Europe ...

A History
by
F.J. Dennett
Contents:
Scan / Edit Notes
List Of Maps
Preface
Introduction
Book One - Foundations
1. Greece
2. Rome
3. Christianity
4. The Roman Empire
Book Two - The Dark Age
5. The Breaking of the Empire
6. Justinian
7. Monks and Popes
8. Islam
9. Charlemagne
10. Ordeal by Battle
Book Three - The Age Of Christendom
11. Recovery in the West
12. The Founding of Christendom
13. Christendom
14. Christendom in Action
15. The Parts of Christendom
16. A Century of Change
17. The Renaissance
18. Meanwhile
Book Four - The Breaking Of Christendom
19. The Protestant Revolt
20. The Catholic Revival
21. The Religious Wars
Book Five - A Divided Europe
22. The Greatness of France
23. France and England
24. Russia
25. The Kingdom of Prussia
26. The Fall of Poland
Book Six - Europe In Revolution
27. The Enlightenment
28. The Making of the Revolution
29. The National Assembly
30. The First Republic
31. Napoleon and France
32. Napoleon and Europe
33. The Industrial Revolution
34. The Nineteenth Century
35. The Vienna Settlement
36. Revolution in France
37. Revolution in Italy
38. The Austrian Empire
39. Revolution in Germany
40. The Eastern Question
41. Russia
42. The English Century
43. The Rise of Materialism
44. Germany versus France
45. Feet of Clay: Italy, Austria, Russia
Book Seven - The Expansion Of Europe
46. Colonial Empires and Colonial Systems
47. The United States
48. Latin America
49. East and West
50. Europe in Africa
Book Eight - Europe In Convulsions
51. The First World War
52. The Peace Movement
53. The Decline of Liberalism
54. The Doubtful Liberals
55. The Cauldron of Asia
56. Omens and Portents
57. The Second World War
Index (Removed)

Scan / Edit Notes
This is quite a rare book which I doubt ever was published outside of Australia.
It is quite a good work which I am proud to preserve for others. This book
begins with the early Greek civilization and continues right up to the end of the
Second World War.
Versions available and duly posted:
Format: v1.0 (Text)
Format: v1.0 (PDB - open format)
Format: v1.5 (HTML)
Format: v1.5 (Ubook-HTML)
Genera: History (Europe)
Extra's: Pictures Included
Copyright: 1960
Scanned: September 21 2003
Posted to:
alt.binaries.e-book (HTML-PIC-TEXT-PDB Bundle)
alt.binaries.e-book (HTML-UBook)
Note: The U-Book version is viewable on PC and PPC (Pocket PC).
Occasionally a PDF file will be produced in the case of an extremely difficult
book. 1. The Html, Text and Pdb versions are bundled together in one rar file.
(a.b.e) 2. The Ubook version is in zip (html) format (instead of rar). (a.b.e)
Structure: (Folder and Sub Folders)
{Main Folder} - HTML Files

|- {Nav} - Navigation Files
|- {PDB}
|- {Pic} - Graphic files
|- {Text} - Text File
-Salmun

List Of Maps

Europe showing rivers and highlands
The Roman Empire in the 2nd Century
Europe in 526 A.D.
Charlemagne's Europe
Europe about 1200
Advance of the Turks
Early Voyages
Europe in 1550
Europe in 1718
North America: 1756
The Growth of Russia
The Growth of Prussia
Partitions of Poland
Europe in 1789
Napoleon's Europe
Europe: 1815
Italy: 1815-1849
Germany in the 19th Century
Races in the Balkans
The Ottoman Empire: 1856 and 1878
British Empire: 1914
Growth of the U.S.A.
Asia in 1910
The Partition of Africa
Europe in 1914
Central Europe: 1920-1938
Frontier of Hitler's Reich: 1939
Russian Occupied Territory: 1945


Preface

It is almost an axiom among teachers that no textbook is quite satisfactory; and
a corollary of this is that every teacher would like to write a textbook of his
own. Originally, the present work was just that: a private textbook, one
teacher's idea of how the history of Europe ought to be presented, to students
old enough to grasp what history is and what Europe is. Two main facts
determined the form of the presentation. The first is that the thing we call
"Europe" is one thing, and that its story is one story, so that no section of that
story can be rightly understood without some knowledge of the whole.
Whatever "period" a student may be concentrating on, he should have at hand,
at least for general reading, a clear and brief account of Europe's history from
the beginning; and the author's first object has been to provide this.
On the other hand, there is also the fact that, in modern times, European
history has outgrown Europe and has become world history. The present state
of the world is due above all to European influence: to what has happened in
Europe, to what Europeans have done, or have failed to do, during the last
couple of centuries. Therefore the book lays heavy stress on these centuries:
more than half of it is concerned with the years since 1789. This foreshortening
is not, historically speaking, an admirable or a desirable thing; but it has
seemed necessary (in such an introductory study as this, written for students of
the present day) to make as clear as possible what the impact of Europe on the
world has been, and is. Anyone who realizes that impact will surely wish to go
further, to study in greater detail what this Europe is and how it has come to
be; but that is beyond the scope of a mere introduction. All I have wished to do
is to give an outline-sketch of Europe, and of Europe's influence on other
continents and societies.
There is nothing original in the sketch except the method of presentation.
Were all the borrowings to be listed, the list would be as long as the book itself.
It is simplest to say that everything in the book has been borrowed; and the
author cannot acknowledge his indebtedness, because he has nothing but
debts. Still, a teacher's chief concern is not to be original, but to tell the truth;
and the only claim I make is to have told the truth, as far as truth can be told in
such a general account as this. Historical truth can never be plain and simple,
because history is about men, and men are the most complex beings we know;
and therefore no simplified outline of history can ever be quite satisfactory; but
one can at least grant Othello's plea, to "nothing extenuate, nor aught set down
in malice"; and this I have tried to do.
In the present state of history "courses", it is too much to expect that the book
will exactly fit the requirements of any curriculum; but to any teachers who
may wish to use it precisely as a textbook, the following remarks may be
helpful. It is conceived ideally as the basis of a two-year course, the first year
ending about chapter 26. Each chapter has been written round a particular
topic, and provides the material for about one week's work. Where it proved
impossible to compress a topic into this space, a double-length chapter was
written, containing matter to occupy a fortnight - chapter 21, on the Religious
Wars, is an example. Experience has shown that the work can be covered in
this way, with the necessary amplifications, exercises, and revisions, without
cramming.
A cause of universal complaint nowadays is the high cost of schoolbooks. Both
the publishers and the author were determined that this book should be priced
as low as possible. For economy's sake, illustrations have been omitted, and the
maps included are only sketch-maps for general guidance - they cannot take the
place of a good atlas. But then, a good atlas is an indispensable aid to any
student of history.
If the work proves helpful to some teachers, and stimulating to some students,
it will do all that its author has hoped for.

Introduction
"Where seven sunken Englands
Lie buried one by one,
Why should one idle spade, I wonder,
Shake up the dust of thanes like thunder
To smoke and choke the sun?"
- G.K. Chesterton: Ballad of the White Horse.
That is the question which, in one form or another, every historian must ask
and answer before he begins to write history. His dealings are with buried
men; his business is to raise them up again for the understanding and
appreciation of the living. Is this worth doing? Why is it worth doing? The first
answer of any true historian will be that it is intensely interesting - the same
answer as the mathematician or the physicist will give you if you question their
ardour in the pursuit of quaternions or quanta. The interest of history, though,
makes a wider appeal. Why the Egyptians built the Pyramids, how the Greeks
came to invent drama, how the Roman army was organized and trained; or, to
come down to detail, what made Napoleon, on June 18th, 1815, put off his
attack on Wellington's line till 11 a.m.: a decision that cost him, perhaps, the
battle of Waterloo and the crown of France; or why did General von Moltke, in
September, 1914, order the German army to fall back from the Marne: a
decision which cost Germany the loss of the First World War - these are the
questions the historian tries to answer. They are interesting questions, and
important ones: more interesting and more important, I think, than questions
about the composition of the atom or the chemistry of carbons; for they are
concerned with human nature, and that is more interesting and important to
men even than the nature of the world they have to live in.
Human nature is the subject of history: what men are like, judging from what
they have thought and said and done, from the motives that have moved them,
the forces and influences that have moulded their lives. We are all men, and we
have to learn to live with men, and to know human nature is to know
ourselves and the men we have to live with: a knowledge without which we
can hardly expect to live wisely and well. History helps us to this knowledge. In
a sense, we know more about the dead than we do about the living. We
cannot, indeed, see them or hear them, but we know things about them that
their contemporaries did not; we have the diaries, the letters, the secret
archives, and we can come near to finding out what really influenced them,
what were their real thoughts and feelings, their purposes, their fears, their
hopes. We know, too, what were the real results of their actions and words,
how far they succeeded and how far they failed. History is a sort of moving
picture of mankind. It tells the story of human development, of men's efforts to
live and grow, of their successes and failures, triumphs and disasters in the art
of living; and the reasons for these things.
It tells us, too, our own place in this development. It shows us how our own
nature grew up, and how our national character was formed. It shows the
relations between ourselves and other peoples. In a word, it helps us to
understand the situation in which we ourselves are placed, and so to decide
what we ought to do for the future. You cannot expect to understand the
present properly unless you understand the past out of which it grew.
Napoleon would not have made such woeful errors about the Spaniards and
the Russians and the English if he had known more about their history. Neither
would Adolf Hitler. It has been bitterly said that "we learn from history that we
do not learn from history"; but we can learn from it, and we need to, if the
future is not to be merely a repetition of the mistakes of the past. To
understand ourselves, to understand our fellow-men, to understand the
situation we are in: these things are necessary to us; and we can hardly hope to
attain them without some knowledge of history.
One cannot study all history at once: there is too much of it. In this book I am
going to explain briefly the development of European civilization. It is worth
studying, not only because it is our own civilization, the one in which we have
been born and brought up, but also because it has been the most successful of
all civilizations, and has become the most widespread, and has had the greatest
share in shaping the modern world. The present state of things, for good or
evil, has been caused by the expansion of European influence over the whole
earth during the last four centuries; we need, therefore, to understand that
influence: how it has been formed and what it is.
Society and Civilization
We cannot understand the life and civilization of European men, without
understanding something of life and civilization in general. Life, as far as we
can understand it, appears to be a process of growth. A baby is only the
beginnings of a man, but as it grows it develops in size and strength and
beauty, in intelligence and feeling and will-power, towards something like
completeness or perfection. All these things were somehow "in" the baby, just
as the whole of a tree is somehow "in" the seed; but they needed to be
developed. We all need to be developed, and the main business of our lives is
to get ourselves developed.
Yet we cannot develop ourselves. We depend for our growth on the world
around us, as much as the seed depends on soil and air and water and sun.
Above all, we depend on our fellow-men. We cannot be born of ourselves; we
cannot bring ourselves up from babyhood to manhood; and, even when we are
grown up, we cannot keep ourselves supplied, by our own efforts, with all we
need for our continued life and growth. We know the story of Robinson
Crusoe on his island, and how the interest and excitement of the tale lies in his
gradual success in the extremely difficult task of supplying his own wants by his
own efforts and skill. But Robinson Crusoe was already a well-developed man
before he was ship-wrecked; he was using knowledge and skill already acquired
from other men; and, even so, he could only succeed in supplying his bodily
wants' his intellectual and moral wants (like the want for rational conversation,
and for the interchange of thoughts and affections) remained unsatisfied. So it
must always be. It is only by co-operation with one another that men can lead
a full human life and reach a full human development. The Greek philosopher,
Aristotle, said long ago: "If a man will not live in society, he must be either a
beast or a god".
In fact, men have always lived in societies: that is, in groups organized for
mutual help and protection. The most fundamental society is the family,
without which the human race could not be carried on at all. But a family can
hardly be self-sufficient; for one thing, its members can hardly be numerous
enough to provide for all wants and to protect against all dangers. Therefore
larger groups must exist, called civil societies: states. These can provide most of
the necessaries of life that are out of reach of the family.
There is one want, however, that has a rather special position, for it is not a
want for something inside the world, but for something outside it. Practically
all men, as far back as our records go, have believed in some supernatural
Power or Powers that somehow rule the world of nature, and have felt awe
and reverence towards such Powers, and dependence on them, and need for
their help, and have wished to express this reverence and dependence, and to
ask for this help. In fact, men have felt the need for worship. And, as men have
always lived together in groups, so they have felt the need to worship together
in groups; and for this purpose they have formed religious societies: religion
being essentially the belief in some supernatural Power and the expression of
this belief in worship.
These are the chief societies that men have formed: the societies that they have
found absolutely necessary to enable them to fulfil their wants and to grow
towards perfection; they are called "natural" societies, because they seem to
spring from human nature itself. There are, of course, many other societies.
Whatever a man wishes to do, he generally finds that he can do it more
satisfactorily if he has the company and cooperation of other men. So we find
men forming football clubs and commercial companies and trade-unions and
universities. It is natural to men to live in society, and their history is chiefly a
history of the various societies they have formed, and the various ways in
which they have organized them and carried them on.
Civilization
Men live in society in order to satisfy their wants. Now, men are twofold
beings, composed of bodies and souls, and they therefore have two kinds of
wants, physical and spiritual. The former are the wants that are satisfied by
such things as food, clothing and shelter ("warmth, water and wittles", as the
saying goes), and the latter are those that are satisfied by such things as poetry,
science, mathematics, philosophy and worship. Well, if we look at human
societies, we find that some of them, like those of the Eskimos, or of our
Australian aborigines, seem to be almost completely occupied with the struggle
to satisfy physical wants, and to have comparatively little time or energy or
inclination to satisfy spiritual wants. On the other hand, there are societies that
manage to satisfy material wants with comparative ease, and have both the
power and the inclination to spend a great deal of time and energy in satisfying
spiritual wants. The latter are said to be civilized, the former uncivilized. It is
the mark of a truly civilized man to look on physical satisfaction mainly as a
foundation for spiritual satisfaction - even eating will be for him an art, rather
than a mere gorge; and growth in civilization is therefore expressed by growth
in the arts, the sciences and religion: the pursuits which occupy and satisfy the
soul rather than the body. All this does not mean that "savages" are
unintelligent: the Australian aborigines are highly intelligent, but their
intelligence is almost wholly occupied with the business of getting physical
satisfaction in a very hard environment, and hence their art, science and
religion are only rudimentary.
You cannot draw a hard-and-fast line between civilized and uncivilized peoples.
A completely uncivilized human being does not exist, and a completely
civilized one is almost as rare. A society is called civilized when it enables its
members (or some of them, at least) to obtain something like a complete
development of both body and soul. But there are many degrees of civilization.
Socrates would certainly say of us that we are too anxious to provide for our
physical comfort, and are little more than educated barbarians.
The Structure of Civilized Society
Life in society must be planned and organized, or the members will not be able
to work together harmoniously and help one another. They must have some
general agreement about the object of their society and the means by which it
can be attained; and also about the general framework of rules by which their
actions and their relations to one another are to be guided. In fact, every
civilized society has five elements, about which the members must agree if the
society is to survive: a political system, an economic system, a social system, a
culture, and a religion. Serious disagreements about these things, if they cannot
be patched up or compromised, will bring about revolution and disruption.
Religion
The main object of a civilized society is to enable its members to grow to
perfection, as far as that is possible. Those who form such a society must
therefore have some common notion of what human perfection is: in other
words, they must have some common ideal to aim at. They must also have
some common notion of how men ought to act in order to become perfect:
that is, they must have some code of conduct, or morals - some agreement
about what is good or bad, right or wrong. Finally, they must have some
motive to urge them to become perfect. For to become perfect (and even to
live in society at all) demands a good deal of effort and self-sacrifice, and men
will not endure these things unless they have good reason for doing so.
Some people will say that these three - the ideal of perfection, the moral code,
and the motives for obeying it - are not necessarily religious, but belong to
what they call a man's "philosophy of life". We need not quarrel about that
here. In history, these three have nearly always been bound up with religion,
with men's ideas about the nature of the supernatural Powers; and the religion
of a civilization will be found to express pretty accurately its ideals and morals
and motives. Our civilization, for instance, has long been based on the
Christian "philosophy of life", in which the ideal of perfection is Jesus Christ,
and the morals and the motives are those which Christ taught and lived by.
(There is a good deal of disagreement about them nowadays, and that is one
reason why our civilization seems to be weakening; but we still agree
sufficiently to enable us to act harmoniously in many things: for instance, we
still agree, on the whole, in condemning murder and fraud, though how long
we shall continue to do so is doubtful.) Without a religion (or a "philosophy of
life") a civilized society cannot come into existence; a change in its religion will
change it, a weakening of belief in its religion will weaken it, and a complete
collapse of that belief will destroy it.
Culture
"Culture" means cultivation, and a cultured man is a man with a cultivated
mind: a man whose powers of thought, feeling and expression are well
developed. Whatever plays a part in this development belongs to the culture of
society. The sciences are part of culture because they both exercise our minds
and add to our knowledge; the arts (poetry, painting, music and the rest) are
part of culture because they stimulate us to think and feel more deeply than we
are accustomed to: more deeply than we could do by our own unaided powers.
Of course, both the sciences and the arts may have "practical" uses: they may
provide us with aeroplanes and houses; but these are only secondary to the
cultural effects. Music and architecture, physics and biology, poetry and
philosophy, are important because they develop our souls and help us to
become complete men. Education, which is the introduction to culture, is
important for the same reason.
Anything that exists can move us to think or feel; and therefore anything that
exists can be the subject of cultural activity. One can write poetry about fossils,
or make a scientific study of the nightingale. The cultures of different
civilizations are different from one another because they make use of different
objects, or deal with them in different ways. For instance, according to the
"romantic" ideas that dominated European culture in the 19th century,
"nature" was the principal object of culture, and this explains the prevalence of
nature-poetry, landscape-painting, and the like; perhaps it also explains the 19th
century passion for physical science and the study of the natural world, and the
decline in the study of the more abstract science of philosophy. At any rate, the
culture of Europe in the 19th century was overwhelmingly "naturalist" and
"realist"; and in that it was rather like the culture of ancient Greece, but very
different from the culture of ancient Egypt. A civilization is usually judged by
its culture, because that expresses most clearly the state of its intellectual
development. We know from the Pyramids that the ancient Egyptians were
highly intelligent; but the fact that they chose to build pyramids shows that
their thoughts and feelings were very different from ours. Their sphinxes and
pyramids, the Greek temples and theatres, the Roman amphitheatres and
aqueducts, the mediaeval cathedrals and castles, are all as characteristic of their
respective periods as skyscrapers and railway-stations are of ours. They all bear
witness to a high state of intellectual development, and therefore of
civilization; but they are still very different from one another. Which shows the
highest achievement is an interesting question.
Government
In religion and culture we have been dealing with the "soul" of a society. Now
we must deal with its "body": with the orderly framework of laws and customs
and social arrangements which enable its members to live and co-operate with
one another. This framework has three parts: the political system, the
economic system, and the social system.
Politics is the science and art of government. If a number of different people
are to live and work together in harmony, they will have to be directed: if each
were allowed to do exactly what he liked, when and where he liked, the result
would be chaos, not society. There will have to be laws, if only to prevent the
citizens from getting in one another's way. Besides, life in society is difficult,
and we are all sometimes tempted to behave anti-socially (to cheat, rob,
assault, or even murder our fellow-citizens, or to shirk paying the taxes which
are our contribution to society's expenses); so there must be laws to keep us
from doing these things. Someone, therefore, must have the power to make
these laws. This power is called legislative power, and those who possess it
make up the legislature.
Laws are not much use unless they are enforced. A law against burglary will
not prevent burglary unless there is a police-force of some kind to keep a look-
out for burglars. Then, too, a society may be attacked from outside: some
other society may make war on it; and therefore a defence-force is needed.
What is more, no set of laws can provide for every possible danger; a sudden
crisis may arise (famine, earthquake, plague); which the lawmakers have not
foreseen. There must be some man, or group of men, with power to enforce
the laws and to take charge of and direct society in times of crisis. This power is
called executive power, and those who wield it are called the executive.
Finally, there must be some means of settling disputes about the law. If a
citizen is accused of breaking a law, and denies the accusation, who is to decide
between him and his accuser? And if two citizens dispute about their rights
under the law, who is to decide where the right really lies? Obviously there
must be someone with power to settle these questions. Such power is called
judicial power, and those who exercise it are called judges and make up the
judiciary.
These three powers, legislative, executive and judicial, are the powers of
government, and those who possess them together make up the government
of a society. The political system is the system by which the men are chosen or
appointed to possess these powers. There are endless varieties of such systems,
and the study of them makes up a large part of history.
The Economic System
Economics is the science and art of supplying goods and services to satisfy
men's wants. No man can provide all he needs for himself: he cannot be his
own farmer, tailor, builder, poet, chemist, doctor and priest. The work of
production must be divided up, so as to allow each man to specialize in some
particular trade or profession, and the goods produced by each trade must
somehow be shared out among the people in general. Everyone must help to
produce something, and everyone must get a share of what is produced by
others. There must be some way of determining what goods are to be
produced, and what part each citizen is to play in producing them, and what
share of them he is to get in return for his work. This is the economic system.
There are almost as many economic systems as there are political systems, and
economic history fills as much space as political history.
The Social System
One of the chief wants of man is simply the want for human companionship in
work and play:
"Words together and wine together
And song together in Balliol Hall".
Yet the citizens of a state cannot all be familiarly acquainted with one another;
and if they could they would not want to be. For men differ a good deal from
one another, in disposition, tastes, education and so on, and a man will usually
prefer to look for his friends among those with similar abilities and pursuits to
his own. Hence we find men grouping themselves together for purposes of
social intercourse, in clubs and other associations; and the social system is
simply the arrangement of these groups.
The foundation of every social system is the division into ranks or classes. One
can usually find in a society at least three distinct classes. At the top there is a
ruling class, consisting of the "bosses" or leaders in politics, economics, culture
and religion: the directors, the managers, the makers of policy, the men who
ultimately decide what is to be done, each in his own sphere. At the other end
of the scale is the "working class", as it is rather curiously called: the class of
those whose activities are directed or managed, those who obey orders and
follow directions, as contrasted with those who give them. And there is
generally an intermediate or "middle" class between these two, of men who,
while not actually rulers in their spheres of action, are more than mere
subjects. To take an example: in a modern socialist society, such as that in
Russia, the ruling class consists of the members of the Communist Party, who
actually decide what is to be done; the middle class consists of the factory-
managers and technical experts and professional men who see that the plans of
the Party are carried out; and the working class consists of the mass of the
people who work in the factories and on the farms, doing what they are told.
In an army the same divisions show themselves between the generals and the
staff-officers, the regimental officers and n.c.o's, and the ordinary private
soldiers.
These classes, upper, middle and lower, exist in any organized society. In some
societies the distinctions between them have been very rigid: in ancient Greece
and Rome the lower class was one of slaves, in mediaeval Europe the upper
class was an hereditary aristocracy. A modern society is usually much more
fluid, in the sense that it is much easier to pass from one class into another; so
that a man is not bound to the class he is born in, but can rise or fall to the
position which his character and talents fit him for. Yet the three classes
remain, as the foundation of most social life; nor is it easy to see how they can
be done away with.
This is only a brief sketch of the constitution of civilized society. Whole
libraries have been written on each of the subjects I have dealt with; but what
has been written here will at least serve as an introduction and enable you to
understand the story of Europe.

Book One - Foundations
1. Greece
At the south-eastern corner of Europe, a projecting mass of mountain-land
stretches deeply down into the warm waters of the Mediterranean. From this
central mass long ridges of rock reach out and down like the stretched fingers
of a hand, and between them the sea penetrates into the heart of the hills.
Southwards and eastwards lie scattered a thousand islands, like pebbles cast
from that open hand to bridge the space between it and the very similar coast
of Asia Minor. These coasts and those islands are the cradle of Europe.
It is, so to speak, a very divided cradle. The mainland of Greece is split up by its
tangled mountains almost as much as the islands are by the sea. The valleys are
pockets of fertile ground isolated among the barren heights, and fed by their
short and violent streams; streams that are torrents when filled by the winter
rains and the melting snows of spring, and dry beds of gravel and stone after
the long heats of summer that parch the land in spite of the ever-present sea. It
is a hard land, but nowhere impossible for human life, and surprisingly fruitful
when well and rightly tilled: a land to breed two of the best kinds of men,
mountaineers and sea-farers. And it is a land of great beauty. A modern
traveller sailing up the Aegean, passing Naxos and Paros and the other golden
islands, watching their yellow cliffs rise out of a sapphire water into an air and a
light as clear as diamond, or seeing the sunset fade over the strong highlands of
Argolis, and light with a parting gleam the floating mass of Aegina or the Attic
hills - such a traveller can even now understand how Homer came to write of
the wanderings of Odysseus over this same wine-dark sea. There is no
weakness in this beauty, nothing luscious or sappy or even mysterious; it is all
sharp and clear, with vivid colours and strong, definite shapes, and with an
austerity that limits as well as stimulating the imagination. There are no misty
mountains here, and no tropical blooms. Geography does not explain genius,
but one can certainly say that the Greek genius found an uncommonly suitable
ground to grow in.
There was a civilization in Greece before the Greeks, which some of them
helped to destroy. The island of Crete was its centre, and two thousand years
before Christ there was at Knossos, in Crete, a great and wonderful city, the
queen of a highly-cultured and closely-organized society, with daughter-cities
in the islands and on the mainland, all equally renowned for strength and
beauty and comfortable living. We know little of this society. About the year
1500 B.C. it was struck down by a great catastrophe - it is supposed, by an
invasion or series of invasions from the North, whence so many invaders have
come to trouble the Mediterranean. At any rate, this "Minoan" civilization was
broken in pieces, its culture and traditions largely destroyed, and Greece was
filled with a medley of fighting men, uprooted and homeless, wanderers of
many races, unsettled and disunited, though more or less dominated by the
Northern invaders with their Northern language: the language we now call
Greek.
In this confused disaster, men did what men will always do: they came
together in groups and bands for mutual protection and help. Here an isolated
valley, there a rock-bound island, became the seat of a settlement and of a
society. These were not such natural societies as the tribes that grow out of
families, but artificial ones: leagues for mutual defence. They formed
themselves into cities, and the first thing they built was a wall. As Gilbert
Murray says: "Every Greek community is like a garrison of civilization in the
midst of wild hordes of barbarians, a picked body of men of whom each
individual has in some sense to live up to a higher standard than can be
expected of the common human animal. As the shield is the typical weapon of
the Greek warrior, so the wall is the typical mark of Greek civilization." ("The
Rise of the Greek Epic", pp. 78-9). Inside that wall there was order and law;
outside it there was only "chaos and old Night".
Thus the Greeks formed independent cities, not a single society. His city was
all the world to a Greek: the main centre of his life, the main object of his love
and loyalty. All else was sacrificed to it: the city was everything, and the
individual and the family nothing in comparison; for bitter experience had
taught the Greeks that only inside the city could they live the orderly lives of
reasonable men. The city and its wall guarded them from the confusion and
misery of disorder and barbarism, and the strength of the city lay in the perfect
union of the citizens under the constitution and the laws. Those who would
not accept these were exiled; and exile was the worst of all punishments to a
Greek, except death itself. Each citizen was expected to be fully developed,
mentally and physically, to play his full part in the city's life, and to help to
defend it at need. Greek patriotism meant patriotism to the city, and Greek
freedom meant the freedom of the city; freedom of the individual, or loyalty to
a nation or a king, were ideas the Greeks could hardly understand.
The same bitter experience of disorder that led them to found their cities bred
in the Greeks a passion for order and reason and moderation, and an intense
hatred of disorder and the unreasonable, of all that was complicated and
exaggerated and mysterious. (Their favourite virtue was "sophrosyne", which
may be translated as perfect moderation: never overstepping the mark, keeping
to the golden mean. This, they thought, was the conduct befitting civilized
men; and those who did not practise it were barbarians.) They strove to apply
reason to everything, and to bring everything into order: art, philosophy,
science, politics, economics, even religion; on each of these they tried to
impose a network of laws that would make them intelligible and orderly.
This orderliness and moderation is what gives all their work, in all these fields,
its "classical" perfection, and makes them the founders of European
civilization. Their builders did not make monstrous constructions like
Stonehenge or the Pyramids or the "ziggurats" of Babylon: Greek temples are
light and simple and perfectly proportioned. Their statues are statues of men
and women, perfectly beautiful and perfectly natural. They brought poetry
itself within the rule of order: the first European poems, the great epics called
the Iliad and the Odyssey, are as carefully planned as the temple of the
Parthenon, and are written in the first definite metre: that wonderful metre of
the hexameter, perhaps the greatest of all metres in the power and volume and
variety of its music. And they followed this up by inventing the ode, which is
the beginning of lyric poetry, and in which Alcaeus and Sappho, Simonides and
Pindar, are as great as Homer is in the epic. Then, out of ceremonial dances
and pageants in honour of the gods, they fashioned drama; and the great
tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the great comedies of
Aristophanes, were the result. Herodotus, Xenephon and Thucydides were the
first historians: the first men to try to see and explain the real meanings and
results of events, instead of just recording them in a chronicle.
The same passion for order and law produced the first mathematicians and
scientists: men like Euclid and Pythagoras and Archimedes; and with them the
first philosophers, who tried to explore and explain the ultimate nature and
causes of things: to explore existence and nature, matter and form, substance
and personality, right and wrong; to find out, above all, what men are and how
they ought to live. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle took up these themes, and
produced the first studies of morality and metaphysics, politics and economics
and criticism. Nor were the Greeks content to theorize about such things: they
experimented with them. Each of the Greek cities had its own constitution and
manner of life, and most of the forms of government that have since been used
in Europe were first tried in Greece. Athens became the perfect democracy, in
which all citizens were members of the Assembly and judges in the law-courts,
and the magistrates were chosen in what Aristotle calls the most democratic
way - by lot. Sparta was an example of exactly the opposite kind: a military and
communistic aristocracy, in which the pure Spartans were bred up from their
youth to hardship and the profession of arms, and lived their lives simply and
strenuously in communal barracks, sternly repressing the subject-population of
helots who cultivated the land for them. Sparta bred the best soldiers in
Greece, Athens the best orators and dramatists. But every city had it own
character and traditions, and the liveliness and variety of Greek life are as
astonishing as the universal passion of all Greeks for reason and order. Each
city claimed the right to pursue reason and order in its own way: that was what
the Greeks meant by liberty.
Greek civilization had its weaknesses, though; and, as usually happens, they
sprang from its strong points, from its pursuit of reason and liberty. The Greeks
tried to subdue everything within the bounds of reason; but everything will not
be so subdued. There are mysteries in the nature of things and in the nature of
man, and mystery was a thing the Greeks hated to admit. Therefore Greek
culture, for all its perfection, is somewhat lacking in depth. By refusing to have
anything to do with the mysterious or the fantastic, the Greeks shut themselves
off from a part of reality. Their art is perfect, but limited - perhaps it is perfect
because it is limited. The Greeks could build the Parthenon, but not York
Minster nor Notre Dame de Paris; they could write poems and tragedies like
the odes of Pindar or the "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus, but not like the Psalms
or "Macbeth".
This limitation showed itself above all in their religion. They believed in a
multitude of gods and goddesses, and in nymphs and guardian spirits of the
streams and groves and hills; but these beings were all natural, not
supernatural - not even Zeus, "the father of gods and men". They were
conceived as superior human beings, suffering human passions, like love and
hatred and grief and jealousy: stronger than men, but not otherwise superior to
men. And they were subject, like everything else, to Fate, the inexorable,
unchangeable force of natural law. They ruled nature, but they were still a part
of nature and subject to its laws, just as a magistrate ruled a city, but was still
only one of the citizens. Gods of that sort are not really necessary. They only
represent natural forces which can get on quite well without them. The more
the Greeks learned about nature, the less they came to believe in their gods.
Everything else of theirs is still somehow alive in modern civilization, but the
gods are dead.
The other passion of the Greeks, for liberty, was also a source of weakness as
well as strength. For the Greeks, as we have seen, liberty meant the freedom of
the city. To preserve this freedom, all the citizens had to stand together and
put the good of the city before everything else. The Greeks had no conception
of "the rights of man": the individual had no rights against the city. He was
only a part of the city, as the hand or foot is a part of the body. This partly
explains why the Greeks tolerated slavery. For we must always remember that
Greek civilization, like all ancient civilizations, was based on slave-labour, and
that the free citizens of Greece were only a minority of the population. One
might have expected the Greeks, with their clear reasoning, to see through this
unjust and uneconomic system, but they did not. Aristotle, the great
philosopher, openly defends it. Some men, he says, are born slaves: that is the
part they have to play in society. For the Greeks, a man was not born free; he
was born to fill a particular place in the society of his city, and his duty was to
fill that place. There is truth in that idea, but it can easily be pushed too far.
Then, too, this notion of civic liberty made it impossible for the Greeks to unite
into one nation. The cities were forever quarrelling with one another. Even in
the face of the Persian invasion they did not all unite. When, later, Athens
began to form a league of cities (the Delian League), Sparta rose up in
opposition to the idea, and the result was the terrible Pelop-ponesian War,
which lasted twenty-seven years and wasted the flower of Greek manhood.
Athens was crushed in the end, and her defeat was hailed as the victory of
liberty. Alexander the Great had no better success than the Athenians. He more
or less forced the cities to support him, but after his death they immediately
flew apart. So, in the end, they were conquered by the Romans, who had a
different idea of liberty.
But before that happened they had spread their influence very far. These
adventurous sea-farers were not content to sit at home at ease. Their earliest
legends are of wanderings: Jason and his quest of the golden fleece, "the first
adventure of the world"; Hercules in search of the golden apples of the
Hesperides; the great expedition against Troy, and the wanderings of Odysseus
on his way home - these show what the Greeks were like. Hardly had their
cities been firmly established when they began to throw out offshoots;
colonies, daughter-cities as independent as their mothers, appeared on the still-
deserted coasts of Europe. Round the Black Sea, in Sicily and southern Italy, as
far away as Gaul and Spain, appeared these little walled oases of Greek culture,
with their harbours and market-places, and theatres and temples, where the
same language was spoken and the same plays performed and the same
sacrifices offered as in Athens or Corinth or Ephesus. Syracuse, Taranto,
Marseilles, Tarragona, are some of the modern cities that owe their origin to
the Greek colonists.
Yet the Greeks established no empire. Freedom was as fiercely cherished by the
colonies as by the mother-cities. In the 6th century, however, this freedom was
menaced even in its homeland. The Persians, a warrior-race out of central Asia,
had subdued the Babylonians and Assyrians, and advanced their borders into
Asia Minor. The Greek cities of Asia Minor resisted, and were crushed. Then
Darius, the Persian king, sent to the cities of Greece itself demands for
submission and tribute. Some submitted; but Athens and Sparta answered with
contempt, and the great king prepared to invade and destroy them. Athens was
the nearer, and the Athenians asked Sparta for help; but the Spartans were slow
in coming, and in the end the little Athenian army went out alone to meet the
enemy. They met him at Marathon, a day's march from Athens, and there they
won the most famous of all victories.
That was in 490 B.C. Ten years later the Persians tried again. Xerxes, the son of
Darius, gathered a great host from all quarters of his empire, and a fleet from
those Phoenician cities, like Tyre and Sidon, which were the chief rivals of the
Greeks in the Mediterranean. Some of the northern Greeks surrendered before
this mighty force, but the rest banded together in a desperate effort to preserve
the liberty that was their life. A little force, led by three hundred Spartans, was
sent to hold as long as possible the narrow pass of Thermopylae. They held it
against the whole Persian army until a traitor showed the Persians a secret path
by which the defenders could be taken in the rear. Terms of surrender were
offered and refused; the Greeks preferred to fight and die.
Then it was the turn of Athens. In the previous ten years the Athenians had
built themselves a fleet, and now their leader Themistocles persuaded them to
take a desperate decision - to forsake their city and take to their ships. The
Persian fleet was sailing down the coast, protecting the seaward flank and
communications of the army; it was met by the Athenians and their allies in
the bay of Salamis and utterly defeated, and the army, thus exposed, was forced
to retreat. Yet the following year the Persians made a fresh effort. They were
met this time on land, by an army representing the whole of the Greek
confederacy, but of which the Spartans were the principal force; and the
victory of Plataea removed the last danger of Persian conquest.
The results were momentous. Not only was Greek independence preserved,
but the Greek victory in these wars established a spirit and tradition which has
been woven into the very stuff of European civilization: a tradition of
passionate independence, of limitless energy, and of indomitable and death-
defying courage. The Greeks showed what could be done by a small people
with the vigour and the nerve to do and dare everything; and that lesson has
never been forgotten. European history, from Marathon to the Battle of
Britain, is full of such examples, and many a man has been inspired, often
without realizing it, by that spirit which the Greeks discovered in themselves in
the Persian wars, and which they bequeathed to us, their inheritors.
After their victory, though, they wasted too much of their energy and courage
in fighting with one another. (This, too, has become a persistent European
tradition.) It is true that this was the great age of Greece: the age of the best
architects, sculptors, dramatists, philosophers and statesmen - Greece was
crowded with genius in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. But this is also the age of
the Pelopponesian War, and of other fratricidal struggles almost as disastrous.
And yet their greatest adventure was still to come.
Between the years 359 and 336 B.C., Philip, king of Macedon, succeeded in
half-forcing, half-persuading the rest of Greece to submit to his guidance. His
son, Alexander the Great, took advantage of this precarious unity to lead a
Greek army into Asia. In ten years of dazzling conquests he changed the face of
history. The unwieldy Persian empire went down before his energy and genius
and the Western valour of his Greeks. Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt,
Mesopotamia, Persia itself, fell to him in rapid succession; he subdued the
tribes of Afghanistan, forced the Khyber Pass and penetrated to the banks of
the Indus. And wherever he went he carried Greek culture and the Greek
language. He founded cities on the Greek model (four hundred of them, it is
said), some of which, like Alexandria in Egypt, became themselves great
centres of Greek culture. The whole of western Asia was transformed and
revivified; to this day Hindu sculpture shows traces of Greek influence, and it is
owing to Alexander that St. Paul was born at Tarsus, "a citizen of no mean
city".
Yet he did not found an empire. He died of a fever in 323 B.C., leaving no heir
to his glory. The cities of Greece almost at once fell apart; and Alexander's
Asiatic conquests were divided among his principal generals, who founded
dynasties which quarrelled with one another as busily as Athens and Sparta.
The Greeks had not the art of ruling an empire. Their civilization was brilliant
but fragmentary; another people, with different gifts, was needed to impose
social unity on these fragments: to give the scattered jewels of the Greeks a
solid and permanent setting.
2. Rome
The Greeks were a race of geniuses, the Romans of ordinary men. That was
their strength. While the Greeks advanced by flashes of brilliance, the Romans
were content to plod along and learn from experience. They were willing to
learn, and they had the kind of virtues that are useful to a learner: caution,
steadiness, perseverance. Their favourite virtues were what they called "virtus"
and "gravitas". By "virtus" they meant strength: the kind of strength we
sometimes call "nerve" - the capacity for standing steady in any kind of crisis.
By "gravitas" they meant a sense of responsibility: the true Roman always
knew his duty and did it to the full, at any cost. The Roman sentries at
Pompeii, who stood their ground in spite of the eruption of Vesuvius, and
whose bodies were found by the excavators two thousand years later, still in
their armour and at their posts, displayed in a high degree both virtus and
gravitas. The Greeks had a fine courage, but they would never have acted like
that - it would have seemed to them irrational. So it was; but that is the kind of
irrationality that makes a people great.
It is true, though, that the greatness of the Romans lay in character rather than
cleverness, and therefore showed itself in action rather than in thought. As
rulers, builders, engineers, they have been rarely equalled and never surpassed.
Of art, science and philosophy they knew little till they came in contact with
Greece. Then, indeed, they were stimulated; and they added, especially in
poetry and architecture, some imperishable things to the heritage of Europe.
Yet even in their greatest works they were still imitating, rather than creating;
and they have no drama to rival Greek tragedy, no sculptor as great as
Praxiteles, no scientists or philosophers to compare with Archimedes or Plato.
Still, this is only saying that they were less than the greatest. The poetry of
Virgil and Horace, Lucretius and Catullus, and the prose of Cicero and Livy
and Tacitus, have become as firmly a part of the European mind as anything
given us by Greece; though the greatest gifts of Rome were not these.
Like the Greeks, the Romans found a suitable land to grow in. To the West of
Greece another great promontory pushes down from the main mass of Europe
into the Mediterranean. It is shaped exactly like a gigantic leg and foot, with
Sicily a football at the toe: geography's great joke. This Italy is a mountainous
land, but it is not cut up into morsels, like Greece. All round its northern
border runs the immense line of the Alps, the mightiest mountains in Europe,
cutting it off sharply from the Germanies and Gaul; and under their shadow is
spread the vast rich plain of Lombardy, watered by the broad and winding Po.
From the western end of the Alps, where they touch the sea, the longer but
lower range of the Appenines runs down the leg of Italy: across to the east
coast, and then swinging down in a great curve right to the toe of the
peninsula, and enclosing another broad plain which looks over the western
Mediterranean into the setting sun. This is the plain of Latium, and one of the
short strong rivers that water it is the Tiber; and on the banks of that river, a
few miles from the sea, still stand the Seven Hills and the City of Rome.
So vast a part has been played by Rome in the history of Europe that its very
name strikes with a sense of awe. Yet, though Rome was the centre of the
Roman achievement, and though under the Empire it became a splendid city,
it would be a mistake to look on the Romans as city-dwellers like the Greeks.
Rome was at first, and for a long time, little more than a fortified market-place
and refuge for the surrounding countryside. The Romans were essentially
farmers and countrymen, leading a family-life on their lands. The family, not
the city, was the central Roman institution. In the "family" the Romans
included the whole household, of parents and children and relations and
servants and slaves, all living and working together under the "patria potestas",
the governing power of the father, the head of the family. Nearly all Roman
institutions grew out of this model: the Senators were called "Fathers", the
Empire itself came to be looked on as one big family, with the Emperor as the
common father of all; and this idea of the family as the basis of social life, and
of the state as a wider family, is perhaps the most important contribution of the
Romans to our civilization.
Another contribution is Roman Law. The Romans were the greatest law-
makers in all history, and the reason is that they based their laws on practical
experience. A law is a general rule for all the citizens, and it must therefore suit
a great many different kinds of people; and only experience of these people and
their needs will make it possible to draw up a satisfactory law. Every law is a
compromise. It cannot perfectly satisfy everyone; it can only be the rule which
gives least dissatisfaction, the rule which best reconciles the different interests
of different men. Now, the Romans were always willing to learn from
experience, and were always willing to compromise when necessary. (Their
family-feeling helped them here: the sense that members of the family must be
willing to yield to one another so as to live together in harmony.) The
fascinating thing about Roman history is the way the Romans learned from
their mistakes, and especially how they learned to reconcile the interests of
different peoples and incorporate them into the Roman family, until finally
they had built up a code of law which could hold together Romans and Greeks,
Africans and Gauls, Britons and Spaniards, and bind them all into one Empire.
That code has been the basis of most European law ever since. Yet it took its
rise out of the petty squabbles of a little rustic community. It was in the
quarrels between patricians and plebeians, when Rome was hardly more than a
collection of mud-huts, that the Romans learnt their first lessons in the art of
reconciling differences under a common law. Their success in acquiring this art
did much more than their military prowess to gain for them the empire of the
Western world.
Indeed, the Romans were not a warlike race. The Greeks were natural fighters,
quarrelling with one another when there was no-one else to quarrel with; but
the Romans only made use of war as an instrument to further their practical
designs. They saw that war was sometimes necessary and often useful; and so
they set themselves to acquire skill in it, just as they set themselves to acquire
skill in every other useful art, by the method of trial and error. They were often
beaten, but they never gave in and they always learned from their mistakes;
and so in the end they built up that great army which has had no equal in
history. Yet they never embarked on war lightly or for the love of fighting; and
the object of their wars was always the extension of the "Pax Romana", the
Roman peace. The bases of their state were the land, the family and the law:
economics, politics and social relations were all founded on these; and the
army was useful in defending them, or in getting them room to expand.
Religion was founded on them, too. The Roman gods were not like those of
the Greeks, superior human beings; they were guardian-spirits, and there was a
whole multitude of them, one for every phase and action of human life. Every
family had its "household gods", to whom the head of the family offered
sacrifice; and there were higher gods for the great family of the people and the
City. Every phase of human development had its own guardian: marriage,
birth, childhood, manhood, death; and there were other spirits to look after
ploughing and sowing, reaping and garnering, and all the rest of human toil.
All nature was filled with these divine presences, and man was encompassed by
them at every step; but he had to earn a legal right to their protection. He had
to give theim their dues, the little sacrifices and acts of piety they demanded;
but if he did his duty by the gods, the gods would do their duty by him: that
was the Roman Creed.
It was a simple and familiar religion; unfortunately, it was no more fitted than
that of the Greeks to stand up to critical examination. As the Roman state
expanded and the Romans came to know other religions, their faith in their
own began to weaken. Their instinct for compromise came into play, and they
tried to combine all these religions into one - thus the Emperor Hadrian built
the Pantheon, a temple for all the gods. But this effort only weakened further
the old Roman religion, mixing it up with all kinds of strange cults and
superstitions; and these helped to bring about Rome's fall. But that came later.
Roman religion as it was originally had a great deal to do with developing and
preserving that simple strength of character, that virtus and gravitas, which
brought the Romans to greatness.
The traditional date of the founding of Rome is 753 B.C., and the traditional
name of its founder is Romulus; but all the early history of the city is
legendary, and there is little to enable us to distinguish in these legends
between fact and fiction. The city was at first ruled by kings, and the first really
certain event in Roman history is the sharp little revolution by which the last of
the kings was expelled and the Roman state became a republic. The traditional
date of this revolution is 510 B.C., and it produced such an effect on the
Romans that five hundred years later they still could not bear the name of king.
It is perhaps significant that king Tarquin was expelled for an offence against
the family: an assault on the chaste Lucretia.
The little republic was at first aristocratic in its constitution, the Patricians
ruling the Plebeians; but it was not long before the plebs began to chafe against
their subjection. And here the political genius of the Romans began to show
itself. For the plebs did not engage in bloody and destructive revolts; they put
forward their demands in a peaceful and orderly way, and when their wrongs
grew too great to be borne, they simply "seceded" from Rome in a body, and
refused to return until their demands had been granted. Three times they went
on strike in this way, and by that simple expedient obtained the justice which
they, and Rome, needed; and they had their privileges written down in laws -
the Laws of the Twelve Tables, the beginning of Roman law. Nor were the
plebs led by resentment to abolish the principle of aristocracy. The Roman
Senate always remained a body of picked men, very different from the
tumultuous gatherings of all the citizens which made up the Assembly of
Athens.
The same political sagacity now began to show itself in Rome's dealings with
her neighbours. From the first she had been engaged in those petty wars which
all these early European communities waged against one another, with little
permanent result; but now the Romans began to be consistently victorious,
and to extend their dominions by permanent conquests. There were two
reasons for this. In the first place, the Romans grasped the great political truth
that conquered peoples must be bound to the conquerors by benefits as well as
by force. They did not enslave or subject the defeated, but admitted them as
"allies" into the Roman state: granting them some of the privileges of Roman
citizens, holding out the promise of full citizenship, and extending over all the
benefits of Roman order and the shield of the Roman peace. In the second
place, they grasped the other simple truth that effective government demands
good communications. They began building roads. They were as thorough
about that as they were about everything else, and the Roman roads have
justly become legendary; for engineering and workmanship nothing like them
was seen in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter) from the fall of the
Empire to the industrial revolution. To safeguard them, little colonies of
Romans were planted as garrisons at strategic points. Conquered peoples were
thus bound to Rome both physically and mentally, and became proud to call
themselves, first "allies" and later "Romans"; yet their individuality was not
crushed, and the Roman state became a close unity of diverse elements. So to
combine unity and diversity is the very essence of the art of government.
Thus the Romans gradually took hold of central Italy, of the Etruscans to the
north and the Samnites to the south and east; and thus they crossed the
Appenines and subdued the Greek cities round the heel and toe of Italy. And
thus they came up against the greatest power in the western Mediterranean -
Carthage.
The Phoenicians, founders of Carthage, were the great traders and voyagers of
the ancient world - greater even than the Greeks. They were an Asiatic people
(Semites, like the Jews; they helped King Solomon to gather his treasures and
to build the Temple at Jerusalem), and from their main ports at Tyre and Sidon
they had spread their commerce throughout the Mediterranean. They were
most admirable seamen. Their galleys dared even the Atlantic, sailing south for
African ivory and north to buy tin from the Britons of Cornwall. But they
always seemed a queer and secret people to Europeans. They had one of those
dark and strange religions which Asia and Africa have often produced; they
worshipped mysterious and savage gods, like Moloch, with mysterious and
savage rites. The Greeks always hated them; and the encounter between them
and the Romans was like the meeting of water and fire.
The Phoenicians had early planted a colony at Carthage, on the point of Africa
nearest to Sicily, at the cross-roads of the Mediterranean; and this became a
most powerful and wealthy city, laying hands on the north African coast and
the greater part of Sicily. The Sicilian Greek cities fought it for long with
varying fortunes; and at last, in the fateful year 264 B.C., they appealed for help
to the new power of Rome.
The Romans at first were at a disadvantage, for they knew little of the sea.
They tackled the problems with their usual thoroughness: took a wrecked
Carthaginian galley as a model for their ship-building, painfully taught
themselves the art of rowing, and invented a spiked draw-bridge by which they
could board enemy vessels and bring their military prowess into play. Even so,
it was their tenacity more than anything else that brought them through to
victory. After twenty-four years of fighting, the Carthaginians grew tired of this
expensive and fruitless war, and agreed to evacuate Sicily.
But this was only a truce. The Romans and Carthaginians had now learned to
know each other, and the result was one of the great hatreds of history.
The Romans, however, wanted to make themselves secure in Italy by
subduing the Gauls who then held the rich northern plain of the Po; the
Carthaginians wanted to compensate themselves for the loss of Sicily by
occupying the wealthy coast of Spain. So it was not till 218 that the military
genius of Hannibal led a Carthaginian army from Spain across the Alps and
down into Italy. The Romans sent an army against him; it was beaten at the
Trebbia. They sent a second; it was beaten at Lake Trasimene. They made a
great effort, and raised a third and bigger army; and the result was the
slaughter of Cannae, where the Romans, out manoeuvred and surrounded,
died in heaps rather than surrender.
Yet the people of Rome would not admit defeat. And now they began to reap
the fruits of their political wisdom: their subjects and allies - even the recently
conquered Gaul's - though offered freedom by Hannibal, remained loyal.
Hannibal found himself in a hostile country, with little hope of reinforcement
or supply. (That he maintained himself there for twelve years shows the
greatness of his genius.) An attempt by his brother to bring help from Spain
was defeated. The Romans themselves discovered a commander of genius in
young Cornelius Scipio; and, while Hannibal lingered in Italy, Scipio drove the
Carthaginians from Spain and invaded Africa. Hannibal himself, hurriedly
recalled, was totally defeated by Scipio at Zama in 202 B.C., and Carthage was
driven to a peace that stripped her of everything but herself.
Even this was not the end. Fifty years later it looked as though Carthage might
rise again; and the Romans, merciless for once, determined to make an end.
After most desperate fighting, they took the city and destroyed it utterly, and
so appeased at last that strange and dreadful hatred which is unique in their
history.
The most important result of this long struggle was that it confirmed and
settled the Roman character. That character had been slowly forming for
centuries; it was finally stamped and, as it were, tempered in the fire of the
Punic Wars. Two centuries later the poet Horace, looking round for a figure to
represent the ideal Roman, picked on Regulus, the defeated commander who
preferred to die by torture rather than advise his countrymen to make peace
with Carthage.
Another result of the Roman victory was that it changed the Roman state into
an empire. The Romans were now responsible for the whole of Italy, for Sicily,
Sardinia, Spain and the north African coast; and they accepted these
responsibilities. But they found they had to go further. Since Alexander's death,
the world of the eastern Mediterranean had fallen into increasing disorder; the
Romans found, like many another imperial power, that disorder is infectious,
and that they could not hope to keep order within their new borders without
extending those borders further. With unwilling irritation they were drawn
into regulating the affairs of Greece, and then into tackling the tangled
confusion of western Asia, with fresh complications assailing them at every
reluctant step forward.
The loosely-built government of the Roman Republic and its civilian army
were neither of them fit to cope with the situation. A more powerful and more
closely-organized form of government was needed to curb the swarms of
Roman merchants, financiers and officials now pouring down like locusts on to
the helpless East, making huge fortunes out of the newly-occupied territories
and filling Rome with their wealth, but gravely hampering the honest Romans
who were trying to make the East secure and contented, and creating a legend
of rapacity which stained the Roman name. And the constant fighting and
police-work which the pacification of the East demanded made necessary a
permanent and professional army.
The army came first. Towards the end of the 2nd century B.C. a horde of
German barbarians threatened to invade Italy. The Romans entrusted the
defence to a young general named Marius, and he formed and trained a picked
force which, when the invaders came, annihilated them. This victory made the
fortune of the new army. Thenceforward the old citizen-levies were more and
more replaced by the long-service professional troops who were to form the
incomparable army of the Empire.
Indeed, it was this army that really made the Empire. The republican
government proved too weak to control it, and during the 1st century B.C. a
succession of able generals, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, made themselves
the real masters of the Roman state. It was Julius Caesar, the greatest political
genius Rome ever produced, who first saw the necessity for replacing the
republic by a stronger and more effective rule. After conquering Gaul, and
establishing the frontier along the Rhine, he openly made himself the sole
master of Rome. He was murdered by the republican diehards, Brutus and
Cassius, in 43 B.C.; but his nephew, Octavius Augustus, took his place and
completed his work, becoming the first Roman Emperor.
The benefits of this were felt immediately. Rapacious officials and speculators
were brought to heel, Roman order and law, and Roman roads were extended
everywhere to the frontiers, and the frontiers themselves were firmly fixed,
along the Rhine, the Danube, and the deserts of Syria, Arabia and the Sahara.
The Emperor Hadrian even built the Great Wall to make a frontier for Britain.
The whole Mediterranean world was incorporated into one state and one
civilization.
Unknown to the Romans, while this was being achieved, a third great force
was entering European history: the Christian religion.
3. Christianity
We have already seen that a religion of some sort is necessary to a civilization.
Men must have an ideal to aim at, reasons for aiming at it, and a way of life
which will enable them to attain it. Therefore they must have some
explanation of the mysteries of life: of what man is, and how and why he
comes to exist. The catechism questions, who made me, and why, are the first
of all questions; we must have answers to them, and on our answers will
depend the whole conduct of our lives. And the answers must be based on
reality. We cannot make our lives out of a game of "let's pretend": let's pretend
there are gods; let's pretend they are like so-and-so; let's pretend they want us
to do this and that. A man must believe his religion is real, or else it will not
have any influence over his actions.
Now, the gods of the Greeks and Romans were imaginary, and only primitive
peoples could really believe in them. When people began to reason about
them, they began to have uncomfortable doubts. At first they tried to suppress
these doubts: Socrates was killed at Athens, and the Christians were later
persecuted, partly for casting doubt on the gods. But such doubts cannot be
suppressed for ever. By the time the Empire was founded, the Romans were
already playing an elaborate game of let's pretend: they went on sacrificing to
the gods because they did not see what else they could do if they were to keep
their society going. They tried to "ginger-up" their religion by adopting gods
and goddesses from other peoples: Isis from Egypt, for instance, and Mithras
from Persia. They began to worship the Emperor, as the representative of the
gods on earth - at least the Emperor's power was a real and a visible one. But
none of this was satisfactory. Doubting religion, the Romans began to doubt
morality, to doubt truth, to doubt life itself. They began to ask if anything was
true, if life itself was worth while. These are fatal questions, unless they are
promptly answered. Christianity answered them; but the Roman delay in
admitting Christianity wrecked the Empire, and nearly wrecked our
civilization.
Christianity arose among the Jews. The Jews were unique among ancient
peoples because they alone had a religion which could stand the tests of reason
and reality. That was all they had. The Greeks had a great culture, the Romans
a great empire; but the Jews had only a God. They maintained that there was
only one God, and that He was the maker and lord of all things. He was not a
part of nature, but altogether above and beyond nature, which was merely His
creation. He was a spirit, and no material image could represent Him. He was
the power of Being itself (His name was "He Who Is"); all other beings came
from Him, and He was absolutely above and beyond them all. "When I behold
the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou has
created: what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? ...." (Psalm 8).
Man, the Jews affirmed, was a creature of God, and had been made to be happy
in the world of God's creation. But he had rebelled against God, and had thus
reduced himself to his present state of wretchedness. Yet God was merciful,
and designed to redeem mankind. He had chosen the Jews as His instrument,
and they were to preserve His truth and worship in the world till the appointed
time, when He would send them a Redeemer, a Messias, who would establish
over the whole world a kingdom of justice and peace.
To this faith the Jews held grimly: the more grimly for their many calamities.
As a small nation, they were continually beaten down and tossed hither and
thither by mighty adversaries: Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians,
Greeks, Romans; continually they rose again, and renewed their faith in the
one God, of Whom they were the chosen people and the cradle of the
Redeemer to come. In the first century A.D. they were scattered throughout
the Roman world; but a remnant still held on, under Roman suzerainty, to
their ancestral land of Judea, and still offered sacrifice to the one God in His
one Temple at Jerusalem. The Romans knew them for a stubborn and stiff-
necked race, and let them alone as far as possible; and the Jews on their side did
not try to make converts: they clung to their God and awaited their Messias,
and "hardened their hearts with hope".
Towards the year 50 A.D., the Romans began to be aware of a quarrel among
the Jews. There was a riot at Corinth, when one Paul of Tarsus was accused by
the Jews there of trying to subvert their religion. A few years later, the same
Paul had to be rescued by Roman troops in Jerusalem from a howling mob of
Jews thirsting for his blood. Yet Paul was himself a Jew. He belonged to a sect
of Jews who were called Christians, because they followed one Jesus Christ, of
whom very queer things were told - as Festus, governor of Judea, said to King
Agrippa, "a dead man called Jesus, whom Paul affirms to be alive". (Acts XXV)
These Christians soon became a problem. Unlike the other Jews, they were
ardent in making converts, and spread with extraordinary rapidity; before the
year 100 Pliny, governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, was complaining to the
Emperor Trajan that the Christians in his province were so numerous that the
temples of the gods were deserted: what was he to do?
What the Romans actually did was to make sporadic efforts to wipe out the
new religion. In ten major persecutions, during two hundred and fifty years,
the full strength of the Empire was exerted to suppress Christianity. The
attempt failed. The Christians numbered their martyrs by thousands, but their
converts by millions. Diocletian, the last great persecutor, found he had to
execute his own officials and members of his personal bodyguard for being
Christians. His successor, Constantine, granted the Christians toleration by the
Edict of Milan, in 313. A century later they had come to be the dominant force
in the Empire - too late to save the Empire, but soon enough to save
civilization.
What was it that they believed, and why were they so successful? St. John the
Apostle summed up the doctrine of Christianity in these words: "God so loved
the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, so that those who believe in
him may not perish, but have everlasting life". (John III) Like the Jews, the
Christians believed in one Divinity, but they believed that Divinity to contain
three distinct principles, or Persons. As there is in each man a being, an
intelligence, and a will, so there is in God a Father, the Being of God, and a
Son, the Understanding or Idea or Word of God, and a Spirit, the Love of God.
These three are all equally and eternally God, and unitedly live the Divine life
of perfect being, knowing and loving.
God had created man to share in this Divine life. But man had rebelled, and
had thus become subject to sin and to its unhappy consequences, suffering and
death; and this explained the miserable state of the world. Yet God loved men
too much to abandon them to themselves and to evil: He had continued to
work on them in various ways, and particularly through the Jews, His chosen
people, drawing them upwards in knowledge and love until the time when He
could make a full revelation of Himself to them.
That time came in what we call the first century A.D. Then God the Son
became man. He was born of a virgin, Mary; He took on Himself the human
nature of Jesus of Nazareth, and with that He took on Himself the whole
burden of humanity: the endurance of evil, suffering and death. He was born
and grew up among the poor; and then He set out to teach men the way to life:
the way back to union with God. That way, as He taught it, was a way of love.
God loved men, and men must love God; God loved all men, and therefore
men must all love one another. He admitted no exceptions to this; He said,
"Love your enemies, do good to those that hate you, pray for those who
persecute and insult you, that so you may be true sons of your Father in
heaven, Who makes His sun to rise on the evil and equally on the good, His
rain to fall on the just and equally on the unjust" (Matthew V). He promised
his followers union with God: "If a man has any love for me he will be true to
my words; and then he will win my Father's love, and we will both come to
him, and make our continual abode with him" (John XIV). He promised Divine
strength: He promised that they would receive the Spirit of God, the very Spirit
of love, "to abide with them forever". He promised that they would receive
everlasting life. "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me,
though he is dead, will live on, and whoever has life, and has faith in me, to all
eternity cannot die" (John XI). The truth of these teachings He confirmed by
extraordinary works: healing the sick, giving sight and hearing to blind and
deaf, and even raising the dead to life.
Crowds of the Jews followed Him; but their leaders and priests for the most
part disbelieved in Him and rejected his doctrine. They accused Him of stirring
up rebellion, and persuaded the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to have Him
arrested and crucified. But (said the Christians) the third day after His burial He
rose from the dead. He appeared to those whom He had chosen, "the
witnesses appointed by God beforehand" (Acts X). He showed them His
Divinity. He told them that He had submitted to death as a sacrifice of love for
men. He gave them authority to carry on the work He had begun, to establish
His kingdom (the kingdom of the love of God and man) over the whole earth,
promising that those who believed in Him and were received into the kingdom
would have their sins forgiven and would be united with God. He told them
that they would have to suffer and die, as He had suffered and died; but that
their suffering and death would be, like His, means of redemption and of
eternal life to themselves and to others. Finally, He promised that He would
return again at the right time (He would not tell them when), to give judgment
on the world and to set all things right for ever.
That was, in very rough outline, the doctrine the Christians were teaching. It
has proved itself the most powerful force in history; and an historian, whether
he believes it or not, must try and understand it and see why it has had such an
effect.
In the first place, alone of all the great religions, Christianity claims to be based
on definite historical fact. Jesus Christ is not a product of the imagination, like
Neptune or Venus; He is not a discovery of the reason, like the First Movers of
Aristotle; He is not even a purely spiritual being, like the God of the Jews; He is
an historical character, born at Bethlehem, living at Nazareth, dying at
Jerusalem, in certain definite years. "In the fifteenth year of the reign of the
Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, when Herod
was prince in Galilee, his brother Philip in the Iturean and Trachonitid region,
and Lysanias in Abilina, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiphas ..." - that
is how St. Luke writes. And St. John says, "our message concerns that Word
Who is life; what He was from the first, what we have learned about Him,
what our own eyes have seen of Him: what it was that met our gaze and the
touch of our hands ... This message about what we have seen and heard we
pass on to you". This appeal to actual experienced fact runs throughout the
New Testament; and it is this which gives Christianity its incomparable reality.
It is not based on imagination, nor on a chain of reasoning, but on something
that is asserted to have actually happened. The early Christians did not argue
about the Resurrection; they simply said, "Christ is risen: we saw Him".
In the second place, Christ's teaching offers a more definite and a clearer
explanation of the perplexities of human life, especially of sin, suffering and
death, than any other religion. In particular, the idea of suffering and death as
the result of sin, but also the means, through Christ, of redemption from sin,
has a Tightness and a justice that come home to men's minds and correspond
to their needs. Then, too, Christianity offers a way of life, a programme of
action, equally clear and definite, and promises to those who follow it Divine
help and a certainty of deliverance.
That way of life itself, the way of love, appeals to what is deepest and best in
human nature. After all, what men want and need more than anything else is
an object of love: a person, a leader, a cause they can devote themselves to.
Such devotion is the foundation of all effort, the source of all heroism; it is the
source also, when it is given to unworthy objects, of the worst evils. Men will
follow a Hitler if they can see nothing better. Christianity satisfies this need.
The idea of God as a God of love (of the Father, "from whom all fatherhood in
heaven and on earth is named"; of the Son, Who gives His life for His friends;
of the Spirit, Who is love itself) gives men an object worthy of love. The
human figure of Christ - the strong, the wise, the compassionate, the best of all
men and the most worthy to be loved - brings this home. No-one has ever
been loved as much as He. And the idea of other men as equally children of
God and equally to be loved makes this devotion practical: "As often as you did
it to the least of these My little ones you did it to Me".
Anyone who takes Christianity seriously knows the enormous relief that
comes with the realization that the sole duty and happiness of man is to love
and serve God and his fellow-men. If that is so now, after all these centuries,
imagine what it was like to the bewildered and groping minds of the first
century.
These considerations help to explain why it was that Christianity in the end
overcame even the Roman Empire, and established itself as a permanent basis
of European civilization. They do not, I think, explain it entirely. What is queer
about Christianity is that it keeps going, although there are very few people
who can be called perfect Christians. Indeed, there never were. The queer
thing is that people persist in calling themselves Christians, and even in trying
to be Christians, in spite of their failures; and the Church as a whole suffers
troubles and scandals of all kinds, and still continues to exist and to go forward:
it rises and falls like a ship in a storm, but it does not sink. This is a peculiar
circumstance, and there is nothing quite like it in history. The extraordinary
tenacity of European civilization, and its power of recovery from crushing
disasters (of which we shall see many examples), are undoubtedly due to the
persistent influence of its religion.
Christianity, we have seen, spread very rapidly. About its early development
there is some dispute: documents are scanty, and scholars tend to interpret
them by theological rather than purely historical lights. It is clear, however,
that from the first the Christians were an exclusive body, admission to which
was only obtained by baptism after a profession of faith in Christ. It is clear,
too, from the letters of St Paul, that the Christians were soon organized in local
communities, or "churches", each of which, generally speaking, was ruled over
by a bishop. There may have been some exceptions to this at first, but it soon
became universal; the city-organization of the Greeks and Romans offered an
obvious model, and it was not long before every city was the seat of a
bishopric. It seems certain, too, that St. Peter, the chief of the Apostles,
established himself at Rome, and that he and St. Paul were martyred there;
from which circumstances the church at Rome and its bishop derived an
exceptional position. All this becomes clearer as the documents grow more
numerous; by the end of the second century it is obvious that the Christians
are everywhere organized under bishops, and that the bishop of Rome holds a
commanding position among the rest.
Christianity thus formed a definite spiritual society, and perhaps it was
inevitable that it should come into conflict with the great secular society of the
Roman Empire. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had any idea of what we
call the division between Church and State: religion, for them, was a part of
civic and family duty. The Romans tolerated all gods, but they insisted that the
Emperor should be worshipped as the representative on earth of whatever
gods there Were; the Christians denied all gods but their own, and refused
absolutely to worship anyone else. They would give loyalty to the Emperor,
but not worship; they would "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and
to God the things that are God's". Unfortunately, the Emperor did not see the
distinction: to him, as to all ancient rulers, the State was absolute. The
Christians were maintaining the principle that the State is not absolute: they
were claiming to be spiritually independent of the State; and it was this
principle, so vitally important for mankind, that was victorious when
Constantine accepted the Faith.
There was another way, too, in which Christianity was revolutionary. Neither
the Greeks nor the Romans had any clear idea of individual rights and liberties;
the individual, for them, was only a part of society: a citizen of the city or a
member of the family. The good of society was more important than the good
of the individual. According to Christ's teaching, the individual must come
first. Each individual is a child of God, and his end is to be united with God;
and society exists, fundamentally, in order to enable him to reach that end.
That is, society exists for the good of its members. This explains, among other
things, why Christianity was bound to lead to the abolition of slavery. The
early Christians did not attack slavery, as such; all they insisted on was that the
slave must be treated as a man and a brother, and not as a mere possession. But
experience shows that this is not possible: if one man is possessed by another,
he will be treated as a mere possession. Slavery is therefore a bad thing both for
masters and slaves. As this fact was gradually realized, it became impossible to
tolerate slavery in a Christian society.
We shall see more of this later on. It is enough to notice now that the working-
out of these revolutionary principles of Christianity is perhaps the main strand
in European history.
4. The Roman Empire
It was under the Roman Empire that the thing we call "Europe" first appeared
in history. Not that the Empire included all Europe; it was bounded,
practically, by the Rhine and the Danube, and by Hadrian's Wall in Britain: it
excluded Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia, most of Germany and most of Russia.
It also included much that is not Europe today: Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and
north Africa. But European civilization is the civilization of the Roman Empire.
It was in that Empire, and mainly by the Roman genius, that the three forces of
Greece, Rome and Christianity were welded together into one thing, and the
later history of Europe is the history of the development of this thing. All the
great modern movements and revolutions in Europe - the Industrial
Revolution, the French Revolution, even Communism - spring, as we shall see,
from elements already present in the Roman Empire. Europe has never been
seriously influenced from any other source. The Celts, the Scandinavians, the
Germans and the Slavs were absorbed into Europe; they all made some slight
contribution to it, but they received far more than they gave. In modern times,
Europe has extended her influence widely and deeply over America, Africa,
Asia and Australasia; but she has not herself been greatly influenced, as yet, by
any of the races or cultures of these continents. She has been too occupied in
developing her own rich inheritance.
"Developing": that is the word. For of course it would be absurd to say that
European civilization is still what it was under the Romans. The society of the
Empire was only its first form, and a very imperfect form at that. We shall see
it grow through many other forms before reaching its present one; but this first
form, just because it is the first, deserves special study. Unless we understand it,
we shall not understand the changes which transformed it. Let us consider it
under the five headings explained in our Introduction.

The Political System
The revolution carried out by Julius Caesar and his nephew Augustus
transferred the power and responsibility of government from the Senate to the
Emperor: from an assembly to a person. Personal rule was the keystone of the
imperial arch. The Emperor was personally in control of all the Empire, and
personally responsible for safeguarding and maintaining it. The Senate was
retained, and the Emperors made use of it; but they were not in any way
subject to it or dependent on it: each Emperor bore the burden of government
alone.
This was not so difficult as you might suppose, for the Empire inherited a
system of law and administration which was already well-developed, and only
needed to be firmly and systematically applied. (Firmness and decision were
the great advantages of the imperial as contrasted with the republican
government of Rome.) Roman law, already well-founded, was formed by the
great lawyers of the Empire (Ulpian, for instance) into a mighty and all-
embracing code which made the task of governing comparatively easy. The
actual administration of the Empire (for example, its division into provinces,
with their governors and subordinate officials) had also been developed under
the republic. All the Emperors had to do was to tighten up the system and
supervise its working.
A further relief to the Emperor was the system of city-government. We have
seen how the Romans, when they conquered a people, did not as a rule destroy
the native institutions which they found, but incorporated them into their own
system. So the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily, of Greece and Asia,
were permitted to retain self-government in their local affairs, under the
supervision of the Roman governors. The Romans extended this system to the
half-barbarian lands of the West, to Spain and Gaul and Britain, deliberately
founding cities like Toledo and Paris and London to serve as centres of local
government. The wealthy families of the neighbourhood were expected to
serve, without pay, as magistrates, to administer the affairs of the city. In this
way government was decentralized as much as possible, and a great weight
was lifted from the shoulders of the Emperor. In fact, the Empire has been
described as "a federation of city-states"; and though this is exaggerated, it
contains a good deal of truth.
Without these three - the universal code of law, the excellent civil service, and
the local city-governments - the task of the Emperor would have been
impossible. As it was, the Empire could carry on fairly well even under a weak
or unworthy Emperor, or even when it was uncertain who was the Emperor.
For it sometimes was uncertain. It was a weakness of the Empire that there
was no regular rule of succession. Julius Caesar achieved power as a victorious
general, as the master of the great professional army which he had helped to
make; and all later Emperors were in the same position. The very word
"imperator" is a military title. The army was the main power in Rome, and the
Emperor was the man who had the confidence and loyalty of the army: if he
lost that, he would soon cease to be Emperor. When he died, it was the army
which, in practice, decided his successor: no man could rule unless the army
accepted him. Of course the army would not always agree, and then there
would be a civil war: the legions in the East, for instance, supporting their
favourite general, while the legions in Gaul and Britain supported theirs; and
the Praetorian Guard at Rome might have a candidate of its own. All in all,
though, the system (if it can be called a system) worked better than you would
expect. No great political gifts were needed to run the Empire: an energetic
and able soldier was probably the best man for the job. Then, too, under this
system the nominal power of the Emperor was combined with the real power
of the army-leader: power and responsibility were in the same hands. And since
the position of Emperor might be gained by any soldier of ambition and ability,
it did not fall into the hands of a family or a clique.
The army itself was, in the early years, the cream of Roman society, and was
certainly as well fitted as any other group to choose the Emperor. Those who
were accepted as recruits became Roman citizens. They enlisted for twenty
years, and at the end of their period of service they were settled on the land, in
one of the numerous military colonies which were scattered over the Empire,
to enrich it by cultivating the soil, and to produce sons who would "follow the
eagles" in their turn. Being professionals, the Roman soldiers were excellently
trained; their discipline and fighting-spirit were magnificent; during the first
two centuries A.D. the army was a kind of embodiment of the Roman
character. Hence it was singularly effective. It never seems to have numbered
more than 600,000 men; yet these 600,000 were enough to preserve order and
to defend all the long line of the frontier against the outer barbarians. (They
were helped, of course, by the network of roads which enabled them to be
concentrated rapidly at any threatened spot.) At its best, the Roman army has
never been surpassed; we shall have to see later how it degenerated as the
Empire grew old.
The Economic System
The two principal figures in the Roman economic system were the landowner
and the slave. The economy of the Empire was essentially an agricultural and a
slave economy. Commerce was well developed, certainly, but Rome had
always been an agricultural rather than a commercial state, and the Empire
carried on this tradition. Land was the chief source of wealth, and the
landowner was the kingpin of the economic system. For, although some of the
land was held by the government (in the great imperial estates which were
managed by public officials), most of it was divided into private holdings. Each
of these was the seat of a "familia". I have already explained that the Roman
"family" included not only what we call the family, but also all the employees
and slaves who worked on the family estate, all living and working together
under the control of the "paterfamilias", the father or head of the family. We
must imagine the Empire, particularly its Western half, as divided into these
self-controlled and largely self-supporting family estates, some large and some
small, but with the larger ones growing more numerous as time went on.
Everything else in the economic system depended ultimately on these. So did
the social and political systems, to a large extent. The cities were fed and
supported by them, the city-government was supplied by the neighbouring
landowners, the principal tax was the land-tax paid by the landowners, and the
army was at first recruited chiefly from among them; they were the most
important class in society, and everyone who was not a landowner aspired to
become one.
The labour-force on these estates consisted chiefly of slaves. Indeed, slaves
performed nearly all the manual labour of the Empire, from ploughing to
rowing galleys. Slavery is, of course, found everywhere in the ancient world,
but in the Empire it became much more extensive than it had ever been, at
least in Europe. The Roman conquests provided an enormous supply of slaves,
and slave-labour was thus made plentiful and cheap. The results of this were
almost wholly bad. Nothing is more wasteful and inefficient than slave-labour,
if only because a slave will rarely do more than he is forced to; and so the
increase in slavery produced a general economic decline. And the slave-system
gave the big landowner, who could afford to use up many slaves, an advantage
over the small one; and this is an important reason why the small independent
farmer, the backbone of the Roman world, gradually died out. Furthermore,
the cheapness of slave-labour produced a class of unemployed free citizens,
who could not compete with the slaves, and therefore formed the city mobs
who had to be fed and entertained at the public expense. Finally, a slave
birthrate generally tends to be low (slave-families being liable to be broken up
by their members being sold off to other masters), and so, the greater the
proportion of slaves in a population, the lower the birth-rate tends to be.
Besides all this, slavery is bad for the morale of a people; the slave tends to
cringe, shirk and lie, the master to be overbearing, callous and lazy.
Apart from slavery, the Roman economy had the defect of placing too many
burdens on the landowning class. It was like having all one's eggs in one basket.
As long as that class remained numerous, vigorous and efficient, the system
would work; but it actually tended to become less numerous, vigorous and
efficient, precisely because of the burdens it had to bear.
The Social System
The social system was really very simple. At the top were the great
landowners, who supplied most of the high officials and officers of the army.
With them may be ranked the rich merchants, who usually ended up by
buying land and so joining the top class. Then came the smaller landowners,
the independent farmers, who formed at first the bulk of the free population,
and who supplied the lesser officials and most of the recruits for the army.
Then, in the cities, came the skilled craftsmen, tradesmen, shop-keepers and
small merchants, and finally the city-mobs of unemployed or half-employed
freemen. Underneath all were the majority of the population - the slaves.
Roman citizenship at first provided other distinctions. We have seen that the
Romans only extended the privileges of citizenship very gradually to the
peoples they conquered. At first, therefore, there were in the Empire full
citizens, and also half and quarter-citizens, so to speak. But the area of
citizenship was always extending, and these distinctions finally disappeared in
235 A.D., when the Emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all the free
inhabitants of the Empire.
Culture
We have seen how the Romans borrowed their culture from the Greeks:
adding something of their own, but not making any essential changes. Under
the Empire, culture advanced but little. After the great age of Augustus (30
B.C. - 14 A.D.), little new was produced in art, science, or philosophy. What
the Empire did was to spread this culture over Europe. The new cities that
were founded, especially in Gaul and Spain, became centres in which the
populations of those countries learned and absorbed the culture of Greece and
Rome. This was later to produce immense fruit. There is little that can be said
about the process: it was chiefly one of fertilization, not having any immediate
practical results, but preparing the way for great things in the future. It is a
principal part of the debt we owe to the Roman Empire.
Christianity, of course, brought a new cultural stimulus. Great churches, like
the Roman basilicas or the cathedral of Sancta Sophia at Constantinople, great
Christian orators like St. John Chrysostom, great theologians like the brilliant
and lovable St. Augustine, show a new flowering of classical culture in the days
of the Empire's decline, and lay the foundations for even greater work in the
future. It is precisely here that we see Greece, Rome and Christianity becoming
united; in the work of St. Augustine, for instance, with its combination of
elements from the Scripture, from Plato, and from Cicero. When we see the
Parthenon or the Pantheon, when we read Homer or Virgil, we are aware of
something Greek or Roman; but anyone who goes into the church of San
Vitale at Ravenna, or reads St. Augustine's "Confessions", at once recognizes
that they are European in the full sense of the word: he is conscious in them of
Greek beauty, Roman order, and Christian inspiration. As I have said, this
fusion of the three elements that go to make Europe is the main achievement
of the Roman Empire.
Religion
Religion was always the weakest part of the Roman system. As I have already
suggested, by the time the Empire was founded the observance of religion
among both the Romans and the Greeks had become an elaborate game of
make-believe. Yet men must have some kind of religion. The gap left by the
decline of the traditional beliefs was partly filled by all sorts of queer rites and
superstitions and mystery-cults. Among the upper-classes Stoicism had a
certain vogue: a kind of puritanism which advocated perfect self-control and
the suppression of all desire; an admirable creed up to a point, but dry and
hard, and not likely to appeal to more than a few. Indeed, the religious
confusion led to a widespread collapse of moral standards. The pagan world
depicted by St. Augustine in his "Confessions" is a world in which morals have
gone to pieces: a world in which practically anything is permitted, because
people can see no reason why it should not be. Sex-morality seems to have
disappeared altogether; and even such virtues as common honesty - on which
the Romans had prided themselves in the past - grew rarer and rarer. What is
generally taken as a symbol of this wholesale moral collapse is the practice of
legalized murder for entertainment in the gladiatorial shows; but that is only
the most obvious example of a universal disease. When one reflects, it is easy
to understand why many Christians concluded that it was not possible to live a
decent life in the world, and went off to live as hermits.
Christianity itself spread too slowly to effect the necessary reformation. When
Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313, the Christians were still only one-
fifth of the population. Furthermore, during the next century - a vital century,
as it turned out - the Christians were distracted by a fierce internal struggle
about the Arian heresy. The Arians denied the Divinity of Christ, and the bitter
disputes which raged about this fundamental doctrine certainly hindered
Christianity - though some historians say that the Empire was already too far
gone by 300 to be revivified even by Christianity.
Decline
The causes of the Empire's decline will now be fairly clear. The chief one was
undoubtedly moral: what a modern historian has called "a loss of heart" in the
peoples of the Empire - an unwillingness to bear the burdens and make the
sacrifices necessary to keep society going. This moral decline was itself caused
mainly, I should say, by the weakening of religion, but also by the curse of
slavery and by the excessive burdens laid on the landowners; its chief results
were a fall in the birth-rate and an increasing difficulty in getting recruits for
the army and magistrates to undertake the task of local government.
The fall in the birth-rate was the most significant and serious of these results.
When a people ceases to have the vitality to reproduce itself - that is, when the
rearing of children comes to be considered too troublesome and expensive to
be worth while - disaster must follow. In the second century A.D. the
population of the Empire was already declining; by the fourth century whole
tracts of land were passing out of cultivation. The burdens of the Empire
remained the same, but the number of people who had to carry them
constantly decreased. Recruits for the army also became progressively more
difficult to obtain. And the number of men who were able and willing to
undertake the responsibility and expense of local government declined, so that
the whole system of city-government began to weaken and collapse. Thus
three of the main pillars of the Empire - the land, the army and the city - began
to fail; while the disputes and wars about the succession of the Emperors still
went on, and so did the unnecessary quarrel with Christianity, which divided
the Empire more and more seriously as the Christians grew in numbers.
While the Roman world was thus decaying, the "barbarians" round its borders
grew more threatening. In the third century the Persians built themselves up
again into a great power, and became a constant menace to the Eastern
frontier. More serious still was the situation in the north, beyond the Danube
and the Rhine. The tribes who lived there were being shaken up by the
pressure from the East. The Huns, a savage warrior race of nomadic horsemen,
were on the move out of central Asia, driving other peoples before them,
towards Russia and central Europe, and under their pressure the whole region
above the Danube became a seething cauldron of fighting tribes, dammed back
by the Roman frontier, but longing more and more to spill over it and find
space and security beyond. It was not a question of mere plundering raids, such
as the Romans had experienced and dealt with often enough; whole nations
were now battling desperately for room, between the hammer of the Huns and
the anvil of the Empire. In the third century the frontier gave way at several
points, and the barbarians poured in. But the end was not yet. A succession of
"soldier-emperors", like Aurelian and Probus, crushed the invaders and
restored the situation; and towards the end of the century the great Diocletian
(284-305) re-organized the whole imperial system and made the Empire (so it
seemed) stronger than ever. But it was not the same Empire.

Book Two - The Dark Age: 400-1000
5. The Breaking Of The Empire
Diocletian made final and definite a number of changes which had begun
before his time. The difficulties which faced the Emperors of the third century
were the depopulation of the land, the decline of the army, the failure of city-
government, and the growing pressure of the barbarians. For the last of these
they found a solution which, so they thought, would also help to solve the first
two. You will remember how, in earlier times, the Romans had been
accustomed to treat the peoples they conquered as "allies", and so incorporate
them into the Roman state. They now determined to do likewise with the
barbarians. Selected groups were allowed to settle in the Empire: were given
land to hold on condition that they paid tribute and provided a certain number
of troops for the Roman army. These settlements were first made in the
frontier districts, to offset the immediate pressure of the tribes, but were later
extended to depopulated areas in the interior. Thus the danger from the
barbarians was somewhat relieved, the fall in population was partly made
good, and a large number of stout recruits were obtained for the Army.
This was a clever and typically Roman move. Had Roman civilization been still
vigorous, it might have been completely successful: the Goths and Alans and
Franks and the rest might have been as thoroughly Romanized as the Gauls
and Spaniards had been. In fact, they were never more than half Romanized.
They retained, for example, much of their own tribal organization and laws.
They were never really assimilated, and their presence, and their increasing
influence, helped to weaken and degrade still further Roman culture and
society. In particular, they came in time to dominate the army, and we have
seen how important the army was in the Empire. Barbarian generals were soon
taking an active part in the selection of Emperors, and in fighting the civil wars
which these selections so often involved. And meanwhile, other barbarian
tribes kept up the pressure on the frontier. So this experiment was only a
partial success. Still, it was a partial success: it did "cushion" the impact of the
barbarians, and prevent them from being so utterly destructive as they might
otherwise have been.
Meanwhile, the internal organization of the Empire was undergoing a
complete change: a change towards centralization and government control. As
voluntary local governments broke down, they had to be replaced by imperial
officials. This development was completed by Diocletian, who established an
enormous civil service, dependent on the Emperor, and controlling every
detail of administration. Thenceforth the imperial officials were everywhere
and did everything. Something like this was needed under the circumstances,
but it was much more cumbersome and expensive than the previous system,
and placed a far heavier burden both on the people and on the Emperor. This,
and the continued decline of population, forced the government into a
wholesale "direction of labour", to see to it that the available labour-force was
used to the best advantage. It was vital, for instance, that the land should be
kept under cultivation; therefore land-workers were forbidden to leave the
land, and landowners were forbidden to sell land without the slaves necessary
to cultivate it. The slaves thus became serfs, "bound to the soil", and their
position was improved accordingly; but the small landowners suffered
severely. They could not bear the increasing weight of taxation, and bit by bit
they were forced into dependence on the big landowners, who took over the
land and paid the taxes, while the former owners worked the land as tenants.
Men in other trades lost their freedom, too. They were organized in groups
called "colleges", bound to carry on a certain kind of work, and forbidden to
change their occupations. Thus the government took over the economic
direction of society, and enlisted another little army of officials to enforce its
regulations.

