The New Penguin History of the World (107 page)

Sometimes this won them admiration from would-be reformers. One great questioner of the
status quo
, Voltaire, was greatly struck by the fact that even in the early eighteenth century a great merchant could be as esteemed and respected in England as was a nobleman. He may have slightly exaggerated and he certainly blurred some important nuances, yet it is remarkable – and a part of the story of the rise of Great Britain to world power – that the political class which governed eighteenth-century England was a landed class and fiercely reflected landed values, yet constantly took care to defend the commercial interests of the country and accepted the leadership and guidance in this of the collective wisdom of the City of London. Though people went on talking of a political division between the ‘moneyed’ and the ‘landed’ interest, and though politics long remained a matter of disputed places and conflicting traditions within the landed class, interests which in other countries would have conflicted with these nevertheless prospered and were not alienated. The explanations must be complex. Some, like the commercialization of British agriculture, go far back into the history of the previous century; some, such as the growth of facilities for private investment in the government and commercial world, were much more recent.

The coincidence of the advanced social evolution of the Netherlands and Great Britain with their economic, and especially their commercial, success is striking. This was once largely attributed to their religion: as a result of a great upheaval within Christendom both had ceased to be dominated by the Catholic Church. Anti-clericals in the eighteenth century and sociologists in the twentieth sought to explore and exploit this coincidence; Protestantism, it was said, provided an ethic for capitalism. This no longer seems plausible. There were too many Catholic capitalists, for
one thing, and they were often successful. France and Spain were still important trading countries in the eighteenth century and the first seems to have enjoyed something like the same rates of growth as Great Britain, though she was later to fall behind. They were both countries with Atlantic access, and so were among those which had tended to show economic growth ever since the sixteenth century. Yet this is not an explanation which goes very far, either. Scotland – northern, Protestant and Atlantic – long remained backward, poor and feudal. There was more to the differences separating Mediterranean and eastern Europe from the north and west than simple geographical position, and more than one factor to the explanation of differing rates of modernization. The progress of English and Dutch agriculture, for example, may owe more to the relative scarcity of land in each country than to anything else.

The European East remained backward. Its social and economic structure remained fundamentally unchanged until the nineteenth century. Deep-rooted explanations have been offered – that, for example, a shorter growing season and less rich soils than were to be found further west gave it from the start a poorer return on seed, and therefore handicapped it economically in the crucial early stages of agricultural growth. It had man-made handicaps, too. Settlement there had long been open to disturbance by Central Asian nomads, while on its southern flank lay the Balkans and the frontier with Turkey, for many centuries a zone of warfare, raiding and banditry. In some areas (Hungary, for example) the effects of Turkish rule had been so bad as to depopulate the country. When it was reacquired for Europe, care was taken to tie the peasantry to the land. In the Russia which emerged from Muscovy in this period, too, the serf population grew larger as a proportion of the whole. Harsher law put state power behind the masters’ control of the peasants. In other eastern countries (Prussia was one), the powers of landlords over tenants were strengthened. This was more than just a kingly indulgence of aristocracies which might, if not placated, turn against royal authority. It was also a device for economic development. Not for the first time, nor the last, economic progress went with social injustice; serfdom was a way of making available one of the resources needed if land was to be made productive, just as forced labour was in many other countries at many other times.

One result, which is still in some degree visible, was a Europe divided roughly along the Elbe. To the west lay countries evolving slowly by 1800 towards more open social forms. To the east lay authoritarian governments presiding over agrarian societies where a minority of landholders enjoyed great powers over a largely tied peasantry. In this area towns did not often prosper as they had done for centuries in the West. They tended to be
overtaxed islands in a rural sea, unable to attract from the countryside the labour they needed because of the dead hand of serfdom. Over great tracts of Poland and Russia even a money economy barely existed. Much of later European history was implicit in this difference between east and west.

It was discernible in informal institutions, too, in the way, for example, in which women were treated, though here another division could be drawn, that between Mediterranean Europe and the north, which was in due course extended to run between Latin and North America. Formally and legally, little changed anywhere in these centuries; the legal status of women remained what it had been and this was only to be questioned right at the end of this period. Nevertheless, the real independence of women and, in particular, of upper-class women, does seem to have been extended in the more advanced countries. Even in the fifteenth century it had been remarked by foreigners that Englishwomen enjoyed unusual freedom. This lead does not seem to have diminished, but in the eighteenth century there are signs that in France, at least, a well-born woman could enjoy considerable real independence.

This was in part because the eighteenth century brought the appearance of a new sort of upper-class life, one which had room for other social gatherings than those of a royal court, and one increasingly independent of religious and family ritual. At the end of the seventeenth century we hear of men in London meeting in the coffee-houses from which the first clubs were to spring. Soon there appears the
salon
, the social gathering of friends and acquaintances in a lady’s drawing-room, which was especially the creation of the French; some eighteenth-century salons were important intellectual centres and show that it had become proper and even fashionable for a woman to show an interest in things of the mind other than religion. When Mme de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, was painted, she chose to have included in the picture a book – Montesquieu’s sociological treatise,
De l’esprit des lois
. But even when women did not aspire to blue stockings, the salon and the appearance of a society independent of the court presented them with a real, if limited, escape from the confinement of the family, which, together with religious and professional gatherings, had until then been virtually the only structures within which even men might seek social variety and diversion.

