ireland. 1798-1800: The Quasi-War is fought between the United States and France. 1799: Dutch East India Company is dissolved. 1799: Austro-Russian forces under Alexander Suvorov liberates much of Italy and Switzerland from French occupation. 1799: Coup of 18 Brumaire - Napoleon's coup d'etat brings the end of the French Revolution. 1799: Death of the Qianlong Emperor after 60 years of rule over China. His favorite official, Heshen, is ordered to commit suicide. 1800: 1 January, The bankrupt Dutch East India Company (VOC) is formally dissolved and the nationalised Dutch East Indies are established.[27] Inventions, discoveries, introductions[edit] Main articles: Timeline of historic inventions § 18th century, and Timeline of scientific discoveries § 18th century The Spinning Jenny 1709: The first piano was built by Bartolomeo Cristofori 1711: Tuning fork was invented by John Shore 1712: Steam engine invented by Thomas Newcomen 1714: Mercury thermometer by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit 1717: Diving bell was successfully tested by Edmond Halley, sustainable to a depth of 55 ft c. 1730: Octant navigational tool was developed by John Hadley in England, and Thomas Godfrey in America 1733: Flying shuttle invented by John Kay 1736: Europeans encountered rubber - the discovery was made by Charles Marie de La Condamine while on expedition in South America. It was named in 1770 by Joseph Priestley c. 1740: Modern steel was developed by Benjamin Huntsman 1741: Vitus Bering discovers Alaska 1745: Leyden jar invented by Ewald Georg von Kleist was the first electrical capacitor 1751: Jacques de Vaucanson perfects the first precision lathe 1752: Lightning rod invented by Benjamin Franklin 1753: The first clock to be built in the New World (North America) was invented by Benjamin Banneker. 1755: The tallest wooden Bodhisattva statue in the world is erected at Puning Temple, Chengde, China. 1764: Spinning jenny created by James Hargreaves brought on the Industrial Revolution 1765: James Watt enhances Newcomen's steam engine, allowing new steel technologies 1761: The problem of longitude was finally resolved by the fourth chronometer of John Harrison 1763: Thomas Bayes publishes first version of Bayes' theorem, paving the way for Bayesian probability 1768-1779: James Cook mapped the boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and discovered many Pacific Islands 1774: Joseph Priestley discovers "dephlogisticated air", oxygenThe Chinese Putuo Zongcheng Temple of Chengde, completed in 1771, during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. 1775: Joseph Priestley first synthesis of "phlogisticated nitrous air", nitrous oxide, "laughing gas" 1776: First improved steam engines installed by James Watt 1776: Steamboat invented by Claude de Jouffroy 1777: Circular saw invented by Samuel Miller 1779: Photosynthesis was first discovered by Jan Ingenhousz 1781: William Herschel announces discovery of Uranus 1784: Bifocals invented by Benjamin Franklin 1784: Argand lamp invented by Aimé Argand[28] 1785: Power loom invented by Edmund Cartwright 1785: Automatic flour mill invented by Oliver Evans 1786: Threshing machine invented by Andrew Meikle 1787: Jacques Charles discovers Charles's law 1789: Antoine Lavoisier discovers the law of conservation of mass, the basis for chemistry, and begins modern chemistry 1798: Edward Jenner publishes a treatise about smallpox vaccination 1798: The Lithographic printing process invented by Alois Senefelder[29] 1799: Rosetta Stone discovered by Napoleon's troops Literary and philosophical achievements[edit] 1703: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki by Chikamatsu first performed 1704-1717: One Thousand and One Nights translated into French by Antoine Galland. The work becomes immensely popular throughout Europe. 1704: A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift first published 1712: The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope (publication of first version) 1719: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe 1725: The New Science by Giambattista Vico 1726: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift 1728: The Dunciad by Alexander Pope (publication of first version) 1744: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book becomes one of the first books marketed for children 1748: Chushingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers), popular Japanese puppet play, composed 1748: Clarissa by Samuel Richardson 1749: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding 1751: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray published 1751-1785: The French Encyclopédie 1755: A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson 1759: Candide by Voltaire 1759: The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith 1759-1767: Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 1762: Emile: or, On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762: The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1774: The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe first published 1776: Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain) by Ueda Akinari 1776: The Wealth of Nations, foundation of the modern theory of economy, was published by Adam Smith 1776-1789: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published by Edward Gibbon 1779: Amazing Grace published by John Newton 1779-1782: Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets by Samuel Johnson 1781: Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (publication of first edition) 1781: The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller first published 1782: Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 1786: Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns 1787-1788: The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay 1788: Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant 1789: Songs of Innocence by William Blake 1789: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano 1790: Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Alexander Radishchev 1790: Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke 1791: Rights of Man by Thomas Paine 1792: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft 1794: Songs of Experience by William Blake 1798: Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population published by Thomas Malthus (mid-18th century): The Dream of the Red Chamber (authorship attributed to Cao Xueqin), one of the most famous Chinese novels

Progress and Pessimism

2 complementary concepts underlying the nature of enlightenment. The concept of a natural order, underlying the disorder and confusion of universe, and secondly the concept of a human faculty, best called reason, which is obscured in most of humanity.

French Expansion

Goal of Bourbons to make france the best -want to expand borders: easier to defend france from invasion. France Real victor of the 30 years war an acquired land on the eastern frontier. Louis hoped to expand into the Rhine and Alps. Sought to build a universal monarchy. Wanted to spread French Language and culture.Louis XIV made new cabinet of clerks, decoders, coders, archivists and secret agents

Louis XIV: The Last Two Wars

Last 3 decades of his reign all of Louis assets were consumed. Wasn't content with prestige he had won so wanted to get more. Starts the War of the League of Augsburg. Spain, England and Romans were against France. War was constantly fought in colonies in the indies and on land, war ended with treaty of ryswick, peace but no winner.

Mercantilism and Colbert

Louis XIV wants econ. power of france Colbert-(his minister) applied mercantilism-aim to make france slef sufficing econ. unit/ expand export of goods/ increase wealth of gov income

Gironde and the Mountain

The Mountain (French: La Montagne) was a political group during the French Revolution. Its members, called the Montagnards (French: [mɔ̃taɲaʁ]), sat on the highest benches in the National Convention. They were the most radical group and opposed the Girondins. The term, first used during a session of the Legislative Assembly, came into general use in 1793.[10] By the summer of 1793, that pair of opposed minority groups divided the National Convention. That year, led by Maximilien Robespierre, the Montagnards unleashed the Reign of Terror. The Mountain was composed mainly of members of the middle class, but represented the constituencies of Paris. As such, the Mountain was sensitive to the motivations of the city and responded strongly to demands from the working class sans-culottes.[11] The Mountain operated on the belief that what was best for Paris would be best for all of France. Although they attempted some rural land reform, most of it was never enacted and they generally focused on the needs of the urban poor over that of rural France.[12] The Girondins were a moderate political faction created during the Legislative Assembly period.[13] They were the political opponents of the more radical representatives within the Mountain. The Girondins had wanted to avoid the execution of Louis XVI and supported a constitution which would have allowed a popular vote to overturn legislation.[13] The Mountain accused the Girondins of plotting against Paris because this caveat within the proposed constitution would have allowed rural areas of France to vote against legislation that benefits Paris, the main constituency of the Mountain. However, the real discord in the Convention occurred not between the Mountain and the Gironde, but between the aggressive antics of the minority of the Mountain and the rest of the Convention.[14] The Mountain was not unified as a party and relied on leaders like Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton and Jacques Hébert, who themselves came to represent different factions.[15] Hébert, a journalist, gained a following as a radical patriot Montagnard (members who identified with him became known as the Hébertists) while Danton led a more moderate faction of the Mountain (followers came to be known as Dantonists).[16] Regardless of the divisions, the nightly sessions of the Jacobin club, which met in the rue Saint-Honoré, can be considered to be a type of caucus for the Mountain.[17] In June 1793, the Mountain successfully ousted most of the moderate Gironde members of the Convention with the assistance of radical sans-culottes.[18] Following their coup, the Mountain, led by Hérault de Séchelles, quickly began construction on a new constitution which was completed eight days later.[19] The Committee of Public Safety reported the constitution to the Convention on 10 June and a final draft was adopted on 24 June. The process occurred quickly because as Robespierre, a prominent member of the Mountain, announced on 10 June the "good citizens demanded a constitution" and the "Constitution will be the reply of patriotic deputies, for it is the work of the Mountain".[20] However, this constitution was never actually enacted.[21] The Constitution of 1793 was abandoned when Robespierre later granted himself and the Committee of Public Safety dictatorial powers in order to "defend the Revolution".[22]

Commerce and Finance

The maritime trade increased the demand for the insurance of ships and cargoes. Marine insurance prospered in part because improved charts and the installation of lighthouses and buoys-trade increased. turnpikes and canals made transport quicker and sextant and chronometer improved navigation.

Louis XIII

king of France from 1610 to 1643 who relied heavily on the advice of Cardinal Richelieu (1601-1643)