Diocletian saw clearly that no one man could administer this system. He
therefore divided the Empire into two parts: the East, consisting of the Balkans,
Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, and the West, consisting of North Africa, Italy,
Gaul, Spain and Britain. As the East was most seriously threatened by the
Persians and the barbarians, Diocletian took its government upon himself, and
appointed a subordinate Emperor, Maximian, to govern the West. This step
was absolutely necessary, but it was nevertheless the beginning of the break-up
of the Empire.
Diocletian also tried to settle the succession: he decreed that each Emperor
should appoint his own successor and then resign. But he reckoned without the
army, and when he resigned there was another civil war. The legions in Britain
elected their young commander, Constantine, and he vanquished all his rivals
and became sole Emperor in 312. This remarkable man (one of the few
generals in history who never suffered defeat) attributed his extraordinary
success to the God of the Christians, and immediately put a stop to the
persecution of Christianity by the Edict of Milan. This is one of his chief titles
to fame. Another is the foundation of Constantinople. He saw, like Diocletian,
how seriously the East was threatened; he saw that Rome was too far away to
be a suitable headquarters; and he determined to establish a new capital for the
Empire in the East. He chose for its site Byzantium, at the outlet from the
Black Sea. It was a brilliant choice: Constantinople at once became, what it has
remained ever since, one of the chief cities of the world. For the West, though,
it was a disastrous choice. Henceforward, although a subordinate Emperor was
maintained in the West, the attention and efforts of the imperial government
were concentrated chiefly on the East, and the West was left increasingly to
fend for itself; and this explains why it was that in the troubled times that
followed the threatened East survived, while the West went down.
Another result, even more important in the long run, was that the Pope was
left alone in Rome. The acknowledged head of the Christian Church was thus
able to maintain his independence of the Emperor, in a way which would
hardly have been possible had the imperial capital and the Christian capital
remained the same. How important this was we shall see later on.
The work of Diocletian and Constantine certainly gave the Empire a new lease
of life. The Persians were held in check, the barbarians were kept out (except
for such tribes as were deliberately admitted to settlement), and the economic
system continued to function. The spread of Christianity even led, as we have
seen, to a new flowering of culture. Yet, on the whole the Empire was still
going down. The deadweight of the imperial government, and the crushing
burden of taxation which it imposed, were stifling to enterprise; the division
between East and West grew ever wider; and even the Christians were now
divided by the great quarrel between Arians and Catholics. Sooner or later a
crisis was bound to come. It was provoked in the end by the Visigoths.
In the year 376 a considerable group of barbarians, hard-pressed by their
enemies, begged to be allowed to cross the Danube and settle in the Empire.
Most of them were Goths: Visigoths, or Western Goths, from the shores of the
Black Sea. The Emperor Valens, badly needing troops, allowed them in on the
usual conditions. But Roman regulations and taxes, and Roman officials,
proved irksome and oppressive to them; it was not long before they staged a
rebellion, and Valens, marching against them, was utterly defeated and killed at
the battle of Adrianople. His successor, the great Theodosius, succeeded in
pacifying the Visigoths, but only by granting them a semi-independent status,
and the whole affair was ominous for the future. Theodosius also found time
to deal with various pretenders who had arisen in the West - including
Maximus, from Britain - but the difficulty he had in doing so showed clearly
how weak by now was the link between East and West. Indeed, Theodosius
was the last Emperor to rule a united Empire. His death in 395 was quickly
followed by disaster.
The commander of the Visigothic troops at that time was a brilliant young
soldier named Alaric. He had been highly favoured by Theodosius, but was
ambitious of greater honours, and decided to satisfy his ambitions by force. He
first seized the province of Illyricum, and then, in 400, attacked the Western
Emperor Honorius in Italy. He was held in check for some years by another
barbarian general, Stilicho; but Stilicho's murder in 408 left Alaric free to
conquer Italy, and in 410 he captured and sacked Rome itself. Soon afterwards
he died, but the damage had been done. Other barbarian tribes, Alans and
Sueves and Vandals, followed the example of the Visigoths. The Vandals,
indeed, had been invited to help in the war against Alaric, but proved
uncontrollable. Together with the Sueves and Alans, they ravaged southern
Gaul, and thence passed on to treat Spain likewise. In 429 they were invited by
a rebellious Roman governor into Africa, and here they set up a Vandal
kingdom whose ships became the terror of the western Mediterranean. In 455
they captured and sacked Rome for the second time.
Meanwhile the Visigoths, after Alaric's death, had been allowed to settle in
Gaul. Thence they were invited to restore order in Spain, and did so; but only
to make it a Visigothic kingdom. Northern Gaul had been occupied in similar
fashion by the Franks, who later, under their great leader Clovis (486 - 511),
took possession of southern Gaul as well. As for Britain, nearly all the Roman
troops had been withdrawn from it in 410, to help in the war against Alaric;
and they never returned. Britain was left to be attacked by the Picts of
Scotland, the Scots of Ireland, and the Saxons from across the North Sea.
In Italy itself, the last Roman Emperor of the West was deposed by a barbarian
commander, Odoacer, in 476. The Emperor of the East at the time consented
to this; but Odoacer then began to act as an independent ruler, and a later
Emperor enlisted against him a force of Ostrogoths under Theodoric.
Theodoric defeated and killed Odoacer in 493, but then proceeded to establish
his own Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.
Thus by 500 the Western Empire had been irretrievably broken. Italy was an
Ostrogothic kingdom, Gaul a Frankish kingdom, Spain a Visigothic kingdom,
and Africa a Vandal kingdom; while in Britain the Celts and the Saxons were
waging a bloody struggle for the possession of the country.
These changes were accompanied by such devastating wars as Europe had not
known since the rise of Roman power. The barbarians, half-savage, ill-
disciplined and eager for plunder, wrought havoc in the countries they fought
over. Moreover, between 440 and 453 Europe had suffered the assaults of Attila
and his Huns. These, indeed, had been driven off (the decisive victory over
them was won at Chalons in 451, by a mixed Roman and barbarian army under
the Roman Aetius); but they had caused worse devastation than all the rest.
These losses might have been restored by a prolonged period of peace and
good government, but there was no possibility of this. Roman unity, and with
it the Roman peace, had gone for good; and the barbarian rulers were not in
any sense the equals of the Romans in the art of government.
Yet we must not exaggerate. The barbarians were not very numerous, and
were not, on the whole, hostile to Roman civilization and law - so long as they
themselves were not required to submit to it. They were content to be a ruling
aristocracy, and to govern the native peoples more or less on Roman lines.
Indeed, their reverence for the Roman name was extraordinary. No barbarian
leader ever ventured to proclaim himself Emperor: they still considered
themselves as somehow subjects of the Empire, though with special privileges.
But they did not understand, and therefore could not carry on, the Roman
tradition. They were content to allow their subjects to live by that tradition, if
they chose; and for many years (such is the force of habit) their subjects did
choose to. We must not imagine a sudden and complete collapse of Roman
society. What happened was a gradual decay: Roman law being continually
less obeyed, and more corrupted by local and barbarian customs; violence and
local war becoming more common; arts and science, and education, being
more and more neglected as people became more and more occupied with the
mere business of keeping alive; population still declining, pestilence and
occasional famine taking their toll; roads crumbling, bridges falling, trade
diminishing; marsh and forest (those great forests which are the background of
all mediaeval legends) swallowing up more and more of the cultivated land;
that would be a fair general picture of Western Europe in the three centuries
that followed the fall of Rome.
Perhaps it had to be. Perhaps the Roman system had become too much of a
strait-jacket, and had to be broken to allow free play to the fuller development
of Europe. There are historians who regard the coming of the barbarians as a
great deliverance. Perhaps it was; but it brought enormous misery in its train.
The chronicles of this period make grim reading: the more so because of the
horrors they only hint at - the untold sufferings of the common people. We,
who are facing the possibility of a similar collapse, have a keener appreciation
than 19th century historians of what is meant by the fall of a civilization. After
the breaking of the Empire, Europe went down into the depths. By all the laws
of history, it ought to have perished and given place to a new order, as the
Minoan civilization gave place to the Greek. That it did not was due to the
latest and strongest of its elements, Christianity. We enter now upon a period
in which religion is by far the most powerful force in European society: its
preserver, its inspiration, its bond of unity. The decisive thing that saved our
Europe was the conversion of the barbarians.
6. Justinian
The reign of the Emperor Justinian (527-565) is an astonishing interlude in
European history: no less than an attempt to restore the Empire; and, though
this attempt was a failure, it had some permanent effects on our civilization.
While the Western Empire was being devastated and broken up by the
barbarians, the Eastern Empire was being preserved - mainly because the chief
efforts of the Emperors were directed towards its preservation. They let the
West go, perforce; but they saved the East. It suffered grave perils; but in the
end the barbarians were held on the Danube, and the Persians in the Syrian
desert; and thus the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt remained Roman. To
this empire Justinian succeeded in 527.
Some men become great by genius, others by sheer hard work. Few combine
the two, and Justinian was not one of them. He was no genius, but he had the
orderly mind and the capacity for detailed and unremitting toil that make a
great organizer. He had, indeed, a simple mind: a "one-track mind", as we
should say; perhaps only such a mind would have conceived and attempted so
immense a project as the restoration of the Empire. For that, and no less, was
Justinian's ideal, and to that he devoted his whole life and all the resources he
could command. He did so, not as a romantic visionary, but methodically,
soberly and perseveringly, like a good civil servant. He was fortunate in his
helpers: his wife Theodora, quick-witted and strong-willed; Belisarius, one of
the finest soldiers in history; lawyers like Theophilus and architects like
Anthemius of Tralles; but none of these would have been effective without the
systematic planning and continual hard work of the Emperor.
The first task he undertook was to re-organize the law and government of the
Empire. Roman law was the greatest and most comprehensive legal system
ever evolved, but it had grown up piecemeal, and the pieces had never been
brought together in proper order. Justinian proceeded to get it into order. The
work took seven years, and the results were published in four books: the most
famous law-books in the world. The first was the "Codex", published in 529: a
collection of all the laws of Rome, simplified, co-ordinated, and arranged in
their various divisions. The second was the "Digest" or "Pandects", published
in 533: a collection of judgments and interpretations of the laws; for even the
best of laws are never perfectly clear, and it is only by studying how judges
have applied the law in particular cases that one can begin to fully understand
it. Then there was the "Institutes", a manual of law for students, in which the
main principles of law are made clear for the beginner; and this is still the
fundamental textbook of Roman Law. Finally appeared in 534 the "Novels",
which brought the Digest up to date by including the judgments of Justinian's
own courts. These four books make up the "Corpus Juris Civilis": the complete
collection of Roman civil law. It was through this work that Roman Law
became known to later ages, and no legal work has ever had so much effect:
there is no civilized code of law in the world today that is not somehow
indebted to it.
Justinian also reformed the actual administration of the government by cutting
out a large number of unnecessary offices. This made government more
efficient and less expensive; it also increased the personal power of the
Emperor, but this was probably a good thing at that time - certainly Justinian's
form of government survived his death by a good many years. The citizens of
the Eastern Empire were rigidly controlled and heavily taxed, but they also
enjoyed the benefits of Roman order and the Roman peace - in fact, of Roman
civilization.
It was to restore these benefits to the West that Justinian embarked on his
gigantic programme of reconquest. He first defeated and made a treaty with
the Persians, in 531. Then, in 533, he sent his best general, Belisarius, with 500
ships and 24,000 men, against the Vandal kingdom in Africa. In two brilliant
campaigns Belisarius destroyed the Vandals, and Africa became once more a
Roman province.
Then Justinian ordered an attack on the Ostrogoths in Italy; but this proved a
more difficult enterprise. The Ostrogoths were the most civilized and
disciplined of the barbarians. They professed to hold Italy as allies of the
Empire, and they had preserved much of the Roman system (they asserted to
Justinian that they had not changed a single Roman law); and they had given
the country a peace and order unknown elsewhere in Western Europe. They
had not however, won the affection or trust of the Italian people: partly
because they were Arians and the Italians Catholics, and partly because, like all
the barbarians, they held themselves above and aloof from the native
population, whose sympathies - for what they were worth - were with the
invaders.
In 535 Belisarius with his little army swept over Sicily in a lightning campaign.
In the following year he reconquered southern Italy and took Rome. But then
the Goths recovered themselves: shocked into action by these defeats, they
assembled all their strength to wipe out the Romans, and Belisarius was forced
to stand on the defensive and withdraw his men behind the walls of Rome.
Here, as brilliant in defence as in attack, he held out during one of the longest
sieges on record, till reinforcements from Constantinople enabled him to take
the offensive again. But there was to be no quick conquest of Italy. The war
swayed to and fro along the peninsula, each year adding to the devastation of
the once-fertile land. In 540 the Goths seemed to have accepted defeat; but two
years later they broke out in rebellion, and all the fighting had to be done over
again. Not till 562 did the last remnants of them give in. Thus the Ostrogoths,
like the Vandals, disappeared from history, and Italy became a Roman province
again; but - except in the south - it was a ruined Italy.
Yet in 554 Justinian had despatched Belisarius to Spain to attack the Visigoths.
The resources of the Empire were not, however, equal to this fresh burden:
Belisarius recovered south-eastern Spain, but then could do no more. Troubles
in the East were constantly interfering with Justinian's Western designs. In 540
the Persians attacked again, and five years fighting were needed before they
were broken and driven back into Mesopotamia. Again, between 549 and 556
Justinian had to fight the barbarians round the Black Sea. He recovered
Armenia and Colchis, and made the Black Sea once more a Roman lake; but he
would have far preferred to recover Spain or Gaul. His resources were never as
great as his designs. Above all, he was short of men. His methodical and
businesslike mind conceived the idea of economizing in soldiers by building
great fortifications, and these were successful up to a point; but, of course, they
also were costly in their own way. All in all, it is an astonishing thing that he
was able to do so much; and, for all the brilliance of Belisarius, it would not
have been done without the careful and laborious scheming of the Emperor,
getting the most out of his Empire, husbanding his meagre resources and
trying to expend them to the best advantage.
He was not content simply to recover the lost provinces: he wanted also to
revive the ancient splendour of the Empire. The Romans, like the Greeks, had
been great builders, and Justinian wished to be a great builder in his turn.
Where his pagan fore-runners had built temples, he wanted to build churches.
He was himself no mean judge of architecture, and under his patronage men
like Anthemius of Tralles perfected that Byzantine style which is one of the
chief glories of his reign. "All later building in East and West", says Fortescue,
"is derived from his models". His great cathedral at Constantinople, Sancta
Sophia, is one of the wonders of the world; and the work of his architects
inspired such later wonders as St. Mark's at Venice, the Alhambra at Granada,
and the Taj Mahal. Justinian has been blamed for spending too much on his
buildings. Those who make this criticism do not understand the difference
between the cost of building and the cost of war. Had all the wealth which
Justinian poured into Sancta Sophia and the other Byzantine masterpieces been
lavished on the army, it is not likely that it would have made much difference;
and the world would have lacked a source of inspiration which has been far
more valuable than Justinian's wars.
His religious policy is more open to question. Before Constantine, the Emperor
had been "Pontifex Maximus", or high priest of the Roman religion; he had
even been recognized as the representative of the gods, and worshipped as
divine. Religion was thus a department of state, and the Emperor was at the
head of it just as he was at the head of all other departments. This attitude
towards religion persisted even after the triumph of Christianity. A Christian
Emperor would not, of course, claim divine honours, but he would still
consider himself as representing the power of God, and as having a divine
commission to rule the Empire; and Christians in general would concede that
that was so. It was easy for an Emperor to conclude that he had some right to
control the affairs of the Church, at least when the good of the Empire seemed
to require it; thus we find Constantine, wishing to get the Arian controversy
settled, taking a leading part in summoning the first General Council of the
Church (Nicaea, in 325), and backing its decisions with his imperial authority.
Yet intervention of this sort was bound to lead to trouble. The Christian
principle was, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the
things that are God's"; and this implied that Caesar's authority was limited, and
that he had no power over religion. In "the thing that are God's" (so the
Christians held) it was the bishops who had authority, and in particular the
bishop of Rome, the head of the Church, and in these matters the Emperor
himself was subject to them. Few Emperors were content to accept this
position.
When the imperial capital was moved to Constantinople, and still more when
the barbarians broke up the West, the Church began, like the Empire itself, to
separate into two parts. Just as the Emperor continued to be the official ruler of
the whole Empire, though in the West his rule was only nominal, so the Pope,
the bishop of Rome, remained the recognized head of the whole Church,
though the eastern part of the Church was more and more, in practice,
controlled by the Emperor. Justinian was the man chiefly responsible for
making this imperial control effective and permanent. Its results were generally
bad.
For one thing, it led to religious persecution. This is what usually results when
religion is made a political question. That was why pagan Emperors had
persecuted the Christians, and now Justinian persecuted the pagans. It is true
that his persecution was by no means so savage as the pagan ones, and true
also that it was successful, on the whole; but what sort of converts it produced
is another matter. Justinian also persecuted the Jews, with much less
justification and quite without success.
Then, too, he entangled himself in doctrinal disputes between the orthodox, or
Catholic, Christians and various heretical sects - chiefly the Monophysites.
(These heretics held that Christ was divine, but not human; the Catholics held
that He was both: true God and true man.) Justinian, himself orthodox, tried at
first to impose a kind of compromise on both sides, but this attempt was a
complete failure; for it is only men who care little about religion who are
prepared to compromise about it, and Justinian's subjects cared about religion
very much indeed. He then started to persecute the Monophysites. This, too,
was a failure. The Monophysites were particularly strong in Syria and Egypt,
and the main effect of the persecution was to arouse such an opposition in
these provinces as to gravely trouble the reign of Justinian and his successors.
Finally, this policy of controlling and directing the Church widened still further
the gap which was already opening between Eastern and Western Christians.
The Church in the East came more and more to depend upon the State, to be a
creature of the Emperor; while the Church in the West moved in the opposite
direction, towards complete independence, and even domination, of the State.
It was partly from this that there sprang, long after Justinian's death, that fatal
schism which still divides most of the Christians of the East (including those of
Russia) from Rome and the West.
Justinian's religious policy, then, must be counted a mistake. The same has to
be said of his western conquests. The Visigoths recovered south-eastern Spain
in 623. As for Italy, already exhausted by the Gothic wars, three years after
Justinian's death it was invaded by the Lombards: a people whom Justinian had
himself enlisted, as former Emperors had enlisted the Goths. The Lombards
swept over the Alps in 568, and treated Italy to an orgy of plunder and
devastation worse than anything she had yet endured. Rome, and parts of the
south, were preserved, but the rest of the country was reduced to misery and
despair. The Roman dominion in Africa survived, but only for a time.
On the other hand, Justinian left two indestructible monuments, which will
preserve his memory even though Europe itself should perish: Byzantine
architecture and the code of Roman law. And it is probably true to say that he
saved and revived the Eastern Empire, and enabled it to survive as a great
civilized state for another 500 years, and as a still important centre of European
culture down to 1453. These are sufficient achievements for one man. Justinian
was, however, a defender of the past rather than a shaper of the future; the
actual remaking of Europe fell to other hands.
7. Monks And Popes
The Eastern Empire, then, continued to conserve the past; the future
development of Europe was to come from the West. No-one would have
thought so. Civilization in the West was still going down year by year,
crumbling and buckling under the strain of continued disorder and war. But
this increasing weakness had one good effect. The great force of Christianity
was not fettered, as it was in the East, by a rigid political and economic system;
it was free to work in its own way, and it did so, and in so doing regenerated
Europe. One institution in the West did not go down into ruin, but revived and
expanded, and that institution was the Church. Left without a rival, the Church
gradually took hold of and re-formed European society, and produced the new
civilization of the Middle Ages. The two main instruments of this
transformation were monasticism and the Papacy.
Monasticism
Anyone who takes religion seriously will sometimes feel the desire to be alone
with God. He will feel that union with God is the one thing necessary and the
main purpose of life, and that most of the ordinary business of life is a
distraction from that end. He will feel with Wordsworth that
"The world is too much with us: late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay
waste our powers". The amassing of wealth, the ambition of glory or power,
the satisfaction of the thousand-and-one desires or passions of the human heart,
will seem to him an absurd waste of time and effort; he will want to escape
from them and to find peace in the contemplation of God alone.
Many feel this occasionally; some are so moved by it that they do actually
renounce the world and the world's desires to lead a life of poverty, obscurity,
silence, solitude: a life of self-denial, or rather of self-surrender to God. All the
great religions have produced men of this kind: ascetics, solitaries,
contemplatives, mystics; and Christianity was certain to do so. For Jesus Christ
promised union with God to those who followed Him - perfect love of Christ
was, for a Christian, the key to perfect union with God. Yet to love Christ
perfectly, in the pagan and demoralized world in which Christians found
themselves, seemed scarcely possible. So they began to leave the world. First
one or two, then dozens and hundreds, and finally thousands of men went out
into the desert, into the waste and lonely places, to lead the lives of perfect
devotion which they could not lead in the temptations and distractions of the
Roman world.
These first monks were hermits, or solitaries. Few men, however, are fit to live
in solitude. The physical difficulties, and still more the psychological and
spiritual difficulties, of such a life are very great. A hermit too easily falls into
extravagance, or even insanity, or becomes too much wrapped up in himself,
which is exactly the opposite of devotion to God. Besides, Christianity is
essentially a social religion. The two great commandments of Christ were to
love God and to love one's fellowmen; indeed, he said that it was by loving our
fellow-men that we should love Him, and that all His followers should be
united with Him and with one another in the society of His Church. So it was
not long before the monks began to group themselves together into
communities for mutual guidance and help, living, praying and working
together under one father, or "abbot"; and these groups were the first
monasteries. They began, too, to help other people: the poor, the sick and the
ignorant; and thus began their social work.
Monasticism was started in Egypt, and during the 4th and 5th centuries it
spread with extreme rapidity over the whole Church, both East and West. In
the West, however, it had at first great ups and downs. Eastern monasticism
was very severe, particularly in its rules of fasting; and Westerners who
adopted it in the first rush of enthusiasm soon found it almost impossible to
keep up. Western monasteries, with some exceptions (the Irish were particular
exceptions) were constantly falling away from their first fervour and having to
be reformed. There was, in any case, no fixed rule of monastic life, and monks
wandered about a good deal from one monastery to another, looking for
congenial surroundings. It was not till St. Benedict wrote his Rule that Western
monasticism found a really firm basis.
St. Benedict was a Roman. He was born about 480 and died about 550. While
still a young man, he determined to "forsake the world"; but he spent three
years as a hermit before deciding to lead a monastic life. About 510 he founded
the first Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, some thirty miles south of Rome;
and there he composed the famous Rule which was to do so much for religion
and for Europe. That Rule had three main features, which I shall call mildness,
order and stability. It was mild; for, though severe enough in modern eyes (it
forbade, for instance, the eating of meat), it did not demand superhuman
strength and courage; and therefore it could be, and was, much better observed
than other rules. This was essential for the second point, order, by which I
mean that the monks had all to live according to a fixed order of time, their day
being divided into periods of prayer, of reading, and of manual labour. (Abbot
Butler has calculated that St. Benedict's monks spent from three to four hours
in prayer, four hours in reading, and seven to eight hours in work.) Thus sloth
and dissipation were banished. The third point, stability, put a stop to
wandering about from one monastery to another: St. Benedict decreed that
each monk must stay in the monastery he first joined, unless he was ordered or
permitted to go elsewhere by the abbot. The abbot himself was elected by the
monks, but he was elected for life, a permanent father of the permanent
monastic family.
Indeed, what St. Benedict really did was to re-establish in religious form the old
Roman "familia": all the monks being members of the one household, living
and working in harmony according to one rule and under the "patria potestas",
the paternal power, of a common father. Western Europe was soon dotted all
over with these monastic households: each an island of peace and order, of
Christian and civilized living, in the surrounding sea of lawlessness, ignorance
and war. Each was independent of the others, and this was particularly
important at that time. A dozen or a score of monasteries might be swept away
by confiscation, barbarian attack, or the failure of the monks themselves; but
other monasteries would not be affected, and from them the lost ones could be
restored. In the fearful confusion of the Dark Age, only this local independence
could enable monasticism to survive, continually renewing itself after all
disasters.
The benefits of monasticism to Europe are incalculable; here I can only give a
brief summary. In the first place, it was the monks who Christianized Europe. I
do not mean merely by missionary-work, though nearly all the missionary-
work of the Dark Age (the conversion of Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia,
Germany and central Europe) was carried out by monks. Over large tracts of
Europe, and especially among the converted barbarians, Christianity was still
only skin-deep. The monks, by their teaching and preaching, but still more by
their living example, slowly and steadily changed this. It was mainly through
them that, after long generations, Christianity really took root. And they did
the same for the countries they converted. St. Patrick's conversion of Ireland
(from about 432 onwards) was followed by an amazing growth of monastic
foundations. Irish St. Columkille began the conversion of Scotland by founding
the great abbey of lona. From lona St. Aidan founded Lindisfarne, and began
the conversion of northern England. Meanwhile, in 597, Pope St. Gregory the
Great had sent a band of monks under Augustine to southern England, and
Canterbury started its long ecclesiastical history as the site of a Benedictine
abbey. An Irish monk, St. Columban, lit a fire of Irish fervour on the
Continent, founding monasteries at Luxeuil in Burgundy, St. Gall in
Switzerland, and Bobbio in northern Italy. The English St. Boniface, Apostle of
Germany, began his work there by founding the abbey of Fulda (744), which
became the centre of German Christianity. Yet such a catalogue as this gives
only a slight impression of the immense volume and scope of monastic activity.
The monks were equally the preservers of culture, being almost the only
people who cared to preserve it. They preserved literature: not only Christian,
but pagan. The works of St. Jerome and St. Augustine, and equally the works
of Virgil and Horace, Caesar and Livy, have come down to us in copies
laboriously transcribed by monks. They also wrote themselves: St. Bede, that
profoundly learned man, was the first English historian; the Irish monk, John
Scotus Erigena, was one of the re-founders of philosophy; Alcuin was called by
Charlemagne from an English monastery to re-found education among the
Franks. Monks developed the art of illuminating, and produced master-pieces
like the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels; they also developed the
Gregorian chant, which is not only a wonderful thing in itself, but is the
foundation of all modern music. A monk, Guittone of Arezzo, invented the
method of writing music, without which the later development of that art
would have been impossible. I could carry on this catalogue for a dozen pages.
The survival of culture in Europe during the Dark Age was due to the monks.
In economics, too, they were preservers and pioneers. They began the
reconquest of the waste, the felling of the forests which had swallowed up so
large a part of the devastated West. They worked out orderly methods of
farming: poor enough, perhaps, by modern standards, but better than anyone
else could provide, and improving as time went on. They preserved in their
workshops such simple and necessary crafts as carpentry and blacksmithing.
Above all, they preserved and taught the art of economic management: how to
organize large groups of men for the production of goods and the satisfaction
of wants. The economic condition of Europe became miserable enough during
the Dark Age; it would have become much worse, and perhaps irrecoverably
so, but for the monks.
Indirectly, too, they influenced political life. They presented the world with the
spectacle of men living according to rule. They elected their abbot, and then
they obeyed him. Other men, watching their peaceful, orderly and contented
lives, learned a practical lesson in the value of law and government.
Socially, the monks taught the world some of its first lessons in Christian
equality. Anyone could join a monastery if he had the necessary talents and
courage: serfs' children mingled in them with the sons of dukes and kings.
Towards the end of the tenth century, a serf's son became a monk at St.
Alban's; he is known to history as Hadrian IV, the only English Pope. Another
social lesson the monasteries enforced was that of the Christian status of
women. For there were monasteries for women as well as for men, and great
abbesses like St. Brigid and St. Hilda were as famous and influential as great
abbots like St. Aidan and St. Martin. The lights that went out all over Europe
after the fall of Rome were rekindled in the monasteries. In many a dark forest,
amid night and storm and winter and the howling of wolves, there arose a
lonely house showing a flickering light, by which a few men praised God, or
painfully and laboriously copied for us what they had been able to preserve of
civilization. We are in their debt for ever.
The Papacy
The Christians were always great believers in unity, and long before the fall of
the Western Empire they had given their society, the Church, a very definite
organization. This organization stems from the Apostles themselves, who were
(as we know from the letters of St. Paul) the first to appoint bishops over
different sections of the Church. Apart from this, the early history of Church
government is not very clear; what is clear, however, is that before very long it
was organized in much the same way as the government of the Empire. Each
city, or "diocese" (a term borrowed from Diocletian) had its bishop, who was
usually elected by the clergy and people, but who had also to receive
"consecration" from other bishops; and each bishop ordained priests and
deacons for his diocese: the priests to hold spiritual power, and the deacons to
look after the "temporalities" or material possessions of the Church. Each
province, too, had its "metropolitan" bishop or patriarch; and the centre of the
whole system was the bishop of Rome, later to be called the Pope. The actual
growth of this system is a matter of controversy; Catholics hold that in all its
essentials it existed from the first, while others maintain that it grew up
gradually; but there is no historical doubt that by the time of Constantine it
was fully established.
At any rate, this unified government was of great importance to Christianity.
For one thing, it made it much easier for the Church to reject heresy and
maintain unity of doctrine. For another, it enabled the Church to build up a
common code of law (later to be called Canon Law) on the same lines as
Roman Law. Without this common law, and without the central authority of
the Pope, it is hard to see how Christianity in the West could have survived the
Dark Age. The monasteries did much, but the one thing they could not have
done was to preserve the unity of the Church. Each monastery, as we have
seen, was a little independent family. Had the preservation of Christianity
depended solely on the monks, or even on the bishops, it would probably have
been broken into discordant fragments. What preserved it (humanly speaking)
from this fate was the Papacy, and the Canon Law of which the Popes were the
guardians. It is an astonishing fact that even the East and the West remained
united under the Papacy till the llth century; only in 1054 did the Eastern
Church break away.
Had this been the only service performed by the Popes of the Dark Age, they
would still have deserved well of Europe. Actually, they did much more. They
strongly supported monasticism; indeed, most of them were monks
themselves, or had at least received their early training in monasteries. They
were at the heart of the missionary efforts of the monks: St. Patrick went to
Rome for Papal approval before embarking on the conversion of Ireland; St.
Gregory the Great sent Augustine and his monks to England; St. Boniface went
to Germany as Papal Legate from Gregory III.
It was in this period, too, that the Papacy began to intervene in temporal
affairs. The early Popes had not dreamed of doing so. The first Christian theory
of the relations between Church and State was put forward by St. Augustine in
his book, "The City of God". According to this theory they are completely
distinct, the Church being an eternal city, occupied with the eternal welfare of
man, and the State a temporal city, occupied with his welfare in this life. The
Popes, indeed, were perfectly willing to leave temporal affairs to the
management of the Emperors - too willing, perhaps, for the government of the
Empire would have benefited a good deal from a greater infusion of Christian
principles. At any rate, a complete separation of Church from State could not
be permanent: temporal and eternal life are too closely connected. In practice,
the Empire and the Church after Constantine became a partnership, in which
the Emperor, because he had the power, tended to become the dominant
partner. Far-seeing Popes, like St. Leo the Great in the 5th century, saw the
danger of the State's coming to dominate the Church; but they could hardly
have prevented it but for the breaking of the Empire. In the East, where the
Empire survived, the Church did in fact fall gradually under the Emperor's
domination, and this was a principal cause of the schism that eventually (1054)
cut off the Eastern Church from the West; for in the West the Church
acknowledged no superior but the Pope.
Yet the fall of the Western Empire did not seem a blessing to the Popes. They
now learned by bitter experience that they could not be indifferent to temporal
affairs. The disorder and violence of the barbarians, striking at the very
structure of civilized life, struck also at the very structure of religious life. How
could the ordinary man be religious, when he was absorbed in the mere task of
keeping himself alive? Some kind of security is necessary for any sort of life.
The Popes began to use their spiritual authority to try and get this security for
their Christian people.
At first they strove to uphold the failing authority of the Emperor. They
exerted all their influence to preserve the memory of Roman power and the
reverence which most of the barbarians genuinely had for the Roman name.
But reality was too strong for them. After the failure of Justinian's efforts at re-
conquest, and particularly after the Lombard invasion of Italy in 568, it became
clear that nothing more could be expected from the Empire. The defence of
Rome itself fell on the shoulders of the Pope: there was no-one else to
undertake it.
It would be quite unhistorical to look on the Popes of this period as being
ambitious of temporal power; they were ambitious only of finding someone on
to whose shoulders they could unload it. Since the Emperors had failed them,
they turned to the barbarian kings. These had already been roughly
Christianized; now the attempt was begun to get them to use their power in a
Christian spirit: to regard it as a gift or a trust from God, to enable them to
safeguard and guide God's people according to God's law. The barbarian
notion of a king was simply that of a warrior leader; the acceptance of this new
idea of the king as a father and protector, a representative of the fatherhood of
God, involved a complete change in their way of thought. It was a slow,
tedious and difficult business. If it was at last achieved, that was not the work of
any one Pope, but of a steady and continual policy pursued over centuries. One
can see the new idea slowly forming, especially in France and Britain, and the
way being thus prepared for the mediaeval idea of kingship which, in its turn,
was the foundation of modern government. This result was not, of course, due
only to the Popes; but I think it is true to say that the steady, persistent effort
which at last produced it had its source in Rome.
In all that I have been saying about the Papacy and monasticism, I have looked
very much on the bright side. There are also shadows in the picture. Since men
are men, and not angels, neither of these institutions was always what it ought
to have been: there were plenty of weak and unworthy monks in the Dark
Age, and some weak and unworthy Popes. Considering the vice and violence
of the times, this is not surprising. What is surprising, it seems to me, is that
there were so many good monks and Popes, and that both monasticism and
the Papacy managed to achieve so much for the salvation of Europe at a time
when its salvation seemed impossible. Most religious men, during most of the
Dark Age, expected the imminent end of the world: it seemed impossible that
things could grow any worse. Yet those men went on working, and saved the
future for us; and that is the remarkable fact which we ought to recognize. The
further fact, that they were themselves weak with the weaknesses of humanity,
seems to make their achievement even more remarkable.
However, most modern historians have particular difficulty in dealing justly
with either monasticism or the Papacy. When Protestantism arose in the 16th
century, these two institutions were precisely the ones which the Protestants
most bitterly attacked, and which the Catholics most ardently defended; and
even nowadays a Protestant will tend to look with suspicion on monks and
Popes, and a Catholic to defend them with indiscriminate zeal. One ought not,
however, to allow theological dispute to cloud the facts of history. Whether
one approves or not of monasticism or the Papacy, there ought to be no
dispute among historians about the capital importance of both institutions in
bringing Europe through her Dark Age.
8. Islam
One of the lessons of history is that the future is unpredictable. It is possible for
a well-informed man to forecast what is going to happen, as long as no
unforeseen influence arises to trouble his calculations; but unforeseen
influences are always arising. A most striking example of this is the rise of
Islam, the religion of Mohammed.
Of all countries known to Europeans at the beginning of the 7th century,
Arabia would have seemed the least likely to trouble the history of the world.
That bare plateau, baked into desert by a relentless sun (except where the
infrequent wells and oases, and the occasional transient watercourses, permit
the growth of date-palms and a scanty herbage), was chiefly inhabited, then as
now, by wandering tribes, pasturing their sheep and camels as best they could.
A few permanent settlements, chiefly on the coast, were dignified with the title
of "city"; in the south, where the water-supply is more plentiful and constant,
there was even a fairly stable Arab kingdom; but for the most part the Arabs
had no unity, and only the most primitive political and economic system. Their
religion was a degraded polytheism, which centred (as far as it had a centre) on
the worship of the "Black Stone" at Mecca, to which yearly pilgrimages were
made and bloody sacrifices offered. Their morals were as low as their beliefs:
they practised polygamy, they were much given to drunkenness, war and
brigandage were to them normal sports and means of livelihood. They had,
however, like most desert-dwellers, a core of toughness and a rough sense of
discipline, without which they could hardly have survived. Something could be
made of them, if a man could be found to give them leadership and law. Such a
man was found in the 7th century.
His name was Mohammed (or Mahomet). He was born about the year 570, in
Mecca. Mecca was the centre of the annual pilgrimage and a crossroads of
trade; Mohammed's family was engaged in trade, and Mohammed himself
went on journeys with the caravans across Arabia, or up into Syria or Egypt,
learning to know men and developing a sound practical judgment of affairs.
Yet he was a dreamer as well as a man of action (a rare but fruitful
combination), and it was not long before his dreaming took a religious turn.
There were Jews in Arabia; there were Christians of various sorts - mostly
heretics who had fled from the persecutions of the Empire; above all there
were, all round the fringes of the desert, those hermits who were reverenced
even by the pagan Arabs for the steadfast austerity of their lives. From these
Mohammed learned to despise his ancestral religion and to get ideas of
something higher. These ideas he gradually combined into a system; and,
when he was about forty years old, announced himself to be a prophet,
commissioned by God, through the angel Gabriel, to preach truth to the
world.
His religion, as it was eventually worked out, was very simple. Its main
doctrine is that there is but one God, Allah, Who is a spirit, and cannot be
represented by any image or idol, and Who is the creator and lord of all, to
Whom all men owe worship and obedience. Allah has sent prophets to reveal
truth about Himself; among these are Abraham, Moses and Jesus; and the last
and greatest of them is Mohammed. Mecca is the city of Allah: a city built by
Abraham, and the religious centre of the world.
The service of Allah lies in five things. Firstly, the true believer must say certain
prayers five times a day, and, if possible, make a pilgrimage to Mecca; secondly,
he must observe certain fasts: in particular, abstain from all intoxicants and
make an annual fast in the month of Ramadan; thirdly, he must give alms to
the poor; fourthly, he must treat all true believers as his brothers; and fifthly,
he must strive to fight against and subdue all unbelievers. Those who fulfil
these precepts will go, after death, to a paradise of all pleasures; those who do
not fulfil them, and all unbelievers, will go to a hell of everlasting torment.
This was certainly a far higher and more austere religion than the old Arab
paganism. It was also a far simpler religion than Christianity; and it was a
warrior religion, which Christianity was not. It appealed strongly to the Arabs.
It had the simplicity and force of their native deserts, and something of their
austerity; it was narrow, clear, definite and pointed like a sword, and, like a
sword, it had a fighting temper. It is not surprising that it spread like wildfire
across the desert. At first Mohammed had to meet opposition, especially from
the ruling families of Mecca whose interests and traditions were bound up with
the old paganism; in 622 he was forced to flee from Mecca to Medina; but
within ten years (partly by persuasion, partly by violence and treachery) he had
united the whole of Arabia under the banner of Islam. When he died in 633,
the new force he had created was ready to ride forth to the conquest of the
world.
The first blow fell on the Eastern Empire. The Emperor Heraclius was then
looking forward to a well-earned rest. He had been the most successful
Emperor since Justinian: he had come to the throne at a time when the Avars
were threatening the Danube frontier and when the Persian attacks were
reaching their climax under Chosroes II, and he had defeated both. First he had
checked the Avars, by bringing in the Serbs and settling them south of the
Danube in the land they still hold. The Persians in the meantime poured over
Palestine and Syria, captured Jerusalem, and even carried off from it the
famous relic of the True Cross; but Heraclius then turned on them and dealt
with them thoroughly, driving them back beyond their borders and forcing
them to restore all their spoils. In 629 he held a sort of Christian triumph, in the
great ceremony of the restoration of the Cross to its shrine in Jerusalem, and
retired to Constantinople in a blaze of glory. It was at this moment, when both
the Empire and Persia were exhausted after the long war, that the Moslem
flood broke in on them.
In 632 the Arabs poured out of the desert into Palestine and Syria. In 634 they
took Jerusalem, and in 635, Damascus; and in 636 the battle of the Yarmak
forced Heraclius, in despair, to abandon Syria to its fate. Then the Arabs turned
on Persia. Between 637 and 639 they swarmed over Mesopotamia; by 641 the
whole of Persia was in their hands, and they were penetrating eastwards
towards China and southwards into India. They were also attacking
westwards: between 639 and 641 they over-ran Egypt, and began the conquest
of north Africa. They seemed to have endless numbers and incomparable
energy and courage; against these swarms of swift and fanatical horsemen it
looked as though nothing could stand.
Fortunately they had one weakness - disunion. According to Mohammed's
idea, Islam was to be ruled by a Caliph, the "Commander of the Faithful", who
was to be elected by the faithful; but it was not long before disputes arose
about the succession, and there began a series of civil wars which occupied
much of the energy that would otherwise have gone to the conquest of
Europe. That is why the Moslem attacks came in bursts rather than in a
continuous flow. The first burst carried them far, but then there was a pause.
In 693 the advance was renewed. The Roman province of Africa, which had
been so hardly recovered by Justinian from the Vandals, was now lost for good
to the Moslems. The straits of Gibraltar were not much of a barrier. In 711 the
invaders crossed them, and the Visigoths, fighting bravely but vainly, went the
way of the Vandals and the Ostrogoths, and disappeared from history. During
the next few years Spain was thoroughly conquered. Then it was the turn of
the Franks. In 732 the viceroy Abd-ur Rahman led a Moslem host across the
Pyrenees and swept northwards over France. But the Franks were tough; and
they had a leader, Charles Martel, who had prepared them to deal with this
invasion. They met the Moslems near Poitiers (the battle is sometimes called
the battle of Tours) in one of the decisive conflicts of history. During long
hours the Arab horsemen charged and charged again the iron-clad line of the
Franks, but they failed to break it, and at the close of day a bare remnant of
them fled southwards, leaving their leader dead on the field. This was a
turning-point. The Moslems held Spain and, for the moment, part of southern
France, but that was the limit of their advance in the West.
Meanwhile, in the East as well a turning-point had been reached. The Moslems
had launched a terrific attack on the Empire: they had taken Cyprus and Crete,
and had swarmed across Asia Minor; and in 717 they attacked Constantinople
by sea and land. They were unlucky. Leo the Isaurian, one of the great fighting
Emperors, had just come to the throne; and he, after a desperate struggle,
broke them utterly, swept them back out of Asia Minor, and re-established the
frontier of the Empire north of Syria. This was an even more important victory
than Charles Martel's. Had the Empire fallen, the Moslems would have found a
way open to them into central Europe, with only a few half-savage tribes to
dispute their passage. As it was, a door was shut against them in the East as
well as in the West, and Europe was given a breathing-space.
Mohammedan Civilization
It is a curious fact that the eastern territories conquered by Islam, and north
Africa as well, were thoroughly Moham-medanized, so that the number of
Christians sank to what it is today, a remnant; while in their European
conquests - Spain in the early period, the Balkans later on - the bulk of the
people remained Christian in spite of centuries of Moslem rule. Another
curious fact is that this religion from the desert gave rise, in the countries it
occupied, to a very splendid culture, which contributed a good deal later on to
the revival of Europe. I believe the reasons for these two facts to be
fundamentally the same.
At the time of the Moslem invasion, both religion and culture in the Eastern
Empire had become fantastically complicated. From almost the earliest days of
Christianity, the East had been filled with disputes about Christian doctrine,
which had produced all kinds of curious sects: Gnostics, Arians, Nestorians,
Monophysites, Monothelites and a score of others, between whom and the
orthodox furious controversies were continually carried on. The Emperors
themselves took sides, some supporting one or other of the heretical sects, but
most (like Justinian) persecuting heresy and supporting orthodoxy. Heresy was
particularly strong in Syria and Egypt, and in those provinces the war of
disputation and persecution raged most fiercely. For ordinary people, the
eventual result was a kind of bewilderment: entangled in a constant flurry of
argument, which they could hardly understand, they fell gradually into a mood
of dull disgust and resentment against their quarrelling pastors. Then came the
clear, straight doctrine of Islam, cutting through all these controversies as with
a sword, simplifying religion down to its bare essentials: the worship and the
service of the one God. It is not surprising that it came to many people as a
liberation and a relief. Within a century of the Invasion, the mass of the
population in the conquered provinces had accepted the new religion.
The conquest brought with it, too, a feeling of political and social liberation.
We have seen in a previous chapter how complicated the system of
government became in the later years of the Empire: the life of the citizen
being controlled from the cradle to the grave by the all-powerful and highly-
centralized civil service, so that economic as well as political freedom was a
thing unknown. By the 7th century this system had come to be an almost
intolerable burden. The Arabs swept it all away. They applied to their new
dominions the simple forms of government they were accustomed to in the
desert. The Caliph was judge and executor in one, the law he applied was the
simple law laid down by Mohammed in the Koran, and he administered it
personally. Local judges, called "cadis", were appointed to administer it in the
same way, and thus the multitude of Roman officials and regulations were
replaced by a loose and simple administration which left much greater freedom
to individuals. It was a far from perfect system: it left the way open for disorder
on the one hand and tyranny on the other; but it came at first as a vast relief to
the overburdened, over-controlled peoples of the Empire. It was even imitated
to some extent by Leo the Isaurian and later Emperors in the provinces that
remained to them.
At first, therefore, the Mohammedan conquest brought to many of the
conquered peoples an experience of intellectual, political and economic
freedom. This explains both why it was so easily accepted and why it gave rise
to a great outburst of culture. It was not the Arabs who produced this culture,
but those they had conquered: and chiefly the former inhabitants of the
Eastern Empire. Now that religious disputation had been put to an end to, men
began to revive the classical tradition. They began once more to study, with
fresh interest, the great Greek philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, the
mathematicians, like Euclid, the astronomers, like Ptolemy, the physicians, like
Galen. They carrier on and developed Byzantine architecture. They carried on
and developed Arabic poetry - the one really Arabic contribution in all this. It
would be a mistake to make too much of this culture, though it produced
philosophers like Averroes, poets like Firdausi, buildings like the Dome of the
Rock at Jerusalem and the Alhambra at Granada. These seem very brilliant
when compared with the barbarism of the West during the Dark Age; but the
Moslems were nevertheless imitators rather than originators, and their culture
was an offshoot of European culture, not an independent growth. In the long
run, too, they proved unable to maintain it. Islam is, after all, too simple a
religion to stimulate the human soul for long. It may be suitable for desert-
dwellers, but it is incapable of sustaining a great civilization. Its believers tend,
in the long run, to over-simplify life: to become desert-minded, as it were. Its
domination of so large a part of mankind has been a disaster. The traveller in
north Africa is at this day astonished and saddened by the vast wrecks of
Roman work which he finds lost in the deserts: the deserts that Moslem
carelessness has allowed to crawl in over a once-fertile land. Yet we must
remember that the Moslems did for a time carry the torch of European culture,
and were one of the channels by which it was restored to the West; and we
ought to be grateful to them for that, just as we ought to be grateful to the
tough battlers who held them off and drove them back from our borders.
9. Charlemagne
Many European rulers have been nicknamed "the Great", but only one has had
that title so joined to his name as to become inseparable from it. We never call
this man "Charles", but always "Charlemagne", which is the French form of
"Caroms Magnus", "Charles the Great". And we are right in doing so.
Charlemagne is one of the great heroes of Europe: great in his position and
power, for he swayed the destinies of Europe for forty years; great in his work,
for he did more than any other single man to save and restore our civilization;
greatest of all in his influence on later generations, for his character and career
became one of those powerful legends, or myths, which enshrine the ideals of a
race or a civilization. For centuries after his death men took him as the type or
model of a Christian king, and his empire as the type or model of Christendom;
and out of the stories that gathered round him has sprung some of the best of
European literature, from the rough epic of the "Song of Roland", which lies at
the origin of French poetry, to Ariosto's "Orlando", the most polished product
of the Italian Renaissance. Charlemagne has been called "the last Emperor of
the West", and also "the first European", and there is truth in both these titles.
Across the gulf of the Dark Age he links the Roman Empire with mediaeval
Christendom.
We have seen in an earlier chapter how the Franks had crossed the Rhine, and
how, under Clovis (486-511), they had got possession of all Gaul and made it a
Frankish kingdom. They were much helped in this by the Church. The other
barbarians - Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths - were Christianized by Arian
missionaries, and were hated as heretics by their subjects in the West; but the
Franks had been baptized as Catholics, and had the steadfast support of the
bishops of Gaul and of the Papacy. Indeed, it was not long before an informal
alliance grew up between the Popes and the Franks, which was beneficial to
both, and beneficial also to the people ruled by the Franks, since the Church
was able to preserve for them some rudiments of law and justice.
The great defect of Frankish rule was the custom the kings had of dividing up
their territories among all their sons, instead ot letting the eldest alone inherit.
The Frankish kingdom was continually being split up, and this was a fruitful
source of discord and civil war; though sooner or later the various fragments
were always brought together again by some strong or ruthless hand. Such a
hand was that of Charles Hartel. He was not, indeed, a king of the Franks, but
a "Mayor of the Palace"; but by the 8th century this official, originally elected
to supervise the royal household, had become the chief figure in the kingdom:
a kind of combined prime minister and commander-in-chief. The later
descendants of Clovis were even weak enough to allow the office of "Mayor"
to become hereditary; but the Franks in general did not acknowledge this, and
the transition from one Mayor to the next was often a period of trouble.
Charles Martel, for instance, had to fight for his position. Luckily, he was a
born fighter: a man of iron whose main determination was to weld the Franks
together again under his single sway. In a series of campaigns he crushed all
adversaries, and established himself firmly by distributing lands and positions
among a group of fighting-men on whom he could rely. The value of his work
was seen in the crushing defeat he inflicted on the Moslems in 732: the victory
from which he earned his nickname of "Martel": "the Hammer". Nevertheless,
he was too much of a rough soldier to be quite successful as a ruler. In
particular, he made the mistake of injuring the Church: confiscating Church
lands to reward his faithful followers, or appointing bishops of his own, more
notable for their warlike than for their priestly qualities. He did not understand
that by weakening the Church he was weakening the main force which stood
for order and civilization. Happily, his short-sighted policy was not followed by
his descendants.
According to Frankish custom, Charles Martel divided his power between his
two sons, Carloman and Pepin, but in 747 Carloman resigned his dignities to
become a monk, and left Pepin the sole ruler. Yet Pepin was not King of the
Franks, any more than his father had been: a descendant of Clovis, Childeric
III, still held the royal name, though he had none of the power. Pepin
determined to put an end to this absurdity. He inquired of the Pope (Stephen
II) whether the name and the power should not go together, and, when the
Pope replied that they should, Pepin deposed Childeric, summoned an
assembly of the Franks at Soissons, and had himself elected King. He was then
solemnly consecrated by St. Boniface, the Pope's legate: a consecration which
was repeated by the Pope himself when he came to ask for help against the
Lombards. This was a most important event. It marks the definite acceptance
of the Christian idea of kingship as a sacred trust, and of a king as a consecrated
representative of God; so that on the one hand obedience to the king became a
religious duty, and on the other hand the king was solemnly bound to rule
justly, according to God's law. It also marks the establishment of a definite
partnership between the spiritual and the temporal powers, each supporting
the other, which is a main feature of European society during the Middle Age.
The exact relations between the partners were often disputed, but the necessity
of the partnership was henceforth accepted: it was not till the 19th century that
Church and State were again separated.
All this was confirmed by Pepin's action against the Lombards. This race,
though at last converted to Christianity, had remained turbulent and half
savage, and had been a constant source of trouble to the Papacy. Pepin now
descended on them and defeated them. By a famous document, "the Donation
of Pepin", he confirmed the Pope's possession of Rome and central Italy, and
forced the Lombards to acknowledge it. This is the real origin of the Papal
States, and of the establishment of the Pope as an independent sovereign,
though the full development and effects of this were not seen till later. In other
ways, too, Pepin showed himself the representative of a new order of things.
He repaired the damage done to the Church by his father. He supported the
great work of St. Boniface in the conversion of Germany. He defeated the
heathen Saxons, and forced them to admit Christian missionaries into their
territories. He turned on the Moslems in southern France and drove them
across the Pyrenees. In all this he was acting on behalf of Christianity as well as
on behalf of the Franks, and he was foreshadowing the work of his far greater
successor.
Pepin died in 768, leaving two sons, Charles and Carloman. The latter
fortunately died in 771, and Charles ruled alone till his own death in 814. This
is the man we call Charlemagne, and his long reign of 46 years was a decisive
event in the history of Europe. He had all the natural gifts necessary for
success: great physical strength, an intense energy, sound judgment, an
indomitable will, and a genial and attractive personality; and he was also
profoundly religious, and deeply conscious of his responsibilities to God and to
his people. Religion gave him the basis of his policy, which was to establish a
thoroughly Christian empire in western Europe; his judgment guided him in
taking the right steps to this end, and in his excellent choice of subordinates to
help him in carrying it out; his will and energy, and his great strength of body,
enabled him to sustain the almost incessant campaigning and journeying which
his immense designs imposed on him; and his frank and generous disposition
made men glad to serve him. His faults were those which usually beset a
powerful personality: a wish to dominate and supervise everything, an
impatience with opposition and an occasional ruthlessness in dealing with it;
but in the circumstances of his time these faults were not important: a
determined and vigorous ruler was precisely what Europe needed. He was
helped, of course, by the preliminary work done by his father, by the constant
support of the still active and vigorous Frankish people on which his power
was founded, and most of all by the religion and the Church which inspired
and guided him; but with all these, only a most powerful genius could have
done what he did in the world of the 8th century.
He had to fight from the beginning. The people of Aquitaine in southern
France (who were not Franks, and had always resisted and resented Frankish
domination) rebelled against him and were crushed. Then it was the turn of
the Lombards, who had broken the treaty imposed on them by Pepin and were
again troubling the peace of the Papacy. Charlemagne marched against them
and broke them completely, taking the iron crown of Lombardy for himself;
and the Lombards, as a separate people, disappeared from history, following
the Goths into oblivion. North of the Alps the Bavarians, who like the
Aquitainians had been claiming a sort of independence, were also reduced to
order.
These victories established unity over most of Christian Europe; but
Charlemagne's kingdom was still menaced from the outside: on the eastern
frontier by the pagan Saxons and Avars, on the southern frontier by the
Moslems of Spain. His attempt to recapture Spain for Christendom was his one
serious failure. He was called away before he could achieve it by trouble with
the Saxons, and during his retreat across the Pyrenees his rearguard, under
Roland, was cut to pieces in the pass of Roncesvalles: a defeat that became
more glorious in the memory of Europe than a thousand victories. However,
Charlemagne did succeed in establishing the "Spanish March", a strip of
Christian territory south of the Pyrenees; and this was the beginning of the
long re-conquest of Spain.
On his eastern frontier he was more successful. The Saxons, a savage pagan
people living between the Rhine and the Elbe, had long been a thorn in the side
of the Franks: raiding over the frontier, massacring Frankish settlers, sacking
monasteries, murdering Christian missionaries. Charlemagne's conquest of
them was his most difficult achievement. Eighteen separate campaigns were
needed before they finally consented to accept his rule and to be baptized. He
had been blamed, and perhaps rightly, for ruthlessness in dealing with them
and for forcing them to accept Christianity; but it is to be remembered that
milder measures had been tried with them and had failed: they were a
bloodthirsty and treacherous people, and their religion was one of war, and no
permanent peace was possible with them until they had been broken and
converted. This does not, of course, altogether justify Charlemagne, but it
explains why he thought it necessary to do what he did. And in the end he was
successful.
The Avars proved easier to deal with. They were another of the groups of wild
horsemen who were still riding out of central Asia. They had established
themselves in the plain of Hungary, and thence they made raiding-expeditions
far and wide, gathering an immense booty into their great circular forts.
Charlemagne marched against them, and, in a war of sieges rather than battles,
captured their main strongholds and recovered the enormous treasures that
were stored there. He thus extended his borders to the middle Danube, and set
up the East March (Ostmark), which later became Austria, to guard against any
further barbarian inroads.
By these conquests Charlemagne had become by far the greatest ruler of his
age. Yet, had he done nothing else, his place in history would have been as
small as that of any other mere conqueror. His conquests were the necessary
foundation of his empire, but his organizing work was more important still.
During the disorder of the preceding centuries, a great deal of the power of
government had fallen from the Frankish kings into the hands of local
landowners and officials, who exercised it at their pleasure. Charlemagne made
a determined effort to stop this tendency. He revived and extended the old
division of the kingdom into counties, over each of which he placed a count: a
man appointed by him, responsible to him, and removable at his pleasure. On
the dangerous frontiers he organized military districts, called "marches" or
"marks", over which he appointed specially trusted officials called markgraves
(mark-grafs, marquises). As he could not personally oversee all these officials
(though he travelled repeatedly from end to end of his empire) he apponted
special officials ("missi dominici" or royal envoys) to make circuits round the
various districts, holding courts for the hearing of grievances, and making
reports to him on the conduct of the counts. He was still very much dependent
on the great landowners, particularly for military support, but he lessened the
danger of this situation by attaching to himself a number of the greatest of
them as "vassals": men bound by oath to give him loyal service. (This was an
extension of a system previously used by the Frankish kings, and is the origin of
the legend of the Twelve Paladins.) Finally, and most important, he issued a
series of decrees, called "capitularies", based partly on Frankish and partly on
Roman law, by which he tried to give a uniform system of law to all his
dominions and to all ranks and classes. To preserve unity, to enforce order, and
to provide justice for all, were the objects of his government; they were not, of
course, perfectly attained, but no ruler since the fall of Rome had made such
persistent efforts to attain them.
Not satisfied with all this, he wished also to restore European culture. Latin,
the language of the Church, was still the language of culture; outside the
Church there was no culture to speak of, and in the Church, and even in the
monasteries, the general standard of culture had fallen very low. Charlemagne
determined to remedy this. His clear mind saw at once that a systematic
education was the great necessity, and he set about providing his empire with
an educational system as enthusiastically as he set about providing it with a
system of government and law. The best schools of Europe then were in
Ireland and Britain, which since their conversion had had a less troubled
history than the Continent, and the most famous school of all in the 8th
century was the cathedral school at York. Its head, Alcuin, was invited to
Charlemagne's court, and there founded the "Palace School" for
Charlemagne's children and those of his chief nobles. It was a model of its kind.
Alcuin was not a great original thinker, but his orderly mind fitted him to be a
great schoolmaster; and he became in fact "the schoolmaster of Europe". For
Charlemagne was not content with one school. He ordered that every
monastery and diocese in his dominions should set up a school on the lines of
the Palace School, and it is surprising how many of them were founded and
how many remained to provide a foundation for mediaeval learning.
Charlemagne himself set the example: he learned to read, and would have
learned to write, but (says his biographer) "as he did not begin his lessons in
due season, but late in life, they met with ill success". However, this did not
deter him from study; he gathered learned men to him from all parts, and
made his court, in the intervals of campaigning, a little academy. The effect of
this, in an age when rulers and men of action generally despised culture, was
extraordinary.
As one would expect, Charlemagne took considerable interest in ecclesiastical
affairs. It is true that in this department, as in every other, he insisted on having
his own way, and appointed bishops and abbots and other Church officials
almost as freely as he appointed counts and markgraves; but it is also true that
he was (unlike his grandfather, Charles Hartel) earnestly religious, and
appointed to these positions the best men he could find. The system of having
ecclesiastical appointments made by a lay ruler is bad, but under a ruler like
Charlemagne, it worked well; especially as he firmly maintained the old
alliance with Papacy. Indeed, one might almost say that at this time the ideal
partnership between Church and State was achieved. Yet Charlemagne
remained the senior partner, and the fundamental question of the relations
between Church and State was masked rather than solved by his remarkable
personality.
Yet in the year 800 the solution seemed to have been found. In that year Pope
Stephen III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West. According to the only
authority we have (Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer) the Pope's action took
the King by surprise and was unwelcome to him, and this is probable enough:
for if it gave him a new honour it also imposed a new burden. What it meant
was that Charlemagne was invested with full temporal authority over the
Christians of the West, and with the corresponding duty of protecting them.
We have seen already how the disorders that followed the collapse of the
western Empire had impressed on the Popes the necessity of temporal peace
and order if the Church was to do her work properly: the secular government
was recognized as a necessary partner in the Christian scheme. The Eastern
Emperor was a broken reed from this point of view: though he still held Sicily
and a small part of Italy, he was quite unable to maintain his imperial authority
elsewhere in the West. The earlier barbarian rulers had not proved satisfactory,
either. But here was a man who actually ruled most of the West, and that in a
civilized, "Roman" manner, and who was also a devout Christian and a good
friend to the Papacy. What could be more natural than to make him the
temporal partner of the Papacy in the West, as the Eastern Emperor was in the
East? At any rate, that was done. Charlemagne's empire was "consecrated", as
it were, by his coronation, and this act produced an impression on the
imagination of Europe that lasted for a thousand years.

Yet the empire itself was not destined to endure. One circumstance would by
itself have made its preservation impossible: the difficulty of communications.
Without good communications a strong united state cannot be maintained; but
the Roman roads had been allowed to fall into decay, and Europe simply had
not the wealth needed to restore them. Only a vast economic recovery could
supply that wealth, and such a recovery could not be achieved by one man, nor
by one generation. Charlemagne's own intense energy and physical strength
enabled him to sustain the toil of incessant and difficult travelling; but when he
died it was certain that the bonds of the empire would be relaxed.
His two elder sons, indeed, were prematurely worn out, and died before him;
and it was a third son, Louis, who became Emperor in 814. He was a man of
great personal charm, but he had not his father's strength either of body or of
will. He could not control his vassals. He could not even control his own sons,
who quarrelled continuously with him and with one another. When Louis died
in 840, these three (Lothaire, Louis and Charles) at once went to war with one
another, and this was the beginning of a series of struggles in which the
manpower of the Franks was wasted and their unity destroyed. In 843, by the
Treaty of Verdun, the empire was divided: Louis getting the eastern or
German part, and Charles the western or French part, while Lothaire received
a long straggling "middle kingdom" (Lorraine or Lotharingia) running between
the other two, from the North Sea to Italy. Here is the origin of France and
Germany, and also of the rivalry between them; for the middle kingdom itself
fell to pieces after Lothaire's death, and its possession was disputed by the other
two. Thus Charlemagne's empire was destroyed.
This was not all. During the 9th and 10th centuries Europe suffered a new
period of "barbarian invasions" far worse than any she had yet had to endure.
From the south the Moslems, from the north the Vikings, and from the east
the Magyars assailed her, plundering, slaughtering and destroying.
Charlemagne's reign turned out to be only a pause in the long ordeal of the
Dark Age, like the calm in the heart of a hurricane. Nevertheless, it was
immensely important. Without that breathing-space and partial recovery our
civilization would not have survived. Most important of all was that
Charlemagne's reign produced the thorough Christianization of the people of
the West. Christianity is not an easy religion: it takes a long time to sink in; and
the process of absorption had been slowed up in the West by the confusion and
devastation that followed the Roman collapse. The Church's work had been
hindered at every turn and in every possible way. But now, with
Charlemagne's protection and active co-operation, the Church reaped the fruit
of her long labours: Christianity became solidly planted in the European mind,
and nothing, down to the present day, has been able to uproot it. In the 9th and
10th centuries this proved the salvation of Europe. For, as we shall see, it was
their religion that nerved the Europeans to fight an apparently endless and
hopeless battle against the hordes of savage plunderers who were now let loose
upon them. The real importance of Charlemagne is that his work prepared
Europe to endure this ordeal.
10. Ordeal By Battle
The Vikings
The inhabitants of Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) had lain right
outside the Roman Empire, and had been little influenced by it - unless it was
from the Romans that they got their ideas of ship-building. Living between the
Baltic and the North Sea, it was natural enough that they should become
seamen and traders, and somehow they developed a type of ocean-going galley
which, though it was only a big open rowing-boat, was the most seaworthy
vessel that had yet appeared in European waters. In these ships they made
astonishing voyages. They discovered and settled Iceland and Greenland, and
there are good reasons for thinking that they were the first Europeans to set
foot in America. No finer seamen ever lived, and it was from this that they
gave themselves the name of Vikings - Sea-Kings. Yet they were not peaceful
traders and settlers. They were essentially warriors, ruled by little local kings
whose glory it was to be war-lords, battle-leaders. Their view of life was both
warlike and tragic: they believed that men were born to fight and die, and so to
come to Valhalla, the home of the gods. Those gods - Odin and Thor and the
rest - were themselves warriors, and were likewise doomed to die in the last
great battle at the destruction of the world. Death and destruction were the
end of everything, and men and gods alike were doomed to fight and fall;
man's part was to meet his doom with courage and take his death-wound on
the front. This was a savage creed, though in some ways a noble one; and the
men who believed it were great fighters, but were also utterly destructive and
merciless.
About the end of the 8th century they began to discover that western Europe,
so much richer than their own barren countries, was also weak and open to
plunder. They began to raid it: first with single ships, then with combined
fleets; and finally they made fortified settlements from which to ravage the
country far and wide. The monasteries, which were the principal centres of
wealth and culture, were naturally the principal target. In 793 the great abbey
of Lindisfarne, the cradle of Northumbrian Christianity, was sacked and burnt
and the monks slaughtered. In 794 Jarrow, St. Bede's monastery, suffered the
same fate. In 806 it was the turn of lona. But these were only beginnings.
Between 800 and 850 Ireland was raided from end to end, and the high
monastic culture which the Irish had built up went down in a welter of fire and
blood. In 865 a great invasion of England swept the Northumbrian kingdom
out of existence, and was barely checked by Egbert and Alfred of Wessex in the
far south. Meanwhile the disastrous civil wars which followed the death of
Charlemagne laid France and Germany open to the raiders. After 840 raid
followed raid throughout northern Europe, the light Viking craft sailing far
inland up the broad rivers that make this land so rich and fair. The Weser, the
Rhine, the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne, were furrowed by countless keels;
Rouen, Amiens, Paris, Tours, Orleans, Bordeaux and a thousand lesser places
were stormed and plundered. At last whole fleets and armies were raiding out
of the Northlands and carrying all before them. In 880 the Danes wiped out a
whole army of Germans in the terrible winter battle at Ebersdorf, and went on
to the sack of Cologne, Treves and Metz. It seemed as though in a few years all
that had so painfully been recovered of western civilization would be
hopelessly destroyed. The Eastern Empire itself was not safe. Swedish warriors
made their way into Russia and set up a principality at Kiev; and thence, in 860,
made their first attack on Constantinople.
What saved Europe in these years was the strength of the Christian faith; the
work that had been done for so many years by so many missionaries, monks,
bishops and popes (to say nothing of the counts, kings and emperors who
supported them) now began to bear its fruit. The Vikings appeared to their
victims as enemies, above all, of their religion; and in its defence, after the first
panics, they began to offer a bitter and obstinate resistance. There was no
longer any Emperor to lead them, but everywhere they rallied round local
leaders in clumps and knots of stubborn fighters, and by sheer stubbornness
and fighting-spirit gradually wore down the invaders until the latter were
willing, not only to make peace, but to become Christians in their turn. It was a
struggle between a destructive paganism and a constructive Christianity; and in
the end the Vikings acknowledged the superiority of Christianity. In 878 Alfred
of Wessex, after years of vain effort, broke the Viking forces in England at
Ethandune, and made them agree, in the Treaty of Wedmore, to settle down
and become Christians. In 885-7 Eudes, Count of Paris, beat off the Viking
forces in France from that city; and a few years later (about 910) they too
agreed to settle in Normandy and accept Christianity. In 891 the German
Arnulf defeated the Vikings at Louvain, and Germany also began to breathe
freely again. In Ireland, which had suffered most, the struggle was longer and
harder, but here too in the 10th century the High King Malachi beat down the
invaders, and the Viking settlements of Dublin, Wexford and the rest became
Christian cities. In the East the last attack of the Swedish-Russian Vikings on
Constantinople was defeated in 972, and was followed by the beginning of the
conversion of Russia. By the year 1000 most of the Scandinavian peoples
themselves had accepted Christianity.
The Magyars
This hideous ordeal was not yet over when another scourge fell upon the
West. The Magyars came riding out of central Asia, like the Huns and the
Avars before them, and pitched their tents in the great plain of Hungary,
whence they carried out a series of devastating cavalry-raids over central
Europe. Like the Vikings, they were out for plunder, and like the Vikings, they
destroyed what they could not carry off. In 890 they made their first
appearance in Germany, and for a full sixty years their swift and savage
incursions continued. In 937 they carried out a great raid through central
Germany (Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia), on into Lorraine and Burgundy, down
across the Alps into Lombardy and Tuscany, and so back by Austria to their
Hungarian home. Regions which the Vikings never saw were plundered and
terrorized by these savage riders. Yet they were beaten in the end. Germany,
which had seemed to be falling to pieces, was pulled together again. With
strong help from the Church, two Saxon kings, Henry the Fowler (919-936) and
Otto the Great (936-973), reformed the German kingdom and built up its
defences; and in 955, on the Lechfeld in Bavaria, Otto defeated the Magyars so
thoroughly that they gave little further trouble. About the year 1000, mainly
through the efforts of their own king Stephen, they were converted to
Christianity and so incorporated into Europe.
The Saracens
While these calamities were falling on northern and central Europe, the
southern coasts were being devastated by yet another set of raiders. The
Mohammedans of north Africa, like the Vandals before them, had taken to the
sea, and during the 9th century they became the scourge of the Mediterranean.
It was not long before they began establishing bases in Europe from which to
carry their raids inland. In 827 they began the attacks which gave them
possession of Sicily, Sardinia and south Italy, and so destroyed the last foothold
of the Eastern Empire in the West. In 888 they established a base in France, at
Fraxinetum, near St. Tropez. It was lucky that they were not united under a
strong leader, or they might at last have succeeded in conquering Europe. As it
was, they spread havoc in Italy and southern France. In 846 they took and
sacked Rome, and Christians throughout Europe heard with horror how they
had stabled their horses in St. Peter's. They were driven off that time, but there
was no security against their return. Indeed, there was no security anywhere.
The great abbey of St. Gall, in Switzerland, had on one occasion to beat off a
Saracen attack. In the passes of the Alps the Saracens met the Magyars, as the
Magyars met the Vikings in the valley of the Rhine. Yet the extraordinary
toughness of the Christians enabled them to beat off these assaults. This is, in
fact, the heroic age of Europe: an age of continual and desperate fighting, in
which Europeans rallied round scores of local leaders to hold and defeat the
most frightful series of attacks that any civilization has had to endure. The
Saracens proved the hardest to deal with. Their religion made them proof
against Christianity, and it was not until the 11th century that a group of
Norman adventurers broke their hold on Sicily and Italy and drove them back
to Africa. By that time the rest of Europe was well on the way to recovery.
It was, however, a very different Europe from that of Charlemagne. Its losses
had been fearful. Of its high monastic culture only remnants survived. The
Emperor and the Pope had been the twin pillars of Charlemagne's Europe;
now there was no longer an Emperor, and the power of government had been
split up among thousands of local lordships; while the Papacy, left unprotected,
had become practically the possession of the Roman nobles who controlled
and fought over the papal elections. Almost everywhere, indeed, the Church
had fallen under the control of the local lords, who practically appointed
bishops and abbots at their pleasure; and the men they appointed were apt to
be more notable for their prowess in battle than for their holiness and learning.
For the years of desperate fighting had driven the peoples of Europe to
organize themselves entirely for war. Fighting-power was what counted. The
feudal system, which had replaced Charlemagne's system, was primarily a
military system: a means of linking together the people of a neighbourhood for
their common defence; and the clergy were drawn into it like everyone else.
European society had become a warrior-society, like the societies of the
Vikings and Magyars themselves. It might have remained so, and never have
recovered its ancient glories; but the force of Christianity, which had nerved
the Europeans to win their struggle with the invaders, now inspired them to
undertake the reconstruction of civilization.

