The Super Summary of World History (36 page)

The new scientific and practical advances were astounding: Peter Heinlein invented the first pocket watch in 1500; in 1515 the first rifles were developed;
Isaac
Newton
described the laws of gravity in 1665 and in his publication of
Principia
Mathematica
(
1687) united gravity, inertia, and centrifugal force; William Harvey discovered how blood circulated in the human body by 1628; Fermat put forth the statistical theory of probability in 1659; John Kay invented the flying shuttle loom in 1733; and so on. After laying the foundations of science, more discovery and invention followed until a tidal wave of progress swept the Western World.

The
Arts—Painting

During this period, painting began to advance as never before.
Michelangel
o (1475 to 1654),
Titian,
Durer,
Raphael,
Jan
van
Eyck,
El
Greco,
Velasquez,
Rubens,
Rembrandt
(1606 to 1669),
Holbein,
and many others brought painting away from the stiff and unrealistic styles of the Middle Ages to the vibrant, realistic, and almost-animated paintings of 1400 to 1600. The artists were using new colors based on oil paints invented in 1400, and painting on new material (canvas) with new techniques founded on perspective drawing (perspective discovered about 1434) that brought the paintings alive. There was still an enormous amount of symbolism, but the depiction of the world became very real. Oils allowed new techniques of paint application including the layering of color where very thin coats of multiple colors were laid on over a long period. This allowed light to enter through the layers of thin paint and then bounce back to the viewer’s eye, imparting a glow to the paintings that made the colors iridescent. Nothing like this had ever been seen before.

Speed
of
Change

Due to the printing press new ideas now spread with astonishing speed and clarity. Ideas spread by word of mouth can warp quickly, but once written down the idea remains the same no matter how many people read the book or pamphlet. This foretells the pace of change in the modern world. Today, 2010, the pace of change is so fast that most of it goes unreported and almost unnoticed. A publication called
Science
News
comes out once
per
week
filled with summaries of new discoveries which most people will never hear of directly. The flow of information has been increasing since 1455, and it is now so great (with the Internet, TV, radio, computers, newspapers, etc.) it is impossible to sort through it all. In ancient Persia, the fastest way to get information around was by pony express (not their name for it). Until the telegraph in 1837, pony express was the quickest way possible to transmit detailed information. Now, the push of a button electronically transports a hundred pages of text to Japan from America in seconds. Hence, from 1837 to 2010, the speed of information transfer has increased from a running horse to the speed of light. From before 5000 BC to 1837, it had not increased at all.

The
French
Revolution 1789
to
1799

The French Revolution is so significant it is difficult to exaggerate its importance. Yet, it is a very complex revolt changing France and Europe a lot, but then changing them very little. The Revolution started in 1789 when starving people in Paris, France, decided to do something about it. Riots and confrontations shook the government, escalating until the king and queen were captured and then beheaded by the unleashed forces of change. Shortly thereafter, suspicious radicals commenced beheading anyone they could lay their hands on calling them enemies of the Revolution, and those beheaded included several prominent early leaders of the rebellion. During the crisis, a strong man arose and captured the Revolution, eventually naming himself emperor of France in 1804. Now everyone is back where they started minus thousands of dead and a swarm of wars stemming from the Revolution. It did not really end until
1815
, after the strong man was defeated at
Waterloo
and the Congress of Vienna convened to stop the wars and achieve a political balance in Europe. The strong man was
Napoleon
, and his ideas on war and government came to dominate the age. The French Revolution set off numerous new political, social, and cultural ideas, but in the final event the “old order” prevailed, suppressing many of the innovative ideas. Still, such ideas did not die, and a permanent structural change took place in the culture and the societies of Europe touched by this inferno.

It all started in the late seventeen hundreds when France was a prosperous state, and one of the most powerful nations in the world.
Louis
XIV
(1661 to 1715), the Sun King, pushed the boundaries of France to the Rhine River, and the luxury of his court was unmatched in Europe. However, novel ideas were starting to challenge monarchies. The
Enlightenment
was taking hold of the intellectual minds in Europe, and they questioned everything.
Reason
was their god, and they knew no other. To these intellectuals, “reason” consisted of applying empirical methods to all matters (some said apply the “methods of Newton,” but that was the scientific method), and under this analysis the “divine right of kings” was suspect.
[108]

The expansion of France under Louis XIV, plus his extravagant lifestyle, drained the state treasury. As time went on, French kings refused to reduce their lifestyles. The French court and nobility were well-known for beauty and pageantry—all very expensive. Unfortunately, the
tax
situation
was mediocre due to several exclusions from the tax rolls, the Catholic Church being the largest, followed by exclusions for the nobility. As
Louis
XVI
ascended to kingship, the financial situation was atrocious. Making a bad situation worse, the 1780s had seen a series of meager harvests, and the poor were doing without food. Additional tax money is hard to find amongst the starving. Casting about for a way to get taxes from Church holdings (which were extensive in both land and buildings
[109]
) and the wealthy nobility, Louis XVI decided to call together the
Estates-General
in May of 1789 (the same year the USA adopted its Constitution). The Estates-General was a gathering of the three classes of society in a national assembly, and in theory it possessed the power to impose taxes where the king could not. Unfortunately, for Louis XVI and his queen
Marie
Antoinette
he had called together a group of men who would lop their heads off.