France

he year 1789 is the great dividing line in the history of modern France. The fall of the Bastille, a medieval fortress used as a state prison, on July 14, 1789, symbolizes for France, as well as for other nations, the end of the premodern era characterized by an organicist and religiously sanctioned traditionalism. With the French Revolution began the institutionalization of secularized individualism in both social life and politics; individualism and rationality found expression in parliamentary government and written constitutionalism. Obviously, the English and American revolutions of 1688 and 1776 prefigure these changes, but it was the more universalist French Revolution that placed individualism and rationality squarely at the centre of human concerns. Because the revolutionary events had such earthshaking power, the history of France in the century preceding 1789 has until recently been seen as a long prologue to the coming drama, a period marked by the decay of the ancien régime ("old regime"), a locution created during the Revolution. Some contemporary historians, however, reject this view and present 18th-century France as a society undergoing rapid but manageable social, economic, and cultural change. They perceive the French Revolution as a political event that could have been avoided if the French monarchy had been more consistent in its effort to modify political institutions in order to keep up with the new needs of its people. The social and political heritage The social order of the ancien régime To understand the developments of the 18th century and to follow the scholarly debates, one may begin with a definition of the ancien régime. Its essence lay in the interweaving of the state's social, political, and economic forms; the term itself, though primarily a political concept, has also always had a clear social and economic resonance. In the society of the ancien régime, all men and women were, by birth, subjects of the king of France. In theory always and in practice often, the lives of French men and women of all ranks and estates took shape within a number of overlapping institutions, each with rules that entitled its members to enjoy particular privileges (a term derived from the Latin words for "private law"). Rights and status flowed as a rule from the group to the individual rather than from individuals to the group, as was true after 1789. France itself can be conceived of as an aggregate of differentiated groups or communities (villages, parishes, or guilds), all of them theoretically comparable but all of them different. In many respects the kingdom was an assembly of varying provinces, a number of them endowed with vestigial representative institutions. In some important ways France was not truly a unit of government. Unlike England, for example, France was not a single customs union; more tariffs had to be paid by shippers on brandy floated down the Garonne to Bordeaux than on wine shipped from France to Britain. The concept of national citizenship was not unknown in France under the ancien régime, existing in the sense that all Frenchmen, regardless of their rank and privileges, had certain legal rights denied to all foreigners. There was, however, no French nation whose citizens taken one by one were equal before man-made law, as was true after 1789. Laws were in the main inherited, not made. This is not to say that France, though structured around the "premodern" concept of the guild, or group, or corps, was a static or, materially speaking, a stable society. For many artisans, peregrination was a way of life, and many years of their young manhood were spent on a tour de France, which took them from city to city in order to learn their trade. Serfdom was practically unknown (only 140,000 serfs remained in France in 1789, none of them on crown lands, where Jacques Necker, the comptroller general, had abolished serfdom in 1779), and peasants were free to move as they wished from one village to the next. Indeed, such large numbers of people were moving around that the fear of unattached vagrants was strong in prerevolutionary France. Monarchy and church In the 18th century, justifications of royal authority drew on many traditions. The king still claimed the status of a feudal suzerain of his subjects. Familial imagery was an important component of royal rhetoric; the king of France was father of his subjects. His right to reign echoed all husbands' right to rule over their wives and all fathers' right to rule over their children. His messages, however draconian and confiscatory they might be, were invariably couched in a rhetoric of religious and paternal solicitude. Sponsored by Advertising Partner Sponsored Video Watch to learn more LEARN MORE The king, moreover, was a Christian monarch and as such was endowed with quasi-priestly functions. He was anointed at his coronation with holy chrism said to have been brought from heaven by a dove. It was thought that, as evidence of his special status, he could cure scrofula by his touch. The relationship of church and state was complex. Oftentimes the king did not hesitate to exploit the church, over which he held extensive power by virtue of the still-valid Concordat of Bologna of 1516. Monarchs used their right to appoint bishops and abbots to secure the loyalty of impoverished or ambitious nobles. The crown asserted its right to regulate church policies, limit the authority of the pope over French Catholics, and abolish or consolidate monastic orders. Nonetheless, until 1788 the Roman Catholic Church retained in France unusually broad doctrinal rights and social prestige, even by the standards prevailing in central or southern Europe, not to speak of what held true in the far more tolerant countries of northern Europe (Prussia, Holland, and Britain). French Protestants were denied religious toleration until 1787. Jews were tolerated only as quasi-foreigners until 1791. Of considerable symbolic importance was the fact that before 1789 it was the church that kept the registers of births and deaths that marked the beginning and end of each person's earthly existence. The church, the police, and the courts collaborated closely to maintain the prestige of religion; until at least the 1780s the church severely condemned licentious or irreligious books such as Rousseau's Émile, which was burned in 1762 by order of the Parlement of Paris, a measure that did little to stop its circulation. Sponsored by Merrill The big shift Experts discuss inflation, volatility, global tensions and potential impacts to your portfolio. LEARN MORE The monarchy basically respected the various rights of the church accrued by tradition, as it did the civil and property rights, or "liberties," of its subjects generally. Continuity ordinarily seemed to be the first principle of the French state, and it was inherent in the concept of king itself: the king was held to have two bodies, a physical one, which necessarily decayed, and a spiritual one, which never died. In this view, the main purpose of the French state was to defend vested interests—i.e., to maintain continuity rather than to change the existing order. Commitment to modernization The great peculiarity of the ancien régime was that a system committed to preserving tradition also contained within it powerful forces for change. The absolute monarchy developed between 1624 and 1642 by Richelieu and later by Mazarin, Colbert, Louvois, and Louis XIV was guided by a modern raison d'état, in which the state was eager to further changes of all kinds for its own purposes. Administratively, its absolutist will, formulated at Versailles in a complex array of governmental councils, was enforced in the provinces by the intendants and their subordinates. The monarchy favoured modern manufacturing and, more desultorily, modern finance. It protected and firmly guided intellectuals through the Académie Française. With greater hesitation, the monarchy also promoted France's drive to obtain economic and military supremacy not just in Europe but overseas as well, in North America, India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Divided in its goals, some of them traditional and others modern, the state was also ideologically double-minded. In the 17th century many intellectuals (some of them clerics such as Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet [1627-1704]) developed a Hobbesian justification of absolutist rule, which was renewed throughout the 18th century. Religion and tradition went hand in hand, but absolutist theoreticians went further. They justified the state's right not only to legislate and tax more or less at will but also to imprison arbitrarily without due process of law. The lettres de cachet, which allowed the king to have individuals committed to the Bastille and to other prisons forever and without any kind of trial, were seldom given out, usually to fathers who wished to correct their wayward children. But they did exist, as liberal or scurrilous propagandists knew full well, sometimes firsthand: about one-fourth of the 5,279 people imprisoned in the Bastille between 1660 and 1790 were connected with the world of the book. Royal proclamations often stressed, however, the king's obligation to govern in the interests of his people. The parlements, frequent critics of arbitrary rule, spread the notion that subjects' rights were protected by a fixed, if ill-defined, constitution that could not be altered without the consent of their representatives. Continuity and change The political history of 18th-century France can be conceptualized in terms of the double heritage and the problems it entailed. The discussion may be linked to two issues: first, the economic transformation of a traditional and essentially agricultural society by both commerce and ideas; and, second, the state's efforts (and eventual inability) to modernize and unify its structure and purpose to encompass the changed economic and cultural expectations of the nation's elites. In contrast to the France of Louis XIV's grand siècle ("great century"), beset by economic stagnation and periodic food shortages, 18th-century France enjoyed a climate of growing prosperity, fueled in part by a sustained rise in population. The kingdom's population, which had barely grown at all during the years 1500 to 1700, increased from approximately 20 million at the end of Louis XIV's reign to about 28 million by 1789. Better preventive medicine, a decline in infant mortality, and the near disappearance of widespread famine after 1709 all served to increase the population. Birth rates continued to be very high, despite both a traditional pattern of late marriage (men on the average at age 27, women at 24 or 25) and the beginnings of the practice of birth control, the effect of which was to become evident only after the Revolution. The yearly number of deaths per 10,000 fell from about 400 in 1750 to 350 in 1775, 328 in 1790, and 298 in 1800. The increased population meant more mouths to feed but also more consumers, more workers seeking employment, and more opportunities for investment; in short, every aspect of French life was affected. Agricultural patterns In its basic organization, French agriculture continued its age-old patterns. This contrasted starkly with England, where new agricultural techniques as well as major changes in the control of land—convertible husbandry (a progressive form of land use that did away with the wasteful fallowing of land every two or three years) and the enclosure movement (which made possible the consolidation of small parcels of land into large farms fenced off from use by the rest of the community)—were beginning to cause an agricultural revolution. In France there was no significant enclosure movement, despite enabling legislation that allowed the division of some common lands in 1767 and again in 1773. Communal patterns of planting—very common in northern France, where a three-field system ordinarily prevailed—were not suspended. Modest improvements in farming techniques and the introduction of new crops such as corn (maize) and potatoes allowed French farms to feed the country's growing population. The increased number of peasants led to further subdivision of land and greater competition for leases; the economic benefits of agricultural growth went mostly to landlords and the small minority of prosperous peasants. In fact, the economic status of many peasants deteriorated markedly in the 18th century; perhaps as many as one-third of them were sporadically indigent, though there was no decline in the peasants' share of the land. In 1789 French peasants still owned about one-third of the arable land, most of it in small plots of less than 10 acres (4 hectares); nobles owned about one-fifth of the land, the church one-sixth, and bourgeois landlords about one-third. Industrial production After 1740 industrial production in France rose annually by about 2 percent overall and even more in some sectors. During the later decades of the 18th century, French industrial production grew rapidly, although not on the same scale as in Britain, whose industrial development had begun 60 years before that of the French. Coal mining was a major industry by 1789, its production nearly 6 percent higher in the 1780s than in the preceding decade. Mining attracted vast amounts of capital, some of it from the aristocracy. In 1789 the Mines d'Anzin near the Belgian border already employed thousands of workers. In textiles, entrepreneurs such as the Swiss Protestant Guillaume-Philippe Oberkampf created new manufactories that permitted better regulation and control of production. Most production continued to be centred in small artisanal workshops, however, and power-driven machinery remained a rarity. Although transportation difficulties and internal customs barriers meant that France on the eve of the Revolution was not yet a unified national market (as Britain had long since been), price discrepancies from province to province, as well as between northern and southern France, were less significant than before. Throughout the country the demand rose for urban manufactured goods and for those luxury items (textiles, porcelains, furniture, articles de Paris) that the French excelled in producing before 1800. French engineers and artisans were highly skilled. French ship design, for example, was superior to that of the English, who routinely copied captured French men-of-war. George Washington, the president of the United States, wishing to buy the best watch available anywhere, turned to the American minister in Paris because the world's most accurate timepieces were still made in France. Commerce Commerce, especially with the colonies, was an important area of change as well. France's first colonial empire, essentially located in North America, was a source of great wealth. Even though France lost both Canada and India during the Seven Years' War (1756-63), the Caribbean sugar islands continued to be the most lucrative source of French colonial activity in the last 100 years of the ancien régime. The French shared the West Indies with Spain and England: Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the eastern half of Hispaniola belonged to Spain; Jamaica belonged to England; but Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (Haiti)—the richest of all nonwhite 18th-century colonies in the world—were French. In Saint-Domingue 30,000 whites stood an uneasy watch over a black slave population that grew to more than 400,000 by 1789. In the islands, the slaves produced sugarcane and coffee, which were refined in France at Nantes, Rochefort, and Bordeaux and often reexported to central and northern Europe. This triangular trade grew 10-fold between 1715 and 1789, and the value of international exports in the 1780s amounted to nearly one-fourth of national income. The sugar trade enriched the planters, the bankers in Paris who had acted as brokers for import and reexport, and the manufacturers of luxury goods that were shipped from France to the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, the French colonial trade was a closely watched process, governed by mercantilist protective tariffs and rules. Indirectly millions of Frenchmen were affected by the accelerating tempo of economic life. The circulation of gold specie in the kingdom as a whole rose from 731 million livres in 1715 to some 2 billion livres in 1788. Domestic commerce also expanded in the 18th century. The urban population and even prosperous peasants began to acquire a taste for new luxuries. Estate inventories show that even modest households were buying more varied clothing, a wider range of furniture, kitchen articles, books, and other items their ancestors could not have afforded. By the early 1780s more than 40 regional newspapers with advertising, or affiches, had been founded, a clear sign that France was becoming a consumer society.The Enlightenment The industrial and commercial developments, already significant by themselves, were the cause, and perhaps also the effect, of a wider and still more momentous change preceding the Revolution—the Enlightenment. Today the Enlightenment can be understood as the conscious formulation of a profound cultural transformation. Epistemologically, the French Enlightenment relied on three sources: rationalism, which had in France a strong tradition dating to Descartes; empiricism, which was borrowed from English thought and which in France underpinned the work of such writers as Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715-71), Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d'Holbach (1723-89), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-80), and Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709-51), the author of a book eloquently entitled L'Homme machine (1747; Man a Machine); and an amorphous concept of nature that was particularly strong in the immensely popular and important work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) and, in the 1780s, in the works of widely read pre-Romantic writers such as Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814). The relationship between these intellectual developments and the Revolution of 1789 remains a subject of dispute among historians, but there is no doubt that Enlightenment critiques undermined belief in the traditional institutions that the Revolutionary movement was to destroy. Though far apart from one another in a strict philosophical sense, these sources of inspiration generated a number of shared beliefs that were of obvious political consequence. The enlightened subjects of Louis XV and Louis XVI were increasingly convinced that French institutions of government and justice could be radically improved. Tradition seemed to them an increasingly inadequate principle to follow in such matters. Meliorism, gauged especially by the progress of the sciences, was one of the cardinal beliefs of the age. Regarding the economy, physiocrats such as the king's own doctor, François Quesnay (1694-1774), praised the virtue of free-market economics and, as they put it, of "laissez-faire, laissez-aller" ("allow to do, allow to go"). The Encyclopédistes—the contributors to the great Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot (1713-84)—spread the idea that agricultural and manufacturing processes could be rationally analyzed and improved; the work also criticized religious and political orthodoxy. Voltaire (1694-1778), the most celebrated French Enlightenment author, used his sharp wit to skewer the absurdities of absolutism and intolerance. His eloquent defense of the Protestant merchant Jean Calas, broken on the wheel in 1762 for the supposed murder of his suicidal son, made him the model of the engaged intellectual, rallying public opinion against injustice. The influence of Montesquieu and Rousseau Two Enlightenment authors who had an especially profound impact on the future revolutionaries were Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). In his Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters), Montesquieu, a wealthy aristocratic member of the Parlement of Bordeaux, used the device of a foreign visitor to highlight the contradictions of the government shortly after the death of Louis XIV. His daring jabs at the pope, "an ancient idol, worshiped now from habit," and at Catholic doctrine brought down the wrath of the authorities but did nothing to stop the book's success. Written in an entertaining and accessible style, the Persian Letters did not present a clear set of doctrines: instead, readers were drawn into a process of dialogue and critique modeled by the novel's characters. In his masterwork, De l'esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), Montesquieu presented a survey of political institutions throughout the world. Drawing on both the rationalist and empiricist traditions, he analyzed politics in purely secular terms, arguing that each country's laws developed in response to its climate and the nature of its customs. His comparative approach made it clear that, in his view, no political system could claim divine sanction. His personal sympathies lay with mixed forms of government, in which a separation of powers protected individual liberties; his description of the English constitution, in which the king shared power with Parliament, strongly influenced French political thinking. A former parlementaire himself, Montesquieu argued that the aristocratic courts were "intermediary bodies" whose resistance to royal authority prevented abuses. Although he was himself no revolutionary, his ideas had great influence at the beginning of the Revolutionary movement in 1789; in the Revolution's early phase, he was cited more often than any other authority. Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau, drawing in pastels by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, 1753; in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva.Courtesy of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva; photograph, Jean Arlaud A generation younger than Montesquieu, Rousseau raised profound questions about both private and public life. According to Rousseau, the self becomes empowered in private union with the beloved other, as portrayed in his immensely popular novel Julie; ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Eloise), or in public union with one's fraternally minded fellow citizens, as explained in Du contrat social (1762; The Social Contract), a work less widely read before 1789 but even more symptomatic of change. Sponsored by Merrill Why markets may be volatile Get insights from our CIO as he examines the causes of market ups and downs in 2022 LEARN MORE Rousseau argued for a reconstruction of private and domestic as well as public life, to make both more in accord with human nature. Women, he claimed, have a natural vocation to be wives and mothers; they are to leave public affairs to men. He put forward the harmonious domestic family as a new cultural ideal and stigmatized ancien régime society, with its emphasis on fashion and its influential "public women," such as royal mistresses and the salon hostesses who played a critical role in promoting the Enlightenment. Rousseau's insistence that mothers should breast-feed their children clashed with the realities of French life, where the employment of wet nurses was more common than in any other European country, and symbolized his program for a more "natural" style of life. Rousseau's second best-selling novel, Émile; ou, de l'éducation (1762; Émile; or, On Education), illustrated how children could be educated to lead a "natural" life. Its most controversial chapter, the "Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," suggested that nature alone provided humanity with the religious knowledge it needed; this dismissal of the church and the Bible naturally led to the book's condemnation. Rousseau's concern for education was part of a wider movement. The French administrator, reformer, and economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, baron de l'Aulne (1712-81), expressed the new sensibility when he wrote that the education of children was the basis of national unity and mores. In 1763 a prominent parlementaire named La Chalotais even put forward a scheme for lay and national primary education. An important landmark in this respect was the expulsion from France in 1764 of the Jesuits, who had theretofore dominated French secondary education. Increasingly, the French language was substituted for Latin in the secondary schools, or collèges (the forerunners of today's lycées). Rhetoric gave way to an emphasis on more "natural" manners and modes of expression. History was raised to the level of a serious discipline; with Voltaire's Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV), modern French historiography began, and there were echoes of this new attitude in the programs of the secondary schools, which added mathematics, physics, and geography to their curriculum. Rousseau developed the political consequences of his thought in his Social Contract (1762). Because men are by nature free, Rousseau argued, the only natural and legitimate polity is one in which all members are citizens with equal rights and have the ability to participate in making the laws under which they live. Like Montesquieu, Rousseau himself was no revolutionary; he expressed a deep pessimism about the chances of freeing humanity from the corrupting institutions that were in place. Although his theories did influence critics of the French monarchy even before 1789, they achieved an unanticipated relevance during the Revolution, especially during its radical phase when Rousseau was read as an advocate of Jacobin-style democracy. Exposure to such writers as Diderot, Guillaume-Thomas, abbé de Raynal (1713-96), author of the anticolonialist Histoire des deux Indes (1770; History of the Two Indies), and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716-95); to such painters as Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and Joseph-Marie Vien (1716-1809); to such musicians as Christoph Gluck (1714-87); and to such visionary architects as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-99) enabled the educated public of the 1770s and '80s to pursue and sharpen their new insights. It allowed them to explore the limits of the private domain as well as to clarify their new understanding of the public good. These radical ideas had transforming power. Rousseau's message especially appealed to the deeper instincts of his contemporaries, inspiring them with a quasi-utopian view of what might be done in this world. The ideological or cultural transformation was in some ways limited to a narrow segment of society. In 1789 only one-third of the population, living for the most part in northern and eastern France, could both read and write French. (Outside the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, literacy for women was considerably below that of men.) About one-third of the king's subjects could not even speak French. Nonetheless, even though probably not much more than half a million people were directly involved in the cultural upheaval, their influence was decisive. The concerns of the new "high culture" were intensely personal and, for that reason, deeply felt, even by people who did not participate in it directly. Readers of sentimental prose might after all also be employers, husbands, and fathers, who would treat their dependents differently. Printed materials were certainly more widely available in the 18th century than ever before, and new ideas reached a wide public, even if often only in watered-down form. Newspapers, some of them from abroad, were widely read (and manipulated by the royal government to influence opinion). Many pamphleteers were ready to be hired by whoever had money to pay for their services. Lawyers published their briefs. Theatrical performances, such as Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais's comedy Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro), which openly exposed aristocratic privilege, were widely publicized events. In the 1780s censorship was increasingly desultory. Public opinion, whose verdict was identified by the middle class not with the expression of its own particular desires but as the voice of universal common sense and reason, became a tribunal of ideological appeal, an intellectual court of last resort, to which even the monarchy instinctively appealed. These sweeping changes had created a country that by 1788 was deeply divided ideologically and economically. The salons of Paris, many of them directed by women, were the worldwide focus of a rationalist and Deist Enlightenment; both Catherine the Great and Thomas Jefferson, though far removed from each other in most respects, shared an abiding interest in the latest intellectual fashions from Paris. But, whatever held true for influential circles, most Frenchmen in these same years remained deeply religious, certainly in the provinces but possibly in Paris as well. Most of the books and pictures Parisians bought on the eve of the Revolution were still related to religious themes. The country was also divided economically; whereas France's foreign trade was very lively, most of the rural communities were, by English standards, unproductive and immobile villages.

French State in Late 18th Century

rance's pacification under Henry IV laid much of the ground for the beginnings of France's rise to European hegemony. One of the most admired French kings, Henry was fatally stabbed by a Catholic fanatic in 1610 as war with Spain threatened. Troubles gradually developed during the regency headed by his queen Marie de Medici. France was expansive during all but the end of the 17th century: the French began trading in India and Madagascar, founded Quebec and penetrated the North American Great Lakes and Mississippi, established plantation economies in the West Indies and extended their trade contacts in the Levant and enlarged their merchant marine.[12] Henry IV's son Louis XIII and his minister (1624-1642) Cardinal Richelieu, elaborated a policy against Spain and the German emperor during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) which had broken out among the lands of Germany's Holy Roman Empire. An English-backed Huguenot rebellion (1625-1628) defeated, France intervened directly (1635) in the wider European conflict following her ally (Protestant) Sweden's failure to build upon initial success. After the death of both king and cardinal, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) secured universal acceptance of Germany's political and religious fragmentation, but the Regency of Anne of Austria and her minister Cardinal Mazarin experienced a civil uprising known as the Fronde (1648-1653) which expanded into a Franco-Spanish War (1653-1659). The Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) formalised France's seizure (1642) of the Spanish territory of Roussillon after the crushing of the ephemeral Catalan Republic and ushered a short period of peace. For most of the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715), France was the dominant power in Europe, aided by the diplomacy of Richelieu's successor (1642-1661) Cardinal Mazarin and the economic policies (1661-1683) of Colbert. Colbert's attempts to promote economic growth and the creation of new industries were not a great success, and France did not undergo any sort of industrial revolution during Louis XIV's reign. Indeed, much of the French countryside during this period remained poor and overpopulated. The resistance of peasants to adopt the potato, according to some monarchist apologists, and other new agricultural innovations while continuing to rely on cereal crops led to repeated catastrophic famines long after they had ceased in the rest of Western Europe. Prior to Louis XIV's reign, French soldiers frequently went into battle barefoot and with no weapons. On the other hand, France's high birthrate until the 18th century proved beneficial to its rulers since it meant the country could field larger armies than its neighbors. In fact, the king's foreign policy, as well as his lavish court and construction projects, left the country in enormous debt. The Palace of Versailles was criticized as overly extravagant even while it was still under construction, but dozens of imitations were built across Europe. Renewed war (the War of Devolution 1667-1668 and the Franco-Dutch War 1672-1678) brought further territorial gains (Artois and western Flanders and the free county of Burgundy, left to the Empire in 1482), but at the cost of the increasingly concerted opposition of rival powers.[13] Louis XIVKing of France and of NavarreBy Hyacinthe Rigaud (1701) French culture was part of French hegemony. In the early part of the century French painters had to go to Rome to shed their provinciality (Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain), but Simon Vouet brought home the taste for a classicized baroque that would characterise the French Baroque, epitomised in the Académie de peinture et de sculpture, in the painting of Charles Le Brun and the sculpture of François Girardon. With the Palais du Luxembourg, the Château de Maisons and Vaux-le-Vicomte, French classical architecture was admired abroad even before the creation of Versailles or Perrault's Louvre colonnade. Parisian salon culture set standards of discriminating taste from the 1630s, and with Pascal, Descartes, Bayle, Corneille, Racine and Molière, France became the cultural center of Europe. In an effort to prevent the nobility from revolting and challenging his authority, Louis implemented an extremely elaborate system of court etiquette with the idea that learning it would occupy most of the nobles' time and they could not plan rebellion. By the start of the 18th century, the nobility in France had been effectively neutered and would never again have more power than the crown. Also, Louis willingly granted titles of nobility to those who had performed distinguished service to the state so that it did not become a closed caste and it was possible for commoners to rise through the social ranks. The king sought to impose total religious uniformity on the country, repealing the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The infamous practice of dragonnades was adopted, whereby rough soldiers were quartered in the homes of Protestant families and allowed to have their way with them. Scores of Protestants fled France, costing the country a great many intellectuals, artisans, and other valuable people. Persecution extended to unorthodox Catholics like the Jansenists, a group that denied free will and had already been condemned by the popes. Louis was no theologian and understood little of the complex doctrines of Jansenism, satisfying himself with the fact that they threatened the unity of the state. In this, he garnered the friendship of the papacy, which had previously been hostile to France because of its policy of putting all church property in the country under the jurisdiction of the state rather than of Rome. Cardinal Mazarin oversaw the creation of a French navy that rivaled England's, expanding it from 25 ships to almost 200. The size of the army was also considerably increased. Starting in the 1670s, Louis XIV established the so-called Chambers of Reunion, courts in which judges would determine whether certain Habsburg territories belonged rightfully to France. The king was relying on the somewhat vague wording in the Treaty of Westphalia, while also dredging up older French claims, some dating back to medieval times. Through this, he concluded that the strategically important imperial city of Strassburg should have gone to France in 1648. In September 1681, French troops occupied the city, which was at once strongly fortified. As the imperial armies were then busy fighting the Ottoman Empire, they could not do anything about this for a number of years. The basic aim of Louis' foreign policy was to give France more easily defensible borders, and to eliminate weak spots (Strassburg had often been used by the Habsburgs as a gateway into France). French invasion of the Netherlands, which Louis XIV initiated in 1672, starting the Franco-Dutch War Following the Whig establishment on the English and Scottish thrones by the Dutch prince William of Orange in 1688, the anti-French "Grand Alliance" of 1689 was established. With the Turks now in retreat, the emperor Leopold could turn his attention to France. The ensuing War of the Grand Alliance lasted from 1688-1697. France's resources were stretched to the breaking point by the cost of fielding an army of over 300,000 men and two naval squadrons. Famine in 1692-1693 killed up to two million people. The exhaustion of the powers brought the fighting to an end in 1697, by which time the French were in control of the Spanish Netherlands and Catalonia. However, Louis gave back his conquests and gained only Haiti. The French people, feeling that their sacrifices in the war had been for nothing, never forgave him. The Battle of La Hougue (1692) was the decisive naval battle in the war and confirmed the durable dominance of the Royal Navy of England. In November 1700, the severely ill Spanish king Charles II died, ending the Habsburg line in that country. Louis had long waited for this moment, and now planned to put a Bourbon relative, Philip, Duke of Anjou, on the throne. Essentially, Spain was to become an obedient satellite of France, ruled by a king who would carry out orders from Versailles. Realizing how this would upset the balance of power, the other European rulers were outraged. However, most of the alternatives were equally undesirable. For example, putting another Habsburg on the throne would end up recreating the empire of Charles V, which would also grossly upset the power balance. After nine years of exhausting war, the last thing Louis wanted was another conflict. However, the rest of Europe would not stand for his ambitions in Spain, and so the War of the Spanish Succession began, a mere three years after the War of the Grand Alliance.[14] The disasters of the war (accompanied by another famine) were so great that France was on the verge of collapse by 1709. In desperation, the king appealed to the French people to save their country, and in doing so gained thousands of new army recruits. Afterwards, his general Marshal Villars managed to drive back the allied forces. In 1714, the war ended with the treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt. France did not lose any territory, and there was no discussion of returning Flanders or Alsace to the Habsburgs. While the Duke of Anjou was accepted as King Philip V of Spain, this was done under the condition that the French and Spanish thrones never be united. Finally, France agreed to stop supporting Jacobite pretenders to the English throne. Just after the war ended, Louis died, having ruled France for 72 years. While often considered a tyrant and a warmonger (especially in England), Louis XIV was not in any way a despot in the 20th-century sense. The traditional customs and institutions of France limited his power and in any case, communications were poor and no national police force existed. Overall, the discontent and revolts of 16th- and 17th-century France did not approach the conditions that led to 1789. Events such as the Frondes were a naïve, unrevolutionary discontent and the people did not challenge the right of the king to govern nor did they question the Church. The reign (1715-1774) of Louis XV saw an initial return to peace and prosperity under the regency (1715-1723) of Philip II, Duke of Orléans, whose policies were largely continued (1726-1743) by Cardinal Fleury, prime minister in all but name. The exhaustion of Europe after two major wars resulted in a long period of peace, only interrupted by minor conflicts like the War of the Polish Succession from 1733-1735. Large-scale warfare resumed with the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748). But alliance with the traditional Habsburg enemy (the "Diplomatic Revolution" of 1756) against the rising power of Britain and Prussia led to costly failure in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) and the loss of France's North American colonies.[15] Louis XVILast King of Early France. By Joseph Duplessis (1775). On the whole, the 18th century saw growing discontent with the monarchy and the established order. Louis XV was a highly unpopular king for his sexual excesses, overall weakness, and for losing Canada to the British. A strong ruler like Louis XIV could enhance the position of the monarchy, while Louis XV weakened it. The writings of the philosophers such as Voltaire were a clear sign of discontent, but the king chose to ignore them. He died of smallpox in 1774, and the French people shed few tears at his passing. While France had not yet experienced the industrial revolution that was beginning in England, the rising middle class of the cities felt increasingly frustrated with a system and rulers that seemed silly, frivolous, aloof, and antiquated, even if true feudalism no longer existed in France. Anti-establishment ideas fermented in 18th-century France in part due to the country's relative egalitarianism. While less liberal than England during the same period, the French monarchy never approached the absolutism of the eastern rulers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople in part because the country's traditional development as a decentralized, feudal society acted as a restraint on the power of the king. Different social classes in France each had their own unique set of privileges so that no one class could completely dominate the others. Upon Louis XV's death, his grandson Louis XVI became king. Initially popular, he too came to be widely detested by the 1780s. Again a weak ruler, he was married to an Austrian archduchess, Marie Antoinette, whose naïvety and cloistered/alienated Versailles life permitted ignorance of the true extravagance and wasteful use of borrowed money (Marie Antoinette was significantly more frugal than her predecessors). French intervention in the US War of Independence was also very expensive. With the country deeply in debt, Louis XVI permitted the radical reforms of Turgot and Malesherbes, but noble disaffection led to Turgot's dismissal and Malesherbes' resignation in 1776. They were replaced by Jacques Necker. Necker had resigned in 1781 to be replaced by Calonne and Brienne, before being restored in 1788. A harsh winter that year led to widespread food shortages, and by then France was a powder keg ready to explode. On the eve of the French Revolution of 1789, France was in a profound institutional and financial crisis, but the ideas of the Enlightenment had begun to permeate the educated classes of society. On 1792 September 21 the French monarchy was effectively abolished by the proclamation of the French First Republic.