Book Three - The Age of Christendom (1000-1500)
11. Recovery In The West
A celestial observer, looking at Europe about the year 950, would have seen it
as a society broken into fragments, apparently without hope of recovery. Of
the two great unifying forces, the Empire and the Church, the former had
vanished completely. There was no longer an Emperor. There were kings, in
France and Germany and England, but they could hardly be said to rule their
kingdoms. The real power of government had everywhere fallen into the
hands of local lords, who might acknowledge the kings as their overlords in a
shadowy sort of way, but who in practice ruled their little domains as they
chose - as far as their own subjects would permit them to do so, which was
often not very far. The necessity of resisting the raiders had forced men to cling
together in groups round their local leaders; but how long would they stick
together when the pressure was removed? Local war had already become the
common practice, and it would be easy to imagine Europe degenerating into a
welter of squabbling fragments, obeying no law but that of the sword
The Church was still, in theory, a bond of unity; but in practice it, too, was
dominated by the lords. Monasteries and bishoprics they had practically taken
possession of, and the bishops and abbots they appointed - members of their
own families, or trusted retainers - were not likely to stand up very strongly for
the law of God or the rights of the Church. The Pope, still in theory the head of
the whole Church, was really powerless to rule it effectively. In any case, the
Papacy itself had fallen under the domination of the Roman nobles, who
fought one another for the privilege of appointing the Vicar of Christ. Some of
the Popes so chosen were good, many were weak, and a few were abominable:
unfit to hold any office in the Church, most of all unfit to be its head.
Altogether, in 950 it looked as though the final collapse was close at hand, and
the year 1000 was freely mentioned as the predestined date of the end of the
world.
And yet a century later a new European society was obviously taking shape,
and within fifty years more that society was strong enough and united enough
to embark on the great enterprise of the Crusade. This dramatic change - the
most momentous in our history - was not the work of any single man or group
of men. Countless individuals and groups all over Europe made their
contributions to it. Certain movements were particularly fruitful, and these we
are now going to consider: remembering, though, that these movements are
only representative of a general tendency and striving towards the renewal of
Europe.
Cluny
In the year 910, Duke William of Aquitaine founded a new monastery at
Cluny, in a lonely valley of Burgundy, and thus began the great Cluniac
reform: a landmark in the history of monasticism, the Church, and Europe.
Cluny was different from former monasteries in three ways. In the first place, it
was made directly subject to the Pope, and therefore independent of any
interference from feudal lords, or even from bishops. In the second place, the
monks of Cluny spent much more time in prayer and study, and much less in
manual labour, than their predecessors, so that Cluny and its daughter-
monasteries (which soon began to be founded as the fame of the first
foundation spread) became at once a spiritual and an intellectual force in
Europe. In the third place (and this was perhaps the most important
innovation), these daughter-monasteries were not allowed to become
independent. They followed the rule of life established at Cluny, they were
ruled by priors appointed by the Abbot of Cluny and subject to supervision by
him, and all the priors met periodically under the Abbot's presidency to discuss
the affairs of the whole order. For Cluny was an "order": the first religious
order in the Church; and its centralized form of government has been imitated
more or less by all the orders founded after it: Cistercians, Carthusians,
Dominicans and the rest.
Thus the Cluniac reform stood for three principles: the independence of the
Church from secular interference or control, the revival of spiritual and
intellectual influences as opposed to the brutal militarism that had come to be
dominant in European life, and centralization and solidarity as opposed to the
disorderly localization which was splitting Europe into fragments. At the
lowest point of the Dark Age, Cluny re-affirmed those principles which were to
be the basis of a new society. The Cluniac influence spread, at first slowly, then
with enthusiastic rapidity, throughout the West, till over three hundred
monasteries, in France, England, Germany, Italy and Spain, acknowledged the
Abbot of Cluny as their head; and from these poured forth a stream of
reformers, saintly and learned men, to become bishops, cardinals and Popes,
and the trusted advisers of lords and kings. The great revival of religious living,
of learning, of the arts (especially architecture), of law and order, which took
place in the llth and 12th centuries, owed its origin chiefly to the Cluniac
reform.
The Normans
Normandy was originally the province of France given to Rollo the Viking and
his followers when peace was made with them about 911. Wherever the
Vikings settled in Europe - France, Ireland, Britain, Russia - they accepted
Christianity and intermarried with the native population, and were soon
absorbed and lost. In Normandy, however, some accident of breeding
produced out of the mingling of Scandinavian and French blood a distinct race,
the Normans, who for about two hundred years played a decisive part in
European history. They inherited the best qualities of both strains of their
ancestry; and it was the even balance in their natures of caution and boldness,
thrift and generosity, love of order and love of enterprise, that marked them
out from other peoples and made them fit to pioneer a new age. At fighting
they were unequalled. In addition to conquering England, and partially
conquering Ireland, they drove the Saracens out of Sicily and southern Italy,
and they played the principal part in the first Crusade. But their services to
civilization were more important than their conquests. They were most deeply
influenced by the Cluniac reform, and were the first to apply the ideas of that
reform to secular affairs: "Normandy in the llth century", it has been said, "was
Cluny in action". It was the Dukes of Normandy in that century who
transformed feudalism from a mere chaos into an ordered system of law and
government, and the Norman Kings of England were the first real kings that
Europe had seen since Charlemagne. One might almost say that the Normans
restored the very ideas of kingship and of law. They were equally enthusiastic
about the revival of learning and the arts. The Norman abbey of Bee became
one of the chief centres of study in Europe, and from it came - to mention only
two - those great Archbishops of Canterbury, Lan-franc and St. Anselm. They
were mighty builders - following in this, too, the example of Cluny. In their
great castles they refounded the art of fortification, and the "Norman style" of
their abbeys and churches was a worthy fore-runner of the greater "Gothic"
style which sprang out of it. And a stream of Norman adventurers carried these
ideas over the length and breadth of Europe, to stir up more sluggish peoples.
The Normans were essentially pioneers. It is easy to point out defects in what
they did, the brutality and coarseness and roughness that went with their
strength and enterprise; but pioneering is always rough and ready work, and
pioneers usually have the faults of their virtues. They leave behind them, not a
finished work, but a foundation that others can build on; and the structure of
modern Europe would have been far different without the foundations laid by
the Normans.
The Holy Roman Empire
The greater part of Germany (Germany east of the Rhine and north of the
Danube) had never been conquered by the Romans; therefore the German
tribal system had never been destroyed. St. Boniface introduced Christianity
into the country in the 8th century, and established a strong and well-organized
Church government, and the Germans began to be a settled and civilized
people; but this did not give them political unity. Charlemagne conquered
Germany up to the Elbe and incorporated it into his empire, organizing local
government under officials like counts, with Roman titles; but tribal feeling
remained strong, and Charlemagne's divisions generally followed the old tribal
lines. In the conflicts that followed his death and the division of his empire, the
real power of government, as we have seen, fell more and more into the hands
of local lords; that meant in Germany that it fell into the hands of the great
Dukes who were the leaders of the German tribes. By the year 900 the
kingdom of Germany practically consisted of five duchies: Saxony, Bavaria,
Swabia, Franconia and Lorraine (Lotharingia). Except in Lorraine (which was
less German than the others), the power of the Dukes rested firmly on the
strong local or tribal loyalty of their subjects; and each of them had far more
power in his duchy than the King of Germany. When the German branch of
the line of Charlemagne died out in 911, the Dukes elected one of their own
number, Conrad of Franconia, as King; and under his "rule" (if it can be so
called) they moved rapidly towards complete independence.
Yet Germany did not break up. This was partly due to the threats and
incursions of the Vikings, Magyars and Slavs, which forcibly demonstrated the
necessity of some kind of unity. It was still more due to the Church. St.
Boniface had instilled into the Church a strong sense of the necessity of union
with Rome, and therefore a strong sense of loyalty to the Pope. Under
Charlemagne this had become combined with an equal devotion to and union
with the King. In Charlemagne's system Pope and King were only two sides of
one authority, working together for the common good of Christian men, and
the German clergy remembered this ideal and strove to preserve it. Thus the
powerful and well-organized Church stood behind the King, not behind the
Dukes, and fought to maintain the royal power, and even to restore the
Empire. Nevertheless, Germany might yet have fallen apart had there not
appeared, between 919 and 1024, a succession of strong and able kings, the
kings of the Saxon House, who knew how to use the dangers from without and
the loyalty of the Church to strengthen the monarchy.
Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony, was elected King in 919. He was more of a
soldier than a statesman. He incorporated Lorraine into the German kingdom,
he began the long task of driving back the Slavs east of the Elbe, and above all,
in 933 he won two spectacular victories over the Magyars. Unfortunately, he
disliked and distrusted the power of the Church, and therefore was not able to
make the most of his opportunities; but the prestige gained by his victories was
very useful to his son and successor, Otto the Great.
Otto (936-973) was the real founder of the Holy Roman Empire. Unlike his
father, he perceived the necessity of a close alliance between Church and King.
The Church was the only strong unifying force in Germany, and the only force
which could provide, from its broad lands, an army which would be
independent of the Dukes. Otto's policy was thus to foster the power of the
Church while demanding its support; and it was astonishingly successful. The
Dukes rebelled, of course, but they were crushed, and by 950 Otto had been
able to get the duchies into the hands of members of his own family. He also
carried on his father's policy of gradually pushing back the Slavs towards the
east, and colonizing with Germans the country between Elbe and Oder.
Finally, in 955 he decisively broke the Magyars at the battle of the Lechfeld,
and put an end for good to their raids on Europe.
He was now the most powerful ruler in the West, and it was natural that Pope
John XII, entangled, like all the Popes of this period, in the endless faction fights
of the Roman nobles, should appeal to him for help. It was equally natural that
Otto should respond. His power rested, as he well knew, on the support of the
Church; weakness in the Church meant weakness in his own position; and here
he saw a chance of strengthening the Papacy and at the same time of making it
dependent on him. In 961 he marched an army into Italy, and found no-one to
withstand him; in 962 he was crowned Emperor by the Pope, as Charlemagne
had been. He at once confirmed the Papal power by renewing the grants made
by Charlemagne, but also insisted that in future no Pope should be consecrated
till his election had been approved by the Emperor. This was the logical
conclusion of all his policy, and the basis of what came to be known as the
Holy Roman Empire.
Of this institution in a much later age Voltaire said that it was "neither holy,
nor Roman, nor an Empire". How far is that true of it at its foundation? It was
then certainly an empire: Otto and his early successors exercised real power,
and kept their subjects in tolerable order; though they could not, of course,
establish anything like the order that Constantine, or even Charlemagne, had
maintained. But it was hardly a "Roman" empire. It included only Germany
and the northern half of Italy; its Emperor was always a German, and the other
European princes made no pretence of obeying him. As for "holiness", it is
certainly true that the support of a strong Church was vital to it. The Church
not only gave the Emperor a reliable army, but also supplied him with a civil
service; clerics, being almost the only educated men at that time, were the only
ones capable of acting effectively as royal officials and administrators, and were
therefore the backbone of the imperial government. Besides, the very idea of
the Empire - the idea of a single institution, combining both Church and State,
and demanding the allegiance of all Christians - was essentially a clerical idea,
and perhaps only clerics fully believed in it and desired it. The Holy Roman
Empire, then, was decidedly a religious institution. But was it "holy"? It
involved the Church in all kinds of secular affairs, and it subjected her very
much to the control of the Emperor; and in the long run this was bound to be
bad for religion. Bishops and abbots who spent their lives in the tasks of secular
government - and who were chosen for their positions precisely because of
their secular ability - were not likely to be equally effective in promoting
religion; and yet the influence of the Church depended on religion, and any
weakening of the religious spirit would weaken the Church, and with her the
Empire.
This underlying contradiction explains the Empire's eventual failure. During
Otto the Great's reign, and for nearly a century after his death, it worked well
enough, with immense benefit both to the Church and to civilization. (For
instance, it freed the Papacy from dependence on the Roman nobles.) During
this period the reforming party in the Church - those clerics who drew their
inspiration from Cluny - were well content to work with the Emperors:
imperial control was far better than the control of a thousand local lords. But
sooner or later the reformers were bound to see that the Church could not do
its own work properly till it was freed from secular control altogether; and it
was precisely the best clerics who would the soonest realize this, and would
most strongly oppose the Emperor's pretensions. When, in 1049, the Emperor
Henry III nominated as Pope the Bishop of Toul (Leo IX), the bishop accepted
only on condition that his nomination was confirmed by the clergy and people
of Rome. The Emperor took this in good part, and he and Leo IX worked well
together; but the situation was clearly becoming impossible, and a few years
later the Empire and the Church were at open war, and the union established
by Otto the Great was broken for ever.
This breach was fatal to the Empire. Already its German and Italian sections
had been moving apart. The Italians were developing much more quickly and
successfully than the Germans, and were increasingly unwilling to be ruled by
the "barbarians" from the North. In Germany itself, the chronic desire of the
various regions for local independence was always re-appearing. Only the
support of the Church had enabled these tendencies to be overcome; but from
the end of the llth century the Emperors were engaged in a hopeless three-fold
struggle: to control the German nobles, to control the Italian cities, and to
control the Church. The three-fold attempt led only to a three-fold failure. The
Holy Roman Empire continued to exist, but only as a loose confederation of
more-or-less independent German states. The idea of restoring a universal
European state like the original Roman Empire remained a dream: a dream
that caused a good deal of trouble from time to time, as we shall see, but still
only a dream. The actual future of Europe was to be very different.
Nevertheless, in the transitional period of the 10th and 11th centuries, the
Empire played a very important part; and without it the mediaeval society of
Christendom would perhaps never have been successfully established.
12. The Founding Of Christendom
Europe at the present day is a very peculiar sort of thing. On the one hand, it is
a unity: there is no doubt about that; when we speak of "Europe", we know
that we are speaking of something really and solidly existing. Nor is it only a
geographical reality, like Asia or Africa; we speak of "European society",
"European culture ", "European civilization"; but it would be absurd to talk of
"Asiatic culture", or of "African society", for there are many cultures in Asia,
many societies in Africa, while in Europe there is but one. Europe is, therefore,
one thing. Yet it is very much divided. It has no political unity and no
economic unity; its inhabitants belong to different races, speak different
languages, obey different governments; its unity is cultural and religious, and
even that unity is far from complete.
This combination of unity and diversity has been characteristic of Europe since
its first beginnings. It was characteristic of the Greek city-states; it was
characteristic of the earlier and better period of the Roman Empire; and it was
most characteristic of the mediaeval period which we are now going to
consider. Indeed, it was during this Middle Age - roughly, between 1000 and
1500 - that Europe was finally stamped with this mark of unity-in-diversity
which still distinguishes her. If Europe ever loses all unity, she will, of course,
cease to exist; but equally, if she ever becomes a complete unity she will cease
to exist: that is she will cease to be what she has been for 2000 years. Europeans
in history, as a matter of fact, have passionately resisted both complete
unification and complete disruption, and they continue to resist them at the
present day.
During the Dark Age after Charlemagne's death, the danger that threatened
Europe was the danger of disruption. The success of Vikings, Magyars and
Saracens would have broken all unity and destroyed European civilization. The
force that nerved Europeans to resist these invaders, to throw them back or to
absorb them, was religion: the enemies had no force or inspiration so strong as
Christianity, and by the power of Christianity they were conquered and
Europeanized. In becoming Christians, they became also Europeans.
But Christianity itself was badly mauled in the process. The new converts did
not at first make very perfect Christians; in any case, as usually happens in time
of trouble and strife, the general standard of morality and religious observance
went down. And the Church herself, as we have seen, was thoroughly
entangled in the warfare and general turmoil of the age: assaulted and
plundered by the raiders, its lands and dignities (even the Papacy) falling under
the control of the hard-fighting, half-savage barons, its very bishops and abbots
themselves behaving, often enough, like barons rather than churchmen: ruling
their estates like petty princes, engaging in the endless rough-and-tumble
fighting of the age like any other feudal lord, and even sometimes getting
married, and turning their bishoprics or abbeys into family estates. Christianity
seemed to be degenerating into a mere warrior-religion - a fit faith for the
savage barbarity of 10th century Europe.
The queer thing about Christianity, though, is that it always succeeds in
renewing its life, even when it seems on the point of extinction. At the lowest
point of the 10th century, there began the Cluniac reform. The founders of
Cluny were not, of course, worrying about civilization, but about the state of
the Church, and especially the state of monasticism. They meant to establish a
house in which some men could live perfectly Christian lives, and from which,
by inspiration and example, other men might be induced to at least improve
their manner of living. But it seemed to them that, in the circumstances of the
time, three things were necessary for the attainment of this end: complete
independence from secular control; centralization of government, so that all
houses following the Cluniac rule should be kept constantly in touch with the
fountain-head of the reform; and learning - education. We have seen how this
example spread, and how the monks, priests and prelates who had been
formed or influenced by Cluny gradually carried the spirit of the reform all
over Europe. The clergy of the 12th century were very different indeed from
those of the 10th; and when, by the action of the Holy Roman Emperors, the
Papacy had been freed from the Italian nobles, a succession of reforming Popes
restored the effective unity and discipline of the Church under an increasingly
centralized system of government.
The reform of the clergy was naturally accompanied by a great revival of
religion among the people. One result of this revival was the Crusade.
Another, even more important for the immediate future of Europe, was the
Peace of God. The endless petty local warfare of the 10th century was an
offence against religion as well as against civilization, and the reforming
bishops were not the men to tolerate it any longer than they could help. Under
their leadership, local associations began to be formed to keep the peace, the
members of which not only swore to give up war themselves, but also
established armed forces to prevent others from fighting. When war could not
be avoided, rules were laid down for its conduct (for example, for the
protection of peasants, merchants and other non-combatants) and were
enforced by the ban of the Church. These associations of the Peace of God had
much success in restoring order, especially in France, their first home; what
was even more important was that they soon began to be supported by kings,
and by great lords who were practically kings, like the Dukes of Normandy.
These rulers undertook to maintain the Peace of God in their dominions; and it
was not long before they were claiming right to suppress all disorder and
crime: the Peace of God was transformed into the King's Peace. This was a
great step forward. At the present day the right of the government to keep
order is taken for granted, and so it had been in the Roman Empire, but during
the Dark Age this right had been simply forgotten because rulers were not
strong enough to exercise it. In the 11th century it began to be reestablished.
This was a vital point in the recovery of Europe, and it was due very largely to
the Peace of God. Indeed, the example of Cluny, and the steadfast support
given by the Church to the restoration of order, played a very great part in the
rebuilding of government in Europe. We have seen how much the Holy
Roman Emperors owed to the Church, and the debt of the Kings of France and
England, and of other lesser rulers, was just as great. The revival of the Church
everywhere made for the revival of law and order.
This would obviously assist an economic revival. During the 9th and 10th
centuries, economic activity had been reduced to a minimum. Trade had
almost disappeared, and each little community had to produce as best it could,
while fighting off bandits and raiders, the food and clothing necessary for
survival. Many communities failed to sustain the savage struggle, and the waste
and the forest again increased on the cultivated land. As some kind of order
began to be restored, however, the economic state of Europe began to
improve. The population started to increase - there were more men to do the
work, and they had more time and security to do it, and merchants could
undertake trading-journeys with some prospect of success. Here again the
monks led the way. They tackled the problems of agriculture in an orderly
way, discovering new methods and reviving old ones, and spreading them
from monastery to monastery over the land. And they recommenced the
clearing of the forests. Other people, lords and peasants, followed their
example. Villages and towns grew up round monasteries or castles, or even
independently. Europe is dotted with names like Newtown, Newcastle,
Neuville, Neuburg, Vil-lanova, which bear witness to the vast extent of the
pioneering movement of the 11th and 12th centuries. By the year 1100 Europe
was producing, on the whole, a surplus of food. This enabled more men to
engage in manufacture and trade: craftsmen and merchants could get to work,
towns could be formed and expanded, because the countryside was now
capable of supporting them. The results were astonishing. It seems almost
incredible, but by the end of the 12th century the economic state of Europe,
judged by the quantity and quality of production and trade, was far better than
it had been even under the Roman Empire.
This economic revival was accompanied and assisted by the beginnings of a
great social change: the growth of personal freedom. The influence of
Christianity stimulated this change; but, quite apart from that, a pioneering age
is always favourable to freedom. The new settlements and towns needed men,
and vigorous recruits were accepted in them without much enquiry about their
origin. Slavery had already disappeared from most of Europe and been
replaced by serfdom: the serf was bound to service, but he was also bound to
the soil he worked on, and could not be bought and sold at random. Now
began a further development. An active and enterprising serf could get away to
one of the new towns or villages with a fair prospect of becoming a free man;
and lords had to treat their serfs better and give them more liberty, if only for
fear of driving them to run off. So the new economic system was essentially
based on free labour, and the extent of freedom continually increased as the
new society of Christendom grew; and this was an immense economic
improvement as well as a great social reform. The movement towards personal
liberty, thus begun, was to produce still greater effects, economic, social and
political, cultural and religious, in the later history of Europe.
A cultural revival would in any case have followed the religious revival. We
have seen the importance which the Cluniac monks attached to learning, and
they were equally interested in fostering the arts, such as architecture and
music, which could contribute to the glory of God and the devotion of man.
Monasteries like Cluny and Bee became great centres of educational and
artistic activity. Their example spread. The cathedral schools began to revive,
and some of them (like those of Rheims and Chartres) became more famous
even than the monastic schools. Scholars and thinkers like Gerbert of Rheims
(Pope Sylvester II), Lanfranc of Bee, St. Anselm of Canterbury, laid the
foundations of a new age in philosophy and theology. These men worked in
Latin, for the popular languages at that time were still too poor in vocabulary
and too weak in grammar to be able to express deep and precise thought; but
they were already strong enough to be used for poetry: the Song of Roland was
written in the llth century, the legends of Arthur and the Round Table were
put into verse, and the early troubadours began the revival of lyric poetry. As
for building, it went on everywhere, at first in the powerful but heavy Norman
or Romanesque style, later in the wonderful Gothic style. All the arts began to
live again: sculpture, glass-work, illumination, embroidery. Music had
flourished even in the Dark Age, but now Guittone, a monk of Arezzo,
invented the method of writing music which made possible all the modern
development of the art.
Most of this intellectual and artistic work was supported by the Church, and
inspired by the religious revival; but of course it could never have developed as
it did without the reestablishment of order and the growth of wealth. Students
and artists need some security, and some surplus wealth: men fighting for their
lives or living on the brink of starvation cannot afford to study St. Augustine
nor to build cathedrals, nor even to pay minstrels. In the llth century a great
religious revival was accompanied by, and helped to produce, great political
and economic development; and the three together brought about the new
society of Christendom.
Popes and Emperors
What form was this society going to take? During the llth century it was full of
life and sprouting in all directions, but it could not be said to have taken any
definite shape. Two important points were still undecided: what was to be the
position of the Emperor, and what the position of the Church? Was
Christendom to be united into a single state under the Emperor's rule, or was it
to remain divided into a number of independent states, of which the Empire
was only one? And in either case, was the Church to be controlled by the
secular power, or to be independent of it, or to be superior to it? Many people
in the llth century hoped to see all Christians completely united, ruled by an
Emperor and a Pope acting as partners, the one controlling temporal affairs
and the other spiritual affairs; and this beautiful dream continued to haunt
men's minds throughout the Middle Age. But it was never more than a dream.
In fact, a bitter struggle took place between the Pope and the Emperor, and it
was this struggle which, between 1050 and 1150, decided the actual future ot
Europe.
About the year 1050, everything seemed to be going in favour of the Empire.
The Emperor was then by far the strongest prince in Christendom - the kings
of France and England were mere shadows in comparison. He certainly
depended very much on the support of the Church, but that support had so far
been willingly given, and the Emperor had actually achieved so much power
over the Church that he practically appointed and controlled even the Pope.
The Pope's own power over the rest of the Church had been largely restored,
and the Emperor might well hope, through the Papacy, to gel control of the
rest of Christendom. But this fair prospect was a mere illusion. The real ideas
of the Emperors and the Popes were in opposition, and in 1050 a clash was
rapidly approaching.
You will remember that the first principle of the reforming party in the Church
was her liberation from secular control. In the first place, this meant the freeing
of the Church lands and Church appointments from the greedy clutches of
hundreds of local lords, and to achieve this the reformers were well content to
ally themselves with powerful rulers like the Emperors or the Dukes of
Normandy, and to allow them a good deal of power in Church affairs. But
once this first step had been taken, they were bound to want to go further, and
make the Church completely free and independent. Already in 1049 Pope Leo
IX had refused to accept the Emperor's nomination unless it was confirmed by
the clergy of Rome, and in 1059 his successor restricted the right of electing the
Pope to the cardinals: that is, the principal members of the Roman clergy.
The reformers, in fact, who now included all the most active and able
members of the clergy, were coming to the conclusion that a thorough reform,
whether in the Church or in secular society, could not be carried out unless the
Church was completely freed from secular interferences. Secular rulers,
however good they might be, would always be tempted to put political
considerations above religious ones, and to tolerate abuses in the Church if
they could win thereby any political advantage. The work of reform, which
had been pushed on very successfully up to about 1070, then began to be
obstructed by the very men - the Emperor, the King of France, the Duke of
Normandy (now King of England) - who had formerly done so much to assist
it. Yet these men were not at all inclined to relax their grip on the Church: it
was too important to them. The lands of the Church were extensive, the
support of the great bishops and abbots was essential to any ruler; without that
he could not hold his barons in check nor preserve the order and unity of his
kingdom. Therefore he insisted that he should control the elections of bishops
and abbots, so as to see that the men elected would be worthy of their
positions, and insisted also that they should do homage and take the oath of
fealty to him before he invested them with their offices. But the men thus
chosen were not always the best from the religious point of view; and anyway,
the reformers maintained that no secular ruler could possibly have the right to
control these elections or to confer these offices. In truth, "the twofold duties
of churchmen made a struggle inevitable, and at the same time almost
insoluble, since neither pope nor king could afford to lose their services".
In 1073 Hildebrand, Archdeacon of Rome, was elected Pope, and took the
name of Gregory VII. This man's remarkable ability and will-power, united to
great personal holiness, had made him for years one of the pillars of the reform
movement; now that he was Pope, he was determined to make the reform
effective throughout Christendom. Even kings and emperors, he asserted, were
subject to the laws of Christ's Church, and it was his business, as the successor
of St. Peter and the Vicar of Christ, to see that they obeyed them. In particular
he was determined to stamp out the practice of "lay investiture", by which
secular rulers conferred Church offices on men of their choice. In 1075 he
issued a decree prohibiting this under pain of excommunication, and
immediately came into head-on collision with the Emperor Henry IV.
Henry IV was Gregory's equal in ability and force of will, though not in
holiness. He had been resolutely engaged in strengthening the imperial power,
and the Pope's decree seemed to him to threaten his work with absolute
destruction. So he replied to it with an outright defiance. Gregory thereupon
excommunicated him, and released his vassals from their oaths of allegiance.
The result was a rebellion which, without the help of the Church, Henry could
not cope with: he was utterly defeated, and the German princes began to talk
of deposing him. He then took a bold and clever step. He fled in person to the
Pope, and appeared before him at the castle of Canossa, barefoot and in the
garb of a penitent, imploring forgiveness for his sins. Gregory forgave him, of
course - as a Christian priest he could do no less, though he justly suspected the
sincerity of the repentance; Henry was absolved from the excommunication
and his subjects were commanded to return to their allegiance. He took his
opportunity and broke his principal opponents, and, having thus settled affairs
in Germany, returned to deal with the Pope.
This time he was successful. In 1084 he captured Rome and installed an anti-
pope there, while Gregory fled south to Salerno, where he died the following
year. But Henry's victory was only apparent. His submission at Canossa, clever
as it was, was a great mistake: he had publicly acknowledged the Pope's
superior authority and men never forgot it; succeeding Popes carried on the
struggle; and, without the support of the Church, the Emperor's reign became
a mere string of rebellions. In the end he was forced to abdicate. His son Henry
V, had no better success, and at last, in 1122, consented to the so-called
Concordat of Worms. This document laid it down that elections to
ecclesiastical offices were henceforth to be free, though the Emperor was
allowed to supervise them. The Emperor was no longer to invest prelates with
"the ring and the staff", the insignia of spiritual authority: but the prelates, once
elected and invested, were to do homage to him for their lands and swear to be
his faithful vassals in temporal affairs. This agreement was in appearance a
compromise, but it was definitely a compromise in favour of the Church.
Thenceforth the Emperor could claim no rights over the election and
investiture of prelates, however he might influence them indirectly. And, since
the other princes of Europe were even less able than the Emperor to resist the
Church, they too were soon brought to acknowledge her independence.
This struggle between the Empire and the Papacy was decisive for the future of
Europe. In the first place, it ruined whatever chance there might have been of
uniting Christendom into a single state. The Holy Roman Empire was
thenceforth a mainly German affair, and a weak one at that - for later
Emperors, not accepting their defeat, wasted their resources in vain efforts to
renew their control over Italy and the Papacy. The rest of Europe remained
separate from the Empire, and fell into a number of independent states. On the
other hand, the Church was established as the one universal and dominant
institution in Europe. If Europeans were politically divided, they were
religiously united, in a Church that taught and enforced a definite doctrine and
way of life, through a closely-organized hierarchy of bishops under one all-
controlling head, the Pope. The Church was not subject to the secular
kingdoms, but independent of them - indeed, superior to them; she proclaimed
in all of them the same doctrine and moral law, and she promoted in them all
the same culture, of which she was the principal founder and inspirer. The
modern state of Europe - politically divided, yet possessing a certain religious
and cultural unity - is due to the victory of the Papacy over the Empire and the
other secular princes in the 12th century.
13. Christendom
Christendom is the name usually given to that particular form which European
society took between the years 1000 and 1500: in what is often called the
Middle Age. That Age, and its society, have been very variously judged by
various historians. Some, at one extreme, have called it an age of barbarism
and superstition, but little better than the Dark Age that preceded it; others
have considered it the perfect age of Europe, presenting a kind of model
society to which all Europeans ought to wish to return. Both these judgments
are wrong. However, what concerns us, as historians, is to see what society
was actually like during that age, and to appreciate what influence it had on the
development of modern Europe.
The first thing to realize is that the Middle Age was an age of pioneering, and
its society was a pioneering society. This was the age during which the forests
were cut down, and the soil of Europe brought properly under cultivation; an
age during which cities were built or re-built, manufactures expanded, trade
revived all over Europe; an age during which law and order and sound
government were re-established; an age in which culture began to live again, in
art and science and education; above all, an age in which philosophical and
theological thought was developed more profoundly and thoroughly than ever
before; in general, an age of both recovery and expansion after the long dark
night that had followed the breakdown of Rome. Like all pioneering societies,
the society of Christendom was lively, daring, hopeful and enterprising. But it
had the defects of a pioneering society as well as its virtues - it was rough and
tough, often brutal, disorderly and violent. Conditions of life were very hard,
especially in the early days - almost as hard for the baron in his bare stone castle
as for the peasant in his mud hut; disease was rife; a bad harvest brought
always the peril of starvation; governments were weak, and "bad men"
(thieves, brigands, robber-barons) had great opportunities.
The men brought up under these conditions were themselves hard and tough,
stern and ruthless, both in thought and action. Compared with ours, theirs was
a hard society, a hard civilization. This hardness shows itself in the great
strength of their art and thought, and the great courage and endurance they
showed in their lives, but also in their readiness to fight, to kill and be killed for
what we should think trivial causes, and in the savage punishments they
inflicted on evil-doers: the burning of heretics, the boiling of coiners, the
hanging, drawing and quartering of traitors. We are shocked by these things
(though, by the by, we have some little cruelties of our own to repent of), but
we must remember that the men who did and suffered them were harder than
we are, both for good and evil, and that they were as ready to suffer them as to
inflict them.
A second great mark of this society was its localization, by which I mean that it
was organized in small local units. Take government for an example. There
were kings and emperors, and they were important, as we shall see; but their
power was very limited. The actual work of government was done almost
entirely by local authorities, such as barons and city councils, and the king's
power depended on his ability to keep these local authorities faithful to him.
The mere difficulties of communication made it hard for him to control them;
and in any case, he had no army to speak of except what they agreed to provide
him with. The local authorities themselves found it hard enough to control
their own subjects. The idea of a mediaeval king or baron as a mail-clad tyrant
riding roughshod over opposition is mere nonsense: the fault of that society
was too little authority rather than too much. Its history is studded with
rebellion, often successful: of barons against kings, of peasants against barons,
of cities against barons or kings, of one section of a city against another. The
men of that age were not easily controlled, and no mediaeval ruler had one-
tenth of the power of a modern government. Even the power of the Pope, so
great in theory, was in practice very limited. It is strange to see how often the
Popes were successfully disobeyed during these "Ages of Faith", and it is
notable that they won their great successes (as against the Emperor Henry IV,
or against King John of England) only when their commands were strongly
backed by public opinion. Never, perhaps, in the history of the world has
government depended so much on the consent of the governed as it did in the
age of Christendom.
Yet these rough and turbulent men were great believers in mutual co-
operation and in the rule of law. This is natural enough. In a confusion like that
of the Dark Age no individual can stand alone, and the men of Christendom
had had driven into them by bitter experience the necessity of hanging
together if they were not to hang separately. So they formed themselves into
co-operative groups, like manors and guilds, and these groups are the most
characteristic institutions of the Middle Age. And what they insisted on most of
all was the rule of law - that definite rules of conduct should be laid down, and
that every member of the group should be bound by them. This, too, is natural
enough. Only an experience of lawlessness teaches men the real necessity of
law, and Europeans in the Dark Age had gone through an experience of
lawlessness such as is rare in history. They emerged from it as passionate
believers in law. Such a passion is, in fact, characteristic of a pioneering society.
So in the Western states of the U.S.A. during the 19th century, while there was
much lawlessness and gun-play, and plenty of "bad men", the majority of the
settlers banded themselves together in groups to enforce the law, and did so,
often by lynchings and the ruthless methods of "vigilantes". In mediaeval
Europe similar conditions had similar results.
The basis of this society was religion. Practically everyone in Europe belonged
to the Catholic Church, and took its authority and doctrines for granted. This
does not mean, of course, that everyone submitted to the Church in practice!
There was plenty of carelessness about religion; there were a good many
survivals from the old paganism, which died hard; there was always a good
deal of open or secret opposition to the exercise of the Church's authority, and
especially to the authority of the Pope; but, by and large, it is true to say that
the society of Christendom was based on a general acceptance of, and
submission to, the Church. Its culture was, at first, almost wholly religious,
being the offspring of the monasteries, and always remained strongly
influenced by religion - nine-tenths of mediaeval art is devoted to religious
themes. And even in political and economic affairs, the influence of religion
was very strong. The moral teaching of the Church applied to all classes, and
dealt with the duties of princes, knights, merchants and peasants, as well as
with those of priests and monks; and the Church's right to lay down these
duties and see that they were carried out was generally admitted - though, as I
have explained, it could not always be enforced in practice. Still, it generally
was enforced, because it generally was admitted; and that explains the
remarkable uniformity of conduct in Christendom, in spite of the innumerable
local divisions: the idea of the "just price", for instance, was everywhere the
same, because everywhere maintained by the universal Church; though the
machinery for enforcing the just price varied considerably from place to place.
Finally, however, we must always remember in dealing with Christendom that
it was a progressive society, and therefore constantly changing. The men of
that age were pioneers, re-building civilized life almost from the foundations,
and were always seeking to improve on what had been done by their
predecessors. It is therefore almost impossible to make general statements
about mediaeval institutions. Feudalism in 1200 was very different from what it
had been in 1100, and a university or a guild of the 15th century was very
different from a university or guild of the 13th. Even at the same moment
there were great differences between different parts of Europe; the university
of Oxford, for instance, was always very differently organized from the
university of Bologna. Such differences always exist in a lively, enterprising
society; and you must bear them in mind while reading what I am now going
to say about some particular mediaeval institutions.
Feudalism
The feudal system, as it is now called, was the political basis of mediaeval
society. About its origin and character great disputes have raged, and it
certainly varied very much from place to place, and probably had many
different origins. The following account is not complete, and is not intended to
be; it is only meant to give some general idea of feudalism by explaining how it
came to rise and grow in certain parts of Europe.
Perhaps you remember how, in the later years of the Roman Empire, the
growth of slavery and the increasing weight of taxation produced, in place of
small farms, large estates cultivated by armies of slaves. These estates were
called "latifundia". They were of two kinds: private estates belonging to great
landowners, and imperial estates belonging to the government.
Since the wealth of the Empire depended on agriculture (the land-tax being the
chief source of revenue), the imperial government made every effort to keep
land under cultivation. Therefore, on the one hand free farmers and their heirs
were forbidden to leave the land, and on the other hand, land owners were
forbidden to sell land without the slaves who worked on it. The slaves thus
ceased to be chattels and became serfs (ascripticii glebae: "bound to the soil"),
who could neither leave the land nor be put off the land by their owners: they
had a legal right to live on the land, though they were still bound to give
personal service to the landowner. But the landowner himself was bound to
the soil; and, as the weight of taxation grew greater, the smaller landowners
found it even more difficult to carry on. So they began to enter into contracts
with the big landowners, whereby the latter agreed to pay all taxes in return
for legal ownership of the land, a share in its produce, and (sometimes) certain
other services. The small farmer thus became a land-holder rather than a
landowner, a "vassal" rather than a free man; and the big farmer became, not
merely a landowner, but a lord.
As the imperial authority grew weaker, these lords had to look after the
defence of their estates. They therefore hired soldiers of their own. These were
at first, perhaps, paid in money, but later, when the monetary system itself
began to break down, in land: they held land of the lord in return for military
service. (This kind of tenure was called "commen-datio", and was copied from
the action of the Emperors in settling barbarians in the Empire in return for
military service.) As the need for defence grew greater, the duty of military
service was gradually extended to all free tenants.
Moreover, the continued decline in the power of the central government
threw more and more of the duties of government into the hands of the lords.
The administration of justice itself began to be their affair: on their own estates
they, and not the Emperor nor the King, made and enforced law. Charlemagne
made a determined effort to check this tendency by making his own laws and
appointing his own counts to be his deputies in local government; but after his
death his system broke down. In the confusion of the 9th and 10th centuries,
the lords took over almost the whole work of government in their territories.
This was a natural development: the kings being unable to protect their
subjects, the latter formed themselves into groups (where they had not already
done so) round some prominent lord, swearing allegiance to him and thus
becoming members of his "family" or household: providing him with forces for
labour and defence, and receiving in return his protection and help. Feudalism
was thus essentially a cooperative system: the power of the lord depending on
the allegiance of his vassals, who in turn depended on that power for their own
protection. The whole system was backed by religion through the oath of
fealty which the vassals took to their overlords. The Roman legal system
having disappeared, and legal contracts being practically worthless, religious
contracts took their place, since religion was the only universally-recognized
bond.
The Normans, finally, reduced this mass of local contracts to a definite system,
governed by something like a definite code of feudal law. According to the
theory established by them, all the land of a country was owned by the king,
the feudal sovereign. Some of it he kept for himself, as his "demesne"; the rest
he let out to his barons ("tenants-in-chief") in return for services, military and
other. These in turn let out some of their land to sub-vassals, on similar terms;
and so on. At the bottom came the serfs, and just above them the freemen who
were vassals but not lords. Every lord had certain rights and duties on the land
he held, and the powers of overlords were limited by the terms of the feudal
contracts they had made with their vassals. The King, indeed in virtue of his
solemn consecration and crowning, claimed certain rights of suzerainty over
the whole kingdom, but the exercise of these depended on his power to
enforce them against his more-or-less reluctant barons. The Norman kings of
England were distinctly more successful in asserting their sovereign rights than
(for instance) the kings of France; and the Emperors were the weakest
sovereigns in Europe, unable to control even their cities, and much less the
dukes, markgrafs and knights who were nominally their vassals.
This weakness of the central government was the main evil of feudalism. The
comparative independence of the vassals hindered the growth of a uniform
system of law, permitted or encouraged local warfare, and was a great obstacle
to trade, since each lord claimed the right to levy tolls on roads and bridges, to
control markets, and so on. Furthermore, since all land was held feudally,
bishops and abbots were overlords and vassals like everyone else, and thus the
Church (the one unifying force in Europe) tended to become involved in feudal
quarrels. And the divisions between lords, ordinary freemen and serfs became
too rigid: the feudal social system was decidedly static rather than dynamic,
and to pass from one class to another was extremely difficult. Against these
evils it must be remembered that communications were so difficult, especially
in the early Middle Age, that local government was the only practicable form
of government, and that, as the mediaeval community was virtually self-
supporting, trade was far less important then than it is now.
We must admit, too, that feudalism achieved some very positive good results.
It restored the rule of law, since all men were bound by some kind of feudal
contract, and therefore it provided a certain measure of essential security. It
supplied Europe with a definite social and economic system: everyone knew
what his position in society was, and what his rights and duties were. And it
provided a military system: imperfect, certainly, but sufficient for the defence
of Christendom, and even for carrying on the Crusade. And we, who are
experiencing the defects of an over-centralization of government, can perhaps
understand better than some previous historians the possible merits of a
decentralized system like feudalism.
Nevertheless, feudalism was essentially a transitional and not a permanent
system. It came under attack from many quarters, and gradually dwindled and
died away. The kings were always endeavouring to whittle away the power of
the barons, and to concentrate law and government in their own hands. The
Church, on the whole, steadily supported the efforts of the kings. So did the
growing cities (except where, as in Italy, they made themselves independent of
king and feudal lord alike). New methods of warfare destroyed the value of the
armoured knight and the feudal castle. As long as the knight and the castle
dominated the field of war the feudal military system endured. But in the 14th
century the Welsh and English bowmen, and the Scottish and Swiss spearmen,
began the downfall of the knight; and at the same time the invention of
gunpowder began the downfall of the castle. These inventions made it
necessary to replace the feudal levies by professional soldiers - regular armies
which only kings were rich enough to support. At the same time, the growth of
trade induced the lords more and more to substitute money-rents for feudal
services; and the shortage of labour that followed the Black Death greatly
improved the lot of the serfs - made it impossible, in fact, for the lords to
maintain serfdom in its old form.
So, while it is true that feudalism is typical of mediaeval Christendom, it is also
true that feudalism was constantly changing, and that by (say) 1500 there was
very little of the original feudal system left. Yet it is also true to say that
feudalism was a necessary transitional form, without which the development
of Europe would have been practically impossible.
It is easy to attack it in the abstract; it is much more difficult to suggest any
alternative organization which could have filled in the gap between the Europe
of the Dark Age and the Europe of today.
The Manor
We have already seen that mediaeval society was localized and co-operative,
and this meant in practice that people were grouped in small local and co-
operative units. On the land, the typical unit was the manor. I do not mean to
say that the manorial system was universal in Christendom, for it was not: it
flourished especially in England and northern France; but something of the
sort, some such co-operative organization as I am now going to describe,
existed nearly everywhere in mediaeval Europe as the basis of country life.
A manor consisted of a group of people, partly serf and partly free, living on a
particular area of ground and holding land therein from a lord - the lord of the
manor. The manorial land was divided into three sections: ploughland, which
was used for growing crops, common land, for grazing (and some of which
might be set apart as meadow, for growing hay), and wasteland or woodland,
which was a source of timber and game and a pasturage for swine. The
ploughland was again divided into three fields, which were cultivated in
rotation: each field lying fallow every third year, to recover from the crops
which were taken off it in the other years. The fields were further divided into
strips of about an acre each, and each landholder held a number of these strips,
some good and some bad. The strips were re-distributed from time to time, to
make sure that everyone got a fair share of the good land.
The inhabitants consisted of the lord, his tenants (some serf and some free),
and the officials and craftsmen of the manor (bailiff, reeve, blacksmith,
swineherd etc.), who might be either free or serf. The land was divided up
among the lord and the tenants, each of whom held a number of strips of the
ploughland, and had certain rights of pasturage on the common and of
woodcutting etc. in the waste. The serfs (and their children) were bound to the
soil, and could not leave it without the lord's permission. They paid for their
holdings chiefly by labour-service (e.g. working for so many days in the year on
the lord's land), but had also to pay certain "dues" to the lord from their own
produce. The free tenants also paid dues of one kind or another, but usually
their chief payment was military service. The lord himself, of course (unless it
was a royal manor), held the manor of an overlord, to whom he owed military
service: his own service and that of a certain number of men from his manor.
The manor was governed according to "custom": the way of doing things
which had grown up over centuries and was sanctioned by time. This custom
was administered by the Manor Court, an assembly of all the landholders and
officials, serf and free, presided over by the lord or his representative. It
belonged to this court to determine disputes about the rights and duties of
members of the manor, to allot or re-allot the strips of ploughland, to decide
on methods of cultivation and so forth, and even to judge minor criminal cases,
such as thefts and common assaults.
Such a manor would, in the early Middle Age, be practically self-sufficing, and
throughout the period would be much more independent, both economically
and politically, than any similar small community at the present day. Its
standard of living would be low, but it would generally give its members an
essential security of life and stability of tenure. It would be conservative, since
any change would have to be accepted by the manor as a whole before being
put into practice; but perhaps that was not a bad thing in so restless and
difficult an age. In point of fact, agriculture made considerable progress during
the Middle Age; but it is true that the absence of private property in land and of
individual enterprise limited this progress considerably; but there again, we
have learned in modern times that too rapid progress may be an evil. And if the
manor was self-contained and exclusive, it fostered a strong community-spirit.
On balance, and in the circumstances, it certainly did more good than harm to
European development.
The Guild
By the 13th century the volume of wealth and of trade in Europe was already
far greater than it had been under the Roman Empire. This astonishing
development was partly due to the restoration of order as the feudal system
became more clearly organized, and partly to the better organization of
agriculture in the manors and similar institutions; but most of all was it due to
the guilds, and to the cities which the guilds did so much to revive and foster.
A guild, when fully developed, was an association of all the people engaged in a
particular trade or process of manufacture in a particular city or locality. It was
a co-operative and local institution, like the manor. Merchants of wool or cloth
or leather, shoe-makers, butchers, carpenters, stone-masons - all had their
guilds. The actual origins of these associations are obscure, but their objects are
clear enough. The men of a particular trade would band together for mutual
protection and help, and especially to get freedom from feudal obligations or
servitude, and to get definite laws for the promotion and regulation of their
trade - and so to obtain the essential security without which no trade can be
carried on. A guild was properly established when its members obtained a
charter from king or baron or other feudal overlord, giving them exemption
from feudal obligations and the power to make and enforce laws for their trade
or craft. These laws were the most important work of the guild. They
regulated the buying of raw materials and the selling of finished goods, fixing
the quality of these, their prices, and the quantity that could be bought or sold
by each member; they determined the hours of labour, the wages of
journeymen, the treatment and education of apprentices, and so forth; and
their main object was always to provide stability and security for all members
of the guild, and so promote the general prosperity of the trade or craft. The
guilds also acted as social clubs, as benefit societies, and as religious
confraternities; but their most important work, historically speaking, was this
re-establishment of definite codes of commercial law.
The members of a guild were divided into three classes: masters, journeymen
and apprentices. The apprentices were youngsters learning the trade. They
worked for a master for from three to eight years (according to the rule of the
guild), and the master was obliged to teach them the trade, and usually to
lodge, feed and clothe them as well. When their apprenticeship was over they
became journeymen, and hired themselves out to a master. Finally, a
journeyman might set up as a master, but not till he had passed an
examination, which usually consisted of submitting to the guild's inspectors a
piece of work, hence called his "master-piece". It was generally possible for a
good journeyman to become a master, for the laws of the guild prevented
unfair competition, and provided equal opportunity for both rich and poor
craftsmen. Hence, though the guild was something of a co-operative society,
like the manor, and no member was allowed to act except according to its
laws, it offered much greater opportunities to its members than the manor, and
was therefore much more "progressive". We shall see that the guilds in later
times became restrictive, but during the Middle Age as a whole they gave just
that measure of security which was necessary to support the vast expansion of
manufacture and commerce which is the most amazing feature of these
centuries.
(Note: - The governments of the guilds varied so much that it is impossible to
say anything useful about them in this short sketch. Mediaeval people generally
cared very little about forms of government: what they wanted was an
authority that would maintain their rightful laws and customs, and they were
ever-ready to rebel against any authority that failed to do so. The "provosts" or
"deacons" or "priors" of guilds led an uneasy life, like most mediaeval rulers.)
Cities
The growth of the guilds was closely connected with another great
development: the revival of the cities. We have seen that the Roman Empire at
its best was almost a federation of city-states, each with its own government,
but that in the later Empire these city-governments were almost everywhere
replaced by imperial officials. The consequent loss of civic spirit (of civic
patriotism, if you like) made it hard for the city-communities to meet the
disasters of the Dark Age. Some of them disappeared altogether; others
dwindled into mere villages, inhabited by the workers in the surrounding
countryside, without any separate life of their own. The Church's system of
government through bishops, each with his diocese centred in some city,
preserved some of them (as, for instance, the Popes preserved Rome); and little
groups of workers grew up around the great abbeys, or around castles built by
kings or barons; but none of these were really cities, for none of them had its
own government.
Now, what the merchants and craftsmen demanded for their own trades, they
also demanded for the whole local community in which they lived; and as they
grew more numerous and wealthy, their demands became more insistent and
effective. They demanded that their city should be free from the dominance of
feudal lords and the restrictions of feudal contracts and customs, and should
have its own separate government and its own code of laws. Bishops often
supported these demands, and kings were often glad to grant them, seeing in
the cities possible allies against the barons; but at all events, by payment or
persuasion or force, by hook or by crook, city after city obtained for itself a
charter of liberty. The city-governments varied considerably, like those of the
guilds; they might be chosen by all the citizens, or by a few rich men, or by the
king himself; but their power always depended on the support of the city's
guilds, and their business was to make and enforce the laws which the
guildsmen wanted. Four-fifths of the Roman cities were revived in this way;
and civic life and civic government were spread in countries which had never
known Roman rule.
The extent to which the cities demanded independence depended on the
extent to which they could trust their king or other overlord to grant them the
laws and liberties they desired. In northern Italy they rebelled against the
Emperor altogether. They formed themselves into the Lombard League to
fight him, and, after years of struggle, gained complete independence from him
by winning the decisive battle of Legnano (1176). Hence arose that brilliant
cluster of city-republics, Florence, Milan, Venice, Genoa and the rest, which
revived in Italy the glories and the struggles of ancient Greece. In Germany
itself, too, the cities aimed at practical independence. It was the Baltic cities, led
by Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck, that formed the great Hanseatic League,
which became for a time the biggest and richest trading corporation in
Christendom, and dealt with kings and emperors on terms of equality. In
England and France, on the other hand, the cities had generally no need to
quarrel with their kings. Indeed, it was not long before the kings in these
countries were summoning representatives of the cities to advise them and to
form a counterbalance to the barons; and it was thus that parliaments began to
appear: the most far-reaching of all the political improvements of the Middle
Age. But that was for the future. For the present, one might say that with the
revival of the city the material framework of European civilization was
restored.
Mediaeval Culture
The lively pioneering spirit of Christendom would not rest content with
merely material achievements. Through the Dark Age the monks preserved
what they could of the ancient culture; but this work of mere preservation was
but the foundation of the fresh advances that were to be made once the
disorder of the Dark Age was overcome and European life regained a certain
stability. Already in the 11th century, artistic and intellectual life was stirring to
a new birth.
Architecture offers the most obvious example. The Cluniac monks, and after
them the Normans, began again to build in stone, and on the largest scale.
They had nothing to guide them but the remains of Rome: the round arch, the
heavy pillar, the massive wall; but "they were capable of impressing even on
these forms a superhuman majesty". They did not, however, remain for long
content with such relics, which were incapable of expressing their soaring
aspirations. We do not know who first thought of using the pointed arch, but
whoever he was, he introduced new ideas as well as a new appearance in
architecture. A round arch is anchored or wedged by its keystone; in a pointed
arch the two halves may be made, as it were, to lean against and support each
other, and this principle of mutual support, of thrust and counter-thrust, is the
essential principle of what is called Gothic architecture. Greater height and
strength and lightness were the immediate results. But a pointed roof would
still have to be supported all along the wall: the Gothic builders next
discovered how to concentrate the thrust of the roof by supporting it on
clusters of ribs fanning out from selected points, at which they placed
buttresses to take the strain; and for extra high roofs, as in cathedrals, they
invented the "flying buttress", a half-arch soaring up to meet the points where
the roof-thrust was concentrated. Thus a Gothic building became a skeleton of
stone, all its parts balanced against one another in a system of thrust and
counter-thrust; and it is this remarkable achievement of engineering that
makes possible the soaring height and the enormous windows so characteristic
of the Gothic cathedrals. It was in cathedrals and churches and abbeys that the
new style was first developed; but its principles were later applied in modified
forms to many other sorts of building, and some of the great guildhalls and
university colleges of mediaeval cities are as remarkable as their cathedrals.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that ecclesiastical and civil
architecture exhausted the genius of the mediaeval builders; war was another
great interest of that age, and its castles are as wonderful in their own way as its
cathedrals, though the development of the art of war has left most of them to
fall into ruin. The plain square towers of the llth and 12th centuries soon
proved too simple, and later builders elaborated the castle into as intricate and
balanced a scheme of fortification as has ever been worked out. They re-
discovered the essential principle of fortification, that "every defence must itself
be defended." In a complete mediaeval castle every stretch of wall is covered
by a tower, and every tower itself covered by another tower or wall; while the
whole is so arranged that the fall of one part scarcely weakens what remains.
Being built for strength, the castle does not strike the eye with the beauty of
the cathedral, but it is equally a work of "fine intelligence"; and such a castle as
that built by the crusaders at Banias in Syria, with its three concentric lines of
defence, and the cisterns and granaries and workshops that enabled it to
support a whole army during months of siege, must rank as one of the
supreme achievements of military engineering.
Sculpture was a natural outgrowth of architecture: builders were not long
content with bare stone, but desired to enrich it with carving. In the 12th and
13th centuries there was such a flowering of sculpture as the world has rarely
seen: a flowering which populated the Gothic cathedrals with (literally)
hundreds of statues, and embroidered every capital and corbel and other point
of vantage with bold and intricate designs. The west front of such a cathedral
as Rheims is not merely a great architectural masterpiece, but is also a perfect
gallery of carving of all sorts, from the forty-two full-size statues of the kings of
France down to innumerable light details of foliage and curling tendrils that
enrich without obscuring the great design. Consider that Rheims is but one of a
hundred examples, and you will get some idea of the immense fertility of this
amazing period.
Of mediaeval painting little can be said, for too much of it has been destroyed
or lost; but we know that it was plentiful, and that some of it was first-rate. The
surviving works of the Italian primitives, such as Duccio, Cimabue, and (above
all) the great Giotto, are enough to show us that. But these are somewhat
overshadowed, as we shall see, by the later Renaissance painters. There was
another art, stained-glass-work, which the mediaevals originated, and in which
they still surpass all rivals. The great window-spaces of Gothic buildings were a
challenge to them: to fill these in with plain glass would be a tame and dull and
unimpressive solution; so men invented means of colouring glass, and
discovered how to build up out of nuggets and splinters of glass whole pictures
or designs, as a mosaic-worker does out of coloured stones. The results must
be seen to be appreciated. The jewelled brilliance of these wonderful windows
is a completely new form of beauty, undreamed of by former ages, and rarely
even approached in later times.
These brief notes are hardly even an introduction to the broad field of
mediaeval art. You must also remember the work that was being done at the
same time in wood and iron and bronze, in embroidery and arras-work, in the
illumination of manuscripts - in all these we see the same fertility of invention,
the same strength of design, the same perfect craftsmanship, as in the
cathedrals. During this age a vast multitude of skilled craftsmen produced a
continual stream of works of use and beauty, and in doing so gave new life to
the arts of Europe.
Mediaeval art is different from modern art in many ways, but in three
especially. In the first place, it is popular. We are accustomed to look upon the
artist as a man set apart from the common herd, creating works of art for a
comparatively small group of educated and cultivated people, who alone are
capable of appreciating them. But in the Middle Age an artist was not set apart:
he was usually a member of a guild like any other workman. Speaking in
general, we may say that every workman was then a craftsman, and every
craftsman something of an artist, and every artist was both a workman and a
craftsman. And the work he produced had popular appeal. Mediaeval art has
plenty of subtlety, and like all really great art, it can only be fully appreciated by
a great mind; but it can be sufficiently appreciated by everyone. A Gothic
cathedral, or a Gothic window, gives everyone, however dull or ignorant, an
experience of beauty: it is as popular as a sunset, or the sea. It was meant to be.
It was constructed for the common people, not for the connoisseurs, and by
men who belonged to the common people, and did not hold aloof from them.
In the second place, mediaeval art is fresh and vigorous. The modern artist
seems to be weighed down by the dead hand of the past: even his desire to be
original expresses itself usually in a violent determination to be different from
his predecessors - he is always conscious of the work that has already been
done. There is nothing of this in mediaeval art. These artists are neither
enslaved by the past nor in revolt against it. Their architecture begins as a copy
of Roman work; but their minds and feelings were too vigorous to be bound
down by the past, and they soon undertook the daring innovations and
experiments which produced the Gothic style. Their enterprise led them
sometimes to be extravagant, or childish, or grotesque; but their art at its worst
is always fresh and vigorous, because it is always full of life. In my opinion this
vigour is due partly to the popularity of mediaeval art, and partly to the
immensely powerful religious faith which galvanized the whole of that society;
whatever the reason, the vigour is certainly there, as it is certainly absent from
most modern art.
Finally, mediaeval art is hard. We have noted how a quality of hardness runs
through the whole of mediaeval life, like a steel frame in a concrete wall. It
would be absurd to call mediaeval art gloomy or inhuman, but it would be fair
enough, on the whole, to say that it is inspiring rather than comforting, strong
rather than gentle. Such generalizations are never wholly true, but I think that
one expresses the general impression made on a modern observer. It is the art
of a pioneering age, of an age of battle. As Chesterton says, "The truth about
Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the
Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture."
Mediaeval Thought
This quality of hardness is above all apparent in mediaeval thought. During the
Dark Age few men cared to think, and those who did were mostly monks, and
they were chiefly concerned to preserve what could be preserved of the
thought of earlier ages; but about the llth century men began to think for
themselves again, and they began at the very beginning, with the meaning of
thought itself. They began to ask themselves what are the exact meanings of
our fundamental ideas: such ideas as being, matter, form, life; they began to ask
themselves how the human mind works in getting to know and understand
and reason about things; they began to inquire into the differences between
various departments of human knowledge, such as theology and philosophy
and physics and astronomy and mathematics. What we see in their thought is a
passion for precision - for exact definitions of terms and ideas, for exact and
logical argument, for exact and clear-cut divisions between the various
sciences. They strove perpetually to reduce every part of knowledge to a
precise and systematic form. In some departments they were notably
successful, especially in religion, which was their chief interest: the precise and
systematic explanation of the Christian faith which they worked out has had,
and still has, an enormous influence on religious thought. St. Thomas Aquinas,
for instance, produced in his "Summa Theologica" the most complete and
logical exposition of Christianity that has ever been made, and no-one has since
been able to write on theology without taking his work into account. In other
departments, such as physics, the mediaeval thinkers were less successful,
because they were too much occupied with thought and not enough with
observation and experiment. They accepted too easily the authority of earlier
observers like Aristotle. What is much more important, however, is that by
their passionate striving for precision, and by their continual and violent
disputes with one another, they gave the European mind a training in exact
and logical thought which was most necessary, and which has been the basis of
all later developments in every branch of science; though we must admit that
their thought is sometimes too narrow and rigid to be quite satisfactory. In that
age, however, the European mind needed such a rigid framework to brace it
up: it was needed, as the guilds were needed, to provide an essential basis of
order.
We can say the same of the revival of the study of law. We know already what
a passion the mediaevals had for law. In the 12th century, chiefly owing to the
work of two great men, Irnerius and Gratian of Bologna, the whole body of
Justinian's work in Roman Law was recovered for the West. Men fell upon this
great treasure with incredible enthusiasm. From all over Europe they flocked
to Bologna, and thence carried back to their own countries the knowledge
which made possible a steady improvement in local systems of law. Here
again, it was the clarity and precision of Roman law that appealed to the
mediaeval mind. Yet its influence was not wholly good. The Romans, for
instance, admitted the use of torture in criminal cases, and this absurd and
horrible practice hung like a millstone round the necks of European lawyers for
centuries, hampering the sane development of legal procedure. Nevertheless,
European law gained incalculably from the work of the mediaeval lawyers.
New work was also done in medicine. Nothing had suffered more severely
during the Dark Age: the tradition of Galen and the other classical physicians
had been wholly lost. The Arabs, however, had learned that tradition from the
Eastern Empire; and from the Arabs, in the 12th century, it came back to the
West. Salerno, in Sicily, became the centre of a great medical school. And the
mediaeval doctors were not content merely to learn from the past: in this field,
as in architecture, men were willing to experiment. In particular, they began
the scientific study of anatomy by means of dissection, and thus they vastly
improved the art of surgery. They also experimented with herbs and drugs,
and even with anaesthetics; and, though the full development of scientific
medicine had to wait on the general development of physical science,
mediaeval doctors advanced much further, and laid far sounder foundations,
than they are usually given credit for. The 14th century surgeon, Guy de
Chauliac, is justly termed "the father of surgery"; yet he had predecessors, like
Mondino of Bologna and William of Salicet, who deserve to be remembered.
Literature
For all these learned studies, the common language was Latin. Latin had been
the common language of all the Western Empire, but during the Dark Age it
had degenerated among the unlearned into a number of local dialects; and
there were also the Teutonic and Celtic dialects spoken in Germany,
Scandinavia and the British Isles. None of these were of any use in the revival
of learning, for they were too formless and changeable, too poor in vocabulary
and too vague in grammar to express the definite and exact ideas which the
mediaeval schoolmen were striving for. But it was not long before the revival
of thought began to affect them, too; they began to be shaped into fixed and
precise languages, and, though they could not compete with Latin in the
learned sciences, they soon surpassed Latin as a medium for popular literature,
and espe-ciallv for poetry. It was now that the traditional legends of the
European peoples began to be written down in true poetic form: the Frankish
legends of Charlemagne and his Paladins, the Celtic legends of Arthur and the
Round Table, the German legends of the Volsungs and Nibelungs. Then the
poets went on to fresher themes. English was slower to develop than the other
tongues, but even in English, before the end of the 14th century Chaucer had
written the Canterbury Tales. Long before, in the 12th centurv, the
troubadours of Provence had revived lyric poetry, and their influence, crossing
the Alps, had started the far greater Italian school, which culminated in the
work of Dante, one of the three supreme poets of European literature. In his
great epic, the "Divine Comedy", Dante draws equally from the heroic legends
of the North, from the melody and grace of the troubadours, from the
teachings of the theologians and philosophers, and from the classical Latin
poetry of Virgil: in that one poem he sums up the life and thought and
achievement of the Middle Age. In the Divine Comedy modern European
literature comes of age, and takes its stand beside the literature of Greece and
Rome.
Universities
The great intellectual development of Christendom could not have been
maintained without regular and permanent institutions of learning; and here
the mediaeval schoolmen certainly built better than they knew - they invented
the university, which is perhaps the greatest of their many gifts to European
civilization.
Schools - abbey-schools and cathedral-schools - had been set up by the Church
long before. Charlemagne had given Alcuin the task of making out a model
system of education, and had ordered all abbey- and cathedral-schools in his
empire to be organized on the lines of Alcuin's Palace School. Some of these
schools survived the Dark Age, and in the llth century began again to be
thronged with scholars. It was the enthusiasm of these scholars that did the
rest. Wherever a great teacher appeared the word went round, and hundreds
or thousands came nocking to hear him. Thus the cathedral-school at Chartres,
under Ivo, became famous for classical studies, Gratian's teaching of Roman
law at Bologna brought him an international audience, and crowds of students
gathered in Paris to hear Peter Abelard lecture in theology. Where such
multitudes of students assembled, masters also gathered: masters of various
branches of knowledge, for students, though they might be attracted by the
fame of one master, would need to study other subjects as well. Thus there
appeared in various European cities groups of scholars and masters engaged in
studying and teaching every branch of learning then available.
The next step might easily be predicted. In the Middle Age, men thus engaged
in a common pursuit would inevitably try to form a self-governing
corporation. Sometimes, as in Paris, it was the masters who took the initiative,
sometimes, as at Bologna, it was the students; but what they wanted was the
same in either case: freedom from outside interference and the right to make
laws for themselves - the same rights and "immunities" as guilds and cities
were striving for. Thus Bologna obtained a sort of charter from the Emperor
Frederick I in 1158, and perhaps can claim to be the first university. But a local
charter was not enough. The masters wanted power to confer degrees which
would be recognized throughout Christendom. As the Church was the only
universal institution, only the Pope could grant such powers, and so the early
universities turned to the Pope for their charters - not in vain. After all, the
schools out of which the universities had grown were established by the
Church; to take the universities under papal protection was a natural step. Its
results were momentous. The students, whether laymen or ecclesiastics,
immediately became "clerics", subject as such to the government and law of
the Church, but not to any secular power. Neither king nor emperor nor feudal
lord had rights over them; they were exempt from military service and other
vexatious feudal duties; and thus the universities became oases of intellectual
life, where the work of studying and expanding human knowledge could be
carried on in a relative tranquillity. The effect of this on the whole intellectual
life of Europe cannot be exaggerated.
The Church
We must now consider more closely the position and activity of the Church in
this society of Christendom. I have already emphasized the great part she
played in building up that society - indeed, it is obvious that Christendom was
essentially a religious society, based on a common acceptance (in theory, not
always in practice!) of Christian belief and Christian morality. But Christianity
was then represented, not by a number of quarrelling sects, but by one definite
institution, the Church, with a definite hierarchy of government, the bishops,
and a single definite head, the Pope. It is this institution whose position and
power we are now going to study.
In the first place, we must beware of imagining the Church as something
outside and above the ordinary life of Europe - a kind of superior and dominant
force, ruling over more-or-less unwilling peoples. In fact, the Church was the
one universal institution of the age: the one society of which all men were
members, in which each had a share, in which any man might rise to any
position, even to the highest of all. I have mentioned that the only English
Pope was the son of a serf. Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, one of the great pioneers
of Gothic architecture, and regent of France during the second crusade, was of
a peasant family; but he was educated at the Abbey of St. Denis along with
Louis VI of France. The Church was thus the common possession and the
common mother of mediaeval men; they accepted her as the people of the
Roman Empire accepted the imperial government, as the essential framework
of civilized life. But the influence of the Church was far wider and deeper than
that of the Empire had ever been. She imposed standards of belief and conduct
on all.
The laws and statutes of kings, barons, cities, manors, guilds and universities
had to conform to those standards: hence their remarkable uniformity, in spite
of all their local differences. The Church claimed no direct right of civil
government, but she did claim the right to enforce these common standards of
belief and conduct on everyone, from king to serf; and thus we find mediaeval
Popes excommunicating and deposing even Emperors for offences against her
law, the common law of Christendom. Yet we must not exaggerate:
remember, once again, that the actual power of the Church depended very
much, in practice, on the common consent of Christian men: Popes and
bishops could no more behave as tyrants than any other mediaeval rulers. Two
astonishing things are the immense power which, in theory, belonged to the
Pope, and the freedom with which he was sometimes disobeyed. If the Church
succeeded, as she did, in uniting Europe under her code of doctrine and
morality, it was because the majority of Europeans wanted to be so united:
they wanted to have that common religious authority guiding their lives.
Perhaps this is another example of their passion for exact definitions and for the
rule of law. Many modern historians are inclined to reproach them for this -
wrongly, as it seems to me. Considering the matter only from the secular point
of view, it seems to me that at that period Europe badly needed just such a
central authority to keep it from flying to pieces; and, though the exercise of
that authority may not always have been perfectly wise or just, it was generally
in agreement with what most Europeans thought and desired. At any rate, it is
a fact that Christendom was fostered and maintained mainly by the authority
of the Church, and that the Church stimulated its activities far more than she
restricted them. In the great developments of the Middle Age, the growth of
law, of the arts, and of education, the Church played the foremost part; and she
also succeeded in the very difficult task of keeping these developments within
reasonable bounds and saving them from degenerating into extravagance. On
balance, in spite of the restrictions she sometimes imposed, I think one must
conclude that the mediaeval Church performed immense services to European
civilization. (Whether she did equally well by religion itself is, of course, a
point which Catholics and non-Catholics still dispute about.)
14. Christendom In Action
It would be impossible in such a short history as this to tell in detail the story of
Europe during the Middle Age: I must be content to pick out certain great
movements which are characteristic of the period. And first I pick the Crusade,
which is characteristic in two ways: in being a war, and in being a religious
war; for war was certainly characteristic of the Middle Age, and the Crusade
was essentially an attempt by the Church to turn the passion for war towards
religious ends.
In the year 1095 Pope Urban II called a great council at Clermont, and there, on
November 25th, he delivered "the most effective oration recorded in history".
He recalled to his hearers how the holy land of Palestine, and the great shrines
of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, were in the hands of infidel Saracens,
"enemies of the Cross of Christ". It had been bad enough when they were held
by the civilized Arabs, but lately the wild Turks had come riding out of Asia,
had seized the Holy Places, and were inflicting robbery, torture and death on
Christian pilgrims. They were attacking, too, the Eastern Empire; and the
Emperor (a Christian, though a schismatic) was calling on the West for help.
Meanwhile the warriors of the West were wasting their valour and strength,
and endangering their souls' salvation, by futile and barbarous wars with one
another. The Pope implored them to forget their petty feuds and join in one
mighty effort to free the country of Christ. By so doing they would atone for
their sins and earn everlasting rewards; and, in addition, would enter into
possession of fertile and fruitful lands.
The success of this speech astonished even the Pope. Thousands rushed to
"take the Cross". Wandering preachers, like Peter the Hermit, spread the word
throughout Europe, and led great multitudes, old and young, men and
women, in a sort of enthusiastic stampede along the road to Constantinople
and Jerusalem. Urban tried to stop these unorganized masses, but in vain: they
rushed on their fate. Many fell by the wayside; the balance were nearly all
massacred by the Turks. Meanwhile, the real Crusade was being organized
under real leaders by the Pope himself. Robert of Normandy, Godfrey of
Boulogne, Robert of Flanders, Stephen of Blois, Raymond of Toulouse,
Bohemond and Tancred of Sicily, were some of the great lords who took part.
They gathered their armies into three divisions, and by 1097 had marched
them successfully to Constantinople.
Here they met with a mixed reception. The Emperor, Alexius Comnenus, had
asked for help, but not on such a scale: he began to fear lest the Crusaders
should take it into their heads to seize the Empire itself. The Crusaders, on
their side, were suspicious of the Greeks as being schismatics, and hardly true
Christians; while the polished and highly-civilized Greeks regarded these iron-
clad, iron-souled Westerners as semi-barbarian emissaries of the Pope.
However, a treaty was patched up at length, and the Crusaders were able to
continue their march across Asia Minor. They had a first experience of Turkish
tactics at Dorylaeum, where one division of the army was ambushed and
almost overwhelmed; but the desperate valour and fighting weight of the
Christians told in the end, the Turks were utterly defeated, and the way was
open to Antioch. The Turks were in a difficult position: they were at enmity
with the Arabs, and at the same time their Christian subjects were disaffected.
It was one of the latter, an Armenian, who betrayed Antioch to the Crusaders,
so that it was captured almost without a blow. But then the Turks raised a
great army and besieged the city in their turn. The Crusaders, reduced to
starvation, marched out to fight while they still had the strength; and once
again their courage and resolution turned the tables - the Turkish charge failed
to break their armoured line, and their counter-attack swept the Turks from
the field.
By this time divisions were appearing among the Crusaders themselves. All the
leaders were anxious to make sure of their shares of the conquered territory.
Godfrey's brother Baldwin had already made himself Count of Edessa, and
now Bohemond declared himself Prince of Antioch. It was a much reduced
army that was at length re-organized under Godfrey's leadership for the final
attack on Jerusalem. This great and strong city could not be besieged and
starved out, and there were no traitors within to open the gates; it had to be
taken by direct assault. How this- was done is a mystery; the fact remains that,
after five weeks of desperate struggle and bitter fighting, the attackers were
successful. Godfrey himself, it is said, was the first to set foot on the wall; and
after him his followers, maddened by their losses, their sufferings and their
religious zeal, poured into the city and mingled garrison and inhabitants in an
indiscriminate slaughter. "In Solomon's Porch and in his Temple our men rode
in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses": so they wrote to
the Pope. But when Godfrey was chosen to rule in Jerusalem, he refused the
title of king, saying that he would not wear a crown of gold in the place where
our Lord had worn a crown of thorns.
The Crusaders had now done what they set out to do: they had rescued the
Eastern Empire and regained the Holy Places, and had set up a line of Christian
states along the eastern Mediterranean: the County of Edessa, the Principality
of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Now they had to
hold what they had won. And immediately they were faced with a great
problem: a shortage of men. Plenty of European knights were willing to go on
crusade for a year or two; few were prepared to spend their lives in the East.
The leaders did what they could. They organized their states on the strictest
feudal lines, every landholder being bound to military service against the
infidel. They built a line of great castles to hold the strategic points along their
borders: castles of immense size and strength, far surpassing anything in
Europe. (Indeed, the crusading castles have no rivals in the world. By
themselves, they bear witness to the almost incredible power and
determination of their builders, and give us some explanation of how a handful
of Europeans could hold on for so long in the heart of Islam.) And finally, the
shortage of man-power produced the military Orders: the Knights of the
Temple and the Knights of the Hospital of St. John. These were monastic
orders, and their members took monastic vows; but their work was to fight the
Saracens. They were, in fact, orders of professional soldiers, organized in
military formations under their Grand Masters, and were undoubtedly the
most formidable fighting forces of their age. They were not, however, subject
to any secular power, and the Christian princes found it impossible to control
them. Indeed, the crusading states suffered from the same division of authority
which was the chronic malady of feudalism, and which made any concerted
action difficult, and often impossible.
Therefore, after 1100 the history of the Crusade becomes the history of a series
of rearguard actions - efforts to retain what had been won in the first rush. In
1144 the fall of Edessa led St. Bernard of Clairvaux to preach the second
Crusade, and he succeeded in persuading the Emperor Conrad III and Louis
VII of France to take the Cross. The crusaders again had trouble with the
Eastern Emperor, and the German contingent was almost cut to pieces in the
terrible march across Asia Minor, but the two leaders eventually foregathered
in Jerusalem. They very sensibly determined to attack Damascus, the capture
of which would push the Christian frontier to the desert, and also break the
lateral communications of the Saracens; but bad intelligence and staff-work led
to the failure of the whole plan, and only a remnant of the army survived.
So far the Saracens had been divided among themselves, but now there arose
among them a great leader, Saladin, who united them all for a concerted attack
on the Christian states. In 1187 he wiped out a whole Christian army at the
desperate battle of Hattin, and went on to take Jerusalem. This news roused
Christendom to the third Crusade. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa
assembled a German army; the kingly knight-errant, Richard of England, led an
Anglo-Norman force; and even the cautious and crafty Philip Augustus of
France was forced by public opinion to take the Cross. But the Emperor was
accidentally drowned during the crossing of Asia Minor, and most of his men
went home again; and the hot-headed Richard succeeded in quarrelling so
violently with Philip Augustus and the Duke of Austria that they also retired
from the Crusade. Richard did wonders with the men who remained to him,
and inflicted on Saladin, at Arsouf, the worst defeat of his life; but he could not
regain Jerusalem.
The Crusades of the 13th century only prolonged the agony. The men of the
fourth Crusade (1202-4) allowed themselves to be sidetracked into attacking
the Eastern Empire, and captured Constantinople instead of Jerusalem; but the
only permanent result was to weaken the Eastern Empire and intensify the
hatred of the Greeks for the Latins. The Emperor Frederick II succeeded in
buying Jerusalem from the Saracens in 1228; but the place could not be held,
and was lost again in 1244. St. Louis IX of France, the best (and perhaps the
greatest) of mediaeval rulers, led two crusading expeditions, in 1248 and 1270;
neither was successful. In the meantime, the Saracens kept nibbling away at the
Christian possessions. The last Christian stronghold on the mainland of Asia
fell in 1291, and that date is usually taken to mark the end of the main Crusade.
Was it, then, nothing but a failure? Not if we consider its effects on Europe. I
said in chapter III that the Punic Wars fixed the Roman character; in the same
wayv the Crusade developed the character of Christendom. Here a profound
religious faith found a practical expression which suited the nature of the time
and the people: in which the hard, warlike, rough and enterprising spirit of the
Middle Age was directed towards an ideal, instead of towards merely selfish
ends. No other ideal could have so appealed to the mass of men in that age as
the Crusade did, and through it the Christian faith became even more deeply
rooted in the mind and heart of Europe. Even the failure helped, for it brought
Europeans up against the hard facts of reality, making them realize that mere
enthusiasm is not enough, that life and religion are not so simple as they look,
that you cannot establish the kingdom of God just by riding off and knocking
your enemies on the head. And the ideal survived the failure. It is astonishing
to note how, even today, the idea of crusading is fascinating and inspiring to
men of Western blood: the word "crusade" seems to sum up for us the battle
for right and truth against the powers of darkness. So the moral and religious
effect of the Crusade has been both intense and lasting.
Then, too, the Crusade was a school for Europe: not merely in the art of
warfare, but in travel, geography, navigation, trade, finance, politics and almost
every other department of life. It is hard to estimate how much the European
mind was broadened and deepened through the experiences of these wars. The
mere process of organizing and financing such great expeditions taught lessons
which could have been learnt in no other way; the mere contact with the East,
with men and societies so different from those of the West, taught other, more
valuable, lessons. Christendom became aware of the world beyond its borders,
and began to learn how to deal with that world. The later development of
European exploration, missions, trade and colonization springs from the
experience of the Crusade.
To complete this account, we should note that, while the main Crusade was
failing, the Spaniards and Portuguese were carrying on a crusade of their own,
to break the grip of the Moors on their country; and this crusade was
successful. To it, also, there came men from all parts of Europe: Lord James
Douglas, carrying the heart of Robert the Bruce to Palestine, paused in his
journey to fight the Moors, and died in that warfare. In Palestine the Christians
were few and far from their bases, but in Spain the advantages were on their
side, and this outpost of Islam was gradually reduced till by 1262 only the little
kingdom of Granada remained under Moorish rule. And the character of Spain
was formed in this warfare even more firmly than the general character of
Christendom by the great Crusade.
Finally, during this period the last pagan peoples in Europe, the Prussians and
Letts of the Baltic coast, were conquered and Christianized by the Germans
and Poles; and these wars, too, were looked on as a crusade. The Teutonic
Knights, a military order like the Templars, played a large part in the conquest;
and men from other lands came here, too, to fight for the Faith. Chaucer's
Knight, who had fought in so many places against the Saracens, had also fought
"in Lettow and in Pruce". By 1300 Christendom had taken substantial
possession of Europe, though its great external adventure had failed.
The Friars
At the beginning of the 13th century, Christendom was passing through a
serious religious crisis. It was a twofold crisis, caused by the two great
developments of the 12th century - the growth of wealth and the revival of
learning. An enormous expansion of production and trade had not only
increased the general wealth of Europe, but had produced the cities, with their
restless and enterprising populations of merchants and manufacturers and
artisans. The existing organization of the Church (and especially the monastic
orders) had grown up in a rural society: it was not easily adapted to the new
conditions. Besides, the clergy themselves were being affected by the new
passion for wealth and luxurious living, and were losing, in many places, the
respect of the people. Side by side with the passion for wealth went a passion
for learning - for study and speculation, particularly in philosophy and
theology. In this field the influence of the Arabs was very strong: for instance,
of the great Arabic commentators on Aristotle; and, along with much that was
good, they introduced some very queer ideas to the restless and inquiring
minds of Europe. This, too, was a situation which the Church at that time was
not well equipped to deal with. Morally and intellectually, Christendom was in
danger. That this danger was overcome was due principally to the Friars - the
new religious orders founded by St. Francis and St. Dominic.
Francesco Bernadone (1182-1226), whom the world knows as St. Francis of
Assisi, was himself a member of the new wealthy middle-class, his father being
a merchant of the thriving little city of Assisi in central Italy; but there was little
of the mercantile spirit in him. Indeed, he was always in revolt against it. As a
youth, and one of the leaders of the youth of Assisi, his head was filled with
"romantic" notions of being a troubadour and a knight-errant: he dreamed of
love and poetry and feats of arms, scorning the warehouse and the cloth-
market. These early dreams were disappointed. Yet, though defeat,
imprisonment and sickness disillusioned him of his fancies they did not convert
him to any love of money or the commercial life; they rather disgusted him
with "worldly" life in any form, and turned him towards a study of the life of
Christ. Anyone who studies that life will find in it what he needs - what Francis
found there was poverty. He saw that Christ was poor: that during the years of
his preaching He had no trade, no land, no revenues, that His only occupation
was to "go about doing good", and His only support the alms of the charitable.
It struck Francis in a sudden flash that this was his way of escape from the
sordid commercial selfishness which was growing about him. He saw poverty,
not as a penance, but as a deliverance: as the path which would lead him into
the fellowship of Christ and the freedom of the sons of God; and he gave up
everything to embrace it. And with poverty, of course, he embraced charity: a
life of going about and doing good. It was also, for him and those who
followed him, a gay and happy life; for they were prisoners who had broken
their chains.
They called themselves brothers ("frati"), and this is the origin of their English
name of Friars - "Friars Minor", or "little brothers", as St. Francis used to call
them. Their life was very simple; its two chief points were that they should live
by begging and that they should give whatever help they could to anyone who
needed it. They were not confined, like monks, within a monastic enclosure,
but travelled by two and two over the length and breadth of Europe: begging
for the poor, helping the sick, preaching Christ at crossroads and markets and
wherever they could find hearers; and as their fame spread they increased by
hundreds and by thousands. They were just what their age needed, to preach
the Gospel to the poor, to turn the rivers of new wealth into channels of
Christian charity, and above all, by their happy poverty to give avarice the
heaviest defeat which that wretched vice has suffered since Christ was born in
a stable. The Franciscans went singing along the roads of Europe, and re-
opened the hearts of their hearers to generosity, and to the love of God and
man.
Dominic Guzman (1170-1221) was a different sort of person from Francesco
Bernadone. For one thing, he was a noble, and no merchant's son; for another,
he was a Spaniard, born and bred in the atmosphere of the war between
Christians and Moors; and for a third, he was a great scholar, the pride of the
university of Palencia during the ten years of his residence there. He, too,
however, had in him strong roots of Christian charity, and on one occasion
sold his books (the greatest possible sacrifice for a mediaeval scholar) to relieve
the starving poor of his university city.
The quiet course of his life was changed by a journey he made into Languedoc,
in southern France, in 1203. He there for the first time came up against
Albigensianism, the most peculiar of the many queer doctrines which were
leaking into Christendom from the East. We shall consider it in detail later; for
the present it is enough to say that it was destroying the Christian faith in
Languedoc, and that the local clergy had too much wealth and too little
learning to be able to fight it successfully. St. Dominic, an ascetic and a scholar,
preached against it with considerable results; and his experience made him
revive a design he had already formed for establishing an order of learned
preachers, who could meet and overcome the intellectual difficulties of the
time. Poverty, study and preaching were to be their marks: poverty, because
only by renouncing wealth could they win the confidence of the people; study,
because only by learning could they combat error; preaching, because that was
then the most effective way of spreading the truth. The great new cities, and
especially the university-cities, were to be their field of action, and St. Dominic
soon scattered them broadcast into every centre of learning in Europe. Less
spectacular than the Franciscans, their work was at least equally important -
such was their influence that in the most "advanced" intellectual circles they
made orthodoxy fashionable again.
Between them the Friars overcame the double crisis which Christian society
was passing through. On the one hand, by their teaching and practice of
poverty they kept within bounds the spirit of avarice which was creeping over
Christendom; on the other, by their bold and confident handling of intellectual
problems they defeated the errors which were menacing the European mind,
and established Christian philosophy and theology on firm and rational
foundations. It was due to them, more than to anyone else, that the 13th
century was the golden age of mediaeval civilization.
The Inquisition
The mediaeval attitude towards religious disputes was very different from that
of modern Europeans; but then, the mediaeval attitude towards religion itself
was very different. Everyone then agreed that religion was the most important
thing in life, the guide of all human action, the basis of all social, political and
economic organization. Heretics believed this just as strongly as the orthodox.
It followed that a mediaeval heresy was never a mere difference of opinion, but
always a revolutionary doctrine, tending to the over-throw or alteration of all
existing institutions. The Waldensians are often described by historians as a
gentle and harmless sect. Yet the Waldensians believed that a man living in sin
is in the power of the devil, and can do no good. Therefore a sinful priest is
worthless. But one can never be sure that a priest (or any other man) is sinless.
Therefore all priests are useless. Therefore the Pope and the bishops, the
organization and law of the Church, are all useless. Furthermore, all power is
from God. But a man in sin cannot hold power from God. Therefore a sinful
ruler need not be obeyed. This last doctrine, subversive as it is of all civil order,
was not held by all the Waldensians, but it was held by many, and it was
revived repeatedly during the Middle Age - notably by Wyclif in the 14th
century. It is not really surprising that such heretics were persecuted.
But the most dangerous of the heresies, and the one that in the end provoked
the Church into setting up the Inquisition, was that of the Albigensians (so-
called from Albi, a town in southern France, which was one of their chief
centres). This doctrine had come from the East - it was a revival of Manichaean
teaching, which had been driven out of Europe under the Roman Empire.
According to this teaching there are two gods, a god of good and a god of evil.
Matter is the creation of the evil god, spirit of the good god. Man, therefore, is
a mixture of good and evil, and his business in life is to enable the good
principle in him, the soul, to overcome the evil principle, the body. This can
best be done by the practice of extreme penance; and, once a man has attained
by penance a complete mastery over his body, the best thing for him to do is to
complete the good work by suicide: preferably by starving the body to death in
a ceremony known as the "endura". The visible Church, with her organization
and laws, is an invention of the evil god; the sacraments, since they are mixed
with matter, are likewise evil; and marriage is the worst of them all, since it
blesses the procreation of offspring, the bringing of children into this world of
evil.
You may ask how such doctrines could ever have become popular. Partly
because of a puritan reaction against the excess of luxury which the new wealth
was introducing into Europe; but it is also to be noted that the Albigensians
admitted two classes of people: the "perfect", who were vowed to a life of
extreme asceticism, and the ordinary folk, who hoped to be saved by receiving
on their death-beds, a rite known as the "consolamentum", and who in the
meantime were free from the restrictions of Christian morality - especially
from the law of marriage. Thus the new teaching appealed both to ascetics and
to libertines; and it spread with great rapidity, particularly in southern France,
where it was protected even by local lords like the Counts of Toulouse.
It was impossible to tolerate Albigensianism. Those who were not converted to
it hated it intensely, and religious and secular authorities alike considered it a
cancer on society. The Church at first attempted to deal with it by means of
preachers like St. Dominic, but with only partial success. Then Pope Innocent
III was reluctantly persuaded to preach a crusade against it; reluctantly,
because, as he foresaw, the religious fervour of the crusaders became entangled
with political ambitions. The crusade was, indeed, an outward success. Simon
de Montfort, its leader, was a great soldier; and in 1214, at the battle of Muret,
the heretics and their supporters were totally defeated. But southern France
was desolated with fire and sword; and in the end the Albigensians were not
exterminated, but only driven underground. They became a kind of secret
society, eating away at the very vitals of Christendom; and the fear and hatred
they aroused were multiplied tenfold. Outrages against suspected Albigensians
became common, and many innocent people suffered from the violence of
mobs or the ignorant zeal of feudal lords. It was in these circumstances that the
Church at last instituted the Inquisition.
The word "inquisition" means inquiry, and the Inquisition was a series of
commissions of learned theologians, whose business was to inquire into cases
of suspected heresy, to convict the guilty and let the innocent go free. The
guilty were handed over to the secular authorities for punishment; and this
punishment, if they refused to give up their doctrines, was death. This new
weapon proved most effective, and Albigensianism was so thoroughly stamped
out that it has never reappeared; but during the process an evil wound was
inflicted on European civilization.
Yet the nature of the evil is often misunderstood. The Inquisitors were not
monsters of cruelty: the Inquisition courts were far more efficient, more just,
and more humane than the secular courts of the time. The detestable practice
of torture was not introduced by them, but was a legacy from Roman law. Nor
is it true (as far as I can see) that the Inquisition hindered intellectual
development. The greatest advances in mediaeval theology, philosophy and
medicine were made after it had been set up. Much later, in 1494, it was
revived in Spain, and its activity did not prevent the following century from
being the golden age of Spanish culture. No - the evil done by the Inquisition
was not intellectual, but moral. It set the official approval of the Church on the
principle of religious persecution; and that principle, once admitted, continued
to plague Europe for centuries. Only in 1789 was it repudiated in France; only
in 1829 in England; and in other countries it was maintained longer still. I am
speaking, of course, of official and formal persecution, not of the occasional
persecutions that are always likely to arise when men have serious differences
of opinion. The official practice of religious persecution has done more harm to
Europe than many wars.
At the same time, a fair historian will remember the extremely difficult
situation produced by the rise of Albigensianism, and will wonder whether any
other effective means could have been found to deal with it. The trouble with
such extraordinary means is that, once set in motion, they are very hard to
check. The Albigensian crusade half-ruined southern France; the institution of
the Inquisition made the persecution of heresy a normal part of the criminal
law of Europe. Yet modern men, confronted with a somewhat similar problem
in Communism, are inclined to deal with it in similar ways.
15. The Parts Of Christendom
It would be absurd to talk of "nations" or "national feeling" in the Middle Age.
A mediaeval man's loyalty was given primarily to his guild, his city, or his
overlord. Kings were specially regarded, on account of their position as
supreme overlords and their consecration by the Church; but, even so, their
subjects' loyalty to them was a personal one: loyalty to the king as a man rather
than as the representative or head of the nation; and the extent and power of
this loyalty depended very much on the personality of the king. The only great
institution which could evoke loyalty was the Church, and she was an
international institution.
Nevertheless, it was during the Middle Age that the national groups which
were later to be formed into nations came into existence. Between the 12th and
the 15th centuries the national languages took shape and form: by 1400 Italian,
French, Spanish, English and German were pretty well established. At the same
time, under the influence of Roman and Canon law, local customs in various
regions were being brought together and codified into the beginings of national
systems of law. Above all, in two countries, France and England, a centralized
system of government, administered by the king for his whole kingdom, was
worked out, and this led the way towards the later establishment of national
states. But no mediaeval state could be called "national" in the modern sense;
and in some parts of Europe (notably in Germany and Italy) no national state
was set up before the 19th century.
The Empire
In Germany this failure was perhaps partly due to the character of the
Germans: who, after all, had never known the strong government of Rome. It
was still more due to the continuing dream of the Holy Roman Empire. We
have seen in an earlier chapter how that Empire was founded and how it failed;
but the dream of establishing it was never surrendered. The German princes
went on electing their kings, and each king desired to be crowned by the Pope
as Emperor; but the Empire remained a shadow. Unfortunately, too many of
the Emperors dreamed of making it a reality - in particular, they dreamed of
possessing Italy and of controlling the Papacy; but neither the Italians nor the
Popes were inclined to submit to them. The Emperor Frederick I,
"Barbarossa", (1152-1190) was a good soldier and an able ruler; but his efforts
to control Italy were totally defeated by the Pope and the cities of the Lombard
League. The Emperor Frederick II (called "Stupor Mundi" - "the wonder of the
world") made a great stir for a time. He was a brilliant, though erratic, genius,
and one of the most fascinating characters of the Middle Age: a promoter of
learning and the arts, but also of war; a religious sceptic who burned heretics to
the glory of God; a crusader who kept a Saracen guard and lived like an
oriental prince, and who recovered Jerusalem at a time when he was under
sentence of excommunication. He chose to challenge the Papacy, was worsted
after a desperate struggle, and he died in 1250, a stupendous failure. And while
the Emperors were thus wasting their strength in fruitless Italian adventures, at
home in Germany the princes and barons and knights and cities were quietly
securing their independence. Germany became a patchwork of principalities.
The greater princes elected the Emperor, and were careful not to allow the
honour to become hereditary in any one family. In 1356, by the "Golden Bull",
Charles IV vested the right of election in seven princes: the Archbishops of
Mainz, Trier and Cologne, the Count Palatine, the Margrave of Brandenburg,
the Duke of Saxony and the King of Bohemia. Thus the division of power in
the Empire became a recognized and legal fact, and the Emperor surrendered
any claim to more than a vague overlordship.
Italy
During the Middle Age Italy was divided into three parts - a division which was
to last down to 1860. Southern Italy and Sicily had been the last territories in
the West to be held by the Eastern Empire. They were conquered by the
Saracens, and then by the Normans, who formed them into a compact and
well-ordered state. The royal line of the Normans died out in the 12th century,
and after that the possession of the Sicilian kingdom was disputed for years
between German, French and Spanish claimants, falling at last to the Kings of
Aragon.
Across the middle of the peninsula ran the Papal States. We have seen already
how these territories had been secured to the Papacy during the Dark Age, and
they continued to be held as a safeguard of the independence necessary to the
head of the Church. But they were never formed into a really strong state.
Here, more than anywhere else in Europe outside Germany, the nobles
remained practically independent of their sovereign, and during the whole of
the mediaeval period the Popes never succeeded in subduing them. The
disorder of the Papal States was a byword throughout Europe. But the nobles
had no mind to be subjected to any other ruler either, and were therefore
ready, as a rule, to support the Pope against attacks by the Emperor or other
enemies.
Northern Italy was different again. Partly owing to the survival of Roman
traditions, partly owing to the growth of trade (and especially the very
lucrative trade with the East), cities developed in northern Italy more rapidly
and thoroughly than anywhere else. Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Milan,
Padua, Mantua, Verona - these were all important centres before the end of the
12th century. And they were determined to have their independence. They
formed governments of their own. They broke the power of the local nobles
and destroyed the feudal system. Legally, they belonged to the Holy Roman
Empire, but they began to resent the overlordship of the Emperor, and in 1176
the cities of the Lombard League, led by Milan, totally defeated Frederick
Barbarossa at Legnano, and obtained practical freedom of government.
Northern Italy thus became a mosaic of city republics. Like the cities of ancient
Greece, they were often torn by internal factions, and they quarrelled fiercely
among themselves; but they quarrelled still more fiercely with any power that
threatened their freedom. And (again like the Greek cities) they were filled
with an immense vigour, spiritual, intellectual and commercial. Venice and
Genoa, the great mercantile and naval rivals, had no other serious rivals in the
Mediterranean. Milan, holding as she does the gate of the North, became a
great military power. The merchants of Florence pioneered banking, extending
their operations as far as Paris and London. (It was two Florentine banking
houses, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, who lent Edward III of England the money
with which to begin the Hundred Years' War.) More important, Florence
produced in Giotto the greatest painter, in the brothers Pisano the greatest
sculptors and in Dante the greatest poet, of the Middle Age. We have already
mentioned the university of Bologna and its work in the revival of law. The
intense vitality of these Italian cities produced profound effects on European
life; in the later age of the Renaissance it was to produce effects still more
profound.