After the Estates-General assembled an impasse soon arose. The First and Second Estates were comprised of the clergy and the nobility, and they refused to allow any kind of tax change, especially in exemptions, because their taxes would increase from zero to something, and that something might be a lot. The clergy also feared the seizure of Church land. The Third Estate was comprised of everyone not in the First and Second estates and represented ninety plus percent of the population. The Third Estate stormed out of
[110]
the Estates-General in an unhappy mood, and formed the
National
Assembly
. Shortly thereafter unrest increased and a Paris mob stormed an old jail called the
Bastille
on
July
14,
1789
, and released its prisoners—all six of them. During the storming of the ancient jail the army was mustered to suppress the rioters, but the military refused to fire on the starving public and joined the revolt. That was the end for the monarch of France. This event is often used to mark the start of the Revolution. The National Assembly decided to transform France into a constitutional monarchy. They promptly freed the peasants by abolishing serfdom, confiscated all the lands, buildings and money of the Catholic Church in France, and acted as if King Louis XVI was a criminal. The pope rejected the idea that a government could seize Church property, thereby raising the issue of
authority
. Who owned the land, the French National Assembly or the Church? The fellows with an army easily answered that issue, and the Church lands were lost. The word flew across Europe about the new government in France, the
Declaration
of
the
Rights
of
Man
, and other pronouncements indicating the age of monarchs and popes was over and the age of the people was dawning. Unfortunately, it was a red dawn.

We should pause to note that the French Revolution differed extensively from the American Revolution even though tax policies started the trouble both times. The American Revolution started because England was pushing Americans around, and they objected with gunfire. The settlers wanted Parliament to leave them alone. It was a war of independence from Great Britain more than a revolution. A revolution aims at the ruling government and its desire is to replace that government with another. In America’s case the revolutionaries wanted to keep their local government and get rid of the overseeing government in England. In France, the Revolution was started by bad economic times and starving peasants, then expanded to answer the question “who had the ultimate right to rule?” The people won, and the assembly of the people took over from the king—for awhile. The goal of the uprising was to oust King Louis XVI and replace him with a different kind of government. They did not want a new king, they wanted a new state. And that the French revolutionaries both compelled and received . . . in spades.

Intellectuals across Europe saw the French Revolution as a wake-up call for the monarchs who continued to rule most of Europe, and not benevolently. The peasants everywhere wanted a change, and the French model seemed a good place to start. This alarmed every government in Europe. The radical ideas of the French Revolution might overthrow the conservative governments. As the danger was amplified through increasingly radical words and actions from Paris, the governments of Europe began preparations for the coming storms. The popularity of the French Revolution with the peasants and intellectuals of many nations, and growing threats against the Revolution from neighboring realms, triggered the French decision to export the Revolution. This in turn led to the pitiless wars of the 1800s often called the
Napoleonic
Wars
.

In Paris, the National Assembly beheaded the king and his family
[111]
after an escape attempt. It was probably a sad sight watching the royal family, surrounded by cheering crowds and dressed in peasants’ clothes, put to death because they were of royal blood. There was no other crime except their status. That was enough for the Revolution and the
Committee
of
Public
Safety
as they began killing anyone of royal blood or royal connection. With France fighting to maintain its national sovereignty, radical elements of the Revolution gained more power, soon beginning the
Reign
of
Terror
(1793 to 1794) which took the lives of several extremist leaders of the Revolution. At the height of the terror,
George
Danton
and
Maximilien
Robespierre
led the Committee of Public Safety, supervising a killing machine sweeping through France murdering over 18,000 in Paris alone. Both these men’s heads would roll by the very method, the guillotine, they had used to slay so many others. The extremist journalist and publisher
Jean
Paul
Marat
got a killing knife stuck in him by the counter-revolutionary
Charlotte
Corday
on July 13, 1793, leading to increasingly harsh measures by the Committee. Marat was demanding the execution of nearly everyone, and the publisher could rouse the mobs of Paris to zealous action at his whim. Charlotte said she killed one man to save one hundred thousand, and was much later viewed as a hero. Scorned at the time, Charlotte was executed four days after she stabbed Marat. In Paris the government devolved into chaos, while outside Paris European states invaded France trying to bring the Revolution to a halt.

War now seemed to be the only way to protect and spread the Revolution. The National Assembly began drafting citizens of the French Republic (the Revolution’s new name)
in
mass
to fight for the “new” nation. An army made up of
large
numbers
of
draftees,
rather than small numbers of professional soldiers, was an original concept in the Europe of 1800. Once this large army took the field smaller opposing armies endured defeat after defeat. Under Napoleon Bonaparte with his innovative ideas, the combination of massed armies and inspired leadership proved almost unstoppable.

Napoleon
Bonaparte
was a low ranking artillery officer in the French Army prior to 1789. Born in Corsica, a French island off the Mediterranean coast, his chances in the old aristocratic French army were nil, but revolutionary France opened the door for the rough but able Corsican. Proving himself on the battlefield, he quickly achieved the rank of general and soon held sway over all the armies of France. By 1799, he established a military dictatorship over France and its (his) conquests. The dictatorship was cleverly masquerading as a continuation of the Revolution and the French Republic. Napoleon had conquered nearly all before him, and he expanded the French Republic (later the French Empire) over the face of Europe.
[112]
On May 18, 1804, while declaring the French Empire,
he
crowned
himself
Emperor
Napoleon
I
. It is important to note that he crowned himself; no priest or government official put the crown on his head. As such, he claimed no right flowing from god, the church, or anybody else (such as the people of France). By crowning himself he was showing that his person alone was the cause for his becoming emperor. This is very much in line with the Age of Reason. Once more, as in Rome, we go from a Republic to an Empire through the actions of a great general—only very much faster.