Colonies and Slavery

By 1675 slavery was well established, and by 1700 slaves had almost entirely replaced indentured servants. With plentiful land and slave labor available to grow a lucrative crop, southern planters prospered, and family-based tobacco plantations became the economic and social norm.

The Sciences of Man

That the human and the social sciences, or at least a certain number of them, were born during the eighteenth century is a thesis which seems at present largely accepted, and which has been confirmed by some recent, valuable works.! They developed through a rather complex historical process, full of theoretical detours and ambiguities. An adequate illustration of this itinerary would comand a much longer analysis than that which is possible here. Tackling the problem at the level of the history of ideasand thereby passing over all the extra-cultural factors which favoured the growth of the sciences de l'homme during the Enlightenment-it is undeniable that this growth took place in the eighteenth century, above all by way of a critical confrontation with the episteme of the preceding century. It is not by chance that, while tracing the programmes and procedures of the new-born human sciences, many savants andphilosophes of the Age of Reason constantly took as their point of reference precisely the character and content of that episteme. Yet, the result of this confrontation was not uniform. On the one hand, the Enlightenment expressed the highest admiration for the age of Rationalism and the Scientific Revolution. On the other, it strove for self-emancipation from a theoretical perspective which was felt to hinder the birth and growth of certain sciences--or, to recall the notion dear to Imre Lakatos, of certain research programmes. This helps explain the energy with which the eighteenth century criticized some philosophical principles of the age of Descartes, and worked out new cognitive principles and new anthropological views which were considered necessary for the elaboration of the sciences de l'homme. In the course of this paper it is my aim not so much to examine analytically the inquiries and debates through which the Enlightenment founded the human and social sciences, but rather to specify and comment briefly on the main theoretical conditions which permitted the opening of a new perspective for some of those sciences.

The Reign of Terror

The Reign of Terror, also called the Terror, was a period of state-sanctioned violence and mass executions during the French Revolution. Between Sept. 5, 1793, and July 27, 1794, France's revolutionary government ordered the arrest and execution of thousands of people. French lawyer and statesman Maximilien Robespierre led the Terror, which was caused in part by a rivalry between France's two leading political parties: the Jacobins and the Girondins. WHAT CAUSED THE REIGN OF TERROR? At the end of the French Revolution, a revolutionary government called the National Convention came into power and formed the first French Republic. The Convention found King Louis XVI guilty of treason in 1792 and beheaded him by guillotine in January 1793. Many areas of France — including Normandy and the city of Lyon — opposed the revolution and rebelled against the new government. In March 1793, an armed revolt in the Vendée resulted in first several towns and eventually the entire region being captured by a counterrevolutionary army. After a bloody campaign, republic forces defeated the rebellion, resulting in around 200,000 deaths, New Republic reported. Sponsored Links Video from our partnersBrought to you by Taboola Mature Trainer: This Is What "Ripped" Old Guys Do Differently (Genius!)Power Life A copperplate engraving of the execution of King Louis XVI on Jan. 21 1792. (Image credit: Public Domain / Georg Heinrich Sieveking) On March 18, 1793, the French army lost the Battle of Neerwinden against a superior Austrian force, causing further opposition to the Convention's rule. "The new regime had to devise a new executive form to replace the monarchy," Peter McPhee, emeritus professor of history at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told All About History magazine. RECOMMENDED VIDEOS FOR YOU... CLOSE 0 seconds of 2 minutes, 46 secondsVolume 0% PLAY SOUND Related: How many French revolutions were there? "The critical military and political situation was felt to require an emergency executive," McPhee said. "In April 1793, the National Convention created a 12-man Committee of Public Safety, with the aim of taking the emergency measures necessary to save the revolution." According to McPhee, the Committee arrested alleged opponents of the revolution, who were then tried by revolutionary courts. On Sept. 5, 1793, the Committee for Public Safety declared France "revolutionary until peace," according to Anne Sa'adah's book "The Shaping of Liberal Politics in Revolutionary France" (Princeton University Press, 2014). This meant that a state of emergency was in force and that the Committee was prepared to use violence against its own citizens to bring stability to France. This triggered what would become known as the Terror, or Reign of Terror. WHEN WAS THE REIGN OF TERROR? On Sept. 17, 1793, the Convention passed the Law of Suspects in order to identify and punish any alleged enemies of the revolution. This law also created the Revolutionary Tribunal, which would try accused enemies of the state and execute them if found guilty, according to Ian Davidson's book "The French Revolution" (Pegasus Books, 2016). The Storming of the Bastille painting by Jean-Pierre Houël. The prison was attacked on July 14, 1789, during the French Revolution. (Image credit: Wiki/ Bibliothèque nationale de France) The Law of Suspects also authorized the arrest of anyone who "by their writings have shown themselves partisans of tyranny," according to Liberty Equality, and Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, a website run by George Mason University and City University of New York. This prevented any criticism of, or opposition to, the Convention. On June 10, 1794, the Law of 22 Prairial was passed. It said that those accused of being "enemies of the revolution" were not allowed lawyers for their defense during trial, that there would be no interrogation or evidence presented against them, and that the only possible verdicts were acquittal or death, according to Mike Rapport's chapter in the book "The Routledge History of Terrorism" (Routledge, 2019). Related: Palace of Versailles: Facts and History "After June 10, in the six weeks remembered as 'The Great Terror,' 1,376 people were sentenced to death, averaging 30 daily beheadings," Rapport wrote. This continued until the dissolution of the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1795. WHO LED THE REIGN OF TERROR? Advertisement When the Terror began, the most influential group in the Convention was called the Jacobins. The most prominent members of this group were Robespierre (1758-1794), Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794) and Georges Danton (1759-1794), according to McPhee. "Like so many of his peers, Robespierre saw in the political upheaval of 1788-89 the opportunity to rectify the glaring injustices of absolutism and aristocratic privilege," McPhee said. "Only in July 1793, at the time of the Revolution's greatest crisis, did he enter government as an elected member of the governing Committee of Public Safety, and was widely seen as its key spokesman." Although he occupied no official role in the Committee, Robespierre was the most influential and vocal of its members. Maximilien Robespierre was one of the main instigators of the Terror, and a leading politician in France's National Convention. (Image credit: Wiki/ Musée Carnavalet) VICTIMS OF THE TERROR Most of those arrested and executed during the early Terror were members of the aristocracy, priests, members of the middle class and anyone accused of counterrevolutionary activity, according to historian Sylvia Neely's book "A Concise History of the French Revolution" (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007). One of the most famous victims of the Reign of Terror was Marie Antoinette, the deposed queen of France. She was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal on Oct. 14, 1793, and executed two days later. Some members of the revolutionary government were also killed during the Terror, including the Girondins, who were, at the time, the largest faction in the Convention. This group was more moderate than the Jacobins and had been sympathetic toward the monarchy. Some of its members had opposed the execution of Louis XVI. A contemporary engraving depicting the execution of the Girondins by guillotine. (Image credit: Wiki/ Gallica) Advertisement In June 1793, a popular uprising of Parisian workers forced the Girondins from office, leaving the Jacobins as the majority in power. On Oct. 24, 1793, the most prominent Girondin members were put on trial and were executed by guillotine a week later at the Place de la Révolution in Paris. The executioner took 36 minutes to behead 22 Girondin members, including the corpse of one who had already died by suicide at the trial, according to historian Simon Schama's book "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution" (Vintage, 1990). A number of other Girondins were later tracked down and either died by suicide or were executed. Related: What is a coup? Estimates of the number of arrests during this period range from 300,000 to 500,000, but no one knows the exact number, according to Davidson. "It was certainly tens of thousands and may well have been hundreds of thousands," he wrote.The number of those executed during the Terror is also uncertain. Official court records of those sentenced to death numbers 16,594, but 18,000 to 23,000 more may have been killed without trial or may have died while imprisoned, according to historian Hugh Gough's book "The Terror in the French Revolution" (Red Globe Press, 2010). OPPOSITION TO THE TERROR One of the most prominent opponents of the Reign of Terror was Georges Danton, an influential member of the Jacobins and Robespierre's political rival. By the fall of 1793, Danton argued that the instability threatening the revolution, which had justified the Terror, had ended. In a speech to the Convention on Nov. 20, 1793, Danton called for an end to the killing. "I demand that we spare men's blood! Let the Convention be just to those who are not proven enemies of the people," he said, according to David Lawday's book "The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton, a Life" (Grove Press, 2010). Danton also co-edited a newspaper that criticized the Terror, the Convention and Robespierre. French Jacobin politician Georges Danton (1759 - 1794) is led to the guillotine after being convicted of trying to overthrow the revolutionary government, April 5, 1794. (Image credit: Getty) Advertisement In March 1794, Danton and his allies were arrested on a range of charges, including attempting to save King Louis XVI, carrying out treacherous transactions with the Girondins and having secret friendships with foreigners. No witnesses were allowed to give evidence at the trial, and on April 5, 1794, Danton was sentenced to death. As he was led to the guillotine, he reportedly turned to the executioner and said, "Show my head to the people; it is worth seeing," according to Neely. HOW DID THE REIGN OF TERROR END? On July 26, 1794, Robespierre delivered a long speech denouncing several members of the Convention and claiming there was a conspiracy against the government, according to McPhee. "The rambling, emotional speech of almost two hours was vague to the point of incoherence because by then almost everyone was suspected of conspiring," McPhee wrote in his book "Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life" (Yale University Press, 2012). When Robespierre refused to name any of the conspirators, the Convention turned against him, booing and shouting him down to prevent him from speaking. "He was silenced with cries of 'Down with him! Down with him!'" McPhee wrote. "Robespierre tried repeatedly to speak amid the general cacophony. Finally, he shouted: 'I ask for death.'" Contemporary illustration depicting the execution of Robespierre and his accomplices, 1794. Robespierre is shown wearing brown in the cart to the left of the scaffold, holding a handkerchief to his face. (Image credit: Wiki/ Gallica) The convention voted to arrest Robespierre and declared him and his allies outlaws. At around 2:30 a.m. the next morning, soldiers arrived to arrest the group, and during a struggle, Robespierre was shot in the jaw. Robespierre and his followers were executed on July 28, 1794. "While most histories link the overthrow of Robespierre and his associates on July 27, 1794, with the end of the Terror, it is more accurate to see a continuing period of 'terror,'" McPhee said. This time, however, it was directed at the Jacobins and lasted until the abolition of the Revolutionary Tribunal on May 31, 1795. This period may have seen up to 6,000 extrajudicial revenge killings across the country, according to McPhee.