Spain
When the Moslems flooded Spain in the 8th century, they did not bother to
occupy the barren mountains of the north coast; and towards the end of the
century they were driven back from the Pyrenees by Charlemagne, who
formed the Spanish March to hold them in check. Thus a fringe of Christian
territory ran round the north of Spain, and the Christians living there gradually
organized themselves under various leaders and began the reconquest of the
whole peninsula. By the 12th century five Christian kingdoms had been
formed: Aragon, Navarre, Castile, Leon and Portugal. Three of these in
particular - Aragon, Castile and Portugal - sustained the struggle with the
Moors. They often fought among themselves, of course (so did the Moors, for
that matter), but the dominant force in Spain remained the enmity between
Christian and Moslem. Gradually the Christians proved themselves tougher,
more determined and more enthusiastic than their opponents; and central
Spain, fought and re-fought over for centuries, began to pass into Christian
hands. Early in the 13th century Pope Innocent III succeeded in getting all the
Christian kingdoms except Leon to unite in a common crusade; the result was
the decisive victory of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, which swung the balance
of power permanently to the Christian side. By 1262 the Moors had lost all
Spain except the kingdom of Granada.
Mediaeval war was not a school of discipline. Cradled in war, and in war
against the Moslems, the Spaniards and Portuguese became the most fiercely
independent, as well as the most fiercely religious of mediaeval peoples. The
country remained divided. Leon, it is true, was united to Castile by marriage -
though Ferdinand III, the son of a king of Leon and a queen of Castile, had a
desperate struggle to hold the two kingdoms together; but little Navarre in the
north, Portugal in the west and Aragon in the east continued to maintain their
independence. The nobles had profited by the wars to increase their estates and
extend their privileges: the greater among them rivalled their kings in pride and
power. The cities, many of which had been founded as frontier outposts
against the Moors, had obtained large privileges of their own, which they
jealously and bitterly defended against any attempt to diminish them. The
Church, naturally, having played a large part in the reconquest, was
exceedingly powerful. Yet the Church, in Spain as in other parts of Europe,
steadfastly supported the idea of kingship; so, though a king in Spain had a very
difficult task, it was not an impossible one; and royal power did in time
increase, though slowly and spasmodically. In any case, the independence
which the Spaniards claimed for themselves though it brought with it much
disorder, also stimulated them to astonishing efforts. The desolated
countryside was re-settled and brought under cultivation; trade was revived on
a great scale - Aragon became a power in the Mediterranean, and its port,
Barcelona, was not too far behind Venice and Genoa; a vast amount of building
was undertaken, and Spanish Gothic is a fair rival of the French or English
styles; universities were founded - the famous one at Salamanca in 1243. In the
14th and 15th centuries the Portuguese and the Spaniards, still enterprising and
still unsatisfied, were to undertake those great voyages which changed the
history of the world. But that takes us beyond our present subject.
England
After 1066, when William of Normandy had conquered England, he
established there the organized form of feudalism which the Normans had
already worked out in France: a system in which every man had his place, his
rights, his duties, clearly and permanently marked out. This was a great
improvement on the primitive and chaotic feudalism which had previously
existed in England. Yet William had suffered too much from the rebellious
tendencies of his barons in Normandy to be quite satisfied with it. In his
English kingdom he introduced two changes. Instead of allowing his barons to
acquire large and compact estates, he scattered their holdings in various parts
of the country, so as to make it more difficult for them to concentrate their
forces; and he made all landholders, large or small, take a special oath of
allegiance to him. These things are important, not in themselves, but because
they show his determination to strengthen the position of the king as against
the barons: a determination which most of his successors shared. William
himself was already strong enough to carry out the great survey of the
kingdom which is recorded in Domesday Book - something no other king in
Europe could have achieved. A strong kingship, determined to become still
stronger, and in the process establishing order and national unity: that was the
priceless gift of the Normans to England.
William's government was still essentially feudal; and William II (Rufus) made
little change in it; but his brother, Henry I, began the transition from feudal to
royal government. In the first place, he began to establish a permanent civil
service. Other kings had to employ their barons as officials and instruments of
governing: an unsatisfactory arrangement, both because the barons could only
give part of their time to such work, and because they were apt to abuse the
powers entrusted to them. Henry I began to choose men from lower ranks,
who could give their full time to the job, and who, being dependent on the
king, would do as they were told. In the second place, Henry began to extend
the royal control of law and of the administration of justice, by sending round
the country royal judges, to whom all could resort who were not satisfied with
the working of the baronial courts. The King's government and the King's
justice were becoming independent of the feudal system.
Henry's death was followed by "the nineteen years' anarchy": the civil war
between Matilda and Stephen in which all that had been gained seemed lost
again. In fact, however, this dreadful experience convinced everyone, even the
barons, of the desirability of a strong ruler; so that when Henry II became king
in 1154, his great political genius was given almost a free hand. It was this king
who really established the power of the English monarchy. He improved and
extended Henry I's system of government by royal officials; still more, he
greatly extended the jurisdiction of the royal courts, by giving every free man
the right to demand a trial by jury before a royal judge. His attempt to bring
the clergy under the jurisdiction of these courts was a failure; but, with this
exception, he made the "King's justice" universal in England; and his judges
began to build up the great legal code which was later to be called the
Common Law. In military affairs, too, he strove to make the monarchy
independent. The royal army had previously consisted of the feudal levies
which the barons were bound to contribute by the terms of their feudal
contracts. Henry II got his barons to make him a money-payment (scutage)
instead of men; and with the money he hired mercenary troops, who were
both more efficient and more reliable than the barons' forces. Historians deal
much with Henry's large possessions in France and his consequent conflicts
with the French King, or with the unfortunate and unnecessary struggle with
the Church which led to the murder of St. Thomas Becket, or with the
invasion of Ireland which was undertaken during his reign, and which only
succeeded in throwing that country into fresh disorder; but none of these are
important compared with his establishment of the royal power in England.
It was firmly established. His son, Richard I, spent his reign outside England,
much of it on the third Crusade; yet the royal government carried on. Richard's
brother John was obsessed with disastrous schemes for maintaining or
recovering his lands in France, and his consequent greed for money and his
unscrupulous methods of raising it turned his whole people against him; yet
when, in 1215, the barons successfully revolted and forced him to sign Magna
Garta, they made no attempt to destroy the royal power, but only demanded
that John should keep within the limits laid down by Henry II. During the long
reign of Henry III (1216-1272) the barons gave plenty of trouble; yet they made
no attempt to overthrow the monarchy, but merely to limit or control it: to
claim for themselves a share, as it were, in the government of the kingdom.
They particularly insisted that the King should consult them on grave matters
of policy, and should obtain their consent to any taxation; and a custom grew
up of consulting them in a general council, or Parliament, for these purposes.
Edward I (1272-1306) began summoning the representatives of the shires and
towns to these assemblies, and so laid the foundations of Parliament as we
know it.
To sum up, by the end of the 13th century England was united under a single
royal government and a single Common Law. The king's government was not
absolute: it was itself subject to the law, and it was influenced by the Church,
the barons, and (to some extent) the towns; but it had no competitors: there
was no-one who did not accept the royal government and the Common Law
as the government and the law of England. Of no other country in Europe
could this be said.
France
Even before William of Normandy had conquered England, he was far
stronger than his overlord, the King of France. France was then divided into
great feudal lordships - Flanders, Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Guienne,
Gascony; and few of the dukes or counts who held them were as weak as their
nominal ruler. Except in his own demesne, the region round Paris, the King
was powerless; and even within his own demesne he was imperfectly obeyed.
It is surprising that the French monarchy survived at all; that it did so was due
principally to the influence of the Church, which still remembered Pepin and
Charlemagne.
In the 12th century the kings of France began their long climb to power. Louis
VI (1108-1137) restored order in the royal demesne; by the time of his death the
king was at least master in his own household. Louis VII (1137-1180) began
with excellent prospects: he married the great heiress, Eleanor of Aquitaine,
and so more than doubled his lands; and he had for friend and adviser Suger,
Abbot of St. Denis, the wisest administrator of his age. When Louis went on
the second Crusade in 1147, he left Suger as regent, and the latter not only
maintained excellent order, but vastly increased the revenues of the Crown.
But the crusade was a failure, and Eleanor proved a faithless wife, and in the
end the King quarrelled so bitterly with her that he had the marriage annulled
on the ground that they were too closely related. Eleanor at once married
Henry II of England, who thus came to hold more of French soil than the
French King himself, and was ambitious of extending his power further. Louis
battled against this dangerous neighbour for the rest of his reign, and held him
in check, but no more.
Meanwhile, however, in France as in the rest of Europe, an anti-feudal
movement was growing. Louis VII kept up the traditional alliance with the
Church, and bishops and abbots who were threatened by local lords appealed
to him for help. Towns were beginning to grow, and they too came to the king
for charters of freedom and protection against feudal tyranny. Even some of
the smaller feudal lords, threatened by their great neighbours, were willing to
surrender some of their power to the king in return for his support. The great
lords themselves, in their disputes with one another, would sometimes seek a
judgment from the king rather than go to war: they were beginning to tire of
incessant war, and the king was the only higher authority to whom they could
appeal for justice.
Philip Augustus (1180-1223) was just the man to exploit this situation. A man of
high intelligence, he was also completely unscrupulous, and was prepared to
take every possible means of increasing the power and possessions of the
French Crown. His biggest obstacle was the power in France of the English
king. When Philip succeeded his father, as a nervous and sickly fourteen-year-
old, Henry II befriended and helped him; but this did not prevent Philip, a few
years later, from helping Henry's sons in their revolt against their father. After
Henry's death, when public opinion forced Philip to join Richard I in the third
Crusade, he took the earliest opportunity of slipping home again to attack
Richard's French lands. Richard himself, returning home after the Crusade had
failed, was captured by the Duke of Austria and held to ransom, and Philip did
his best to get the captivity prolonged. Richard came back burning for revenge,
and in the ensuing war Philip was badly beaten, and might have been crushed
altogether had not Richard been killed by a chance arrow while besieging an
unimportant castle. This was decisive. John was no match for Philip Augustus,
and in a few years most of his lands in France had been added to the demesne
of the Crown.
These conquests would have weakened rather than strengthened Philip, had he
not worked out a new method of governing them. Instead of using vassals, in
the old manner, he appointed to each district a royal official (a "bailie" or
"sene-chal"). These officials were given complete powers of government in
their districts, but they were paid by the King and were accountable to him,
they held office only during his pleasure, and they were moved at intervals
from one district to another, so that they had no opportunity of making
themselves independent. In fact, Phillip was imitating the English kings and
setting up a civil service. Besides this, he supported the cities and assisted trade,
and so increased his power and his wealth at the same time. At his death,
though the great nobles still remained, and still retained most of their
independent power, the King of France had become by far the richest and most
powerful man in his kingdom.
Louis VIII ruled only three years, but he was succeeded (1223-1270) by the best
of all mediaeval kings, Louis IX - St. Louis. If Philip Augustus had made the
monarchy great and respected, Louis IX made it loved. He was wise, firm and
hardworking, like Philip Augustus, but he was also honourable, just and
merciful; and he was a gallant knight and a good companion as well. He strictly
preserved the rights of the Crown, but he was equally strict in respecting the
rights of others, and he had a particular care for the poor and the oppressed. He
made no great efforts to expand the royal power, yet during his reign it steadily
increased: the trust and love which all classes felt for him led them more and
more to appeal to him and rely on him. His gallantry during the two Crusades
he led (on the second of which he died) further endeared him to "a nation of
gallant men". It was in his reign that there first appeared that intense devotion
to the monarchy which was to inspire the French and hold them together for
centuries, and which, in the hearts of some Frenchmen, lives on still.
Yet the country was not fully united. The nobles were still largely independent,
and one could not say that France had a common government - still less a
common law. There was no general council, or parliament, of the realm; the
Estates-General, an assembly representing the clergy, nobles and commons of
France, was first called in 1302, and never took any real part in the
Government. The monarchy itself had still to go through many ups and
downs. Philip the Fair lost much of the ground gained by St. Louis by trying to
extend royal power too rapidly and by unjust means. The brutality, rapacity
and trickery of his officials at length stirred up so much resentment that his
death was followed by revolts all over the country, and his successors had to
tread much more warily. All the same, in France as in England, the 13th
century brought the growth of a strong monarchy and the beginnings of
national unity.
We cannot consider in detail the rest of Christendom, but one event must be
noticed, as it changed the whole future of eastern Europe. This was the
Mongol invasion. Like so many previous invaders, the Mongols were wild
nomadic horsemen from central Asia. They were a small tribe to begin with,
but early in the 13th century they produced a great leader, who called himself
Genghis Khan. He imposed himself on all the nomadic tribes, and turned their
united forces first against China, which he conquered, and then westwards
over Persia and Caucasia and into Russia. He even succeeded in organizing this
vast empire effectively; and in 1236 his grandson undertook an immense raid
into Europe: across Russia, Poland and Hungary, and as far as the Adriatic.
Poland and Hungary were disastrously plundered, and then abandoned; but
Russia was made a permanent part of the Mongol empire, and not for two
centuries did the Russians regain their freedom. Russia was thus absorbed into
the East and detached from Europe, and this experience has left a permanent
mark on her people. Not for another four centuries were the Russians to play
any serious part in European history. Hungary and Poland, on the other hand,
recovered from their brief experience of Mongol conquest; but their
development was injured by it, and that may explain why they have never
been so influential in Europe as the vigour of their peoples would lead one to
expect.
16. A Century Of Change
The revival and re-fashioning of our civilization, begun in the Dark Age, had
produced the society of Christendom, which reached its height in the 13th
century; in the 14th, this revival did not halt nor slacken, but changed its
direction, and began to move towards a new form of society. Christendom was
a religious society, based on the common acceptance of one religious creed,
and the common membership of one religious organization, the Church; its
culture was principally the expression in art and thought of this common
religion; its political organization was local, not centralized; its social and
economic institutions were co-operative. This society was now to be gradually
replaced by another: a society which was secular, with no common religious
faith or Church, and in which religion held only a secondary place; a society
whose culture was the study and expression of man and nature, rather than of
God and the supernatural; a society organized in great centralized national
states; a society which was individualist rather than co-operative. This
enormous change took many generations to accomplish, but it began in the
14th century. In that century the society of Christendom was shaken by four
great disasters: the "captivity" of the Popes at Avignon, the Great Schism, the
Black Death, and the Hundred Years' War; at the same time, there arose in
Europe the new and powerful movement called the Renaissance, which the
weakened society of Christendom proved unable to absorb or control. That is
why the 14th century is called "the century of change".
The Avignon Papacy
Quarrels between Popes and secular rulers were not infrequent in the Middle
Age, and the quarrel between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair of France seems
at first sight to be just another of them. The cause of the quarrel was, as often
happened, the "immunity" of the clergy: in this case Philip claimed the right to
tax the French clergy without the permission of the Pope. Both Philip and
Boniface were determined and headstrong characters, and in the course of the
dispute both made extravagant claims. But Philip went beyond words. In 1302
an agent of his, William de Nogaret, with a small force of soldiers, surprised
and captured Boniface at the castle of Anagni. The Pope was soon freed by an
uprising of the townspeople in his favour; but he was an old man of 85, the
shock was too much for him, and he died soon after. The next Pope only
reigned for a few months; and then, after a long deadlock, the cardinals elected
a Frenchman, Clement V. Clement was certainly much under the influence of
the French king. He absolved him - even excused him - for the attack on
Boniface VIII; he yielded on the matter of taxation; he suppressed the Templars
at the king's behest; but the most important thing he did was to take up his
residence permanently at Avignon instead of going to Rome. Avignon then
belonged to the Papacy, and was not legally part of France; but it was a French
city none the less, and just on the borders of the French king's dominions; and
the natural conclusion which all men came to was that the Pope had settled
there in obedience to the king's desire.
This was not the whole truth. Clement's successors were not weak men, and
yet, one after another, they remained at Avignon down to 1378. Avignon was a
much more attractive place to live in than Rome. For years the Popes had not
been able to keep decent order in their own city: the Roman people and nobles
were the most turbulent and persistent troublemakers in Europe; France, on
the other hand, was the chief centre of mediaeval civilization, and the Pope
could live at Avignon in the dignified tranquillity which befitted the head of the
Church. Nevertheless, the decision to remain at Avignon was a fatal error. The
Pope was the bishop of Rome. All his prestige, all his authority depended on
his claims to be the lineal successor to the first of all bishops of Rome, St. Peter.
And Rome was the centre of Christendom: not Florence, not Venice, not
Vienna, not Paris - certainly not Avignon. Mediaeval Rome, that queer
collection of stupendous ruins, ancient churches, fortress-palaces and mud-
huts, was the centre of Christian faith and the Christian society, as much as
imperial Rome had been the centre of classical society. A Pope at Avignon was
a Pope in exile, and his prestige and influence were weakened accordingly.
More: the Avignon Popes were generally suspected of being under the
dominion, or at least the influence, of the kings of France. The suspicion was
false, but it could not be refuted, and it was fatal to the Pope's position as
supreme judge and arbiter of Christendom. Gregory VII and his successors had
striven at all costs to make the Church independent of any secular power - all
that achievement appeared now to be thrown away. Incidentally, the Popes of
this period were engaged, like the kings, in strengthening and centralizing their
government, and especially their finances; this work would in any case have
aroused opposition, but coming from Avignon, it sometimes aroused actual
revolt.
The Great Schism (1378-1417)
Gregory XI finally determined to go back to Rome; but, after wrestling for a
few months with the confusion and disorder of the city, he suddenly died, and
the cardinals met to elect his successor. Most of them were French, and would
have returned to Avignon; but the people of Rome were determined to keep
the Papacy now that they had got it, and a howling mob besieged the Vatican,
clamouring for a Roman Pope. The cardinals decided on a compromise. They
chose the Archbishop of Bari, an Italian, though not a Roman; but they had
hardly completed the election when the mob broke through the guards and
rushed into the conclave. The cardinals escaped; but the following day they
met again secretly and confirmed the election of the Archbishop, who took the
name of Urban VI.
Urban soon quarrelled with the cardinals. He was not only determined to
remain in Rome, but also to carry out a thorough reform of the Church,
beginning with the cardinals themselves; and his headstrong and violent
character made him act with little tact or care for other people's feelings. The
cardinals bore with him for a few months; then the majority of them fled to
Anagni, and issued a manifesto to the world declaring that the election had
been held under the fear of the Roman mob, and was therefore invalid;
proceeding to a new election, they chose a Frenchman, who called himself
Clement VII and established his court at Avignon.
Today it is easy to see that the cardinals were wrong, but it was not so easy at
that time, and people took sides with the rival claimants according to their
prejudices or interests. The Italians for the most part supported Urban; the
French naturally supported Clement, as did the Spaniards; England, at war
with France, supported Urban; Scotland, allied with France, supported
Clement; Portugal allied with England, supported Urban; the states of the
Empire were divided. Everyone took sides, and each claimant
excommunicated the supporters of the other. There was no higher authority to
decide the matter, and thus the schism dragged on for nearly forty years.
The results were disastrous. The discipline of the Church went to pieces.
Neither claimant could govern firmly, or make any strong opposition to the
growth of abuses, for fear of driving his supporters into the opposite camp.
Indeed, both were in such need of money that they winked at or connived at
abuses for the sake of raising revenue. And, as neither could take a strong line
against the people who supported him, the secular powers began once more to
obtain control over the Church, with the usual evil results - church revenues
being seized, prelates being appointed for political reasons, and so on. Both
morally and materially, the Church in the 15th century was much worse off
than the Church in the 14th: Christendom still accepted it, but no longer
reverenced and looked up to its authority as in former ages. The heresies that
sprang up in this period of disorder - those of Wyclif in England, for instance,
and Huss in Bohemia - were not so dangerous as the Albigensians had been,
but they proved more difficult to deal with because of the general disgust
which even sincere Catholics felt about the condition of the Church.
Humanly speaking, what saved the Church and the Papacy was the fear, felt by
nearly everyone, of a total collapse of society if the schism were not healed.
Even those who were profiting from it, like the cardinals and the secular
princes, came to believe that it must be ended at all costs. In these
circumstances, a General Council of the Church was assembled at Constance in
1415 under the patronage of the Emperor Sigismund. The Roman claimant,
Gregory XII, having officially approved the Council, resigned his position; the
Avignon claimant, more obstinate, was deserted by nearly all his followers and
then deposed; and the Council finally arranged the election of a new Pope,
Martin V, who was accepted by all Christendom. His election was followed by
a general reaction in favour of the Papacy, and he and his successor, Eugenius
IV, recovered much of its external prestige; but they could not recover all the
real power and influence it had once held. In particular, they could not free the
Church from secular interference, nor carry through the thorough-going
reform which was now so badly needed. The condemnation of Joan of Arc, by
a French bishop bribed by the English government, is an example of the sort of
thing that was liable to happen in the 15th century, and that the Pope, in
practice, could neither prevent nor punish. Such a Church could no longer be
the dominant force in Europe, because she could no longer be the mistress and
mother of the hearts of men.
The Black Death (1346-1350)
Material disasters are not usually so serious as the moral disasters we have been
considering; but the Black Death was something extraordinary. It seems to
have been a form of bubonic plague, which is dangerous enough at any time,
and the medical science of that time was quite incapable of dealing with it. It
originated in China, where it slew millions, was carried along the trade-routes
to the Mediterranean, and thence brought by Italian sailors to Europe. The
story is told that an Italian colony on the Black Sea was besieged by a vast host
of Mongols; that the defenders were surprised one morning by a strange
silence in the enemy camp, and, exploring, found the besiegers lying dead in
heaps, black and rotten; that they had hardly time to rejoice before they began
to die themselves; and that a few panic-stricken survivors fled back to Italy,
carrying the plague with them. However this may be, the Italian ports were the
first to suffer, and they suffered horribly. During 1347 the plague ran like a fire
through Italy, crossed the Alps into France and the Pyrenees into Spain. In 1348
it passed the Channel and raged through England; thence the Hanseatic traders
carried it to Scandinavia and Germany. No part of Europe escaped, though
some parts were more hardly hit than others. The plague, it was noticed,
attacked especially the young and vigorous; and where it struck, it killed - there
was no defence against it, and hardly any of those infected survived. The worst
thing about it was the terror it inspired, of an inevitable and horrible doom.
And though by 1350 it seemed to have run its course, the germs of the disease
had been acclimatized to Europe: in later years it struck, and struck again, now
here, now there; though never with the power and deadliness of the first awful
visitation.
Exact statistics were not kept, but it is certain that the mortality was enormous,
and in some places catastrophic; careful historians have computed that a
quarter of the population of Europe perished in these three years. A single
example: the poet Petrarch had a brother, a monk in a community of thirty-
five; when the plague had passed, he was the sole survivor. The development
of Europe came to an abrupt stop: unfinished buildings, silted-up and
abandoned harbours, decayed and half-forgotten towns, still bear witness to
the effect of the plague. Every mediaeval institution was deeply shaken; in
many places the manorial system, the guild system, could no longer be
maintained, and elsewhere they had to be drastically modified. There was a
general lowering of standards: standards of work and workmanship, standards
of learning and education, standards of morals. The Church suffered
particularly. The monks were more often open to contagion because of their
community-life, the friars and parish-clergy because their work took them
among the sick. The great shortage of priests that resulted forced the
authorities to lower the standards of learning and conduct required in
candidates for the ministry. And, though the number and quality of the clergy
declined, the wealth of the Church did not, so that individual priests might be
much richer than before. A monastery that formerly supported fifty monks
might now have but fifteen or twenty, a cathedral endowed for twenty canons
might now have only ten. This increase in wealth had an evil effect on the
clergy, it attracted unworthy men into their ranks, and it aroused the envy and
greed of the laity.
Every disaster great enough to loosen the bonds of a society produces two
contrary effects: revolutionism and conservatism. Some men will want to take
advantage of the situation to loosen the bonds still further, to improve their
position and shake off such restrictions as those imposed by the guilds or the
Church; others will want to do the opposite: they will oppose all change, they
will want to make the rules and regulations more rigid and more strictly
enforced than ever. These tendencies are shown after the Black Death in the
great peasant revolts (like Wat Tyler's in England or the "Jacquerie" in France)
and in their merciless suppression; they are shown in the strikes and riots of
journeymen against their masters and of lesser guilds against greater ones, and
in the increasing tendency for wealthy men to work outside and independently
of the guilds, while on the other hand the masters tried to make each guild a
close corporation of little capitalists, jealously guarding their privileges and
rigidly limiting any admittance into their ranks. They are shown in the moral
field in the outbreaks of reckless debauchery, or in the more elegant
licentiousness described by Boccaccio in his "Decameron", and in the contrary
movements of extreme asceticism and puritanism, like that of the Flagellants,
who went about publicly scourging themselves for the sins of the world. These
opposite tendencies had existed before the Black Death, but the great
catastrophe intensified them and brought them out into the open, and
thenceforth they deepened continually, dividing the very structure of
mediaeval society.
The Hundred Years' War (1340-1453)
France was the main source and centre of civilization in the Middle Age;
therefore the division and devastation of France weakened the whole of
Christendom. This is what makes the Hundred Years' War so important. It
began as an ordinary feudal struggle, like many another. The French kings
were still endeavouring to maintain and increase their dominion over their
vassals; but the most important of their vassals were the kings of England, who
still held Gascony; and, while a king of England might well be a king of
France's vassal, he would not submit to being his subject. There was continual
and increasing trouble between the two. When Philip VI of France and Edward
III of England quarrelled about the affairs of Flanders, Philip took the
opportunity of declaring all the fiefs in France forfeit to the French Crown.
Edward then went one better by claiming that through his mother, a French
princess, he was the rightful king of France. Thus the war was joined.
Once it was begun, neither side could finish it. The English at first had far
better armies than the loose feudal levies of the French, and they had the
priceless asset of the long-bow; they could raid France at will, and could usually
defeat the French in the field; but to occupy France, to besiege and capture
every castle and fortified town in France, was utterly beyond their strength.
France could be devastated, but not conquered.
Devastated she was. The great raid of 1346 is remembered, because it ended in
the battle of Crecy, and the great raid of 1356 because it ended in the battle of
Poitiers; but the endless small forays and skirmishes are not remembered,
though each inflicted a black scar on the fair land of France. Up to 1360 the war
went steadily in favour of the English, and a temporary peace in that year gave
Edward III full sovereignty over southwestern France; but then the French
entrusted their fortunes to that tough Breton fighter, Bertrand du Guesclin;
and he, by avoiding pitched battles and using guerilla tactics, wore the English
down till they consented to a much less favourable truce in 1375.
Meanwhile, the war had gradually weakened both kings: in England and
France the nobles took advantage of the royal difficulties to increase their own
power. In England, Edward III died in 1377. His son, the Black Prince, had died
the year before, leaving as his heir a boy of ten, Richard of Bordeaux, who now
became Richard II. During his minority factious nobles disputed the control of
the government and shamefully mismanaged the affairs of the country. When
he came of age, Richard patiently set out to recover the power of the Crown.
His more obstinate and dangerous opponents were executed or exiled, and by
1397 he seemed to be master of the kingdom. But in 1399 he went to Ireland,
to try and put some order into the affairs of that distressful country; and while
he was away his cousin, Henry of Lancaster, raised a rebellion against him. The
discontented nobles came flocking to Henry, who had himself proclaimed as
Henry IV, and Richard was captured and quietly murdered.
Henry of Lancaster owed his crown to the nobles. He had therefore to make
large concessions to them, and even so he was never secure. When he died in
1413, his son, Henry V, determined to give the nobles occupation by leading
them once more to the conquest of France. The moment was favourable. In
1392 Charles VI of France had gone mad, and his cousins, the Dukes of
Burgundy and Orleans, disputed the regency of the country. In 1407 Burgundy
had Orleans murdered, and the result was a bitter civil war. Thus, when Henry
V revived the English claim to the throne of France, he was able to get the
support of the Duke of Burgundy, the second-greatest vassal of France.
Henry opened the war with the usual raid, ending it with the incredible victory
of Agincourt. But he was an intelligent man and a good soldier; he saw the
futility of mere raiding, and he realized the immense new power of
gunpowder; and armed with cannon, he set out on a methodical conquest,
town by town and castle by castle, of northern France. By 1420 he was strong
enough, with the help of Burgundy, to conclude the Peace of Troyes, by which
he was recognized as the lawful heir of the mad Charles VI, whose son, the
Dauphin Charles, was disinherited and declared illegitimate. And then, in 1422,
Henry V died, leaving as his heir a baby twelve months old; and soon after
Charles VI died, and the baby became king of France and England.
But Henry had also left, as his regent in France, his brother John, Duke of
Bedford, a soldier and a statesman not inferior to Henry himself; and Bedford,
though he got little support from England (where the nobles were intriguing as
usual round the person of the baby king), was so successful that in 1429 he
could lay siege to Orleans, the last French stronghold north of the Loire. The
Dauphin, weak and vacillating, and dominated by the Orleanist faction,
seemed powerless against him. But then came the miracle of Joan of Arc. A
seventeen-year-old peasant-girl from Lorraine suddenly appeared at the
Dauphin's court, affirming that she had been commissioned by God to deliver
France from the English. By the force of her wonderful personality, her
shrewdness, and her evident holiness, she broke down the Dauphin's despair
and inertia, and was allowed to lead a force to the relief of Orleans. Her arrival
in the city was followed by such an outburst of enthusiasm as France had not
known for generations, and a series of daring sorties forced the English to raise
the siege. Then Joan dragged the Dauphin almost by main force to Rheims,
though it was in the heart of enemy country, and there had him crowned by
the Archbishop according to the traditional rite by which the French kings had
been crowned for centuries. From that instant he became Charles VII of France
for all Frenchmen, and the claim of the English baby was destroyed. Yet he was
not grateful. When Joan was captured by the Burgundians and sold to the
English, he did nothing to help her, and the English found a French bishop to
condemn her as a witch and have her burnt at the stake.
This was a disastrous error. Joan of Arc dead, Joan of Arc murdered by the
English, did even more to rouse the spirit of France than Joan of Arc living had
done. There was such an uprush of national feeling that Charles VII was forced
into action. The English nobles, torn with the internal squabbles that were
soon to produce the Wars of the Roses, cared nothing for French affairs; they
even quarrelled with the Duke of Burgundy, and in 1435 Burgundy came back
to his allegiance and Bedford died. After that it was a foregone conclusion. The
English who remained in France fought stubbornly and well; but they had little
help from home and their own French subjects were against them. By 1453
they had lost everything in France except Calais, and the Hundred Years' War
was over. But the damage had been done. The material damage was the least
part of it. Whole tracts of France had been devastated and re-devastated; many
districts had fallen back completely into forest; every winter the howling of
wolves was heard round Paris. Rome was now a much better place to live in
than Avignon. There had been an equal degeneration in the standards of
learning and the arts: the university of Paris in 1340 had been the chief
intellectual centre of Europe, but it would be laughable to make such a claim
for it in 1453. All classes had been brutalized by the war, and all sorts of queer
cults and superstitions had grown up: an extreme example is that of Gilles de
Rais, Marshal of France and comrade-in-arms of Joan of Arc, who was executed
for sacrificing babies to the Devil. In both France and England the nobles had
taken advantage of the war to increase their own power, and in both countries
they had disgraced themselves and disgusted the people by their quarrels,
cruelties, and general imbecility. The days of Louis IX and Edward I seemed far
away. Yet for that very reason the idea of monarchy had survived and grown
stronger among the people as a whole, and the new national feeling which the
war had helped to arouse found expression in the desire for a strong king. In
the long run, the rise of absolute monarchy both in France and England was
rather helped than hindered by the Hundred Years' War.
In the 15th century, then, the society of Christendom was in decline. Its ideals
and institutions, though still accepted, no longer commanded the devotion of
men, and they were upheld by stubborn conservatism rather than by any real
faith or hope in them. And meanwhile there had already risen in Italy the
movement which was to destroy them. We call that movement the
Renaissance.
17. The Renaissance
The main difficulty in describing the Renaissance is that it is so various: it is not
really one movement, but half-a-dozen or more. "Renaissance" means "re-
birth", and the men of the Renaissance did really feel that Europe was being re-
born or re-made in every possible direction. However, it is probably true to
say, as Burckhardt says in "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy", that
there were fundamentally two movements, a social one and a cultural one;
though these two interacted on each other, and also found expression in the
economics, the politics and the religion of Europe.
On the social side, the Renaissance meant the rise of individualism, which is
best defined as the belief that the individual ought to be free to think, speak and
act for himself and by himself. Mediaeval people did not believe in that at all.
The monstrous disorder of the Dark Age had led Europeans to organize
themselves in co-operative groups, and we have seen how characteristic these
groups were of mediaeval society, and what a great part they played in re-
establishing law and order in Europe. But by the 14th century times had
changed, and men's feelings began to change too. The growth of order and
wealth made co-operation seem less necessary, and the restrictions which it
imposed on individual liberty began to be resented, especially by the more
vigorous members of the groups. Then, too, the influence of the Church, with
her insistence on co-operation as a Christian duty, had had a great deal to do
with the formation of the groups; and now, as we have seen, the influence of
the Church was gravely weakened. The Black Death, again, loosened the
whole structure of mediaeval society - indeed, the manorial system never really
recovered from it. We notice in the 14th century the beginnings of a desire for
greater individual freedom and responsibility: an increasing number of men
begin to want to think and talk and write and act for themselves, independently
of other men. I say "the beginnings", and it is important not to exaggerate in
this matter. Individualism met with strong opposition, and grew slowly. It did
not become wholly dominant in Europe till the 19th century. But it began in
the 14th, and it was the first of the two main elements in the movement we call
the Renaissance.
The other element was a cultural change. So far, since the revival of culture
had begun in the llth century, Europeans had been chiefly interested in
theology, philosophy, and law, and to a lesser extent in mathematics and
astronomy. They had been recovering what the Greeks and Romans had
taught on these matters; they had combined this with a profound study of the
Christian religion; and they had organized the results of their inquiries into
systematic form. But now they began to be less interested in such inquiries,
and to be more interested in another field of culture - art. The arts are means of
expression. Perhaps it is generally true that a period of exploration is followed
by a period of expression; certainly it is true that in the 14th century expression
(in the arts of prose, poetry, the drama, sculpture, painting, architecture) began
to replace the explorations of philosophy and theology as the chief interest of
educated Europeans. Here again we must not exaggerate. Nowadays the
dominant interest of educated men is physical science; yet it would be absurd
to say that we are not interested in the arts, or in philosophy, or even in
theology; but science is our major interest. And so, during the Renaissance, art
was the major interest.
And, just as men had begun the revival of European culture by going back to
Greek and Roman thinkers like Aristotle, so the men of the Renaissance began
by studying Greek and Roman literature, sculpture and architecture. There
was a "classical revival". Not that Renaissance art was a mere imitation of
classical art, any more than mediaeval philosophy or law was a mere imitation
of classical philosophy or law; but the Renaissance artists took the forms and
styles of the classical artists as their guides, and based their work on them.
They wanted to write like Cicero, to carve like Praxiteles, to build like the
architects of the Parthenon and the Pantheon; and they turned their backs on
the forms of mediaeval art, which they contemptuously called "Gothic". For
them, the classical age was the golden age.
Both these elements, social and cultural, are combined in the ideal of the
Renaissance - Humanism. Humanism has been variously denned, but it is best
understood as a belief in the complete development of the individual in all his
powers. Every man should become a perfect specimen of human nature:
perfect as a statue is perfect, or a picture; perfect in every way, physically,
intellectually and morally. In other words, every man should be a work of art.
This ideal is most fully expressed by Baldassare Castiglione in his famous book,
"The Courtier" (II Cortigiano). The perfect courtier, he says, should be good at
everything: a soldier, a sportsman, a man of taste and wit and conversation, a
musician, a dancer - courteous, generous, amiable, handsome and strong - such
a man is truly "human", wanting nothing to the perfection of his nature. And a
man can best attain this ideal by contemplating and imitating it in the literature
and art of Greece and Rome; for the Greeks and Romans (so the men of the
Renaissance believed) had come nearer to the complete expression of human
nature than any peoples before or since.
There is nothing particularly religious in this idea; and, though it would be
absurd to call the Renaissance anti-religious, it would be true to say that
religion was no longer so important to the Renaissance mind as it had been to
the mediaeval mind. It no longer held quite the centre of the stage. In fact, we
can see in many of the great men of the Renaissance an uneasy conflict
between their Christian ideal and their humanist ideal. There is a difference
between carrying the Cross after Christ and being a perfect courtier: a
difference that was never wholly resolved.
Partly for this reason, partly because of the intense study, and almost worship,
of the classics, and partly because of the general decline of the Church's
influence, during the Renaissance the power of religion in Europe declined.
Europe did not cease to be both Christian and Catholic, but its religion became
more of an appearance and less of a reality: more a matter of outward
observance, and less of a power over men's hearts. Faith diminished, and was
replaced by a certain feeling of indifference towards religion. This change was
accompanied, especially in the upper classes, with a disastrous fall in moral
standards. The typical example of this is Machiavelli's "The Prince" (II
Principe). This is a little manual for the guidance of rulers, and a very clear-
headed and sensible little manual, too; only, it leaves morality out of account.
Machiavelli discusses whether a prince ought to aim at being loved or feared by
his subjects, and concludes that it is best to be both, but that, if he must choose,
he had better try and make himself feared. He discusses whether a prince
ought to keep faith, and concludes, not unless it is to his advantage to do so.
Some have thought that Machiavelli was only writing a bitter satire on the
political condition of Italy in the 15th century; it may be so, but in any case his
book bears witness to a great decline in political morality. Economic morality,
family morality, personal morality, declined equally. Among the princes of
Renaissance Italy avarice, falsehood, cruelty and lust were mere
commonplaces; and lesser men imitated the princes. This is the worst side of
the Renaissance; and it is not surprising that it produced the later reaction of
puritanism.
In art, on the other hand, the Renaissance produced its greatest glories. The art
of ancient Greece may be more technically "perfect", but no period in
European history has been more fruitful of great masterpieces than the period
between the 14th and 16th centuries. A period which produced (in painting)
Botticelli, Perugino, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Holbein, Rubens, (in
sculpture) Donatello, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, Michelangelo, (in architecture)
Brunelleschi, Bramante, Michelangelo, Palladio, (in literature) Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Ronsard, Spenser, Shakespeare - such a period can
certainly claim to be unsurpassed even by ancient Greece. And these names are
only a rough selection. In painting and sculpture especially the Renaissance
excelled. It seems almost as though, in those days, a man could hardly put
brush to canvas or chisel to stone without producing a masterpiece. The
present writer, as a matter of taste, prefers mediaeval art: prefers Giotto to
Raphael, Dante to Shakespeare, Notre Dame de Chartres to St. Peter's or St.
Paul's; but only a fool will fail to recognize the immense vitality and
consummate mastery of Renaissance art.
It has a mastery both of technique and of nature. Renaissance art, in general,
differs from mediaeval art in being naturalistic rather than symbolic. Of course,
all art is symbolic up to a point. An artist always wants to express an idea, or
feeling, or state of mind, by means of some material image - a landscape, or a
figure, or a story; a work of art is never a mere reproduction of a material
image, nor is it ever a mere idea or feeling - it must be both. But in mediaeval
art the idea, or feeling, predominates, and the material image is re-fashioned
(distorted, if you like) so as to express it; whereas in Renaissance art the image
predominates, and the artist expresses himself through a perfect representation
of some natural reality. The Renaissance artists excel in the study and
representation of nature; and in this field it seems impossible that they should
ever be surpassed.
On the other hand, Renaissance art has one big drawback: it is a learned rather
than a popular art. The Renaissance artists immersed themselves in the study
of the classics, and their art can only be fully appreciated by one who is himself
a student of the classics: it is essentially an aristocratic art. The Renaissance
began that divorce between the artist and the common man which has
widened so disastrously in our own day, so that modern art is produced by
specialists for specialists. Mind, I say "began": this development, too, was a
gradual one. Raphael's Madonnas are as "popular" as Giotto's St. Francis; but
Raphael's "The School of Athens" is not.
The social and economic effects of the Renaissance are obvious enough. It
hastened the downfall of co-operative groups, like the manors and the guilds,
and their replacement by individual landowners and individual capitalists. Thus
there began to arise three new classes: the landowners, an aristocracy whose
power was no longer based on feudal contracts but on the actual ownership of
land; the middle-class capitalists (merchants, bankers, manufacturers); and the
workers: agricultural or industrial labourers employed by the landowners or
capitalists, and working for a wage. Here we have the beginnings of the
modern class-system.
The chief political effect of the Renaissance was the rise of absolutism, or
despotism. An absolute ruler is one who possesses complete political power,
without restriction. A mediaeval ruler was far from absolute. He was limited
by the feudal rights of the nobles, by the charters of guilds and cities and
universities, and most of all by the independent power of the Church. During
the Renaissance period all these institutions declined, and the princes of Europe
successfully seized for themselves more and more power. They were aided in
this by the natural desire of their subjects for law and order: as the other
institutions failed, men looked for protection increasingly to the central power
of the Crown. Even the Italian city-states gradually lost or surrendered their
liberties to despots. This movement culminated in the doctrine of the "Divine
Right of Kings", which asserts that the Sovereign receives his power from God,
and is responsible only to God. This extreme doctrine did not last; but the
movement for the concentration of all power in the hands of a central
government has persisted down to our own day, and has found its latest
expressions in Fascism and Communism.
Some Characters of the Renaissance
1. Petrarch (1304-1374). Francesco Petrarca was born at Arezzo, the son of a
Florentine merchant named Petracco. (Francesco later changed the name to
Petrarca to make it more euphonious). In 1311 his father moved to Avignon, to
the Papal court, and it was here that the young Petrarch was brought up. He
was destined for the law, but he early decided that literature was more
important, and greatly annoyed his father by insisting on studying and
composing poetry. He soon made up his mind that the most perfect models
were the Greek and Latin writers, and from that time forth he devoted his life
to reviving the study and appreciation of classical literature. He himself
cultivated a perfect Latin style both in prose and verse (he tried, but failed, to
learn Greek); he travelled about Europe, digging out of monastic libraries the
old, neglected classical manuscripts, and copying them or having them copied;
and he exhorted all his friends to do likewise, ln time he attained an
extraordinary reputation and influence as a man of learning and letters: princes
and kings, as he proudly wrote, were glad to have him as their guest, and every
scrap of his writing was carefully treasured. His chief Latin works were his epic
poem, "Africa", and his eclogues and epistles, in which he imitated Virgil and
Horace; but his fame now rests on the little sheaf of Italian sonnets and odes
which he wrote almost as a pastime, and of which he was rather ashamed than
proud. He is important in history because of his work in reviving the classics,
but even more because in his Italian poems he introduced individualism into
literature. They are addressed to Laura, his beloved, but there is much more of
Petrarch in them than of Laura; in them he expresses his own personality, his
thoughts and feelings, his hopes and ecstasies and despairs, and it is this intense
and personal passion that makes them one of the foundations of modern
poetry. Petrarch has been called "the father of humanism" and "the founder of
the Renaissance", and he deserves both titles; but it is clear that Europe was
awaiting such a man: the ready welcome given him shows that the ground was
already well prepared.
2. Giovanni Boccaccio (1317-1375) was the most important of Petrarch's disciples.
He, too, was the son of a Florentine merchant, born in Paris (where his father
was resident on business) and brought back to Italy for his schooling. His father
attempted to make him a merchant, and then a lawyer; but Boccaccio was a
born writer, and as soon as he could he set off in pursuit of literature. He
almost worshipped Petrarch, and helped him greatly in the work of collecting
an<? copying classical manuscripts. But his chief gift was for telling stories, and
his chief work is the "Decameron", a book of stories which is one of the first
classics in Italian prose and which also expresses, as well as one book can, the
whole character and spirit of the Renaissance. It is significant that Boccaccio
gave it a Greek name, and it is full of references to and borrowings from
classical literature. The individualism of the Renaissance is displayed in the
immense variety of the characters: all of them are individuals, none of them
mere types, and Boccaccio is perhaps the first modern writer to unite character-
drawing with story-telling, and make the stories spring out of the characters.
And some of his stories unfortunately illustrate the paganism and immorality
of the Renaissance: in reading them one would almost think that Christianity
and Christian morals did not exist. Boccaccio himself afterwards repented of
this; and here, too, he was characteristic of his age: fundamentally Christian,
though desperately attracted by the paganism of classical times.
The Humanists
The growing enthusiasm for classical learning naturally produced a demand for
experts in it: professionals, so to speak, who were thoroughly acquainted with
the languages, literatures, art and history of Greece and Rome, and who could
impart their knowledge to others. There was an especial demand for men who
could write in an elegant Latin style. Latin was still the international language
of Europe, and Popes and princes and other great men were forced to have for
their secretaries men who could write like Cicero. These professional scholars
called themselves "Humanists", because they maintained that they, above all
others, fulfilled the humanist ideal.
In the 15th century these Humanists came to dominate educated Europe. They
were not only secretaries, but also teachers, professors, archaeologists,
historians, poets, satirists and novelists. Most of them were men of genuine
learning. A few were really great men, like the teacher Vittorino da Feltre, or
like Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the scholar, author and diplomat who in the
end became Pope Pius II. But the majority were just professional scholars,
living by their wits and by their ability to write classical Latin. They did much
good work in continuing the task of recovering the classical manuscripts and
spreading the knowledge of them. They also founded the art of editing these
manuscripts: the first scientific editors in history. It was by their work that the
classics became, what they were to remain for centuries, the dominant
intellectual influence in Europe. We may think it strange that mere scholars
should have such importance; but perhaps posterity will find equally strange
the deference which we show to scientific experts.
However, the Humanists had many faults: vanity, quarrelsomeness, avarice,
sensuality, and, above all, mendacity. Many of them were liars on a grand
scale: they freely calumniated one another; and, if disappointed in their
expectations (which were large), they calumniated their patrons. Everyone has
heard stories of the Borgias and their poisons; not everyone realizes, even
today, that these stories are the impudent fabrications of disappointed
Humanists. Naturally, therefore, as classical learning became more widespread,
and their expert knowledge less necessary, their power declined. In the 16th
century the Reformation (both Protestant and Catholic) destroyed them: they
could not live in a world in which religion had once again become a matter of
extreme importance.
One of them, however, deserves special commemoration. Vittorino da Feltre
(1397-1446) was the pioneer of Renaissance education. He got his opportunity
when he was invited by Gian Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, to tutor
the Gonzaga children, and he set up a school at Mantua that became famous
throughout Italy, and even throughout Europe.
The object of his system was humanism: the complete development of each
pupil, morally, intellectually and physically; and this development was attained
as far as possible through the classics. The moral training was thoroughly
Christian; but it was supported, wherever possible, by reference to classical
philosophers like Plato and Seneca. The intellectual training was entirely
classical: prose, poetry, oratory and history were studied from the original
Latin and Greek authors; Latin and Greek composition was practised, both in
prose and verse, together with recitation and reading aloud; arithmetic was
studied, geometry (from Euclid) and astronomy (from Ptolemy); and music,
too, though this could not be learnt from the classics. But Vittorino's most
remarkable innovation was his insistence on physical education. Training was
given in swimming, riding and military exercises, and every form of healthy
outdoor activity was encouraged. He intended his pupils to become complete
men. He thus founded a system which became the basis of all higher education
in Europe down to the 20th century, and to which the enormous influence of
the Renaissance is very largely due.
Many more could be added to this list, the great artists in particular. Leonardo
da Vinci, for instance (1452-1514), the universal genius whose insatiable
curiosity led him to explore almost every branch of art and knowledge,
painting, sculpture, architecture, mechanics, engineering, botany, anatomy,
geology: the perfect example of the humanist ideal. A strange fatality has
pursued his works, and yet all those that survive are acknowledged
masterpieces. Then there is Michelangelo, that lonely and tempestuous figure,
independent, powerful and passionate, a supreme genius in sculpture, painting
and architecture - the sculptor of "Moses", the painter of the "Last Judgment",
the architect of the dome of St. Peter's - the individualist who imitated no-one,
but expressed his own tremendous personality in every stroke of the brush or
blow of the chisel. Then there is Raphael, the greatest painter of them all -
Raphael, who died young, but who found time to create in his paintings a
world of such serene and harmonious beauty that one can scarcely believe it
the fruit of a mere human imagination: These are only three out of a hundred.
And I have said nothing of the musicians: yet no-one understands the
Renaissance who has not heard Palestrina, or Victoria, or Orlandus Lassus, or
Thomas Byrd. How can one sum up such an age? It was not a scientific age,
and yet it produced Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Clavius. It was not a
theological age, and yet it produced Cajetan, Bellarmine. It was an age teeming
with life - intense, passionate, brawling, raging with life - a life which burst the
framework of mediaeval society and boiled over, for good or evil, into a new
world. It was not, perhaps, a happy world to live in; its immense achievements
were balanced by frightful evils; but it was a great age.
It was especially the great age of Italy. Most of the makers of the Renaissance -
and some of its worst villains - were Italians. The Italians had never, perhaps,
been really mediae-valized. The memory of Rome had survived there more
clearly than elsewhere in Europe; the Eastern Empire had held on to parts of
Italy long after the collapse of the West; Italian cities like Venice had
maintained contact with Constantinople - it is significant that when the
Venetians wanted to build a cathedral they built it in the Byzantine, not the
Gothic, style. Then, too, owing to their practical monopoly of the eastern
trade, the Italians had the wealth necessary to support a great artistic
movement. And the passion for independence and democracy in the Italian
cities must have stimulated the growth of individualism. Yet none of these
things explain the outbreak of genius. They do not explain, for instance, why
Florence gave birth to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Donatello, Ghiberti, Botticelli,
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, or why her chosen rulers were great
patrons of art like the Medici. Perhaps such things can never be explained. It
was from Italy, at any rate, and very largely from Florence, that the impulse
came forth which renewed the vitality and changed the course of European
civilization.
Naturally, it did not last. The advance of the Turks (they took Constantinople
in 1453) interrupted and diminished the commerce of the Mediterranean; the
discoveries of America and of the sea-routes to the East swung the balance of
European trade away from Italy; above all, while the Italians remained divided,
other nations were becoming united, and they made the wealth of Italy their
prey. In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, and for generations after that
Frenchmen, Spaniards and Germans fought up and down the peninsula, killing,
looting and destroying. The frightful sack of Rome in 1527 was only the worst
of these horrors. It is true that the invaders took back the inspiration of the
Italians to their own countries: the wars which ruined Italy helped to spread
the Renaissance to France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, England. But
then there broke out the Protestant revolt; and the controversies which it
produced, and the terrible religious wars, and the violent Puritan reaction
against the immorality which accompanied the new culture, checked and half-
stifled the Renaissance throughout Europe. It did not die, for all that. Under
the name of the "Enlightenment" it revived after the religious struggle had died
down, and became, as we shall see, the chief influence in the making of
modern Europe.
18. Meanwhile
1. The Turks
At the very time when our civilization was being changed and renewed by the
Renaissance, it was also being threatened once again by destruction from the
East. The long duel between Christian and Moslem was not yet over. The
Crusade had failed, just as the first assault of the Arabs had failed; and in the
14th century the struggle was renewed by the Ottoman Turks. This branch of
the Turks had been settled in Asia Minor for some time, but it was only in 1307
that they set up a state of their own, and set out to conquer impartially both
their fellow-Moslems and the Christians. By 1350 they had secured a firm hold
on the north-west quarter of Asia Minor. In 1354 they crossed the Dardanelles
and seized Gallipoli. Then, by-passing Constantinople (which was too strong
for them to attack), they advanced into the central Balkans. There, in 1389,
they broke the power of the Serbs at the terrible battle of Kossovo, and
swallowed up most of Serbia and Bulgaria. A great raid by the Mongols under
Tamerlane distracted them for a time, and after that they secured their position
by conquering most of Asia Minor; but in 1451 their Sultan Mohammed II
determined to renew the attack on Europe. In 1453 he besieged and took
Constantinople, and thus destroyed the last remnant of the Roman Empire.
(The last Emperor, well named Romanus, died like a Roman, fighting in the
breach.) Mohammed then marched northwards. But the disaster of
Constantinople had roused the Christian powers: he was met at Belgrade by a
crusading army under the Hungarian John Hunyadi, and was beaten back. Yet
the Christians could not prevent him from seizing and holding all the Balkans
south of the Danube. In the Europe of the 15th century the crusading spirit had
grown too weak to unite the Christian powers in a long sustained effort; except
for brief spasmodic campaigns, like that of 1456, the Turks were only opposed
by those states which they immediately threatened, and this explains much of
their success.

Fortunately, they were also engaged with their fellow-Moslems. Mohammed II
himself completed the conquest of Asia Minor, and his successors occupied
themselves in absorbing Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Only in the reign of
the Sultan Solyman the Magnificent (1520-1566) did they return to the attack
on the West. In 1526 Solyman led an army up the Danube into Hungary. At
the desperate battle of Mohacs the Hungarians were totally defeated, and the
whole valley of the Danube, and with it the whole of central Europe, lay open
to Turkish arms. But here, by a strange chance, they came up against the one
man in Europe who was in a position to check them. The Emperor Charles V
(1520-1556) was not only the ruler of Austria and the Empire, but also king of
Spain; he controlled far greater resources than any other European prince; and,
distracted though he was by other troubles, he yet succeeded in stemming the
Turkish advance. Two attacks by Solyman on Vienna, in 1529 and 1532, were
beaten off; Charles was able to hold the Empire, and even to regain part of
Hungary.
But Solyman was also active on the sea. In 1522 he captured Rhodes from the
Knights of St. John, and then, in alliance with the Moors of Africa, attempted to
obtain complete command of the Mediterranean, harrying Christian
commerce and raiding all the European coastline. Here again Charles V
opposed him: this time as king of Spain and with the help of Venice and Genoa.
He gave Malta to the Knights of St. John, and helped them to build it up into
the strongest fortress in the Mediterranean: often attacked, never taken, a
constant menace to the African coast. Its possession proved decisive in 1535,
when Charles made his great and successful attack on Tunis. In 1541, however,
a similar attack on Algiers failed.
In fact, the struggle between the Emperor Charles and the Sultan Solyman was
a drawn struggle. Yet, as such, it was of capital importance for Europe. Just
when the Turks were most powerful, they came up against this patient and
stubborn opponent, holding a position, as Emperor and king of Spain, which
no other prince had held or was ever to hold. But for this chance (if one can call
it chance) anything might have happened to Europe; as it was, Europe was
saved. The Turks gave plenty of trouble later on; in 1571 the danger seemed so
pressing that Pope Pius V organized a league against them, of Spain and Genoa
and Venice, and a son of Charles V, Don John of Austria, led the ships of the
league to victory in the great battle of Lepanto. As late as 1683 the Turks again
attacked Vienna, only to be defeated by another John: John Sobieski, the last
great king of Poland. But they had already lost their chance of conquering
Europe when they failed to defeat Charles V.
2. The Explorers
Why was it that in the 15th century Europeans began to explore the rest of the
world? Having been content with Europe for so long, why was it that just
when Europe itself was being attacked by the Turks, Europeans began to
undertake those great voyages which ended in the expansion of European
influence over the whole earth? Some historians have said that the advance of
the Turks was itself the cause - that the cutting of the eastern trade-routes led
Europeans to seek other ways of reaching the rich markets of India and the
spice-islands. No doubt the Turkish wars stimulated the new movement, but
they cannot have been its main cause. If they had been, we should expect to
see the Italians, the chief exploiters of the eastern trade, pioneering the new
routes; instead, we find the Portuguese leading the way. In any case, though
the Turks hindered the eastern trade, and made it more expensive, they did not
by any means destroy it - after all, they profited by it as well as the Europeans.
Other historians have found the explanation in the Renaissance. Renaissance
individualism, they say, breaking the shackles of mediaeval society, introduced
a new spirit of enterprise into Europe, which showed itself partly in the new
movement of exploration and colonization. But neither can this be the whole
truth. If it were, we should once again expect to find the Italians leading
Europe in this, as they did in other manifestations of the Renaissance; the
Portuguese and Spaniards, who actually led, were in the 15th century the most
"mediaeval-minded" of Europeans, the least touched by the new spirit of the
Renaissance. Besides, it is really absurd to say that the men of the Renaissance
were so very much more enterprising than their forefathers - we have seen
already that the llth, 12th and 13th centuries are the great pioneering centuries
in the history of modern Europe.
The truth is that enterprise is native to Europe: it is an essential part of what
we call the "spirit of Europe", and is the most obvious difference between
Europeans and men of other races. We have never been able to build up a
"static" civilization: we have always been reaching out for something higher
and greater than we have known. For my part, I believe that this is due
principally to Christianity. Of all the great religions of history, ours is the only
"dynamic" one. It teaches us that mankind is on the march, towards "some far-
off divine event", and that "we have not here a lasting city"; and it teaches us
that the success of this march depends, not merely on God, but on the free
efforts of individual men to co-operate with God, and so attain the perfection
of themselves and of their society. We do not believe in fate, destiny, the
unchanging "wheel of life", but in "Providence"; for us, the relation between
God and man is not the relation of an engineer towards his wheels, nor of a
master towards his slaves, but of a father towards his children: He wants us to
grow up into perfect men in a perfect society. Therefore we feel that we must
be up and doing. We may disagree with one another about the direction of our
march, but we all agree that it is wrong to sit with folded hands and let the
world roll onward.
However this may be, the society of Christendom was from the first an
enterprising society. But its enterprise was limited by circumstances. There was
so much to be done in Europe itself, for one thing, and there was, at first, so
little capital or spare wealth to do it with, and there was also so much disorder,
that men had to organize themselves carefully and go about with
circumspection. The great common effort of the Crusade was a failure, just
because Europe lacked the manpower, the wealth and the organization to
carry it through.
Yet it is astonishing how much was done. And by the 15th century the essential
foundations had been laid. The development of Europe had gone so far that
some men, at least, could begin to look about for fresh fields. Even in the 14th
century the movement had begun. Some Italian merchants were already
journeying far into the East, and one of them, Marco Polo, became an official
of Kubla Khan, travelled in that service over a great part of Asia, and returned
to Venice to leave an accurate account of his travels. The Franciscans sent
missionaries overland to China, and one of them (John of Monte Corvino)
established a church at Peking and became the first bishop of that city. These
beginnings were blasted by the advance of the Turks, but the spirit they
represented did not die.
The Portuguese and the Spaniards were formed in a hard school: in the wars
for the reconquest of Iberia from the Moors. In this long struggle religious,
political and economic motives were inextricably mixed. The Christian states
were fighting to drive back the Moslems and to recover Iberia for Christianity,
but by doing this they were also increasing their own power and wealth. Their
destiny seemed to be to expand the dominion and wealth of Christendom (and,
incidentally, their own power and wealth) at the expense of the infidel; and
when they reached the boundaries of their own peninsula. they saw no reason
why they should stop there. The great movement of exploration, conquest and
colonization which they began was for them no more than a continuation of
their own "reconquista": an expansion of the frontiers of Christendom over the
huge dark areas of Mohammedanism and paganism; and, like the
"reconquista", it was driven by a tangle of religious, political and economic
ambitions. For the Iberians, toughened by the harshness of their country,
toughened further by their own history, the conquest of the infidel seemed the
obvious means of both spiritual and temporal development, and they advanced
their banners over sea and land behind the standard of the Cross. Grasp this,
and you will understand their zeal, their heroism, their almost fanatical
perseverance; and you will understand, too, the queer mixture in their colonial
enterprises of generosity and greed, of justice and oppression, of noble
benevolence and despicable cruelty towards their heathen subects. And you
will also understand their strength, and why (for instance) a place like Buenos
Aires is to this day as fundamentally Spanish as Seville: because it was
conquered by the same sort of men, for the same reasons, in the same way.
One would have expected the Portuguese and the Spaniards to carry their arms
first against the opposing shore of Africa; and they did make some barren
efforts to do so. They were turned to more fruitful fields by the work of three
people of genius: Prince Henry the Navigator, Isabella the Catholic, and
Christopher Columbus. Henry the Navigator (1364-1460), a younger son of
John I of Portugal, was first and foremost a crusader against the Moors. In 1415
he played a brilliant part in the capture of Ceuta; in 1437 he tried, but failed, to
take Tangier; almost at the end of his life, in 1458, he was present (though not
in command) at the taking of Alcacer. He was Governor of the military Order
of Christ. It was his crusading zeal that led him to undertake the work of
exploration. He soon saw the difficulty of a direct conquest of north Africa, and
conceived the bold plan of outflanking the Moors by sailing southwards,
getting round Africa, and joining hands with the Christian kingdom of
Abyssinia, the kingdom of Prester John. What makes him a great explorer,
however, is not merely the idea, but the methodical persistence with which he
carried it out. He got hold of Jayme of Majorca, one of the best navigators of
his time; he had nautical instruments made and maps and charts prepared; and
he used the wealth of the Order of Christ to fit out expedition after expedition,
as well equipped as they could be in that age, and send them out to explore
southwards. The Canaries had already been discovered by a Norman
adventurer in the service of Spain (and they are Spanish to this day); but
Henry's captains discovered Madeira, the Azores, Senegal, Gambia, and before
his death had got round the westernmost point of Africa.

More important than the actual discoveries was the fact that these voyages
supplied Portugal with a force of trained seamen and expert navigators who
could carry on the work. More important still was the awakening of Europe to
the possibilities of exploration.
Successive kings of Portugal carried on the work. In 1471 the Equator was
crossed, in 1484 the Congo was reached, and in 1486 Bartholomew Diaz
rounded the Cape of Good Hope (which he called, with reason, the Cape of
Storms). A voyage to India now became a practical possibility, but it was an
immense and perilous undertaking; and it was not, in fact, undertaken till
Manoel the Fortunate became king of Portugal in 1496. He commissioned
Vasco da Gama to make the attempt. This great seaman sailed from Lisbon on
July 8th, 1497, left the Cape Verde islands on August 3rd, made thence across
the uncharted Atlantic to south Africa, which he reached on November 4th,
rounded the Cape, sailed up the east coast till he reached Mombasa, found
there an Indian pilot to take him across the Arabian Sea, and arrived off Calicut
on May 20th, 1498. The Arab merchants there opposed his application to trade;
but he outwitted them, shipped a cargo of pepper, ginger, cloves, cinnamon,
nutmegs and rubies, and got back to Lisbon in triumph in September, 1499.
In those days the Indian seas, from Mombasa and Aden to Malacca, were
dominated by the Moslem traders, and the Portuguese soon found that they
would have to fight a crusade to establish and secure themselves there. They
were not unwilling. The work was begun by Vasco da Gama himself, and was
practically completed by the still greater Affonso de Albuquerque. Between
1509 and 1516 the latter destroyed the chief Moslem settlements, established
the Portuguese firmly at Goa, at Ormuz, and above all at Malacca, "the cross-
roads of the East", broke the Moslem power for good, and made Portugal the
mistress of the greatest maritime empire in the world. The eastern trade was
now firmly in European hands.
The Portuguese made no serious attempts at colonization or conquest. They
were content to imitate the Moslems in getting a monopoly of the sea-borne
trade and in establishing centres of missionary activity. They built a chain of
fortified trading posts round the Indian seas, but they made little effort to
penetrate inland. Nevertheless, each post became a radiating centre of
European influence, both commercial and religious. In 1542 the greatest
missionary of modern times, St. Francis Xavier, landed at Goa, and with his
advent the work of Christianizing the East may be said to have begun in
earnest. But it was left to later arrivals, Dutch, French and English, to bring
Asia under the political control of Europe.
Meanwhile, America had been discovered. Its discoverer, Christopher
Columbus, was a Genoese. Like many of the great Italian sailors, he was
attracted into the service of Portugal, and during fourteen years, from 1470 to
1484, he made many Atlantic voyages, becoming in the process a consummate
seaman and navigator. Yet he was by temperament as much a crusader as
Henry the Navigator himself. He, too, dreamed of subduing to Christendom
the vast populations and wealth of the East, and he grew impatient with the
endless crawling of the Portuguese down the coast of Africa. Reason and
experience seemed to him to show that the shortest and easiest way to the
Indies was to strike out boldly across the Atlantic. He proposed this to the king
of Portugal, but met with a cool reception. With Genoa and Venice he had no
greater success. But when he tried Spain, he met a kindred spirit in Isabella the
Catholic. This Queen of Castile had married Ferdinand of Aragon - a marriage
which created the kingdom of Spain. She had the crusading spirit and the vivid
imagination to respond quickly to Columbus' dream; but she had set her heart
on first capturing Granada, and so recovering the whole of Spain for
Christianity.
When this was done, she promised she would consider the matter of the
westward voyage; and she kept her word. Granada fell in 1492; in the same
year Columbus was made an Admiral of Spain and given three caravels with
which to cross the western ocean. The surprising thing about this voyage is
that it proved so easy. Columbus sailed from Spain on August 3rd, left the
Canaries on September 6th, and on October 12th landed on one of the
Bahamas, and claimed to have reached Asia. He was wrong; but there was no
lack of adventurers willing to follow once he had shown the way, and by 1500
it was clear that what had been discovered was a new and extensive continent.
To prevent trouble with the Portuguese, Ferdinand and Isabella first obtained a
grant from the Pope of the newly-found lands, and then, in 1494, signed with
Portugal the Treaty of Tordesillas, which settled as the dividing line between
the territories of the two Crowns the meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape
Verde islands: a line which, though it was not realized at the time, gave Brazil
to Portugal.
Then the work of exploration, conquest, exploitation and Christianization was
carried briskly forward, with the usual mixture of heroism, idealism,
oppression and rapacity. Men like de Solis, de Soto, Ponce de Leon, Balboa,
Cortez, Pizarro, made their names as "conquistadores" in the new world. And
the greatest of all the early voyages was undertaken by Magellan, a Portuguese
in the service of Spain. Sailing from Spain in 1519, he coasted down South
America, passed the straits that bear his name, and made the first crossing of
the Pacific. He was killed by natives in the Philippines, but his second-in
command, Sebastian del Cano, carried on across the Indian Ocean and around
south Africa, and got back to Spain in 1522, after completing the first voyage
round the world.
The Spanish empire in America was very different from the scattered trading-
posts that formed the Portuguese empire in the East. When Cortez conquered
the Aztecs in Mexico, he added thousands of square miles to the territories of
the Spanish Crown; when Pizarro conquered the Incas of Peru, he added as
much again. Then there were Florida, Venezuela, Paraguay, Argentina: not yet
called by those names, but all beginning to be annexed and occupied. The
organization of these territories, their commercial development, their
protection from rival nations like France and England, the protection of the
native inhabitants from oppression, and their Christianization - all this
presented an enormous task. The rugged and roadless country increased the
difficulties. So did its distance from Europe. So did the character of the
"conquistadores" - men of incredible courage and resolution, but also,
generally, of insatiable rapacity and ambition, little inclined to respect either
the rights of the Crown or the rights of the natives.
The man who had to deal with this situation was Charles V, whom we have
met already. He was king of Spain from 1516 to 1556. He dealt with the
situation with the same dogged persistence, and with the same steady
insistence on his rights, as he showed in all his dealings. As he saw it, the new
lands were the property and responsibility of the Spanish Crown, and he
thought he could best safeguard the rights and fulfil the responsibilities of the
Crown by making the royal power absolute and all-pervading. The empire was
divided into the vice-royalties of Mexico and Peru. Each viceroy was personally
appointed by and personally responsible to the king; he held full executive
power and controlled all subordinate executive officials. Legislation for the
empire was issued by the king on the advice of the Council of the Indies, a
body of royal appointees sitting in Spain. The judges in the empire were
likewise appointed by the king, and were completely independent of the
viceroys. (Indeed, at the end of his term of office, the viceroy - and every other
official - had to face a "residencia", or court of inquiry, which minutely
examined his conduct and reported on it to the king.)
This system was not fully established by Charles V: it was completed by his
son, Philip II; but its main outlines were due to Charles. Its great disadvantage,
of over-centralization, is obvious. On the other hand, it is questionable
whether any other system would have held the empire together, and held it for
Spain. It is certain that no other system would have prevented the exploitation
and extermination of the native populations. In this matter of the treatment of
native peoples no European nation has clean hands. It is certain that in the
Spanish possessions the natives were often ill-treated and oppressed. But the
Spaniards have a better record than most European colonists, precisely
because, after the first period of confusion, the strong power of the Spanish
Crown was exerted to protect its coloured subjects. And the Spanish-American
empire survived for three hundred years; no other European colonial empire
has yet survived so long.
These discoveries and conquests changed the history of the world. Perhaps
their most important result was that they changed the mind of Europe, and
turned the eyes of Europeans out over the vast unoccupied or undeveloped
spaces of the globe. Here begins the expansion of European influence which
has produced the nearest thing to a "world civilization" that the world has yet
known. Here begins, in particular, the transformation of America into a new
Europe, which looks today even more important than the old Europe from
which it sprang. A more immediate result was a vast increase in European
trade, and in the gold and silver needed to finance that trade. This, in its turn,
stimulated still further the rise of the new "capitalist" class of merchants and
financiers, and the corresponding growth of the new labouring class, employed
by and dependent on the capitalists; and these developments, coupled with the
rise in prices due to the influx of American gold and silver, set off a new wave
of "social unrest". The same increase in wealth was soon to give Europeans an
unquestioned material superiority over the other races of mankind, and
therefore to make possible the Euro-peanization of the world. Finally, in
Europe itself the discoveries made Spain the most powerful of the European
states, with what result we shall see as the story unfolds.
3. National States
The main political development of the Renaissance period was the growth of
absolutism: the concentration of all political power in the hands of the
sovereign. All European governments moved in the direction of absolutism
during the 15th and 16th centuries, but this movement did not everywhere
produce national states. On the contrary, in Italy and the Empire it was the
local rulers who became despots, and so the Italians and the Germans were
further than ever from being united. But elsewhere, and particularly in
England, France, Spain and Portugal, the sovereign was a national king, and in
these countries the growth of the sovereign's power produced a tightening of
the bonds of national unity. It now becomes possible to speak of them as
"nations".
England
Henry VI (1422-1461) was the most unfortunate of English kings. He was not
even the rightful king, for his grandfather, Henry of Lancaster, had usurped the
throne. He succeeded as a baby, and during his minority various factions
among the nobles disputed the control of the government; and he grew up into
a good, well-meaning, and even holy man, but weak of will and touched with
that insanity which he inherited from his French grandfather, Charles VI. A
patron of religion and of learning, the founder of King's College, Cambridge,
and of Eton, he was never a real king, but a puppet to be pushed this way and
that by whatever party hap-pended to be strongest. During his reign, therefore,
the faction-fighting among the nobles grew continually, until at last they
divided into two main groups: those who wished to rule through Henry VI,
and those who wished to replace him by the other branch of the royal family,
represented by the Dukes of York. Between 1455 and 1485 these two groups
fought out the Wars of the Roses.
We need not follow these wars in detail. They did not concern the people
(who cursed both sides indiscriminately); they were fought by the nobles and
their retainers, and they were even more fruitful in treachery and murder than
civil wars usually are. When the last Yorkist king, Richard III, was killed at
Bosworth in 1485, nearly all the royal family, and a considerable part of the
nobility of England, had been wiped out. But the prestige of the nobility was
still more thoroughly destroyed. The victor at Bosworth was Henry Tudor,
and his claim to the throne was so weak as to be almost comic; but he was able
to get himself accepted as Henry VII because the one thing everyone in
England most earnestly desired after 1485 was a strong king who could keep
the peace. Even the nobles wanted it. Henry VII was thus able to establish the
"Tudor despotism" which ruled England for a century and a half, and under
which the English came to feel themselves a nation. His methods were not
scrupulous. His ways of raising money were especially detested. He invented
the Star Chamber, a secret court for trying political offenders without benefit
of jury or the other forms of law, and with the killing of the Earl of Warwick he
started the long string of judicial murders which stains the Tudor name. But
the English wanted peace, order, and strong government, and Henry gave
them what they wanted.
France
With the Hundred Years' War brought to a victorious conclusion, it was
natural that the French monarchy should once more take up the task of
bringing the nobles under the control of the Crown. Charles VII, indeed, was
too much occupied in repairing the ravages of the war, but his son, Louis XI,
approached the work with enthusiasm. With too great enthusiasm at first; for
he stirred the nobles to combine against him in the League of the
Commonweal (1465), and was forced to make a treaty confirming their
privileges. This only meant that henceforth he had to pursue his end by
indirect and subtle means, diplomacy, bribery, trickery of all sorts; but these
were means which Louis XI was well fitted by nature to use and make the most
of. A clever, crafty, and thoroughly unscrupulous man, he was a Machiavellian
before Machiavelli - he certainly did not believe in keeping faith unless it was to
his advantage to do so.
His great asset was that, in France, as in England, the nobles had destroyed
their own prestige by their imbecile quarrels: the mass of the people, and
especially the rising middle-class or "bourgeoisie", wanted nothing so much as
a strong monarchy, and were even ready to surrender their own privileges, if
necessary. Louis took full advantage of the fact. He cherished the middle-class,
and drew from its ranks, not from among the nobles, his chief advisers and
officials.
His great difficulty was that, unlike England, France was still divided into great
feudal lordships, like Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Provence, Burgundy; the rulers of
which, though his vassals, were semi-independent princes. By the victory over
the English, the Crown had acquired such former English fiefs as Normandy
and Guienne, and the king was much the greatest landholder in France; but he
was not overwhelmingly stronger than his vassals. His first task, therefore, was
to weaken or break up the fiefs of those vassals.
The most powerful and independent of them was Burgundy. We have seen
already the very doubtful part played by Burgundy in the Hundred Years' War,
and how it had been able to put the Crown itself in jeopardy. Clearly, that
could not be allowed to occur again. Yet the Dukes of Burgundy were not at all
prepared to have their power diminished; on the contrary. Holding, as they
did, large fiefs both in France and the Empire, holding not only Burgundy itself,
but the rich country of Flanders with its powerful and prosperous cities, they
aspired to build up their possessions and to revive the old "Middle Kingdom"
between France and Germany. This was particularly the design of Charles the
Bold, who was Duke of Burgundy when Louis XI became King of France. A
man the very opposite of Louis in character, frank and noble, but rash,
headstrong and of an ungovernable temper, he made no secret of his
aspirations, nor of his determination to keep down the royal power. The duel
between the two was long. Charles made himself the principal support of the
League of the Commonweal. Louis endeavoured to break up the League by
bribery and diplomacy, and to stir up against Charles his own subjects in
Flanders, the princes of the Rhineland, and the Swiss on his southern borders.
These tactics were successful. Charles was enticed and goaded into war with
the Swiss, and in 1476 was killed in battle, leaving only a daughter, Mary, to
succeed him. Louis at once seized on the French fiefs of Burgundy, declaring
them forfeit to the Crown under the Salic Law, which forbade the succession
of a woman. He would have liked to get the rest by persuading Mary of
Burgundy to marry his eldest son, but she preferred a Hapsburg, Maximilian of
Austria: a marriage which was to cause trouble later on. However, Burgundy
was finished with. Almost at the same time, by great good fortune, the male
lines of Anjou, Maine and Provence died out; and, owing to his careful
preparations and astute diplomacy, Louis got possession of them without
having to strike a blow. When Louis' son married the heiress of Brittany, the
last of the great feudal lordships disappeared.
This did not mean that the French nobles were entirely brought under royal
control. They were not, and they were to give plenty of trouble in later years.
But they were no longer able to treat with the king as equals, no longer able to
shake the position of the monarchy itself; and bit by bit the sheer weight and
persistence of the royal power was bound to bear them down. The process was
delayed. Louis' successors, Charles VIII, Louis XII and Francis I, engaged
themselves in the fruitless Italian wars; and after that France was convulsed for
fifty years by the wars of religion. But the domination of the Crown was firmly
established, and the old feudal government, with its balance of rights between
the sovereign and his vassals, had passed forever.
Spain
The new era began in Spain with the marriage, in 1469, of Isabella of Castile
and Ferdinand of Aragon, by which the two chief Spanish kingdoms were
united, and modern Spain was born. It was, however, in an appalling
condition. The Moors still held Granada, from which they raided and
terrorized the southern provinces; and at any time they might be expected, in
alliance with the triumphant Turks, to launch an all-out attack on Christian
Spain. In Castile itself they had many sympathizers among the rich and
influential Moorish and Jewish families who had become Spanish subjects by
previous conquests. Many of these had pretended conversion to Christianity
while secretly preserving their former loyalties, and between them and the
"Old Christians" there was a bitter feud, marked by riot, massacre, and civil
fighting. The towns and the nobles jealously preserved their privileges and
their independence of the Crown; but they also quarrelled bitterly among
themselves, and Spain was torn by vendetta, brigandage, and private war.
The remedy for these evils, so Ferdinand and Isabella thought, was absolutism:
only the power of the Crown could save Spain. Both were highly intelligent:
Ferdinand a good soldier, and a clever and unscrupulous politician, something
like a more attractive Louis XI; Isabella a far nobler character, wiser, more far-
seeing and more tenacious than her husband, more of a crusader and less of a
diplomat; they made a good combination. They were helped by the fact that
many Spaniards were coming to agree that the Crown was the best hope of
Spain, and also by the long crusading tradition and the vivid religious faith
which were the foundations of Spanish nationality.
They attacked their problems with the decision and ruthlessness which they
thought the times demanded. To restore order, for instance, they instituted the
"Holy Brotherhood", a semi-military police force whose members were
empowered to patrol the roads and deal out summary justice on all
malefactors. Lawless and rebellious nobles were handled by the sovereigns
themselves with an equal speed and severity. To clear up the troubles caused
by secret Jews and Moslems, they persuaded Pope Sixtus IV to allow them to
establish the Inquisition, and it became thenceforth one of the chief weapons of
Spanish absolutism. It was instituted for political rather than for religious
reasons, and was always kept strictly under royal control; and it was directed
chiefly against people of importance, whose religious aberrations might
become politically dangerous. It was highly successful in maintaining religious
unity: it saved Spain from the religious dissensions which wrought so much
havoc in most of Europe during the 16th century, and it prevented such
excesses as the witch-burnings in Germany and Britain, and the massacre of St.
Bartholomew in France; in fact, if there must be persecution, some such
efficient instrument as the Inquisition is probably the best way of keeping it
within some sort of limits. But I have said enough on this subject in Chapter
XIII. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella went so far as to expel the Jews altogether.
The kings of England and France had taken this extreme step long before, in
1290 and 1306 respectively, for religious and economic reasons; in Spain it was
taken for political reasons, to remove a source of disunion and possible
treachery. It is perhaps worth noting that Pope Alexander VI strongly
disapproved, and received many of the exiled Jews into the Papal States; also
that the Popes in general disliked the Spanish Inquisition, and often protested
against its objects and methods, but without success - they were no longer
strong enough to enforce their disapproval.
In 1482 the Moors commenced their long-expected attack by capturing Zahara,
only fifteen miles from Seville. Isabella and Ferdinand accepted the challenge.
There followed ten years of hard fighting, but at the end of it the Moors
surrendered, and in 1492 the whole of the kingdom of Granada was annexed to
Spain. In the same year Columbus was at last commissioned to cross the
Atlantic - perhaps the most important event of the reign. And finally, in 1515,
after Isabella's death, Ferdinand rounded off the kingdom by capturing the
southern half of Navarre, and so carrying the boundary of Spain to the crest of
the Pyrenees.
The amazing success of these two sovereigns is underlined by the fact that the
16th century is Spain's "golden age"; and there is no doubt that this was largely
due to the foundations they laid. Their grandson, Charles I (the Emperor
Charles V), and their great-grandson, Philip II, did little more than expand and
apply their policies. They have been justly criticized for their absolutism, and
more particularly for their institution of the Inquisition and their expulsion of
the Jews; but it cannot be maintained that these things were immediately
injurious to Spain - rather the contrary. The growth of absolutism in the 15th
and 16th centuries was not, I think, a good thing; but perhaps it was the right
thing at the moment, under the circumstances of the time. Certainly it seems
to have been so for Spain.
It is clear, however, that the rise of the despots (and this applies to the petty
princelings of Italy and Germany as well as to the great kings of England,
France, Spain and Portugal) tended more and more to divide Europe into
sections; and that at a time when the binding power of the Church was
growing weak. The next stage in the history of Europe was the destruction of
that binding power itself, and with it, of the society of Christendom. The
despots did not produce this change; but, as we shall see, they took advantage
of it.