By the end of the eighteenth century we have arrived at the age of the female artist and novelist and of acceptance of the fact that spinsterhood need not mean retirement to a cloister. Where such changes came from is not easy to see. In the early years of the century the English
Spectator
already thought it worthwhile to address itself to women readers as well as to men, which suggests that we should look a fair way back. Perhaps
it helped that the eighteenth century produced such conspicuous examples of women of great political influence – an English queen and four empresses (one Austrian and three Russian) all ruled in their own right, often with success. But it is not possible to say so with confidence for the prehistory of female emancipation still largely awaits study.

Finally, none of this touched the life of the overwhelming majority in even the most advanced societies of early modern Europe. There had not yet come into being the mass industrial jobs, which would provide the first great force to prise apart the unquestioned certainties of traditional life for most men and women alike. Though they may have weighed most heavily in the primitive villages of Poland or in a southern Spain where Moorish influences had intensified the subordination and seclusion of women, those certainties were everywhere still dominant in 1800.

2
Authority and Its Challengers

In 1800 many Europeans still held ideas about social and political organization, which would have been comprehensible and appropriate four hundred years earlier. The ‘Middle Ages’ no more came to a sudden end in this respect than in many others. Ideas about society and government which may reasonably be described as ‘medieval’ survived as effective forces over a wide area and during the centuries more and more social facts had been fitted into them. Broadly speaking, what has been called a ‘corporate’ organization of society – the grouping of men in bodies with legal privileges which protected their members and defined their status – was still the rule in eighteenth-century continental Europe. Over much of its central and eastern zones, as we have noted, serfdom had grown more rigid and more widespread. Many continuities in political institutions were obvious. The Holy Roman Empire still existed in 1800 as it had done in 1500; so did the temporal power of the pope. A descendant of the Capetians was still king of France (though he no longer came from the same branch of the family as in 1500 and, indeed, was in exile). Even in England, and as late as 1820, a king’s champion rode in full armour into Westminster Hall at the coronation banquet of King George IV, to uphold that monarch’s title against all comers. In most countries it was still taken for granted that the State was a confessional entity, that religion and society were intertwined and that the authority of the Church was established by law. Although such ideas had been much challenged and in some countries had undergone grievous reverses, in this as in many matters the weight of history was still enormous in 1800 and only ten years earlier it had been even heavier.

When all this is acknowledged, it was nevertheless the general European tendency of the three centuries between 1500 and 1800 to dissolve or at least weaken old social and political bonds characteristic of medieval government. Power and authority had instead tended to flow towards the central concentration provided by the state, and away from ‘feudal’ arrangements of personal dependence. (The very invention of the ‘feudal’ idea as a technical term of law was in fact the work of the seventeenth
century and it suggests the age’s need to pin down something whose reality was ebbing away.) The idea of Christendom, too, though still important in emotional, even subconscious ways, effectively lost any political reality in this period. Papal authority had begun to suffer at the hands of national sentiment in the age of the Schism and that of the Holy Roman emperors had been of small account since the fourteenth century. Nor did any new unifying principle emerge to integrate Europe. The test case was the Ottoman threat. Christian princes exposed to the Muslim onslaught might appeal to their fellow Christians for help, popes might still use the rhetoric of crusade, but the reality, as the Turks well knew, was that Christian states would follow their own interest and ally with the infidel, if necessary. This was the era of
Realpolitik
, of the conscious subordination of principle and honour to intelligent calculation of the interests of the state. It is curious that in an age in which Europeans more and more agreed that greater distinctions of culture separated them (to their credit, they were sure) from other civilizations they paid little attention to institutions (and did nothing to create new ones) which acknowledged their essential unity. Only the occasional visionary advocated the building of something which transcended the state. Perhaps, though, it is just in a new awareness of cultural superiority that the explanation lies. Europe was entering an age of triumphant expansion and did not need shared institutions to tell her so. Instead, the authority of states, and therefore the power of their governments, waxed in these centuries. It is important not to be misled by forms. For all the arguments about who should exercise it, and a mass of political writing which suggested all sorts of limits on it, the general trend was towards acceptance of the idea of legislative sovereignty – that is, Europeans came to feel that, provided the authority of the state was in the right hands, there should be no restriction upon its power to make laws.

Even given the proviso, this was an enormous break with the thinking of the past. To a medieval European the idea that there might not be rights and rules above human interference, legal immunities and chartered freedoms inaccessible to change by subsequent law-makers, fundamental laws which would always be respected, or laws of God which could never be contravened by those of men, would have been social and juridical, as well as theological, blasphemy. English lawyers of the seventeenth century floundered about in disagreement over what the fundamental laws of the land might be, but all thought some must exist. A century later the leading legal minds of France were doing just the same. Nevertheless, in the end there emerged in both countries (as, to a greater or lesser degree, in most others) the acceptance of the idea that a sovereign, legally unrestrained law-making power was the characteristic mark of the state. Yet this took a
long time. For most of the history of early modern Europe the emergence of the modern sovereign state was obscured by the fact that the most widely prevalent form of government was monarchy. Struggles about the powers of rulers make up much of European history in these centuries and sometimes it is hard to see exactly what is at stake. The claims of princely rulers, after all, could be challenged on two quite distinct grounds: there was resistance based on the principle that it would be wrong for any government to have powers such as some monarchs claimed (and this might be termed the medieval or conservative defence of freedom) and there was resistance based on the principle that such powers could properly exist, but were being gathered into the wrong hands (and this can be called the modern or liberal defence of freedom). In practice, the two claims are often inextricably confused, but the confusion is itself a significant indicator of changing ideas.