Revolutionary Culture

The Revolutionary legacy for Napoleon consisted above all in the abolition of the ancien régime's most archaic features—"feudalism," seigneurialism, legal privileges, and provincial liberties. No matter how aristocratic his style became, he had no use for the ineffective institutions and abuses of the ancien régime. Napoleon was "modern" in temperament as well as destructively aggressive. But in either guise he was an authoritarian, with little patience for argument, who profited from the Revolution's clearing operations to construct and mobilize in his own fashion. His concept of reform exaggerated the Revolution's emphasis on uniformity and centralization. Napoleon also accepted the Revolutionary principles of civil equality and equality of opportunity, meaning the recognition of merit. Other rights and liberties did not seem essential. Unlike others before him who had tried and failed, Napoleon terminated the Revolution, but at the price of suppressing the electoral process and partisan politics altogether. Toward the end of the empire, his centralizing vision took over completely, reinforcing his personal will to power. France was merely a launching pad for Napoleon's boundless military and imperial ambition, its prime function being to raise men and money for war. In utter contrast to the Revolution, then, militarism became the defining quality of the Napoleonic regime. Napoleon's ambiguous legacy helps explain the dizzying events that shook France in 1814 and 1815. Even before Napoleon's abdication, the Imperial Senate, led by the former foreign minister Talleyrand, had begun negotiations with the allies to ensure a transition to a regime that would protect the positions of those who had gained from the Revolution and the Napoleonic period. Louis XVI's long-exiled brother was allowed to return as King Louis XVIII, but he had to agree to rule under a constitution (called the Charter) that provided for legislative control over budgets and taxes and guaranteed basic liberties. However, the Bourbons alienated the officer corps by retiring many at half pay and frightened many citizens by not making clear how much of their property and power the church and émigrés would regain. As the anti-Napoleonic allies argued among themselves about the spoils of war, Napoleon slipped back to France for a last adventure, believing that he could reach Paris without firing a shot. At various points along the way, troops disobeyed royalist officers and rallied to the emperor, while Louis fled the country. Between March and June 1815—a period known as the Hundred Days—Napoleon again ruled France. Contrary to his expectation, however, the allies patched up their differences and were determined to rout "the usurper." At the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815) British and Prussian forces defeated Napoleon's army decisively, and he abdicated again a few days later. Placed on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, he died in 1821. The "Napoleonic legend"—the retrospective version of events created by Napoleon during his exile—burnished his image in France for decades to come. But in the final analysis Napoleon's impact on future generations was not nearly as powerful as the legacy of the French Revolution itself. Isser WolochJeremy David Popkin France, 1815-1940 The restoration and constitutional monarchy Constitutionalism and reaction, 1815-30 Louis XVIII, 1815-24 King Louis XVIII's second return from exile was far from glorious. Neither the victorious powers nor Louis's French subjects viewed his restoration with much enthusiasm, yet there seemed to be no ready alternative to Bourbon rule. The allies avenged themselves for the Hundred Days by writing a new and more severe Treaty of Paris. France lost several frontier territories, notably the Saar basin and Savoy (Savoie), that had been annexed in 1789-92; a war indemnity of 700 million francs was imposed; and, pending full payment, eastern France was to be occupied by allied troops at French expense. Louis XVIIILouis XVIII, engraving by Pierre Audouin.Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Within France, political tensions were exacerbated by Napoleon's mad gamble and by the mistakes committed during the first restoration. The problem facing the Bourbons would have been difficult enough without these tensions—namely, how to arrive at a stable compromise between those Frenchmen who saw the Revolutionary changes as irreversible and those who were determined to resurrect the ancien régime. The reactionary element, labeled ultraroyalists (or simply "ultras"), was now more intransigent than ever and set out to purge the country of all those who had betrayed the dynasty. A brief period of "white terror" in the south claimed some 300 victims; in Paris, many high officials who had rallied to Napoleon were dismissed, and a few eminent figures, notably Marshal Michel Ney, were tried and shot. The king refused, however, to scrap the Charter of 1814, in spite of ultra pressure. When a new Chamber of Deputies was elected in August 1815, the ultras scored a sweeping victory; the surprised king, who had feared a surge of antimonarchical sentiment, greeted the legislature as la chambre introuvable ("the incomparable chamber"). But the political honeymoon was short-lived. Louis was shrewd enough, or cautious enough, to realize that ultra policies would divide the country and might in the end destroy the dynasty. He chose as ministers, therefore, such moderate royalists as Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, and Élie Decazes—men who knew the nation would not tolerate an attempt to resurrect the 18th century. There followed a year of sharp friction between these moderate ministers and the ultra-dominated Chamber—friction and unrest that made Europe increasingly nervous about the viability of the restored monarchy. Representatives of the occupying powers began to express their concern to the king. At last, in September 1816, his ministers persuaded him to dissolve the Chamber and order new elections, and the moderate royalists emerged with a clear majority. In spite of ultra fury, several years of relative stability ensued. Richelieu and Decazes, with solid support in the Chamber, could proceed with their attempt to pursue a moderate course. By 1818 they were able, thanks to loans from English and Dutch bankers, to pay off the war indemnity and thus to end the allied occupation; at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, France was welcomed back into the Concert of Europe. In domestic politics there were some signs that France might be moving toward a British-style parliamentary monarchy, even though the Charter had carefully avoided making the king's ministers responsible to the Chamber of Deputies. In the Chamber something anticipating a party system also began to emerge: ultras on the right, independents (or liberals) on the left, constitutionalists (or moderates) in the centre. None of these factions yet possessed the real attributes of a party—disciplined organization and doctrinal coherence. The most heterogeneous of all was the independent group—an uneasy coalition of republicans, Bonapartists, and constitutional monarchists brought together by their common hostility to the Bourbons and their common determination to preserve or restore many of the Revolutionary reforms. The era of moderate rule (1816-20) was marked by a slow but steady advance of the liberal left. Each year one-fifth of the Chamber faced reelection, and each year more independents won seats, despite the narrowly restricted suffrage. The ultras, in real or simulated panic, predicted disaster for the regime and the nation; but the king clung stubbornly to his favourite, Decazes, who by now was head of the government in all but name, and Decazes, in turn, clung to his middle way. The uneasy balance was wrecked in February 1820 by the assassination of the king's nephew, Charles-Ferdinand de Bourbon, duc de Berry. The assassin, a fanatic Bonapartist, proudly announced his purpose: to extinguish the royal line by destroying the last Bourbon still young enough to produce a male heir. In this aim he failed, for Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, duchesse de Berry, seven months later bore a son, whom the royalists hailed as "the miracle child." But the assassin did bring to an end the period of moderate rule and returned the ultras to power. In the wave of emotion that followed, the king dismissed Decazes and manipulated the elections in favour of the ultras, who regained control of the Chamber and dominated the new cabinet headed by one of their leaders, Joseph, comte de Villèle. This swing toward reaction goaded some segments of the liberal left into conspiratorial activity. A newly formed secret society called the Charbonnerie, which borrowed its name and ritual from the Italian Carbonari, laid plans for an armed insurrection, but their rising in 1822 was easily crushed. One group of conspirators—"the four sergeants of La Rochelle"—became heroic martyrs in the popular mythology of the French left. Subversion gave the government an excuse for intensified repression: the press was placed under more rigid censorship and the school system subjected to the clergy. Meanwhile, the ultras were winning public support through a more assertive foreign policy. Spain had been in a state of quasi-civil war since 1820, when a revolt by the so-called liberal faction in the army had forced King Ferdinand VII to grant a constitution and to authorize the election of a parliament. The European powers, disturbed at the state of semianarchy in Spain, accepted a French offer to restore Ferdinand's authority by forcible intervention. In 1823 French troops crossed the Pyrenees and, despite predictions of disaster from the liberal left, easily took Madrid and reestablished the king's untrammeled power. This successful adventure strengthened the ultra politicians and discredited their critics. In the elections of 1824 the ultras increased their grip on the Chamber and won a further victory in September 1824 when the aged Louis XVIII died, leaving the throne to a new king who was the very embodiment of the ultra spirit. Charles X, 1824-30 Charles X, the younger brother of Louis XVIII, had spent the Revolutionary years in exile and had returned embittered rather than chastened by the experience. What France needed, in his view, was a return to the unsullied principle of divine right, buttressed by the restored authority of the established church. The new king and his cabinet—still headed by Villèle—promptly pushed through the Chamber a series of laws of sharply partisan character. The most bitterly debated of these laws was the one that indemnified the émigrés for the loss of their property during the Revolution. The cost of the operation—almost one billion francs—was borne by government bondholders, whose bonds were arbitrarily converted to a lower interest rate. A severe press law hamstrung the publishers of newspapers and pamphlets; another established the death penalty for sacrilegious acts committed in churches. Along with these signs of reaction went a vigorous campaign to reassert the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, which had been undermined by Enlightenment skepticism and by the Revolutionary upheaval. The Concordat of 1802 had allowed the beginning of a religious revival, which gained strength after 1814. The best-selling Le Génie du christianisme (1802; Genius of Christianity), by the Romantic writer François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, marked a change in public attitudes toward belief; Chateaubriand rejected Enlightenment rationalism and argued that only religion could satisfy human emotional needs. Under the Bourbons several new missionary orders and lay organizations were founded in an effort to revive the faith and to engage in good works. Catholic seminaries began to draw increasing numbers of students away from the state lycées. Charles X threw himself enthusiastically into the campaign for Catholic revival. The anticlericals of the liberal left were outraged, and even many moderates of Gallican sympathies were perturbed. Rumours spread that the king had secretly become a Jesuit and was planning to turn the country over to "the men in black." King Charles and his ultra ministers might nevertheless have remained in solid control if they had been shrewd and sensitive men, aware of the rise of public discontent and flexible enough to appease it. Instead, they forged stubbornly ahead on the road to disaster. Villèle, though a talented administrator, lacked creative imagination and charismatic appeal. As the years passed, his leadership was increasingly challenged even within his own ultra majority. A bitter personal feud between Villèle and Chateaubriand, who had entered politics after 1814 and had become the most colourful of the ultra politicians, undermined both the ministry and the dynasty. The liberal campaign organization "Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera" ("God helps those who help themselves") coordinated the opposition's preparations for the elections of 1827, which brought a sharp resurgence of liberal and moderate strength and led to Villèle's downfall. The king patched together a disparate ministry of moderates and ultras headed by an obscure official, Jean-Baptiste-Sylvère Gay, vicomte de Martignac. But Martignac lacked Charles's confidence and failed to win the support of the more moderate leftists in the Chamber. In 1829 the king brusquely dismissed him and restored the ultras to power. The delayed consequences of this act were to be fatal to the dynasty. The king, instead of entrusting power to an able ultra such as Villèle or a popular one such as Chateaubriand, chose a personal favourite, Jules-Auguste-Armand-Marie, prince de Polignac, a fanatic reactionary. The makeup of the cabinet, which included several members of the most bigoted faction of "ultra-ultras," seemed to indicate the king's determination to polarize politics. That, in any case, was the immediate result. On the left the mood turned aggressively hostile; the republicans of Paris began to organize; an Orleanist faction emerged, looking to a constitutional monarchy headed by the king's cousin, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d'Orléans. The liberal banker Jacques Laffitte supplied funds for a new opposition daily, Le National, edited by a young and vigorous team whose most notable member was Adolphe Thiers. A confrontation of some sort seemed inevitable. Some of Polignac's ministers urged a royal coup d'état at once, before the rejuvenated opposition could grow too strong. Instead, the king procrastinated for several months, offering no clear lead or firm policy. When the Chamber met at last in March 1830, its majority promptly voted an address to the throne denouncing the ministry. The king retaliated by dissolving the Chamber and ordering new elections in July. Both Charles and Polignac hoped that pressure on the electors, plus foreign policy successes, might shape the outcome. Such a success was won at just the opportune moment: news came that Algiers had fallen to a French expeditionary force sent to punish the bey for assorted transgressions. But even this brilliant victory could not divert the fury of the king's critics. The opposition won 274 seats, the ministry 143. When Charles chose not to substitute a moderate for Polignac and accept the role of constitutional monarch, the risk was great that a royal coup d'état would leave the Charter of 1814 in tatters. King and ministers prepared a set of decrees that dissolved the newly elected Chamber, further restricted the already narrow suffrage, and stripped away the remaining liberty of the press. These July Ordinances, made public on the 26th, completed the polarization process and ensured that the confrontation would be violent. The revolution of 1830 The July Revolution was a monument to the ineptitude of Charles X and his advisers. At the outset, few of the king's critics imagined it possible to overthrow the regime; they hoped merely to get rid of Polignac. As for the king, he naively ignored the possibility of serious trouble. No steps were taken to reinforce the army garrison in Paris; no contingency plans were prepared. Instead, Charles went off to the country to hunt, leaving the capital weakly defended. During the three days known to Frenchmen as les Trois Glorieuses (July 27-29), protest was rapidly transmuted into insurrection; barricades went up in the streets, manned by workers, students, and petty bourgeois citizens (some of them former members of the National Guard, which Charles, in pique, had disbanded in 1827). On July 29 some army units began to fraternize with the insurgents. The king, on July 30, consented at last to dismiss Polignac and to annul the July Ordinances; but the gesture came too late. Paris was in the hands of the rebels, and plans for a new regime were crystallizing rapidly. As the insurrection developed, two rival factions had emerged. The republicans—mainly workers and students—gained control of the streets and took over the Hôtel de Ville, where on July 29 they set up a municipal commission. They looked to the venerable General Lafayette, commander of the National Guard, as their symbolic leader. The constitutional monarchists had their headquarters at the newspaper Le National; their candidate for the throne was Louis-Philippe. He was at first reluctant to take the risk, fearing failure and renewed exile; Adolphe Thiers undertook the task of persuading him and succeeded. On July 31 Louis-Philippe made his way through a largely hostile crowd to the Hôtel de Ville and confronted the republicans. His cause was won by Lafayette, who found a constitutional monarchy safer than the risks of Jacobin rule; Lafayette appeared on the balcony with Louis-Philippe and, wrapped in a tricolour flag, embraced the duke as the crowd cheered. Two days later Charles X abdicated at last, though on condition that the throne pass to his grandson, "the miracle child." But the parliament, meeting on August 7, declared the throne vacant and on August 9 proclaimed Louis-Philippe "king of the French by the grace of God and the will of the nation." The July Monarchy The renovated regime (often called the July Monarchy or the bourgeois monarchy) rested on an altered political theory and a broadened social base. Divine right gave way to popular sovereignty; the social centre of gravity shifted from the landowning aristocracy to the wealthy bourgeoisie. The Charter of 1814 was retained but no longer as a royal gift to the nation; it was revised by the Chamber of Deputies and in its new form imposed on the king. Censorship was abolished; the Tricolor was restored as the national flag, and the National Guard was resuscitated. Roman Catholicism was declared to be simply the religion "of the majority of Frenchmen," the voting age was lowered to 25, and the property qualification was reduced to include all who paid a direct tax of 200 (formerly 300) francs. The suffrage was thus doubled, from about 90,000 to almost 200,000. The new king seemed admirably suited to this new constitutional system. The "Citizen King" was reputed to be a liberal whose tastes and sympathies coincided with those of the upper bourgeoisie. He had spent the Revolutionary years in exile but was out of sympathy with the irreconcilable émigrés; and since his return, his house in Paris had been a gathering place for the opposition. Yet, in spite of appearances, Louis-Philippe was not prepared to accept the strictly symbolic role of a monarch who (in Thiers's phrase) "reigns but does not govern." His authority, he believed, rested on heredity and not merely on the will of the Chamber; his proper function was to participate actively in decision making and not merely to appoint ministers who would govern in his name. As time went by, he was increasingly inclined to choose ministers who shared his view of the royal power. The Orleanist system thus rested on a basic ambiguity about the real locus of authority. In the Chamber two major factions emerged, known by the rather imprecise labels right-centre and left-centre. The former group, led by the historian François Guizot, shared the king's political doctrines; it saw the revised Charter of 1814 as an adequate instrument of government that needed no further change. The left-centre, whose ablest spokesman was the kingmaker Adolphe Thiers, saw 1830 as the beginning rather than the culmination of a process of change. It favoured restricting the king's active role and broadening the suffrage to include the middle strata of the bourgeoisie. These differences of viewpoint, combined with the king's tendency to intrigue, contributed to chronic political instability during the 1830s. The decade of the 1830s was marked also by repeated challenges to the regime by its enemies on the right and the left and by a series of attempts to assassinate the king. Both the ultras (who now came to be called Legitimists) and the republicans refused to forgive "the usurper" of 1830. In 1832 the duchesse de Berry, mother of "the miracle child," landed clandestinely in southern France in an effort to spark a general uprising; but the scheme collapsed, and most Legitimists withdrew into sullen opposition. More serious was the agitation in the cities. Economic distress led to the November 1831 insurrection in Lyon, in which armed workers seized control of the city for a week. In June 1832 a republican demonstration in Paris drew 100,000 participants. Again in 1834 there were serious disturbances in Lyon and Paris that had to be put down by the army. In 1836 it was the turn of the Bonapartist pretender to challenge the regime. Since Napoleon's death in 1821, a legend had taken shape around his name. No longer detested as a ruthless autocrat who had sacrificed a generation of young Frenchmen on the battlefield, he became transmuted into the Little Corporal who had risen to the heights by his own talents and had died a victim of British jealousy. The emperor's nephew Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte presented himself as the true heir; he crossed the frontier in 1836 and called on French troops in Strasbourg to join his cause. The venture failed ignominiously, as did also a second attempt on the Channel coast in 1840. Louis-Napoléon was condemned to prison for life but managed in 1846 to escape to England. Interspersed with these attempts at political risings were individual attacks on the king's person; the most elaborate of these plots was the one organized by a Corsican named Giuseppe Fieschi in 1835. By 1840, however, the enemies of the regime had evidently become discouraged, and a period of remarkable stability followed. François Guizot emerged as the key figure in the ministry; he retained that role from 1840 to 1848. One of the first Protestants to attain high office in France, Guizot possessed many of the moral and intellectual qualities that marked the small but influential Protestant minority. Hardworking and intelligent, Guizot was devoted to the service of the king and to the defense of the status quo. He was convinced that the wealthy governing class was an ideal natural elite to which any Frenchman might have access through talent and effort. To those who complained at being excluded by the property qualification for voting and seeking office, Guizot's simple reply was "Enrichissez-vous!" ("Get rich!"). His government encouraged the process by granting railway and mining concessions to its bourgeois supporters and by contributing part of the development costs. High protective tariffs continued to shelter French entrepreneurs against foreign competition. The result was an economic boom during the 1840s, beginning the transformation of France from a largely rural society into an industrial one. François GuizotFrançois Guizot, 1855.Archives Photographiques, Paris Guizot shared with Louis-Philippe a strong preference for a safe and sane foreign policy. The king, from the beginning of his reign, had cautiously avoided risks and confrontations and had especially sought friendly relations with Britain. In 1830, when the revolution in Paris inspired the Belgians to break away from Dutch rule, Louis-Philippe avoided the temptation of seeking to annex Belgium or of placing one of his sons on the Belgian throne. Again in 1840, when a crisis flared up in the Middle East and Thiers (then