Book Four - The Breaking of Christendom (1500-1648)
19. The Protestant Revolt
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe went through a great religious
crisis: a crisis which ended by destroying her religious unity, and destroying
with it the society of Christendom which had grown out of it. There appeared
instead a new form of society, organized in the great secular national states
which are characteristic of modern Europe. This immense revolution was
called by those who began it a "reformation", and this is the name that has
stuck to it in history.
It is not a very accurate name, but it is so widely accepted that it would be
useless to try and change it. We shall use it, therefore; but remember that this
movement was much more than a "reforming" of what already existed: it was
the beginning of something altogether new.
We have already seen how the Renaissance was, on one side, a movement
towards individualism. During the Middle Age, men had chosen to live and
work together in co-operative groups: partly because circumstances forced
them to do so, but also because they wanted to do so; but now some of them
began to want more independence - to want to live their lives and do their
work according to their own ideas and choices. In the 16th century such men
were still a small minority in Europe, but their numbers and influence were
growing. A struggle had already begun between them and those who wished
to retain the old co-operative organizations. Sooner or later this struggle was
bound to involve the Church. For the Church was the central and universal
organization of Christendom, the source and foundation of all other
organizations; she claimed Divine authority to teach all men the truths of
religion and morality; and she was so firmly established and so well organized
as to be able, on the whole, to impose her teaching effectively, and to
command the belief and loyalty of most Europeans. Her claim and her power
did not, of course, deny individual liberty, but they certainly limited it; and
sooner or later the individualists would have to face that claim and that power,
and to decide whether to accept them or to reject them. And some were pretty
certain to reject them when it came to the point.
The growth of individualism was thus bound to provide a challenge for the
Church, just as it did for the manors or the guilds. And the Church was not in a
very good condition to meet a challenge. I have said that she could still
command the loyalty of most Europeans, but that loyalty was far weaker in
1500 than it had been two centuries earlier.
In the first place, the prestige of the Papacy itself had been gravely weakened
by the "Captivity" at Avignon and the Great Schism. It is true that during the
15th century the Popes succeeded in re-establishing the official position of their
great office, but they did not succeed in recovering all its former power, nor all
the respect and reverence which it had once had. The enthusiastic popular
support which men like Innocent III had received was gone. The court of
Alexander VI in 1500 was far more splendid in outward appearance and
ceremony than the court of Innocent III had been, but Innocent was far more
secure than Alexander, and far better able to lay down the law for
Christendom.
What is more, this decline in the prestige of the Papacy was only one aspect of
a general decline in the prestige of the clergy as a whole. Ever since the Black
Death the quality of the clergy, and the people's respect for them, had been
going down. The great pestilence had drastically reduced the number of the
clergy, and the desperate need for more priests had led the bishops everywhere
to lower the standards of learning and conduct required from them. Such a
lowering of standards is always hard to repair, and the general loosening of
discipline caused by the Great Schism made it practically impossible. The
wealth and power of the mediaeval Church were likely in any case to attract
undesirables: ambitious men who wanted a short cut to fame and influence,
lazy men who wanted a life of ease and plenty, studious men who only wanted
a life of scholarship, not of devotion. Such men were now able to get into the
Church, and an increasing number of them did so. Three famous names in the
early 16th century are those of Cardinal Wolsey (Archbishop of York and
Chancellor of England), Albert of Brandenburg (Prince Archbishop of Mainz),
and Erasmus of Rotterdam. Wolsey was a great secular statesman, and the
wealthiest man in England; but he never went near his diocese of York. Albert
was famous for his extravagant festivities, and his equally enormous debts, but
as an archbishop he was a laughing-stock Erasmus was the most famous
scholar of his age; but, though he began his career in a monastery, he took
great care never to go back to it once he had made his reputation. Of course
there were many better men than these - Ximenes, for instance, Cardinal of
Toledo, or John Fisher, bishop of Rochester; but there were perhaps more of
the other sort, and their worldliness and neglect of their duties were tacitly
tolerated. It was not altogether the fault of the ecclesiastica] authorities; the
secular princes must share the blame. After all, if Henry VIII wanted Wolsey
for his Chancellor, what could the Pope do?
At any rate, too many of the clergy were not fit for their office; and there was
no-one in Europe who did not realize the fact. Two results followed. Among
worldly people there grew up a contempt for the clergy, and therewith an
impatience with their pretensions and a hatred of their power Among pious
people (including many of the clergy themselves) there grew up a strong and
bitter resentment against the unworthy pastors and the scandal of their
toleration, and a cry was increasingly raised for reform - "Reform of the
Church! Reform in head and members!"
Even in the sphere of doctrine the Church was weaker than she had been. It is
true that there were no great heresies in Europe in 1500. A century before,
during the Schism, there had been much dispute about the position of the
Papacy, and there had also flourished the heresy of Wyclif in England and Huss
in Bohemia; but these differences had been composed or suppressed. The
weakness in 1500 did not spring from dis putes about religion, but from
indifference to it. The Renais sance was responsible for this. The Humanists
had turned men's minds to the pursuit of secular learning and literature.
They had poured contempt on the scholastic philosophy and theology, and had
bidden men go back to the "fountain-heads of thought" in the Greek and Latin
writers. They had also ventured to apply their methods of literary criticism to
various ancient documents of the Church, sometimes with curious results. The
Donation of Constantine, for instance, purported to be a charter of the
Emperor Constantine's giving Rome to the Papacy, and the Popes had for
centuries claimed to govern Rome in virtue of this charter; but it was now
proved to be a 9th century forgery. Even the accepted Latin version of the
Bible, the Vulgate, was shown to be not always an accurate translation of the
Greek or Hebrew originals. This sort of thing made many educated people
sceptical about the Church and her claims; they were not tempted to break
away and found a new religion, but rather tended to shrug their shoulders at
religion in general. Such people were not likely to stand very stoutly by the
Church if she were attacked; and, indeed, one of the features of the later
religious struggles was the easy way in which many Europeans changed sides
again and again. Among the lower classes, moreover, there was a great deal of
sheer blind ignorance about religion. The poor were dependent for their
instruction on the local clergy; and, where the latter neglected their duty - as
they too commonly did, - the mass of the people were left a prey to their own
passions and superstitions. The religious orders of monks and friars could not
remedy the situation, for they themselves were affected by the general
slackness and love of ease. There were some shining exceptions to this, but not
enough of them to change the general situation.
In addition to all this, the great wealth of the Church was a standing
temptation to all sorts of people. To many it seemed a scandal that the Church
should possess so much wealth; and their agitation was powerfully supported
by those who wished to lay their own hands on the vast mass of Church
property. The new despots were particularly eager to do so. As they took more
and more of the work of government into their own hands, they found their
expenses continually growing. In the 16th century every prince in Europe was
looking round for new means of raising revenue. The wealth of the Church
was an increasing temptation to them, and the outflow of Papal taxes to Rome
an increasing irritant; and it was easy for them to convince themselves that,
could they but lay hands on the Church's property, all their financial problems
would be solved. It was still easier to persuade the people that poverty would
disappear if the Church could be made to disgorge her superfluous riches -
"soaking the rich" is naturally an attractive policy to the poor.
Thus, in the 16th century a religious crisis was inevitable. Individualism was
bound, sooner or later, to challenge the claims of the Catholic Church, and that
challenge was certain to find support from many sources: from some who
hated the worldliness and corruption that had crept into the Church, from
some who were jealous of the power of the Church, and from some who
coveted the wealth of the Church; and also from those who appear in every
revolution, to take advantage of the general disorder to further their own
interests. The Church, on the other hand, weakened though she was, remained
the most powerful organization in Europe, and still commanded both love and
loyalty. A gigantic struggle was already in preparation when Luther's teaching
precipitated it.
Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Martin Luther was born at Eisleben, in Saxony. He was the son of a miner, and
had a hard childhood; but he was clever enough to win his way to the
university of Erfurt, where he studied law with considerable success. He was,
however, a sensitive and moody character, given to fits of melancholy and
scrupulosity, and beset by the fear of damnation. According to his own
account, he was one day caught in a thunderstorm and, terrified by the
imminent danger of death, vowed that if he were spared he would "become a
monk." In fact, he joined the Augustinian Friars.
As a friar, he tells us, he was still tormented by scruples and religious terrors.
He tried to overcome these by practising extreme penances and by continual
work (especially by preaching - he had a fine command of language, and his
preaching was popular). Yet all this hard work and penance, far from
quietening his conscience, only made him worse. All of a sudden he decided
that he was on the wrong tack, and swung round in the opposite direction.
Good works, he began to think, were useless for salvation; man was incurably
sinful, and could only be saved by "faith" - - by which he meant a complete
trust in the merits of Christ. Men cannot save themselves from sin and Hell;
but Christ has died to save them; and those who have the grace simply to
believe this and to trust in Christ will be saved, but those who trust in "good
works" are only deluding themselves.
This is the famous doctrine of "justification by faith". It naturally leads on to
the rejection of indulgences, pilgrimages, prayers to the Saints, the monastic
life, sacraments, the sacrifice of the Mass, the priesthood. Clearly, if "faith"
alone is necessary, none of these outward observances, practices, or
ceremonies can be necessary; and those who trust in them are in error.
Naturally, Luther was asked how he could justify his rejection of the Church's
teaching and practice. He replied by appealing to Scripture. The Bible, he said,
is the inspired word of God, and the sole source of religious truth; if the
teaching of the Church runs contrary to the Bible, then the teaching of the
Church must be rejected. But, his opponents rejoined, only the Church has the
power to interpret the Bible and show its true meaning. Luther answered with
a flat denial. Everyone, he said, who receives from God the gift of "faith",
receives also the power to understand the Bible correctly; those who have not
this gift (that is, those who still rely on "works") cannot interpret the Bible.
The essence of Protestantism lies in these three doctrines: justification by faith,
the Bible as the sole rule of faith, and the power of every believer to interpret
the Bible for himself. The first of these removes all necessity for a special
priesthood, with special sacraments and sacrifice; the second and third remove
all necessity for a teaching Church. Thus the whole organization of the
Church, as it was then accepted (and as it is still accepted by Catholics)
becomes a needless burden, and its claim to supreme authority in religious
matters becomes a monstrous tyranny. This, then, was the form in which
individualism made its challenge.
The Indulgence
The challenge was openly delivered in 1517, on the question of indulgences. As
this doctrine is often misunderstood, I shall explain it briefly, as it was
explained by Luther himself in a sermon preached in 1516, a year before he
decided to attack it. A sinner can obtain forgiveness of his sins by repenting of
them, confessing them, and receiving absolution. But, though the sins are
forgiven, they must still be atoned for by suffering, either by penance in this
world or by Purgatory in the next. This suffering is called "temporal
punishment", to distinguish it from the eternal punishment of Hell. An
indulgence is the remission by the Church of this temporal punishment, in
whole or in part. The Church appoints certain prayers to be said or good works
to be performed; and to those who, after receiving absolution for their sins, say
these prayers or do these works, she grants a remission of temporal
punishment which they would otherwise have to undergo. That is the doctrine
as Luther himself, correctly, understood it; it was this doctrine that he decided
to attack.
In 1517 the circumstances were peculiarly favourable to such an attack. The
Elector of Brandenburg, Joachim of Hohenzollern, had managed in 1514 to get
his brother Albert chosen as Archbishop and Elector of Mainz, one of the great
Prince-Bishoprics of the Empire. This in itself was a scandal, for Albert was a
young man of twenty-four, a young man of worldly life, and was already
Archbishop of Magdeburg. But worse was to follow. On his accession to Mainz
he had to pay the usual fee (a considerable sum) to the Papal treasury, besides a
special fee for the dispensation to hold two archbishoprics. This would
normally have presented no difficulty; but Mainz had been unlucky enough to
lose two archbishops in the previous ten years, and the people were decidedly
unwilling to raise a third heavy payment for Albert of Hohenzollern. We do
not know who first proposed the idea of raising the money by an indulgence.
Pope Julius II had previously granted an indulgence to those who contributed
to the rebuilding of St. Peter's. Albert of Brandenburg now struck a bargain
with the officials of the Papal treasury, to the effect that this indulgence should
be preached in the provinces of Mainz and Magdeburg, and that the proceeds
should be split, half going to the building-fund of St. Peter's, and the other half
to the Archbishop himself, to compensate him for the expenses of his election
and dispensation. The whole transaction was guaranteed by the great banking-
house of Fugger, which had advanced the Archbishop a loan of 21,000 ducats,
and wanted to make sure of getting it repaid.
This discreditable affair offers a kind of summary of the abuses that were
weakening the Church. We have a young man of worldly life, raised to high
ecclesiastical office purely by family influence and to increase the political
power of the Hohenzollerns, holding two archbishoprics at once, and using his
office and the piety of the people to raise money to pay his debts and satisfy the
demands of the Papal treasury. As the details became known, a wave of
resentment began to sweep over Germany. Reformers who hated the abuses in
the Church, anti-clericals who hated the power of the clergy, German
"patriots" (a very mixed lot) who hated to see good German money flowing to
Rome, all joined in condemning this indulgence. And Martin Luther, now a
professor of theology in the university of Wittenberg, chose this moment to
launch an attack on all indulgences. In October, 1517, he published his famous
ninety-five theses on indulgences, and challenged all comers to debate them
with him.
Immediately all the discontented elements rallied to him and hailed him as
their leader. To his own astonishment, he found himself at the head of a
powerful revolutionary party, containing representatives of all ranks and
classes: theologians, Humanists, peasants, merchants, knights, nobles, and even
the Elector of Saxony, Luther's own prince. Thus supported, he was
emboldened to go further; he issued a flood of vigorous pamphlets and
sermons setting forth his ideas on justification and the interpretation of the
Scriptures, and attacking the Papacy, the monastic life, clerical celibacy, and in
general, the whole existing structure of the Church. He aroused vigorous
opposition, but was too well supported to need to fear it. In 1520 Leo X
excommunicated him, and he dared to burn the papal Bull. In 1521 the
Emperor, Charles V, summoned a Diet of the Empire at Worms, and there
Luther was examined and bidden to recant. He refused; and the Elector of
Saxony carried him off and placed him in safety in the castle of the Wartburg,
where no enemy could get at him. With this powerful protection, Lutheranism
flourished.
The Peasant Revolt
Yet it was far from being firmly established, Luther had great gifts; he was a
man of enormous energy and powerful feeling, an impressive preacher and a
master of language one of 'the founders of German prose. But he had also
great weaknesses. In particular, he was profoundly unpractical and illogical,
incapable of constructing an organized church or of drawing up a rational
scheme of doctrine: in fact, he despised reason, and preferred to rely on feeling.
He proclaimed, in violent and popular language, the uselessness of "works",
the necessity of destroying the existing organization of the Church and
returning (as he said) to the Church of the Bible; but he did not understand in
the least the possible effects of this revolutionary propaganda. Therefore his
movement was nearly destroyed in its infancy by the extravagances of some of
his own followers. The men who were later known as Anabaptists began to
assert that those who have faith are inspired by the Holy Ghost; that therefore
they have no need of secular learning; that they are all equal among themselves
and superior to all unbelievers; that they should have no private property, but
possess all things in common; that it is for them to rule the world and establish
the perfect society, in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ and the
Last Judgment. Luther opposed such doctrines bitterly, and in 1522 had their
chief authors expelled from Wittenberg; but he could not prevent them from
spreading over Germany and producing the great social upheaval known as the
Peasants' Revolt.
Not that there was anything unusual in a peasants' revolt as such. These revolts
had become common enough in the 15th century. The old manorial and
village system was being broken down by new economic and political forces,
and the peasants found their ancient rights being gradually whittled away. The
mediaeval village had been a co-operative community, but now the lords were
making themselves little despots: seizing control of the common lands,
attempting to reduce all their peasants to the status of serfs, and so on. In the
Empire, where there was no strong central government, the lords were able to
extend their power almost as they chose, and the peasants were
correspondingly discontented. Moreover, the inflation caused by the influx of
gold and silver from America, while it advantaged the merchant-class, made
the peasants' lot still more miserable. Revolts were to be expected. But
normally they would have been sporadic revolts, blazing up here and there,
with no particular plan, producing a little fighting, some atrocities on both
sides, the execution of the more violent peasant leaders, and in the end a
compromise, granting some of the peasants' demands. What made this revolt
different was the influence of wandering preachers like Carlstadt and Thomas
Munzer. who inspired the peasants to demand, not merely their ancient rights,
but the complete abolition of serfdom and feudal services, and of all feudal
courts and jurisdictions, the distribution of Church lands among the peasants,
the right to elect their own priests, and so on: all of which demands they
claimed to be based on the Gospel, which made all men free and equal. Thus
the peasants' revolt became an attack on the whole existing order of society,
both civil and religious, and thus it called forth widespread and fervent support,
but also very bitter opposition.
It began in June, 1524, near Schaffhausen, and it began as a purely economic
rising; but the religious element soon entered in, the preachers spread the
revolt, and by April 1525 western and southern Germany was all ablaze, castles
and monasteries were being seized, and revolutionary governments set up.
The numbers and fervour of the rebels at first overbore all opposition; but then
the lords and princes began to gather and organize their forces. The peasant
masses proved no match for the hard-riding cavalry and trained artillery of
their opponents: their armies were defeated in the field, and then savagely
hunted down and exterminated. The lords had been seriously frightened, and
were merciless in their vengeance.
Luther, for his part, urged them on: he bade them hunt down the rebels like
mad dogs. They did not need the exhortation, but Luther needed to make clear
his absolute opposition to the peasants: otherwise he himself and his doctrines
would be involved in their catastrophe, and his whole movement be
suppressed and come to nothing. He was sincerely horrified by the peasants'
demands, but he also realized how utterly dependent Lutheranism was on the
favour of princes like Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse; he was therefore
bound to oppose the revolt. "Luther", it has been said, "saved the Reformation
by cutting it adrift from the failing cause of the peasants and tying it to the
chariot-wheels of the triumphant princes". This is probably true; but his action
weakened the Reformation in two ways. In the first place, Lutheranism ceased
to be a popular movement, and became a movement of the upper and middle
classes; and therefore it failed to sweep through the Empire as it had seemed
likely to do. In the second place, Lutheranism became, and remained, subject
to the secular power of the princes, its fortunes bound up with theirs. In
Lutheran Germany, for the first time in modern history, the spiritual power
acknowledged its subjection to the state.
Zwingli (1484-1531)
Ulrich Zwingli was born in the village of Wildhaus, near Zurich. Switzerland,
then as now, was a federation of self-governing Cantons, each jealous of its
independence, and each having a vigorous political life of its own, very
different from the feudalism of the Empire. Zwingli's father was the elected
bailiff of his native village, and his uncle the elected parish priest; and he was
therefore early brought into contact with both secular and ecclesiastical
politics, and politics became the chief interest of his life. As a boy he was
captivated by the Renaissance enthusiasm for the classics, which he studied at
the universities of Vienna and Basel; and he became one of the select group of
Humanists who took for their leader the great Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Nevertheless, he determined to make a career for himself in the Church. He
studied theology, and was ordained in 1506; but he always remained more of a
Humanist than a theologian, and more of a politician than either, and his
private morals were notoriously bad. In fact, his admission to the priesthood is
another striking example of the laxity that prevailed in the Church.
Politics remained his chief concern. The Swiss pikemen were in those days the
best soldiers in Europe, and the European princes competed with one another
to hire bands of this incomparable infantry; and Swiss politics were largely
concerned with deciding whose offers were to be accepted, and on what terms.
In Zurich the dominant party stood for an alliance with the Pope, and Zwingli
became at first a zealous Papalist and received a Papal pension. Yet there was
growing up a patriotic opposition to this traffic in soldiers, and he was
gradually drawn to give it his support. In 1522 a quarrel broke out over the
Pope's use of certain Zurich troops; Zwingli took a leading part in it, and
became thenceforth an uncompromising enemy of the Papacy and all it stood
for. He had long been an individualist and something of a sceptic,
contemptuous of authority both in faith and morals: now he adopted Luther's
principle of making the Bible, privately interpreted, the sole rule of faith, and
carried it even farther than Luther had done. Not only did he reject some
doctrines that Luther still retained (such as belief in the real presence of Christ
in the Eucharist), but he wished, it seems, to submit religious affairs, like
political affairs, to the free vote of free citizens: as it were, to "democratize"
religion. The priest was to become a simple preacher, drawing his power, like a
politician, from his influence over the people.
These ideas triumphed at Zurich, where by 1525 Catholicism was completely
overthrown; they spread also to the neighbouring Cantons of Basel and Berne,
and Zwingli began to work for a great Protestant confederation of Swiss and
German cities: a new political and religious force in Europe. He could not,
however, reach agreement with the Lutherans; and, on the other hand, many
of the Swiss Cantons now showed themselves determined to resist any further
spread of the new doctrines; and five of them (Lucerne, Schwyz, Uri,
Unterwalden and Zug) formed a league to this end. Zwingli attempted to
coerce them by getting the Protestant Cantons to boycott their trade: but in
the war that followed his forces were soundly beaten at Kappel (1531), he
himself falling on the field.
His work survived him. He did not, indeed, found a church. In the actual
history of the Reformation, his chief importance is that he prepared the way for
Calvin. But he was by far the most individualistic of the Protestant leaders, and
it was his ideas and his spirit, much more than those of Luther and Calvin,
which were to triumph in the end. A modern Protes-tant finds it difficult to
sympathize with Luther's point of view, and still more with Calvin's; it is
Zwingli, the free-thinking religious democrat, who seems to express most fully
the nature and aims of the Protestant revolt.
Calvin (1509-1564)
All the same, John Calvin was by far the most important of the Reformers,
because it was through him that Protestantism received a definite form. Before
he appeared it was still only a revolt: a confused mass of men asserting a
confused mass of doctrines, allied only by a common leaning towards
individualism and a common hatred of the existing constitution and condition
of the Church. Calvin changed all that. He supplied a complete and logical
scheme of doctrine, a comprehensive code of morals, and an organization for
teaching that doctrine and imposing that code. In other words, he supplied
Protestantism with a theology, a morality, and a church. In his famous work,
"Christianae Religionis Institutio" (The Institute of the Christian Religion), he
stated his ideas so clearly that no-one could misunderstand them, and all other
Protestants were forced to consider them, and to decide how far to accept or
reject them. All accepted them to some extent; and even those, like the
Lutherans, who did not accept them wholly, found their own ideas become
clearer and more definite by their opposition to Calvin's. They began really to
understand what they believed, and why. This is immensely important:
without it, Protestantism would hardly have survived the counter-attack which
was soon to be made on it.
Calvin was a Frenchman, and a lawyer, and had a shy, reserved and fastidious
nature. As a Frenchman, he was clear-headed and logical; as a lawyer, he was a
lover of order; and his fastidiousness revolted from the gross immorality which
accompanied the Renaissance, and especially from the immorality in the
Church. Religion appeared to him as the law of God; he observed that this law
was everywhere disobeyed, even by the clergy; he set himself to discover the
reason for this, and he seemed to find it in Luther's doctrine of justification by
faith. He agreed with Luther that man was naturally sinful and incapable of
doing good - incapable, therefore, of meriting faith. Faith, the only means of
salvation for sinful man, is a free gift of God. But, he went on, it is clear from
experience that God gives faith to some and refuses it to others; we must
therefore conclude that God predestines some souls to heaven and others to
hell, and that He does this independently of their merits, by His own will and
infallible decree - infallible, because God is all-knowing and all-powerful. Some
men are born to be saved by God's mercy, others to be damned by His justice.
Furthermore, God, as the supreme lawgiver, has made a law for man, which is
revealed in the Bible: e.g. in the Commandments. This law must be obeyed,
simply because it is the law of God. To establish His law God first chose the
Jews; then He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to found the Church, the purpose of
the Church being to impose the Divine law on all men and see that they obey
it. Yet the Catholic idea of the Church, as the whole body of Christians,
governed by the successors of the Apostles, the Pope and the bishops, is all
wrong. The Apostles, said Calvin, originally established a number of separate,
self-governing congregations, each ruled by elders (presbyters) elected by its
members; and this is the true organization of the Church. The elders, once
elected, should teach the true Christian doctrine, repress error and enforce
morality; and to do this they have the right to call on the support of the secular
power, whose duty it is to serve the Church, as the body serves the soul.
This was the system which Calvin set up at Geneva after 1541. He had fled to
Switzerland in 1534, to escape persecution in France; and in 1536, at Basel, he
had published the first edition of his "Institutio". In the same year the citizens
of Geneva being in revolt against their prince-bishop, decided to go over to
Protestantism, and Calvin was asked to organize a reformed church for them.
At first he met with great opposition. The pleasure-loving Genevans
particularly objected to his puritan morality and his strict enforcement of it,
and in 1538 they banished him. But in 1541 his party got the upper hand and he
was recalled; and thenceforward till his death in 1564 he was the master of the
city. Geneva under his rule has been called "the Protestant Rome", "the
Protestant Athens", and "the Protestant Sparta". From its printing-presses
poured a flood of first-rate propaganda, and from its schools a stream of ardent
Calvinist missionaries, equally renowned for their zeal, their heroism, their
strict uprightness and rigid puritanism, and their bitter intolerance of all
opposition, and especially of Catholicism. From Geneva was organized the
Reformed Church of France; from Geneva the Dutch Reformed Church drew
the zeal to oppose Philip II of Spain; from Geneva John Knox went to make
Scotland Presbyterian; from Geneva came the inspiration of Oliver Cromwell's
Ironsides. Calvinism became the fighting-force of the Protestant revolt. The
Calvinists were more ardent and better organized than the other Protestant
sects; they were also more savagely intolerant; wherever they appeared the
religious struggle became sharper, bloodier, more desperate. They conceived it
their duty to avenge the majesty of an outraged God; and so they hated and
were hated even more bitterly than others in that age of hatred, the 16th
century.
It may be asked how Calvin's appalling doctrine ever came to win converts.
The answer lies partly in the extreme clarity and logic of its presentation:
Calvin's "Institutio" is a masterpiece. But the chief part of the answer is -
reaction. An age of ease, sloth, immorality, is bound to produce a reaction in
the opposite sense. The immorality of the Renaissance produced a wave of
Puritanism, of which Calvinism was only the most severe expression. The
religious atmosphere of the Renaissance period, with its too-easy absolution for
sin, too-easy indulgence for punishment, too-easy toleration of abuses, too-easy
reliance on the intercession of the Saints: all this, together with the splendid,
half pagan opulence of the art in which religion was enshrined, was likely to
produce a reaction towards an extreme and fanatical austerity. That is what
Calvinism was: a religion of austerity. It was a reaction, and that is why it is
dead today. But at its height it was as powerful as Communism is now.
The Rise of Anglicanism
Except Spain, no country in Europe seemed less likely to go Protestant than
England. True, the Church in England was subject to the common abuses of
the time, but they were less pronounced here than in most countries, and
figures like Cardinal Wolsey were balanced by respected and even holy men
like Warham of Canterbury and Fisher of Rochester. There was some anti-
clericalism, but outside London it was not very important. The English as a
whole were easy-going and tolerant: not, certainly, enthusiastic about their
religion, but not in the least inclined to change it. There was social discontent
in England, as there was in Germany, but it did not take the form of opposition
to the Church. On the contrary - it was the secular landlords who were hated,
and especially the rich merchants who were now beginning to buy up land and
turn themselves into country squires. Such men were out for profit. It was they
who were endeavouring to enclose the common lands; it was they who were
squeezing out small farmers, turning arable land into pasture and replacing a
score of ploughmen by a couple of shepherds, and so on. The monastic
landlords were more conservative in their methods; and indeed, it was at the
monasteries that dispossessed peasants often found refuge and support. So the
English people were not likely to rebel against the Church. Their king, in any
case, was determined that they should not. Henry VIII was even fanatically
determined to uphold the Catholic doctrine against the "New Learning" (as
Lutheranism was called in England); he had himself written a book against
Luther, and had received from the Pope the title, "Defender of the Faith". He
had the will to oppose heresy, and he had the power. The Tudor despotism
was more solidly established, and had less opposition to fear from either nobles
or commons, than any other government in Europe. Parliament itself was the
king's instrument; and Wolsey, as Papal Legate and Chancellor, governed both
Church and State according to the royal will.
For that very reason, however, when Henry did quarrel with Clement VII, it
was easy for him to withdraw England from obedience to Rome. The king
wanted an annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon so that he
could marry Anne Boleyn; after long negotiations he lost patience, had his
marriage annulled in England by the man he had made Archbishop of
Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and married Anne Boleyn in the teeth of the
Pope's remonstrances. For this, in 1533, he was excommunicated. He retaliated
by having himself proclaimed head of the Church of England.
Yet Henry continued to maintain Catholic doctrine and to persecute heretics,
and the breach with Rome might have been only a temporary one but for
Thomas Cromwell. This man, indifferent to religion and thoroughly
unscrupulous, was a firm believer in absolutism, and wanted all power to be
concentrated in the king's hands. After Wolsey's disgrace he became Henry's
chief counsellor, and it was by his advice that Henry proclaimed himself head
of the Church, and then proceeded to suppress the monasteries and seize upon
their lands. This measure ought to have made the English monarchy the
richest and most secure in Europe; but it was bungled. Partly through the
greed of Cromwell and his helpers, partly through mismanagement, partly
through the king's own extravagance, most of the monastic wealth was
dispersed among the landowners, the nobles and the squires, of England. This
result weakened the monarchy, but it also gave the English upper class the best
of reasons for supporting Protestantism and resisting any return to Rome.
Henry VIII himself generally maintained Catholic doctrine. His death in 1546
brought a boy, Edward VI, to the throne. The government fell into the hands
of a group of nobles, who were determined to complete the spoliation of the
Church, and for this purpose were prepared to establish Protestantism in
England. A group of Protestant divines, like Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer,
undertook the reconstitution of the Church in England. Their work was set out
in the Book of Common Prayer and the Forty-Two Articles of Religion, which
were imposed on the whole country, in spite of strenuous opposition, by the
power of the landowning gentry who profited by the changes. As we shall see
later, this settlement, briefly reversed under Mary, was finally confirmed by
Elizabeth, and became the foundation of the Anglican Church.
It was a political rather than a religious settlement. The squires, on whose
support it really rested, cared little for religion, but wanted an arrangement
which would enable them to seize and retain Church property, while
otherwise causing as little disturbance as possible. Anglicanism was therefore
worked out as a compromise. It combined Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist
elements, and its formularies were deliberately expressed in vague terms,
which could be interpreted in different ways according to the wishes of the
interpreters. It was thus the most individualist of all forms of Protestantism.
From the first it sheltered different parties. There was room in the Anglican
Establishment for all "moderate" men - for anyone who was not a convinced
and unyielding adherent of Catholicism, or Calvinism, or some other opinion;
and this moderation, this "comprehensiveness," has remained characteristic of
Anglicanism: to its supporters, its crowning glory, to its opponents, its basic
defect. At any rate, it was this quality which, in the long run, got it accepted by
the majority of the English people.
20. The Catholic Revival
It looked at first as though the Protestants would carry all before them. Their
opponents were at a triple disadvantage. They were hampered by the slothful
and easy-going habits which had been engendered by long years of religious
peace. They were hampered still more by the great abuses which existed in all
the Church's institutions, from the Papacy downwards, and which were a chief
point in Protestant propaganda. They were hampered further by a certain
difficulty in distinguishing Protestant from Catholic teaching. The Protestants
maintained that they were not introducing new doctrines, but merely clearing
away false additions which had been made to the original doctrines of Christ,
and at first it was not very easy to dispute this claim, or to show where (in their
opponents' view) they had gone wrong. After all, Catholics as well as
Protestants believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God, that Faith
was necessary to salvation, that Faith was a free gift and could not be merited,
and even that there was such a thing as predestination. Catholics and
Protestants understood these words in different ways, but it was hard to make
clear what exactly the differences were. In the early days of the Reformation,
many a priest was able to preach pure Lutheranism to his flock without being
detected, and many a zealous Catholic was quite falsely accused of being some
sort of Protestant. It was urgent, then, to clarify doctrine, to reform the clergy,
and to stir up a new spirit of zeal among Catholics; and these tasks were
successfully carried out in the movement of Catholic revival which is
commonly called the Counter-Reformation.
It had begun, actually, before the Reformation. The study of theology had
degenerated like so much else in the Church; but in the late 15th and early 16th
centuries a group of Dominicans, mostly Spaniards, set on foot a great
theological revival. The names of Cajetan, Victoria and Melchior Cano are not
usually found in secular histories, but they were as important for Catholic
theology as Calvin was for Protestant theology, and it was their learned labours
which later made it possible for the Council of Trent to re-establish Catholic
teaching in a clear and decisive manner. Their influence and importance can
hardly be exaggerated.
The Franciscans, too, had their typical contribution to make - more
spectacular, though not more important, than that of the Dominicans. Like
other religious orders, they had degenerated somewhat from their first fervour;
but in 1525 an Italian friar, Matteo di Bassi, proposed a return to the strict letter
of the rule, and especially to the practice of absolute poverty. Those who
followed him became known as Capuchins, from the "cappucino", or hood,
which they wore as part of their habit; and they soon began to multiply with
extraordinary rapidity and to carry on their work with extraordinary success.
The people reverenced them for their apostolic poverty, for their intense
devotion to the poor, the sick and the suffering, and for the simplicity and fire
of their preaching. They travelled all over Europe, preaching wherever they
could find hearers; and they produced such a wave of popular fervour as had
not been known for generations. The wandering Protestant preachers had had
it all their own way; but now they were met on their own ground by men who
were their equals in heroic fervour and their superiors in practical and self-
sacrificing charity. It is significant that, in the controversies of the time, the
Capuchins were attacked almost as bitterly as the Society of Jesus.
This Society was the most typical of the new orders which sprang up to help
the Catholic revival. It was more successful than the others because it was
better adapted to the needs of the times. Its founder was Ignatius of Loyola, a
young Spanish noble, poor but proud, who had determined to restore the
fortunes of his house by a career in arms. His hopes were shattered along with
his right leg at the siege of Pamplona in 1521; after months of sickness and pain
he became convinced of the worthlessness of earthly glory, and concluded to
devote himself thenceforward to the service of God. He did this at first with
the same reckless ardour as he had brought to the profession of war, and
passed in consequence through bitter spiritual struggles; from which, however,
he emerged victorious - master of himself, with a profound knowledge of
human nature, and with his wild fervour transmuted into that sober
steadfastness which marks him out in history. He decided that he could do
nothing worth while without learning, and at the age of 31 went back to
school. Eleven years later (eleven years of difficult and dogged effort) he was at
the University of Paris studying theology, and had gathered round him six
others of like mind with himself; and after long deliberation the seven decided
to form a religious order, and to offer themselves especially to the Pope to
serve the Church as he should direct them. In 1540 the offer was accepted.
The first mark of the new order was, therefore, obedience: to the Pope
primarily, and under him to the General. Its second mark was versatility: its
members had to be prepared to undertake any kind of work which might be
laid on them for the service of God and the Church. Therefore they had to be
freer than members of other orders: not bound to any particular place or habit
or mode of life, not even to prayer in common or to the singing of the Divine
Office, but united only by the common bond of obedience. Therefore, also,
they had to be trained very thoroughly, both spiritually and intellectually. For
their intellectual training St. Ignatius prescribed the same lengthy course of
studies as he had undergone himself; he could not put them through his own
spiritual experiences, but he provided something better for them in the
"Spiritual Exercises", in which the fruits of his experiences are crystallized and
summed up. This little book consists mainly of an orderly course of
meditations and considerations on the teachings of Christianity and the life of
Christ. If it is gone through, as its author intended, during thirty days of
solitude and silence, it is apt to produce a profound knowledge of oneself, an
intensely personal devotion to Jesus Christ, and a practical appreciation of how
to make that devotion effective in one's life. Every Jesuit was made to do this
course twice: once when he entered the Society, and again fifteen years later,
when the rest of his training was finished.
One main reason for the success of the Jesuits will now be clear: they formed a
society of obedient individualists. To the individualism of the Protestants they
opposed a disciplined individualism of their own. Each of them was developed
and trained in accordance with the aptitudes and needs of his own soul; each
was given, as far as possible, the kind of work he was best fitted to do; and each
was capable of doing that work with a maximum of zeal and a minimum of
supervision. Flexibility and adaptability were their marks. The discipline that
bound them together and directed their work was not a wooden rigidity, but
an intelligent co-ordination of effort, the living expression of the personal
devotion which had been awakened in each man. In a word, they took the vital
force of individualism and harnessed it in the service of Catholicism.
The work they undertook was so various as to defy classification; but all work
was to them an instrument by which to communicate to others the spirit that
burned in themselves. Education may be taken as a typical example. They were
not the first to perceive the necessity of a Catholic system of education, but
they were the first to take in hand the making of such a system. They
established seminaries - the Roman College, the German College, the English
College - from which poured forth a stream of priests very different from the
pre-Reformation clergy. More important still were their lay-schools. It is
significant that they adopted, and adapted to their purpose, the scheme of
Vittorino da Feltre. They provided a Humanist system of education, so good
that it became the basis of all higher education in Europe; but the humanism
they taught was emphatically Catholic humanism, and the future rulers of
Catholic Europe, so trained, were men to whom religion had become a matter
of vital and personal importance. This was just the spirit that Catholicism
needed in its fight against Protestantism.
The revival of theology begun by the Dominicans, the revival of popular
fervour begun by the Capuchins, and the new spirit of individual enterprise and
zeal introduced by the Jesuits, combined to make possible the work of the
Council of Trent. A thorough reform of the Church could hardly be carried
through except by a General Council. Only such a Council could satisfactorily
define Catholic doctrine and effectively impose new standards of discipline on
the whole Church. Pope Julius II had actually summoned a General Council
(the Fourth Lateran) in 1512, which had laid down an ambitious programme of
reform; but the spirit of sloth and corruption that then hung over the Church
had prevented these reforms from being applied in practice. It was not until
1545 that Pope Paul IV succeeded in getting together an effective Council at
Trent. That Council met three separate times: in 1545-7, 1551-2, and 1562-3;
after which it was finally concluded, having done its work.
The chief importance of the Council in secular history is that it made the split
between Protestant and Catholic definite and unbridgeable. Before it, many
people on both sides had cherished hopes of an eventual reconciliation through
this very means of a General Council. In fact, the Protestants were invited to
send representatives to Trent; but they refused, and so the constitutions and
canons of the Council were drawn up by staunchly Catholic theologians. They
form a masterpiece of theological expression (that was largely due to the
Dominicans), but they are absolutely clear-cut and uncompromising in their
attitude to Protestantism: the canons on justification and predestination
particularly so. After the Council both Catholics and Protestants knew exactly
where they stood, and knew that no conciliation between them was possible. It
is significant that the real fury of the religious wars only appears in the second
half of the sixteenth century.
The Council also issued decrees for the reform of discipline in the Church; and
these decrees, unlike those of the Fourth Lateran, were put into force. A
succession of reforming Popes, Paul IV, St. Pius V, Sixtus V, Clement VIII, Paul
V, enforced them; a whole galaxy of reforming bishops, like St. Charles
Borromeo at Milan, applied them to their dioceses. Even a number of
reforming princes appeared, like Philip II of Spain, to lend the weight of their
authority to the work of reform - as Philip, for instance, supported the reform
of the Carmelites by St. Teresa. Less and less was any tolerance shown to
backsliding prelates and priests; in country after country of Europe the
Protestants found the tide turning against them; and an immense missionary
effort, such as the Protestants did not yet dream of, was spreading Catholicism
in America, India, the East Indies, China and Japan.
This is a most inadequate account of the Catholic revival. It says nothing of the
work of the Theatines, Barnabites, Oratorians, nothing of St. John of the Cross,
St. Francis de Sales, St. Robert Bellarmine, nothing of a hundred other famous
men and movements. The old Church, which in 1500 had seemed so very old,
so inevitably decaying to an inglorious end, became as young, as fresh and
vigorous as it had been in the 13th century. Europe was not to be rushed into
Protestantism, after all. But was it to be regained for Catholicism?
21. The Religious Wars
No-one, in the 16th century, dreamed of toleration. Protestants believed as
strongly as Catholics that the Church of Christ was one and indivisible, and
that heresy and schism were the worst of crimes. Men like Luther and Calvin
had no notion of breaking away from the Church: they wanted to reform it
according to their own ideas; and it was with perfect sincerity that they called
themselves "reformers", not rebels nor revolutionaries. To tolerate opposing
doctrines would have seemed to them a betrayal of the truth; and the various
Protestant sects raged almost as violently against one another as they did
against the Catholics; and all parties freely used violence and persecution
whenever they had the opportunity of doing so: that is, whenever they could
get the support of the secular power. They usually could. The secular princes
of Europe might not be much concerned about the unity of the Church, but
they all wanted to preserve the unity of their states; and since, under the
circumstances, religious differences would certainly disrupt that unity, they
were not prepared to tolerate such differences. Religious wars were therefore
inevitable.
Other than religious motives entered into them, of course. The great wealth of
the Church, for instance, was in dispute. And there were all sorts of people
who were discontented with the existing state of affairs, or who had ambitions
of their own to achieve, and who were prepared to throw in their lot with one
side or the other in order to obtain what they desired. The men who fought
the religious wars fought them for a tangle of motives, political, economic and
social as well as religious; yet we rightly speak of them as "religious wars",
since it was religious enthusiasm that kept them going, and that made them
more desperate and savage than any wars that Christendom had known.
1. The Empire (1530-55)
Juana, eldest daughter and heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was
married to Philip of Hapsburg, eldest son and heir of the Emperor Maxmilian I
and Mary of Burgundy. Their son, born in 1500, was named Charles. Through
his mother he inherited Spain and Sardinia, Naples and Sicily, and the Spanish
possessions in America; through his father, Austria, Franche-Comte, the
Netherlands, and the Hapsburg claim to the Empire. He succeeded to the
throne of Spain in 1516; in 1519 he was elected Emperor, and thus became, on
paper, the wealthiest and most powerful ruler in Europe. He is known to
history as the Emperor Charles V. It was this man who had to deal with the
rise of Luther.
Being by nature conservative - a cautious, deliberate and persevering man - he
was not likely to sympathize with Lutheranism, and would no doubt have
dealt with it drastically had he been able to; but his difficulties were great. As
Emperor his power was very limited, depending very greatly on the attitude of
the imperial princes; and some of these (like Frederick of Saxony and Philip of
Hesse) were supporters of Luther, while the others, though Catholic, were not
very willing to see their fellow-princes subdued and the power of the Emperor
increased. Then there were the Turks. In 1526, on Mohacs field, the power of
Hungary was destroyed, and thenceforward the Turks were a continual
menace to the Empire, just as the Moors were to Charles' Mediterranean lands.
Finally, there was France. The French were anxious to expand, but wherever
they turned, towards the Pyrenees or the Rhine or Italy, they found themselves
hemmed in by Hapsburg lands. Their king, Francis I, was determined to break
through this ring-fence by hook or by crook. He was a man who hid, behind an
appearance of gallantry and chivalry, the most crafty and unscrupulous mind in
Europe; and he was equally prepared to fight, to intrigue, to ally himself with
Lutherans or with Turks, in order to weaken the Emperor. The Pope himself
was doubtful of Charles, thinking that he might choose, if unchecked, to renew
the attempts of former Emperors to dominate Italy and the Papacy; so there
was trouble in that quarter, too.
So it is not surprising that Charles V was slow to provoke an outright quarrel
with the Lutherans, or that he attempted for years to arrange a compromise
between them and the Catholics. We have seen already how he summoned
Luther before the Imperial Diet at Worms, how Luther refused to recant his
teaching, and how he was carried off into protective custody by the Elector
Frederick of Saxony. Charles had to shut his eyes to that. The revolt of the
peasants came next, and it was suppressed because all the authorities in the
Empire combined against it; but several of the princes (notably those of
Saxony, Hesse and Brandenburg) were now turning towards Lutheranism, and
the division in the Empire was growing wider and deeper. In 1529 (the year of
the first siege of Vienna by the Turks) Charles summoned a Diet at Speier, at
which the majority of the princes voted for Catholicism; but the minority
refused to accept this verdict and drew up a "protest" against it - hence arose
the name "Protestant". In 1530 Charles called another Diet at Augsburg to try
and get the parties to agree. The Lutherans drew up the declaration of doctrine
which is known as the Confession of Augsburg; but the Catholics refused to
accept it, and the Diet broke up with nothing done. Thereupon the Lutherans,
fearing attack, formed the League of Schmalkalden for mutual defence, and
Charles dared not challenge them to open battle.
So there followed fifteen years of uneasy peace, during which the Emperor was
kept too busy in other directions to be able to pay much attention to German
affairs. In 1544, however, he succeeded in winning his fourth war with France,
and in forcing Francis I to accept the Treaty of Crepi; and in 1545 it became
possible at last for Pope Paul IV to summon the Council of Trent, which
Charles hoped would finally solve the religious problem. The Lutherans
dashed his hopes by refusing to attend the Council. In the same year, in a Diet
at Worms, the Lutheran princes refused him a subsidy to which he thought he
was entitled. So he at last made up his mind to open war.
In the war of the League of Schmalkalden (1546-7), the Lutherans were rather
badly beaten. Saxony, in particular, was conquered, and its Elector deposed and
replaced by his cousin Maurice. Yet even now Charles did not feel that he
could undertake to crush Lutheranism. Instead, he issued another attempt at
compromise, the Interim; which was promptly rejected by Catholics and
Protestants alike. Then, while the Emperor hesitated and considered what
course to take, his position was undermined from within.

Maurice of Saxony was a man who cared nothing for religion or for the
Empire, but much for his own ambitions. Brought up a Lutheran, he turned
Catholic and joined the Emperor in order to get possession of Saxony, and then
began to wonder whether he might not get even more by betraying him. A
new king of France, Henry II, was eager to avenge his father's defeat; Maurice
made a secret alliance with him and with some of the Lutheran princes, and in
1552 made a lightning attack which took the Emperor by surprise and, for the
moment, drove him in flight across the Brenner into Italy. Yet the Protestants
no more than the Catholics were able to make their victory decisive. There
was a welter of confused fighting, varied by short-lived truces and treaties,
from which no-one derived any advantage - not even Maurice, for he was killed
at the battle of Sievershausen. By 1555 all parties were heartily sick of the
business and prepared to come to an arrangement. The Emperor, worn out
and thinking of his abdication, left the negotiations to his brother Ferdinand,
who summoned the Diet to meet at Augsburg, and here was drawn up the
famous and fatal Peace of Augsburg.
The two main clauses of this treaty were, firstly, that the religion of each state
in the Empire was to be determined by its prince, and secondly, that no more
Church property was to be taken by the Lutherans, though they were
permitted to retain what they already held. This obviously settled nothing It
allowed freedom of conscience to princes only, and it permitted the Lutherans
to retain what they had taken of Church lands, while telling them that they
were naughty boys and were not to take any more. It did not settle either of
the great questions which were disturbing the Empire: whether Catholicism or
Protestantism was to be the dominant religion, and whether the Emperor or
the princes were to hold the main political power. Nor did it make any
allowance for Calvinism. Sooner or later both the religious and political
disputes would have to be fought out; sooner or later the Calvinists would
insist on making their own bid for power. Meanwhile the Peace of Augsburg
was accepted as a "modus vivendi"; but no-one liked it, and no-one thought of
it as a permanent settlement.
2. France (1560-93)
Calvin was a Frenchman, and Protestantism in France took the form of
Calvinism. The French Protestants, indeed, are known to history as
"Huguenots": a name which probably originated in Calvin's Geneva as a
French corruption of the German "Eidgenossen" - "sworn comrades". At first
the Huguenots formed scattered and independent communities, but in 1555,
under Calvin's directions, they united and organized themselves into the
Reformed Church of France.
Francis I, who was supporting the German Lutherans against Charles V,
inclined at first to tolerate the Huguenots; but Calvinists were difficult people
to tolerate. They soon aroused considerable popular hatred, and the pressure
of public opinion as well as of the Church forced Francis I into persecuting
them. They, in turn, were therefore inclined to side with the enemies of the
monarchy. The struggle between king and nobles was by no means settled. In
the south and west of France especially, there were many nobles who were
determined to maintain their local independence, and not to suffer themselves
to be controlled by the Crown; and many of them were very willing to make
use of the religious enthusiasm of the Huguenots, and therefore to foster and
protect them. The chief of these were the Bourbons (Anthony of Navarre and
his brother the Prince of Conde) and the Admiral of France, Gas-pard de
Coligny. On the other hand, some nobles thought that they could do better for
themselves by supporting the strong popular Catholic feeling, and at the head
of these stood the great Guise family of Lorraine, the richest and most
powerful house in France. (How far any of these nobles were sincere in their
religious professions it would be hard to say.) As for the Crown itself, it was
represented from 1559 onwards by Catherine de Medici, a princess of the
famous Florentine family, wife of Henry II and mother of three successive
kings of France: Francis II, (1559-60), Charles IX (1560-74) and Henry III (1574-
89). This remarkable woman had no religious scruples. Her object in life was to
preserve the power and independence of the Crown, and to do this she was
prepared to play off Huguenots and Catholics against each other, without
allowing either to become predominant. She had the support of her
Chancellor, L'Hopital, and of a group of "moderates" known as the Politiques.
Such were the parties in France about the year 1560: the Huguenots, a small
but well-organized and ardent minority, led by Coligny, Conde and Navarre;
the Catholic mass of the people, much more numerous but ill-organized, led by
the Duke of Guise; and the court party, or Politiques, led by the Queen-
Mother, Catherine de Medici.
Fighting broke out in 1560, in the affair known as the Tumult of Amboise: an
attempt by the Huguenots to kidnap the young king, Francis II. The attempt
was foiled, and Catherine thought to quieten the Huguenots by giving them a
measure of toleration: in 1561 she issued the first Edict of January, putting a
stop for the time being to all persecutions for heresy. The enthusiasm of the
Huguenots knew no bounds; unfortunately, it expressed itself in a series of
attacks on Catholic priests, churches and monasteries: the great monastery of
Cluny, for instance, was sacked. The Catholics were not slow to retaliate, and
religious rioting broke out all over France. This led Catherine, in 1562, to issue
the second Edict of January, which bade the Huguenots hold their meetings
outside towns; but the trouble was renewed by the Tumult of Vassy, in which
the Duke of Guise's men forcibly broke up a Huguenot meeting, and with that
the religious wars began in earnest.
Between 1562 and 1570 there were three "wars": that is, three sharp bouts of
fighting, each diversified by atrocities and each concluded by an uncertain
truce, imperfectly observed. It was Catherine's policy not to allow the conflict
to reach a decisive issue, but to be continually proposing some kind of
compromise which would maintain a balance between the two sides - hence
the frequent truces; but it was a policy which became ever more difficult to
pursue as men's feelings became more heated and the tale of atrocities
lengthened. One of the atrocities proved especially important - in 1563 the
Duke of Guise was murdered, by order (so the Catholics said) of Coligny; and
his young son vowed vengeance. But Coligny was no easy mark. He was
certainly the best of the Huguenot leaders; by 1570 he was generally accepted
as the head of the party, and in that year, after the Peace of St. Germain, he
began to exercise a considerable influence on the government of France. For
Catherine had now determined to favour the Huguenots more decisively: she
not only consented to tolerate them, but invited their leader (as we should say)
to "join the cabinet", and even arranged to cement the peace, after the fashion
of those times, by a marriage between her daughter Marguerite and the young
Henry of Navarre. Coligny made the most of his new power, and the
Huguenots began to dream of a Protestant France.
It was a vain dream. The mass of the French people detested Calvinism, and by
1572 the Queen-Mother had become more frightened of Coligny's growing
power than of the Guises. She gave no sign of this; she allowed the marriage of
Marguerite and Henry of Navarre to go forward; she allowed the Huguenot
leaders to asemble in Paris for its celebration; but she secretly determined to be
rid of Coligny. Her instrument was at hand in the young Duke of Guise. Four
days after the wedding, on August 23rd, as Coligny was returning from the
palace to his lodging, he was shot in the open street by one of Guise's men. But
he was only wounded, not killed. The Huguenots were incensed; they
demanded justice; they uttered dark threats of what they would do if they did
not receive justice. Catherine and her allies panicked, and, in a hurried council
on the 23rd, resolved to dispose of the Huguenot leaders before they could
make up their minds to act. In the darkness before the 24th of August, St.
Bartholomew's day, bands of armed men went to the lodgings of the
Huguenot lords, dragged them out of their beds and murdered them. Now the
people of Paris hated all Huguenots, and their hatred had been fanned to fury
by the triumphant arrival of so many great Huguenot nobles and by the boasts
and insults of their retainers. When the Parisians grasped what was happening,
they rushed into the streets to hunt out and slaughter all Huguenots, high and
low. Catherine had not intended this, but she could not check it. By the
evening of the 24th Paris was cleared of Huguenots, and orders had gone to
other cities to act in like manner. Such was the massacre of St. Bartholomew -
not, perhaps, the worst atrocity committed during the religious wars, but a
most typical one, displaying clearly the forces and passions that were at work.
The effect was the very opposite of that which Catherine had originally
intended. The Guises were now far more powerful than before. The
Huguenots had lost heavily - two to three thousand in Paris, an unknown
number in other cities, and most of their leaders except Henry of Navarre - but
they had not been crippled, and they did not dream of giving in. On the
contrary, the struggle became only more savage, the devastation of France
more widespread, and the position of the Crown between the contending
parties more precarious. Four further wars were fought between 1572 and
1580, and it was ever more difficult for Catherine and her Politiques to hold the
balance.
In 1585 the balance was abruptly overset. Henry III was now king of France,
Catherine's last son, and childless like his brothers; the next heir to the throne
was the Bourbon, Henry of Navarre. Meanwhile, the Catholics had been
organizing. Since 1576 the Guises had been gradually developing the great
Catholic League, which by 1585 had spread through most of France, and which
was pledged not to accept a Huguenot as king. The head of the League and the
leader of its forces was Henry Duke of Guise, who was thus the most powerful
man in France. Henry III tried desperately to undermine him, but in vain, and
in 1585 the King was forced to join the League in making war on Henry of
Navarre: a war which was intended to crush the Huguenots for good - the war
which is known as the War of the Three Henries. It proved no easy affair.
Henry of Navarre was a first-rate soldier; and, if the League had help from
Spain and the Pope, the Huguenots had help from England and Germany.
Three years of fighting produced no result, except to intensify the wretched
Henry Ill's hatred of his domination by the Guises. His mother was dying and
could no longer help or guide him; left to himself, a weak man, he found a
weak man's remedy, and on December 23rd, 1588, the unsuspecting Henry of
Guise was murdered like his father: but murdered by the King's guards in the
King's antechamber. A scream of fury went up from the League. Henry III was
denounced from end to end of France. He had to flee for his life, and found no
refuge save in the camp of Navarre; and even to that refuge a Catholic fanatic
pursued him, and sacrificed his own life to have the satisfaction of thrusting a
dagger into the last of the Valois.
Henry of Navarre now proclaimed himself Henry IV, the first Bourbon king of
France. But the League would not have him. He besieged Paris for four
months, and thirty thousand of the citizens died of starvation, but they would
not give in - no Huguenot should be king of France. Yet everyone was sick of
fighting, and there was no possible claimant to the throne but Henry of
Navarre. In these circumstances, Henry decided to compromise: he would
himself become a Catholic to satisfy the great majority of his people, and he
would grant reasonable terms to the Huguenots to satisfy his former comrades
in arms. And so he did. In 1593 he was received into the Catholic Church, and
was thenceforth accepted as king; and he set on foot the negotiations that led,
in 1598, to the Edict of Nantes, the first formal grant by a European prince of
religious toleration. The terms of that Edict we shall study later; here it is
enough to say that, while Henry IV's conversion may or may not have been
sincere, he deserves the credit of having restored peace and unity to France,
repaired the ravages of the religious wars, and set his country's feet on the way
to prosperity and greatness.
3. Spain, the Netherlands, England, Ireland (1556-1609)
In the religious struggle, the fates of these four nations were all bound up
together; and, complicated as their story is, it is best studied as one story.
Spain
The Emperor Charles V came to the conclusion that his dominions were too
great for one man to rule. When he abdicated in 1556, he divided them, leaving
the Hapsburg lands (except the Netherlands) to his brother Ferdinand, who
was elected Emperor in his stead, and Spain and the Spanish empire, plus the
Netherlands, to his son Philip II. The latter thus became the strongest prince in
Europe: stronger than his father, for he had a more compact dominion and
fewer responsibilities.
Spain was the most intensely Catholic nation in Europe, and Philip II was as
Catholic as Spain. For this reason he was perhaps the most popular of all
Spanish kings: in nothing more popular than in his maintenance of the
Inquisition, which was in Spain a national as much as a religious institution, the
guardian of Spanish unity as well as of the Catholic Faith.
Spain was therefore the main centre of the Catholic revival, and Philip II the
chief political leader of the Catholic cause in Europe. His influence was to be
seen in all quarters: publishing the decrees of the Council of Trent, helping in
the reform of religious orders like the Carmelites, sending missionaries to
America, endowing seminaries for the training of priests for England, sending
arms and men to help the Catholic League in France or Hugh O'Neill in
Ireland, as well as upholding the Christian power against the Turks and Moors
in the Mediterranean. Being the great Catholic champion, he became the
principal object of Protestant hatred: a fact which largely accounts for the
blackening of his name in English history. He was not, in reality, more ruthless
than other princes of his time, and he was perfectly sincere - which is more
than can be said for Catherine de Medici, Henry of Navarre, or Elizabeth of
England. As a ruler, however, he had three grave faults. He was inclined to
identify the advancement of Catholicism with the political advantage of Spain,
somewhat to the detriment of both; he was too absolute in his methods of
ruling, too slow and unwilling to delegate power to others; and he had no
appreciation of economics. This last point deserves to be emphasized.
Economic conditions were then changing rapidly, and were but little
understood; few governments pursued a reasonable financial policy, and most
of them were in sore straits for money. In Spain, however, economic thinking
was particularly distorted by the continual inflow of apparently "easy money"
from the American mines. In reality, there is no such thing as easy money.
Money can only be used to buy goods, and an increase in money which is not
accompanied by an increase in production and trade only leads to inflation.
Now, the Spanish fiscal system was such as to discourage trade: especially the
"alca-bala", or 10% sales-tax, which was the main source of revenue; and thus
the productivity of Spain, and therefore her real wealth, was gravely restricted,
in spite of the genuine energy and enterprise of the Spanish people; and the
inflow of American gold and silver produced inflation, while at the same time
masking the real economic situation from the eyes of the government. Philip II
could never understand why he was so constantly short of money. But he was;
and this was a fatal weakness in the position of Spain and her empire.
England
Three children of Henry VIII ruled England in turn: Edward VI (1546-53), Mary
(1553-8), and Elizabeth (1558-1603). Under Edward VI, as we have seen, the
great nobles took the opportunity of "reconstructing" the English Church and
imposing the Anglican settlement; and they bloodily repressed the popular
rebellions against their proceedings. But Edward died young, and Mary
(daughter of Catherine of Aragon) was a staunch Catholic. She restored
Catholicism, persecuted Protestantism, and even married Philip II; but she did
not dare to attempt to take back the stolen Church property, and the men who
had fattened on it did not mind very much calling themselves Catholics as long
as they were not asked to disgorge. Nevertheless, they were very glad when
Mary died without issue and they were able to put Elizabeth on the throne.
Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, whom Henry VIII had married
while his first wife was still alive; in Catholic eyes, therefore, she was
illegitimate, and the true heir to the throne was Mary of Scotland, Henry Viii's
grand-niece. Elizabeth therefore judged it expedient to put herself into the
hands of the Anglican group, to second their designs in return for their support.
The Anglican settlement was re-established, and Catholicism subjected to
persecution in its turn. Thus, without really wanting to, Elizabeth became the
chief Protestant ruler in Europe, as Philip II was the chief Catholic ruler, and
the two were gradually drawn into definite opposition. Yet neither wanted to
come to open war. Philip had too much on his hands already, and for some
time he cherished hopes of marrying Elizabeth as he had married her sister
Mary. Elizabeth, for her part, felt her position very precarious. The most
powerful men in England were on her side, and her chief minister, Robert
Cecil, was one of the cleverest politicians in Europe, with certainly the best
secret service; but the Catholic opposition was strong, and grew even stronger
under the impulse of the Counter-Reformation. Elizabeth, then, would weaken
Philip if she could without risking open war, and Philip would do likewise by
Elizabeth; and, as it happened, each had a weak spot which the other could
attack: Philip's being the Netherlands and Elizabeth's Ireland.
The Netherlands
Then, as now, the Netherlands were one of the wealthiest parts of Europe.
Cities like Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent had long been rich centres of manufacture
and commerce - fattened particularly on the great wool-trade with England.
After 1556 they were nominally under the rule of Philip II, and governed by a
Regent appointed by him, but that did not mean very much. The Netherlands
had a long tradition of independent local government. They were divided into
seventeen provinces, ruled for the most part by ancient noble families; and the
great cities had their own rights and privileges, jealously guarded. Philip, like
most of the rulers of his time, was a firm believer in absolutism. He took it for
granted that this was the proper and the best form of government, and thought
himself bound to make the power of the Crown supreme and effective
throughout his dominions. In the Netherlands, and especially from the nobles,
he was certain to meet with opposition.
In religion, the Netherlanders were still mostly Catholics, but Calvinism had
begun to win converts in some of the Northern provinces. Charles V had
already published edicts against the Protestants; his son was certain to
persecute them more zealously and effectively. As in France, it would be
natural for the disaffected nobles to make common cause with the persecuted
Protestants.
Ireland
Ireland had been nominally subject to the English Crown since the days of
Henry II, but no English king had ever been able to make his rule there
effective. In practice, the king's writ ran only in the small district round Dublin
called the Pale. Elsewhere, the effective power of government lay in the hands
of local rulers: some of them native Irish "chiefs", like the O'Neill or the
O'Donnell, and others the heads of great Anglo-Norman families like the
FitzGeralds and the de Burgos, who had endeavoured to conquer Ireland in
Henry II's time, but were now not easily distinguished from the original Irish.
There was no unity in the country, and each local ruler worked and fought for
himself, his family, or his clan. Outside a few ports (Dublin, Cork, Galway)
city-life was unknown, commerce scanty, roads almost non-existent. The
people had, nevertheless, a vigorous cultural life of their own; but nothing
could be conceived more different than Ireland from the opulent and closely-
settled Netherlands.
When Henry VII established the Tudor despotism in England, he naturally
wished to extend it also to Ireland. Thus there began a long-drawn-out effort to
bring the country effectively under royal control: an effort that became
progressively more difficult, especially when Henry VIII complicated it by
introducing religious as well as political changes. Elizabeth's advisers, however,
recognized very clearly the danger of an unsubdued and discontented Ireland
lying on England's flank, and pursued obstinately and ruthlessly the design of
imposing on Ireland English government, English law, and the Anglican form
of religion.
Protestantism thus came to Ireland as part and parcel of the attempt to impose
on Ireland an English despotism, and was therefore the more bitterly resisted.
There were no native Irish Reformers; and, as the Catholic revival gathered
strength, it united the Irish more and more in a common effort to preserve
both their religion and the political liberty which had become bound up with it.
The Struggle
Philip became King in the Netherlands in 1556. He at once began to tighten up
the laws against heresy, and simultaneously got the Pope's consent to carry out
a thorough reorganization and reform of the Church. Both measures were
opposed by a group of nobles on the ground of being an unwarrantable
interference with local privileges, but Philip insisted on them as being essential
to the good of the Church. Thus the struggle began. William Prince of Orange,
his brother Louis, and the Counts of Egmont and Hoorn were the chief leaders
of the opposition, and they used all their power and influence (after Philip had
gone to Spain) to hamper the Regent, and especially to make difficult the
enforcement of the laws against heresy. Philip, however, persisted. In 1564 he
ordered the promulgation of the decrees of the Council of Trent in the
Netherlands. This order provoked still stronger opposition, and now the
discontented began to organize themselves: they formed a group which
became known as "les Gueux" - "the Beggars". Philip deliberated what to do;
but while he was pondering the situation his hand was suddenly forced. In 1566
bands of Protestant fanatics (organized no-one knows how or by whom) made
a series of concerted attacks on Catholic churches throughout the Netherlands:
even the great cathedral of Antwerp, the pride and glory of the city, was
savagely wrecked and left a battered shell. The King was furious. He acted as
any other prince in Europe would have done: raised an army, placed in
command his best general, the Duke of Alba, and sent him to the Netherlands
to restore order and punish the rebels and heretics without mercy. Alba, a
blunt, tough soldier, took his orders literally, and from 1567 to 1573 maintained
a reign of terror. He would doubtless have succeeded in crushing all resistance,
but for the work of two men: William of Orange and Robert Cecil.
Orange, a man as obstinate as Philip himself, had escaped Alba by fleeing to
Germany. There he organized bands of privateers (French, English and
Germans, as well as Dutch) to prey on Spanish shipping. Cecil, who had early
realized the advantage to England of trouble in the Netherlands, now secretly
allowed these privateers ("Sea-Beggars", as they called themselves) to rest and
refit in English harbours, till they were strong enough, in 1572, to seize their
own bases at Brill and Flushing. Cecil had done an even greater service in 1568.
To pay Alba's army, Philip had raised an enormous loan of 450,000 ducats, and
sent the money by sea; but when the ships put into Southampton for shelter,
Cecil persuaded Elizabeth (who was also short of funds) to take over the loan
for her own use. Alba was thus driven to levy taxes which made him bitterly
unpopular even with loyalists and Catholics, so that he was recalled in 1573
with his task unfinished.
Meanwhile, also in 1568, Elizabeth had got into her power Mary of Scotland,
driven to take refuge in England by a Protestant rebellion; and in 1569 an
English rebellion in Mary's favour was bloodily suppressed. Again in 1568,
Drake and Hawkins made their first voyage to the Spanish Main, and thus
began a long series of piratical attacks on Spanish trade and Spanish colonies.
On the other hand, 1568 witnessed the outbreak of the first Desmond rebellion
in southern Ireland, which was not finally suppressed till 1573. The four-
cornered conflict was now in full swing.
Alba's successor, forced to relinquish the taxes he had imposed, could not pay
his troops. They at length determined to pay themselves. In 1576 they
mutinied, and perpetrated the horrible sack of Antwerp which is known as the
Spanish Fury. This for a time united all the Netherlander against the Spaniards.
Representatives of all seventeen provinces met together and formed the Union
of Brussels: not, they carefully explained, to overthrow the King's government,
but to secure their ancient rights and liberties. However, Calvinists and
Catholics could not co-operate for long, and in 1578 Philip managed to raise a
new army, and placed at its head Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, an
excellent soldier and a statesman of great ability. Farnese first defeated the
Netherlanders at Gemblours, and then set himself to win back the Catholics to
their allegiance. Helped by the excesses of the Calvinists, he succeeded. But the
seven northern provinces, where Calvinism predominated, remained obstinate:
in 1579 they formed themselves into the Union of Utrecht, and in 1581 took the
decisive step of declaring their total independence of Spain. Their strength on
the sea, and the help they received from England, enabled them to maintain
themselves even against Alexander Farnese.
The Irish were less successful, because less united. In 1579, with Spanish and
Papal help, broke out the second Desmond rebellion, in which the whole of
Munster was involved. But the Irish in the north did not rise, and the rebels
were eventually crushed, though only after desperate and savage fighting,
accompanied by frightful atrocities and widespread devastation. Meanwhile, in
1580-81 Francis Drake made his famous voyage round the world, capturing
Spanish ships and sacking Spanish-American cities, and returning with an
enormous treasure, of which Elizabeth took a large share.
Philip now made up his mind to an open attack. No more tinkering at the
Netherlands and Ireland: England was the keystone of the arch: knock that out,
and the rest would crumble into his hands. Patiently and laboriously he began
to construct the great fleet which the English called the "Invincible Armada"; it
was to sail up the Channel, embark Alexander Farnese and his troops, and land
them in England. Under this threat Elizabeth likewise was moved to act
openly. Cecil at last induced her to have Mary of Scotland executed. An
expedition was sent to the Netherlands to keep Farnese occupied; it failed,
though, and is remembered in history mainly for the death of the poet-soldier,
Sir Philip Sidney, on the field of Zutphen. Drake's expedition to Cadiz, to
interrupt the preparation of the Armada, was more successful. But none of
these things shook Philip's purpose. On May 20th, 1588, one hundred and
thirty ships sailed for the Channel.
But the Spaniards were no longer masters of the sea. After the experience of
the past twenty years, the English and the Dutch were better seamen and had
better ships - more weatherly and more heavily gunned. In a running fight up
the Channel the Spaniards had generally the worst of it. They were never given
a real chance to embark the troops from Flanders, and in a further fight off
Gravelines they were so roughly handled that their admiral despaired of
forcing his way back down-Channel, and made off up the North Sea. Storms
and the savage uncharted coasts of Scotland and Ireland took heavier toll than
the English fleet; sixty-three ships failed to get back to Spain.
After this crippling disaster the balance swung definitely against Philip. The
prospect of subduing the Dutch became ever more doubtful, while the English
went ahead more confidently with their "pacification" of Ireland. However, the
Irish now made their greatest effort, in the O'Neill-O'Donnell rebellion of 1595-
1603. Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was one of the most remarkable men of
his time. By clever diplomacy he had long maintained his own position in
Ulster without breaking with Elizabeth, but now the increase in English power
made that impossible - he had either to submit or rebel. He then allied himself
with the other great Northern lord, Hugh O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnel, and
for six years held off or defeated every force the English could send against
him. In 1601 a Spanish army was sent to his aid. But, by an incredible blunder,
it landed at Kinsale, in the remotest south-west corner of Ireland, and was
quickly besieged there by the English. O'Neill took the desperate resolution of
marching to its relief, but his effort failed; far from his base, with his men
starving, he was totally defeated. He got back to his own country, and held out
there somehow for another two years, but then was forced by famine to come
in and surrender.
In the Netherlands, the Spaniards fought on till 1609, and even then would
only sign a twelve-year truce; but whatever they might say, the independence
of Holland was by that time a recognized fact. The ten southern provinces
remained loyal to Catholicism and to Spain, and were called thenceforth the
Spanish Netherlands.
The religious effects of this long struggle were that England and Holland
became definitely Protestant, Ireland and Belgium definitely Catholic.
Politically, Holland became an independent state, while Ireland was at last
really subjected to the English Crown. The struggle marks also the beginning
of the rise to commercial and naval greatness of both Holland and England,
and the beginning of Spain's decline. When Philip II became King in 1556,
Spain really was the strongest power in Europe; when he died in 1598, she only
appeared to be so.
The Thirty Years' War (1618-48)
This last and worst of the religious wars was the belated fruit of the faults in
the Peace of Augsburg. That peace had failed to settle either the religious or
the political situation in the Empire; it was a compromise which no-one liked.
It was not even properly observed, for the Protestant princes had continued to
seize Church lands whenever they had the chance, and the Calvinists, not
recognized in the Peace, had grown enormously in numbers and power, and
were determined to grow further.
Ferdinand II of Hapsburg was elected Emperor in 1618, having already
succeeded to the Austrian dominions and to the kingdoms of Hungary and
Bohemia. Like Philip II, he was a product of the Catholic revival. From the
outset of his reign he had two main objects, one religious and one political. His
religious aim was to make Catholicism dominant in the Empire; his political
aim was to make the Emperor dominant: to transform the Empire from a loose
confederation into something more like a national state. In his mind, the two
went together. Others, however, did not agree. His cousin the Spanish
Hapsburg, Philip IV, could be counted on to support him, in the hope not only
of strengthening the Faith and the dynasty, but also of recovering Holland. But
the Catholic princes of the Empire, such as Maximilian of Bavaria, were not at
all in favour of strengthening the Emperor; Catholic France was absolutely
opposed to any increase in Hapsburg power; and even the Pope was doubtful -
the Papacy had had trouble with Holy Roman Emperors before.
Yet the Protestants were divided, too. Lutherans and Calvinists hated each
other almost as much as they hated the Catholics. And though they might
hope for help from their coreligionists in other countries, these hopes were
tempered with doubt. England was already entangled in the internal disputes
that led to her civil war; and, though the Dutch, the Danes or the Swedes
might be expected to help their fellow-Protestants, they had also certain
designs on the territories of the Empire, and the Protestant princes did not like
those designs any more than the Catholic princes or the Emperor. All these
complications help to explain why the war, once begun, dragged on so
interminably. For convenience sake we may divide it into four sections: the
Bohemian war (1618-23), the Danish war (1624-29), the Swedish war (1630-34)
and the French war (1635-48); but these divisions are very rough-and-ready. A
detailed history of the war is more complicated than you would easily believe.
1. The Bohemian War
The conflict opened with the "defenestration of Prague". Ferdinand's
predecessor, Matthias, had granted a measure of toleration to Protestantism in
Bohemia, but Ferdinand refused to renew it. A group of Bohemian nobles
thereupon started a rebellion, and their first act was to rush into the royal castle
at Prague, seize the Emperor's representatives, and fling them from a high
window into the courtyard. The victims survived because they fell on a heap of
dirt which was awaiting removal; but this initial act of savagery is worth
recording, as being typical of the general conduct of the war.
Having thus burned their boats, the rebels now asked for help from the
German Protestants. They met with but a cold reception, but at last the Elector
of the Palatinate, a Calvinist, was persuaded to accept the Crown of Bohemia.
His reign was brief and disastrous. Lutheran Saxony and Catholic Bavaria
combined to help the Emperor against him; he was totally defeated in 1620 at
the battle of the White Hill near Prague. Ferdinand then, to bind Maximilian
more closely to him and his designs, conferred on him the lands and titles of
the defeated Elector. Much to the disapproval of the other princes, Maximilian
accepted the offer and proceeded to conquer and absorb the Palatinate.
2. The Danish War
There now enters on the scene one of the most brilliant statesmen in the
history of Europe, Cardinal Richelieu. In 1624 this man became the chief
minister of the French king, Louis XIII, and he remained at the head of affairs
in France down to his death in 1642. The principal object of his foreign policy
was to diminish the power of the House of Hapsburg; and to do this he was
perfectly prepared to help the Dutch against Spain and the German Protestants
against the Emperor. He tried to get the Protestants to combine, and he tried
to get help for them from England, Denmark, or Sweden. England could not
be induced to risk more than a small force in Germany; Sweden was at war
with Poland; but the King of Denmark proved willing to help his co-religionists
and to pursue his own ambitions by taking French money and opening a
campaign in Germany.
The Emperor responded by raising a fresh army under a new general, the
brilliant but unstable Wallenstein. Against the Danes Wallenstein was
completely successful. He won a decisive victory at Lutter, in 1626, and
proceeded to over-run most of north Germany and Denmark itself.
Ferdinand II was now in a position which no Emperor had occupied for
centuries: it did really look as though he might make the Empire a reality
instead of a shadow, and at the same time make it Catholic. In 1629, as an
assertion and a test of his power, he issued the Edict of Restitution,
commanding that all Church property which had been seized by the
Protestants since the Peace of Augsburg should forthwith be restored. This was
an enormous demand, involving some millions of acres, much of which had
changed hands several times, and had been acquired by its present holders by
inheritance or lawful purchase. There were places where restitution would
mean economic and social revolution. The Edict aroused great discontent. And
yet there was no serious resistance to it: had the Empire alone been concerned,
Ferdinand would probably have got away with it. and could then attempt with
confidence the rest of his great design. His mistake lay in forgetting that other
nations might be interested in Germany.
Richelieu's worst fears seemed to be realized. He implored the King of Sweden
to cease his useless conflicts with Poland and intervene in the Empire before it
was too late, at the same time promising him a large subsidy towards the
expenses of the war. He also endeavoured again to bind the Protestant states of
the Empire into an alliance between themselves and with Sweden, and tried to
detach the Elector of Bavaria from the Emperor. He was so far successful that
Sweden did consent to invade Germany.
3. The Swedish War
All historians agree that Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, was the best
general of his time. His speed in manoeuvring, his grasp of tactics (especially of
the use of artillery), the training and discipline of his troops, and also his power
to awaken in them an uttermost loyalty and devotion, mark him out as one of
the great captains. He soon over-ran a large part of north Germany. Yet the
German Protestants were unwilling to give him full support: they felt that they
had suffered enough. At this moment there occurred one of those outstanding
atrocities which become historical legends. An imperialist army laid siege to
Magdeburg. The surrounding country had been devastated, and the besiegers
faced starvation unless they could lay hold of the stores of food in the city.
After several assaults, and after suffering heavy losses, they at length penetrated
the desperate defence; and then, breaking loose from all restraint, the starving,
maddened soldiery perpetrated a sack which made Magdeburg a name of
horror even in that age of horrors. The Protestants were both terrified and
infuriated, and Gustavus got his chance. In twelve months he all but destroyed
the imperial power. A great victory at Breitenfeld, near Leipzig, cleared his way
into central Germany; he carried fire and sword through the length and
breadth of Bavaria; at length, in November, 1631, he encountered Wallenstein
near Lutzen, in a battle which ought to have finished the Emperor's cause for
good. Instead, there was a strange and tragic anti-climax: the great King himself
was killed on the field, leaving no worthy successor. The Protestants fell to
wrangling among themselves, while Ferdinand, with the help of Spain,
painfully rebuilt his shattered forces; and in 1634, at Nordlingen, the Swedish
army suffered a crushing defeat.
4. The French War
Richelieu had so far kept France out of the war; but now he saw that he must
either fight or resign himself to a Haps-burg victory. He chose to fight.
Wearily, but obstinately, the Hapsburgs girded themselves for battle with this
new adversary, but in vain. They were too exhausted. They could still maintain
forces in the field, but they could not deliver a decisive stroke. It was the
French who gradually got the upper hand: under Turenne they conquered
Alsace, under Conde they crushingly defeated the Spaniards at Rocroi.
Ferdinand II died in 1637, a beaten man; Ferdinand III had no wish to live a life
of warfare like his father. Throughout the horribly devastated Empire
Catholics and Protestants were desperately calling for peace. At length the
Emperor told his cousin of Spain that Spain and France could fight it out for
themselves if they liked, but the Empire had had enough.
It took four years to make peace: four years of complicated negotiations and
hard bargaining, while the fighting still went on. Not till 1648 was the Treaty of
Westphalia signed: the first of the great general peace treaties which
henceforth break periodically the warlike history of the European nations.
France, naturally, came off best, receiving Alsace and the fortresses of Metz,
Toul and Verdun; Sweden received West Pomerania and the two great ports of
Hamburg and Bremen; East Pomerania was given to Brandenburg: Bavaria
was allowed to keep part of the Palatinate.
The most obvious result of the war was the ruin and disruption of the Holy
Roman Empire. As for ruin, it is enough to say that the Empire's population fell
from twenty-three to thirteen millions. As for disruption, the power of the
Emperor was totally destroyed; Emperors continued to be elected, but from
this time on they were shadows of a shade. Each state in the Empire was now
independent. The attempt to unify Germany had failed; with what results for
Germany and for Europe, the future was to show. On the other hand, the
Treaty of Westphalia marks the beginning of the greatness of France in
modern Europe; the beginning, too, of the rise to power of Brandenburg-
Prussia, which was to become France's great opponent and the master of
modern Germany. The Treaty also gave a temporary importance to Bavaria
and Sweden, which in the long run neither of them was able to sustain. Finally,
and above all, the Treaty of Westphalia marks the end of the religious wars, in
the spiritual exhaustion of both sides. Catholics and Protestants still hated each
other, but they no longer had the energy to try and conquer each other; they
stood fast in their positions and accepted the situation: the religious unity of
Europe was irretrievably broken.
Here we see the end of what may be called the religious period of European
history: the period in which religion was, on the whole, the dominant interest
of European men, and the universal Church the dominant institution.
Henceforth the affairs of Europe were regulated by the great sovereign States,
and the alliances and conflicts between them. (It is a most significant fact that
the Pope was allowed no voice in the West-phalian deliberations.) Everywhere
the State became superior to the Church. In Protestant countries laymen
regulated religious affairs just as they regulated political or economic affairs.
Even in Catholic countries the Church had come to lean so heavily on the State
for protection and support as to be practically dependent on it: the Pope was
still the acknowledged head of the Church, but in practice the exercise of his
power was very much limited, very much subject to the influence of the
secular power. Church and State were still closely united, and were to go on in
that alliance down to the 19th century; but now it was the State that was the
dominant partner.
One good result the religious wars did produce: the first glimmerings of a
feeling for religious toleration. Catholics and Protestants still sometimes
attempt to lay on each other's shoulders the blame for the persecutions and the
religious wars. It is a futile attempt. Still more futile is it to try and prove that
one side was more or less atrocious or provocative than the other. How is it
possible to weigh up the conduct of the Spaniards in the Netherlands against
the conduct of the English in Ireland? Or the burnings of Queen Mary against
the disembowellings of Queen Elizabeth? Or the murder of William of Orange
against the murder of Mary of Scotland? On both sides there were wise and
humane men who deplored the prevailing savagery, but they produced no
effect: not until both sides were exhausted. And perhaps that is the most
significant effect of the religious wars: the exhaustion, in a bitter and (as it
turned out) indecisive conflict, of the violent passions stirred up by the coming
of Protestanism; the exhaustion even, in some degree, of the feeling for
religion itself. The age which followed the Thirty Years' War was to be called
the Age of Reason. It was certainly not an age of passion, nor yet an age of
faith.

Book Five - A Divided Europe (1648-1789)
22. The Greatness Of France
From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the history of Europe is
principally the history of the great national states; and in the period that
followed the Thirty Years' War the greatest of these was France. It was a
favourable moment for her. The over-taxed power of Spain was declining; the
growing power of England was hampered by internal struggles between king
and parliament, and between Anglicans, Puritans and Catholics; while France
had the good fortune to be ruled in succession by four great administrators,
who all pursued the same policies and knew how to make the most of their
opportunities. These four were Henry IV, Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal
Mazarin and Louis XIV.
Henry IV (1589-1610)
Henry of Navarre is important in the history of France, not merely for what he
did himself, but because he laid down the policies which French governments
were to follow for a hundred years. His popularity helped him: brave and gay,
quickwitted and high-spirited, he was the best-loved king since St. Louis. He
thoroughly understood his people and appreciated their needs and desires; and,
though the amours which disfigured his private life, and sometimes even
affected his public conduct, have damaged his reputation, they did not make
him less popular with the French.
His first task was to settle the religious question. He had become a Catholic,
and had thus gained the allegiance of the mass of the people: but he had then
to appease the strong Huguenot minority, still in possession of half the country
and of many fortresses, and suspiciously determined not to surrender them
lightly. Only after long negotiations, carried through with great skill and
admirable patience, could Henry IV issue, in 1598. the Edict of Nantes. By this
Edict the Protestants were given freedom of worship except in certain specified
cities, such as Paris; they were permitted to attend schools and universities, and
to hold offices under the Crown, on equal terms with Catholics; and they were
allowed to garrison over a hundred of the royal fortresses, including such key-
points as Montpellier and La Rochelle. This final concession was a great error,
and Henry fought hard against granting it, knowing that it would lead to
trouble later on. However, the Huguenots would allow nothing less; and the
Edict of Nantes did at least provide a settled framework in which Catholics and
Protestants could learn to respect each other's rights, and the passions of the
religious wars could die away into comparative peace.
At the same time, Henry had to repair the devastation and restore the
prosperity of France. He genuinely cared for the welfare of his people, and had
a real interest - rare in those days - in practical economics. With the help of his
famous minister, Sully (a high-handed, close-fisted, but persevering and
methodical man) he carried through a string of economic reforms. The
restoration of law and order after forty years of civil war and weak government
was itself a necessary condition for the return of prosperity, and Henry was so
successful in this matter that in 1598 he was able to issue and enforce an
ordinance forbidding the bearing of arms on the public highway. But he also
took positive measures to improve agriculture, manufacture and commerce.
Marshes were drained, rivers canalized for navigation, roads vastly improved;
silk-culture was introduced, and the manufacture of silk and other textiles
extended; commercial treaties were made with England, Spain, and the
Ottoman Empire; and the great Champlain was encouraged and assisted in his
efforts to found a French dominion in Canada. The reign was filled with
constant efforts of this kind, and much greater designs were worked out (such
as that of a canal system for the whole of France) which later governments
were gradually to put into effect; the general result being a steady increase in
both public and private wealth. The revenue of the Crown, for instance, grew
from twenty-three million livres in 1597 to thirty-nine million in 1609, and that
without any increase in the burden of taxation.
In political matters, Henry was of course a believer in absolutism, like nearly
every ruler of his time. He was not able, however, to make himself effectively
absolute: he had even to agree to let the power of the Crown be diminished by
the concessions made to the Huguenots. What he did set himself to do was to
make the existing royal power fully effective by eliminating corrupt and
untrustworthy officials and by reorganizing the whole administrative system to
make it more efficient. In this he was most successful, and in a few years the
French monarchy regained nearly all the ground it had lost during the religious
wars. What is more, the results of this were obvious to everyone, in the
restoration of order and the growth of prosperity, and the mass of the people
were confirmed in their view that a strong monarchy was the best form of
government for France: a view which greatly assisted Richelieu, Mazarin and
Louis XIV.
Henry's foreign policy was, one might say, marked out for him by nature as
well as by tradition: a policy of opposition to the Hapsburg power in Spain and
in the Empire. The Haps-burgs generally acted in concert, being united not
only by a very strong family feeling, but also by a belief in themselves as the
main champions of Catholicism in Europe. Like other French kings before him,
Henry felt himself cramped between the nutcracker jaws of Spain and the
Empire, and made it his business to weaken these jaws as much as possible by
supporting the Dutch and the discontented imperial princes. He was too wise,
however, to attempt any foreign adventures until order and prosperity had
been restored in France, and thus it was not till the close of his reign that he felt
himself able to take a decided stand in foreign affairs. He was actually
preparing an army to attack the Hapsburgs when, in 1610. he was assassinated
by a lunatic named Ravaillac.
His son, Louis XIII, was then nine years old, and the government was taken
over by the Queen-Mother, Henry's second wife, Marie de Medici. She had
neither the intelligence nor the strength of will needed to deal with a difficult
situation; great nobles like Conde, Nevers, Longueville, Bouillon, Rohan,
began at once the old game of extorting pensions, concessions, privileges of all
kinds from the weakened Crown: the Hugue-nots, not satisfied with the Edict
of Nantes, threatened a renewal of the religious wars; and the whole of Henry
IV's achievement seemed about to be undone. In 1614 the Estates-General was
summoned to advise the government, but the three Estates spent most of the
time quarrelling with one another, and nothing was done. In 1617 the young
Louis suddenly asserted himself, dismissed his mother and her ministers, and
undertook the government himself: but, though resolute enough, he was too
young to be able to form a policy of his own or to select good ministers. His
government was energetic, but his energies were ill-directed and therefore
largely ineffective.
Marie de Medici, however, in her enforced retirement, had the good fortune to
have the advice of the Bishop of Lucon. Jean Armand Duplessis de Richelieu.
This man, a younger son in an obscure noble family, is now universally known
as "Richelieu", simply. Born in 1585, at the age of seventeen he was sent, rather
against his inclination, into the Church. and in 1608 family influence made him
bishop of Lucon. He made an excellent bishop, and could easily have become
famous as one of the great reforming prelates of that age - the age of St. Francis
de Sales; but his talents and ambitions pointed him another way. He was
elected to the Estates-General in 1614; and he made such good use of his
opportunities, and so deep an impression on the Queen-Mother, that in 1616
he was made her minister for war and foreign affairs. A few months later the
overthrow of his patroness ruined him; but he did not despair. He constituted
himself her adviser. and devoted his unrivalled diplomatic skill to bringing
about a reconciliation between her and her son. Against all likelihood, he
succeeded: in 1622 Marie de Medici was even admitted to the royal council,
and Richelieu, at the King's request, was made a cardinal. He now set himself
to impress Louis XIII as he had impressed Marie de Medici, and was equally
successful. In 1624 he was made the King's chief minister, and thenceforward
till his death in 1642 he retained his master's confidence and controlled the
government of France.
His qualities and character fitted him to do so. To an exceptionally quick and
keen intelligence he united an endless capacity for work, a flawless courage and
an inflexible will. He was not much troubled by scruples; and yet he cannot be
called simply an unscrupulous man. Towards his enemies he was mercilessly
severe; but he would have maintained that such severity was necessary for
effective government, and when, on his death-bed, he was asked whether he
forgave his enemies, he made the famous answer: "I have had no enemies but
those of the State". A Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, he yet
supported the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War, and was chiefly
responsible for the Emperor's defeat; but he would have doubtless maintained
that a Hapsburg victory, a Hapsburg domination of Europe, would in the long
run have injured both Europe and the Church. The truth is that he was one of
the first examples of a new species of politician: a type of the modern secular
statesman, who instinctively puts the interests of the State before those of the
individual, and the interests of his own nation before the interests of religion,
or of Europe, or of international justice or humanity; and Richelieu's career
gives an excellent idea of the qualities and defects of the type. His main object
was always the glory and greatness of France.
This object, he thought, could best be attained by strengthening the monarchy,
and this entailed weakening every other authority. If only all the power in
France, all the resources of France, could be brought under the control of the
monarchy, and thus directed along a single line of policy by a single master-
hand, the greatness of France would be increased almost immeasurably. And
that is precisely what Richelieu set out to do: not to introduce a new system or
organization of government, but simply to make the royal power really
effective, so that any order about anything given by the king would be
promptly obeyed anywhere in France. The French, and particularly the French
nobles, were not at all accustomed to such obedience, and that explains the
ruthlessness with which Richelieu often had to act; but he was successful to a
surprising extent in imposing this discipline on a high-spirited and far from
tractable nation.
He began by dealing with the Huguenots. Their possession of the fortresses
which they had been concedeaby-4ke-Edict of Nantes had proved (as Henry IV
had foreseen) a great source of weakness to the monarchy and to France. They
were not really content with their situation, but constantly desired to improve
it. and were chronically suspicious of Catholic authorities, and especially of the
Crown. Richelieu had no desire to persecute the Huguenots - quite the
contrary, he wanted all Frenchmen to give up their sectional quarrels and live
at peace under their king - but he saw that their political power was nothing
but a source of discord, and he was determined to destroy it. He ordered them
to surrender the fortresses they held. Many refused. The most important of the
recusants were the Rochellois, and accordingly the most important event of
the ensuing war was the siege of La Rochelle.
It was a long business, and the townsfolk went so far as to call the English to
their aid; but the English expedition under the Duke of Buckingham was totally
defeated, and the city itself surrendered soon afterwards (1627). There was no
more serious trouble from the Huguenots.
The nobles were more difficult to handle. Indeed, Richelieu never succeeded in
subduing them utterly; after many a severe lesson, they learned for the most
part to give him a grudging obedience, but they did not accept the situation,
and always longed to overthrow him and return to "the good old days". Yet he
got more obedience out of them than any royal minister had done. He did it
partly by clever diplomacy, but still more by sleepless vigilance and unsparing
severity. One of the chief weapons he invented was the "Intendant": an official
appointed by him and removable by him, but bearing, during the term of his
appointment, the fullness of the royal power, who could be sent to any part of
France to enforce the royal (that is, the Cardinal's) commands. These in-
tendants were like tentacles reached out through the country, and through
them Richelieu made himself and his policy felt from end to end of France.
He did not, however, establish any definite system of government to suit the
changing circumstances: that is one of the two great defects in his domestic
policy. The other is the inefficiency of his financial management. It is true that
the order he maintained in France favoured the further growth in the country's
prosperity; and it is true that he succeeded in wringing immense sums of
money out of the people for his ambitious foreign policy; but both the raising
and the spending of the taxes were poorly organized and supervised, and the
result was a great deal of unnecessary waste and corruption. Yet it is still true
to say that the government of France became under Richelieu stronger than it
had ever been before.
The Cardinal's chief interest, however, lay in foreign affairs; and here he was
presented, in the Thirty Years' War, both with dangers and with opportunities
which are rare in history. He was faced with the possibility that the Holy
Roman Empire might become a really strong state confronting France, with its
border still well on the French side of the Rhine, and with an Emperor closely
bound by blood and interest to the still powerful king of Spain. On the other
hand, he had an opportunity of ending that nightmare for good, by
permanently destroying the possibility of German imperial unity. The story of
the Thirty Years' War is very much the story of how Richelieu seized that
opportunity. The more one studies the history of that war, the more one
realizes that it was he who was really responsible for its prolongation and for
its eventual result - even though he died six years before the Treaty of
Westphalia was signed. It was he who, after the failure of the Bohemians,
brought the Danes into the war; and he who, after the total defeat of the
Danes, let loose on the ravaged Empire the Lion of the North, Gustavus
Adolphus; and he, finally, who, after his other instruments had broken in his
hands, opposed to the weakened Haps-burgs the fresh forces of France. He
attained his object. After the Thirty Years' War the German states were
irrevocably divided: not only could they not form a menace to France, but they
afforded a fair field for French ambitions to exploit. On a short view, he
certainly deserved well of his country; but some have wondered whether he
deserved equally well of Europe, or of religion, or of humanity. To be known
in history as the chief promoter of the worst of European wars is at least a
singular distinction.
Cardinal Mazarin
Richelieu died in 1642. In a few months he was followed to the grave by his
master, Louis XIII, who left as his heir a five-year-old Louis XIV; so that once
again France came under the rule of a Queen-Mother - this time Anne of
Austria. She, however, accepted as her chief minister, as Richelieu's successor,
a man whom Richelieu himself had marked out for that post. Giulio Mazarini,
an Italian cleric, had come to France as a Papal Nuncio in 1634, had won the
notice and favour of Richelieu by his great skill in diplomacy, and had been
invited to enter the service of France. He had himself naturalized a Frenchman
(changing his name to Mazarin), and soon became Richelieu's chief confidant
and his designated successor. Yet, though he rivalled Richelieu in diplomacy,
and though he shared his ideas and agreed with his policies, he was a man of a
very different stamp. He had great personal charm, and a singular talent for
intrigue, and he preferred to attain his ends by these means rather than by
force - a gentler man than Richelieu, according to his friends; more cowardly
and more cunning, according to his enemies. Certainly, though his policy was a
continuation of Richelieu's, he had much greater difficulty in carrying it out.
The nobles soon discovered that this man was no Richelieu. The charm which
won him the devotion of Anne of Austria had no effect on them; they began
their old plots, they exploited the discontent aroused in the country by the
heavy wartime taxation, and between 1649 and 1654 they succeeded in half
paralyzing the government of France by the strange series of conspiracies and
rebellions which are known to history as the "Fronde". Mazarin survived these
attacks partly through the selfish disunion of the malcontents, partly by the
skilful diplomacy with which he exploited their divisions, but most of all by the
underlying conviction of the French people that the fortune of France
depended on the strength of the monarchy. Even the "frondeurs" themselves
felt that; they were not willing to push their rebellion to a conclusion, and in
the end Mazarin's tenacity maintained both his own position and that of the
Crown. But young Louis XIV never forgot the Fronde: he never forgot how
he, the King of France, had been forced out of his own capital and made to flee
from place to place by the wilful arrogance and selfishness of a group of great
nobles; and he determined that that should never happen again. He
determined to ensure that henceforth there should be only one power in
France, and that the power of the King.
In foreign affairs Mazarin faced equal difficulties, and achieved a long-delayed
but equal success. He brought the Thirty Years' War to a successful conclusion
- the acquisition of Metz, Toul and Verdun, and of the greater part of Alsace
meant not only a great strengthening of the eastern frontier, but also a
considerable step towards the Rhine. But the Treaty of Westphalia did not end
the fighting. Spain still refused to admit defeat, and Mazarin was obliged to
carry on the war against her for another eleven years - hampered during a large
part of that time by the operations of the "frondeurs", who did not scruple to
ask and accept assistance from the enemy. In 1659. however, Mazarin's
admirable patience and tenacity triumphed again: Spain was fought to a
standstill, and Philip IV had to consent to the Treaty of the Pyrenees. By this
treaty the French were granted possession of the County of Roussillon, which
carried their frontier to the crest of the Pyrenees, and they secured some minor
gains in Artois, on their north-west frontier, and a recognition by Spain of their
rights in Alsace. More than all this, the treaty represents an admission by the
Spaniards of the superiority of the French: a recognition of the fact that France,
not Spain, was the nation that counted for most in European affairs.
When Mazarin died in 1661, and Louis XIV took personal charge of the
government of France, his position was a most favourable one: the monarchy
was more powerful and the country more united than ever before; and the
chief enemies of France, the Austrian and Spanish Hapsburgs, had suffered
crushing defeats and had seen their strength drastically reduced. Louis XIV
always aspired to be called "Louis the Great", and certainly under the
circumstances he might reasonably aspire to it; but historians have generally
refused it him because they have thought that he did not make adequate use of
his advantages.
Louis XIV (1661-1715)
He was nevertheless, a remarkable man, and his reign forms a remarkable
epoch in the history of France and of Europe. Born in 1638, and succeeding to
the throne prematurely in 1643, he received his first rude experiences of
political realities during the Fronde, and his basic training in politics and
diplomacy from Mazarin; and there is no doubt that the frondeurs and the
Cardinal were excellent teachers, and the young king a very apt pupil. He was
born with an excellent intelligence, and with the high courage which has
always been a characteristic of the Bourbons; and he learned from the Fronde
the dangers of a weak or divided authority, and from Mazarin the caution, the
patience, the tenacity and the continual hard work which are needed for the
government of men. His policies were simple and forthright. At home, he
meant to perfect the work begun by Henry IV, and carried on by the two
Cardinals, of bringing all authority in France under the control of the Crown;
abroad, now that the Hapsburgs were no longer dangerous, he meant to
exploit the situation by advancing France's eastern frontier towards her natural
boundary, the Rhine. In carrying out these policies he had little to fear from
external opposition; the danger was from within, from the lack of moderation
in his own character, from the marked traits of obstinacy and vanity which
disfigured it, and which might easily lead him into exaggerations and
extravagances that might endanger his whole achievement. That, in fact, is
what happened.
The political power of the nobles was finally destroyed, along with their local
independence. Under Louis XIV all local government was brought under the
supervision of royal officials like the intendants, who now became, for all
practical purposes, the governors of the provinces of France. Furthermore,
Louis was determined to make himself the central figure of France, in social as
well as in political matters - it was with this object that he established his great
court with its continual and elaborate etiquette, summoning the nobles to
attend him and to take part in the splendid ceremonies with which he
surrounded the monarchy, and building the great palace of Versailles as a
fitting centre for the new France. He thus detached the nobles from their local
duties and local loyalties, and thus destroyed the basis of their ancient power,
and made it impossible for them effectually to oppose the Crown; but he did
not realize that by so doing he was producing a social and economic
revolution: turning the nobles from a class with a real function in the state, the
function of taking care of their estates and looking after local affairs, into a
parasitic class - a class of people who drew their revenues and collected feudal
dues from the rest of the nation without performing any services in return.
How fatal this was to the nobles, and how injurious to France, we shall see
later; we note it here as a typical example of Louis' tendency to exaggerate, to
carry his policies too far.
His system of government showed the same defect. In itself it was excellent.
He set up a number of councils to deal with the different departments of state:
the Conseil d'Etat for foreign affairs, the Conseil des Finances for money
affairs, and so on; but he was careful to staff them with men selected by
himself, usually from the middle class, whom he could count on to be perfectly
subservient; and he allowed them little independence, but kept a jealous eye on
all their operations, and never hesitated to interfere with them when he
thought it advisable. He could not bring himself to give any of his subordinates
a really free hand; and one of the results was that it became somewhat difficult,
after the first few years, lo find intelligent men willing to serve under such
conditions. The whole system of government depended too much on one
man, the king. Under a wise and hard-working monarch it would work well,
but under a lazy or slow-witted one it would fail badly.
In matters of religion he had the same criterion - just as good government was
royal government, so sound religion was royal religion. He therefore always
chafed at the presence of Huguenots in his kingdom, and it was not long before
he began inflicting on them a species of petty persecution; though it was more
than twenty years before he could bring himself, in 1685. to revoke the Edict of
Nantes and break the toleration that had become the settled, policy of France.
Modern historians are severe on him for this, and rightly; apart from any moral
or religious considerations, the flight of many Huguenots impoverished France
and enriched the surrounding countries. It is fair to remember, though, that
Louis was only returning to the almost universal practice of his age; in
England, for instance, Presbyterians and Catholics were still normally subject
to fines and imprisonment, and only a dozen years before the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes the English parliament had passed the disgusting Test Act,
which compelled every man holding office under the Crown to receive the
Sacrament in the Church of England. Louis' persecution of the Huguenots may
be deplorable, but it is not surprising. What is surprising is his apparent desire
to detach the Church in France from the Pope. That he should want to control
the Church would be natural enough: Richelieu and Mazarin had done no less;
but Louis seems to have wanted to control it in theory as well as in practice, to
set up a Gallican Church something like the Anglican Church: a royal Church
in which the Pope should have a primacy of honour but no jurisdiction. Yet he
remained, and wished to remain, a sincere Catholic! These ill-considered and
ineffectual efforts in the religious sphere are simply further examples of his
tendency to exaggerate his ideas and push them to extreme lengths; and his
obstinacy made him persevere in them long after their ineffectiveness had
become evident.
Yet he rendered great services to France. In particular, he resumed the
commercial and financial policies of Henry IV, Richelieu and Mazarin had
cared little about this side of the national interests, over-preoccupied as they
were with foreign affairs, and Louis found the finances of the country in a
fearful tangle. To straighten them out he chose an official of Mazarin's called
Colbert, a man as careful and industrious as the King himself; and during the
next twenty years Colbert built up both the prosperity of the country and the
revenue of the Crown to heights they had never reached before. His first step
was to purify the administration: to get rid of corrupt officials, to reform and
simplify the system of taxation, and above all to see to it that proper accounts
were kept. He went on to transform the state of France by such a programme
of road-making, canal-digging and harbour-building as no other European
administrator dreamed of. He promoted the growth of industries by subsidies
and protective tariffs, and at the same time fostered internal trade by lowering
the customs-barriers between the central provinces of France, while forming
trading-companies to exploit the French settlements in Canada, Louisiana and
India. As if all this was not enough, he also organized the French navy into an
effective professional fighting-force - just as James, Duke of York, and Samuel
Pepys were performing the same service for the English navy. Doubtless
Colbert would have reorganized the army as well, had not Louis entrusted this
task to another man: the highly unpleasant but very effective Louvois, who in
about ten years' time transformed the French army from a collection of half-
disciplined volunteer-bands into a modern army: an army of professionals,
properly organized in regiments and divisions. All later European armies were
copies of this. Indeed, most European monarchs took Louis XIV as their
model; but of this influence, and of his services to literature and the arts, we
shall have more to say in a later chapter.
Down to 1700 his foreign policy was simple enough: it was just to extend the
French frontier by hook or by crook in the direction of the Rhine. Franche-
Comte, Lorraine, Luxembourg and the Spanish Netherlands were the
territories he coveted, and a series of attacks on them brought him up against
Spain, Austria and Holland. The War of Devolution (1667-8) tore away several
fortresses from the Netherlands, particularly Lille. The Dutch War (1672-78)
was intended to break the power of Holland for good; but William of Orange.
who had become Stadtholder of Holland in 1672, was a man as obstinate and as
cunning as Louis himself, and in the end Louis had to be content with
acquiring Franche-Comte and leaving Holland unconquered. Other alarms and
excursions followed: in 1681. for instance, Louis seized Strasbourg by a coup-
de-main. The decisive event did not occur, however, till 1J88. when a
revolution in England overthrew James II and replaced him by William of
Orange. This changed the situation radically.
The two Stuart kings, Charles II and James II, had been too occupied with
internal troubles to be able to play much of a part on the Continent; besides,
England's growing naval and commercial power seemed to mark out Holland
rather than France as her enemy; and Louis' diplomacy had been able to play
off England against Holland and the English king against the English
parliament with great success. But now England and Holland were at one
under William of Orange, who was determined to oppose the French designs,
and who was able to draw up against Louis the really formidable coalition of
the Grand Alliance, or League of Augsburg (England, Holland, Spain^ Austria,
and Brandenburg). In the war which followed, the French were for the first
time held to a draw - they could win battles occasionally, and could hold their
own in defensive warfare, but they could not deliver a decisive blow. Neither,
to be sure, could the troops of the League, but as their main object was to
defeat the designs of Louis XIV, stalemate did not matter so much to them.
After several years of such fighting, Louis saw that he was making no headway;
he saw also the prospects in the near future of trouble over the Spanish
succession; and he at length resigned himself to cutting his losses and signing
the Peace of Ryswick (1697): the first treaty he had ever signed in which France
had not made some notable gain. But for Louis it was "reculer pour mieux
sauter".
The Spanish Succession
In 1700 a decisive change came over France's foreign policy. Louis had hitherto
been pursuing the traditional policy of the past hundred years: to attack the
Hapsburgs, and so push France's borders nearer and nearer to her natural
frontiers. Louis had had considerable success in this, and would have had more
but for the unfortunate accident of finding himself opposed by William of
Orange. Perhaps it was the checks imposed on him by this opposition, perhaps
just his natural tendency towards extravagance; but towards the end of the
seventeenth century the question of the Spanish inheritance began to loom
larger and larger in his thoughts, and he began to build on it more grandiose
schemes than he had ever yet conceived.
Charles II of Spain had no children. His two sisters had married, the one Louis
XIV, the other the Emperor Leopold, and the daughter of this second marriage
had married the Elector of Bavaria. Thus there were three possible claimants to
the throne and empire of Spain. The simplest way out would have been to
allow the unimportant Bavarian to succeed; and in 1698 Louis and William III
actually signed a treaty guaranteeing his succession. It is unlikely that Louis
meant this to be his final word; in any event, in 169g the Bavarian claimant
died. Louis then played a double game: on the one hand he negotiated with the
Emperor a Partition Treaty, by which the Spanish possessions were divided
between France and Austria, while on the other hand he represented to the
Spaniards the disgrace of having their empire thus divided, and suggested that
he alone was strong enough to hold it together. His diplomacy succeeded.
Charles II made a will leaving the Spanish throne to Louis' second grandson,
Philip of Anjou, and then died; and Louis, after some hesitation, decided to
take, the risk of accepting the will and thus becoming, as he thought, master of
the widest empire on the face of the globe.
War would almost certainly have followed, but it was hastened by Louis'
aggressive policy. He showed that he meant to make the most of his new
position: seizing the "barrier fortresses" on the frontier of the Netherlands,
recognizing James II's son as king of England instead of William III, and so on;
it was not long before the Dutch and the English were ready to join with the
Emperor in fighting what is known as the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-
14).
The Allies were fortunate in having, in John Churchill, first Duke of
Marlborough, the best general of the time, and one of the best generals of all
time: the war is famous in military history chiefly as the setting of his victories.
Where he commanded, the Allies never lost a battle. Yet Louis' obstinate
resistance, backed up as it was by the great majority of the peoples of both
France and Spain, prolonged the war from year to year. He recognized, indeed,
his ghastly error, and in L706 and 1708 offered to make a compromise peace;
but when his enemies foolishly refused his offers he fought on with the utmost
resolution; and in the end he outlasted the Alliance. For in 1711 a new
government came to power in England, determined to make peace even in the
teeth of the Austrians and the Dutch; and the result was the Treaty of Utrecht
(1713).

By this treaty Philip of Anjou was after all permitted to become king of Spain,
but had to renounce any claim he might have to the throne of France - indeed,
a special clause was inserted to the effect that France and Spain were never to
be united. Austria was given Milan and the Spanish Netherlands (which now,
therefore, began to be called the Austrian Netherlands). England retained
Gibraltar, which had been captured by Admiral Rooke in 1704, and received
also Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Hudson Bay, together with a monopoly
of the slave trade between Africa and America, and the right to send one
merchant-ship each year to trade with the Spanish colonies.
France gained little. It is true that a permanent alliance was gained with Spain
(it was later established formally as the "Family Compact"); but it was of little
worth. Spain's losses were such that she was never again a first-class power,
and France herself was too heavily embarrassed to be able to do much to help
her partner. France, indeed, was about to go into a long decline; and, although
this cannot fairly be blamed entirely on Louis XIV, it is a fact that by
overplaying his hand in the affair of the Spanish Succession, he lost for France
much of the greatness which he himself had gained for her in the earlier part of
his reign. Other nations were now to profit at her expense: the chief of them
her ancient enemy, England.
23. France And England
Between 1689 and 1815 England and France fought out a contest which is
called by some historians "the second Hundred Years' War"; of those hundred
and twenty-six years they spent sixty-one at open war with each other and
most of the other years in more or less covert opposition - diplomatic disputes,
commercial rivalry, frontier-fighting and the like. In every major European
conflict of the period, the French and the English are to be found on opposite
sides; however the relations of other European nations might change, however
their alliances or enmities might shift or waver, one thing remained constant:
the enmity between France and England. The wars in which they embroiled
themselves had many sources and involved many other nations; at the
beginning of the period the English formed part of a great European coalition
against Louis XIV, and at the end of it they were the mainspring of another
similar coalition against Napoleon; but it was not primarily for Europe's sake
that they were fighting in either case. The essential cause of the quarrel was
very simple. England, coming to her full national development, feeling her
strength and desirous of extending it, found herself faced, in her chosen fields
of expansion, by France. Just so, two centuries earlier, France had found herself
faced by the Hapsburgs; and, as the French had warred down the Hapsburg
power in the Empire, so the English were now to war down France and secure
for themselves the position they coveted.
England's development had been curiously delayed. Long before France had
England obtained a strong royal government: during the sixteenth century the
English Tudor s held powers which the French Valois could only impotently
envy. Yet during the seventeenth century it was England that was torn by
internal dissension, revolution and civil war, it was in England that the royal
power was weakened and finally destroyed, it was the English who had to
work out a new form of government before they could continue their national
development. In England as in France there was a struggle between the
nobility and the Crown, but in England the Crown lost, because it was dealing
with a different kind of nobility. The old feudal nobility with its old feudal
notions of local independence and co-operation, had died in the Wars of the
Roses; the new men who took hold of the land in the sixteenth century were of
a different stamp: rich merchants investing in sheep-farms, with a keen eye to
profits; adventurers of all sorts sharing in the monastic lands, with a contempt
for the old monastic or manorial ways, but with a firm determination to make
money, and to use that money in buying up more land. Thus England became
a country of big estates, owned by country gentlemen - "squires", as they were
called; a few of whom were great men with big titles, but the majority of
whom were well-content to be called plain "Squire", to live on their land and
see that it was properly worked and make as much out of it as they could. The
Russells, more successful than most, are still a typical example. Their fortunes
began when John Russell got possession of the abbey lands of Woburn, in
Bedfordshire, and became first Earl of Bedford. His successors preserved and
increased their lands by various and devious means, but also began the first
systematic efforts to drain the fens; during which efforts they deprived a great
many small landholders, fishers and fowlers of their rights and of their
livelihood, but also added many thousands of fertile acres to their own
inheritance and to the wealth of England.
Such were the men the Stuarts had to deal with - men very different, both for
good and evil, from the high nobility of France. Parliament was their
instrument - the House of Lords representing the greater nobility, while the
Commons represented the squires and the city merchants; and that is why the
history of England in the seventeenth century is mainly the history of a
struggle between King and Parliament. The details of that struggle do not
concern us here; it ended in 1688, when James II, the last King of England who
tried to act independently of Parliament, was deposed and replaced by William
of Orange. After that there was no question that Parliament was the dominant
power in England: England's government was an aristocracy, a "squirearchy."
It is the fashion nowadays to regard aristocratic government as conservative,
stay-at-home, stick-in-the-mud government; but the government of the English
squires was not at all of that kind. They were by tradition revolutionary and
"progressive"; they belonged for the most part to families whose fortunes had
been founded in the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century, and
confirmed by the great political revolution of the seventeenth; they had
overthrown the traditional religion and the traditional monarchy of England,
and were already beginning to change her traditional agricultural economy
into something very different. During the eighteenth century they were going
to pioneer the industrial revolution. It was natural that their policies, once they
had achieved power, should be expansive and progressive, with a particular eye
to commercial advantage. The trading and colonizing ventures which had been
begun by private groups of merchants and settlers would now be supported by
the full force of the State, and especially by the great weapon of naval power
which had been developed by the Stuarts and had now fallen into the hands of
their conquerors. But the main fields of English enterprise, North America and
India, were also being exploited by the French; and that explains how the two
nations came into conflict.
North America
The North American coast had been explored by the Cabots in the 1490's, and
in 1534 a French navigator, Jacques Cartier, had discovered the St. Lawrence;
but these voyages produced no immediate fruit. There was no obvious wealth
to attract settlers to those parts, the Spaniards and Portuguese had enough on
their hands already in central and southern America, and the English and
French were preoccupied at home. An attempt by the French Huguenots to
settle in Florida was destroyed by the Spaniards; an attempt by the English,
under the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh, to settle the land they called
Virginia was also a failure, because the original effort was not properly
sustained. At the turn of the sixteenth century, however, both English and
French made new and better-organized settlements: the French on the St.
Lawrence, in 1604, the English in the old colony of Virginia, in 1606.
The French were at first the more active, and certainly the better organized.
Under the great Champlain (one of the greatest and best of colonial
administrators) they explored the St. Lawrence and took a firm hold on that
great river, founding Quebec and Montreal, and pushing their exploring and
missionary parties as far as the Great Lakes. After savage wars with the
Iroquois, they extended their efforts further.
In 1673 a Jesuit missionary, Fr. Marquette, discovered the Mississippi; and in
1682 the explorer La Salle sailed down the mighty river to its mouth,
discovering and naming the country of Louisiana; and there a second French
colony was soon planted, with its capital at New Orleans. Thus the French had
got a firm hold on the two great rivers of the new continent; and they went on
to confirm their position by building a line of forts, on the St. Lawrence, on the
Richelieu and Lake Cham-plain, on the upper Ohio, and so to the Mississippi.
Louis-bourg, Quebec, Montreal, Ticonderoga, Crown Point, Fort Du-quesne,
were to be names of sinister meaning to the English colonists. Yet, for all their
enterprise and good organization, the French settlements were weak in one
decisive respect: they were chronically short of men. The French as a whole
were satisfied with their own country and had no desire to emigrate; the
Huguenots, who would have been glad to do so, were forbidden by Richelieu
to enter the colonies; and those Frenchmen who did come to America were
chiefly moved to do so by a desire for a freer and more adventurous life than
they could find in Europe - they were the "coureurs de bois", the wood-
runners, who spent their lives hunting and trapping and exploring; they were
incomparable woodsmen and first-rate scouts, but quite incapable of forming a
settled community. As late as 1756, there were only 100,000 Frenchmen in
America.
At the same date, there were over 2,000,000 English, scattered in thirteen
separate and quarrelsome colonies along the eastern seaboard. For if the
English had numbers, they had no unity. Many Englishmen (to say nothing of
the Irish, Scots and Welsh) were found willing to emigrate in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries; but they migrated for very different reasons. Some
were enterprising "merchant venturers", like the founders of the Virginia
Company; some came to America to escape religious persecution, like the
Puritans who founded the New England colonies, the Catholics who settled
Maryland, or the Quakers of Pennsylvania; others again were transported
convicts, who might be thieves or murderers, or just rebels against the form of
government which happened to be in power in England at the time. Even
when these troubles had been ended by the Revolution of 1688, the new
Parliamentary government of England took no care to unify the colonies: they
were looked on as sources of commercial profit, and their trade was strictly
preserved to England, but for their political guidance England took no care. A
governor was appointed for each colony, but he was given little support from
home, and the real power fell into the hands of the elected colonial assemblies.
Hence there was no real colonial policy; each colony had its own policy, except
insofar as it might be forced or persuaded to act with the other colonies for
mutual protection against Indians or French.

In the circumstances, it is easy to see why this struggle in America was so long
in reaching its climax. The English settlers were constantly expanding and
taking in more ground, but in a haphazard sort of way; the French were
constantly strengthening their grip on the rivers in preparation for the clash
which must come if the English expansion continued. Where the settlements
of the two nations touched already, in the north, outposts were almost
continually being won and lost in a kind of stealthy guerilla warfare that was
winked at by the home governments. The first recognition of the importance
of the American colonies came in the Treaty of Utrecht, when the English
insisted on the acquisition of Acadie (Nova Scotia), Newfoundland and Hudson
Bay. The French repaired their position by making Louisbourg the strongest
fortress in the Western world. In the next general European war, the War of
the Austrian Succession (1740-48), an English expedition succeeded in
capturing Louisbourg, but it was given back at the peace in exchange for the
Indian fort of Madras, which had been taken by the French. The French
celebrated this success by building Fort Duquesne and defeating two
"unofficial" attempts to capture it - the first led by a young American named
Washington, and the second by an old Englishman named Braddock. And that
was the situation when the Seven Years' War broke out in 1756.
Why did this war make such a difference? It is customary to give the credit to
William Pitt, who came to power in 1757: "the greatest war-minister England
has ever had". Some historians dispute this claim, but for the war in America I
believe it still holds good. The English had long had the strength to beat the
French, if they had chosen to use it effectively; after 1757 it was used
effectively, according to a concerted plan. A "pincer-movement" was worked
out; Fort Duquesne was to be taken, and a land-force was to advance up the
Richelieu to the St. Lawrence; a sea-force was to take Louisbourg and sail up
the St. Lawrence from the sea; the two forces were to combine to take Quebec.
Like most plans, this plan did not work out exactly as it had been planned; but
it was essentially successful, in that by 1759 the English were able to bring an
army up the river to Quebec. It is a famous circumstance that both the
commanding officers, Wolfe and Montcalm, were killed in their hour of
victory and defeat. That victory and defeat settled the fate of North America:
by the Peace of Paris, in 1763, the French gave up Canada and all their holdings
east of the Mississippi; and, though they still retained claims to land west of
that river, they made no attempt to exploit them. A few years later, in fact,
they sold those claims to Spain; many years later, they were acquired by the
United States.
India
The situation in India was altogether different from that in America, just as the
two countries themselves were different. North America, with its temperate
climate, its enormous untouched forests and wide prairies, sparsely inhabited
by a few half-savage tribes, was a land crying out for European settlement, and
incapable of yielding its wealth until it had been settled and developed. India
was a tropical country, and a country already for long ages densely populated
and well-developed by peoples of high culture, with a religious and social
system strange to European eyes, but profoundly considered and well
organized; peoples, too, whose military skill and prowess were not inferior to
those of Europeans. It is true that when the Portuguese first appeared on the
coast India had no unity; but during the course of the sixteenth century a
considerable measure of unity was imposed on the Indians by the
Mohammedan conquerors who called themselves Moguls and founded the
Mogul Empire. The greatest of these was Akbar (1556-1605), who was
wealthier and more powerful than any European prince of his age, and his
successors on the whole maintained and increased his empire, till under
Aurungzebe (1658-1707) it did actually come to include the whole of India. In
these circumstances, there could be no question of European settlement or
conquest. Europeans were in India as traders, and their "forts" were primarily
trading-stations equipped with defensive works and a few soldiers in case of
war. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the English and the French had established
such posts, leased from the natives with the permission of the Grand Mogul or
his local representative, and till the beginning of the eighteenth century it did
not look as though they would ever possess more of India. Nor did they greatly
desire to. They were merchants, not warriors, and were anxious (the English
East India Company in particular) to avoid the expense of warlike preparations.
What changed this situation was the swift collapse of the Mogul power after
the death of Aurungzebe. That power had always been alien to India and
difficult to maintain, and after 1707, when there was no longer a strong man to
maintain it, it quickly faded into a mere shadow. Everywhere in India generals
or local governors began to try and build up kingdoms of their own, or the old
Indian princely families who had been conquered by the Moguls began to
reassert their independence. The state of India degenerated into a welter of
confusion and civil war, complicated by such external invasions as that of Nadir
Shah of Persia, who in 1739 sacked the Mogul capital of Delhi and carried its
treasures back to his own country. In these circumstances the Europeans were
forced to provide for their own defence; and, what with the expense of this,
what with the falling off of trade caused by the general anarchy, their position
became ever more difficult. It was a Frenchman, Dupleix, who first saw how
this state of affairs could be turned to the advantage of his country. He saw that
India must henceforth be ruled by the strong hand, and he saw a European
power could make itself stronger than any other power in India. During the
seventeenth century the military skill of Europeans had immensely improved,
chiefly through the introduction into European armies of proper training,
discipline and organization. Dupleix perceived that Indians were not savages,
that they were capable of being trained, disciplined and organized like
Europeans, and that a force of such soldiers ("sepoys", as they came to be
called) would be far more than a match for any other native troops. With such
a force the French could set up and pull down princes as they liked, and make
themselves the real rulers of India; and thus they could get rid of all their rivals,
and make the commerce and wealth of India their own. He determined to
begin with the state of Carnatic, in which were situated the French post of
Pondicherri and the English post of Madras - he would set a prince of his own
choosing on the throne of the Carnatic, and through him expel the English
once and for all.
Dupleix's mistake lay in forgetting that two could play at that game, and that
the English were likely in the long run to get better support from home than
the French. At first, indeed, the latter carried all before them, and the pitifully
small and ill-organized English forces could do nothing. But then the English
authorities, seeking everywhere for volunteers, found a soldier of genius in a
young clerk named Robert Clive: a man whose firmness of will, rapidity of
decision and of movement, and power of inspiring his men with the utmost
ardour and devotion, mark him out as one of the great captains. In 1751 the
French were besieging the last stronghold of the prince whom the English
favoured, the fortress of Tri-chinopoly; Clive, with a small force, marched
boldly into the heart of the enemy's country and captured the rival capital of
Arcot, which he then held against all assaults for fifty days, until the power of
the besiegers was broken. After that everything went ill for the French; and in
1754 the French authorities showed their poor grasp of the situation and their
lack of resolution by recalling Dupleix; whereas the English East India
Company, though very parsimonious, did continue to support Clive.
The recall of Dupleix marked, as we can now see, the end of any real possibility
of a French empire in India. Nevertheless, the French continued to trouble the
English for some time to come. There were still many French adventurers in
India, skilful and gallant men who had imbibed the ideas of Dupleix, who
offered themselves to native princes as soldiers or political advisers, and often
succeeded in playing important parts in Indian war or politics. It was partly by
a group of such Frenchmen that the ruler of Bengal (called by the English
Surajah Dowlah) was induced to attack and capture the English "fort" at
Calcutta in 1757. (It was for long asserted that he murdered most of the English
prisoners by having them shut up in a narrow room called the "Black Hole"
during an Indian summer night; but this story is of doubtful authenticity.) At
any rate, when Clive brought a small army up from Madras, the French from
Chandernagore fought alongside the troops of Surajah Dowlah. Their efforts
were vain. Part of the prince's army deserted him, and the rest could not or
would not confront the fire of the English and their sepoys. At Plassey Clive
won a complete victory, and proceeded to put his own nominee on the throne
of Bengal, as he had already done on the throne of the Carnatic. An attempt by
the French to retrieve their fortunes was defeated by another English
commander, Eyre Coote, at the battle of Wandewash in 1760. At the Peace of
Paris, which closed the Seven Years' War in 1763, it was agreed that the French
were to keep their settlements at Pondicherri and Chandernagore, but were
not to fortify them - in other words, they were allowed to go on trading in
India, but were to leave political and military arrangements in the hands of the
English.
It was in this way that, against their will, the shareholders and directors of the
East India Company were led along the road to empire. They were to find it
even more of a burden than they had anticipated. They were now in control of,
and responsible for, the two immense and populous provinces of the Carnatic
and Bengal; they had to learn how to rule these, and at the same time how to
deal with the disorder which continued to rage through the rest of India and
constantly threatened to spill over their borders. How they set about their task
belongs, however, to another sector of history.
By 1763 the struggle between England and France was practically finished: it
was decided that England, and not France, was to be the great commercial and
colonial power. The French, though, were not yet willing to admit defeat, and
two strange accidents gave them opportunities, as it seemed, to recover some
of their lost ground. The revolt of the American colonists against England, and
the consequent War of American Independence (1775-83), is an extremely
important episode in the world's history, and we shall consider it later on in its
appropriate place; here we have only to note that this entanglement of the
English in a distant, difficult and unpopular war offered the French a great
temptation to seek their revenge, and in fact they declared war in 1778, and
persuaded Spain to do likewise in 1779; and the English government itself was
rash enough to declare war on the Dutch for helping the Americans. The result
was that England's naval resources were seriously overstrained, and her
command of the sea was successfully challenged for a time both in American
and Indian waters by admirals like Suffren and D'Estaing. Indeed, it was the
French naval power that made it possible for the Americans to win the decisive
action of the war, the capture of Yorktown in 1781. In the following year,
however, Rodney re-established England's supremacy by his victory in the
West Indies at the "Battle of the Saints"; and at the Treaty of Versailles in 1783,
though the Americans received their independence, the French recovered little
of their former empire. The French government was not, in fact, very anxious
to recover it. The immense difficulties, financial and other, which within six
more years led to the outbreak of the Revolution, were already pressing hard
on France; and in the circumstances colonial ambitions seemed out of place. At
any rate, the French showed no such ambitions at Versailles in 1783.
Yet fifteen years later the whole business was revived again by the appearance
on the French scene of the brilliant genius of Napoleon Bonaparte. His career
we shall study later; here we have only to note that his efforts to establish a
French colonial empire failed: partly because, an incorrigible landsman, he did
not thoroughly understand the difficulties involved, partly because the French
navy had been hopelessly disorganized by the Revolution, and partly because
the English navy was, on the contrary, in a high state of efficiency, and was
commanded at the decisive moment by perhaps the finest admiral in the
history of the sea, Horatio Nelson. The net result of Napoleon's efforts was to
leave England indisputably mistress of the seas both in commerce and in war -
a fact which was to determine the history, not only of England taut of a large
part of the world, during the nineteenth century.
24. Russia
There is no natural barrier between Europe and Asia, Europe being only the
north-western offshoot of the great Asiatic land-mass. Geographically, it is
distinguished from its mother-continent chiefly by the continual presence of
the ocean - the Atlantic, which washes all its western shores and deeply
interpenetrates it through that strange group of landlocked basins which we
call the Mediterranean, the Black, the Baltic, the North and the Irish seas. This
perpetual presence and flow of saltwater does certainly give Europe a
character, an atmosphere and a climate all its own, very different from the
savage alternations of intense heat and cold, of barren aridity and steamy
jungle, that mark the immense areas of Asia and Africa; and the same influence
has certainly affected very greatly the character, habits and history of the
European peoples. Yet there is one part of Europe hardly touched by the sea.
The tremendous plateau of central Asia, tilted towards the north and west,
slopes down into an almost equally tremendous plain, which itself rolls away
northward to the Arctic ocean and westward to the Baltic Sea. It is sliced in
two by the low ridge of the Ural mountains, the traditional boundary of
Europe, but they are no real barrier, and the fact is that all those thousands of
miles of flat prairie, steppe, and tundra, occasionally diversified by low rolling
hills, and watered by the vast windings of immense rivers (the Volga, the Don,
the Dnieper, the Vistula, the Ob, the Yenisei and the rest), are, in climate and
appearance, much more Asiatic than European.
Yet they have been possessed for centuries - no-one knows how long - by
Europeans: by the Slavs, an authentic branch of the white race from which all
the European peoples are sprung. Some historians think that that is why the
Slavs seem strange compared with other Europeans: they are Europeans
brought up in a non-European environment. There may be some truth in that;
at any rate, it is well to emphasize from the beginning this peculiarity of their
environment, which still persists. For, though the Slavs have long been divided
into various national groups (Russians, Poles, Czechs, Serbs etc.), and have
spread into various parts of eastern Europe, most of them still inhabit the great
plains that roll east away from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Caspian and
the Asiatic uplands. Nowadays most of this plain is included in Russia, and
most of the Slavs are called Russians.
Russia, however, was long in the making. The Slavs originally had no more
unity than the Germanic tribes to their west. The first beginnings of a "state"
seem to have been forced upon them by the Viking invaders of the 9th century.
It seems clear that the Vikings set up some kind of kingdom with a capital at
Kieff, in what is now the Ukraine or "little Russia"; it is certain that from this
centre they raided Constantinople, that they were eventually beaten off by the
Eastern Empire, and that (like the Vikings who attacked western Europe) they
submitted to Christianity after their defeat. Then they were gradually absorbed
into the native population and disappeared. It would be vain to look for Viking
blood in a modern Russian; yet under the Viking domination, crude and savage
as it was, the Russians gained their first contacts with civilization and
Christianity, and began themselves to be settled, civilized and Christian.
One might have thought that here were the beginnings of a Slav kingdom, or
empire; but in the llth century there befell a great disaster. In the year 1054 the
eastern half of the Church, with its centre at Constantinople, broke away from
the western half, with its centre at Rome; and the Russian Christians, who had
been converted from Constantinople, followed its lead and became Eastern, or
"Orthodox", Christians. This step isolated them from the reviving West, and
bound them to the decaying Eastern Empire. Worse, it produced a schism
among the Slavs themselves. For the western Slavs were converted from the
West, and remained loyal to Rome; and thus the Poles and the Lithuanians
became mortal enemies of the Russians and the Ukrainians, so that the latter
were still more decisively cut off from the West.
Every influence thus seemed to be turning the Russians eastwards; and then, as
if all this were not enough, there fell on them in the 13th century the invasion
of the Tartars. I have said something in another chapter about this great raid;
for Russia it was no mere raid but an actual conquest. For two centuries the
Russians remained tributaries of the Tartars; and what with that domination,
and the hostility of Poland, and the advance of the Turks through the Balkans,
Russia's isolation from the West became complete, and the Russians became
increasingly oriental in their modes and manners of life. They would probably
have been absorbed into Asia but for the power of their religion. For Russia, as
for Spain, the infidel invasion aroused an intense religious fervour, and it was
during this period that the Russians became the most religious of European
peoples; though it is true, as we have seen, that even their Christianity had an
oriental strain.
Apart from this, the most important result of the Tartar conquest was the
growth in power of the princes of Moscow. Russia had never yet been united;
but her centre, as far as she had a centre, had been Kieff in the Ukraine. The
Tartars destroyed the dominance of Kieff, and Russia became a medley of small
states ruled by petty princelings, each busily intriguing and trying to curry
favour with the Tartar khans against the rest. During the 14th century the
princes of Moscow were more successful in this than the others, and they
prospered accordingly; though the Tartars might have foreseen that, by thus
favouring one tributary at the expense of others, they were only training up a
scorpion to sting them. Their empire was shattered, in any case in the second
half of the 14th century, by the famous Mongol conqueror, Timur
(Tamerlane); and, though his conquests died with him in 1405, the power of
the Tartars never really recovered. On the contrary, their tributaries generally
took the opportunity of asserting a greater or less degree of independence, and
during the first half of the 15th century, the princes of Moscow made it plain
that they were rather allies than subjects of the khans.
They continued, nevertheless, to acknowledge some form of Tartar suzerainty
down to the time of Ivan III (1462-1505). Ivan III deserves, more than any other
man, to be called the founder of Russia. On the one hand, he brought most of
the other Russian states under his rule (destroying, for instance, the republics
of Novgorod and Pskoff), and thus creating for the first time a great Russian
state. On the other hand, he finally asserted the independence of Moscow from
Tartar control. And he has a third title to fame, though it was gained without
his knowledge or intention - he married a princess of the Eastern Empire, and
thus enabled his successors to claim that the traditional power of the Emperors
had, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, been transferred to Moscow.
Moscow was thus claimed to be "the third Rome", the repository of imperial
and Christian tradition; and the title of Czar (Caesar) which the princes of
Moscow assumed, was held to mark them out as the successors of Augustus
and Justinian.
All the same, Russia remained cut off from the West; indeed it remained a
semi-barbarian kingdom. A few Italians were invited to his court by Ivan III -
among them the architect Solari who built the Kremlin; but they failed to
appeal to the Russian soul, and the Renaissance passed Russia by. Ivan Ill's
grandson, named for excellent reasons Ivan the Terrible, might stand as a type
of the intelligent savagery which marks the Russian rulers of this epoch. He
succeeded to the throne as a minor, and during his minority suffered much
from the insolence of the nobles; and accordingly, as soon as he was able to
assert himself, he set to work to reduce them to strict obedience. They
naturally resisted; and the most energetic and ruthless means were used to
coerce them - means which were effective at the moment, since they induced
in the Czar's opponents a terrified submission, but which did not produce any
permanent effect. Indeed, Ivan the Terrible made sure that the power of the
nobles would rise again when, in a fit of fury, he murdered his eldest son and
left the throne to a weakling. Yet he has a high place in Russian history, for all
his crimes and cruelty; for he conquered Kazan and Astrakhan, and thus
extended Russia's boundaries to the Caspian; and during his reign the
Stroganoffs began the occupation of Siberia; though on the other hand, Ivan
failed to fulfil his desires of reaching either the Black Sea or the Baltic.
His death in 1584 was followed by a period of confusion and civil war, and
eventually by a Polish invasion. Ivan's incapable son, Theodore, was a puppet
managed by this or that faction among the nobles; he died, in any case, without
issue, and for some years the succession to the throne was disputed among the
same factions; the king of Poland took advantage of the confusion to intervene
and propose a candidate of his own, whom he actually succeeded in
establishing at Moscow. However, this threat to their independence and (as
they thought) to their religion roused the people of Russia as a whole, and
particularly the minor nobility and the middle class, and in the end they proved
strong enough to defeat both the Polish designs and the intrigues of the greater
nobles, and to have elected as Czar Michael Romanoff - the first Czar of the
family which was to rule Russia down to the Revolution of 1917. The unity of
Russian was thus restored, and the period of troubles had revealed the
existence of a genuine national feeling which might become the basis of a
strong state; but Russia was still far from being such a state, and the first three
Romanoffs, between 1611 and 1682, did little to make her one. It is true that
during these years Western influences began to creep into Russia along the
channels of commerce and diplomacy; but it is not likely that they would have
had much effect. What changed the history of Russia, and of Europe, and of
the world, was the appearance on the Russian throne of a great genius.
Peter the Great (1682-1725)
Everyone admits the "greatness" of Czar Peter I, but historians are much
divided in the judgments of his character. He was a man of immense strength
and energy, both in body and mind; but he allowed his strength to express itself
in very different ways. On the one hand, he seems sometimes to be a type of
the worst kind of oriental despot: treating his country and its inhabitants as if
they were merely his personal property, ruthlessly repressing opposition and
treating rebellion with horrible cruelties, having his own son tortured to death
for daring to disagree with his designs - and withal indulging himself from time
to time in savage debauches, the details of which are scarcely printable. On the
other hand, he is the man who introduced into Russia Western civilization,
who re-made Russia into a Western nation and a European power, whose
work is the foundation of nearly all the later political, economic, social and
cultural development of Russia - even of the great masterpieces of Russian
literature, for without the inspiration of Western ideas, and without the reform
of the language which Peter set on foot, those masterpieces could hardly have
been born. The memory of his great services to his country must be tempered
by the thought of the abominable methods by which they were sometimes
performed; but there is this to be said for Peter, that his own upbringing was
not a very humanizing one. He himself needed civilizing as much as anyone
else in Russia. His greatness lies in the fact that he realized that, and set to work
to remedy the state of affairs that produced it, and thus made it difficult for any
future Czar to be as savage as Peter the Great.
It is not easy to decide how far he was conscious of the importance of what he
was doing. He seems by nature to have been interested in mechanics, and at
first it was the superiority of the West in such practical arts as ship-building,
engineering and architecture that impressed him; but he soon found more
important things to admire, and he seems before long to have firmly decided
that the future of civilization lay with Europe, not Asia, and that Russia must
throw in her lot definitely with Europe if she was to share Europe's destiny. If
he had not come to this conclusion, he would hardly have pursued the policy
of westernizing Russia with such thoroughness, determination and energy. It is
a conclusion that shows rare insight: at that time, when the Turks were still
capable of threatening Vienna, Europe's superiority was not so very obvious;
but it was a correct conclusion, and Russia benefited accordingly.
To put down in order all that Peter did, from his early experiments in boat-
building to the establishment of St. Petersburg, would be an endless task; we
can only list a few of the more important ones. To begin with his political
changes, one may sum them up by saying that he transformed the government
of Russia from a sort of oriental feudal despotism to an up-to-date absolute
monarchy on the lines laid down by Louis XIV. He set up departments of state
staffed by permanent officials selected by and dependent on the Czar. As he
had not, like Louis XIV, a wealthy educated middle-class to draw on, he had to
choose these men from among the nobility; but he saw to it that they should
be his men, selected and trained under his eye, and dependent throughout their
careers on his will; he compelled the ancient families of Russia to offer recruits
for his service, on pain of losing their nobility if they refused, but he also
offered, of course, to the chosen ones more splendid careers than they could
have dreamed of under the old regime. It was a clever scheme and, up to a
point, a very effective one; but it was not entirely successful. The government
of Russia became far more efficient than it had been, and yet it did not reach,
either under Peter or under his successors, the standard set by the great
Western powers - financial corruption in particular, that curse of oriental
politics, could not be eliminated even by Peter the Great. All the same, he now
controlled Russia as none of his predecessors had done. Even the Church (the
Orthodox Church, that is) was brought strictly under his command, and he set
up a special department, the Holy Synod, to administer its affairs. (In the long
run this turned out badly - the Orthodox Church in Russia suffered from
political control even more than the Catholic Church in France; but the
immediate effects of Peter's interference were probably good.)
The economic and cultural changes he introduced were as far-reaching as the
political ones. He was desperately anxious to get the Russians to work and
think like Europeans. Early in his reign he himself undertook that famous
journey through the West in search of enlightenment, not only to visit the
court of Louis XIV, but also to work in the ship-yards of Holland and England;
and he took with him fifty young Russians who were intended to learn the lore
of the West and teach it to their countrymen. All through his reign he was
continually sending selected men to study abroad, and offering the most
favourable terms to Western experts of all kinds (soldiers, sailors, merchants,
manufacturers, engineers, artists) to induce them to settle in Russia. He was
above all anxious to extend Russia's trade with the West, realizing that only the
constant intercourse of commerce could keep Russia permanently in touch
with the West; and the desire for a port, an outlet, a "window on the West,"
was the mainspring of his foreign policy all his reign. On a higher plane, he
imported western books, western music, western statues and paintings and the
rest, began the collection which made St. Petersburg one of the great artistic
centres of Europe, and laid the foundations on which later Russians,
particularly in music and literature, have raised such splendid achievements.
Even in what might seem more trivial matters, in matters of personal and
social habit, Peter was earnest that the Russians should forsake their ancient
traditions and follow the fashions of the West. Russian men still wore the
dignified but cumbersome oriental gown, still sported the luxuriant beard and
the spreading moustaches; Peter would have them wear breeches and go clean-
shaven. Russian women still lived in oriental seclusion, and veiled their faces
before venturing into the streets; Peter would have his nobles bring their wives
and daughters to court balls and banquets, dressed and adorned after the
fashion of Versailles. He well understood the importance of such "trivialities";
he well understood that nothing would so strongly turn men's minds to the
West as to make them follow the West in their personal habits, their everyday
lives. Certainly none of his other changes provoked such obstinate resistance.
The new ways were condemned as indecent and irreligious, and Peter could
only enforce them by repeated efforts - some of them comic, as when he
summoned to him a number of the great nobles, produced a large pair of
shears, and snipped off their beards with his own hand, others horrible, as
when the "Streltsi", the royal troops revolted, and two thousand of them were
tortured to death in the streets, while Peter spent his days enjoying their
struggles and shrieks and his nights in drunken revels. As you would expect, in
the end he got his way.
Naturally, few of these changes would have been possible but for the new
army. A reliable standing army is the necessary weapon of an absolute ruler.
The former Russian army had consisted either of feudal levies controlled by the
nobles, or of privileged guards like the Streltsi who were almost equally
difficult to manage. Peter soon determined to have an army on the new model
which Louis XIV had established: a permanent force of professional
mercenaries, perfectly armed and disciplined, and totally dependent, both
officers and men, on the king their master. Without such an army Russian
resistance could never have been overcome; with such an army, there was no
power in Russia that could withstand the Czar's will. Quite early in his reign
Peter had perceived that, and had brought in officers from various parts of
Europe to raise and train for him the kind of army he wanted. It proved to be
even more necessary in foreign affairs, however, than in enforcing his domestic
policies.
Peter's foreign policy was as simple as could be imagined. He wanted a port - at
first, perhaps, merely as a means of indulging his love of ships and the sea,
though he soon came to see that a port towards the west was essential to his
general policy. The White Sea was Russia's only outlet, and it was rendered
useless by ice for a great part of the year. The other possibilities were the Black
Sea and the Baltic. The Black Sea offered the better prospects: it was quite free
from ice, and it gave access to the Mediterranean. True, it was held by the
formidable power of the Turks, but Peter hoped his new army would prove a
match for them; in 1695 he declared war and led his men against the fortress of
Azoff. It was his first campaign, and a disastrous one; the Turks beat him
soundly, destroyed his siege artillery and forced him to retire. The result was
unexpected. Peter was roused to one of those bursts of furious energy which so
often during his life enabled him to achieve the apparently impossible. He not
only reorganized his forces: he conscripted 26,000 labourers and built a fleet on
the Don, and the following year besieged Azoff by sea and land. It fell in two
months, and Peter returned to Moscow in triumph.
Yet this experience taught him that the Turks were too tough to be handled by
Russia alone, and when in the following year he made his famous journey to
the West, one of his objects was to bring about a great European coalition
against them. He failed, of course. The Western powers were eagerly or
anxiously awaiting the death of the King of Spain and the disposal of his
empire, and had no desire to be entangled in other adventures; and Peter
reluctantly concluded that he would have to make peace with Turkey and turn
his attention from the Black Sea to the Baltic. The prospects here looked more
promising. It is true that Russia would have to fight Sweden, and Sweden was
still a major power; but her King Charles XI had just died, and Charles XII, his
son, was an unknown and inexperienced youngster of sixteen, and the newly-
elected king of Poland, Augustus II, was willing enough to join Peter in
attacking him. A bargain was soon struck. Long negotiations with Turkey
delayed matters, but a thirty year truce was signed at last in July, 1700, and in
August the Russian army was ordered to invade the Baltic province of Livonia.
Thus lightheartedly did Peter begin the great Northern War.
It was to last for twenty-one years, and to test the new Russia to the uttermost.
Sweden was not a large power, but she was splendidly organized and had a
great military tradition; and Charles XII turned out to be a genius. In sheer
energy he was Peter's equal, and probably his superior in intelligence and
military skill; but luckily for Russia he was an extravagant and unstable genius,
perpetually making plans and embarking on enterprises that were beyond his
available resources. It was lucky, too, that Denmark had an old quarrel with
Sweden, and was willing to join the coalition against her. Even so, everything
at first went wrong for the allies. Charles XII opened the war brilliantly by
outmanoeuvring the Danes and forcing them to a settlement; he then
transported his army swiftly to the other end of the Baltic and inflicted on the
Russians the terrible defeat of Narva; finally he turned south against Poland.
But Poland is a big country, and during the next few years Charles was engaged
in traversing its vast plains and bringing it under effective control, and in
establishing his own nominee, Stanislaus Leszczynski, as its king. Peter
meanwhile was obtaining a firm grip on the Gulf of Finland, his main object
throughout the war, and in beginning the building there of his new capital, St.
Petersburg, and of a Baltic fleet. By 1707 Charles had settled the affairs of
Poland to his satisfaction, and was ready to try conclusions with his main
antagonist. Luckily for Peter, the Swedish hero's ambitious and visionary mind
led him into undertaking a wholesale invasion and conquest of Russia - he
boasted that he would dictate terms of peace from Moscow - and Peter was
able to do what many Russian commanders since his time have done: to use
the great size of his country, to retire before the invader and draw him on
across those interminable plains until his army was exhausted, and then to turn
on and overwhelm him by force of numbers. He was helped again by Charles'
obstinacy, which led him to prolong his enormous march beyond all bounds of
reason, till at length, in June, 1709, 20,000 exhausted and starving Swedes were
confronted by 80,000 Russians at Pultowa, and utterly routed and dispersed.
Charles himself escaped, but was forced to take refuge across the Turkish
border.

This was the turning-point in the long struggle. Not that Charles XII gave in:
he was not the sort of man to give in, and both by his diplomacy and his
military prowess he made plenty of trouble for many years - until, in fact, he
was killed at the siege of Fredrikssten in 1718; but Sweden had lost the war
long before. Peter's grip on the Gulf of Finland was unbreakable, and his great
new port and capital of St. Petersburg was already an accomplished fact -
though the Swedes refused to yield to the inevitable till 1721. On the map
Russia's gains do not look very important; but in fact they were vital. From this
time forward Russia was a western power and a force in European politics, in
which she was to play an increasingly important part. On the other hand,
Sweden's greatness was finished, and the Swedes had to accustom themselves
to being a small nation, outside the main stream of history. The entrance of
Russia on the stage was, however, far more important than the exit of Sweden;
the struggle between Peter the Great and Charles XII was, from that point of
view, one of the most important in history: one of the few wars that have
really affected the future of the world.
25. The Kingdom Of Prussia
Most of the great states of Europe in the 18th century (the states into which we
have watched Europe being divided) were national states: that is, they were
based on a unity of race and language and tradition, a unity which was
symbolized for them by their loyalty to their respective kings. Two of them,
however, were not national, but dynastic: that is, they were composed of
different peoples with different traditions, united only by their common loyalty
to a dynasty, or ruling House. These two were Austria, the state of the
Hapsburg, and Prussia, the state of the Hohenzollerns. Of the Austrian empire
we shall say something later on; now we must consider the growth of Prussia.
Prussia proper is the land that lies east and west of the mouth of the Vistula, at
the south-eastern end of the Baltic Sea; but the Prussian kingdom did not begin
there. It began in the little Mark of Brandenburg, a small stretch of rather poor
and sandy country in northern Germany, between the Elbe and the Oder,
which in the early Middle Ages was an outpost of the Holy Roman Empire
against the then pagan Slavs. As time went on, and the Germans gradually
edged their way eastwards, the Brandenburgers were naturally in the van of
the movement; between 1000 and 1400 they fought their way to the Elbe and
pressed on beyond it in the direction of the Vistula, though with increasing
difficulty as the Poles began to organize themselves. Still, the Brandenburgers
had considerable success, and to help them to hold their gains and to keep on
expanding they encouraged immigration from all quarters: anyone was
welcome in Brandenburg if he was ready to work and fight. Thus the
population of the Mark became a curiously mixed one, while remaining
decidedly warlike. It also remained poor, like the country itself; there were no
great nobles in Brandenburg, but just a lot of small country squires, rough and
tough and half-barbarous, ready to fight at the drop of a hat, and ready to
follow any leader who would show them good fighting, but difficult to control.
With this early history of the Mark the Hohenzollerns had nothing to do. They
were a family that had risen to prominence in southern Germany, chiefly by
their fighting qualities and their steadfast loyalty to the Emperors. Early in the
15th century, the Emperor Sigismund (whose father had acquired Brandenburg
and passed it on to him) was looking round for someone to whom he could
entrust this frontier-province, and it was natural that he should pitch on his
friend and supporter, Frederick von Hohenzollern, Burgrave of Nuremburg,
who accordingly became Elector of Brandenburg in 1417. This Frederick
proved an excellent ruler. In particular, by a skilful mingling of force and
persuasion, and with the help of the Church, he reduced the squires to order;
and not only that, but he laid the foundation of the intense personal loyalty to
his House which maintained it for 500 years.
Meantime, what of Prussia? During the 13th century the eastern end of the
Baltic became the main field of action of the Teutonic Order. This was one of
the military orders, like the Templars and Hospitallers. It was founded later
than the others, in 1190, at a time when (as it turned out) the cause of the
crusade in Palestine was practically lost; and during the 13th century the
Knights turned their attention to countries nearer home, and undertook the
conquest and conversion of the pagan peoples at the eastern end of the Baltic:
the Prussians, Lithuanians and Letts. Their success was extraordinary. They
were helped, of course, by wandering crusaders from other parts of Europe
(Chaucer's Knight, for instance:
Full ofte tyme he had the bord bigonne
Aboven all naciouns in Pruce;
In Lettow had he reysed and in Ruce ...");
but the main work, both of fighting and of organizing, was done by the Order
itself, and by 1350 it had obtained a solid block of territory stretching from west
of the Vistula to the Gulf of Finland. The methods used by the Knights, their
"muscular Christianity", were not always admirable; but they deserve credit
for Christianizing and civilizing these savage peoples, as also for developing the
latent wealth of those wastelands by introducing German settlers and
merchants, and founding such important cities as Danzig, Konigsberg and
Memel. Their form of government, of course, was military; and thus Prussia
was stamped with the same kind of warlike tradition as Brandenburg, though
in a different way.
Unfortunately, the Teutonic Order shared in the general decline in the
religious spirit that marks the 15th century. The Knights neglected their
monastic rule and forgot their crusading obligations. The advance of the Turks
left them unmoved. But this decline in fervour on the part of the Knights
coincided with an increase of the national spirit in Poland, and in particular
with the growth of a determination on the part of the Poles to break through
to the Baltic and become a maritime nation. The consequent wars went in
favour of Poland. The Knights suffered a first heavy defeat in 1410 at
Tannenburg, though it was not until 1466 that they were finally beaten. Then,
however, they had to cede to Poland West Prussia and the city of Danzig (and
consequently, the mouth of the Vistula), and to consent to hold East Prussia as
vassals of the Polish Crown. After this the decline of the Order was rapid, and
by the end of the century, threatened by Poles, Swedes and Russians, the
Knights adopted the custom of electing as their High Master a member of
some princely German family, in the hope of thus getting German help against
their non-German foes. It was in this way and for this reason that, in 1511, they
elected Albert von Hohenzollern.
Albert was not in any sense a religious man. He accepted the High Mastership
purely to further his secular ambitions, and when Protestantism began to
spread in Germany, it did not take him long to decide that the best thing he
could do was to adopt the new faith, secularize the Order, and make himself
hereditary ruler of its lands. He found sufficient support among the Knights for
his project, obtained the consent of King Sigismund of Poland by promising to
hold his lands as a vassal of Poland, and in 1525 was invested by Sigismund
with the Duchy of Prussia. However, the associated branch of the Knights
which held the northern provinces of the Order refused to follow Albert's lead,
and West Prussia, of course, remained Polish, so that he had to be content with
East Prussia as his domain. His son married the heiress of the little Rhineland
duchies of Julien, Cleves and Berg, and in 1618 died without issue; the Elector
of Brandenburg, after some trouble, succeeded in establishing his claim to
inherit these lands; and thus the Hohenzollern state began to be a real force in
northern Europe: firmly planted in the centre at Brandenburg, and reaching
out with one hand beyond the Vistula and with the other to the Rhine.

From 1619 to 1640, (that is, during the greater part of the Thirty Years' War),
the Elector was unfortunately George William von Hohenzollern, the silliest
and most wretchedly incompetent of all the rulers of his House. He could not
make up his mind what part to play in the War, but wavered inconstantly from
side to side; the natural result being that his lands were invaded and ravaged
impartially by both sides, and more especially by the Swedes, and he himself in
the end abandoned Brandenburg to the fortunes of war and fled to East
Prussia, outside the field of conflict, where his inglorious death closed "a reign
of twenty-one years, full of misfortunes and humiliations". The Hohenzollern
power then lay in ruins; yet, by one of the ironies of history, the son of this
drunken waster, Frederick William, is commonly and deservedly called the
Great Elector.
Like many of those who have received the title of "Great", Frederick William
was a man without scruples; we must fairly add, though, that he did a great
deal for the welfare of his subjects as well as for the aggrandizement of the
House of Hohenzollern. He began by making a firm peace with the Swedes
who were in possession of Brandenburg, thus setting them free to employ their
forces elsewhere against the Emperor, who was thus powerless to retaliate. He
used the breathing space so gained to restore some measure of prosperity to
the country, and even succeeded in building up a compact and efficient little
army, which enabled him to intervene with some effect in the peace
negotiations. Thus the Peace of Westphalia gained him East Pomerania,
though he was forced to let West Pomer-ania go to Sweden. His next care was
to establish the independence of East Prussia from vassalage to Poland, and he
did so by intervening in the Swede-Polish war of 1655-7. He first helped the
Swedes, but, when he had obtained their recognition of East Prussia's
independence, he went over to the Polish side and got a similar recognition
from the Poles. The disadvantage of this conduct was that it aroused the
resentment of Sweden, and when the Great Elector was helping the Emperor
against the designs of Louis XIV in the Dutch War (1672-8), the French king
was able to persuade the Swedes to take the opportunity of attacking
Brandenburg. The result was a triumph for Frederick William. All during his
reign he had been steadily improving his army; and now, in 1675, he scored his
greatest military success - a total defeat of the Swedes at the battle of
Fehrbellin, followed by the conquest from them of West Pomerania. The latter
was restored to Sweden at the peace; but the Elector's victory over Sweden,
the greatest power in the North, showed that the Hohenzollern state had
"arrived". The statesmen of Europe now had to take it into account in any
calculation of political or military chances.
This external success was, of course, based on an extensive internal
reorganization and development. At the very beginning of his reign the Elector
was faced, as we have seen, with a devastated and impoverished countryside,
and he busied himself immediately with the task of restoring and increasing its
prosperity. His foreign policy could not have achieved the results it did achieve
had it not been backed up by a sound and solid economic development.
Agriculture and commerce were particularly encouraged, and Frederick
William showed equal interest in schemes for the reclamation of marshland
and for developing foreign trade. The population of Brandenburg had been
drastically reduced by the Thirty Years' War; he encouraged immigration as
much as his mediaeval predecessors had done, and to encourage it further,
proclaimed a policy of religious toleration. He enticed large numbers of settlers
from the Netherlands, and, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, threw
open his territories to Huguenot refugees, more than 20,000 of whom settled
in Brandenburg. The immigrants brought with them new methods of
cultivation, new manufactures, new commercial ideas of every kind, all of
which the Elector was delighted to encourage.
To enable him to carry out his policies, he determined to reorganize the
government, to destroy the power of the nobles and to set up an efficient
despotism on the lines already worked out in France. In East Prussia he had
some little trouble in doing this, since there the estates of the nobles were
bigger than they were in Brandenburg, and there was a thriving commercial
middle class centred in the port of Konigsberg. But the Elector insisted on
gathering all power into his own hands, thinking that this was necessary both
for the unity and the prosperity of the state; and, with the aid of the standing
army which he organized, he was able to carry through his designs. Whether
this was a good thing may be much disputed; it may be said in his defence that
he was only following the fashion of his age, and it is certain that he greatly
increased the efficiency of the government. On the other hand, while
destroying the political power of the nobles, he left them a free hand to deal
with the peasants on their estates, and they took advantage of this to intensify
and extend the system of serfdom: a backward step which was to cause trouble
in the future. A.11 the same, it is true to say of the Great Elector that he greatly
increased, not only the unity and strength of his state, but also the wealth and
well-being of his people; he was a tyrant, and in some ways a scoundrel, but he
was not a bad ruler, and not undeserving of the title of "Great".
His son, the Elector Frederick, was a much weaker personality. He had
inherited a great position, but he did little to justify it or to improve it. During
his reign (1688-1713) the great Northern War was fought between Russia,
Poland, Denmark and Sweden; it seems scarcely credible, but Frederick took
little interest in this vital conflict, and reaped no advantage from it. The project
on which he had set his heart, and to which he devoted his chief efforts and the
main strength of his state, was to be granted by the Emperor the title of "king":
a title held by no other prince of the Empire, but one which Frederick thought
suitable to the increased dignity of Brandenburg-Prussia. To obtain this he
supported the Emperor against Louis XIV, both in the War of the League of
Augsburg and in the War of the Spanish Succession, and he was actually
granted it in 1700 in return for the promise of his support in the latter struggle.
The form in which he was to assume the title gave him much anxious thought.
Brandenburg was inside the Empire, and if he called himself "King of
Brandenburg", other imperial princes might take it as a precedent for assuming
the royal title themselves. So he decided to attach the title to Prussia; though
here again, since he did not rule the whole of Prussia, but only East Prussia, he
would not call himself "King of Prussia", but "King in Prussia". Common usage
soon brushed aside this fine distinction; soon everyone was calling him "King
of Prussia", and it was not long before the name "Prussia" was extended to all
the Hohenzollern dominions, which thenceforward were lumped together
under the name of the "kingdom of Prussia". This was the main effect of the
reign of Frederick I. And for this the country had been burdened with the
expenses of two great wars, so that Frederick's son, Frederick William I,
succeeded to an outwardly great but inwardly impoverished kingdom. He was,
however, the sort of man to set that situation right.
He was a man with a passion for economy. His father had maintained a court
of some magnificence, as befitted the regal dignity which he had assumed; and
he had accordingly encouraged the arts and done much to make Berlin a centre
of culture. With his death all this came abruptly to an end. The new king
despised court etiquette, and abominated such things as balls, plays, operas and
masquerades: partly for religious reasons, for he was a sincere puritan, but still
more because they swallowed up money. He cut down court expenditure till it
was no more than that of the establishment of a private gentleman, caring
nothing for the fact that he thereby ruined Prussian culture. In fact he
suspected and despised culture as tending to lead to light-mindedness and
extravagance: even going so far as to forbid his son to learn Latin. To the other
European courts of his time he became a laughing-stock; but he cared nothing
for that, either. What was more important for his country was that he went
through the accounts of the government departments with the same severity
as he went through those of the court, cutting down expenditure to a
minimum, and reorganizing them so as to get the utmost possible amount of
work out of every official in his employ. By these rigid economies he not only
repaired the losses of the previous reign, but also increased the revenue to such
an extent that he was able almost to double the size of the standing army.
The army, indeed, was the object of all this economizing. It was Frederick
William's great passion, and on it he was prepared to spend lavishly - though
not without scrutinizing carefully every item of expenditure. His interest in it
did not stop with providing it with the best possible equipment; he also
supervised carefully every detail of his men's training: he was himself the
founder of that rigid Prussian discipline (enforced by the lash) and of the drastic
system of drill by which the Prussian troops were so trained that they could
perform the most complicated manoeuvres under the heaviest fire, and could
meet the most vigorous assaults with a firm and unshakable front. Yet in
Frederick William's own reign his splendid army never saw fighting. The
statesmen of Europe speculated whether his peaceableness was due to his
religious scruples (which were genuine), or his bad diplomacy (which was so
faulty that he could never count on having allies), or finally, because he was as
much a miser of his troops as he was of his money, and could not bear the
thought of their being expended in battle. Whatever the reason, it was
fortunate for his country. His economic reforms produced a general increase in
prosperity; the strength of his army prevented any attacks on his domains by
other states; while he himself was determined not to provoke war on his own
account. He thus left to his son a prosperous country, a well-filled treasury, and
an army half as large as that of France, and far better trained. But that was not
his only legacy.
Frederick William was cursed with an ungovernable temper. In other respects
he was a rather admirable character, though hardly an amiable one; but his
temper was atrocious. His eldest son had to bear the brunt of it. Prince
Frederick had the misfortune to be born a genius: far more sensitive, far more
intelligent than his father, he was particularly attracted to music and poetry
and the whole world of art, and correspondingly contemptuous of his father's
boorishness and parsimony, and of the parade-ground existence which he
delighted in leading. Frederick William on his side, became convinced that this
son, unless reformed, would ruin and dissipate all that he, with so much labour
and watchfulness, had built up . The thought drove him frantic. He scolded his
son, he abused him, he beat him even in public, even before the troops or in
the presence of foreign ambassadors. A time came when the young man could
bear it no longer, and determined to run away; but his design was discovered,
the young officer who was assisting him was tried by court-martial and
executed, and he himself was held for months in solitary confinement and
semi-starvation, till he consented to appease his father by putting on a show of
submission. He came out of prison a changed man. The "amiable prince" for
whom his friend Katte had cheerfully died was now a man without illusions:
close, cold, crafty and cynical, with a contempt for human nature, and a still
greater contempt for the religious beliefs and moral maxims of his detested
father. He remained a genius: the greatest genius of all the Hohenzollerns, and
the most forceful and persevering character, but also the most unscrupulous.
His succession to the throne in 1740, as Frederick II, gave him an immediate
opportunity of displaying both his genius and his unscrupulousness. In the
same year the Emperor Charles VI died, leaving as heir to the Austrian
dominions a young daughter, Maria Theresa. Austria in those days was the
most extraordinary state in Europe, and it is a pity that we have not time to
examine its history more closely. The Haps-burgs had been building it up for
centuries, chiefly by marriage and inheritance, but also by conquest (Hungary,
reconquered from the Turks, being the most recent acquisition); it was divided
into a dozen parts, inhabited by a dozen different races (Germans, Magyars,
Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Belgians etc. etc.), with different languages, laws and
traditions, united only in a common allegiance to the House of Hapsburg. To
hold such an empire together was no easy task for anyone; it would be an
extremely difficult one for an inexperienced girl, and Charles VI tried to
forestall trouble for his daughter by at least ensuring that she should have an
undisputed succession. With this object he issued a "pragmatic sanction" (a
fundamental law, universally accepted), and actually got it accepted, not only
throughout the Austrian dominions, but also by the states of the Holy Roman
Empire and by the chief European powers. To get this general consent the
Emperor made many concessions and sacrifices; but at least he had been able,
he thought, to guarantee his daughter a peaceful succession; and it would
indeed have been peaceful but for Frederick II of Prussia.
Frederick coveted Silesia, an outlying Austrian province which abutted on his
own Brandenburg, and he thought he would never have such a favourable
opportunity of getting it; so, when Maria Theresa indignantly refused to give it
to him, he marched the splendid Prussian army in and took it by force. He thus
started the War of the Austrian Succession. If the Pragmatic Sanction was
going to be broken, and the Austrian empire dismembered, then France and
Spain and Bavaria wanted to share in the spoil; England, though, had more to
get by fighting France and Spain, and therefore supported Austria. We cannot
go into the details of the war - it proved disappointing to everyone but
Frederick. (We have already seen, for instance, how in the colonial sphere
England's conquest of Louisbourg was balanced by her loss of Madras.) Maria
Theresa astonished the world by her energy and courage and organizing
power; she aroused throughout her dominions a devoted loyalty, which
showed itself practically in contributions of men and money to the war; she
was able to hold in check all her enemies except Frederick. He, indeed, soon
gave proof of being the outstanding soldier of the age, and also its most
unscrupulous monarch. In 1742, when Maria Theresa consented to buy him off
by yielding up Silesia, he made peace with her, deserting his allies; but when, in
1744, it began to look as though Austria would win a complete victory,
Frederick declared war on her again, only to make another separate peace in
1745, after Austria's hopes had been blasted by a few more defeats. When the
final peace-treaty was signed at Aix-La-Chapelle in 1748, he alone gained
anything substantial: he gained Silesia, which had been his object from the
start. Thus his first venture into international affairs was a complete success,
thanks largely to his father's work in building up the army and the finances of
the kingdom.
His second venture was not so successful. Maria Theresa had a character as
determined as Frederick's own; she had come to terms with him simply
because the English government insisted on it, but she was not prepared to
trust him an inch, nor to leave him in possession of Silesia a minute longer than
was necessary. She believed that if his conduct went unpunished the Austrian
state could never be secure against him, and from 1748 onwards she and her
great minister, Kaunitz, devoted their efforts to building up a coalition
powerful enough to destroy him. An alliance between Austria, Russia and
France was their aim, with a consequent three-pronged attack which even
Frederick would be unable to withstand. The Czarina Elizabeth was ready
enough to enter such an alliance; the French, the ancient enemies of the House
of Hapsburg, were not, nor is it likely that they would have done if Frederick
had not, in 1756, made a treaty with England. His reason for doing so was very
simple. He knew Maria Theresa's sentiments towards him, and he was always
of the opinion that the best form of defence is attack; so he proposed to himself
to round off his dominions by seizing Saxony, compensating the Elector of
Saxony at the expense of Austria, who would thus be weakened while Prussia
was strengthened. The French, however, already entangled in war with
England, would not support any further disturbance of affairs in Germany, so it
was to England that Frederick turned. This was an error. France immediately
began to respond to Austria's blandishments, and the great alliance against
Prussia began to take shape; and, though Frederick sought to forestall the
action and shake the resolution of his enemies by invading Saxony without
warning or declaration of war, this act only confirmed their opinion that he
was not to be trusted and ought to be suppressed. The armies of France,
Austria and Russia were put in motion against him, and Sweden joined in from
the north to close the ring. Thus began the Seven Years' War.
A modern state in Prussia's position would certainly be overwhelmed. What
saved Frederick was that 18th century armies moved slowly. His own was the
fastest mover of them all, and he had the immense advantage of acting on
interior lines, so that his genius was given opportunities to act. Famous in
history is the campaign of 1757, in which, after beating a French army at
Rossbach on November 5th, he turned round on the Austrians and defeated
them at Leuthen on December 5th. And he was helped by the English: after
some early defeats, Pitt had come to power in England, and he formed an
Anglo-Hanoverian army under the Duke of Brunswick, which acted with such
vigour against the French that after 1757 the latter were hardly a danger to
Prussia at all. Yet Frederick was desperately hard-pressed; and as, year by year,
more and more of his dominions were devastated or occupied by his foes,
while he still refused absolutely to surrender, or even to give up one foot of
land as a concession for the sake of peace, people began to wonder whether he
was quite sane. By that time perhaps he was not; yet his obstinacy was
rewarded. In 1762 the Czarina Elizabeth died, and her successor, Peter III at
once made peace; in the same year the Austrians suffered another crushing
defeat at Burkersdorf; while the French had lost so heavily to the English that
they had already begun to despair of victory. Thus in 1763 peace was restored:
the peace which destroyed the French colonial empire, but which confirmed
the King of Prussia in his possession of Silesia. Prussia had come successfully
through such an ordeal as perhaps no other modern state has had to endure. If
one asks why such a curiously mixed and scattered group of territories was able
to do this, the answer must be, because of the work of the Hohenzollerns: the
organization and consolidation carried out by earlier rulers of that House, and
the political and military genius of Frederick II, who brought this storm upon
his country, but also carried his country through it, and thereby created a
legend which has affected both for good and evil the history of Germany and
the history of the world.
26. The Fall Of Poland
After 1763 Frederick the Great never fought again. He had, indeed, little
inducement to do so. For many years after the Seven Years' War he was looked
on with fear and suspicion by his neighbours, and could hardly move without
the risk of stirring up such another hostile coalition as had so nearly destroyed
him. In any case, he had learned his lesson. He devoted himself mainly to
repairing the devastation which nearly all the Prussian dominions had suffered
during the war, and to restoring the financial position of the government. In
this his success was very great. The rebuilding of shattered farms and factories
went on steadily; and with that there was a great renewal of the forest-clearing,
marsh-draining, canal-digging operations which in previous reigns had done so
much to develop the country. Frederick also renewed the policy of
encouraging immigration - it is said, though it seems hardly credible, that
300,000 foreigners were settled in his territories during his reign. He was
equally keen on encouraging secondary industries: he introduced the
manufacture of silk and velvet, and greatly increased that of linen. But, though
he was prepared to spend largely for all these purposes, he insisted on getting
an adequate return; the settlers and manufacturers who profited by his bounty
found that they were expected to pay it all back with interest.
Taxation on all classes was raised continually, and the people were not
consoled by the fact that an increased prosperity enabled them to pay what the
King demanded. The peasants, too, were still subject to the forced labour of
serfdom. Frederick was an enlightened prince, and in theory opposed to
serfdom; but he could not bring himself to forego cheap labour. So, while the
position of the government and the state of the army were both restored, and
even much improved, in the last twenty years of Frederick's reign, the welfare
of the people as a whole did not advance so rapidly; and Prussia, though more
prosperous than before, remained a poor state. This was all the more reason,
thought the King, for maintaining the closely centralized despotism which his
father had worked out; and he maintained it, managing the country as though
it were his own private estate, supervising everything, controlling everything.
It did not occur to him that a little more freedom might have stimulated the
energies of his subjects to better purpose. But then, that was a thought which
occurred to few sovereigns in the 18th century.
In spite of the disastrous losses of the Seven Years' War, Frederick had not
given up hope of expanding the boundaries of Prussia still further. In a
"testament" written for his son during the war, he had noted three territories
that could with advantage be added to the kingdom: Saxony, Swedish Pomer-
ania and West Prussia. The first of these would, with Brandenburg and Silesia,
make a neat and well-rounded block of land, and would add some much-
needed fertile ground to the sandy wastes which occupied so much of
Brandenburg; the second would give Brandenburg a secure grip on the Baltic
coast; the third would unite Brandenburg with East Prussia. After 1763 he had
to despair of obtaining either Saxony or Pomerania, for he saw clearly that the
Powers would not permit him to disturb again the balance of forces in the
Empire; but West Prussia was in Poland, not in the Empire, and the weakness
of Poland and the greed of her other neighbours offered a favourable
opportunity of acquiring it.
By that time Poland had fallen far from its former greatness: it was no longer
the nation that had fought with Russia on equal terms, that had beaten the
Teutonic Knights and forced its way to the sea, that had been the chief bulwark
of northern Europe against the Tartars and the Turks. As late as 1683, when
the Turks with a vast army made their final assault on Austria and laid siege to
Vienna, it was a Polish army under King John Sobieski that routed them. That,
however had been almost the last gasp of Polish power, called forth by
religious fervour and by the genius of a great leader; already in 1683 Poland
was disintegrating into something that could hardly be called a state at all.
The Polish nobles were responsible for this - those same nobles whose reckless
valour and fighting quality had in former times done so much to establish the
power of their country. They had the defects of their qualities - they were
impatient of restraint, and particularly impatient of royal control. They had
always been so. Long before this they had asserted their right to elect their
King, and to make him pay for his election by confirming to them all their
privileges and giving them such new privileges as they might think desirable.
Thus the growth of the Polish monarchy was effectually checked. It is true that
from 1384 to 1572 the family of Jagiello (or Jagellon) was allowed to hold the
throne; but when its last representative died the nobles resumed full freedom
of action and thenceforth elected whomever they wanted - he was often not
even a Pole. This led to Poland's becoming embroiled in the ambitious
schemes of neighbouring rulers: as when Augustus II of Saxony was elected in
1696, and proceeded to engage Poland in the great Northern War against
Charles XII of Sweden: a war from which Poland could not hope to receive any
benefit. There were, of course, many Poles who saw the danger into which
Poland was drifting; such were the powerful and wealthy Czartoryskis; but,
however devoted and however powerful, they had no chance of bringing
about the reforms that were needed. All laws, and particularly all changes in
the constitution, had to be passed by the Diet, which consisted of all the
nobles, and in which, by a most pernicious custom, the opposition of even one
man was sufficient to prevent any measure from passing.
The nobles - or most of them - persisted in supporting the existing constitution;
they said they did so out of love of freedom, not perceiving how their freedom
was ruining their country. It is worth noting, too, that their love of freedom
did not extend to their own peasants, the majority of the Polish people, whom
they kept in a state of serfdom, and who therefore had little cause to be
interested in the fate of Poland. In any case, the population was very mixed,
including Lithuanians, Russians, Germans, and a considerable number of Jews;
in this mixture one could hardly expect to find an ardent patriotism. And, as
though these sources of weakness were not enough, Poland had no natural
frontiers, but was simply a segment of the great northern plain; and the states
around those frontiers were, by the 18th century, effectively organized under
powerful centralized despotisms. Poland looked like their predestined prey.
Two of these states in particular, Russia and Prussia, had good reasons for
wanting to seize parts of Poland. Russia was eager to expand further towards
the West, and Prussia was still more eager to end the isolation of East Prussia
by linking it up with Brandenburg. For long, however the mutual suspicions of
these states, together with the opposition of Austria, prevented them from
taking any positive steps to realize their ambitions. Indeed, in the early part of
Frederick the Great's reign the Russian government was decidedly opposed to
him, the Czarina Elizabeth looking on him as the principal disturber of the
peace and of the balance of power in Europe. We have seen already how her
death in 1762 came just in time to save Frederick from a hopeless position and
to enable him to emerge with credit from the Seven Years' War. The young
and rather foolish Peter III, who succeeded her, was one of Frederick's most
enthusiastic admirers; for this very reason, however, he was profoundly
unpopular in Russia, and after a few months his wife, equally young but very
far from foolish, organized against him a successful palace revolution. Peter III
was deposed and murdered, and Catherine II became the ruler of Russia.
Catherine also admired Frederick, but she had no illusions about him. Her
character was too like his for her to be deceived by him; she had an equally
high intelligence and an equal freedom from the shackles of religion and
morality. The daughter of an obscure German prince, she had realized from
the moment of her arrival in Russia that her future in that country would
depend on the degree to which she could identify herself with Russian interests
and the Russian character, and she set herself to become, in appearance, as
Russian as possible: ostentatiously joining the Orthodox Church, changing her
name from Sophia Augusta to Katherina Alexeievna, and so on. In this way she
did make herself popular, just as her unfortunate husband made himself
unpopular by his admiration and imitation of the King of Prussia. Her
intelligence showed itself in the way in which she made the most of this
situation and organized against Peter the plot which overthrew him, and her
unscrupulousness showed itself in her consent to his murder.
Since she had attained power in this way, it is obvious that her policy as
Czarina would be a purely Russian one: one that would put the interests of
Russia first, and would certainly not subordinate them to the interests of any
other power. In particular, she would not be likely to favour the ambitions of
Frederick the Great, who was already, in most people's opinion, too powerful
for his neighbours' good. And so, at first, she watched him carefully. But
Frederick after 1763 seemed a changed man. He appeared to have given up his
wide designs, and to be devoting himself to the internal restoration and
development of his kingdom. Suspicion of him began to die down, and
thereupon the similarity between his character and Catherine's, and between
his and her ideas of government, led to the growth of a queer kind of
friendship: each of them perfectly aware that the other was not to be trusted,
but each drawn to the other precisely by that circumstance.
It is not known which of them first suggested the partition of Poland. Frederick
had by far the greater interests at stake: the acquisition of West Prussia would
make all the difference to his kingdom, and we know that this design had long
been close to his heart. Yet Catherine seems to have been the first to make
open mention of it. At any rate, once it had been mentioned, the two soon
found themselves in complete agreement about it. However, they could not
act by themselves: Austria too was vitally interested in the fortunes of Poland,
and was in a position to make things very difficult for the others, and perhaps
even to involve them in a great European war, if they proceeded to act without
her knowledge and consent. And Austria had no reason to wish for the
weakening of Poland - on the contrary. Her Polish frontier, unlike those of
Prussia and Russia, was a perfectly satisfactory one: the line of the Carpathians;
to advance beyond it would weaken rather than strengthen her position; and in
any case the existence of Poland as a buffer state was of great advantage to
Austrian statesmen and soldiers in dealing with the ambitious designs of Russia
and Prussia. Maria Theresa, too, was very unwilling to permit any further
strengthening of Prussia - not only because of her personal hatred and
suspicion of Frederick the Great, but also because she rightly saw that a strong
Prussia must necessarily threaten Austria's dominance in Germany.
It was therefore fortunate for Catherine and Frederick that when they began to
discuss the partitioning of Poland Maria Theresa was no longer the sole ruler of
Austria. Her eldest son, Joseph II, had been elected Emperor in 1765, and had
been made co-regent of the Austrian dominions. Now Joseph II, with many
estimable qualities, had an insatiable appetite for more territory, and cherished
great dreams of expanding the Hapsburg dominions: indeed, of replacing the
mere shadow of the Holy Roman Empire by an Austrian Empire which would
be really, and not just nominally, under Hapsburg control. The offer of a large
slice of Poland was to him an irresistible temptation; and he was ready to
justify its seizure by the old excuse which squeamish conquerors have always
used: that he would give the Poles better government than they had been
receiving from their own kings. A bargain was therefore struck between the
three Powers, and in 1772 the first partition of Poland was carried out.

The shock of this bare-faced robbery did what no amount of exhortation had
been able to do: it awakened many of the Polish nobles to the realities of their
situation, and a strong movement was begun for a thorough-going reform of
the constitution. It is easy to understand, though, that the anarchical traditions
of centuries were not easily overcome. It was not until 1788 that there finally
met the so-called "Long Diet", the great majority of whose members were
determined on reform; and it was then too late. The adoption of the
constitution of 1791 alarmed Catherine the Great: she feared that a strong
Poland would be hostile to Russia; she therefore persuaded Frederick the
Great's successor in Prussia to join her in the second partition in 1793. But this
time the Poles acted. Under the leadership of Kosciusko they fought
desperately to save their country. It was hopeless, of course, especially when
Austria joined in; but it was ominous for the future. After crushing the last
pitiful remnants of resistance, the Powers proceeded to the third and final
partition in 1795, and then believed that they had settled the Polish business for
good. They were never more mistaken.
The destruction of Poland was not merely the greatest political crime of the
18th century: it was also the greatest political blunder. The partitioners
doubtless thought that the Poles would allow themselves to be absorbed; or
that, even if they did not, their traditional love of "liberty" would prevent them
from combining effectually against their spoliators. The opposite happened.
The Poles were united as never before by a great common resentment,
continually increasing because continually fed by the efforts of the three
governments to suppress and force them into submission: efforts which only
succeeded in hammering them into one of the strongest national blocs in
Europe. With the buffer of Poland removed, the three great states of Russia,
Prussia and Austria found themselves with common frontiers (a circumstance
which would in any case have been likely to cause trouble); and when one
remembers that the Polish populations along those frontiers were thoroughly
disaffected, one begins to realize why it was that Poland, though suppressed,
became during the 19th century one of the chief trouble-centres of Europe. We
shall see later on some of the evil effects that resulted; it is probable, though
that the worst of these effects are still in the future. There was never a better
example of poetic justice (or historical irony) than the Polish partitions.