head of the government) took an aggressive stance that threatened to coalesce all of Europe against France, the king had found an excuse to replace his firebrand minister. Guizot continued this cautious line through the 1840s, with the single exception of an episode in Spain. A long contest involving rival suitors for the Spanish queen's hand finally tempted Guizot, in 1846, to try for a cheap diplomatic victory; it infuriated the British and helped to destroy the Anglo-French entente. One problem Guizot inherited from his predecessors was that of Algeria. Since 1830 the French had maintained an uneasy presence there, wavering between total withdrawal and expanded conquest. The decision to remain had been made in the mid-1830s; during the Guizot era, General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud used brutal methods to break Algerian resistance, pushed the native population back into the mountains, and began the process of colonizing the rich coastal plain. The Second Republic and Second Empire The revolution of 1848 The overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in February 1848 still seems, in retrospect, a puzzling event. The revolution has been called a result without a cause; more properly, it might be called a result out of proportion to its cause. Since 1840 the regime had settled into a kind of torpid stability; but it had provided the nation with peace abroad and relative prosperity at home. Louis-Philippe and his ministers had prided themselves on their moderation, their respect for the ideal of cautious balance embodied in the concept of juste-milieu. France seemed to be arriving at last at a working compromise that blended traditional ways with the reforms of the Revolutionary era. There were, nevertheless, persistent signs of discontent. The republicans had never forgiven Louis-Philippe for "confiscating" their revolution in 1830. The urban workers, moved by their misery and by the powerful social myths engendered by the Revolution of 1789, remained unreconciled. For a decade or more they had been increasingly drawn toward socialism in its various utopian forms. An unprecedented flowering of socialist thought marked the years 1830-48 in France: this was the generation of the Saint-Simonians (followers of utopian thinker Henri de Saint-Simon [1760-1825]) and of Charles Fourier, Auguste Blanqui, Louis Blanc, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Étienne Cabet, and many others. Most of these system builders preached persuasion rather than violence, but they stimulated the hopes of the common man for an imminent transformation of society. Women also began to question existing social arrangements; the first French feminist groups grew out of the Saint-Simonian movement in 1831-32. Within the bourgeoisie as well, there was strong and vocal pressure for change in the form of a broadening of the political elite. Bills to extend the suffrage (and the right to hold office) to the middle bourgeoisie were repeatedly introduced in parliament but were stubbornly opposed by Guizot. Even the National Guard, that honour society of the lesser bourgeoisie, became infected with this mood of dissatisfaction. Other factors, too, contributed to this mood. In 1846 a crop failure quickly developed into a full-scale economic crisis: food became scarce and expensive; many businesses went bankrupt; unemployment rose. Within the governing elite itself there were signs of a moral crisis: scandals that implicated some high officials of the regime and growing dissension among the notables. Along with this went a serious alienation of many intellectuals. Novelists such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Eugène Sue glorified the common man; the caricaturist Honoré Daumier exposed the foibles of the nation's leaders; and historians such as Jules Michelet and Alphonse de Lamartine wrote with romantic passion about the heroic episodes of the Great Revolution. Beginning in 1847, the leaders of the opposition set out to take advantage of this restless mood and to force the regime to grant liberal reforms. Since public political meetings were illegal, they undertook a series of political "banquets" to mobilize the forces of discontent. This campaign was to be climaxed by a mammoth banquet in Paris on February 22, 1848. But the government, fearing violence, ordered the affair canceled. On the 22nd, crowds of protesting students and workers gathered in the streets and began to clash with the police. The king and Guizot expected no serious trouble: the weather was bad, and a large army garrison was available in case of need. But the disorders continued to spread, and the loyalty of the National Guard began to seem dubious. Toward the end of two days of rioting, Louis-Philippe faced a painful choice: unleash the army (which would mean a bloodbath) or appease the demonstrators. Reluctantly, he chose the second course and announced that he would replace the hated Guizot as his chief minister. But the concession came too late. That evening, an army unit guarding Guizot's official residence clashed with a mob of demonstrators, some 40 of whom died in the fusillade. By the morning of February 24, the angry crowd was threatening the royal palace. Louis-Philippe, confronted by the prospect of civil war, hesitated and then retreated once more; he announced his abdication in favour of his nine-year-old grandson and fled to England. The Second Republic, 1848-52 The succession to the throne was not to be decided so easily, however. The Chamber of Deputies, invaded by a crowd that demanded a republic, set up a provisional government whose members ranged from constitutional monarchists to one radical deputy, Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin. Led by the poet-deputy de Lamartine, the members of the government proceeded to the Hôtel de Ville, where the radical republican leaders had begun to organize their own regime. After considerable palaver, the provisional government co-opted four of the radical leaders, including the socialist theoretician Blanc and a workingman who called himself Albert. Under heavy pressure from the crowd surrounding the Hôtel de Ville, the government proclaimed the republic. During the next few days, continuing pressure from the social reformers pushed the government further than its bourgeois members really wanted to go. The government issued a right-to-work declaration, obligating the state to provide jobs for all citizens. To meet the immediate need, an emergency-relief agency called the ateliers nationaux (national workshops) was established. A kind of economic and social council called the Luxembourg Commission was created to study programs of social reform; Blanc was named its president. The principle of universal manhood suffrage was proclaimed—a return to the precedent of 1792 that increased the electorate at a stroke from 200,000 to 9,000,000. In matters of foreign policy, on the other hand, Foreign Minister Lamartine resisted radical demands. The radicals were eager for an ideological crusade on behalf of all peoples who were thirsting for freedom: Poles, Italians, Hungarians, and Germans had launched their own revolutions and needed help. Lamartine preferred to confine himself to lip-service support, since he was aware that an armed crusade would quickly inspire an anti-French coalition of the major powers. By April 23, when Frenchmen went to the polls to elect their constituent assembly, the initial mood of brotherhood and goodwill had been largely dissipated. Paris had become a cauldron of political activism; dozens of clubs and scores of newspapers had sprung up after the revolution. Severe tension developed between moderates and radicals both within and outside the government and led to a number of violent street demonstrations that were controlled with difficulty. The ateliers nationaux satisfied no one: for the radicals they were a mere caricature of social reform, whereas for the moderates they were a wasteful and dangerous experiment that attracted thousands of unemployed to Paris from every corner of France. Financial problems plagued the government, which sought a solution by imposing a special 45-centime surtax on each franc of direct property taxes; this burden weighed most heavily on the peasantry and was bitterly resented in the countryside. The radicals, fearing that universal suffrage under these conditions might produce unpleasant results, vainly urged postponement of the elections until the new voters could be "educated" as to the virtues of a social republic. The election returns confirmed the radicals' fears: the country voted massively for moderate or conservative candidates. Radicals or socialists won only about 80 of the 880 seats; the rest were bourgeois republicans (500) or constitutional monarchists (300). Lamartine led the popularity parade, being elected in 10 districts. When the assembly convened in May, the new majority showed little patience or caution; it was determined to cut costs and end risky experiments. In spite of Lamartine's efforts to maintain broad republican unity and avert a sharp turn to the right, the assembly abolished the Luxembourg Commission and the ateliers nationaux and refused to substitute a more useful program of public works to provide for the unemployed. The immediate consequence was a brief and bloody civil war in Paris—the so-called June Days (June 23-26, 1848). Thousands of workers suddenly cut off the state payroll were joined by sympathizers—students, artisans, employed workers—in a spontaneous protest movement. Barricades went up in many working-class sections. The assembly turned to General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac as a saviour. Cavaignac had made his mark in repressing Algerian rebel tribes and was entrusted with full powers to do the same in Paris. He gave the workers time to dig themselves in, then brought up artillery against their barricades. At least 1,500 rebels were killed; 12,000 were arrested, and many were subsequently exiled to Algeria. The radical movement was decapitated; the workers withdrew into silent and bitter opposition. Social conflict now gave way to political maneuvering and constitution making. Cavaignac was retained in office as temporary executive, while the assembly turned to its central task. After six months of discussion, it produced a constitution that appeared to be the most democratic in Europe. The president of the republic would be chosen for a four-year term by universal male suffrage; a one-house legislative assembly would be elected for three years by the same suffrage. What remained unclear was the relationship between president and assembly and the way out of a potential deadlock between them. This problem might not have been fatal if the right kind of president had been available in 1848. Instead, the voters chose Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who had returned from British exile in September after having successfully stood for the constituent assembly in a by-election. He had made a poor initial impression; indeed, some politicians, such as Thiers, backed him for the presidency because they thought him too stupid to rule and thus soon to be shunted aside for an Orleanist monarch. What he possessed, however, was a name—a name that Frenchmen knew and that conveyed an aura of glory, power, and public order. In December Louis-Napoléon won by a landslide, polling 5.5 million votes against 2 million for all other candidates combined. In May 1849 the election of the legislative assembly produced an equal surprise. The two extremes—the radical left and the monarchist right—made impressive gains, whereas the moderate republicans, who had shaped the new system, were almost wiped out. The moderates emerged with only 80 seats, the radicals with 200, the monarchists with almost 500. But the monarchist majority lacked coherence, being split into legitimist and Orleanist factions that distrusted each other and differed on political principles. During the next two years, President Bonaparte played his cards carefully, avoiding conflict with the monarchist assembly. He pleased Roman Catholics by restoring the pope to his temporal throne in Rome, from which he had been driven by Roman republicans. At home he accepted without protest a series of conservative measures adopted by the assembly: these laws deprived one-third of all Frenchmen of the right to vote, restricted the press and public assemblage, and gave the church a firm grip on public as well as private education. Yet there was some reason to doubt that Louis-Napoléon really welcomed this trend toward conservatism. His writings of the 1840s had been marked by a kind of technocratic outlook, in the tradition of Saint-Simonian socialism. His effort to please the assembly probably derived from his hope that the assembly would reciprocate: he wanted funds from the treasury to pay his personal debts and run his household, along with a constitutional amendment that would allow him to run for a second term. By 1851 it was clear that the majority was not ready to give the president what he wanted. His alternatives were to step down in 1852, bereft of income and power, or to prepare a coup d'état. Some members of his entourage had long urged the latter course; Louis-Napoléon now concurred, with some reluctance. On the early morning of December 2, 1851, some 70 leading politicians were arrested, and the outlines of a new constitution were proclaimed to the nation. It restored manhood suffrage, sharply reduced the assembly's powers, and extended the president's term to 10 years. Although the coup went off smoothly, it was followed by several days of agitation. Barricades went up in the streets, crowds clashed with troops and police in Paris and in the provinces, several hundred demonstrators were killed, and 27,000 were arrested. A widespread peasant revolt in southeastern France showed that republican convictions were much stronger by 1851 than they had been in 1848. Once the resistance was broken, Louis-Napoléon proceeded with his announced plebiscite on the new constitution and was gratified to receive the approval of 92 percent of those who voted. But the authoritarian republic was only a stopgap. Officially inspired petitions for a restoration of the empire began to flow to Paris; the Senate responded to what it described as the nation's desires, and on December 2, 1852, Louis-Napoléon was proclaimed emperor of the French as Napoleon III. This time there was no open protest; and the voters, in a new plebiscite, accorded Napoleon a handsome majority of 97 percent. Napoleon IIINapoleon III, detail of a portrait by Hippolyte Flandrin; in the Versailles Museum.H. Roger-Viollet The Second Empire, 1852-70 Posterity's image of Napoleon III and his regime has not been uniform. Some historians have seen him as a shallow opportunist whose only asset was a glorious name. Others have described him as a visionary reformer and patron of progress, a man who successfully attempted to reconcile liberty and authority, national prestige and European cooperation. The emperor's enigmatic character and the contradictions built into his regime make it possible to argue either case. The authoritarian years From 1852 to 1859 the empire was authoritarian in tone. Civil liberties were narrowly circumscribed; vocal opponents of the regime remained in exile or were constrained to silence; parliament's wings were clipped; elections to the Corps Législatif (the lower house of the parliament) were spaced at six-year intervals and were "managed" by Napoleon's prefects, who sponsored official candidates. An illusion of popular control was created by the use of the plebiscite to ratify decisions already made. The emperor and his ministers (members of his personal entourage or former Orleanist politicians) rested their authority on the peasant masses, the business class, the church, and those local notables who were willing to cooperate. Little attempt was made to install a new power elite or to create an organized Bonapartist party. Policy during the 1850s was consistently conservative; defense of the social order took precedence over reform. The most striking achievements of these authoritarian years were in economic growth and foreign policy. The economic crisis of the late 1840s had been prolonged by political instability after the revolution; the restoration of order set off a vigorous economic expansion. During the Second Empire industrial production doubled, foreign trade tripled, the use of steam power increased fivefold, and railway mileage grew sixfold. The first great investment banks were founded (e.g., the Péreire brothers' Crédit Mobilier) and the first department store (the Bon Marché in Paris). The surge of French enterprise transcended frontiers: French capital and engineers built bridges, railways, docks, and sewerage systems throughout much of Continental Europe. In part, this burst of energy had its source in favourable world conditions: the availability of more rapid steam transportation, an influx of new gold from overseas, general recovery from the slump of 1846-51. But to some degree Napoleon's government could claim credit, too—not so much by direct intervention in economic life as by creating a favourable climate for private enterprise. Many Frenchmen took advantage of the opportunities offered; they accumulated sizable fortunes and founded enterprises that still exist today. Among these entrepreneurs, however, there was a disproportionate number of "outsiders"—notably men of Protestant or Jewish origin or former disciples of Henri de Saint-Simon. Alongside these dynamic newcomers, the older business and banking leaders continued to operate on more cautious traditional lines. From the Second Empire onward, the French economy would combine these two contrasting sectors: a dynamic modernized element superimposed upon a largely static traditional kind of enterprise. Napoleon's foreign policy at the outset was cautious; "the empire means peace," he assured his countrymen and the nervous powers of Europe. Yet, for a ruler who bore the name Napoleon, the prudent and colourless policy of a Louis-Philippe seemed hardly appropriate. Besides, the emperor was eager to achieve recognition from the other European monarchs, who regarded him as an upstart. It was for these reasons rather than because of urgent national interest that he became involved in the Crimean War in 1854. Britain and Russia were engaged in a contest for influence in the crumbling Turkish empire. A dispute over the holy places in Palestine gave Napoleon an excuse to offer the British his support and thus to restore the Franco-British entente. Although the Crimean campaign was on the whole a fiasco for all the participating armies, the French forces came off less ingloriously than the others and could with some justice pose as victors. Napoleon served as host for the Paris peace conference that ended the war in 1856. Midway through the conference, the birth of a male heir to the emperor and his empress, Eugénie, seemed to assure the permanence of the dynasty. The liberal years The empire thus appeared to have compiled a record of unbroken successes and to be beyond challenge by its domestic critics. Perhaps it was this stability and self-confidence that led Napoleon, beginning in 1859, to turn in the direction of liberalizing the empire. The immediate impulse for this dramatic reversal was the attempted assassination of the emperor in January 1858 by an Italian patriot, Felice Orsini, who sought thus to draw public attention to the frustrated hopes of Italian nationalists. Napoleon, shaken by the episode and by the reminder that in his youth he, too, had fought for Italian independence, met secretly in July 1858 with the conte di Cavour, premier of Piedmont; the two men laid plans designed to evict Austria from northern Italy and to convert Italy into a confederation of states headed by the pope. In return, France was promised Nice and Savoy (Savoie). The new allies provoked the Austrians into a declaration of war in April 1859, and Napoleon led his armies across the Alps. French victories at Magenta and Solferino were followed by a somewhat premature settlement in which the Austrians turned over the province of Lombardy to the Piedmontese. The campaign had aroused the passions of Italian nationalists up and down the peninsula; revolutions broke out in some of the smaller Italian states, and in 1860 the colourful guerrilla leader Giuseppe Garibaldi set forth from Piedmont to conquer Sicily and Naples. These repercussions of Napoleon's new foreign policy stirred up bitter controversy in France. Conservatives were outraged and feared that the pope would be deposed as temporal ruler of Rome by the Italian nationalists. On the other hand, the long-silent liberal and radical opposition voiced reluctant approval. It is likely that Napoleon, whose bent toward Saint-Simonian reform ideas was strong, had never been very comfortable in his alliance with the conservatives and welcomed a chance to indulge his deeper instincts. At any rate, late in 1859 he announced the first hesitant steps toward a liberal empire. Political exiles were amnestied, press controls were relaxed, and the Corps Législatif was given slightly increased authority. An even more dramatic turn toward economic liberalism soon followed; in January 1860 Napoleon negotiated a low-tariff treaty with Britain, ending the long tradition of protectionism that had insulated French producers. With this move, however, the emperor alienated the businessmen, who until now had been his strong supporters. Some of the emperor's advisers had sharply opposed the turn toward liberalism. Events during the next decade seemed to confirm their warnings; for the empire now ran into increasingly stormy weather. The political opposition, stifled since 1851, showed little gratitude to its benefactor and took every opportunity to harass the government. In the 1863 elections, opposition candidates polled two million votes, and 35 of them were elected to the Corps Législatif—including such effective spokesmen as the Orleanist Thiers and the republican Jules Favre. A downward turn in the economy played into the hands of the opposition. Foreign policy errors added to the regime's embarrassment: Napoleon's ill-conceived intervention in Mexico, where he hoped to establish a client empire under Maximilian of Austria, proved costly and futile and seemed to threaten a conflict with the United States. And from the mid-1860s a new threat began to loom across the Rhine: the burgeoning power of Prussia, under the guidance of Otto von Bismarck. Despite these evil portents, Napoleon clung doggedly to his liberalization venture; additional reforms were granted throughout the decade. He expressed sympathy with the workers, granted them a kind of extralegal right to form trade unions and to strike, and helped them organize mutual-aid societies. His minister of education, Victor Duruy, carried out an enlightened program of broadened public education, including the establishment of the first secondary education for girls. In 1867 the emperor restored quite considerable freedom of the press and of public assembly and further broadened the powers of the Corps Législatif. Yet the response of the voters to these concessions caused some dismay; in the elections of 1869 the opposition vote rose to 3.3 million, and the number of seats held by oppositionists more than doubled. The emperor now faced a momentous choice: a still further dose of liberalism or a brusque return to the authoritarian empire. He chose the former alternative; in January 1870 he asked the leader of the liberal opposition, Émile Ollivier, to form a government. Ollivier supervised the drafting of a new constitution, which, though hybrid in nature, converted the empire into a quasi-parliamentary regime. The ministers were declared to be "responsible," and their powers (as well as those of the Corps Législatif) were increased. At the same time, the emperor retained most of his existing prerogatives, so that the real locus of power in case of a conflict was unclear. Nevertheless, the voters, when consulted by referendum (May 8, 1870), gave the new system a massive vote of confidence: 7 million in favour and only 1.5 million against. Outwardly, at least, it appeared that the emperor had found a widely accepted solution. But war and defeat only four months later were to prevent a fair test of the liberal empire in its final form.

The Peninsular War

The Peninsular War (1807-1814) was the military conflict fought in the Iberian Peninsula by Spain, Portugal, and the United Kingdom against the invading and occupying forces of the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. In Spain, it is considered to overlap with the Spanish War of Independence.[d] The war began when the French and Spanish armies invaded and occupied Portugal in 1807 by transiting through Spain, and it escalated in 1808 after Napoleonic France had occupied Spain, which had been its ally. Napoleon Bonaparte forced the abdications of Ferdinand VII and his father Charles IV and then installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne and promulgated the Bayonne Constitution. Most Spaniards rejected French rule and fought a bloody war to oust them. The war on the peninsula lasted until the Sixth Coalition defeated Napoleon in 1814, and it is regarded as one of the first wars of national liberation and is significant for the emergence of large-scale guerrilla warfare. The war began in Spain with the Dos de Mayo Uprising on 2 May 1808 and ended on 17 April 1814 with the restoration of Ferdinand VII to the monarchy. The French occupation destroyed the Spanish administration, which fragmented into quarrelling provincial juntas. The episode remains as the bloodiest event in Spain's modern history, doubling in relative terms the Spanish Civil War.[10] A reconstituted national government, the Cortes of Cádiz—in effect a government-in-exile—fortified itself in the secure port of Cádiz in 1810, but could not raise effective armies because it was besieged by 70,000 French troops. British and Portuguese forces eventually secured Portugal, using it as a safe position from which to launch campaigns against the French army and provide whatever supplies they could get to the Spanish, while the Spanish armies and guerrillas tied down vast numbers of Napoleon's troops.[e] By restricting French control of territory, the combined allied forces, both regular and irregular, prevented Napoleon's marshals from subduing the rebellious Spanish provinces, and the war continued through years of stalemate.[12] The British Army, under then Lt. Gen. Sir Arthur Wellesley, later the 1st Duke of Wellington, guarded Portugal and campaigned against the French in Spain alongside the reformed Portuguese army. The demoralized Portuguese army was reorganized and refitted under the command of Gen. William Beresford,[13] who had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Portuguese forces by the exiled Portuguese royal family, and fought as part of the combined Anglo-Portuguese Army under Wellesley. In 1808, the Spanish Army in Andalusia, defeat the French in the Battle of Bailen, considered the first open-field defeat of the Napoleonic army in Europe. In 1812, when Napoleon set out with a massive army on what proved to be a disastrous French invasion of Russia, a combined allied army defeat the French at Salamanca and take the capital Madrid. In the following year the Coalition scored a victory over King Joseph Bonaparte's army in the Battle of Vitoria paving the victory of the war in the Iberian Peninsula. Pursued by the armies of Spain, Portugal and Britain, Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult, no longer getting sufficient support from a depleted France, led the exhausted and demoralized French forces in a fighting withdrawal across the Pyrenees during the winter of 1813-1814. The years of fighting in Spain were a heavy burden on France's Grande Armée. While the French enjoyed several victories in battle, they were eventually defeated, as their communications and supplies were severely tested and their units were frequently isolated, harassed or overwhelmed by partisans fighting an intense guerrilla war of raids and ambushes. The Spanish armies were repeatedly beaten and driven to the peripheries, but they would regroup and relentlessly hound and demoralize the French troops. This drain on French resources led Napoleon, who had unwittingly provoked a total war, to call the conflict the "Spanish Ulcer".[14][15] War and revolution against Napoleon's occupation led to the Spanish Constitution of 1812, promulgated by the Cortes of Cádiz, later a cornerstone of European liberalism.[16] The burden of war destroyed the social and economic fabric of Portugal and Spain, and ushered in an era of social turbulence, increased political instability, and economic stagnation. Devastating civil wars between liberal and absolutist factions, led by officers trained in the Peninsular War, persisted in Iberia until 1850. The cumulative crises and disruptions of invasion, revolution and restoration led to the independence of most of Spain's American colonies and the independence of Brazil, which remained a monarchy, after severing ties with Portugal.

Richelieu

(1585-1642), ruled as regent in place of Louis XIII, set in place the cornerstone of French absolutism, reshuffled royal council to curb the power of the nobility, established intendant system—intendants appointed directly by the monarch, solely responsible to him, enforced royal orders and weakened the power of the nobility, established French Academy to standardize language Had 4 goals for France-to eliminate the Huguenots as an effective political force, to remind the nobles that they were subordinate, unite france under national greatness, make france an absolute monarchy.

Louis XIV

(1638-1715) Known as the Sun King, he was an absolute monarch that completely controlled France. One of his greatest accomplishments was the building of the palace at Versailles. Determined to suppress any challenge to his authority

Outbreak of the revolution

Bread riots break out in Petrograd Factory workers went on strike Soldiers sent to break the strikes and riots sided with the people Background The French Revolution began in 1789 and lasted until 1794. King Louis XVI needed more money, but had failed to raise more taxes when he had called a meeting of the Estates General. This instead turned into a protest about conditions in France. On July 14 1789 the Paris mob, hungry due to a lack of food from poor harvests, upset at the conditions of their lives and annoyed with their King and Government, stormed the Bastille fortress (a prison). This turned out to be more symbolic than anything else as only four or five prisoners were found. In October 1789, King Louis and his family were moved from Versailles (the Royal palace) to Paris. He tried to flee in 1791, but was stopped and forced to agree to a new form of government. Replacing the power of the King, a 'legislative assembly' governed from October 1791 to September 1792, and was then replaced by the 'National Convention'. The Republic of France was declared, and soon the King was put on trial. The Revolution became more and more radical and violent. King Louis XVI was executed on January 21 1793. In the six weeks that followed some 1,400 people who were considered potential enemies to the Republic were executed in Paris. Many historians now regard the French Revolution as a turning point in the history of Europe, but also in North America where many of the same ideas influenced the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. The famous slogan 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' called for every person's right to freedom and equal treatment. Across France and the rest of Europe the consequences of the Revolution were huge. There were many new developments including the fall of the monarchy, changes in society with the rise of the middle class, and the growth of nationalism.

The Diplomatic Revolution and the 7 Years War

The Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 was the reversal of longstanding alliances in Europe between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War.[1] Austria went from an ally of Britain to an ally of France, while Prussia became an ally of Britain.[2] The most influential diplomat involved was an Austrian statesman, Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz.[3] The change was part of the stately quadrille, a constantly shifting pattern of alliances throughout the 18th century in efforts to preserve or upset the European balance of power.The diplomatic change was triggered by a separation of interests among Austria, Britain, and France. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, after the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, left Austria aware of the high price it paid in having Britain as an ally. Maria Theresa of Austria had defended her claim to the Habsburg throne and had her husband, Francis Stephen, crowned Emperor in 1745. However, she had been forced to relinquish valuable territory in the process. Under British diplomatic pressure, Maria Theresa had given up most of Lombardy and occupied Bavaria. The British also forced her to cede Parma to Spain and, more importantly, to abandon the valuable state of Silesia to Prussian occupation. During the war, Frederick II ("the Great") of Prussia had seized Silesia, one of the Bohemian crown lands. That acquisition had further advanced Prussia as a great European power, which now posed an increasing threat to Austria's German lands and to Central Europe as a whole. The growth of Prussia, dangerous to Austria, was welcomed by the British, who saw it as a means of balancing French power and reducing French influence in Germany, which might otherwise have grown in response to Austria's weakness.As a result, Britain and Prussia faced Austria, France, and Russia. Despite the reversal of alliances, however, the basic antagonisms remained: Prussia versus Austria and Britain versus France. The war ended in a victory for Britain and Prussia, aided by the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg and Britain's control of the seas, which was enhanced by success during its 1759 annus mirabilis. France, Austria, and their European allies ultimately were unsuccessful in their aims. However, the Anglo-Prussian Alliance proved to be short-lived largely because Britain withdrew financial and military support for Prussia in 1762; Prussia subsequently allied with Russia instead. The dissolution of the alliance and the new pre-eminence of Britain left it with no allies when the American Revolutionary War broke out. See also

German National Awakening

The Revolutions of 1848 led to many revolutions in various German states.[13] Nationalists did seize power in a number of German states and an all-German parliament was created in Frankfurt in May 1848.[13] The Frankfurt Parliament attempted to create a national constitution for all German states but rivalry between Prussian and Austrian interests resulted in proponents of the parliament advocating a "small German" solution (a monarchical German nation-state without Austria) with the imperial crown of Germany being granted to the King of Prussia.[13] The King of Prussia refused the offer and efforts to create a leftist German nation-state faltered and collapsed.[22] In the aftermath of the failed attempt to establish a liberal German nation-state, rivalry between Prussia and Austria intensified under the agenda of Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck who blocked all attempts by Austria to join the Zollverein.[1] A division developed among German nationalists, with one group led by the Prussians that supported a "Lesser Germany" that excluded Austria and another group that supported a "Greater Germany" that included Austria.[1] The Prussians sought a Lesser Germany to allow Prussia to assert hegemony over Germany that would not be guaranteed in a Greater Germany.[1] This was a major propaganda point later asserted by Hitler. By the late 1850s German nationalists emphasized military solutions. The mood was fed by hatred of the French, a fear of Russia, a rejection of the 1815 Vienna settlement, and a cult of patriotic hero-warriors. War seemed to be a desirable means of speeding up change and progress. Nationalists thrilled to the image of the entire people in arms. Bismarck harnessed the national movement's martial pride and desire for unity and glory to weaken the political threat the liberal opposition posed to Prussia's conservatism.[23] Prussia achieved hegemony over Germany in the "wars of unification": the Second Schleswig War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (which effectively excluded Austria from Germany) (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870).[1] A German nation-state was founded in 1871 called the German Empire as a Lesser Germany with the King of Prussia taking the throne of German Emperor (Deutscher Kaiser) and Bismarck becoming Chancellor of Germany.[1]

Government

The institution through which a society makes and enforces its public policies. The Enlightenment brought political modernization to the west, in terms of focusing on democratic values and institutions and the creation of modern, liberal democracies. Enlightenment thinkers sought to curtail the political power of organized religion, and thereby prevent another age of intolerant religious war.In 1649, a civil war broke out over who would rule England—Parliament or King Charles I. The war ended with the beheading of the king. Shortly after Charles was executed, an English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), wrote Leviathan, a defense of the absolute power of kings. The title of the book referred to a leviathan, a mythological, whale-like sea monster that devoured whole ships. Hobbes likened the leviathan to government, a powerful state created to impose order. Hobbes began Leviathan by describing the "state of nature" where all individuals were naturally equal. Every person was free to do what he or she needed to do to survive. As a result, everyone suffered from "continued fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man [was] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." In 1690, Locke published his Two Treatises of Government. He generally agreed with Hobbes about the brutality of the state of nature, which required a social contract to assure peace. But he disagreed with Hobbes on two major points. First, Locke argued that natural rights such as life, liberty, and property existed in the state of nature and could never be taken away or even voluntarily given up by individuals. These rights were "inalienable" (impossible to surrender). Locke also disagreed with Hobbes about the social contract. For him, it was not just an agreement among the people, but between them and the sovereign (preferably a king). According to Locke, the natural rights of individuals limited the power of the king. The king did not hold absolute power, as Hobbes had said, but acted only to enforce and protect the natural rights of the people. If a sovereign violated these rights, the social contract was broken, and the people had the right to revolt and establish a new government. Less than 100 years after Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government, Thomas Jefferson used his theory in writing the Declaration of Independence. Although Locke spoke out for freedom of thought, speech, and religion, he believed property to be the most important natural right. He declared that owners may do whatever they want with their property as long as they do not invade the rights of others. Government, he said, was mainly necessary to promote the "public good," that is to protect property and encourage commerce and little else. "Govern lightly," Locke said. Locke favored a representative government such as the English Parliament,

Frederick the Great

This was the Prussian king who embraced culture and wrote poetry and prose. He gave religious and philosophical toleration to all subjects, abolished torture and made the laws simpler In his youth, Frederick was more interested in music and philosophy than the art of war, which led to clashes with his authoritarian father, Frederick William I of Prussia. However, upon ascending to the Prussian throne, he attacked and annexed the rich Austrian province of Silesia in 1742, winning military acclaim for himself and Prussia. He then became an influential military theorist whose analysis emerged from his extensive personal battlefield experience and covered issues of strategy, tactics, mobility and logistics.modernised the Prussian bureaucracy and civil service, and pursued religious policies throughout his realm that ranged from tolerance to segregation. He reformed the judicial system and made it possible for men of lower status to become judges and senior bureaucrats. Frederick also encouraged immigrants of various nationalities and faiths to come to Prussia, although he enacted oppressive measures against Catholics in Silesia and Polish Prussia. He supported the arts and philosophers he favoured, and allowed freedom of the press and literature. Frederick was almost certainly homosexual, and his sexuality has been the subject of much study. He is buried at his favourite residence, Sanssouci in Potsdam. Because he died childless, he was succeeded by his nephew, Frederick William II.Nearly all 19th-century German historians made Frederick into a romantic model of a glorified warrior, praising his leadership, administrative efficiency, devotion to duty and success in building Prussia into a great power in Europe. Frederick remained an admired historical figure through Germany's defeat in World War I, and the Nazis glorified him as a great German leader pre-figuring Adolf Hitler, who personally idolised him. His reputation became less favourable in Germany after World War II, partly due to his status as a Nazi symbol. Regardless, historians in the 21st century tend to view Frederick as an outstanding military leader and capable monarch, whose commitment to enlightenment culture and administrative reform built the foundation that allowed the Kingdom of Prussia to contest the Austrian Habsburgs for leadership among the German states.

Social Trends

commercilization of agriculture or most inhabitants of Europe, the highest aim was to survive in a hazardous world. They were contained in an inelastic frame by their inability to produce more than a certain amount of food or to make goods except by hand or by relatively simple tools and machines. In this natural, or preindustrial, economy, population played the main part in determining production and demand through the amount of labour available for field, mill, and workshop and through the number of consumers. Jean Bodin (writing toward the end of an age of rising population) stated what was to become the truism of the anxious 17th century when he wrote that men were "the only strength and wealth." The 16th century had seen the last phase in recovery from the Black Death, which had killed about a third of Europe's people. The 1590s brought a sharp check: dearth and disorder were especially severe in France and Spain.

The Baroque Period

the stylistic period between approximately 1600 and 1750 The movement is often identified with Absolutism, the Counter Reformation and Catholic Revival,[1][2] but the existence of important Baroque art and architecture in non-absolutist and Protestant states throughout Western Europe underscores its widespread popularity.[3] Among the greatest painters of the Baroque period are Velázquez, Caravaggio,[5] Rembrandt,[6] Rubens,[7] Poussin,[8] and Vermeer.[9] The Early Baroque (1584-1625) was largely dominated by the work of Roman architects, notably the Church of the Gesù by Giacomo della Porta (consecrated 1584) facade and colonnade of St. Peter's Basilica by Carlo Maderno (completed 1612) and the lavish Barberini Palace interiors by Pietro da Cortona (1633-1639). Church of the Gesù by Giacomo della Porta (consecrated 1584), interior, and Santa Susanna (1603), by Carlo Maderno. In France, the Luxembourg Palace (1615-45) built by Salomon de Brosse for Marie de Medici was an early example of the style.[5] The High Baroque (1625-1675) produced major works in Rome by Pietro da Cortona, including the (Church of Santi Luca e Martina) (1635-50); by Francesco Borromini (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1634-1646)); and by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (The colonnade of St. Peter's Basilica) (1656-57). In Venice, High Baroque works included Santa Maria della Salute by Baldassare Longhena. Examples in France included the Pavillon de l'Horloge of the Louvre Palace by Jacques Lemercier (1624-1645), the Chapel of the Sorbonne by Jacques Lemercier (1626-35) and the Château de Maisons by François Mansart (1630-1651). The Late Baroque (1675-1750) saw the style spread to all parts of Europe, and to the colonies of Spain and Portugal in the New World. National styles became more varied and distinct. The Late Baroque in France, under Louis XIV, was more ordered and classical; examples included the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles and the dome of Les Invalides. An especially ornate variant, appeared in the early 18th century; it was first called Rocaille in France; then Rococo in Spain and Central Europe. The sculpted and painted decoration covered every space on the walls and ceiling. Its most celebrated architect was Balthasar Neumann, noted for the Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers and the Würzburg Residence (1749-51).[6]

Limitations of Enlightened Depotism

Enlightened despotism was impaired by the problem of succession. So long as monarchs came to the throne by the accident of birth, there was nothing to prevent the unenlightened or incapable from succeeding the enlightened and able. Even the least of the enlightened despots deserves credit for having reformed some of the bad features of the Old Regime; but not even the best of them could strike a happy balance between enlightenment and despotism. Joseph II was too doctrinaire, too inflexible in his determination to apply the full reform program of the Age of Reason. Pombal and Gustavus III were too arbitrary. Frederick the Great, obsessed with strengthening the Crown, entrenched the power of the Junkers, who were hostile to the Enlightenment. And in Russia events after the death of Peter the Great furnished another lesson in the difficulty of applying rational principles to political realities.