Book Six - Europe in Revolution
27. The Enlightenment
We have reached what may be called the "revolutionary age" in European
history: an age which began in the 18th century and is still proceeding, an age
which produced more drastic changes in European society than any since the
fall of Rome and the establishment of Christendom. But it is what men think
that determines how men act; and the social revolutions of modern times were
caused by an even more remarkable revolution in European thought. This
revolution is known as "the Enlightenment"; and unless we understand it we
cannot understand the enormous results which it produced and is still
producing.
Fundamentally, the new movement was a revival of the Renaissance: but of a
Renaissance deeply changed by the awful experiences of the religious wars. It is
true that the individualism of the Renaissance was one of the chief causes of
the Protestant revolt; but, once the battle was fairly joined between Protestant
and Catholic, the original cause of conflict tended to be thrust into the
background: for men engaged in a life-and-death struggle easily forget
everything but the immediate necessities of war, and Protestants became, in
practice, as hostile to individual liberty in religion as Catholics had ever been,
while Catholics became more hostile to it than they had ever been before. In
the 17th century, however, when it became plain that there was to be no clear-
cut victory for either side, a strong reaction set in against the whole affair; and
out of this reaction the Enlightenment was born.
First and foremost, it was a simple reaction against war, persecution and
controversy, in favour of peace and order. Men were getting sick of violence,
sick of passion and tumult, sick of interminable arguments that led to no
agreement; they wanted security and a quiet life. Religion, it seemed pretty
clear, could not give them these things; religion was the root of all the trouble;
would it not be better, then, to set "faith" aside for the moment and let
"reason" have a chance? "Faith", they said in effect, "is a matter of dispute; but
reason is common to all men. Let us forget these old controversies and make a
completely fresh start, basing ourselves simply on what reason tells us; surely
there are some truths on which we can all agree, and surely, with the help of
reason, we can build out of these truths a philosophy and a way of life suitable
for all sensible men. Over and above that, let every individual believe what he
thinks right; but let him not attack other individuals for believing differently.
Thus we shall arrive at a reasonable and well-ordered state of society".
Here, then, is the first principle of the Enlightenment - rationalism: the belief
that reason is of more practical value than religious faith, that reason can solve
all the problems that men really need to have solved, and can therefore enable
them to live a properly civilized life. This belief in the power of reason became
so strong among educated people that the age of the Enlightenment is still
often called the Age of Reason.
Rationalism led, in its turn, to a great revival and extension of individualism. If
reason alone is a sufficient guide for men, and if reason is the same for all men,
it follows that authority is largely unnecessary - it is only needed to curb those
few lunatics or criminals who refuse to live according to reason. Ordinary
sensible people ought not to be coerced by authority, but to be convinced by
reasoning. Authority ought only to be obeyed if its commands are reasonable,
and any authority which puts unreasonable restrictions on thought or speech
or action is acting tyrannically and need not be obeyed. And who is to judge
whether an authority is, in fact, acting tyrannically? Why, the average
reasonable individual, of course; or, if you like, the general mass of average
reasonable individuals who are the subjects of that authority. If this is so, then
every human authority depends on the judgment and will of its subjects; in the
words of the United States Constitution, every government "derives its just
powers from the consent of the governed".
Furthermore, since reason is common to all men, it follows that all men are
equal: not merely in the sense that they all have equal rights to such things as
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", but also in the sense that they all
have an equal right to sit in judgment on their governments and laws, to join in
discussing them and in accepting or rejecting them. King, aristocrat or
common man: they are all reasonable beings, and all ought to have a say in
deciding what kind of a society they are going to live in. The only exceptions
are those who have forfeited their right by showing themselves to be criminals
or lunatics, who either will not or cannot act reasonably.
Such were the ideas of the philosophers of the Enlightenment; what, then,
were their practical aims? First of all, they wanted to "rationalize" human
society. Looking round at the state of Europe - its governments, economic
systems, social systems especially - they thought it absurdly hampered and
restricted by ridiculous survivals from former times: institutions like serfdom,
feudal privilege, guilds and the like; and they wanted to clear away all these
antiques and set up simple and rational and efficient institutions in their stead.
Secondly, they wanted to remove as many as possible of the restrictions on
individual liberty: they wanted greater freedom of speech and of the press,
greater freedom of trade and travel, more religious toleration, and so on. In
cultural matters they were true children of the Renaissance, taking the classics
as their models and making classical studies the foundation of educa-tion; but
they were strongly convinced of the need to extend the boundaries of
knowledge in every direction, and favoured and furthered the development of
mathematics and the physical sciences. (They were generally inclined to think
that ignorance was the root of all evil.) Their attitude towards religion was
ambiguous: some of them thought it completely irrational, and despised it
accordingly; others believed that religion had rational foundations, but that all
the historical religions of mankind had been overlaid by a mass of superstition
which needed clearing away; still others were sincere and devout Christians:
but all of them were inclined to regard religion as a private affair, and to dislike
"churches by law established".
We are not concerned, as historians, to pass judgment on the ideas of the
Enlightenment - like all such movements, it contained both truth and error;
but certain of its errors must be pointed out, as they produced effects in later
history. Firstly, these philosophers were too optimistic about human nature.
No doubt men are rational beings, but they do not always act rationally, and
they sometimes prefer to act irrationally; they are deeply influenced by passion,
sentiment and tradition; when they were given greater freedom, they did not
always use it as the philosophers expected them to. No doubt, too, it is often
possible to improve upon the past; but it is not possible to shake off the past
completely and make an entirely new start, and any attempt to do so leads to
trouble. Again, human beings are changeable. The Enlightenment itself was
due partly to the fact that men were getting sick of the strife occasioned by
religion; it did not occur to the philosophers that men in later times might get
equally sick of pure reason; but they did. The Romantic movement on the one
hand, and Nazism on the other, were at least partly caused by a revolt against
rationalism. The men of the Enlightenment were themselves less rational, and
more influenced by the traditions of the past, than they imagined. Thus the
movement they started produced great changes, both for good and evil; but it
did not produce a final and perfect society.
I have been talking so far about the "philosophers" and their "movement", as
though they and it were all one thing, as though they were as much united in
their ideas as, say, the Calvinists; actually, they were more like the Humanists:
a group of educated men who happened to be thinking along the same lines,
not a sect nor a society. Hence, while they agreed in their main principles, they
disagreed very much in matters of detail - while, for instance, they agreed that
more freedom was desirable for the individual, they did not all agree as to how
much more freedom was desirable, or as to how it should be secured. (It is
important to remember this, for we shall see the same disputes arising among
the "Liberals" who sprang from the Enlightenment and who finally put its
philosophy into practice.) It is not surprising, in any case, that individual
members of an individualist movement should differ strikingly from one
another.
The first of them all was Rene Descartes (1596-1650). In many ways he was far
from typical (he was, for instance, a devout Catholic); but he must be counted
the leader of them all because he was the first to put forward a scheme for
sweeping away all previous philosophies and replacing them by a new one
based purely on reason. As a young man he joined the Bavarian army in the
early days of the Thirty Years' War, and it was while actually serving against
the Protestants in Bohemia that he was suddenly converted from the
profession of arms to the pursuit of philosophy. He became convinced that
ignorance was the great enemy of mankind, and the main cause of all the
divisions and wars among men; and that this ignorance was due to men's
failure, so far, to find a proper method of reasoning; and he determined to
devote his life to working out such a method as would enable men, by the
exercise of pure reasoning, to attain mathematical certainty about everything
under the sun. This was in 1619. In 1637 he published his most famous work:
"Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verite" (A
Discourse on the method of rightly using one's reason and seeking out truth).
This is one of the books which have changed the history of the world. Not that
Descartes' particular propositions were all accepted - far from it; but the idea of
wiping out the past, of making a completely fresh start with reason alone for
one's guide, proved captivating and enchanting to men who were already
growing weary of and disgusted with the tangled and knotty controversies of
their age. If any man started the worship of reason, it was Descartes; and
therefore he is rightly considered the founder of the Enlightenment.
John Locke (1632-1704) can hardly be called a "disciple" of Descartes, yet it was
Descartes who awoke in him the desire to philosophize. The son of a Puritan,
growing up through the turmoil of the Civil War, the Commonwealth and the
Restoration, he encountered almost all possible forms of fanaticism and
enthusiasm, and ended by being disgusted with them all. He became the
apostle of moderation and reasonableness. He agreed with Descartes that men
should be guided by reason, but he thought Descartes pushed the claims of
reason too far. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", he argued
that reason was not capable of finding out all truth, but was perfectly capable
of finding out all that men really needed to know, and that if men would only
content themselves with that, they would have more security and fewer
occasions of quarrelling with one another. Let them be reasonable and all
would be well. Locke was also a strong advocate of religious toleration,
holding that the points of difference between Christians were obscure and of
little importance, while the really fundamental doctrines of Christianity were
common to all sects - opinions which aroused so much indignation that they
rather hindered than helped the cause of toleration. Much more important
historically were his two "Treatises of Civil Government". In these he argues
for the most extreme "democratic" view, that government is dependent
entirely on the people. According to Locke, civil society is not necessary but
voluntary: a group of people freely choose to form themselves into a society by
making a contract with one another, and they thereupon arrange the form of
their constitution and government; whence it follows that they can change
their society, their constitution or their government at will: all depends on
them. It is the boldest possible expression of complete political freedom, a kind
of Magna Garta of revolution; and it was to have enormous effects, though
more in other countries than in its author's own.
Descartes and Locke were both men of the 17th century, forerunners and
prophets of the new movement; it was in the 18th century that the
Enlightenment reached its full flowering, and in France, in the works of a
group of writers who are generally called the "Encyclopaedists" because most
of them were connected with the making of the Encyclopaedia. This, the first
of encyclopaedias, was a typical product of the Enlightenment. It was a gigantic
effort at education and propaganda: an attempt to give, in one set of volumes, a
complete and rational account of all human knowledge and thought, and to
prepare the way for further advances on "enlightened" principles. It is an
immense monument of industry and perseverance. Diderot, its chief designer
and editor, who pushed it through to completion within twenty years (1751-
1772), in spite of great difficulties with his collaborators and great opposition
from the conservatives in France, was undoubtedly a man of singular energy
and determination. Yet the Encyclopaedia is also a monument of over-
confidence. Its authors had no doubts about their ability to fulfil their self-
imposed task, and they convinced most of their readers that they had
succeeded in it, so that the Encyclopaedia became a kind of general reference-
book and source of ammunition for all the "progressive" people in Europe; yet
a modern reader, impressed by the industry and intellectual ability it displays,
sees also a great deal of ignorance and a great deal of prejudice of which the
writers themselves were quite unconscious. The fact is that the Encyclopaedia
was an impossible task for mere human beings. Yet the followers of the
Enlightenment did not realize that; they thought that they had in the
Encyclopaedia a firm and clear statement of their case, backed up by a mass of
fact and argument which only fools or knaves could call in question. This helps
to explain their intolerance of opposition - only fools or knaves, they thought,
could possibly oppose them.
Diderot himself, the chief maker of the Encyclopaedia, is also the chief example
of this self-confidence. He was a plain, blunt atheist and rationalist; and, having
no doubts himself about anything, could not understand why anyone else
should have doubts either. A far greater writer, and a far more interesting
personality, was his friend and collaborator, Voltaire. Voltaire is one of the
great masters of French prose, which is as much as to say that he is one of the
greatest prose-writers who ever lived; he is also a master of ridicule: unequalled
by any other satirist in the power of pouring mockery on the objects of his
satire and arousing Homeric laughter in his readers. Yet he never wrote a
major work. Something incurably flippant in his nature prevented him from
tackling any subject with the high seriousness which great art demands. He
wished to do so: he attempted tragedy on more than one occasion; for he was
no scorner like Diderot, but a man with serious thoughts about life and death,
and God and man; but his pen ran naturally with ridicule, and he could only
restrain it with an effort, and so his tragedies are artificial and dull, and his best
work is "La Pucelle", a burlesque epic on Joan of Arc, tersely and truly
described by a modern critic as "very dirty, and very funny". It is also
completely lacking in reverence, and that is the important point about Voltaire
and his influence. He is the greatest of all destructive critics. He shows no
reverence at all when his daemon has hold of him. He mocks men, institutions,
beliefs and laws impartially and unrestrainedly: even those which, in his heart
of hearts, he himself reverenced. And he taught his readers to mock, likewise;
he destroyed their bump of reverence, too. Wherever he turned that terrible,
thin-lipped smile, some magic went out of traditional feeling and observance,
some fatal absurdity appeared in traditional ceremony and custom and belief. It
is quite true that many of the things he attacked deserved to be attacked (the
use of torture, for instance); what is more important is that he broke down in
people's minds the "ancient pieties" in which they had been brought up: their
reverential feelings towards church and king and law and custom; and by so
doing he did more than almost any other man to prepare Europeans for the
age of revolution.
If Voltaire was the great destructive critic, Montesquieu (1689-1755) was the
constructive statesman. It is true that he began his career of author as a satirist,
publishing the "Lettres Persanes" in 1721; and these "Letters" were very
popular at the time, though they are dull to a modern reader. However,
Montesquieu's great work was the general survey of the theory and practice of
government which he called the "Esprit des Lois". If even this seems dull to a
modern reader, it is because so much of it has been taken over by later thinkers
and has become the normal stock-in-trade of political discussions. We have no
space to examine the book as a whole, but two of its points must be referred
to, as they were particularly fruitful in later times. In the first place,
Montesquieu held that there was no ideal form of government, but that every
nation should have the government that suited best its character,
circumstances and traditions: the constitution should grow with the nation. He
also held, though, that there was one general principle that should be followed
in every form of government: the principle of the "separation of powers". In no
government should all the powers, legislative, executive and judicial, be held
by the same man or group of men: such a concentration was, in his view,
destructive of all good government, and equally dangerous to order, efficiency
and liberty. Accordingly, he hated the government set up in France by Louis
XIV, and made no secret of his desire to see it changed; and he convinced many
others, too, that such a change ought and must be brought about. His
apparently moderate and sober views impressed many who were rather
irritated or shocked by the extravagances and irreverences of Voltaire, Diderot
and their friends.
Yet there was another and very different writer, whose influence was still more
profound. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was neither a satirist nor a statesman; rather,
he was a prophet. He was a man with a dream; and that dream of his has
moved men more deeply and powerfully than all Locke's commonsense or
Voltaire's laughter or Montesquieu's reasoning. Yet as a man he was far from
being admirable or attractive. He was one of those unhappy beings whom we
call neurotics: abnormally sensitive, a man whose nerves were always exposed
and quivering; as the Scots philosopher, David Hume, wrote of him, "a man
born without a skin". This sensitiveness made him desire, and yet shrink from,
human contacts; made him love solitude, yet never be satisfied with it; made
him passionately desire love, and yet never surrender to love, but treat even
those who befriended him with coldness, suspicion and distrust; and in the end
pushed him over the border into madness. Yet this man, who could never live
at ease in society, and whose own social conduct was either contemptible, or
pathetic, or absurd, dreamed of a perfect society; and the very sensitiveness
that was his ruin enabled him to express his dream in words that went to the
hearts of men - even of men who disagreed with him or despised him. "To the
hearts" - that is the secret. Among the cold reasoners of the Enlightenment,
Rousseau was the enthusiast, the prophet. He alone could wake an answering
enthusiasm in others; and that is why, though his reasoning has been riddled by
criticism, his dream is still living, still powerful, after the lapse of two centuries.
He dreamed of "a state of nature". Once, long ago, before laws or
governments, arts or sciences, had been thought of, men had been happy.
They had been happy because they were free. Living on water and wild fruits,
sheltered only by the trees, dressed (if at all) in leaves, they had needed no
property, and therefore no government. They had all been equal, since none
had possessions or power. They had lived like brothers, in mutual love; for
they had nothing to be jealous about, no reason to hate each other.
At first, perhaps, Rousseau really believed in this "state of nature", and really
thought men could return to it. If so, he soon gave up the idea. He admitted
the present necessity of living in society; but he thought it possible to have a
society which would retain the advantages of the state of nature: a society in
which there would be no artificial distinctions or divisions between men, in
which all would be free, equal, and mutually loving; and in his most famous
book, "The Social Contract", he explained the principles of such a society.
It is formed, he said, by free consent. A group of men have a common desire, a
"general will", to live together, and they make a free contract with one another
to do so. They choose their own government and they make their own laws: a
government established by their general will and laws which express their
general will. Such a government and such laws cannot be tyrannical or unjust,
precisely because they are produced by the general will. The citizens are still
free, for they obey only the general will, and "each man, in obeying the general
will, obeys only himself". They are equal, because each has the same share in
forming the general will, and all are equally bound by its decisions. And as they
freely desire and consent to live and work with one another, they are bound
together by mutual love: what reason can they have for hatred? Such, says
Rousseau, is the true form of society; and no society is legitimate unless it is
based on these principles.
It is easy to criticize this. When have men ever been free to form their own
society? Do they ever agree together so completely as to form a "general will",
in Rousseau's sense? If the general will is only the will of the majority, what
becomes of the minority? What possible machinery can be devised for
choosing a government, and for making laws, which only express the general
will, and not the wills of particular men, or parties, or classes? Rousseau could
not answer such questions. Yet his failure to do so hardly lessened the power of
his dream. What fascinated his readers was his vision of the perfect society, and
for two hundred years that vision has fascinated men of all sorts, all over the
world. Jefferson, Robespierre, Napoleon, Byron, Karl Marx, William Morris -
what an assortment! Yet all came under the spell. And still it works; and our
20th century Communists are inspired by the same dream: the society in which
all men shall be brothers, all equal, and (in the end) all free.
28. The Making Of The Revolution
Every revolution has two sets of causes, negative and positive. The negative
causes are the reasons which make people dissatisfied with the existing state of
things; the positive causes are the ideas they have about a new state of things.
The two sets are not necessarily connected, and that is why a revolution is
often followed by conflict among the revolutionaries; for people may agree
that an existing regime is unsatisfactory without at all agreeing on what they
would like to put in its place. This fact explains a good deal of the history of
Europe in the 19th century.
1. Ancien Regime
The state of affairs in France in 1789 was unsatisfactory in many ways. The
government, to begin with, was still the absolute monarchy set up by Louis
XIV. The King was, almost literally, the possessor of all power and the source
of all law; the officials who actually carried on the government were dependent
on him and responsible to him, but he himself was dependent on and
responsible to nobody. He controlled the armed forces, he controlled the
police (such as they were); he made war or peace; he could imprison or set
free, condemn or reprieve, at will. In practice there were limitations on his
power, but in theory that power was unlimited. Now, when Louis XIV had
established this absolutism, the people of France had welcomed it: they
preferred the power of the King to the power of the nobles; but by 1789 the
nobles had long since accepted their defeat, and to the people in general the
royal power was no longer a bulwark against the pretensions of the nobles, but
rather an irksome tyranny; and an inefficient tyranny, at that. For the weakness
of absolute monarchy is that it depends too much on one man. France had
been well enough governed under Louis XIV, because Louis XIV was both
intelligent and hard-working; but Louis XV was incurably lazy and Louis XVI
unteachably dull, and during their reigns the government of France stiffened
and stagnated. The frightful defeats of France in the wars of the 18th century
were due to no deficiency in her people, but to the hopeless incapacity of her
government.
The weakest part of the government was the fiscal system. It was defective in
almost every possible way, but four of its defects were outstanding. In the first
place, the weight of taxation fell most heavily, not upon the wealthy but upon
the poor. The "privileged classes" - that is, practically speaking, the clergy and
the nobles - paid very little direct taxation; the main burden had to be borne by
the peasants and the middle class. Hence a great part of the wealth of France
was hardly taxed at all, and those who provided most of the government's
revenue were those who could least afford to do so. In the second place,
taxation varied enormously from place to place. The classic example of this is
the "gabelle", or salt tax. Salt was a government monopoly, and the
government compelled the citizen_s to buy so much salt a year at the
government's price. But that price was not uniform: it varied from a few pence
in Brittany to two or three pounds in the neighbourhood of Paris. Smuggling
was therefore rife, and the cost of collecting the tax absorbed nearly a third of
the revenue it produced. In the third place, the collection of indirect taxes was
for the most part "farmed out"; that is, private financiers were invited to bid
against one another for the right to collect these taxes; those who bid highest
paid the sum agreed on into the Treasury, and then proceeded to make their
profit out of the citizens; and thus a great deal more was paid than ever
reached the government. Finally, customs-dues were levied, not merely on
goods entering the country, but on goods in transit within the frontiers: for
example, on goods entering Paris. The land of France was criss-crossed by
these barriers, and internal trade was thus made long, difficult and expensive.
These absurdities had not always been so absurd. When the nobles, for
instance, were bearing the burden of local government, it was not
unreasonable that they should be exempt from some of the taxes; when the
government had no trained body of officials, it was natural that it should invite
private citizens to assist it; when communications were difficult and trade
small, and when the provinces of France differed greatly from one another in
population and prosperity, it was right that taxation should vary accordingly;
but in the 18th century these conditions no longer obtained, and the fiscal
system appeared to be, as it really was, unjust, inefficient and uneconomic.
The legal system was even worse. The French kings, weaker than the English,
had never succeeded in establishing a common law for the whole kingdom:
they had been satisfied with bringing the existing courts and laws under royal
control. France was roughly divided into the South, the region of Roman Law,
and the North, the region of customary law: but in each part there were
endless local variations, and all over France the royal government interfered at
will, making innumerable exceptions to the laws which were supposedly in
force. Even apart from these royal interventions, it has been calculated that
there were more than three hundred different legal codes in force in different
parts of the country; and the courts (royal courts, feudal courts, municipal
courts) were almost infinite in number and variety. Here again, this was a
situation which had been tolerable in an earlier age, when communications
were poor and the various parts of France widely different in customs and
character; but it had become ridiculous in the 18th century, and there was
almost nothing which the people so longed for as a simplification and
codification of the law.
Yet, it seems, they longed even more for the abolition of "privilege". A
privileged person is one who is somehow exempt from the ordinary operation
of the law. There were many such exemptions in France, since the King was in
a position to grant them to any person or institution he fancied, and one of the
difficulties in studying the law in pre-revolutionary France is precisely the
number and extent of such "privileges". What was especially exasperating to
the French people in the 18th century was, however, the existence of two great
classes of privileged people - the nobles and the clergy.
The privileges of the nobles were particularly annoying because they came by
inheritance, in return for no services rendered nor sacrifice made. Just because
a man was born a noble he was privileged - the "noblesse" were a class set
apart from and above the rest of the nation. It would take too long to
enumerate all their privileges. The most important was that they were exempt
from a great deal of taxation: the most annoying was their social privilege: the
right to take precedence of others, to be outwardly respected and saluted by
others. The peasants hated their "sporting" privileges: the fact that only the
nobles could hunt game. They hated still more the "seigneurial" privileges
which most noble families still possessed and exercised. A seigneur (a "lord-of-
the-manor", as we should say) might no longer possess a foot of ground - his
ancestors might have long since sold the land to the peasants who occupied it;
but those occupiers of the land would still have to pay feudal dues of various
kinds (tolls on bridges and markets, for instance) to the family of the seigneur.
Furthermore, while the King was still careful to choose his officials mainly
from the middle class, he compensated the nobles by choosing his army and
navy officers, and even his bishops and other prelates, almost entirely from
them. A commoner had little chance of rising from the ranks in the armed
services, or of becoming more than a parish-priest in the Church.
And, once again, these privileges had once been reasonable and were now no
longer so. The nobles had once been a real ruling-class, both politically and
economically. They, under the feudal system, had carried most of the burdens
of government and had supervised and directed the cultivation of the soil.
Their privileges had not then seemed extravagant. But in the France of the 18th
century they were coming to be thought a class of mere parasites, and their
privileges a mere burden on the rest of the community. This view was not
entirely correct. The nobles performed at least one great service to France in
maintaining a high standard of culture and manners: they were munificent and
tasteful patrons of art, and they set an example in their own lives of courtesy
and civilized conduct. These are not small things. They were also willing to
risk their lives freely in the armies and navies of France. Yet their claim to a
superior and privileged status cancelled out these services in the eyes of most
Frenchmen.
The position of the clergy was peculiar. In theory, the Church in France was
part of the Catholic Church and was subject to the Pope; in practice, it was
subject to the King, and most of the higher ecclesiastical appointments were in
the King's gift. The men so appointed were not usually bad clerics (though a
few of them were); but they were not distinguished men either: they were
chosen because they were not likely to give trouble, or because the King
wanted to please their noble relatives. The lower ranks of the clergy, on the
other hand, were filled mainly from the peasantry. To this distinction in rank
corresponded a difference in wealth. The Church in France was immensely
rich by the standards of that age, but its income was very unequally divided:
many bishops had enormous revenues, many parish-priests existed on a
pittance. Further, the clergy as a whole were privileged like the nobles, in the
sense of being exempt from most of the taxes and of being allowed a special
position in society. Thus the Church seemed to be a standing example of the
evils of the Ancien Regime: of royal despotism, of inequality, of privilege.
Nor was it any longer whole-heartedly supported by the people. The days of
the Catholic League were gone. The peasants, indeed, still practised their
religion faithfully enough; but the educated classes had been deeply affected by
the scepticism of the Enlightenment. Country churches were still pretty well
rilled; city churches were often empty. To an increasing number of Frenchmen
the Church was coming to seem an outdated and irrational institution, a mere
survival from the past, and the clergy a class of parasites like the nobles, who
had great wealth and privileges and did little that was useful in return. The
mass of the clergy themselves agreed that reforms were needed; and many {a}
country cure, when the revolution began, was glad of it and used his influence
over his flock in its support.
However, the main support of the revolution, the main opposition to the
Ancien Regime, came from the middle class and the peasants. This, remember,
was before the "industrial revolution". There were not, then, any great
factories owned by millionaire-capitalists, and there was no great mass of wage-
earning factory-hands; the great majority of the French lived on the land and
were peasants: and the business-men who carried on the manufacture and
commerce operated, for the most part, on a small scale. Thus there was no
opposition between the peasants and the middle class, as there is between
"labour" and "capital" today; on the contrary, they were united in a common
dislike of the Ancien Regime, though they disliked it for somewhat different
reasons.
The middle-class families of France, the "bourgeoisie", were prosperous
enough. They were the manufacturers, merchants, and bankers of France, they
filled the legal, medical, and other learned professions, and they supplied most
of the royal officials. They had improved their position very greatly during the
17th century, and still more during the 18th. But they were not satisfied. They
objected to the restrictions on trade, to the _absurd network of customs-
barriers that criss-crossed France, to the continual royal interference with the
laws and to the irrational intricacies of the laws themselves: they resented the
pretensions of the nobles, and most of all the unjust distribution of taxation
which burdened them so much more than their betters. They were well-
educated, too, and of all the people of France they were most deeply
influenced by the Enlightenment. Hence they thought they knew, not only
what was wrong with France, but why it was wrong, and what ought to be
done to put it right. They provided nine-tenths of the leadership of the
revolution.
The condition of the peasants is less easily explained. It was not so black as it
has sometimes been painted. The picture of the French peasantry as living in
utter wretchedness and poverty, ground down by taxes and feudal dues, and
generally existing on the edge of starvation, is for the most part false. The most
obvious proof to the contrary is that all during the 18th century the peasants
were buying up land: by 1789 perhaps a third of the land of France was held by
peasant proprietors. Yet they were not as well off as this seems to show. For
one thing, they depended too much on their -own resources. Most of the
nobles even those who owned great estates took little interest in the land
and were little inclined to invest money in it. The peasant, whether tenant or
proprietor, was usually left to farm the soil according to his own limited ideas
and with his own very limited capital: the English squires, who so vastly
improved English agriculture during the 18th century, had no counterpart in
France. A French farmer might do well enough in a good season, but a bad
season meant serious scarcity, and the restrictions on trade made this worse by
hindering the proper distribution of whatever food might be available.
The fiscal system added to the difficulty. The peasants, as we have seen, were
the main source of revenue. This meant that the very class which most needed
capital, and which could make the best use of capital, found it most difficult to
save any capital at all. It was even discouraged from saving; for if a peasant
improved his land or his house, he was simply inviting the tax-collector to
assess him at a higher figure for the future. (This explains, incidentally, the
wretched appearance which the peasants and their dwellings presented to
outsiders: it was a wretchedness deliberately assumed to fool the rise.) Yet the
royal taxation was less vexatious and burdensome than the feudal dues. When
a French seigneur sold land, he did not usually sell his feudal rights: and so the
peasant, even when he had become a proprietor, continued to have to pay tolls
on roads and bridges and markets, to get his corn ground in the lord's mill and
his bread baked in the lord's oven, to let the lord's pigeons feed on his crops
and the lord himself come hunting over his land. For the wealth so lost the
peasant got nothing: most of it was lost to the land for good, being spent far off
in the cities and at Versailles, on clothes and fine buildings, and books and
works of art, or in gambling and dissipation. The peasants could see some use
in the royal taxation, but the feudal dues seemed to them to be utterly wasted.
It would thus be a great mistake to picture the French Revolution as a wild
uprush of people maddened by starvation and oppression; the kings of France
were not brutal tyrants, nor the nobles hard-hearted oppressors, nor the clergy
hypocritical parasites; and the French people were the most sober, thrifty and
hard-working in Europe. But a system had been allowed to grow up under
which the thrift and industry of the working population were continually
hampered by restrictions and inequalities which seemed quite senseless:
survivals from a forgotten age; and at the same time ideas were being put
forward the ideas of the Enlightenment which seemed to show exactly
what was wrong and exactly how it could be righted. The bourgeoisie seized
eagerly on these ideas and only waited an opportunity to put them into
practice: and when that opportunity came, the massed ranks of the peasants
stood behind the bourgeoisie: not that they understood the Enlightenment, but
that they understood, by daily and bitter experience, the defects of the Ancien
Regime.
2. The Opportunity
The opportunity arose out of the bankruptcy of the French government and
the character of the French King. Louis XVI, when he ascended the throne in
1774. inherited a situation which was already serious. The revenue was not half
what it should have been, and the expenditure (owing partly to inefficiency and
corruption, but still more to the debts incurred during the great wars of the
previous reign) was extremely high. The policy of France should obviously
have been one of economy and peace while thorough-going reforms were
being carried out in every department, and above all in the fiscal system. Louis
began well. He appointed as his controller-general of the finances Turgot, and
Turgot understood perfectly the seriousness of the situation, and was resolved
precisely on those policies of economy and reform which were needed. Yet
within two years Louis was persuaded to dismiss Turgot, and within two more
he was persuaded to join in the American War; and by those decisions (as we
can see now) he sealed his own fate and that of the French monarchy. Why did
he?
Louis XVI was a good man. He was easy and pleasant in temper, a devoted
husband and father, and deeply concerned for the welfare of his country and
his people. He was also a sincerely religious man. In normal times he would
have been a successful and popular ruler. He had two defects, however, which
unfitted him to ride out a great political storm: slowness of mind and weakness
of will. He was no fool, but he could not think in a hurry; any urgency
distressed and confused him. And he was no mere jellyfish, but he was too
amiable to stand up obstinately for his own views, especially against people he
liked and was intimate with. For both these reasons he was much influenced by
others. He did not want to dismiss Turgot in 1776, and decidedly he did not
want to enter the American War in 1778; and he was right both times; but in
each case he let himself be overpersuaded.
The people who surrounded him were not likely to give him much help. The
nearest was his wife, Marie Antoinette. She was an Austrian, offered by her
mother, Maria Theresa, as a pledge of the Austrian alliance, and married to
Louis in 1770, when she was fifteen years old. The Austrian alliance was not
popular in France, and Marie Antoinette did nothing to make it popular.
Quick-witted, vivacious and high-spirited, she at first rather despised her slow
husband, and found her amusement in a round of balls, masques, card-parties,
private theatricals and the like: harmless enough, but ill-befitting the dignity of
a Queen of France. Her extravagance and lack of decorum became legendary.
So did her influence over the King. For as the years passed, and the children
came, she grew to love that slow, awkward man for his deep kindness and
simple faith; and he had always loved her; and so her quick wit and strong will
could usually impose themselves on him. Yet her counsel was nearly always
bad. She had little understanding of the business of government, and less, if
possible, of the state of France or the character of the French people; her very
presence by the King's side was a source of weakness to the monarchy.
Louis' two brothers, the Count of Provence and the Count of Artois, were no
help to him. The former was intelligent enough, but wasted his talents in
dissipation. The latter had few talents to waste. The King had also a cousin, the
Duke of Orleans; but he was an active enemy. The Orleans branch of the
French royal family had always been ambitious; this particular Duke had
dreams, perhaps, of supplanting Louis on the throne of France. At any rate, he
was active in opposition to the King's government; his house in Paris, the
Palais-Royal, became a centre of intrigue, and from it poured out a flood of
propaganda, pamphlets, broadsheets and the like, which helped to prepare
public opinion to accept a revolution. (During the Revolution the Duke
suffered the fate of most traitors, being distrusted by all parties: he was at last
guillotined under the Terror.)
Thus the stage was set. Reform was urgently needed: under the old regime
reform could only come from the King; yet the King was fatally hampered, by
his own nature, by his associates, and by the very atmosphere of Versailles,
from undertaking reform. His appointment of Turgot was a promising move;
but he failed to maintain Turgot. Turgot's successors took warning from his
fate, and did not attempt to introduce any radical reform; one of them, indeed,
a banker named Necker, did a great deal of harm by publishing a falsified
balance-sheet (the "compte rendu" of 1781) which misled public opinion by
giving a far too favourable view of French finances. The shock was all the
greater when a later minister, Calonne, frankly announced that only drastic
measures would save the country from bankruptcy. Yet the privileged classes
would not consent to such measures. Someone then suggested that the Estates-
General, the old parliament of France, should be summoned, and should be
asked to find a solution to the problem. This suggestion found general favour.
It might enable the government to get the necessary reforms made without
taking responsibility for them. The King was gradually brought round to this
view, and on August 8th, 1788, he summoned the Estates-General to meet at
Versailles in the following year. By this action he began the Revolution.
The one thing that an absolute government must not do is to evade
responsibility. By calling the Estates, Louis XVI, in effect, confessed that he
could not save France, and requested the representatives of the people to save
her; he practically abdicated from his position of sole and sovereign power, and
that was how his action was understood by the people themselves. Further, the
bourgeoisie and the peasants had only been waiting for a chance to get the
whole regime in France revised and reformed, and now they thought the
chance had come. Louis might protest that he had only summoned the Estates
to give him financial advice; but the people thought differently.
When "representative institutions", as we call them, were developing in
Europe in the 13th century, the French were divided, for purposes of
representation, into three groups or "estates": the clergy, the nobility, and the
commons or "third estate". Thus the French assembly had three houses, the
members of which deliberated and voted separately. The Estates-General was
never more than an advisory body, and never wielded much influence; it was
summoned in 1614, during the period of confusion that followed the death of
Henry IV, but it proved quite incapable of dealing with the confusion, was
soon dissolved, and disappeared from the French political scene. The proposal
to summon it in 1789 was a counsel of despair: only a government at its wits'
end would have thought of the Estates-General.
As soon, however, as the proposal to summon it became known, the active
reformers in France conceived the idea of using it for their own designs. But
they foresaw difficulties in the way. Only the representatives of the third estate
could be counted on to support the reforms, and that estate could be outvoted
by the other two. Two demands were therefore made: that the third estate
should have double representation (six hundred members as opposed to three
hundred each for the other estates), and that the estates should meet and vote
together as one assembly. The first demand was granted; the second was left to
be determined by the estates themselves when they should meet; and this
provided the first trial of strength between the revolutionaries and their
opponents.
It had been customary when the Estates-General was summoned for the
electors in each constituency to draw up a list of their grievances and desires
for presentation to the Crown. These lists were called "cahiers". The custom
was revived in 1789, and the cahiers then drawn up still remain. They demand
many and various reforms; but those drawn up by the third estate nearly all
agree in demanding the abolition of privileges and of the arbitrary power of the
Crown, a statement of the fundamental rights of the citizen, and a constitution.
Some historians have maintained that this remarkable unanimity can only be
explained by a conspiracy of propaganda, perhaps directed by the agents of the
Duke of Orleans; but there is little evidence for this, and no need to suppose it;
it is sufficient to remember that in each constituency the cahier would be
actually drawn up by the educated electors, members of the bourgeoisie, all
imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment. The important point is that the
representatives of the third estate came to Versailles with clear statements of
their electors' wishes: statements which demanded revolutionary changes in
the political, social and economic order in France.
29. The National Assembly
1. The Making of the Assembly
The six hundred representatives of the Third Estate were determined to make
great changes in the government of France; but they were not certain how to
go about it. They were nonplussed right at the start, when the representatives
of the other Estates voted to sit as separate bodies, apart from one another and
from the Third Estate. Forty-seven of the nobles, indeed, and one hundred and
thirteen of the clergy, voted to sit with the Third Estate; but they were
outvoted, and it became clear to the Third Estate that any reforms it proposed
would likewise be voted down in the other two houses. The members of the
Third Estate were not violent revolutionaries, but solid, sober citizens; but
they were now faced with a choice between revolutionary action and the
frustration of all their hopes. They debated long; and then, on June 16th, they
proclaimed that they, as the representatives of the people, were the National
Assembly of France, and that the government of France depended on them.
This was an act of defiance towards the existing government.
The King was advised to assert his authority against this defiance by holding a
Royal Session of all three Estates, at which he would tell them what they were
to do. The hall in which the Third Estate met was chosen for this purpose, and
its members arrived on June 20th to find their meeting-place in the hands of
carpenters and decorators. They suspected that this was a deliberate attempt to
prevent them from meeting (and perhaps it was); so, adjourning to a near-by
tennis-court, they issued their second defiance: they took a solemn oath not to
disperse till they had given France a constitution.
The Royal Session was duly held on June 23rd, and the King proclaimed his
intention of introducing important reforms; but he concluded his address by
bidding the representatives disperse, and meet in future as three separate
houses. The clergy and the nobles obeyed; the Third Estate stood fast. When
the Master of Ceremonies told them to obey the royal command, a certain
Mirabeau, soon to be famous, stood forward and said: "Only bayonets will get
us out of here". This was the third defiance, and it succeeded. One hundred
and forty-nine of the clergy, and forty-seven of the nobles (led by the young
Lafayette) decided to stand with the Third Estate; and Louis XVI thus found
that he must choose between giving way to these rebels or dissolving the
Estates by force. He gave way, of course: on June 27th the three Estates were
ordered to sit henceforth as the National Assembly.
Yet the King was much alarmed by the weakness of his own position and the
consequent danger of widespread disorder; and he determined to concentrate
some thousands of troops in the neighbourhood of Paris and Versailles. The
revolutionaries suspected that this was a deep-laid plot: that the King, having
failed to obtain obedience by words, was now going to try arms; and they had
no arms with which to resist him. Hence followed the next act in the
Revolution. On July 12th Louis dismissed Necker, the Minister who was
popularly (but mistakenly) believed to have been responsible for the
summoning of the Estates-General, and replaced him by a soldier, Marshal de
Broglie. When the news reached Paris, people thought that the counter-
revolution had begun; there was an outbreak of rioting, and the bourgeoisie at
once began forming themselves into a National Guard, both to preserve order
and to resist what they thought were the designs of the King. They elected
Lafayette as their commander. To obtain arms, they approached the two royal
arsenals in Paris, the Invalides and the Bastille; the former offered no resistance,
the latter did; and so, on July 14th, 1789, the Bastille was stormed by the
people, its governor murdered, its prisoners freed, and its arms distributed to
the National Guard, who at once threw up barricades in the streets to meet any
counter-attack by the royal troops.
There was no counter-attack. Louis XVI genuinely hated civil war; nor could
he seriously think of dissolving the National Assembly, since that would simply
return France to the impasse from which the Estates-General had been
summoned to save her; so he recalled Necker, and allowed the revolutionaries
to think they had won a victory. The results were momentous. In the first
place, the revolutionaries were encouraged to go ahead with their plans
recklessly, in the name of the sovereign people. In the second place, the
revolutionaries became convinced that the King, or at least his advisers, were
opposed to reform; and henceforth they viewed with suspicion every act of his,
or of his ministers, or of his officials. Continually the Assembly interfered with
the government, and thus the government was fatally weakened, the
enforcement of law became ever more difficult, and a general disorder spread
through France since no royal official dared to act strongly for fear of being
condemned by the Assembly, and perhaps of suffering the fate of the governor
of the Bastille. In the third place, the peasantry were set in a flame. They were
ripe for revolt already, and in most parts of France the news of the Bastille was
followed by attacks on the chateaux of the nobles, with the object of destroying
the manor-rolls and so making impossible the collection of feudal dues. In
some places unpopular nobles were murdered and their chateaux burned
down, but always, wherever the peasants were successful in their attacks, the
manor-rolls were destroyed. These attacks led, in turn, to the disastrous session
of the Assembly on August 4th, when the members, in a transport of generous
enthusiasm, abolished all privileges of every kind immediately: a reckless and
ill-considered act which produced immense confusion throughout France.
Finally, the fall of the Bastille led to the "first emigration". The Count of Artois
and a number of important nobles fled from France, and began to use all their
influence to provoke foreign intervention to suppress the Revolution. The
presence of these "emigres" over the frontier became a constant exasperation
to the revolutionaries.
The revolutionaries in Paris were not yet satisfied: they thought that while the
King remained at Versailles he would always be able to organize a counter-
revolution; they wanted him in Paris where he could be kept under
observation. For this purpose they organized the "march of the women". The
harvest of 1789 was a poor one, and there was danger of famine; the people of
Paris were persuaded by careful propaganda that Paris would be supplied with
plenty of food if the King were living there; and on October 5th a group of
women were got together to march to Versailles and petition the King to come
and live in his capital city. They were accompanied by an armed mob, and
followed by the National Guard, which Lafayette had hurriedly mobilized in
order to prevent violence. The arrival of this motley host at Versailles caused
consternation. The King had no means of resistance, and the upshot was that
he consented to come to Paris and live in the old palace of the Tuileries, while
the Assembly took up its quarters in a riding-school close by. Thus both King
and Assembly were now in the power of the Parisians, and henceforth the
opinion of Paris controlled the course of the Revolution.
2. The Constitution
Against this background of disorder and violence the Assembly painfully
carried on its work of drawing up a constitution. The foundation of the new
order was stated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (August 27th). which
laid down the now familiar principles of the Enlightenment: that all men are
free and equal; that all have certain natural rights, such as liberty, security,
property, and resistance to oppression: that all sovereignty resides in the
people; that law is the expression of the general will, and must be the same for
all: that all men are free to speak and write as they choose, provided they do
not disturb public order; and so on.
Local government was then transformed in accordance with these principles.
The old provinces and provincial governments were abolished, and France was
redivided into eighty "departments" of approximately equal size, each
department being in turn divided into districts, and each district into cantons;
and the governments of these localities were to be elected by the people. The
legal system was reformed in the same way. The old tangle of royal and
provincial and feudal courts was swept away, and replaced by departmental
and district courts, with elected judges. Trial by jury was established for
criminal cases. A beginning was made of reforming the laws themselves; but
this proved immensely difficult, and dragged on till it was taken in hand much
later by Napoleon.
The form of the new central government was decided on the principle of the
"separation of powers". The King was to be allowed to retain full executive
power, but was to have no control over taxation, and only a "suspensive veto"
over legislation: that is, he could delay the enactment of a law for six months,
but no longer. He could not make laws at all, nor could he choose his ministers
from among the members of the legislature. The legislature itself was to
consist of one house of parliament, the Legislative Assembly, elected by the
people yet not by all the people, but only by those who paid a certain sum
(the equivalent of three days' wages) in direct taxation. And its members were
to be elected "indirectly": that is, the voters in each constituency were to elect
a group of representatives, who in their turn would choose a deputy to the
Assembly.
The mistakes of this constitution are obvious enough. The most obvious is the
number of elections which it entailed. Too many elections are as bad as none
at all, for ordinary people soon get tired of them and leave them to be managed
by the few enthusiasts or professionals who are willing to devote their lives to
politics: a minority of professional politicians replaces a minority of royal
officials in control of the state. Again, this constitution is too "bourgeois". The
National Assembly was frightened of the "mob", remembering the disorders
which had attended the fall of the Bastille, and was determined to make sure
that the government should rest in the hands of sober, responsible citizens: in
other words, members of the bourgeoisie. This was illogical: it contravened the
principles of the Enlightenment and exasperated many of the Revolution's
strongest supporters. It did not even ensure order; for the division of power
between the King and Assembly made order impossible. Given the suspicion
and distrust which existed between the Court and the revolutionaries, it was
certain that the executive and the legislature would constantly hamper and
oppose each other; and they did. In fact, the "Constitution of 1791", as it is
called, was a constitution that might have worked well enough if everyone had
been determined to see that it did work; but since it was wearisome to the
people, and disliked by both the King's party and the most ardent
revolutionaries, it was bound to work badly.
3. The Assembly and the Church
More serious than any defects in the constitution, however, was the Assembly's
quarrel with the Church. It was a quite unnecessary quarrel. The majority of
the clergy were, on the whole, in favour of the Revolution, and even the anti-
revolutionary minority were by no means so hostile to it as the anti-
revolutionary nobles. Yet the Assembly blundered into a dispute with the
Church which split France from top to bottom, and which has continued to
bedevil the relations between Church and State ever since.
The trouble first arose out of the financial situation. The Estates-General had
been summoned in the first place because the government was going
bankrupt; and, though the revolutionaries as such were more interested in high
ideas about the rights of man and the making of a perfect constitution, they
were at length forced by sheer necessity to tackle the sordid details of the
financial situation. Gradual reforms were not enough the government
needed immediately a large supply of money. There was only one body of
wealth which could be immediately taken over without causing a disastrous
economic collapse, and that was the wealth of the Church. It was admitted on
all hands, even by the clergy, that the Church had much more wealth than it
needed, and that much of this wealth was badly applied; the Assembly
therefore formed the project of confiscating the lands of the Church to supply
the pressing needs of the treasury, undertaking in return that the Church
should in future be supported out of the government's revenues. This measure
was passed on November 2nd, 1789. against surprisingly little opposition;
though even then some of the clergy warned the Assembly that it was
assuming a power over the Church to which it had no right. The
revolutionaries heeded no such warnings. Were they not the representatives of
the sovereign people, and were not the sovereign people the source of all
authority? So they thought; and they recklessly proceeded to draw up a
constitution for the Church on the same lines as the one they were drawing up
for the State.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was finally passed on July 12th, 1790. It
provided that the clergy should henceforth receive salaries from the
government; it suppressed the existing dioceses, and decreed that henceforth
there should be one bishop for each department; and it ordered that all holders
of ecclesiastical benefices, from bishops down to parish priests, should be
elected by the people. The first provision destroyed the Church's
independence, making the clergy more dependent on the Assembly than they
had ever been on the King; the second assumed the right to interfere at will
with the practical organization of the Church; and the third, of course,
completely overturned the traditional constitution of the Church, and could
not be accepted by any faithful Catholic. The opposition was overwhelming.
Out of one hundred and thirty-five bishops, only four accepted the
Constitution, and these four were the worst members of the hierarchy like
Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, who was equally renowned for the brilliance of
his mind and the dissoluteness of his life, and who had received his bishopric by
royal favour, not by merit. The lesser clergy were as obstinate as their
superiors. But the Assembly was obstinate, too. Instead of trying to make an
agreement with the clergy, it insisted that they should all accept the Civil
Constitution and take an oath to observe it; and, since nearly all of them
refused, the Assembly was forced into an open persecution of them: first by
depriving them of their benefices in favour of newly-ordained "constitutional"
clergy; but in later years, as they remained obstinate, by fines, imprisonment,
and ln the end even by death.
This quarrel developed into a permanent split between the Revolution and the
Church. As usually happens in such cases, the extremists on either side came to
the fore, so that the Revolution became definitely anti-religious, and the
Church as definitely anti-revolutionary. The people were divided. The
peasants, in particular, wished both to keep their religion and their priests
(whom they respected and loved), and to keep the gains of the Revolution. We
shall see later the evil results of this division; and we shall see also how, as the
revolutionary principles spread to other parts of Europe, the religious quarrel
spread too, making equal or worse trouble in Spain, in Italy, in Germany and in
Russia.
4. The Assembly and the King
One result of the Civil Constitution was to bring to a head the differences
between the Assembly and the King. Louis XVI was not a convinced opponent
of the revolutionary reforms: left to himself, he would probably have been
willing to give them a fair trial. The Civil Constitution changed all this, because
it brought his conscience into play. He was a sincere Catholic; he thought that
in consenting to this interference with the Church he was being false to his
religion; and from that moment he wanted above all to escape from his
intolerable position if necessary, by leaving France altogether and taking
refuge with his brother-in-law, the Emperor. Marie Antoinette rejoiced in this
change of heart. She had always wished her husband to take a strong line
against the Revolution, and hoped that her brother the Emperor would
support him, if necessary, by force of arms.
A definite breach between the King and the Assembly was postponed for some
time by the influence of Mirabeau. This man, the most remarkable of the early
revolutionaries, was the younger son of a powerful noble of Provence, but had
destroyed his prospects by a career of boundless dissipation and debauch. He
was more than once imprisoned at the request of his own father, and finally
spent three years in Vincennes for abducting another man's wife. On emerging,
he found himself ostracized by his own order, and was forced to support
himself by a series of more-or-less shady jobs for the French secret service. Yet
he had great gifts. He was powerful both in mind and body, and was a forceful
and convincing speaker; his years in prison had enabled him to read widely,
and his secret service experience had instructed him in the art of political
intrigue. Though rejected by the nobles, he had no difficulty in getting himself
elected to the Third Estate.
His political career had three phases. In the first, he put himself forward as the
most violent and determined champion of the Revolution, becoming the
dominant figure in the Third Estate, and later in the National Assembly. He
soon perceived, however, the danger of the growing breach between the
Assembly and the King: he saw the absolute necessity of strong government if
France was to come through the Revolution without falling into anarchy; and
in May, 1790, he began the second phase of his career by offering himself as a
secret adviser to the King. He then wrote that famous series of "Notes for the
Court", in which he instructed the King about what was going on in the
Assembly, and about the changing currents of feeling and opinion among its
members; and accordingly advised him what line to take in dealing with them:
when to oppose, when to temporize, and when to yield gracefully to their
desires. At the same time he still posed openly as a violent revolutionary, so as
to maintain his reputation and power in the Assembly and in Paris. Like a
circus-rider, he tried to keep two horses together by standing with one foot on
each.
He failed. The King naturally distrusted him; his personal reputation made him
hateful and disgusting to the Queen; and furthermore, he came up against the
King's conscience. Having no conscience himself, he could not conceive how
Louis could surrender political advantage for conscience' sake. Louis' vain
resistance to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy seemed to Mirabeau merely
stupid: Mirabeau's outspoken support of the measure in the Assembly seemed
to Louis basely hypocritical. In such circumstances, it was impossible to get the
King and the Assembly to pull together.
Mirabeau then swung over to a third policy. The King must assert himself if
France were not to fall into anarchy: therefore the King should flee secretly
from Paris and make an appeal to the people of France: he should promise to
maintain the major reforms that had been made, but should appeal for help in
restoring order against the mismanagement of the Assembly and the
turbulence of the city of Paris. This scheme would probably have been
successful; but once again Louis' conscience forbade him to take Mirabeau's
advice: he would not risk starting a civil war. He wanted to get out of France
altogether and take refuge with the Emperor, as Marie Antoinette was always
urging him to do; Mirabeau struggled desperately against this, warning Louis
that as soon as he started getting help from foreigners the French would turn
irrevocably against him. The tug-of-war lasted till April 2nd. 1791. when
suddenly, after a brief illness. Mirabeau died.
The Queen now had it all her own way, and preparations were at once begun
for the royal family to escape over the German frontier. The attempt was made
on June 20th. It failed. The party got safely out of Paris, but as they approached
the frontier they were recognized and stopped at Varennes. and thence
brought back to Paris and the Tuileries: a palace which was henceforth little
better than a prison.
This was the King's fatal error, and the turning-point of the Revolution. It was
like a flash of lightning, showing up to the whole of France in a sudden glare
the King's opposition, the fact that he was even ready to take refuge with the
foreigner rather than consent to the revolutionary reforms. The Assembly,
indeed, tried to gloss it over, hoping that Louis would give way when he saw
that there was nothing else to be done; and when, on July 17th, some of the
extremists staged a demonstration against the monarchy, their meeting was
broken up by the National Guard in what became known as "the massacre of
the Champ-de-Mars", and the organizers, Danton and Marat, were forced to go
into hiding. But this was all useless. The Emperor made matters worse by
holding a conference with the King of Prussia at Pillnitz, whence the two
sovereigns issued a joint Declaration to the effect that they were prepared to
uphold the liberty of the King of France by force of arms, if necessary. This
only exasperated the French. The younger of the revolutionaries talked more
and more of the need for a republic, and more and more of the people came
round to their view. This was the situation when, on September 21st, 1791, the
Constitution was formally promulgated, and the National Assembly dissolved
itself having first voted, with noble but misguided enthusiasm, a "self-
denying ordinance", that none of its members could stand for election to the
new parliament, the Legislative Assembly.
Note: The Assignats
When the Assembly decided to use the wealth of the Church to satisfy the
government's debtors, it was faced with the difficulty that to throw all that land
on the market at once would so depress property-values that the returns from
the sale would be inadequate. It was therefore decided to sell off all the
Church-lands gradually, and in the meantime to pay in paper-notes, called
"Assignats", which were to be redeemed in gold according as the land was sold.
Unfortunately, the troubles of the following years did depress property-values,
so that the Church-lands never realized the prices which had been hoped for;
and further, the revolutionary governments yielded to the temptation of
getting easy money by issuing more and more assignats, till there were so
many in circulation that they could not be redeemed at their face-value; the
result was a wave of inflation, and fresh confusion in the finances.
The Church-lands were actually bought up in small parcels by the richer
peasants and by some members of the middle-class, and the number of small
landowners was correspondingly increased. It was increased further when the
estates of the emigre nobles began to be seized and sold. This wide distribution
of property was one of the most important effects of the Revolution; but it
happened by accident, not by design.
30. The First Republic
When the National Assembly dissolved itself, its members thought, or hoped,
that the Revolution was successfully completed; but they were mistaken. The
new regime which they had established was far from secure; and their own last
act, by which they deprived themselves of the right to stand for election to the
Legislative Assembly, made it certain that the leaders of that Assembly would
be new men: younger, more ardent, less experienced revolutionaries, who
were not at all satisfied with the Constitution of 1791, but wanted to carry the
Revolution to its logical conclusion by overthrowing the monarchy and setting
up a republic. The Constitution was doomed from the start. What saved it for
a time was that its opponents did not agree among themselves.
The Legislative Assembly
In fact, there soon appeared two groups in the Legislative Assembly: the
Girondins and the Jacobins. The Girondins were so named because among
their leaders were three great orators from the department of the Gironde:
Vergniaud, Gensonne and Guadet. Indeed, the Girondins might almost be
called the party of oratory. They were idealists, full of noble sentiments but
with little practical sense; they wished not only to establish a perfect
democracy in France, but also to spread the Revolution abroad, and destroy
monarchy and aristocracy throughout Europe. They disliked, too, and they
distrusted, the great influence of Paris, and wanted to diminish it by setting up
a federal system of government.
Their opponents, the Jacobins, got their name from the famous revolutionary
debating society, the Jacobin Club. It was first established in 1789, as a place in
which ideas and measures could be informally discussed before being
introduced into the Assembly; and branches of it soon appeared in all the cities
of France. All the leading men of the Revolution were to be found in its rolls,
but as time went on it fell more and more into the hands of the extremists,
until at last it became the organ of a single party, the Jacobins, whose chief
leaders were Marat, Danton and Robespierre. These men were, above all,
realists. They agreed with the Girondins in desiring a democratic republic, but
they saw very clearly the dangers and difficulties involved. They saw how very
insecure the Revolution still was, even in France, and they wanted to make
sure of France before starting any quarrel with other governments. They saw,
too, the necessity of unity and strong government if the Revolution was to
survive, and so they hated federalism and wanted to increase rather than
diminish the influence of Paris.
Their leaders are worth considering as revolutionary types. Marat was a
physician, and a very good one. He had studied and practised in Holland and
England as well as in France, and he held the degree of M.D. of Edinburgh. In
1777 he became personal physician to the King's brother, the Count of Artois.
However, his life as a doctor made him acquainted with the miserable
conditions of the poor, especially in Paris, and his compassion for them
gradually developed in him an almost insane hatred for all whom he
considered their oppressors. He resigned his court appointment in 1786, and
from 1788 onwards devoted himself to revolutionary propaganda, attacking
not only the Court, nobles and clergy, but also all the revolutionaries who
were less extreme than himself. At one time he was forced to hide in the
sewers of Paris, where he contracted a horrible skin disease which embittered
him more than ever. He helped Danton to overthrow the monarchy and later
to set up the Terror; he was chiefly responsible for the September Massacres
and for the final destruction of the Girondins; and he was stabbed by Charlotte
Corday, a young supporter of the Girondins, on July 13th, 1793. He is a
classical example of the sort of revolutionary who is so obsessed with the
wrongs of the oppressed that he forgets both justice and mercy.

Danton was in 1789 a young lawyer practising in Paris. His chief characteristic
was his immense vigour, both of body and mind. His voice was as powerful as
the rest of him, and he was a great mob-orator. He was not elected to the
Estates-General, but from the first became the revolutionary leader of his own
section of Paris, the Cordeliers, and after Mirabeau's death became the most
popular figure in the city. He was an extreme democrat, and one of the first to
proclaim the necessity of a republic; but he was above all a patriot. Love of
France was his ruling passion, and if he wanted democracy it was for the sake
of France. He engineered the fall of the monarchy, and was the chief figure in
the provisional government that took its place. There he devoted himself
particularly to forming the new revolutionary army. In time he became
convinced that a temporary dictatorship was necessary for France, and was the
chief author of the Terror; but he took little part in its working, for he had no
love of power for its own sake. Nor was he a bloodthirsty man: he did not want
the September Massacres, and he would have saved the Girondins if he could.
Early in 1794 he became convinced that the Terror had done its work, and
demanded a return to democratic government: but Robespierre and the other
Terrorists did not agree, and they used the machinery of the Terror (which he
had himself set up) to have him tried and executed (April 5th. 1794).
Robespierre was a lawyer, like Danton, but was unlike Danton in every other
respect. Both physically and mentally he was small, neat and precise; and he
was a complete fanatic. He did not love the poor; he did not love France nor
the French; indeed, he did not love anyone; but he worshipped Rousseau, and
the one desire of his heart was to establish an ideal republic on Rousseauan
lines. To this desire he was prepared to sacrifice anyone and anything. From
the moment of his ejection to the Estates-General he began to preach his ideal.
At first he was laughed at, but his steadfastness gradually won him respect, and
after the fall of the monarchy he became the most revered man in France: the
one man who had never changed his opinions, nor needed to change them,
because he had been right all along. He used his popularity to help Danton in
set-ting up the Terror; but, unlike Danton, he regarded the Terror as a means
of preparing France for the ideal republic by eliminating all possible opposition.
Therefore, when Danton wanted to stop the Terror, Robespierre helped to
destroy him, and then allowed the Terror to be intensified. But in doing so he
undermined his popularity, which was the basis of his influence. Too many
people began to feel themselves threatened by his designs and there was a
general combination against him of both supporters and opponents of the
Terror; and he was sent to follow Danton on July 28th, 1794.
Men like these three, with their clear and definite designs and their ruthless
determination, were bound in the end to defeat the woolly thinkers from the
Gironde; yet the Girondins won the first victory. They were enthusiasts, and
they counted among them great orators whom the Jacobins could not match;
and thus for several months they dominated the debates in the Assembly. The
great question on which the two parties clashed was that of war or peace.
Relations between France and the Empire had become strained. Both sides had
their grievances. The Emperor naturally resented the treatment of his sister.
Marie Antoinette; but still more he, and the other German princes, resented
the disturbances which were being stirred up in Belgium and the Rhineland by
the violent revolutionary propaganda of the Girondins. The French could re-
tort, though, that the Emperor had given shelter to a number of emigre nobles,
the declared enemies of the French government, and had even allowed them
to form a little army on the borders of France. The Girondins pressed for a
declaration of war, believing that that would be the signal for a general rising
of oppressed peoples and the overthrow of all absolute monarchies. The King's
friends were equally in favour of war, for they reasoned that, if the French
armies were victorious, the King would regain his popularity, while if the
French were defeated, the Emperor would sweep away all this revolutionary
nonsense and restore Louis XVI to his former power. The Jacobins agreed with
this reasoning, and therefore opposed war; but the Girondins carried the day.
On April 20th, 1792, the French government declared war: a war which was
finally concluded twenty-three years later, on the field of Waterloo.
The Girondins were at once proved hopelessly wrong. Not only was there no
general rising in the Empire, but an attempt of the French to invade Belgium
broke down completely. The French army was divided against itself. The
officers were nearly all nobles and anti-revolutionary, the men nearly all
peasants and pro-revolutionary: and thus the men had no confidence in their
officers nor the officers in their men. So the Austrians and Prussians were able
to concentrate their forces at leisure for an invasion of France, to which the
French commanders would not be able, nor perhaps willing, to make an
effective resistance.
The Jacobin leaders now decided that all was lost unless the royal government
was overthrown and the royalist officers dismissed. Danton and Marat began
preparing an insurrection in Paris. They were helped by the Duke of
Brunswick, the commander of the invading army, who on August 3rd issued a
manifesto to the effect that Paris would suffer drastic punishment if any harm
befell the King. This only enraged the Parisians, and convinced them that the
King was on the side of the enemy. On August 10th. Danton, Marat and their
friends seized control of the municipality of Paris and organized a general
attack on the Tuileries. The palace was taken, the King's guards massacred, and
the King and Queen forced to take refuge with the Assembly; which gave them
sanctuary indeed, but proceeded to declare the King suspended, to elect a
provisional government, and to decree the summoning of a National
Convention to draw up a new constitution. It was the end of the French
monarchy.
These events cleared the air. Large numbers of army officers deserted and
crossed the frontier; those who remained were committed without reserve to
the support of the revolution. Many other nobles also left the country; even
Lafayette left; on every side doubts and hesitations disappeared, and men took
up their stand either for or against the new government of France. In that
government Danton was the mainspring. He flung all his enormous energy
into the double task of suppressing the monarchists and defeating the invaders.
He set himself above all to raise and equip an immense army of volunteers, in
the hope that numbers and enthusiasm would match the superior skill of the
enemy; but he also arrested hundreds of people who might be supposed to be
in sympathy with the invaders ("fifth-columnists", as we should say), and
confined them in the prisons of Paris. This action led to the horrible episode of
the September Massacres. The Austro-Prussian army was now on the march
for Paris; the Parisians remembered Brunswick's manifesto and were terrified
lest the prisoners should break out as the enemy approached; and Marat (to
whose diseased mind the prisoners were simply "enemies of the people") took
advantage of this fear to urge a general massacre in the prisons. A band of
about two hundred murderers was organized, and between the 2nd and the 6th
of September some fourteen hundred prisoners were killed while the
National Guard, the volunteers, and the citizens stood sullenly inactive, and
the government dared not intervene. This showed how much the authority of
government had declined in France since 1789; and it naturally produced the
worst impression in other countries.
Yet the invasion failed. On September 20th Brunswick's army attacked the
French position at Valmy and was repulsed; and Brunswick decided that the
season was getting too late and withdrew his forces Till 1793. Dumouriez, the
soldier of fortune who now commanded the French, let him go; but in
November, reinforced by a swarm of undisciplined but enthusaistic volunteers,
he invaded Belgium, overwhelmed a weak Austrian force at Jemmappes, and
entered Brussels in triumph.
2. The Convention and the Terror
Meanwhile, on the very day of Valmy the Convention had met in Paris and
had unanimously declared France a republic. Then arose the question of what
to' do with the King. The Jacobin view was simple: Louis was an enemy of the
Revolution and was in sympathy with the foreign invaders, and the new
republic would not be secure unless he were executed. The Girondins were
divided, but most of them were in favour of sparing the King's life. After long
debates, it was decided that he should be tried by the Convention; he was
condemned by a majority of one; and on January 21st. 1791. he was guillotined.
meeting his death with a courage and dignity worthy of his name.
His execution was a great mistake. It aroused horror not only in France but
throughout Europe, and was the immediate cause of the formation of the great
alliance which is called by historians the First Coalition. The threats and
propaganda of the revolutionaries had already aroused misgivings; now the
Bourbon rulers of Spain and Naples joined with the Emperor and the King of
Prussia, with Sardinia and Holland, with Portugal and with England, against
the French Republic. (Holland and England were, in reality, more concerned
about the future of Belgium than about the French monarchy; but the King's
death, combined with the memory of the September massacres, proved a very
useful propaganda-cry.) To meet this vast threat, the Convention passed a law
of conscription, and at once found itself faced with rebellion: the peasants of La
Vendee, already stirred up by the religious persecution and the execution of the
King, now blazed into open revolt. The south of France was also known to be
very disaffected. And in Belgium, as soon as the campaigning season opened,
Dumouriez found himself faced by a combined Anglo-Austrian army, was
totally defeated at Neerwinden, and, despairing of the Republic, deserted to the
enemy.
Danton rose to the occasion. He saw that France needed a strong government
to repress disorder at home and to combine all the country's resources against
the enemy. He proposed, and got the Convention to adopt, the system which
became known as the Reign of Terror. The Girondins for some time made a
fruitless resistance in the name of democracy; but they failed to convince the
Convention, and finally, on June 2nd, their chief leaders were arrested: a move
which was at once followed by revolts in Lyons, Marseilles, the Gironde, and
Normandy.
The Reign of Terror began in March. 1793, with the establishment of the
Revolutionary Tribunal and the first Committee of Public Safety; it ended (for
all practical purposes) with the execution of Robespierre on July 28th, 1794. It
was a revolutionary, despotism, working through three main instruments. The
first was the Committee of Public Safety, a body of men elected by the
Convention and given complete executive authority over the whole of France.
It made its presence universally felt by the "representatives-on-mission":
members of the Convention sent out to the armies and the provinces. each of
whom was a little despot, responsible only to the Committee. The second was
the Committee of General Security, which, subject to the other Committee,
organized the policing of the country. The third was the Revolutionary
Tribunal, which tried all offenders against the so-called "laws of the Terror":
the Law of the Suspect and the Law of the Maximum. The first allowed anyone
to be arrested and tried who could be even suspected of being an enemy of the
Republic. The second was apparently intended to curb the inflation produced
by the Assignats it fixed maximum prices for wheat and other necessary goods.
But the prices were fixed so low that they could not be observed; and thus
everyone in France habitually offended against the Law of the Maximum, and
could be tried and executed for it. Prompt obedience to the Committee and its
representatives could thus be enforced by the guillotine.
The practical effects of the Terror were astounding. Order was restored in the
country and disciplire in the army. Enormous forces were raised, equipped,
and sent to the various fronts, where by sheer weight of numbers they at first
impeded, and then began to drive back, the invaders. The rebellions (except
that of La Vendee) were crushed. In September the English were defeated at
Dunkirk, in October the Austrians at Wattignies. The Spaniards were driven
back across the Pyrenees. In December Toulon, which had been occupied by
the English fleet, was retaken largely by the skill of a young artillery-officer,
Napoleon Buonaparte. Such successes persuaded the French, as a whole, to
submit to the excesses .of the Terror. These excesses were sometimes horrible:
the atrocities of Carrier, at Nantes, and of Collot d'Herbois, at Lyons, were
particularly infamous; and in Paris every day saw thirty or forty victims
guillotined. Yet some historians maintain that, after the growth of disorder
since 1789, and in face of the First Coalition, only such ruthless severity could
have saved France. In 1794, however, the success of the French armies on
every front seemed to show that the Terror had done its work and ought to be
discarded. Danton himself was the first to urge a relaxation of it; but he could
not get enough support in the Convention, and his attempt, as we have seen,
was fatal to himself. But Robespierre, though he helped to destroy Danton,
was no more in love with the Terror: what he wanted was an ideal republic;
and he planned, it seems, to use the machinery of the Terror to make a final
holocaust of all who were dangerous to his schemes, and then to abolish the
Terror and inaugurate the "Reign of Virtue". Hence the Committees combined
with some moderate members of the Convention to overthrow him, and he
went to the guillotine on July 28th. Yet after his death the Terror collapsed.
There was a general reaction against it, even on the part of its own agents;
nearly everyone was sick of it, and scarcely anyone any longer believed it
necessary; and so, though the form of government remained unchanged, the
bloodshedding practically ceased. The French armies went on winning
victories: in the course of 1794 they advanced into Belgium, Holland,
Germany, Italy and Spain; and during 1795 Spain, Prussia and Holland made
peace with the French Republic. The First Coalition had been broken.
3. The Directory
The Convention which set about drawing up a new constitution in 1794 was
very different from the Convention which had met in 1792. Its chief members,
both Girondin and Jacobin, had been killed off; what remained was a mass of
rather common-place men, whose early enthusiasm had been blunted by the
scenes of violence they had passed through, who wanted no more
revolutionary tumults, but only desired to save their own-necks and to enjoy
the fruits of office in peace and comfort. They wanted no more Jacobinism,
therefore; but still less did they want a violent reaction against Jacobinism for
they were all more or less responsible for the Terror, and they knew how
many people in France now thirsted for vengeance for its excesses. So the
constitution they drew up was designed to leave power in their hands, and to
make any further change, whether revolutionary or reactionary, impossible.
The legislature was to consist of two houses, the Council of the Five Hundred
and the Council of the Ancients. Candidates for the Council of the Ancients
had to be at least forty-five years old. One-third of each Council was to retire
each years, so that there would never be a general election; and it was decreed
that, for the first election, two-thirds of the members must be chosen from the
Convention.
The executive power was to be held by five Directors, who were to be chosen
by the legislature, but were not allowed to be members of the legislature. One
of them was to retire and be replaced each year. The first five were chosen by
the Convention itself, and were all members of the Convention who had voted
for the execution of the King and the establishment of the Terror. By these
dispositions the Conventionals thought they had made themselves
permanently secure.
The terms of this constitution, and particularly the means taken to secure the
dominance of the Conventionals in the new government, raised a howl of rage
throughout France democrats and reactionaries were alike outraged. In
Paris the opposition was especially strong, and its leaders lost no time in
organizing an insurrection, which they hoped would be as successful as the one
of 1792 which had overthrown the monarchy. But the Conventionals were
more resolute than the King they knew their heads were at stake; and
among their supporters they had a young general, Napoleon Buonaparte, who
hated mobs and who understood the use of artillery. On October 5th, 1795, the
National Guard led an attack on the Tuileries, where the Convention was
sitting; but Napoleon had sited his guns to cover the approaches, and he blew
the insurgent columns to pieces. There was no further trouble. The
Convention dissolved itself on October 26th, and the Directory replaced it.
The rule of the Directory lasted for four years; and all we need say of it is that it
was probably the most inefficient and the most corrupt government in the
history of France. The Directors continually intrigued and quarrelled with and
against one another: the different groups (one can hardly call them parties) in
the Councils did likewise; and everyone connected with the government set to
work to get as much money and power as he could. Disorder and crime once
again went unpunished; the armies began to be ill-supplied and to become
discontented; the government's unpopularity increased from year to year; and
yet the constitution was such that the people's resentment could not make
itself felt. Even those who at first were simply glad that the violence of the
Revolution had at last been ended became disgusted with the Directory; at last
a universal cry arose for decent, efficient and orderly government; and there
was a man at hand ready to take advantage of that cry. Indeed, the chief
historical importance of the Directory is that it gave his opportunity to
Napoleon Buonaparte.
31. Napoleon And France
1. The Years of Formation (1769-1795)
The greatest political and military genius of modern times was born in Corsica
in 1769, the second son of a poor noble. Till 1768, Corsica had belonged to
Genoa; but in that year the Genoese sold their rights in the island to France, so
that, when Napoleon's father decided on a military career for him, he was able
to obtain for him a place in the French military school at Brienne. Thither
Napoleon went in 1779.
His school-days were not happy. He distinguished himself at his studies,
particularly at mathematics; but being poor, and a Corsican, and an ardent
student, he was looked down on by most of his schoolfellows; and he returned
their contempt with interest. It was here that he developed the intense hatred
of "privilege" which afterwards became one of his main principles; and this
hatred was fed by his reading of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and
especially of Rousseau. He was commissioned a sub-lieutenant of artillery in
1785. But, being poor and without influence, his prospects in the French army
were small, and he determined to devote himself to the liberation of his native
Corsica.
The Revolution changed all that. Napoleon was its ardent supporter, but the
Corsicans as a whole were not; they especially detested the Civil Constitution
of the Clergy; and the young man's efforts to revolutionize Corsica ended in
failure, and in the flight of the whole Buonaparte family to France. At the same
time, the desertion of many royalist officers opened up to him the possibility of
a brilliant military career; and thenceforward his fortunes were bound up with
those of the French revolutionary army. In 1793, at the age of twenty-four, he
was already a major.
He distinguished himself during the siege of Toulon, where he was given
command of the artillery; and his efforts brought about the fall of the city in
December, 1793. For this he was made a general. As a soldier, however, he had
attached himself to the Jacobins, and had become conspicuous for his support
of the Terror; so that the fall of Robespierre brought him into acute danger. He
was for some time in prison; and soon after being released, to keep him out of
mischief, he was ordered off to fight the rebels in La Vendee. To escape this
dead end, where there was no prospect of either glory or profit, Napoleon
dared to disobey orders and come to Paris; the immediate result being that he
was deprived of his rank and his military career was apparently brought to an
end. Yet the final result was fortunate. For he was in Paris in October, 1795,
when revolt broke out against the new constitution of the Directory. He was
pressed into service like everyone else available; and his tactics, and especially
his handling of the artillery destroyed the revolt. For reward he asked and
obtained the command of the "army of Italy". On March 27th, 1796, he arrived
at Nice to begin his real career. He was twenty-six years old.
2. Napoleon's Character
What makes Napoleon's genius fascinating is the combination in him of
apparently contradictory qualities. He combined a powerful imagination with
an equally powerful practical sense: he could not only dream great dreams, but
also work out the plans to make his dreams come true; he was at once an
idealist and a realist, a Girondin and a Jacobin. His admirers lay stress on the
ideals; his critics point to the sometimes base and brutal means which he
employed to achieve his ends; he himself seems to have thought that the ends
justified the meansor rather, that the ends and the means were inseparable. It
is absurd to call him a pure-souled, high-minded reformer but equally absurd to
call him a mere crafty schemer or ambitious self-seeker. He was all these, and
more besides.
His practical intelligence was, of course, immense, and here too he combined
apparent contradictories: to a prodigious memory for detail he added the
power of grouping innumerable details in one comprehensive plan. He could
see with his own mind every aspect of a problem political, military,
diplomatic, geographical, economic and work out a solution to suit each and
all.
His will-power equalled his intelligence. It showed itself most obviously in his
capacity for work: close and continuous application to the job on hand.
Probably no-one has ever worked so hard some of the stories told by his
secretaries seem incredible; it is a fact, though, that the day before the battle of
Ligny he was eighteen hours in the saddle and was still able to fight and win a
pitched battle on the morrow and this was at the end of his career, when his
powers had begun to fail him! His courage shows the same force of will not
merely physical courage (of which he had plenty, and which endeared him to
his soldiers), but still more the moral courage, the inward resolution, the
"nerve", which sustained him in the most difficult and doubtful circumstances,
and enabled him often to snatch victory where others would have admitted
defeat.
But the strength of his will appears most of all in his mastery of himself. For his
feelings were as strong as his intelligence; his loves and hatreds were intense;
his passions were volcanic; and what is amazing is that they so rarely succeeded
in breaking forth. This strength of feeling, and the constant struggle between
feeling and will, account for many apparent contradictions in Napoleon's
behaviour. He could be splendidly generous or bitterly spiteful, nobly forgiving
or remorselessly vindictive, tenderly affectionate or as cold as a stone.
Generally his will ruled his feelings, and he acted as his reason dictated; whence
superficial observers call him a cynical calculator. But no calculator was ever
loved, or hated, as passionately as he.
In later life he degenerated somewhat. His health began to break down, and
from about 1812 he was no longer able to work so continuously or at such high
pressure. More important than this was his moral decline. He never
encountered his intellectual equal, and his evident superiority to those about
him led him in the end to become self-satisfied, obstinate, overconfident, even
vain. This was the main cause of his downfall.
3. Napoleon's Ideas
His fundamental principle was his belief in equality. Not that he wanted to
reduce all men to the same dead level: on the contrary; but he believed in
equality before the law and equality of opportunity, and he detested privilege.
He thought that society could only be justly and efficiently organized if every
man were given the opportunity of rising (or falling) to the position for which
his talents fitted him: as he said himself, "Every one of my soldiers carries a
marshal's baton in his knapsack". In this respect he was very much the child of
the Enlightenment and the Revolution.
His other main principle was a belief in the necessity of order: he strongly
approved the saying that "Order is heaven's first law". His practical sense
naturally led him to this conclusion; but, besides, his experience of the
Revolution had given him a profound hatred of disorder, and particularly of
anything like mob-rule. Therefore he did not believe in political liberty. Yet he
did believe that government should be popular; and he always claimed, and
rightly, that his own power rested on the consent of the people. In his own
words: "My policy consists in governing men as the greater number wish to be
governed. That, I think, is the way of recognizing the sovereignty of the
people". He thought, that is, that government should satisfy the people, but
not be controlled by the people; it should be controlled by men of talent, and
such men should be given every opportunity of rising from the ranks into
positions of responsibility and power.
His views on culture and religion were strangely onesided. The main bent of
his mind was practical, not speculative (in which he foreshadowed the
development of the "scientific" mentality of today); and he was unfortunate in
being educated so much under the influence of the Enlightenment, with its
over-emphasis on "reason". He always tended to look on the arts, and even on
religion, as mere instruments of government, and this helps to explain why his
reign did not produce a great artistic revival, and why his religious policy was
only partly successful. Yet, almost alone in his generation, he did realize the
immense power of religious faith: the force of his genius rising above the
limitations and prejudices of his education. What his private religious beliefs
were will always be disputed; three facts are certain: he always believed in God,
on his death-bed he received Extreme Unction, and in his will he declared that
he died "in communion with the Apostolic Roman Church".
His military principles were no different from those of other great captains; but
he was much helped by two circumstances: the revolutionary enthusiasm
which animated the French armies (and which he was able to transform into a
personal enthusiasm for himself), and the fact that his subordinate
commanders, like himself, had risen in the service through merit, and not
through influence or seniority. His men were more ardent, and his officers
more efficient, probably, than those of any other commander in history;
though, of course, Napoleon's genius was needed to turn these advantages to
account. On the sea, however, he was at a disadvantage. The French navy had
been ruined by the Revolution, and it was never given a chance to recover. On
the sea, especially in those days of sail, technical efficiency could only be gained
by long experience; and the English, keeping the French fleets bottled up in
harbour, prevented them from getting this experience. The courage of the
French was superb; their seamanship was inadequate. And the English had
Nelson, the greatest fighting admiral in the history of sea-warfare. "Fate", it
was said by an Englishman, "owed us that compensation."
4. Napoleon's Policies
His primary policy, as soon as he was powerful enough to have a policy, was to
make himself master of France. It was not mere personal ambition that moved
him. He was certainly ambitious, but his ambition was not just selfish: he
looked on himself as the representative of a new regime, based on equality and
order, to replace the old regime of privilege and the disorder caused by the
Revolution. France would thus become united, prosperous, and the first
modern state in Europe.
Then he meant to make France a great colonial power. He was one of the first
to see the enormous opportunities which then lay open to Europeans in the
less-developed or less-civilized parts of the world. He understood the success of
the English, and he thought that he could do far better than they, and could
build up such an empire as the world had never dreamed of, while at the same
time carrying immense benefits to the peoples of Africa and Asia. He never
realized this design because the English stood in his way; but he never
relinquished it, and some historians maintain that this was always his ultimate
object, and that his later policy of European conquest was only a means to this
end.
His European policy was that Europe ought to be united. There have always
been two views of Europe: the first, that Europe is essentially one, and that its
parts ought to be conbined under some form of common government, as
under the Roman Empire; the second, that the life of Europe depends on the
independence of its parts, and that a balance of power should be maintained, so
that no one part can overbear the others. Napoleon held the first view. He
once said: "Every war in Europe is a civil war". He thought the divisions of
Europe an outrage on commonsense; and he had no doubt of his own ability,
as ruler of France, to unite Europe under French domination, and to establish
over it his own new regime of equality and order, and thus to open to the
peoples of Europe a broader, fuller, and happier life. He did not realize,
though, how deeply rooted were national feeling and patriotism. To the end of
his life he looked on himself as a liberator, and thought that the opposition to
him arose merely from the selfishness of the privileged classes; whereas his
opponents depicted him as a brutal conqueror, an enemy of the liberties of the
nations. The two views are not, of course, contradictory.
5. Italy and Egypt (1796-99)
The Italian campaign was chiefly important because it displayed the greatness
of Napoleon's genius both to himself and to others. He was given command of
a small, half-starved, and ill-organized army; opposed to him were Austrian and
Sardinian armies holding the heights of the Maritime Alps. He first reorganized
and reanimated his own troops, and then turned on his enemies. He struck at
their point of junction and drove them apart; then turned on the Sardinians,
beat them back on Turin and compelled them to sign an armistice; then turned
on the Austrians again, beat them at Lodi, forced them back down the valley of
the Po, and occupied Milan where the Italians hailed him as a liberator. But
the Austrians now fell back on the great fortress of Mantua, and Napoleon was
faced with the task of laying siege to it while holding off the Austrian attempts
to relieve it. Four such attempts were made; they were defeated at Castiglione
(in August), at Bassano (September) , at Areola (November), and at Rivoli
(January). This last crushing defeat was followed by the surrender of starving
Mantua on February 2nd. Napoleon at once proposed to invade Austria, and in
March his army forced its way across the frontier. But the Austrians had had
enough: on April 17th they agreed to a peace, which was finally sealed by the
Treaty of Campo Formio in October. It was the most successful peace,
following the most brilliant campaign, in French history. It gave France the
Rhine frontier, and it established Milan as the Cisalpine Republic, and Genoa as
the Ligurian Republic, both under French influence; but Austria was permitted
to compensate herself by seizing Venice. And this treaty, as well as the
campaign, was Napoleon's work. He kept the Directors quiet by sending them
huge quantities of loot from Italy; but he kept control of all operations and
negotiations in his own hand; and, when he returned to France in December,
1797, he was not only the idol of the people: but had also realized his own
genius and begun to prepare his later plans.
England alone still held out against the French Republic, and Napoleon was
asked to prepare a plan against her. He rejected the idea of a direct invasion,
and proposed instead an attack on her trade and empire. If the French got hold
of Egypt and Syria, they could hamstring England's Mediterranean trade,
threaten her position in India, and incidentally build up a great eastern empire
of their own. Accordingly, he sailed from Toulon in May, 1798, with thirty-five
thousand men, landed in Egypt on July 1st, captured Alexandria, and marched
on Cairo. The Mamelukes, a sort of military caste who ruled Egypt in the name
of the Sultan of Turkey, took up their stand outside Cairo, and were totally
defeated in the Battle of the Pyramids; and Napoleon proceeded to occupy the
country and give it a new and efficient government. He had left his fleet, his
sole means of communication with France, in Aboukir Bay; it was surprised
there by Nelson and completely destroyed in the so-called Battle of the Nile.
But such disasters only stimulated Napoleon's genius. He set to work to make
his army independent of Europe, by growing food, making gunpowder, setting
up workshops and so on, and succeeded so well that by February 1799, he was
able to undertake the invasion of Syria. However, unwilling to impose on his
men the labour of dragging heavy siege-guns across the desert, he sent them
round by sea; the English, who were watching the coast, captured them; and
Napoleon arrived before the walls of Acre to find the very artillery with which
he had hoped to batter them down mounted for their defence. After several
desperate assaults he was forced to admit himself checked and to retire to
Egypt.
There he received grave news from France. The Second Coalition had been
formed between England, Austria and Russia: Austria being only too willing to
denounce the Treaty of Campo Formio, and Russia being seriously alarmed by
the French designs against the Turkish Empire. In Napoleon's absence the
French were beaten: they lost nearly all Italy, and only held their own with
difficulty in Holland and on the Rhine. The Directory was muddling and
intriguing, and more unpopular than ever. Napoleon saw that his hour had
come, and took the daring resolution of leaving his army in Egypt and sailing
almost alone to France, where he landed in October, 1799, and was welcomed
enthusiastically by the whole people. A conspiracy had already been formed
against the Directory (among others, by Talleyrand and Napoleon's brother
Lucien); only a leader was wanted; Napoleon, the idol of the army and of the
people, was the obvious leader; he soon struck a bargain with the conspirators,
and on November 10th used his grenadiers to disperse the Councils and
overthrow the Directory.
6. The Consulate (1799-1804)
The details of the new constitution are of little importance. In theory the
government was to be in the hands of three Consuls; in practice the First
Consul, Napoleon, was supreme, and from the start he ruled as a dictator. A
plebiscite, held in January, 1800, gave the new government an overwhelming
vote of approval.
It is agreed on all hands that the years of the Consulate were the best of
Napoleon's life: the years when his powers were at their height, and during
which he did his best work for France and (one may say) for humanity. But first
he had to deal with the Second Coalition. The Russians were already
quarrelling with the Austrians, and Napoleon's diplomatic skill was soon able
to convince the Czar that France and Russia ought to be friends. Then it was
Austria's turn. Napoleon sent one army over the Rhine to hold the Austrians
on the Danube; at the head of another, he struck boldly across the Alps by the
Great St. Bernard, came down on the rear of the Austrian army in Italy, and
destroyed it at the battle of Marengo. Then he reinforced his army on the
Danube to such good purpose that the Austrians, beaten at Hohenlinden and
driven back on Vienna, lost heart and sued for peace. The Peace of Luneville,
signed in February, 1801, practically repeated the terms of Campo Formio. The
English were by now heartily sick of war, and, without allies, saw no prospect
of defeating France. Napoleon made resounding professions of his desire for
peace; and the English government, though distrusting him, decided to give
him a chance to prove his professions, and signed the Peace of Amiens in
March, 1802.
We have now to consider the great reforms which Napoleon instituted in
France. The revolutionaries had destroyed the old regime, but they had failed
to supply anything to take its place. Napoleon's greatest glory is that he not
only restored order in France, but gave it a new regime with new institutions
based on revolutionary principles.
His first concern, however, was to put an end to the religious conflict which
was still dividing France; and, with his usual insight, he saw that the only way
to do it was to stop the persecution of the Church, abolish the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, and make an agreement with the Pope. This was
the Concordat of 1801. Napoleon drove a hard bargain. He insisted that the
Church should resign all claim to its confiscated property; that all existing
bishops, both those who accepted and those who rejected the Civil
Constitution, should resign, and new ones be appointed by the First Consul
with the approval of the Pope; and that the clergy should take an oath of
fidelity to the government. In return, Napoleon promised to pay for the
support of the clergy, and to allow the Church complete control of sacred
buildings and complete freedom of worship and of religious education. The
Concordat was welcomed with great relief by the people; though the surviving
revolutionaries on the one hand, and the Pope on the other, were not
enthusiastic about it. But the fact that it lasted a hundred years shows that it
was a good practical solution based on the realities of the situation.
The restoration of order required a reform of local government: the elected
local governments established by the revolutionaries had proved inefficient and
corrupt. Napoleon replaced them by permanent officials. Over each
department he placed a prefect, over each district ("arrondissement") a sub-
prefect, and over each commune a mayor: all these being appointed, not
elected. The local assemblies were still allowed to function, but only as
advisory bodies. Local government was thus placed in the hands of a special
corps of trained civil servants, and this has been of the utmost importance to
France: it has meant that, through whatever crisis of revolution or invasion,
the day-today government of the country has been carried on securely and
effectively. The disorder that accompanied the Revolution has never been
repeated.
A still more important work was the promulgation of a new code of law: the
Code Napoleon. The revolutionaries had swept away the frightful legal tangle
of the old regime; but the confused series of revolutionary government had
produced a confused mass of enactments and decrees which were not much
better than what they had replaced. Under the drive of Napoleon's energy, and
to a large extent under his personal direction, there was now hammered out a
complete and consistent code of law: the greatest legislative achievement since
Justinian. It was based, of course, on Justinian's code, but it was both simpler
and more comprehensive than its model, and was well adapted both to
modern conditions and to the character of the French people. Napoleon's ideal
was a law which should be the same for everyone and which everyone could
understand; and, though he did not quite achieve his aim, he came nearer to it
than any of the legislators who preceded him. We cannot go into the details of
the Code, but two points should be noted which have greatly influenced
French society: on the one hand, fathers of families were given great power
over their children; but on the other, they were obliged, at death, to divide the
family inheritance among them. The first provision greatly strengthened the
institution of the family; the second (which was carried against Napoleon's
wish, and in which he had to yield more than he wanted to the revolutionary
desire for equality) hindered the growth of large estates by inheritance, but also
checked the birth-rate. Yet, whatever, may be said of such particular points, the
Code as a whole has been immensely beneficial to France, and to the many
other countries which have adopted it or borrowed from it.
When Napoleon became First Consul, French finances were in a tangle, owing
chiefly to the reckless issue of assignats and bonds by previous governments,
and of bank-paper by private bankers. Napoleon first stabilized the currency by
recalling the assignats and replacing them by the gold "Napoleon"; he then set
up the Bank of France (a private corporation, but strictly supervised by the
government) to control the issue of notes and credits; and he re-organized the
whole ministry of finance, so as to make the collection and distribution of
government revenue thoroughly efficient.
Public works, of course, he executed on a grand scale. The road-system of
France, which had sadly degenerated since 1789, became once more the best
on the Continent; the canal-system was improved out of all recognition; the
harbours were deepened and extended. Paris was given a new water-supply,
and new bridges were thrown over the Seine; the theatres were lavishly
subsidized, and the old palace of the Louvre was transformed into the great
treasury of art which it still remains. He spent public money, too, in promoting
the efforts of private capitalists to extend existing industries and to start new
ones, which he protected by an elaborate scheme of tariffs. The long wars
prevented France from profiting by the great industrial inventions of the
English; and though Napoleon strove to get French scientists to apply their
knowledge to industrial problems, he only partially succeeded. Yet the
commercial prosperity of France, and the material well-being of her people,
were vastly increased under his rule; so that France, in 1815, emerged from
over twenty years of war far wealthier and more contented than she had been
in 1789.
She was also better educated. Napoleon's view of education was strictly
utilitarian. Its main object, he thought, was to enable men of talent to rise from
the ranks into those positions of importance in which they could best serve
their country. He therefore did little for primary education; but he organized
secondary education on the lines along which, on the whole, it still runs in
France. With his usual genius, he saw at once that an educational system
depends, not on buildings, classrooms, or apparatus, but on teachers; and he
set up the University of France to provide the country with a continuous
supply of first-rate teachers. The University was a teaching corporation which
maintained seventeen academies in different parts of France; and henceforth
no-one was to be allowed to teach without having graduated from one of
these. The ultimate result was to give France the finest body of trained teachers
in the world. It is true that the training was, in Napoleon's time, too rigid, but
the general improvement in the standard of teaching was so great as to give
French education, on the whole an advantage over that of any other country
an advantage which it still retains, though the University established by
Napoleon has since been replaced by other institutions.
One other institution Napoleon established which was all his own. The
Revolution had swept away all ancient titles of nobility, and had reduced all
Frenchmen to plain "citizens". Napoleon disagreed with this. He thought the
State should recognize and reward merit, and for this purpose he made a new,
non-hereditary order of nobility, membership in which was to be conferred on
distinguished men in every profession, civil or military. This was the Legion of
Honour. It is the classic example of Napoleon's favourite doctrine of "equality
of opportunity": no-one could be born into it, but any man of talent (soldier,
scientist, artist, philosopher) could rise into it. It was unpopular at first with the
strict egalitarians; but none of Napoleon's works have been more enduring.
It leads us on, however, to speak of his one great failure: his failure to give
France a stable and permanent system of government. From 1799 to 1814 the
government was simply Napoleon: he was the State much more completely
than ever Louis XIV had been. Yet such a system could hardly outlive him. In
1804 he astonished Europe by declaring himself Emperor, and bringing the
Pope from Rome to crown him; and he began to surround his throne with a
new hereditary nobility, chosen and created by himself. This is the most
surprising action of his life, since it seems to run counter to his own most
cherished beliefs. What was in his mind? No-one knows. He said later on, at St.
Helena, that he had not had time to complete his design for the government of
France. However that may be, his failure was disastrous. The institution? of
modern France are mainly those provided by Napoleon; and the French are
still looking for that stable and satisfactory form of government which
Napoleon failed to provide. On the other hand, the kind of "popular
dictatorship" he estab lished (a dictatorship claiming to draw its power from
the approval of the people) has proved unhappily attractive to political
schemers in all countries. Genius is not to blame, of course, for its moonstruck
imitators, and it would be hard to blame the great Napoleon for the
extravagances of Napoleon III, of Rosas, of Mussolini and the rest; but it is
unfortunately true that he set them the example.
Yet on the administrative side Napoleon's government was a model of
competent efficiency, and on this account it has been called "the first of
modern governments". By this is meant that it was the first that could control
and direct the whole life of a people: not only political, but economic, social
cultural, and even religious. The absolute governments of the old regime had
lacked the efficient organization, and particularly the trained bureaucracy,
which is needed to make government omni-present and all-powerful.
Napoleon not only remade the whole life of France; he also provided for his
successors the administrative machinery by which the whole life of France
could be controlled; and this concentration of power in the hands of one
central government is the most important political development of our time.
Modern governments whether they are monarchical, republican, or dictatorial,
have a power over the lives of their subjects such as no despot of the old
regime ever dreamed of.
32. Napoleon And Europe
1. Napoleon and England
Napoleon had made the Peace of Amiens with England in 1802; but a
permanent peace with her was impossible for him. The English believed firmly
in preserving the balance of power, for if one power ever succeeded in
dominating the Continent, England would be in great danger; but Napoleon
despised the whole principle of the balance of power, and had no intention of
respecting it. On the other hand, he did firmly intend to build up for France a
great colonial empire: he had his eyes particularly on Egypt and India; but the
English, who had formerly had to fight so desperately to maintain their
colonial position against the French, were determined not to let that weary
struggle be renewed. The popular opposition which existed in England to the
principles of the Revolution made it easy for the government to rouse the
people against Napoleon; the popular enthusiasm in France for those same
principles made it easy for Napoleon to rouse the French against the
"reactionary oligarchs" of England. The immediate cause of the quarrel was
that the French refused to evacuate Holland and the English to evacuate Malta;
and it was the English government which declared war, on May 8th, 1803.
Napoleon now determined to finish with England for good, by invading and
conquering her. Assembling 150,000 men near Boulogne, he trained and
exercised them till they became the Grand Army: the finest force he ever
commanded. He built for them fifteen hundred barges to carry them to
England. And he began to make plans for getting control of the Channel during
the forty-eight hours which would be needed for the crossing. These plans,
however, did not work out. Napoleon never quite understood the necessities
of sea-warfare; and in any case, his fleets were too weak in seamanship to be
able to act effectively against the best navy in the world, with a Nelson in
command. Even when the English government blunderingly provoked Spain
into declaring war, the situation was not much improved; for the Spanish navy
was rather worse than the French. The years 1803-1805 were filled with
schemes and attempts, which certainly kept the English busy and caused them
much anxiety, but which, as we now know, had little chance of success, and
which the English checked or parried with ease. It was not until October, 1805,
when Napoleon had given over his plan of invasion, that Nelson finally
succeeded in bringing his enemies to fight a great fleet-action; the result was
Trafalgar, which demonstrated to all the world the overwhelming superiority
of England on the sea. Napoleon, for the time being, accepted his failure. By
that time, indeed, he was occupied elsewhere.
For the English, who had been striving by all means to form a new coalition
against him, had at last succeeded. Austria was not yet resigned to her defeats;
Russia was suspicious of Napoleon's designs in the eastern Mediterranean; and
these two, with England, formed the Third Coalition in August, 1805.
2. The Third Coalition
The campaigns that followed were the most brilliantly successful of Napoleon's
career. The Grand Army turned its back on the Channel and marched to the
Danube, where Napoleon destroyed the first Austrian army at Ulm. Three
weeks later he was in Vienna. The main Austrian forces retired northwards and
effected a junction with the Russian army which the Czar Alexander had led to
their relief. Though it was the depth of winter, Napoleon marched after, and
encountered the combined army of his enemies at Austerlitz; where, on
December 2nd, he won the greatest of his victories. The Austrian Emperor at
once asked for an armistice and withdrew from the war.
Prussia, the other great German power, had so far been kept neutral by the
folly of her King, and the astute diplomacy of Napoleon. The sudden and total
collapse of Austria alarmed and disgusted the Prussians, and pressure was
brought on Frederick William to make an alliance with England and Russia.
Still Napoleon succeeded in beguiling him with fair promises while signing the
Peace of Pressburg with Austria, and carrying out his own plans for the
settlement of Italy and western Germany. It was not till September, 1806,
when Napoleon was all ready, that the Prussian King finally resolved on war;
and then he met with shameful and utter defeat. His armies were crushed at
the twin battles of Auerstadt and Jena; and Napoleon pressed the pursuit so
relentlessly that within two months he had occupied the whole of north
Germany.
Russia remained. The Russians had been tardy in giving help to Prussia; but
when Napoleon advanced against them he found them tough fighters, and the
battle of Eylau (February 8th, 1807) was a drawn struggle. Napoleon then
reorganized his troops, brought up reinforcements, and called on the Poles to
rise against their oppressors; and the reopening of the campaign in June was
followed by another decisive victory: Friedland. The Czar requested an
armistice.
It was not that Russia was beaten. Her immense size and great resources would
have enabled her to survive half-a-dozen Friedlands. But Napoleon's reputation
was now something extraordinary. His towering genius, equally shown in
government, diplomacy and war, made it seem hopeless to confront him. The
English, secure behind the Channel and their navy, might still defy him; but no
Continental power could venture to oppose him without deep misgivings. Had
he pressed on Russia such severe terms as he imposed on Prussia and Austria,
the Czar might have nerved himself to continue the struggle; as it turned out,
however, Napoleon had quite other designs.
3. Tilsit and the Settlement of Europe
The new Europe that he was making could not, he thought, be built up in
defiance of all the great powers: some ally France must have, to help to hold
Europe together till it had "set" in its new form. Austria and Russia were the
only possible allies, and Napoleon had chosen Russia for three reasons. Firstly,
Russia was less interested than Austria in central Europe, and would be less
likely to interfere with his plans. Secondly, the Czar Alexander was young,
generous and impressionable, and Napoleon had no doubt of his ability to
captivate him as, in fact, he succeeded in doing. Thirdly, Russia had good
reason to be dissatisfied with England. The English were insisting on their right
to search neutral ships on the high seas, and to impound those that carried
contraband of war; and they had recently given proof of their ruthless
determination to preserve their command of the sea, by forcibly seizing the
whole Danish fleet when they had reason to think that the Danes might assist
the French.