Religion

Enlightenment thinking on religion culminated in the late 18th century in the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that time, space, causation, and substance—among other features of reality—are innate conceptual categories through which the human mind imposes order on experience

Louis XIV: First Two Wars

First war was a minor war with Spain and ended quite quickly. Louis was trying to resolve and teach a lesson to the Dutch, and bought off England and Sweden and then invaded holland. Spain, Roman Empire and Brandenburg Prussia joined against France. France reached military peak and won parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, and part of Habsburg Dynasty

The Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution

The main features involved in the Industrial Revolution were technological, socioeconomic, and cultural. The technological changes included the following: (1) the use of new basic materials, chiefly iron and steel, (2) the use of new energy sources, including both fuels and motive power, such as coal, the steam engine, electricity, petroleum, and the internal-combustion engine, (3) the invention of new machines, such as the spinning jenny and the power loom that permitted increased production with a smaller expenditure of human energy, (4) a new organization of work known as the factory system, which entailed increased division of labour and specialization of function, (5) important developments in transportation and communication, including the steam locomotive, steamship, automobile, airplane, telegraph, and radio, and (6) the increasing application of science to industry. These technological changes made possible a tremendously increased use of natural resources and the mass production of manufactured goods.There were also many new developments in nonindustrial spheres, including the following: (1) agricultural improvements that made possible the provision of food for a larger nonagricultural population, (2) economic changes that resulted in a wider distribution of wealth, the decline of land as a source of wealth in the face of rising industrial production, and increased international trade, (3) political changes reflecting the shift in economic power, as well as new state policies corresponding to the needs of an industrialized society, (4) sweeping social changes, including the growth of cities, the development of working-class movements, and the emergence of new patterns of authority, and (5) cultural transformations of a broad order. Workers acquired new and distinctive skills, and their relation to their tasks shifted; instead of being craftsmen working with hand tools, they became machine operators, subject to factory discipline. Finally, there was a psychological change: confidence in the ability to use resources and to master nature was heightened.

Britain

When Georg Ludwig, elector of Hanover, became king of Great Britain on August 1, 1714, the country was in some respects bitterly divided. Fundamentally, however, it was prosperous, cohesive, and already a leading European and imperial power. Abroad, Britain's involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). It had acquired new colonies in Gibraltar, Minorca, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Hudson's Bay, as well as trading concessions in the Spanish New World. By contrast, Britain's rivals, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic, were left weakened or war-weary by the conflict. It took France a decade to recover, and Spain and Holland were unable to reverse their military and economic decline. As a result Britain was able to remain aloof from war on the Continent for a quarter of a century after the Hanoverian succession, and this protracted peace was to be crucial to the new dynasty's survival and success. War had also strengthened the British state at home. The need to raise men and money had increased the size and scope of the executive as well as the power and prestige of the House of Commons. Taxation had accounted for 70 percent of Britain's wartime expenditure (£93,644,560 between 1702 and 1713), so the Commons' control over taxation became a powerful guarantee of its continuing importance. Britain's ability to pay for war on this scale demonstrated the extent of its wealth. Agriculture was still the bedrock of the economy, but trade was increasing, and more men and women were employed in industry in Britain than in any other European nation. Wealth, however, was unequally distributed, with almost a third of the national income belonging to only 5 percent of the population. But British society was not polarized simply between the rich and the poor; according to writer Daniel Defoe there were seven different and more subtle categories: 1. The great, who live profusely. 2. The rich, who live plentifully. 3. The middle sort, who live well. 4. The working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want. 5. The country people, farmers etc., who fare indifferently. 6. The poor, who fare hard. 7. The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want. From 1700 to the 1740s Britain's population remained stable at about seven million, and agricultural production increased. So, although men and women from Defoe's 6th and 7th categories could still die of hunger and hunger-related diseases, in most regions of Britain there was usually enough basic food to go around. This was crucial to social stability and to popular acquiescence in the new Hanoverian regime.

Core Ideas Enlightenment

Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness. A brief treatment of the Enlightenment follows.

Mazarin

Chief minister and regent to Louis XIV; tried to continue Richelieu's centralizing policies, but his attempts to increase royal revenue led to the civil wars known as the Fronde; He could not control nobility as Richelieu had.

Consulate and the Empire

Consulate, (1799-1804) French government established after the Coup of 18-19 Brumaire (Nov. 9-10, 1799), during the French Revolution. The Constitution of the Year VIII created an executive consisting of three consuls, but the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, wielded all real power, while the other two, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Pierre-Roger Ducos (1747-1816), were figureheads. The principles of representation and legislative supremacy were discarded. The executive branch was given the power to draft new laws, and the legislative branch became little more than a rubber stamp. Elections became an elaborate charade, with voters stripped of real power. Napoleon abolished the Consulate when he declared himself emperor in 1804.

Cromwell and the Interregnum

Cromwell's convincing military successes at Drogheda in Ireland (1649), Dunbar in Scotland (1650) and Worcester in England (1651) forced Charles I's son, Charles, into foreign exile despite being accepted and crowned King in Scotland. From 1649 to 1660, England was therefore a republic during a period known as the Interregnum ('between reigns'). A series of political experiments followed, as the country's rulers tried to redefine and establish a workable constitution without a monarchy. Throughout the Interregnum, Cromwell's relationship with Parliament was a troubled one, with tensions over the nature of the constitution and the issue of supremacy, control of the armed forces and debate over religious toleration. In 1653 Parliament was dissolved, and under the Instrument of Government, Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector, later refusing the offer of the throne. Further disputes with the House of Commons followed; at one stage Cromwell resorted to regional rule by a number of the army's Major Generals. After Cromwell's death in 1658, and the failure of his son Richard's short-lived Protectorate, the army under General Monk invited Charles I's son to become King as Charles II.

Charles I

King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1625-1649). His power struggles with Parliament resulted in the English Civil War (1642-1648) in which Charles was defeated. He was tried for treason and beheaded in 1649. Charles consistently went against parliament. Parliament introduces Petition of Right. Charles consents to gain more money. Charles then disbands parliament to gain more money. Systematically forced anglicans conformity. Charles then called parliament back and created tensions leading to civil war.

The Civil War I

Led to civil war amongst, social, ethnic, territorial, religious and parliamentary. Puritan Oliver Cromwell wins crucial battle in Marston Moor and wins support. Charles turns to scotland for help, who turn him over to the parliament. Cromwell beats the scots and beheads Charles 1 and takes control.

Turkish and Polish Questions

In 1716 the Ottoman Empire became embroiled in a war with Austria that resulted in the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718), by which Charles VI recovered the portion of Hungary still under Turkish rule, plus some other Ottoman lands in the Danube valley. Another Austro Turkish war (1735-1739) modified the Passarowitz settlement. In this war Austria was allied with Russia, but they fell to quarreling over division of the prospective spoils. In the end there was little to divide, and Charles VI had to hand back to Turkey the Danubian lands annexed in 1718. During the negotiations leading to the Austro-Turkish settlement of 1739, France gave the Ottoman Empire powerful support. In the early 1730s Bourbons and Habsburgs also chose opposing sides in a crisis over the kingship of Poland. The stage was set for the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735), pitting a Polish contender, Stanislas Leszcynski, protege of Charles XII, plus France and Spain, against Augustus III, a protege of Peter the Great, who also had Austrian support. The diplomats quickly worked out a compromise settlement. Much to the satisfaction of Austria and Russia, Augustus III secured the Polish throne. Yet from the French standpoint, Stanislas Leszcynski was well compensated for his loss. He acquired the duchy of Lorraine on the northeastern border of France, with the provision that when he died Lorraine would go to his daughter Marie, wife of Louis XV of France, and thence to the French Crown. The incumbent duke of Lorraine, Francis, future husband of the Habsburg heiress Maria Theresa, was awarded the grand duchy of Tuscany. Finally, as a by-product of the settlement, Elizabeth Farnese of Spain capped twenty years of perseverance by procuring the kingdom of Naples for her elder son. The War of the Polish Succession may seem like much ado about a kingship possessing no real power; and the postwar settlement, which affected chiefly Italy and Lorraine, may appear to be a striking case of diplomatic irrelevance. Yet the whole Polish crisis neatly illustrates the workings of dynastic politics and the balance of power. Statesmen regarded thrones as diplomatic prizes, to be assigned without reference to the wishes of the populations involved. The complicated arrangements of the 1730s preserved the balance of power by giving something to almost everyone. Although the diplomats had not prevented a little war over Poland, they did keep it from becoming a big one.

Religion and Education

The French Revolution and Napoleon each in their turn had a tremendous impact on the development of the French educational system. This article will briefly review the development of French education prior to the Revolution, and then place the contributions of the Revolution and Napoleon in their proper context. Much of the history of Europe can be seen in the rise and fall of its educational systems. With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D., educational institutions, such as they were, declined rapidly. The Dark Ages which followed the fall of Rome may not really have been completely dark, but there is little question that the level of intellectual development on the part of the people suffered. Learning was largely confined to private study, often isolated from other people making the same effort. There was a movement in England to preserve, restore, and copy some of the old manuscripts, and institutional education did survive, but it was a far cry from earlier years. It was not until the reign of Charlemagne, made King of the Franks in 768 A. D. and crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas day of 800 A. D., that there was a revival of formal learning on the continent of Europe. After meeting with the Saxon teacher Alcuin at Parma, Charlemagne established the palace school, with Alcuin at its head. [2] His famous capitulary of 787 established the idea of a more widespread educational effort, and he imported educators from throughout the rest of the world. Education under Charlemagne spread throughout his realm, and three important characteristics can be drawn from this period. First, the system of education being developed was very centralized. In this case it began with the palace school, and spread to some monasteries throughout the kingdom. Second, while Charlemagne had a genuine intellectual interest in education, most of the education provided was religious in nature. Third, the education was provided to a very tiny elite. These three characteristics would continue to dominate education in France for centuries, and the centralization and elitist aspects can be seem, to one extent or another, up to the present day. By the end of the eleventh century, various church schools had been established throughout France. Eventually, Paris became the intellectual center of learning, though other cities gave it competition. Ecclesiastical schools provided free education, and taught grammar and other traditional subjects. It is important to note that during this period (the early twelfth century in particular) the Catholic Church became alarmed with the level of "liberal" education being provided in some schools, and insisted on the right to license teachers. Thus, in order to teach you had to get the permission of the bishop. This authority could and did stifle intellectual development in directions considered improper by the church. This strong influence of the church would continue until the French Revolution. By the 13th century, the University of Paris had been established. It provided education in theology, law, medicine, and the liberal arts. Students were enrolled as young as 14, and a system that was the forerunner of the modern degree system was established. The middle of the 16th century saw the increase in educational activities brought on by the Renaissance. The Church maintained its control, however, as France saw many years of religious strife that ended with effective Catholic domination over the country. One educational development of note, however, was the replacement of Latin by French as the language of scholars. In the years immediately prior to the French Revolution, the idea of universal education was beginning to develop. Cardinal Richelieu, the power behind Louis XIII (ruled 1610 to 1643), and later Rolland advocated the principle that "each one ought to have within his reach the education for which he is best fitted." [3] But, for all the talk, it could be argued that the involvement of the French government was less than overwhelming, and education was largely left to the Catholic Church. As Farrington suggests, "The time was not then ripe, however, for accomplishing these reforms. It needed the drastic purgation of the Revolutionary period, followed by the constructive genius of Napoleon, to put them into effect." [4] The French Revolution The period of the French Revolution (1789-1799) is not noted for its stability, either of policy or of government, and it may be a surprise to the average reader that this period dealt with education at all. While most literature concentrates on the activities surrounding foreign policy and internal conflicts, the fact is that the leaders of the Revolution were very concerned with education. This was seen early in the Revolutionary period, in the cahiers that had been requested by Louis XVI. These cahiers consisted of grievances and/or suggestions for improvement. While the cahiers of the third estate (workers and peasants) seldom mentioned education, those of the first and second estates (clergy, nobility) often called for improvements in the educational system. [5] Later, in 1793, the Convention established the Committee of Public Instruction, and charged it with reordering education in France. It is not surprising that the destructive tendencies of the other components of the Revolution were carried out in education as well. That which existed had to go, simply because it had existed before the Revolution. But it would be unfair to characterize the Revolution as merely destructive. They considered the problem of education from a variety of points of view, including "the duties and prerogatives of the state, the rights of parents, the potential benefits of higher education, the economic needs of the nation, the necessity for training teachers, and the suitable status of the teaching profession in a republic." [6] That list sounds very much like the debate in late 20th century America. While education was not mentioned in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that 1789 statement of rights so like the US Bill of Rights, it was included in the first constitution and in the constitutions that would follow. One of the first changes made to French society had to do with religion. Much of the Revolution can be seen as a rejection of the old order, including the prominent role played by the Church. Thus, while Revolutionaries were destroying the statues at Notre Dame, they were also removing any vestiges of influence by the Church in the educational system. Interestingly, the great revolutionaries of France were willing to change just about everything, but they were not willing to change attitudes toward women in education. Thus Mirabeau, the Revolutionary leader, in line with Rousseau, the philosophical "father" of the Revolution, felt that education was for men who were to become involved in the affairs of state, while women, whose main job was to raise the family, had little need for such things. [7] During the early years of the Revolution, there was a lot of talk about education, but relatively little institutional action. Many reports were issued, and some changes were made, but the internal turmoil and external conflict made domestic reform difficult. With the execution of Robespierre on July 28, 1794, some level of normalcy was established, and the government was able to pay more attention to educational reform. Action soon followed with the decree that teacher training was now the top educational priority. The Paris Normal school was created with a curriculum that included "republican morality and the public and private virtues, as well as the techniques of teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, practical geometry, French history and grammar;" and they were to use books which would be published and prescribed by the Convention. [8] This latter requirement merely reflects what had by that time become a strong French tradition, namely the extreme centralization of educational policy. Also instituted at this time was the establishment of a public secondary school for every 300,000 people. The curriculum for these écoles centrales consisted of literature, languages, science, and the arts. The decree establishing the écoles centrales also provided that ...the age-range of the pupils will be from eleven or twelve to seventeen or eighteen ... every school is to have one professor for each of the following subjects: mathematics; experimental physics and chemistry; natural history; scientific method and psychology; political economy and legislation; the philosophic history of peoples; hygiene; arts and crafts; general grammar; belles lettres; ancient languages; the modern languages most appropriate to the locality of the school; painting and drawing. The teaching throughout will be in French. Every month there is to be a public lecture dealing with the latest advances in science and the useful arts. Every central school is to have attached to it a public library, a garden and a natural history collection, as well as a collection of scientific apparatus and of machines and models relating to arts and crafts. The Committee of Public Instruction is to remain responsible for the composition of text-books which are to be used in central schools, and the citing of these schools is to be determined by special enactment. [9] Again, we see the strong French commitment to centralization. It is also of interest to note that the teacher salaries were established by the national government, and that the schools were to be run by a committee of teachers who were to meet every ten days (which was once per week, under the new Revolutionary Calendar). Financing was to be the responsibility of the Department. The commitment to central financing soon weakened, with the responsibility for teacher salaries soon delegated to the town governments to be paid by the parents. [10] The requirement that instruction be in French may at first seem to be rather routine, but it reflects a political problem of the time as well as the use of education to political and nationalistic ends. A common language is one of the most fundamental of nationalistic tools available to a country. In Revolutionary France, however, a great many different languages and dialects were spoken. If France was to become unified under the new Revolutionary Government, then surely one measure of that unity would be a common language. And if there is to be a common language, then it must fall to the schools to instruct all citizens in that language. Indeed, during the early years of the Revolution, non-French was seen as counterrevolutionary and, therefore, dangerous. [11] This extreme nationalistic attitude toward the French language can still be seen in modern France. The central schools were further strengthened, especially in regard to competition with some religious based private schools, by a provision that required almost anyone who desired a position with the government to present evidence that he had attended "one of the Republic's schools." [12] This gave them an enormous competitive advantage over any private efforts. In spite of all that has been recounted here, by the end of the 18th century the position of public education in France, especially that of the central schools, was weaker than one might have expected. Numerous problems existed, including a shortage of qualified teachers and, more importantly, a shortage of qualified students. The schools in Paris and several other major population centers did fairly well, but throughout the country the story was not always as positive. One problem had to do with the organization and curriculum of the schools. There was really no continuity in the curriculum, and very little in the way of required courses. Thus, a "graduate" from a central school might or might not have met some reasonable standards, either academic or curricular. In short, the system of central schools had not lived up to its promise. [13] It remained for one of the great figures of history to bring some order to the system. Napoleon During much of the middle and late period of the French Revolution (1796-1799), the young General Bonaparte had been winning battles and gaining great popularity among the French people. This was largely due to his image as a savior of the Revolution, an image which remains today. In 1799, he participated in a coup d'état which established a three person consulate with him as first consul. Under the newly established system of government, most of the power rested with Napoleon. On December 2, 1804, First Consul Bonaparte became Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and his control over the government became virtually complete. While Napoleon is often seen in terms of his military image, he was also one of history's great administrators. Napoleon set out to make France the greatest nation of Europe. To do this, he proposed many changes and projects, ranging from a complete re-do of the nation's legal system, including the establishment of the civil Code Napoléon, to a massive road construction project. Education was high on Napoleon's list of priorities, which were in large part those of the middle class. Napoleon believed in a system of merit, and for such a system to be effective there must be some form of widespread education, especially at the secondary level. Besides, the state of French education was not all that it could have been when Napoleon began to rule. This fact was made abundantly clear by the results of a survey of all prefects in the nation conducted in March of 1801, under the direction of Minister for Home Affairs Chaptal. Numerous complaints were heard regarding the lack of schools in many areas, lack of professionalism among teachers, lack of discipline and attendance by the students and, in a few areas, the lack of religious education. [14] The issues of religious and primary education were partially resolved by the Concordat between the Pope and Napoleon, which allowed some of the religious elementary schools to be reestablished. These schools had provided most of the education available to girls, a fact that conveniently reflected Napoleon's attitudes toward female education. Napoleon felt that education was important for girls, but did not generally expect them to have the same sort of education given to boys. In his Note Sur L'Établissement D'Écouen, [15] Napoleon suggests that religion and assorted domestic skills necessary for the attraction of husbands should be stressed at this girls' school. While Napoleon's comments in this note regarding women are hardly designed to win him favor in the modern world, he at least does call for their learning numbers, writing, and the principles of their language, as well as history, geography, physics and botany. Napoleon has been criticized for his attitude toward women and their education, but he was simply a reflection of the historical trend in France. Indeed, women received the right to vote in France almost a quarter century after they did in America. Secondary education was extremely important to Napoleon. In a letter to Home Affairs Minister Chaptal on June 11, 1801, Napoleon outlined in some detail his opinions on the structure of education for boys. He divided such education into two parts: under age twelve and over age twelve. The first four classes [grades] would teach general topics such as reading, writing, history, and the use of arms. The second class would be divided into those boys who were destined for a civil career, and those destined for a career in the military. Civil careers would stress languages, rhetoric and philosophy; military education would stress mathematics, physics, chemistry, and military matters. Both civil and military graduates would be guaranteed employment in their chosen career. [16] On May 1, 1802, a decree established what was to be a new system of education in France. [17] This new system would be the foundation for the system found in France today. Under the new system, elementary schools (écoles populaires) were to be the responsibility of the local municipalities. Napoleon had relatively little interest in this level of education, and was not firmly committed to the mass education that would result from a state-wide elementary education system. As a result, the religious schools were to share a significant amount of the responsibility for elementary education. Secondary education, however, was the base education for the future leaders of the nation, as well as members of the bureaucracy and the military; hence, Napoleon's greater interest. The state had a strong interest in the curriculum being presented, and control would be easier if they established a system of secondary schools under the direction of a central authority. Many of these secondary schools would be established by private initiative, including clerical, but all such schools were controlled by the state. Covering students roughly from age 10-16, they would provide a level of education designed to provide students for higher levels of education. Indeed, some bonus plans were established for teachers who had large number of students qualifying for advancement. [18] The heart of the new system was the establishment of thirty lycées, which provided educational opportunities beyond the secondary schools and replaced the écoles centrales. Every appeal court district was to have a lycée, and they were to be completely supported, and controlled, by the state. Scholarships were provided, with about one-third going to sons of the military and government, and the rest for the best pupils from the secondary schools. [19] The lycées had a six year term of study, building on the work of the secondary schools. The curriculum included languages, modern literature, science, and all other studies necessary for a "liberal" education. Each lycée was to have at least eight teachers, as well as three masters (a headmaster, an academic dean, and a bursar). In a reflection of modern debate on the subject, the government provided a fixed salary for teachers, but also provided bonuses for successful teachers. They were also provided a pension. Teachers were, incidentally, chosen by Napoleon from a list of recommendations provided by inspectors and the Institute. The inspectors were given over-all responsibility for inspecting the schools on a regular basis. It is clear that the new system of education introduced by Napoleon had more than one purpose. It was intended, of course, to provide an educated elite that could help run the country and the military. It was also designed to provide for an increased middle class; a middle class that would be successful and hence non-revolutionary. Moreover, there was a great emphasis on patriotism in the schools; an emphasis that was to increase during the years of the empire. This is not surprising, of course, as even in modern America we are expected to teach a certain amount of patriotism in our classes. When Napoleon became Emperor in December of 1804, he became even more interested in centralized control of the educational system. He raised the issue of education in at least one meeting of the Council of State. At such a meeting in 1807 he declared: Of all our institutions public education is the most important. Everything depends on it, the present and the future. It is essential that the morals and political ideas of the generation which is now growing up should no longer be dependent upon the news of the day or the circumstances of the moment. Above all we must secure unity: we must be able to cast a whole generation in the same mould. [20] Napoleon was particularly concerned with the independence of the secondary schools. Moreover, there were problems with the lycées as well. Financial constraints had limited the number that had actually opened, and competition with the private schools had limited enrollment. Napoleon's solution was to be the ultimate in centralized control of the French educational system. He established the Imperial University in 1808. The law creating this "university" stated, in part ...the Imperial University, a body charged exclusively with instruction and public education throughout the Empire... No school, no educational institution of any kind whatsoever, shall be permitted to be established outside the Imperial University, without the authorization of its chief. No one may open a school or teach publicly without being a member of the Imperial University and a graduate of one of its faculties. [21] The Imperial University was actually something of a compromise with those who wanted to eliminate private education altogether. This allowed private schools to exist, but put them under strict public control and demanded various taxes from them, designed to reduce the educational outlay of the central government. The quality of instruction in private schools was controlled, however, in part by a requirement that teachers must have degrees. Later revisions to the law reduced the number and enrollment of the private schools, especially those of the Catholic church. Perhaps the most important element in the development of the Imperial University was that for the first time the state took responsibility, and control, of the elementary education of its citizens. [22] Teachers were placed under stricter controls, including dress, discipline, and salary. Napoleon had long been concerned about the teaching profession. He recognized the central importance of teachers to the educational system. He had at times suggested that the teaching profession should take on some of the characteristics of an order, or corporation, with very specific expectations, privileges, and rewards. He had, for example, in a Note Sur Les Lycées [23] of February 14, 1805, suggested that beginning teachers might be forbidden from marriage. On the other hand, by the end of his career a teacher should see himself in the highest ranks of state officials, having been placed under the protection of the Emperor himself. As stated earlier, the purpose of education went beyond the need for an educated elite. As is the case with schools today, patriotism and loyalty to the state were a major part of the purpose of educational institutions. We might be somewhat reluctant, however, to be as bold about it as was the law establishing the Imperial University: All schools of the Imperial University will take as the basis of their instruction (i) the teaching of the Catholic religion, (ii) fidelity to the Emperor, to the imperial monarchy which is entrusted with the happiness of the people, and to the Napoleonic dynasty which ensures the unity of France and all the liberal ideas proclaimed in the constitution, (iii) obedience to the regulations of the teaching body, the object of which is to secure uniformity of instruction and to train for the State citizens who are attached to their religion, their prince, their country and their family. [24] The system of education under the Imperial University was as follows. First was elementary education. This was, as before, the lowest priority of Napoleon. Following that was the secondary education of the middle class. As before, Napoleon placed the greatest emphasis on this level of education. The lycées were, as before, mainly boarding schools supported by the state and providing a six year course heavy on the Classics and mathematics. Along with them were the collèges which were municipal or communal secondary schools, a bit lower than the lycées. These schools stressed French, Latin, geography, history and mathematics. There were also some independent schools known as instituts, which were more or less the equivalent of the collèges. This system was not, of course, uniquely Napoleonic; it mirrored ideas of earlier systems as well as other systems in Europe. It is also no surprise to learn that Napoleon stressed various military aspects in his schools, including uniforms, formations, music, and discipline. Aftermath The real value of an institution may be in its ability to survive the ravages of time. On this basis, one must evaluate the Napoleonic educational system in mostly favorable terms. After the downfall of Napoleon, it might have been expected that his system would be abolished, or greatly modified. There has certainly been some turmoil in French education over the years, especially as regards the role of the Catholic Church. During the Third Republic, the separation of church and state was made complete, and the teaching of religion was no longer part of the public school curriculum. Thus, the curriculum of Napoleon was replaced by that of the Revolution. The Imperial University has, of course, disappeared, but centralized control lives on in the Minister of Public Instruction. The lycée continues and, indeed, plays an even more important role. It is a virtually self-contained unit, and graduation from a lycée is adequate for many careers (unlike, say, the American high school.) As in Napoleonic times, French education is much more stratified and elitist in nature than in the American system; success and progression are based on examination results rather than on the belief in universal education.

James I

(1603-1625) Stuart monarch who ignored constitutional principles and asserted the divine right of kings.In the True Law, he sets out the divine right of kings, explaining that kings are higher beings than other men for Biblical reasons, though "the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon"After the Gunpowder Plot, James sanctioned harsh measures to control English Catholics. In May 1606, Parliament passed the Popish Recusants Act, which could require any citizen to take an Oath of Allegiance denying the Pope's authority over the king.[124] James was conciliatory towards Catholics who took the Oath of Allegiance,[125] and tolerated crypto-Catholicism even at court.[i] Henry Howard, for example, was a crypto-Catholic, received back into the Catholic Church in his final months.[126] On ascending the English throne, James suspected that he might need the support of Catholics in England, so he assured the Earl of Northumberland, a prominent sympathiser of the old religion, that he would not persecute "any that will be quiet and give but an outward obedience to the law".[127]

The Glorious Revolution and its Aftermath

A coup organized by James parliamentary opponents called whigs. In the Glorious Revolution of November 1688[1] James II and VII, king of England, Scotland and Ireland was deposed and replaced by his daughter Mary II and her husband, stadtholder William III of Orange, the de facto ruler of the Dutch Republic Despite his Catholicism, James became king in February 1685 with widespread support as many feared his exclusion would lead to a repetition of the 1638-1651 Wars of the Three Kingdoms.[5] Over the next three years, he alienated his supporters by suspending the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1685 and ruling by personal decree.[6] Despite this, it was considered a short-term issue, as James was 52, and since his second marriage was childless after 11 years, the heir presumptive was his Protestant daughter Mary. While the Revolution itself was quick and relatively bloodless, pro-Stuart revolts in Scotland and Ireland caused significant casualties.[7] Although Jacobitism persisted into the late 18th century, the Revolution ended a century of political dispute by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the Crown, a principle established in the Bill of Rights 1689.[8] The Toleration Act 1688 granted freedom of worship to nonconformist Protestants, but restrictions on Catholics contained in the 1678 and 1681 English and Scottish Test Acts remained in force until 1828; while religious prohibitions on the monarch's choice of spouse were removed in 2015, those applying to the monarch remain.

Nobles and Serfs

In 1730 the gentry set out to emancipate themselves from the servitude placed upon them by Peter. By 1762 the nobles no longer needed to serve at all unless they wished to do so; simultaneously, the authority of noble proprietors over their serfs was increased. The former became the government's agents for collecting the poll tax; the latter could no longer obtain their freedom by enlisting in the army and could not engage in trade or purchase land without written permission from their masters. To understand the revolutionary nature of the liberation of the nobles from the duty to give military service, one must remember that they had historically obtained their lands and serfs only on condition that they would serve. Now they could keep their lands and serfs with no obligations. Yet the service that had been hated when it was compulsory became fashionable when it was optional. There was really little else for a Russian noble to do except serve the state and to tighten controls over the serfs. In these middle decades of the eighteenth century, successive waves of foreign influence affected the Russian nobility. German influence gave way to French, and with the French language came French literature. French styles of dress were copied by both men and women, and some gentlemen claimed that it would be impossible to fall in love with a woman who did not speak French. Quite literally, nobles and peasants no longer spoke the same language.

Paul I

Paul I (Russian: Па́вел I Петро́вич Pavel I Petrovich; 1 October [O.S. 20 September] 1754 - 23 March [O.S. 11 March] 1801) was Emperor of Russia from 1796 until his assassination. Officially, he was the only son of Peter III and Catherine the Great, although Catherine hinted that he was fathered by her lover Sergei Saltykov.[1][2] Paul remained overshadowed by his mother for most of his life. He adopted the laws of succession to the Russian throne—rules that lasted until the end of the Romanov dynasty and of the Russian Empire. He also intervened in the French Revolutionary Wars and, toward the end of his reign, added Kartli and Kakheti in Eastern Georgia into the empire, which was confirmed by his son and successor Alexander I. He was de facto Grand Master of the Order of Hospitallers from 1799 to 1801 and ordered the construction of a number of Maltese thrones.[3] Paul's pro-German sentiments and unpredictable behavior made him unpopular among Russian nobility, and he was secretly assassinated by his own officers.

The Thermidorian Reaction and the Directory

Thermidorian Reaction, in the French Revolution, the parliamentary revolt initiated on 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794), which resulted in the fall of Maximilien Robespierre and the collapse of revolutionary fervour and the Reign of Terror in France. By June 1794 France had become fully weary of the mounting executions (1,300 in June alone), and Paris was alive with rumours of plots against Robespierre, member of the ruling Committee of Public Safety and leading advocate of the Terror. On 8 Thermidor (July 26) he gave a speech full of appeals and threats. The next day, the deputies in the National Convention shouted him down and decreed his arrest. He was arrested at the Hôtel de Ville, along with his brother Augustin, François Hanriot, Georges Couthon, and Louis de Saint-Just. The same guillotine that on 9 Thermidor executed 45 anti-Robespierrists executed, in the following three days, 104 Robespierrists, inaugurating a brief "White Terror" against Jacobins throughout France. FRENCH REVOLUTION EVENTS keyboard_arrow_left Tennis Court Oath June 20, 1789 Civil Constitution of the Clergy July 12, 1790 French Revolutionary wars April 1792 - c. 1801 September Massacres September 2, 1792 - September 6, 1792 Wars of the Vendée February 1793 - July 1796 Reign of Terror September 5, 1793 - July 27, 1794 Thermidorian Reaction July 27, 1794 Coup of 18 Fructidor September 4, 1797 Coup of 18-19 Brumaire November 9, 1799 - November 10, 1799 keyboard_arrow_right 1 2 3 The coup was primarily a reassertion of the rights of the National Convention against the Committee of Public Safety and of the nation against the Paris Commune. It was followed by the disarming of the committee, the emptying of the prisons, and the purging of Jacobin clubs. Social and political life became freer, more extravagant, and more personally corrupt. There was a splurge of fashion and a conspicuous consumption of bourgeois wealth, while the poor suffered from harsh economic conditions.

Bonaparte's Rise

Upon graduating from the prestigious École Militaire (military academy) in Paris in September 1785, Bonaparte was commissioned as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment. He spent the early years of the Revolution in Corsica, fighting in a complex three-way struggle among royalists, revolutionaries, and Corsican nationalists. He supported the republican Jacobin movement and was promoted to captain in 1792, despite exceeding his leave of absence and leading a riot against a French army in Corsica. Bonaparte was promoted to brigadier general at the age of 24. Catching the attention of the Committee of Public Safety, he was put in charge of the artillery of France's Army of Italy. Following the fall of Robespierre and the Thermidorian Reaction in July 1794, Napoleon, although closely associated with Robespierre, was released from the arrest within two weeks and asked to draw up plans to attack Italian positions in the context of France's war with Austria. In October 1795, royalists in Paris declared a rebellion against the National Convention. Under the leadership of Napoleon, the attackers were repelled on October 5, 1795 (13 Vendémiaire). 1,400 royalists died and the rest fled. The defeat of the royalist insurrection earned Bonaparte sudden fame, wealth, and the patronage of the new government, the Directory. During the French Revolutionary Wars, Napoleon was successful in a daring invasion of Italy although he failed to seize Egypt and thereby undermine Britain's access to its trade interests in India. After the victories in the Italian campaign and despite the defeats in the Egyptian campaign, Napoleon was welcomed in France as a hero. Napoleon drew together an alliance with a number of prominent political figures and they overthrew the Directory by a coup d'état on November 9, 1799 (Coup of 18th Brumaire). His power was confirmed by the new Constitution of 1799, which preserved the appearance of a republic but in reality established a dictatorship.

Alexander I

Alexander I (Russian: Алекса́ндр I Па́влович, tr. Aleksándr I Pávlovich, IPA: [ɐlʲɪkˈsandr ˈpavɫəvʲɪt͡ɕ]; 23 December [O.S. 12 December] 1777 - 1 December [O.S. 19 November] 1825[a][2]) was Emperor of Russia from 1801, the first King of Congress Poland from 1815, and the Grand Duke of Finland from 1809 to his death. He was the eldest son of Emperor Paul I and Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg. The son of Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, later Paul I, Alexander succeeded to the throne after his father was murdered. He ruled Russia during the chaotic period of the Napoleonic Wars. As prince and during the early years of his reign, Alexander often used liberal rhetoric, but continued Russia's absolutist policies in practice. In the first years of his reign, he initiated some minor social reforms and (in 1803-04) major liberal educational reforms, such as building more universities. Alexander appointed Mikhail Speransky, the son of a village priest, as one of his closest advisors. The Collegia were abolished and replaced by the State Council, which was created to improve legislation. Plans were also made to set up a parliament and sign a constitution. In foreign policy, he changed Russia's position towards France four times between 1804 and 1812 among neutrality, opposition, and alliance. In 1805 he joined Britain in the War of the Third Coalition against Napoleon, but after suffering massive defeats at the battles of Austerlitz and Friedland, he switched sides and formed an alliance with Napoleon by the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) and joined Napoleon's Continental System. He fought a small-scale naval war against Britain between 1807 and 1812 as well as a short war against Sweden (1808-09) after Sweden's refusal to join the Continental System. Alexander and Napoleon hardly agreed, especially regarding Poland, and the alliance collapsed by 1810. Alexander's greatest triumph came in 1812 when Napoleon's invasion of Russia proved to be a catastrophic disaster for the French. As part of the winning coalition against Napoleon, he gained territory in Finland and Poland. He formed the Holy Alliance to suppress revolutionary movements in Europe which he saw as immoral threats to legitimate Christian monarchs. He also helped Austria's Klemens von Metternich in suppressing all national and liberal movements. During the second half of his reign, Alexander became increasingly arbitrary, reactionary, and fearful of plots against him; as a result he ended many of the reforms he made earlier. He purged schools of foreign teachers, as education became more religiously driven as well as politically conservative.[3] Speransky was replaced as advisor with the strict artillery inspector Aleksey Arakcheyev, who oversaw the creation of military settlements. Alexander died of typhus in December 1825 while on a trip to southern Russia. He left no legitimate children, as his two daughters died in childhood. Neither of his brothers wanted to become emperor. After a period of great confusion (that presaged the failed Decembrist revolt of liberal army officers in the weeks after his death), he was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I.