When, therefore, the two Emperors met at Tilsit, they were not long in
reaching an agreement. It was, however, like most of Napoleon's treaties, a
one-sided bargain. Broadly speaking, Napoleon was left with a free hand in
central and western Europe, Alexander with a free hand in the Balkans and in
Finland. But Napoleon added three stipulations: the Czar was to join in the
continental blockade of England, was to renounce any project of getting
Constantinople, and was to recognize the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, an
independent Polish state which had been formed out of Austrian and Prussian
Poland. Alexander's advisers detested all three stipulations, and, on later
reflection, Alexander himself inclined to agree with them; still, for the moment
the alliance stood, and Napoleon was able to carry out his refashioning of
Europe with a feeling of tolerable security.
It will be convenient to consider his new arrangements all together. In Italy, all
the old states were abolished except the kingdom of Naples, which became a
French principality under Napoleon's brother Joseph. Piedmont, Genoa and
Tuscany (and, after Napoleon's quarrel with the Pope, Rome) were annexed to
France. The remainder of Italy became the Kingdom of Italy, the crown of
which was assumed by Napoleon himself, and which he ruled through his
stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais. Germany was still more radically
transformed. More than three hundred states, most of them very small, had
comprised the Holy Roman Empire; Napoleon abolished five-sixths of them
altogether, and with them the old imperial constitution was swept away, and
the Empire itself, after eight hundred years of existence, disappeared. Of the
remaining states, those west of the Rhine and along the North Sea coast were
annexed to France; Austria and Prussia were severely curtailed and penalized;
the other states of west Germany (long subject to French influence, and now
enriched by the spoils of their suppressed neighbours) were united in the
Confederation of the Rhine, which Napoleon hoped would prove a sound
bulwark against the resentment of Prussia and Austria; as a further bulwark in
the east, he resurrected Austrian and Prussian Poland into the Grand Duchy of
Warsaw.
How did Napoleon expect these new arrangements to stand? After all, the
Russian alliance (on which all depended) was a doubtful one; the two main
states of Germany were unappeasably hostile; and England, still unsubdued,
was ever ready to send help to the malcontents. It is essential to remember,
though, that Napoleon's rule was at first generally popular both in Italy and
Germany. He came into these countries with his reforms in his hand; he
appeared, not as a brutal conqueror, but as a liberator from the old regime: as
the herald of a new and better order. On northern Italy in particular, and on
western Germany, he conferred enormous benefits, and reaped therefrom an
enormous popularity, which was reinforced by the impression of his
overpowering genius: Goethe, the greatest of German poets, and Beethoven,
the greatest of German musicians, were both for a time under his spell. He
seemed to be the creator of a new age. This was what he mainly relied on; and
indeed, he might not have been disappointed, had he not chosen to impose on
this new Europe of his a burden too great for it to bear.
4. The Continental System
Napoleon's judgments of men were generally correct; but in the course of his
career he fell into three great errors: he misjudged the English, the Spaniards
and the Russians: and these errors were disastrous to him. He saw that England
was ruled by an aristocracy, and that her wealth came very largely from trade,
and he drew from these facts two conclusions: that the lower classes were
discontented, and that the ruling class was mercenary. He therefore judged
that, by cutting off England's trade with Europe, he could both touch the
pockets of her rulers and shake their power over their subjects, and thus induce
them to make peace. This was the theory of the Continental System. In
practice it consisted of a systematic exclusion of British goods from ports
controlled by France or her allies. It was begun by the Berlin Decree of 1806,
and reinforced and extended by the Milan Decrees of 1807 and the
Fontainebleau Decrees of 1810. It caused great distress in the industrial districts
of England; but in its main object it failed utterly.
It failed, first of all, because Napoleon had misjudged the English people: the
lower classes were not longing for deliverance from the yoke of the
"oligarchy", nor were the oligarchs the mere "shopkeepers" that Napoleon
supposed them. It failed, secondly, because it affected England's exports, not
her imports: her wealth, not her livelihood (and indeed, in the actual
necessaries of life England was then very nearly self-supporting). It failed,
thirdly, because it only affected England's European trade, and did not touch
her trade with America and the East: indeed, after the French invasion of Spain
in 1808, English merchants were able to build up a thriving commerce with
Latin America. Fourthly, it failed because even Napoleon could not watch all
the coasts of Europe against the thousands of smugglers that soon appeared,
and fifthly, because even Napoleon could not entirely supply for the lack of
British goods, and had to issue import-licences in considerable numbers.
England stood firm. But the continental blockade, and the retaliatory measures
taken by England against European shipping, had evil effects for Napoleon. For
one thing, they did much to weaken his popularity and the popularity of his
new order. We have seen how much, and how rightly, he counted on that
popularity; but the hardships produced by the blockade, and the very harsh
measures taken to enforce it, caused many people to begin thinking of him as a
tyrant, not a liberator and this struck at the root of his power. Again, the
desire to enforce the blockade and make it completely watertight was one of
the chief reasons for his quarrels with the Pope, with Spain, and with Russia. In
the long run, indeed, England benefited from the Continental System; for
Napoleon's decrees, and the English Orders-in-Council which answered them,
made commerce almost impossible for neutrals, so that the carrying-trade of
Europe fell more and more to British ships, the only ones that could keep the
seas with any real prospect of safety or profit.
5. Napoleon and the Pope
Napoleon had signed the Concordat with the Holy See; but it was not to be
expected that so masterful a genius, engaged in laying the foundations of a new
Europe, should live contentedly side by side with a spiritual power which
claimed the right to remain independent of him and his new Europe. Pope Pius
VII was not a warlike personality; he was prepared to go very far in co-
operation with Napoleon; but he was not pre pared to be merely his vassal, nor
to take sides with him against England by joining the Continental System. In
such a purely secular conflict, he affirmed, the Holy See must remain neutral.
Napoleon soon lost patience and resorted to violence. In 1808 he occupied
Rome itself, and afterwards carried the Pope off to France and held him
prisoner at Fontainebleau. But Pius VII remained firm: blandishments, threats,
and even downright ill-treatment failed to move him; and in the meantime the
good effect of the Concordat was largely undone, and the Emperor's popularity
was disastrously weakened. Napoleon took no heed. Self-confidence, born of
his great victories, was beginning to overpower his judgment; he thought he
could do anything with impunity. In reality, however, his treatment of the
Pope played a large part in turning men's minds against him and preparing the
way for his downfall.
6. Napoleon and Spain
In the same year, 1808, in which he openly attacked the Pope, Napoleon
committed another great error, his seizure of Spain. Spain was his ally, and had
joined the Continental System; but her government was so feeble that she was
more of a liability than an asset, more of a gap than a bastion. Indeed, of all the
governments of Europe, Spain's was the one that, in Napoleon's view, most
needed reforming. He determined to reform it altogether; and he had no doubt
that in doing so he would not only strengthen himself and his new Europe, but
also confer great benefits on the people of Spain. He would be welcomed, he
thought, as he had been in Italy and Germany.
A shameful quarrel between the King of Spain, Charles IV, and his son
Ferdinand, gave Napoleon his opportunity. Posing as a mediator, he got both
the King and the Prince to resign their claims into his hand, and then sent his
own brother Joseph into Spain as King. But the Spaniards were not to be dealt
with thus. They were the most conservative and Catholic people in Europe;
they were deeply devoted to their royal family; they detested the Revolution
for its irreligion and for the murder of Louis XVI; they were outraged by
Napoleon's own treatment of the Pope; above all, they were intensely proud,
jealous of their independence, and hotly resentful of any appearance of foreign
intervention in their affairs. Napoleon's action produced an explosion of rage
and hatred throughout the country. The Spanish armies, it is true, were no
match for the French; but everywhere guerilla bands sprang up to harry the
invaders, and were so successful that the French held no land in Spain but what
they had their feet upon, and the provisioning of their troops became
intolerably difficult.
The English, too, took advantage of the situation to land an army in the
Peninsula; and, by a happy chance, they placed in command of it that fine
soldier who is best known by his title of Duke of Wellington. He proved
himself a master of defensive warfare. Greatly outnumbered, but greatly
helped by the Portuguese and by the Spanish guerillas, he contrived to hold his
own year after year. Had Napoleon been able to devote himself to Spanish
affairs, he might have subdued the resistance; but he was occupied elsewhere,
his marshals bungled the business, and thus the Peninsular War became a
constant drain on men and supplies ("the running sore", Napoleon called it)
and a constant encouragement to the discontented in other countries.
7. The Revival of Austria and Prussia
Before Tilsit, any resistance which Napoleon encountered was offered by
governments and their hired professional armies, rather than by peoples; the
peoples were rather inclined in his favour, and the governments and armies,
organized on the principles by the old regime, were most inefficient by
Napoleonic standards. After Tilsit, however, far-seeing statesmen and soldiers
saw the necessity of some reform: of remaking their civil and military systems
on Napoleonic lines, and of stirring up national loyalty and making
government more popular. Austria and Prussia, in particular, attempted such
reforms.
The men who revived Austria were the Counts Stadion and Metternich, and
the Archduke Charles. The diversity of nationalities and of administrative
systems in the Austrian Empire made their task difficult; but the growing
opposition to Napoleon's religious and economic policies helped them, and by
the end of 1808 the army was so much improved, and the loyalty of the
Austrian peoples so much heightened, that the Austrians thought they might
once again try the chance of war, while Napoleon was engaged by the first fury
of the Spanish rising. This campaign of 1809 proved harder for Napoleon than
any of his earlier ones. True, he conquered in the end, winning the decisive
battle of Wagram and forcing the Austrians to make peace; but before that he
had desperate fighting and heavy losses, and once when his crossing of the
Danube was checked at the battle of Aspern and Essling he was in serious
danger of defeat. So impressed was he that he determined to enlist Austria on
his side instead of oppressing her: he proposed an alliance, and that he should
marry an Austrian princess. The Austrian Emperor consented, and the
Archduchess Maria Louisa came dutifully to Paris and married the conqueror;
but the Austrians were not really appeased they licked their wounds and
bided their time.
The rehabilitation of Prussia was easier than that of Austria, and was carried
out much more thoroughly, by statesmen like Stein and Hardenburg, and
soldiers like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Serfdom was abolished, local
government reformed, a new system of education introduced; while the
administration of the army was improved, and the army itself transformed into
a national force by the introduction of conscription. (When Napoleon insisted
that the army should be limited to 42000 men, the Prussians evaded this
restriction by taking in a new lot of recruits every year, and passing the
previously trained men into reserve.) Above all, the Prussian government
encouraged by every possible means the growth of nationalist feeling. After a
few years of this, Prussia, though much smaller than she had been in 1806, was
decidedly more formidable. Yet she did not make Austria's mistake of
challenging Napoleon by herself, but waited for a favourable opportunity.
8. Napoleon and Russia
In 1811 Napoleon decided that the time had come to finish with Russia. He did
not wish to do so, but his influence over the Czar was waning, and he saw no
prospect of being able to renew it except by war. Alexander was becoming too
ambitious for Napoleon's taste: not content with having seized Finland from
Sweden, he was attempting to take Moldavia and Wallachia from the Turks,
and was even laying claim to Constantinople: a claim which Napoleon was
determined not to allow. (It would mean, he said, the empire of the world.)
Still more important, Alexander was ceasing to enforce the Continental
System, and English trade in the Baltic was rapidly reviving. So Napoleon
decided on war.
He understood well enough that the conquest of Russia would be the greatest
enterprise he had yet undertaken, and he assembled for it a greater army than
any European had ever yet commanded: six hundred thousand men French,
Italian, German, Austrian, Polish. Yet he misconceived the nature of his task.
His experience of war had hitherto been simple enough: you marched into the
enemy's country, you destroyed his main armies in battle, you occupied his
capital, and you dictated terms of peace. But Russia had no "capital" in the
Western sense: no centre of communications and administration, the seizure of
which would paralyse her efforts. If the Russians chose (as they had chosen
when fighting Charles XII) to refuse battle, and to draw the enemy further and
further from his base, a time would inevitably come when he could advance no
longer, but must retreat. That is exactly what happened in 1812. The Russians
retreated, denuding the country of supplies as they went. Napoleon advanced,
his front-line troops dwindling and his commissariat difficulties increasing as
his communications lengthened. He had marched eight hundred miles before
the Russians ventured to offer him battle at Borodino; and then, though he
beat them, he had not enough troops to destroy them. They withdrew, and he
followed. A week later he entered Moscow, to find it deserted. Hardly had the
French occupied it when (by accident or design) it was set on fire and almost
wholly destroyed. Napoleon was now thoroughly perplexed. It would be folly
to advance further. To maintain his army at Moscow throughout the Russian
winter would be most difficult and hazardous. He attempted to treat with the
Czar, but Alexander refused all his overtures. At last, too late, he resigned
himself to the necessity of retreating.
The hideous disaster that ensued was due partly to the Russians, who hung
round their enemies, cutting off stragglers and flank-guards, raiding convoys
and depots of provisions, and shepherding the army back over its devastated
line of advance. The effects of starvation, and of incessant marching and
fighting, were completed by the cold: that cold which has made the retreat
from Moscow one of the classic stories of human misery. Napoleon's genius
did not desert him. When the Russians determined to cut him off at the
Beresina, he outmanoeuvred and outfought them, and brought his
disintegrating army safely across the half-frozen stream. But it was only the
wreck of an army.
9. The Last Efforts
Historians rightly consider the retreat from Moscow the true termination of
Napoleon's career. After that, he might still have maintained himself as
Emperor of France, but the possibility of a Napoleonic Europe was gone for
ever. His loss of France itself was caused by his refusal to recognize this fact.
He hurried back and raised a new army, but it was not, and could not be made,
equal to the one he had lost in Russia. When Prussia rose against him, and
Austria joined in, he was opposed by superior numbers, by troops of better
quality, and by generals who had learnt the lessons that he himself had taught.
So it was that, after bitter fighting, after even winning fresh victories at Lutzen
and Bautzen and Dresden, he found himself brought to bay at Leipzig by the
united forces of Russia, Prussia and Austria, and, in three days' fighting against
double his numbers, saw his latest army destroyed. In this same year, 1813,
Wellington drove the weakened French forces in Spain across the Pyrenees.
Yet Napoleon would not give in. He scraped together what troops he could,
and, when the Allies invaded France in 1814, fought against them one of the
most brilliant little campaigns in history. But it was useless. Paris was occupied
by the enemy, Napoleon's own marshals refused to prolong the agony by
further resistance, and on April llth, 1814, he abdicated. He was given the little
isle of Elba as his future kingdom.
Even this was not the end. He waited till the prisoners-of-war had returned
from Russia and Germany, England and Spain; he waited till the new
government of France had made itself thoroughly unpopular; and then stole
away from Elba and, on March 1st, 1815, landed in France. He was received
with enthusiasm. England, Austria, Russia and Prussia proclaimed that they
would make no peace with the tyrant; but the only armies they had
immediately available were those under Wellington and Blucher in Belgium.
Napoleon determined to attack these. After a lightning march he struck
between them and forced them apart, then beat the Prussians at Ligny and
turned to finish off the English. But Wellington was a great general. He
calculated that he could hold his position at Waterloo till Blucher could
recover himself and strike the French in the flank; and he did so. Napoleon lost
his last battle, and this time there was to be no recovery. He abdicated again,
surrendered his person to the English, and was sent by them to the lonely isle
of St. Helena, where for six years he fretted his heart out and so died. He was
fifty-one.
Conclusions
We cannot sum up in a few words the character and career of such a man as
Napoleon: centuries must pass before anything like a final judgment becomes
possible. We can, though, by this time, clear our minds of the prejudice of his
contemporaries and understand what he was trying to do, and how. He came
to power in France at the moment when the Ancien Regime (that complicated
mixture of survivals, some good, some bad, but all out of touch with reality)
had been swept away by that uprush of enthusiasm for liberty and equality
which is called the Revolution. But this enthusiasm was too purely destructive.
Napoleon's design was to harness it to the benefit of mankind by providing for
it a new regime which should satisfy the revolutionary aspirations. To a
surprising extent he succeeded, and modern France is the result. But he did not
succeed in satisfying the revolutionary desire for "liberty"; and the French have
tried many governments since his time, but have never found one to satisfy
them. And this is equally true of the many other nations which have tried to
imitate France.
With regard to Europe, Napoleon's design was to unify it; and he thought he
could do so by spreading the revolutionary enthusiasm among the European
peoples and thus earning their loyalty to his own new regime: the cornerstone
of which would be the power of the great new France, directed by his own
genius. In this design he failed. He succeeded in spreading the revolutionary
enthusiasm, but failed to harness it in support of his new regime. He failed,
partly because he did not recognize the power of ancient loyalties and local
patriotisms; still more because he tried to do too much too quickly: his feverish
impatience led him into blunders and crimes like the Continental System, the
quarrel with the Pope, the invasion of Spain, which in the end deprived him of
the popular support on which he counted for success. Therefore his defeat in
Russia was followed by something like a general rising against him: a rising
with which his overstretched resources could not cope.
In actual fact, as we shall see, his revolutionizing of Europe increased the
discords among her peoples, and led them at last to the greatest of their wars.
And at the same time, his improved methods of government enabled the
European states to carry on these wars with disastrous efficiency. How far
should he be held responsible for all this? We cannot tell. So great a genius can
never, perhaps, be pinned down by a merely human judgment; so it may be a
good thing that such geniuses are rare both the good and the ill that they do
live after them.
33. Industrial Revolution
The Scientific Age
Parallel with the Enlightenment, there began another great change in
European thought. We have seen how, at the time of the Renaissance, men
turned from abstract studies like philosophy and theology to art and self-
expression, and strove to recover all the great artistic tradition of the "classical"
age of Greece and Rome. This movement was still dominant in the 18th
century; the men of the Enlightenment were brought up in it and took it for
granted; but behind and beneath it was growing up a new movement a
movement which in the 19th century was to sweep the board, and to change,
not only the thought, but also the daily life of men, not only in Europe, but all
over the world. It is sometimes called "the scientific movement", and the
changes it produced are generally grouped together under the title of "the
Industrial Revolution".
The word "science" properly means "knowledge"; but it has come to be used
in a very restricted sense, as meaning the knowledge of material things that can
be observed and experimented with; and we can reasonably define it as "the
study of the material world by means of observation and experiment". Now, of
course, it is not true to say that this study is something quite modern. There
have always been scientists, like Aristotle and Archimedes in ancient times, or
like Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon in the Middle Ages; but they were
exceptions, and the great European thinkers were more interested in other
things. Since the 17th century, however, a large and increasing number of our
best thinkers have devoted themselves to scientific studies, and have given us,
not only a vastly increased knowledge of the world we live in, but a vastly
increased power over it.
We cannot consider here the question why men suddenly began to be so
interested in matter: the fact is that they did. Nor can we go into the detailed
history of scientific thought. During the 17th and 18th centuries astronomers
like Galileo and Kepler, mathematicians like Descartes and Pascal, chemists like
Boyle and Lavoisier, physicians like Harvey and Morgagni, botanists like
Linnaeus, zoologists like Buffon, began the orderly exploration of the material
universe. Isaac Newton was the most important of these pioneers. In his
"Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" he stated and proved the
fundamental "laws" of physical motion which guided all subsequent
investigations for two hundred years. It is true that his explanations were over-
simplified; but their historical importance was immense, for they gave
scientists a feeling of absolute confidence: a feeling that, with a little
investigation, the whole working of the material universe could be explained
with equal simplicity and certainty. The year 1687, the date of the publication
of the "Principles", may fairly be taken as the opening date of the new era.
An increase in knowledge is one thing; the application of this knowledge to
practical living is another. The scientific movement would have remained an
intellectual movement only, had it not been for the inventors who worked out
ways and means of applying it in practice. For reasons we shall consider later,
most of the pioneer inventors were English, and England began the great
transformation which has made modern life so different from anything our
forefathers knew.
Agriculture
Three men are generally considered the pioneers of the new agriculture: Jethro
Tull, Lord Townshend, and Robert Bake-well. Tull began farming in 1699. His
great discovery was that, if crops are drilled that is, sown in rows instead of
broadcast they can be hoed while they are growing. He greatly exaggerated
the importance of this, and started a violent controversy among English
agriculturists; but that is precisely his real importance: that he was an
experimenter, and stimulated other farmers to experiment. Townshend's
experiments, begun after 1730, were far more fruitful. He discovered or
rediscovered the principle of the rotation of crops: that different crops take
different nutriment from the soil, and that therefore there is no need to let land
lie fallow every two or three years. His success led other men to study the
whole field of agricultural chemistry: the composition of different soils, what
exactly are the elements in the soil that nourish plants, what fertilization
means, and so on. A pioneer in this study was Sir Humphrey Davy, who
published his "Elements of Agricultural Chemistry" in 1813. Townshend
helped also in another way. The turnips that he grew on land that had formerly
lain fallow could feed stock, and thus many more sheep and cattle could be
kept alive through the winter; and this made possible scientific stock-breeding.
Robert Bake-well was the first great breeder. He began his experiments about
1745, and soon showed that it was possible to improve the breeds of sheep,
cattle and horses to an extent hitherto undreamed of. (A great admirer of his
was George III, from whose Merino stud at Windsor the great Australian wool-
industry was born.) Later developments, in these three lines of practical
husbandry, soil chemistry and stock-breeding, have been continuous; in the
19th century, too, farming began to profit from the new mechanical inventions
which we are about to consider.
Manufactures
The key-word, in this field, is "power". Men had used simple forms of
machinery since prehistoric times, but for driving their machines they had been
restricted to man-power, animal-power, wind-power and water-power. (The
Romans, indeed, had known of a simple steam-engine, but with their
abundance of slave-labour it had not seemed worth developing.) The great
discovery of the 18th century was that other forms of power existed in nature,
and could be harnessed to the uses of man. The first of these was steam-power.
A practical steam-engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen about 1712, but
it was not very efficient. It was redesigned later by James Watt (he took out his
first patent in 1769), whose improvements were so important that he may
fairly be called the inventor of the modern steam-engine. The engines of
Newcomen and Watt were chiefly used for pumping water out of coal-mines:
thus steam-power led directly to cheap coal. At the same time, iron-founders
were experimenting with the use of coke instead of charcoal, for smelting; the
Darbys, father and son, succeeded in their efforts by discovering the principle
of the blast-furnace; and John Smeaton made the first fully efficient blast-
furnace in 1760. This led to cheap iron. After 1780 John Cort began
investigations which led to the reverberatory furnace, the puddling process,
and the steam-driven rolling-mill, which made iron better and cheaper still.
Steel, however, remained very dear. It was not till the 1850's that two new
processes for converting iron into steel were invented independently by
Bessemer and Siemens, and steel began to be cheap and plentiful. Steam-
power, cheap coal, cheap iron and cheap steel these have been called the
four pillars of the industrial revolution. One might add a fifth: the invention of
precision-tools of various kinds, such as lathes, without which machine parts
could not possibly be turned out with the necessary speed and hairsbreadth
accuracy.
The cotton industry was the first to be revolutionized by machinery. Till 1767
thread was still spun by the immemorial spinning-wheel. In that year James
Hargreaves invented what he called a "spinning-jenny"; a machine in which
one wheel turned eight spindles and spun eight threads at once. In 1769
Richard Arkwright patented a somewhat different spinning-machine. In 1779
Samuel Crompton combined both these earlier machines into what he called a
"mule". But Hargreaves's was the essential invention. Once the principle was
discovered of using one wheel to turn several spindles, only patient
experimentation and the application of steam-power were needed to make a
machine in which a hundred or a thousand spindles could be turned at once.
These spinning-machines produced more thread than the weavers could
handle; and the invention of a weaving-machine proved difficult. Edward
Cartwright patented the first "power-loom" in 1785, but another twenty years
of experimenting and improving were needed before it became efficient
enough to begin supplanting the old hand-loom.
Once power-driven machinery had proved its worth in the making of cotton
goods, other experimenters were found to attempt its application, first to
making other textiles, then to all sorts of industries, from shoemaking to glass-
blowing. Throughout the 19th century the old handworkers waged what was
in most industries a steadily-losing battle against the new machine-minders;
until by the 20th century machine-production had become the rule and hand-
production the exception the most extraordinary change in working
methods in the whole history of mankind.
Communications
The flood of new goods produced by the new machines could not have been
effectively marketed by the old methods of transport; but new methods of
transport were being developed alongside the new methods of manufacture.
Already in the late 18th century, engineers like Metcalfe, Telford and Macadam
were improving the making and surfacing of roads, and Brinsley was making
the first successful English canals; but these improvements were not enough.
Trevithick experimented with steam-carriages on the roads; but the steam-
engines of those days (even Trevithick's new high-pressure engines) were too
clumsy and cumbersome to be successful road-carriers. We do not know who
first got the idea of making a steam-locomotive to draw a train of cars over a
"railway", but George Stephenson is usually given the main credit; it was he, at
any rate, who built the first railway, from Stockton to Darlington, in 1825, and
the much more important Liverpool to Manchester railway in 1830. The
success of the latter inaugurated the "railway age." By 1870 England had fifteen
thousand miles of railways, and the roads and canals had been almost
abandoned for long-distance transport.
The first steamship was designed by Fulton, an American, in 1803. But the
development of the steamship was slow. The first steamers, paddle-wheelers,
were clumsy, and vulnerable to wind and sea; the screw-propellor was only
adopted about 1850. And just at this time the sailing-ship was reaching its
highest perfection: the 19th century "clippers" were far better designed than
contemporary steamships. It was not till the 20th century that steam finally
ousted sail. The invention of the steam-turbine by Parsons was, however,
decisive.
But the victory of the railway over the road was only temporary. Other forms
of power than steam (from oil, gas, and electricity) were being experimented
with; and in 1886 a German, Daimler, was the first to patent an internal-
combustion engine: a really practical light engine which could be used on
roads. At the same time the pneumatic tyre appeared. Cars, buses and motor-
lorries resulted, and the deserted roads became populous again. And the new
light engine made flight possible for the first time: Santos-Dumont and Count
Zeppelin powered air-ships with petrol-engines in 1898 and 1900; the Wright
brothers flew the first heavier-than-air machine in 1903.
Meanwhile the transmission of thought was being revolutionized. The
application of power-driven machinery to paper-making and printing led to
cheap books and newspapers. Experiments with electric currents led (to say
nothing of the dynamo, the electric engine, electric lighting) to the inventions
of the telegraph, by Morse, and of the telephone, by Bell. Experiments with
wave-transmission of electrical impulses led Marconi to wireless telegraphy. In
another field, the Frenchman Daguerre invented photography; by 1900 the first
motion-pictures had been produced.
Warfare
It was inevitable that the new techniques should revolutionize war. The new
methods of production and transport and communication enabled very large
bodies of soldiers to be moved, supplied, and directed in the field; hence the
immense size of modern armies. Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with six
hundred thousand men; in 1914 Germany invaded France with three million.
New weapons also appeared. The breech-loading rifle, and the conical bullet,
were invented about the middle of the century. Machine-guns of various types
(Gat-ling, Maxim, Colt) soon followed. The study of chemistry led to the
invention of much more powerful explosives than gunpowder: cordite,
dynamite, and so forth; and these made possible the high-explosive shell and
modern heavy artillery. The aeroplane transformed the field of battle entirely,
and also opened up the interior of an enemy country to immediate heavy
attack. The change from sail to steam transformed the tactics of sea-warfare;
the aircraft-carrier transformed them yet again.
Medicine
If the art of killing was improved, so was the art of healing: not so much by
mechanical inventions as by the growth of knowledge. During the 19th
century two great discoveries transformed the practice of medicine. The first,
and far the more important, was the discovery of the part played by bacteria
(or "germs") in the production of disease. The existence of these millions of
tiny living creatures was already known; it was Pasteur, the great French bio-
chemist, who showed that they were the cause both of disease in living bodies
and of corruption in dead. Till then, physicians had been working largely in the
dark: using methods and drugs which experience had shown to be sometimes
effective, but having no clear notions of why they were effective, or of why, so
often, they were not. Now, however, it became possible to pin down the actual
cause of a disease: to trace it to the presence in the body of some particular
species of "germ", and to work out ways and means of attacking that germ or
of arming the body against it. Now, too, men began to realize the value of
cleanliness not merely in medical practice, but in ordinary living. City
governments, for instance, began to provide good water-supplies and effective
sanitation, and to clean up their slums; and cities, which had been death-traps,
became reasonably healthy and decent. Incidentally Pasteur's discoveries
helped to improve health by improving food-supplies: not merely by
diminishing plant and animal diseases, but also by showing the possibilities of
freezing and canning foodstuffs.
Surgery was equally transformed. Before the 19th century the surgeon
laboured under two great handicaps: he had no reliable anaesthetic, and he had
no resource against "blood-poisoning". Since the pain of an operation was so
great, few people would undergo one except as a last resort; and the violent
shock greatly reduced their chances of recovery. Indeed, many major
operations were practically impossible. Surgeons tried to minimize the pain by
working very fast but there are obvious disadvantages in that. Making the
patient drunk, dosing him with opium, even knocking him unconscious (which
were all tried), were dangerous and unsatisfactory methods of dealing with the
problem of pain. In 1800, however, Humphrey Davy discovered the
anaesthetizing properties of nitrous oxide, and in 1818 Michael Faraday
experimented with ether; and in the 1840's, after much trial and error,
American surgeons devised reliable techniques of anaesthesia.
The "blood-poisoning" remained. No-one could understand why, after a
perfectly successful operation, a "clean" wound should so often putrefy and kill
the patient. Pasteur's discoveries showed that "germs" might be the cause; and
an English surgeon, Joseph Lister, seizing on this explanation, devised a
technique of "anti-septic" surgery and "antiseptic" dressings for wounds. The
results were spectacular. And from anti-septic surgery developed the aseptic
surgery of today.
Effects of the Revolution
It is impossible even to list all the effects produced by these enormous changes:
all the "personal" effects, all the effects produced on individual lives by things
like sewing-machines, refrigerators, typewriters, tinned foods and so forth, I
must leave to your imagination. Only the broad effects produced on society
and social organization can be considered.
1. Economic Effects
The most obvious of these is the vast increase in trade. The huge quantities of
goods produced by the new methods demanded correspondingly large markets
and supplies of raw materials. The markets were provided partly by the growth
in population which resulted from the developments in medicine, but much
more by the new means of transport, by which raw materials and finished
goods could be moved easily and cheaply over the width of the world. All
countries were webbed with railway-networks, and the seas became populous
with shipping. And, to finance this trade, banking was developed almost out of
recognition: the banker, the master of credit, became one of the key-men in
modern society. Another consequence of this was that distant parts of the
world became more and more dependent on one another: England
demanding, for instance, wool from Australia, cotton from America, oil from
Persia, and paying for these goods with its manufactures. A further result
followed: it became increasingly difficult for producers to gauge the capacities
or possibilities of their distant markets, and therefore industrial crises (crises of
"over-production" or "under-consumption", caused by miscalculations of
demand or supply) became a regular feature of economic life, growing more
widespread and more disastrous till the "Great Depression" of 1929-34.
Cheap transport made possible, too, a much greater "localization" of industry.
A producer no longer needed to be close to his market: he could pitch his
factory wherever he could operate it most cheaply; and thus we see the
concentration of industries in special areas, like the English midlands or the
German Ruhr. Thus, too, we see the growth of the enormous cities which are
characteristic of the present age. These developments, and the shiftings of
populations which they entailed, were not confined within the borders of
different countries or states: international migration grew almost as much as
international trade. It was only during the 19th century that the American
continent began to be really populated and settled. Between 1865 and 1900 the
United States alone received fifteen million migrants from Europe, and their
total population grew from thirty-one to seventy-six million.
All over the world, indeed, the rapid development of resources (especially the
resources of "backward" or unsettled countries) was startling. The European
capitalists, who drew such large fortunes from the new industries, did not
allow their wealth to rust unused. They invested it in Cingalese tea-
plantations, Persian oil-wells, Australian sheep-stations, South African mines,
South American railways, and in a thousand other projects, wherever there
were resources to be used and profits to be won. The industrialisation of
Europe was only a prelude to the industrialisation of the world.
2. Social Effects
European society in the 18th century was divided into three main classes. At
the top was an hereditary aristocracy: some thousands of noble families, not all
distinguished by titles, but each possessing an inherited estate of land. As land
was then the prime source of wealth, the aristocrats were the dominant class
economically, and often politically, as well as socially. Under them, on the
land, were the peasants, who formed the mass of the population: some few of
them independent small farmers, but most of them tenants of, or in some way
dependent on, the aristocracy. Standing a little aside from these two classes was
the middle-class, or Bourgeoisie, consisting partly of professional men like
doctors and lawyers, but mainly merchants and manufacturers: few of them
operating on a large scale, and very few being capable of competing, in wealth
and influence, with the land-owning aristocracy. Some of them employed a
considerable number of artisans, but not, usually, in factories; where the guilds
survived, the old divisions into apprentices, journeymen and masters were
retained; elsewhere the artisans were semi-independent: working with their
own tools, and often in their own homes. A few were mere employees, like
sailors or domestic servants; but there were too few of these to constitute a
separate class.
The industrial revolution changed this social system in two ways. In the first
place, it destroyed the aristocracy. It is true that the agricultural changes at first
increased the wealth and power of the English landowners, but this only lasted
till the development of new lands, in countries like America and Australia, by
"capitalistic" methods, in which a landowning aristocracy was out of place.
Power over the land passed either to this new race of large-scale capitalist
farmers, or (as in France) to independent peasant proprietors, who were
prepared to work hard and live frugally. Furthermore, land itself became much
less important: the vast wealth produced by the industrial revolution flowed
mainly into the pockets of the capitalists; for capital, not land, was the key
which unlocked these treasures, and the manufacturers, railway magnates,
ship-owners and bankers were the millionaires of the new dispensation. In
other words, wealth and power passed to the bourgeoisie. Those aristocratic
families which preserved their wealth and power did so by turning capitalist,
and became save for a title here or there indistinguishable from the
bourgeoisie.
At the other end of the scale there appeared a new class, of landless,
propertyless workers, employed in the capitalists' factories, mines, ships,
ranches or plantations, using the capitalists' machines, housed (more often than
not) in the capitalists' houses: men who were mere employees, utterly
dependent on a weekly wage. This was the class which Marx later called the
"proletariat": something quite new in history a class of free men, neither
slaves nor serfs, who possessed nothing but their labour, and had no rights to
anything beyond what they could persuade their employers to pay them. As
industrialism spread, these wage-earning machine-minders came to form an
ever-greater proportion of the population, till by 1900 the terms "working-
class" and "proletariat" came to mean practically the same thing.
The most obvious marks of the new social system were instability and
insecurity. This was beneficial to some: the old rigid divisions between classes
were weakened, and it became much easier to move either up or down in the
social scale; a man of brains and enterprise, with a moderate amount of luck,
might hope to rise very high, especially if he were not overscrupulous; whereas
noble birth and inherited wealth no longer gave security in the rough-and-
tumble of the industrial era. There was still a dominant class, but in that class
the "nouveauriche", the "self-made man", was more powerful than the
aristocrat; the Bessemers, the Liptons, the Goschens, the Morgans, the
Rockefellers benefited accordingly.
The workers, on the other hand, suffered. The old village communities, in
which every man had his place and his job, were everywhere weakened or
destroyed. In the new factory-towns the workers were not members of a
community, but just "hands" in a factory, completely dependent on the
factory-owner; and the factory-owner believed in "free enterprise", with no
rules of conduct to guide him and no laws to restrain him. The results were
horrible. The long hours, the low wages, the unguarded machinery, the badly-
lighted and worse-ventilated factories, the wretched housing: these were bad
enough. The inhuman exploitation of women and children was worse
women crawling on hands and knees in mine-galleries, dragging trucks of coal;
children of seven working twelve or fourteen hours a day, and kept awake by
the whip. Worst of all was the total lack of security. The factory-hands had
only their wages; unemployment meant starvation; and unemployment might
come at any time. A man could be dismissed at will by his employer, and he
had no redress; more awful was the industrial crisis, impossible for the worker
to foresee or provide against, which might close all the factories and throw the
workers on the precarious support of casual charity.
In fairness we should note that it would be unjust to condemn the employers
outright for these conditions. Some of them were indeed brutes and slave-
drivers; a few (like Martin in France and Owen in England) were generous and
humane; the majority were simply dull-witted. Long hours, low wages and the
rest were the familiar conditions of labour; what was not realized was how the
factory-system had changed those conditions. It is one thing for a man to work
twelve hours a day as his own master, at his own pace, but quite another to
work twelve hours at the pace of a machine. It is one thing to work in an ill-
ventilated cottage, quite another to work in an ill-ventilated factory, with
steam, smoke, chemical fumes, the breaths of a hundred fellow-workers,
vitiating the air. It is one thing for a woman to turn her spinning-wheel in her
own home, or for a child to help its parents, but quite another but there is
no need to go on. The loss of the countryside and the common-lands and the
cottage-industries, the rise of factories and factory-towns, had changed the
normal conditions of labour into a horror. But few were wise enough to see
this; just as few were wise enough to see even the simple economic facts that
only a man with good wages can buy goods, and that a well-fed, well-clothed,
healthy and contented worker will be more profitable than a wretched
starveling. The first factory-owners were not brutes only fools. Let us hope
that our descendants will say no worse of us.
The workers, thus uprooted from their age-old village communities, thus half-
starved and brutalized, thus deprived of air and light and the ordinary
amenities of decent living, feared and hated most of all their insecurity and
helplessness. For this they found a partial remedy. They formed trade-unions.
They met with bitter opposition in doing so, but they persisted and they
succeeded. The trade-union movement is, of course, an economic and political
movement as well as a social one; but its social aspect is its most important
one. The man who joined a trade union no longer had to stand alone against
the power of the machine, the boss, the factory-system; he became one of a
group, and of a group which could stand up and fight the machine, the boss
and the system. Nothing has done more than the trade union to give the
workers a feeling of solidarity and the security of numbers, or to make them
realize their position in society and their rights; nothing, therefore, has done
more to remedy the social evils of industrialism. Unfortunately, though, since
it was oppression and injustice that drove the workers to form trade unions,
the trade-union movement has always been a fighting movement, and has thus
been a disruptive as well as a stabilizing influence. We shall have to see later on
how many trade-unionists came to believe in Marx's doctrine of the class-war.
3. Political Effects
The first political effect of the industrial revolution was the all-but-complete
triumph of liberalism. What exactly liberalism meant we shall see in the next
chapter; here it is enough to say that it was the political doctrine of the
American and French Revolutions: the doctrine of "parliamentary democracy".
This movement against monarchy and aristocracy was above all a bourgeois
movement; and, since the industrial revolution put wealth and power into the
hands of the bourgeoisie, liberalism was its natural fruit.
The liberal triumph was not complete, though. Industrialism produced a new
and vast inequality in European society, between the capitalists and the
proletariat, and the indignation and resentment aroused by this inequality led
to the rise of socialism. We shall have to study how socialism became a strong
anti-liberal movement, and how the resultant conflict developed.
Furthermore, industrialism led to an immense increase in the power of the
State. It was not merely that the improvement in communications now made
it possible and practicable for a government to control its subjects as never
before; it was not merely that industrialization of war made rebellion against
an established government more and more difficult. These were important,
but much more important were the abuses which accompanied industrialism,
and which forced governments to interfere increasingly in the lives of the
people. Governments could not forever stand by and watch the health and
happiness of their countries being destroyed, their natural resources recklessly
exhausted, their natural beauties laid waste, by the ignorance, the blind
rapacity, of private capitalists. We know how the power of government had
been increasing ever since the Middle Ages, how the absolute monarchs had
seized all political authority into their hands, how Napoleon had brought
absolutism to a culminating point. The liberals were bitterly opposed to this
tendency. But the evils of industrialism were too much for them. Factory laws,
pensions laws, public health laws, forestry laws, education laws bit by bit the
State took over the regulation of the whole life of the citizen, till a 20th century
citizen came to have less individual freedom than a subject of Louis XIV.
Finally, the industrial revolution brought to a climax European imperialism:
the spread of European dominance over the earth. Wherever industrialism
appeared, there appeared also a need for wider markets and new sources of
raw materials. The Europeans sought them in other continents. European
capital and enterprise went out to develop all the earth and European arms
forced openings for them when necessary. We shall see later what empires
were formed in this way, what quarrels arose, what good and evil followed.
Here it is enough to say that, during the 19th century, through the industrial
revolution, the imperial power of Europe came to overshadow the whole
world.
4. Cultural Effects
The effects of the industrial revolution on art have been almost wholly bad.
Except in the sphere of pure engineering where the penalty for bad
proportions and bad workmanship is disaster the art of Europe since about
1830 has shown a steady decline. The reasons for this are so various and
complicated that a volume would be needed to explain them; I can only try to
set out the most important of them.
The most obvious reason is the replacement of the aristocracy by the
bourgeoisie. The aristocracy had a high standard of taste, inherited from the
high culture of the Renaissance; the new factory-owners had nothing of the
sort. The bourgeoisie preferred comfort and display to elegance in their own
surroundings; and in the goods they produced in their factories they preferred
profitability to beauty not that they would have been able to recognize
beauty, in any case. They let loose a flood of ugliness upon the world.
Architecture suffered most. A vast mass of building was done during the 19th
century; nearly all of it is extremely bad. The new industrial cities became
architectural nightmares, in which it is hard to tell whether the factories
themselves, the homes of the workers, or the mansions of the bourgeoisie, are
the most brutally hideous.
The disastrous ugliness of the industrialized world estranged the artists. The
best of them turned away from it into the world of nature (fast being
conquered by the machine), or into some fairy-land of history or romance, or
into the recesses of their own minds; or, as the blight of industrialism spread
over everything and became impossible to ignore, they developed a mood of
bitter contempt and vindictive hatred for the abominable world they had to
live in. The arts became more and more separated from ordinary life and
living. This does not make for good art. Popular arts flourished, of course, like
that of the cinema; but in these the collapse of taste was obvious and appalling:
a high level of technical accomplishment was united, generally speaking, to a
basely degraded level of thought and feeling.
The great influence of science itself was bad for the arts. Even good architects
began to turn out archaeological studies, or engineering plans, rather than true
designs for building; even good novelists began to transform their stories into
"social studies"; even good painters began to paint studies in anatomy and
natural history rather than figures and landscapes until a wild reaction
brought in the cult of the brutal or the bizarre. Art the slave of the machine, or
art degraded for comfort and profit, or art divorced from life, or art confused
with science: these are the kinds of art that follow the industrial revolution.
They are not good kinds. Some good art was produced, of course; in music,
and in literature, the 19th century rose even to greatness; but the 20th century
has not carried on this greatness, and the general tendency remains one of
decline. Industrialism did not destroy art how could it? But its effects on art
were evil.
Its effects on science, on the contrary, were good. Science gave birth to
industrialism, and the child repaid the mother with interest, putting ever new
and better means of exploration into scientists' hands: more delicate means,
and more powerful ones. The exploration of the earth's surface, of its depths,
and of its past, the exploration of the stars, the exploration of the atom, would
all have been immensely more difficult, perhaps impossible, without modern
industrial machinery and technique. This is so obvious that it needs only to be
stated. The effect on education has not, perhaps, been so good. Industrialism
has led to an emphasis on technical rather than liberal education, and on
scientific rather than humanist education. Now, the true object of education is
the development and training of the soul of the mind, the will, the feelings;
and it is highly questionable whether the study of science and technology is as
well-fitted to achieve this object as the study of the "humanities". The matter is
hotly disputed, but the effects of modern education are not encouraging. The
men who gave us modern science were brought up, after all, on the
humanities.
5. Religious Effects
You will remember that, throughout the 18th century, a struggle raged
between the "naturalism" of the Enlightenment, with its unbounded faith in
reason, and the "supernaturalism'' of Christianity. At first sight, the new
scientific and industrial developments seemed likely to be disastrous to the
Christian side. New discoveries, like that of the immense age of the earth, new
theories, like that of evolution, seemed to shake the basis of the Christian faith;
while the immense new powers developed by the industrialists seemed to
foreshadow a new age, in which men would be able to make their own
paradise on earth, without needing to look to the hereafter. Accordingly, and
especially in the second half of the 19th century, there was a considerable
growth of scepticism and materialism. This must not be exaggerated. The
majority of the great scientists were, and remained, Christian. It was soon
found possible to reconcile the new discoveries with traditional Christian
doctrine: it might seem shocking, at first, to envisage creation as being millions
of years old, and as having been developed by a process of evolution, but there
was nothing unChristian in either of these conceptions. As for the earthly
paradise to be achieved in industrial power, it became less and less likely as
time went on, especially as industrialism developed the new methods of war.
The real enemies of Christianity continued to be the inheritors of the
Enlightenment, the extreme liberals and socialists whom we shall consider in
the next chapter; still, it is true that the scientific and industrial revolution put
new weapons and arguments into their hands, and that as a result, for the first
time for many centuries a large number of Europeans began to lean towards
agnosticism, atheism, and pure materialism.
And there was one very practical way in which industrialism hindered religion.
The uprooting of whole populations and their migration to the great industrial
centres, where it was very difficult to provide churches and clergy and religious
schooling, meant that a great many of the proletariat grew up ignorant of
Christianity, and were captured by the propaganda of its opponents. It was a
long time, too, before the clergy as a whole began to appreciate the nature of
the new conditions and the necessity of doing something about them: they
were not unreasonably charged with neglecting their duty particularly their
duty of taking a stand against the evils of industrialism and preaching social
justice; and, though this was a passing phase, its effects on the minds of the
people were not so transient.
34. The Nineteenth Century
This is the century of revolution: the century during which the old regime, the
traditional form of European society, was finally broken and destroyed. It was
not destroyed, however, by one single force, but by a complex of forces, all
different, and often conflicting. It was not, therefore, replaced by a definite new
regime, but by a state of instability, in which all the forces that had destroyed it
struggled for the mastery of European society and the European soul. This
instability, this chronic state of conflict, still occupies Europe; it accounts, not
only for the wars and revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, but also for
the bemused bewilderment and uncertainty which distinguishes "the modern
mind". To understand what has happened to Europe since Napoleon, we must
understand the forces that have been at work in it.
1. Liberalism
Liberalism is, roughly, the doctrine that springs from the French Revolution: it
is the 19th century form of the Enlightenment. It is essentially, then, an
individualist creed: the individualism which appeared in Europe at the
Renaissance finds its fullest expression in liberalism. A true liberal believes
above all that each individual should be free to think, speak and act as he
pleases so long as he does not impede the exercise of equal freedom by
other individuals. Liberalism is, in practice, an attempt to construct a society
based on individual freedom.
The practical aims of the 19th century liberals can be summed up under the
headings of the revolutionary slogan: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. By liberty
the liberal meant five things: constitutional and representative government,
freedom of speech, freedom of enterprise, freedom of movement, and freedom
of religion. Constitutional government is the opposite of absolute government:
it means government whose forms and powers are determined and limited by
a fundamental law, or "constitution". Representative government in the liberal
sense, is government by men elected by the citizens to represent them:
"parliamentary" government. Freedom of speech means for a liberal that every
individual should be allowed to think, speak and publish what he chooses, as
long as he does not infringe the rights of other individuals or disturb public
order. Freedom of enterprise is economic freedom; it means that each
individual should be free to engage in any business he likes, by any method he
prefers, producing, buying and selling without interference or restriction so
long, again, as he respects the rights of others. Freedom of movement means
freedom to change from job to job, from industry to industry, from place to
place above all, from country to country. By freedom of religion the liberal
meant, not merely religious toleration, so that no religion should be suppressed
or penalized, but also that no religion should be given any privileged position
or special recognition: not even Christianity, in any of its forms.
By equality the liberal did not mean that everyone should be, or could be,
absolutely equal; he simply meant the abolition of privilege. He wanted
"equality before the law" law should be the same for all; he wanted political
equality all should have an equal right to elect or be elected to the
government; he wanted social equality by the abolition, or at least the
disregard, of hereditary titles; in general, he wanted equality of opportunity in
Napoleon's sense that each individual should have an equal chance to find
and follow his own path in life, and rise or fall to the position that suited his
desires and capacities. This involved equality in education, though liberals did
not always realize it.
By fraternity the liberal meant, chiefly, that each individual should
scrupulously respect the rights of other individuals, and cherish them as if they
were his own. Therefore the liberals, strongly as they believed in free and equal
competition, opposed exploitation and detested war; though their passion for
liberty made them sometimes tolerate exploitation and war that could and
should have been prevented. In general, their feeling for fraternity was cold
and formal compared with their feeling for liberty.
2. Nationalism
After the fall of the Roman Empire, loyalty became for most Europeans a
personal and a local thing. Loyalty was given to one's overlord, or to some
local group or community like a guild or a city. As the kings gathered such
local authorities into their own hands, all loyalty came to be concentrated on
the king: a personal feeling, shown by a personal service. (The official tag, "On
His Majesty's Service", still recalls that feeling.) This explains how a family like
the Hapsburgs could build up a state out of such disparate races, bound
together by their common loyalty to the ruling house. In England, France,
Spain and Portugal, however, the kings built up national states, composed of
men of one race, speaking the same language, having the same customs, laws
and traditions; and in such states a feeling of national solidarity arose, and the
king came to be regarded as the head of the nation, and the symbol of its
wealth and glory and power. Liberalism completed this process by destroying
the power of the king or reducing it to a shadow, and substituting the power of
the people's representatives in parliament: thus concentrating loyalty on the
nation rather than on its head. The consequent worship of the nation is what
we mean by nationalism,
Because nationalism grew out of liberalism, most liberals hailed it as an ally. So
it was, at first. Yet in time it became a rival. The nationalist idea of liberty is
freedom for the nation rather than for the individual: one's own nation must be
independent of all other nations. But independence requires strength; and
strength demands solidarity; and solidarity may need the suppression of
individual liberties. We shall see later something of the bitter conflicts that
arose between nationalists and liberals; for the present, note that, as many
nations in Europe were divided, or were ruled by foreign governments,
nationalism in the 19th century was as revolutionary a force as liberalism itself.
3. Industrialism
This is the name usually given to the social and economic system which grew
out of the industrial revolution, and which we have already considered. In
making our picture of the 19th century, we must remember that it was the
century of Europe's industrialization: the immense increase of trade, of
population, of migration, the appearance here and there throughout Europe
(but particularly wherever there were deposits of coal and iron) of the new
"industrial areas", with their capitalists and proletarians all the
developments we observed in the last chapter were proceeding with increasing
speed as the century wore on. By 1900 even Russia, the most "backward" of
the great nations, was feverishly striving to become an industrial power.
4. Socialism
This was the offspring of liberalism and industrialism. The first socialists were
really liberals, but liberals who thought more of equality and fraternity than of
liberty: liberals who insisted on the brotherhood of man and on the necessity of
cooperation between men, rather than on the rights and liberties of the
individual. There were socialists among the French revolutionaries. It was
industrialism, though, that made socialism a real force. To many liberals,
industrialism seemed an outrageous thing: here were they, preaching equality,
destroying aristocracy; and there was industrialism, producing a new
aristocracy and a new inequality worse than the old ones: for the difference
between the millionaire capitalist and his proletarian employee was far greater
than that between the old aristocrat and his peasants, and the factory-hand was,
at first, far worse treated than the peasant. Further, the capitalists, by their
control of employment, production and credit, were far more powerful than
the aristocrats had been: "popular government" seemed a mere mockery while
the vast power of industrialism was held by a few private individuals. One
group of liberals, therefore, declared war on capitalism and the capitalists, and
it was they who came to be called socialists.
They believed that private property was the root of the evil: the new means of
production must not be left in the hands of private individuals, but must be
taken over by the community; and the vast profits of industrialism must not
swell the fortunes of a few millionaires, but must be divided among all who
helped in production. In a word, for private property, private enterprise and
private profit, the socialists wished to substitute public property, public
enterprise and public profit.
How was this to be done? They gave various answers. Some of them imagined
the formation of voluntary groups, to form settlements in which the members
would hold all property in common, would work co-operatively, and would
share the profits. Owen, in England, and Fourier, in France, were the chief
advocates of this "communal-group" system. Robert Owen was the more
remarkable of the two. His early life was a typical success-story of
industrialism: born in poverty, he worked himself up to the position of
manager and part-owner of mills at New Lanark, in Scotland. But, unlike most
of the new capitalists, he was a model employer. He proved conclusively that
providing decent conditions for the workers and their families could increase
and not diminish profits, and New Lanark became a powerful argument for all
those who were demanding a reform of the factory-system. As a socialist,
though, Owen, was a failure. He quarrelled with his partners, and his later
attempts to found socialist settlements had no success. Fourier, in France,
could never even make an attempt. He worked out an elaborate scheme for
organizing communal-group settlements (he called them "phalansteres"), but
he could never raise enough money to make a start.
Louis Blanc, another Frenchman, was more practical. His system was first
designed as a remedy for the worst evil of industrialism: unemployment. He
proclaimed the "right to work" as one of the natural rights of man, and said
that, if private employers could not or would not provide work for all, the
government should do so. It should do so by setting up "national workshops"
for the unemployed: the capital to be provided by the government, the labour
and management by the workers: while the profits should be divided between
equipment, insurance and wages, which should be equal for all.
Blanc is important for two reasons. In the first place, he was the first to win a
popular following for socialism, among the proletariat, because his scheme
promised them immediate practical relief. In the second place, he was a
pioneer of "state-socialism". He thought it useless for private individuals to try
and establish socialism: only the State had the necessary resources and power.
We shall see later how he tried, and failed, to get his national workshops
established during the revolution of 1848; nevertheless, from 1848 onwards
socialism was a political force that had to be reckoned with.
Another Frenchman, Proudhon was rather an anarchist than a socialist. His
simple principle was, "Property is theft". The world, he held, belongs equally
to all men, and no-one has any right to seize any part of it for himself. Property
is theft, and government is only the organized defence of this theft: the
abolition of property can only be attained through the abolition of
government. Without property no government, or only a rudimentary
government, will be needed: men will live at peace and work co-operatively
with one another without being compelled to. This most revolutionary
doctrine had considerable influence in some parts of Europe, especially in
France, Spain and Russia: a Russian disciple of Proudhon's, Bakunin, did much
to spread it. It has never been tried out in practice.
On the whole, all these early socialists deserve Karl Marx's reproach of being
"Utopians", cut off from reality. They did not sufficiently consider the facts:
about human nature, economic organization, or political conditions. Co-
operation between men is not easy, but difficult; all workers are not of equal
value; management requires trained men; peasants are not at all attracted by
socialism; and as for the right to work, how many men really want to work?
Karl Marx, the man who really made modern socialism, attempted to make it
what he called "scientific", basing it on facts. We shall consider his scheme
later: only after 1870 did Marxian socialism become important.
The strangest thing about socialism is that it arose out of liberalism. Just when
the great individualist movement was reaching its height of power, just when
everyone, apparently, was going to accept it, this deadly enemy appeared in its
very bosom. You may find it interesting to ask yourself why.
5. Imperialism
This was the offspring of industrialism and nationalism. We have met it
already, and we shall have to study it in some detail later on; here we need only
put it in its right place. Like socialism, it did not become important till the
second half of the century. 1870-1939 is the great age of European imperialism:
the Brussels Conference of 1878 shows it already under way, and the last great
imperialist adventure was the Italian conquest of Abyssinia in 1936.
6. Anti-Clericalism
"Secularism" would be a better name for it. Anti-clericalism properly means
opposition to interference by the clergy in matters not connected with religion:
opposition to their using their religious influence for secular purposes.
Nineteenth-century anti-clericalism went much further than that.
It began with the Enlightenment and the Revolution. After the religious wars,
governments everywhere had taken control of religion: Church and State had
become firm partners, with the State in the dominant position. It followed that
a revolution against the State was almost bound to be also a revolution against
the Church. Besides, the "rationalist" views of the men of the Enlightenment
made them only too ready to regard Christianity, with its insistence on faith
and the supernatural, as an outmoded superstition, obstructing the path of
progress. Then too, when the Revolution broke out in France, the
revolutionaries made an ill-advised attempt to revolutionize the Church
through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and this led to open conflict
between the Church and the Revolution. Throughout the 19th century this
conflict continued. Everywhere in Europe liberals tended to oppose the
Church, and churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, tended to oppose
liberalism. There were many exceptions: Christian liberals like Daniel
O'Connell, Gladstone, Montalembert, Lamartine, Manzoni, and liberal-minded
churchmen like Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans; but, by and large, Christians
and liberals stood in opposite camps, and liberalism became a secularist, an
"anti-clerical" movement.
The basic principle of this anti-clericalism was that religion should be a purely
private affair, and that the Church should be allowed no power and no
influence in public matters. Church and State should be completely separated;
politics, economics, marriage and social arrangements, and above all
education, should be purely matters of State, about which the Church should
have nothing to say. In the words of a French liberal, "the clergy must be
relegated to the sacristy"; and, if they would not accept this relegation, they
must be made to. They would not, of course; and so conflict and persecution
became inevitable: with most evil results for religion, for liberalism, and for the
nations which the struggle divided. France, Italy and Spain were split from top
to bottom: the bitter animosities developed by the religious struggle were one
of the main reasons for their growing instability and weakness; Germany was
less affected; England, alone among the great powers, preserved her spiritual
unity almost unimpaired. (Hence English historians tend to underestimate the
violence and importance of continental anti-clericalism, and the bitterness of
the hatreds that came to divide the continental peoples.)
:: :: :: ::
To complete our picture of the 19th century, two other things (they can hardly
be called "movements" or "isms") must be noticed. The first is the increasing
influence of scientists. The spectacular triumphs of scientific research and
invention raised scientists to a position not unlike that of the professional
humanists during the Renaissance. Science came more and more to take first
place in the education and the intellectual interest of Europe: classical studies
fought hard to retain their old supremacy, but in vain. Scientific method,
moreover, was applied to most other studies: to history, to philosophy
(especially psychology), to economics and sociology, and even to the arts. So
much respect and reverence was shown to scientists that nearly everyone
wanted to be thought a scientist. It is surprising that, under the circumstances,
most scientists remained modest, disinterested, and faithful to the pursuit of
truth; but they would not have been human if they had not rejoiced in the
supremacy of science and striven to maintain it. The net result was a certain
"materializing" or "dehumanizing" of European thought: a tendency to look
for, and to be satisfied with, materialist explanations of all problems, whether
of thought or action.
The other thing is the unbounded optimism which possessed most men in the
19th century, and which was fostered by the growth of scientific knowledge, by
industrial progress, by the spread of liberalism, and so on. There were some
prophets of doom, like Pius IX, or Ruskin, or Carlyle; but most men thought,
with Shelley, that
"The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return."
Their belief was false, but it was none the less effective. It accounts for the
indomitable energy, the determination and perseverance, the boundless
confidence, which we see and envy in the people of the "Victorian Age": not
only in the scientists and industrialists and imperialists, but in the social and
political reformers, in people as different from one another as Mazzini,
Florence Nightingale, John D. Rockefeller, Bismarck. Belief in "progress" made
the 19th century as forceful and audacious as belief in humanism had made the
15th century.
Remember, finally, that, in spite of the socialists, this century was the great age
of individualism. Its political and economic creed was liberalism: its cultural
creed was romanticism (which is only individualism applied to the arts); its
history is written in the lives and work of great individuals. Towards the end a
counter-movement had already begun; but only in the 20th century did this
reaction become really effective.
35. The Vienna Settlement
When, in November, 1814. the statesmen of Europe met at Vienna to re-draft
the map of Europe, the old regime seemed to have re-appeared in all its power
and splendour. The Europe of the Revolution and of Napoleon seemed to have
vanished like a dream. The Congress of Vienna was a congress of kings and
aristocrats, of the men who had ruled Europe before 1789, and who, now that
Napoleon had been disposed of, meant to see to it that they continued to rule.
They were not hypocritical in this: they believed that only a restoration of
royal and aristocratic government could save Europe from a repetition of the
upheavals and wars of the past twenty years; but they rejoiced at the thought,
and celebrated their deliverance from the Napoleonic nightmare by making the
Congress the most brilliant social event of Europe's history. Parties, balls,
masquerades, banquets, operas, filled the days and nights: and, behind the
merrymaking, the representatives of the great powers bargained and disputed
about the practical details of the settlement they were going to impose on
Europe. There were five such powers: Austria. Russia. Prussia, England, and,
somewhat surprisingly, France.
France's presence was due to the genius of her representative. Talleyrand. Ex-
bishop, ex-revolutionary, ex-Buonapartist, he was the most intelligent member
of the Congress, and the only one who had had practical experience of the
Revolution. He had parted company with Napoleon over Napoleon's design
for Europe, for he was a firm believer in the Balance of Power; from the
signing of the Treaty of Tilsit he had secretly plotted against his master and
given information to his enemies. When Napoleon's downfall appeared
imminent. Talleyrand had arranged and carried through the restoration of
Louis XVIII. and it was as the grateful Louis' envoy that he appeared at Vienna.
He had two aims at the Congress. The first was to get France restored by the
other nations to partnership in European affairs: the second was to make a
settlement that would give peace to Europe, by establishing stable
governments and the balance of power. By cleverly playing on the disputes
between the other powers, he got himself admitted to the secret councils of the
Congress; and there he maintained that the Allies had no quarrel with Louis
XVIII. but with Napoleon, and that, if they really wished the French to settle
down and forget their revolutionary dreams, they had better not make Louis
unpopular by imposing a harsh treaty. This reasoning was accepted, and he
achieved his first aim. For the actual settlement of Europe, he proposed that
the principle of "legitimacy" should be followed: that is, that the states and
governments set up by Napoleon should be replaced by states with some
traditional right to exist, and by rulers with some hereditary right to their
thrones. ("Revolution", he said, "confers no rights".) This principle, too, was
accepted by the Congress. A proper balance of power was harder to achieve,
because of the overgrown ambitions of Russia and Prussia; but Talleyrand
threw the weight of France on the side of Austria and England, who were thus
able to make Russia and Prussia see reason.
In spite of this principle of legitimacy. Talleyrand was not a mere reactionary.
He believed that only legitimate governments could be stable governments,
but he also believed that no ruler, however legitimate, could hold his throne in
the 19th century unless he made concessions to "the spirit of the age" and
granted some kind of constitution. Talleyrand himself had persuaded Louis
XVIII to do this.
He was hampered, however, by being the representative of what was, after all,
in the eyes of the other members of the Congress, the guilty nation, and he was
overshadowed at Vienna by the Austrian representative. .Count Clemens
Metternich. As a diplomat, Metternich was second only to Talleyrand, and he
was a widely-travelled, much-experienced, and exquisitely-cultivated
gentleman an aristocrat in the best sense of the word; but he had seen the
Revolution only from the outside, and never quite understood it. To him, the
revolutionary enthusiasms for liberty and equality were utopian dreams, which
would destroy the whole fabric of society if they were not held in check: the
Revolution was a destructive up heaval. and Napoleon, for all his genius, a wild
beast who needed to be chained up. As an Austrian statesman, moreover, he
could have no sympathy with either liberalism or nationalism; for these, if
admitted into the Austrian Empire, would certainly destroy it.
His main object, then, was to curb the revolutionary forces in Europe. For this
end, he desired the establishment of anti-revolutionary governments
throughout Europe, and therefor he welcomed Talleyrand's principle of
legitimacy: he wanted, secondly, to ensure peace by securing a proper balance
of power between the great states: but thirdly, he wished these states to form a
permanent alliance: to preserve peace, to regulate the affairs of Europe, and
above all to repress any revolutionary movements or tendencies. For Austria's
sake, moreover, he wanted two things: to consolidate the Austrian dominions
(and he did this by letting go the distant Austrian Netherlands in exchange for
the neighbouring Italian provinces of Venetia and Lombardy), and to secure
Austria's dominance in Germany (and this he believed he had secured by
getting the German states linked in a loose Germanic Federation under
Austria's presidency). His immediate success was great; his ultimate failure we
shall have to study.
He was greatly helped at the Congress, not only by Talleyrand, but by the
English representative. Castlereagh: though neither Talleyrand nor Castlereagh
was as much in sympathy with him as he supposed. Robert Stewart. Viscount
Castlereagh. was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, and therefore no liberal: but he was
also a constitutionalist, and therefore no believer in absolutism. As for
international affairs, the traditional policy of England was certainly to preserve
the balance of power in Europe, but this in order that she might keep her own
hands free from continental entanglements, and be able to preserve the
mastery of the sea and pursue her own commercial and colonial ambitions.
Castlereagh therefore supported the principle of legitimacy and the re-
establishment of a balance of power, and he was actually the first to propose a
permanent alliance of the great states, for he thought this would conduce to
the stability of Europe: but he had no intention of allowing England to be
dragged into a scheme for suppressing all revolutionary tendencies
everywhere, and when it became clear that this was what Metternich was
aiming at, Castlereagh began to withdraw his support. In furthering England's
private interests at the Congress, he showed a wise moderation: he took care to
secure the vital bases of Malta and the Cape of Good Hope, while restoring
other,colonial conquests, such as Java, to their former owners.
Alexander I, Czar of Russia, represented himself at the Congress. He was the
strangest figure there: a man of enthusiasms, whose unstable feelings were
constantly at war with his native caution and with the necessities of his
position as "autocrat of all the Russias". His feelings usually got the worst of
these encounters. He was attracted to liberalism; he was fascinated by
Napoleon: he had deep, and apparently sincere, religious feelings: but he made
no serious attempt to free the Russian serfs or give Russia a constitution, he did
not introduce the Napoleonic reforms into Russia, and he did not permit
religion to affect his private life, which was scandalous. In 1815 he was an
enigma to the statesmen of Europe: no-one knew what he would say or do
next; it was only gradually that men began to understand that, whatever he
said, he would not in fact do anything that would diminish the power of Russia
or his own authority.
At Vienna he had three main objects. He wanted, firstly, to retain Finland,
which he had conquered from Sweden while he was Napoleon's ally: and in
this he succeeded. He wanted, secondly, to reconstitute the kingdom of Poland
with himself as its king; and in this he succeeded partly: he got the lion's share
of Poland, but Austria insisted on retaining Galicia, and Prussia on retaining
West Prussia, the "corridor" between Brandenburg and East Prussia. He
wanted, thirdly, to get the other states to form with him what he called a
"Holy Alliance", by which they would agree to co-operate with one another on
Christian principles, for the preservation of peace, for the promotion of religion
and justice, for the suppression of piracy and the slave-trade, and so on and so
forth. As no practical steps were laid down by which these admirable objects
were to be attained, joining the Holy Alliance was no great burden. and most
of the European states hastened to join it; but it meant nothing. Castlereagh
called it "nonsense", and Metternich, "verbiage"; but the latter accepted it as a
useful piece of window-dressing for the practical, anti-revolutionary alliance
which he hoped to establish. So the Czar got his toy, and was, for the time
being, happy.
The last and the least of the great powers was Prussia. She had suffered more
than the others under Napoleon; and her chief representative, Hardenburg,
came to Vienna with the single-minded intention of restoring and amplifying
her territory and power. He succeeded, but not to the height of his hopes. He
would have liked a much larger share of Poland, but had to yield to Alexander
in that matter. He would have liked all Saxony, but had to be content with half
of it: Metternich had no mind to see Prussia dominant in central Germany. But
he got the Rhineland for Prussia, in spite of Talleyrand's opposition: the other
powers were not going to encourage any more French dreams of the "Rhine
frontier". After 1815, then, Prussia stretched across most of north Germany,
from east of the Vistula to west of the Rhine.
The Treaty of Vienna
The principles of the Treaty, then, were to establish a proper balance of power,
so that no state could hope to emulate Napoleon and dominate the continent,
and, as far as possible, bring back the old regime by restoring the states and
rulers that Napoleon had overthrown. The chief provisions of the Treaty were
the following:
France was let off lightly. She was reduced to her boundaries of 1790: that is,
she lost what she had gained during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
She had to pay an indemnity of 700,000.000 francs (about 40.000.000). and to
support an army of occupation for five years.
In Italy Napoleon's arrangements were quite overthrown. Lombardy and
Venetia were given to Austria (the Venetians vainly protesting); the kingdom
of Piedmont-Sardinia was restored to the House of Savoy, and was allowed to
take Genoa (the Genoese protesting as vainly as the Venetians). The duchies of
Parma, Modena and Tuscany were re-established under Hapsburg dukes. The
Papal States were restored to the Pope, and the kingdom of Naples ("the Two
Sicilies") to its former Bourbon ruler.
In Germany, Prussia received the Rhineland and half Saxony, and West
Pomerania was also yielded to her by Sweden. Austria gave up the Austrian
Netherlands (Belgium) to Holland, in exchange for Lombardy and Venetia. No
attempt was made to restore the small states (two hundred and sixty odd)
which Napoleon had abolished: but the remaining thirty-eight were united in a
loose Germanic Confederation under the presidency of Austria.
As for the minor states: Poland was repartitioned. Russia getting most of it;
Denmark. Napoleon's ally, had to yield Norway to Sweden, who in turn had to
yield Finland to Russia. Holland was united with Belgium to form the
Kingdom of the Netherlands.

With our after-knowledge, it is easy to pick out the weak points of this
settlement. It took no account of the feelings of the peoples involved. The
Belgians did not want to be united to Holland, nor the Norwegians to Sweden;
the Poles bitterly resented being partitioned, and so did many of the Italians;
but the statesmen at Vienna cared little for such feelings. Worse: "legitimacy"
meant the restoration of old-fashioned absolutism, in the hands of rulers who,
for the most part, had learned nothing from the past twenty years: who were
not always oppressive or tyrannical, but who were always inefficient. The
Napoleonic reforms disappeared like magic from a large part of Europe. The
discontents thus aroused were to cause continual plotting, rioting and
revolution for more than fifty years.
Yet there is much to be said in favour of the settlement. The lenient treatment
of France, and the fact that a genuine balance of power was established, meant
that no state had any strong reason for upsetting the Treaty, and the general
peace of Europe was preserved from 1815 to 1854 and was then broken over
a matter which had nothing to do with the arrangements made at Vienna.
With regard to "legitimacy", too, it is worth while asking oneself whether any
other principle, under the circumstances, could have been followed. As a
practical solution for a very difficult situation, the Vienna settlement deserves
high praise: it was certainly much .more successful than the settlement made at
Versailles a century later. Metternich, too, should get credit for making the
.first attempt in modern times to establish a system of international conference
and go-operation to regulate the affairs of Europe. He failed, but we, who have
also failed in this matter, can scarcely reproach him.
The Congress System
It was Castlereagh. in actual fact, who first proposed that the Vienna
settlement should be safeguarded by a permanent alliance among the great
powers. He was thinking simply of a practical means of preserving the balance
of power by negotiation and agreement instead of conflict: the powers should
discuss international problems as they arose, instead of leaving them to
develop into situations which could only be resolved by war. Metternich seized
eagerly on the proposal, but he carried it much further than Castlereagh had
dreamed of. The ideas of the Revolution. thought Metternich, were the real
danger to the peace of Europe: it was they which had produced the wars of
1792-1815; and therefore the main object of the great alliance must be to hold
those ideas in check. There was enough truth in this to convince, for the time
being, even Castlereagh; and Metternich got what he wanted. He became the
mainspring of the new system: which, indeed, is often called after him, "the
Metternich system".
Its basis was the Quadruple Alliance, between Austria, England. Russia and
Prussia. (France was admitted in 1818.) The members of the Alliance were to
hold a congress every three years, or oftener if necessary, to discuss the affairs
of Europe and agree on a common course of action. What if they did not
agree? Nothing was said about that.
And there lay the main weakness of the Congress System, as it has been the
main weakness of every subsequent attempt to regulate international affairs: if
the powers disagreed, there was no means of compelling them to agreement
except war, which the system was intended to prevent. It was not long before a
fundamental difference of opinion arose between Austria and England.
Metternich wanted the powers to suppress, each for itself, any revolutionary
tendencies within their own borders, and to combine to suppress by common
action any such tendencies that appeared in any of the smaller states. It was
soon evident that this would mean frequent intervention by the Quadruple
Alliance in many states of Europe, and even outside Europe. The English did
not like this at all. They did not want, in any case, to get themselves entangled
in European quarrels: further, they did not believe it reasonable or practicable
to interfere in the internal affairs of other states; and finally, they were much
less nervous than Metternich was of of revolutionary ideas. So it was not long
before Castlereagh began to show himself very lukewarm in his support of the
Congress System: and after his death in 1822. his successor, Canning, was
positively hostile to it. and worked to overthrow it.
From Metternich's point of view the other members of the Alliance were not
much more reliable. They would give lip-service to his proposals, but they
would not make sacrifices for them: above all, they would not sacrifice their
own national interests for the sake of suppressing liberalism, or even of
preserving the unity of the Alliance. And, after all, Metternich's own views
were due as much to the necessities of Austria as to anything else: Austria
could never admit liberalism or nationalism within her borders. Countries like
England and France felt differently especially about nationalism.
So, after a promising start, the Congress System failed. The first Congress, at
Aix-la-Chapelle in .1818, at which France was admitted to the Alliance, seemed
a great success: though even then a proposal for an international army to
suppress revolutions was vetoed by Castlereagh. Revolts then took place in
Spain and Portugal, in Naples and Piedmont: and congresses were held at
Troppau in 1820. and at Laibach in 1821, to agree on counter-measures.
Castlereagh refused to participate: he sent only an "observer" to represent
England; the revolts in Naples and Piedmont were suppressed, but not with
English assistance or approval. The Spanish business gave more trouble: France
was not willing to see Austrian or Russian troops intervening in Spain. After a
congress at Verona in 1822, however, the French agreed to intervene
themselves, and did so, and the Spanish revolutionaries were suppressed.
Canning, now England's foreign minister in place of Castlereagh, would dearly
have loved to prevent this, but was unable to do so.
However, the Spanish-American colonies were also in revolt: and here England
was in a key-position, for she held the command of the sea. The English had,
too, a great interest in securing the independence of Spanish America, for the
rebels would open the country to English trade, which the Spanish
government would not. Canning therefore made it plain that he would not
permit the French to intervene in Spanish America. In 1823 President Monroe,
of the United States. issued the declaration which became known as the
Monroe Doctrine, to the effect that the United States would oppose any
European intervention in America. Canning at once proclaimed his support,
and that was decisive. The Spanish colonies gained their freedom.
Meanwhile, Greece was providing Metternich with an insoluble problem. The
Greeks, like the other Balkan peoples, had long been held subject by the Turks,
and they hated the Turkish government for its tyranny, its brutality, its
inefficiency, and above all for its Mohammedanism. Later on we shall see how
the Greeks came to revolt; here it is enough to say that they did revolt, in 1821.
and by doing so threw a large spanner into the working of the Congress
System. Metternich was logical about it: he would have wished the revolt to be
suppressed like any other; but the rest of Europe was not so hard-headed or
cold-hearted. Europeans could scarcely be indifferent to a struggle between
Christians and Moslems, between Europeans and Asiatics, between the Greeks,
the founders of European civilization, and the half-barbarous Turks. Russia, in
particular, was moved; not only did the Russians share the Greek Orthodox
faith, and revere Greece as the source of their religion and culture: they wished
also to weaken the Turkish grip on the Balkans, so that Russia would have a
chance of getting Constantinople and an outlet into the Mediterranean.
While the Greeks seemed to be winning, there was little trouble; individual
enthusiasts, like Lord Byron, brought them help, but no European government
moved; but when in 1824 the Sultan sought help from the Pasha of Egypt, and
the Egyptians began to defeat the Greeks, the case was altered. Russia made it
plain that she would not stand by and see the Greeks suppressed: Canning
spoke in the same sense for England: and besides, both England and France
were unwilling to allow Russia to intervene alone, since they feared Russian
designs on Constantinople. The net result was a joint Anglo-Franco-Russian
intervention. A peace was imposed which, while it preserved Turkish
sovereignty over Constantinople and most of the Balkans, made Greece an
independent state.
The negotiations for this were still being carried on when another revolt began
at the other end of Europe. The Belgians had never liked being united with the
Dutch. They had parted company with the Dutch in the 16th century, when
they had determined to stand by Catholicism and the Hapsburgs. and they
thought it outrageous of the Congress of Vienna to put them under a Dutch
Protestant king. Unfortunately, the Dutch made no effort to conciliate them
rather the contrary. The majority of official appointments went to Dutchmen,
laws were passed favouring Dutch rather than Belgian interests, and so . on. In
1830 the Belgians lost patience and rebelled.
The significant thing about Belgian independence is that, except by the Dutch,
no serious opposition was made to it: everyone seemed to recognize that the
union of Holland and Belgium had been a mistake. When the Dutch seemed
likely to repress the revolt, France was even encouraged by the other powers
to intervene on behalf of the Belgians. There was considerable discussion about
the status and government of the new state, but not about its independence;
indeed, in 1839 a general treaty was signed, guaranteeing the perpetual
independence and neutrality of Belgium.
Metternich's attitude to this affair showed clearly his recognition of the ac
that the Congress System had broken down, and that the Vienna settlement
could not be permanently maintained. He was still able to enforce his views in
the German Confederation and in Italy, where Austrian influence was
supreme: and he resigned himself to that. Historians usually take 1830,
therefore, as marking the end of the Congress period of European history.
The system left one useful legacy: the custom of holding general European
congresses to deal with general European problems. There were many such
congresses in the 19th century, and they were often very useful. The idea of a
permanent alliance was replaced by the idea of the "Concert of Europe": the
idea, that is, that the common interests of the nations of Europe should lead
them to act in common to discuss international affairs amicably and to make
definite agreements about them. This loose arrangement did not stop them
from going to war, but it was one reason why there were no general European
wars between 1815 and 1914.
36. Revolution In France (1815-1870)
One result of the French Revolution was to split the French people into
factions. There were divisions between the "strict conservatives, who longed
for the Ancien Regime, and the liberals who detested it; and between those
liberals who wanted a limited monarchy and those who preferred a republic:
and between"'moderate" liberals, who wanted a restricted franchise and
extreme liberals who wanted manhood suffrage; and there were further
disputes about the actual form government should take: whether, for instance,
there should or should not be a strict division of powers between legislature,
executive and judiciary, or whether the executive should be strong (for the
sake of efficient government) or weak (to avoid the danger of tyranny). As
industrialism spread in France, the discontent of the workers, and the rise of
various forms of socialism. added other complications; and mixed up with all
these differences was the great religious quarrel between clericals and anti-
clericals.
It is not surprising, then, that the history of France in the 19th century was a
troubled one, punctuated by political crises and outright revolutions. Luckily
there were other influences, unifying and stabilizing forces, which prevented
these divisions from being carried too far. There were the Napoleonic reforms,
particularly the strong system of local government, the Code Napoleon, and
the Concordat; there was the strong independent peasantry, the backbone of
the nation: conservative, as peasants usually are, and yet determined against
any revival of the Ancien Regime; there was, most important of all, the intense
patriotism which animated all ranks and parties, and held them together in
spite of their sectional differences. Nationalism, so fatal to Austria, was the
salvation of France.
1. The Restoration (1815-1830)
Louis XVI had two brothers, both of whom escaped from France during the
Revolution and lived in exile till the fall of Napoleon. It was Talleyrand who
manoeuvred the restoration of the elder of these to the French throne, under
the title of Louis XVIII. Elderly, fat, and gouty. Louis XVIII was not an
inspiring figure: but he was a quiet-tempered and sensible man: sensible
enough to see the impossibility of restoring the Ancien Regime: sensible
enough, even, to follow Talleyrand's advice and grant his people a "charter",
which established a parliamentary government. It was not a very liberal
parliament. It had an upper house of Peers (appointed by the King) and a lower
house elected on a very restricted franchise (about a hundred thousand people
had the vote); but it showed clearly enough that Louis XVIII did not mean to
rule as an absolute
Indeed, till his death in 1824. Louis ruled as a kind of royal liberal. He met
much opposition, though: not merely from the republicans who detested all
monarchy, not merely from the Buonapartists who longed for Napoleon and
the Empire, but from the emigre nobles who had shared his exile and were his
staunchest supporters, and from his own brother and heir, Charles. Count of
Artois. Charles and the emigres had no patience with Louis' liberalism. They
regarded the Revolution as the source of all evils, and they wished to restore
the full power of the Crown and make the nobles once more the dominant
class in France. (The industrial revolution had not yet showed up the absurdity
of such dreams.) Charles himself wished to go further still. He wished to go
back behind the old regime, behind Louis XIV even, and to revive the
mediaeval monarchy. He saw himself as the successor of St. Louis, and when
his brother died in 1824. he had himself crowned at Rheims with the full
splendour of the ancient ritual. He even sought to make himself popular by a
new crusade. The Algerian pirates having insulted a French ambassador, he
prepared an expedition for the conquest of Algeria. It was successful: but it did
not make him popular.
France did not want a mediaeval monarchy; France, for the most part, did not
want even a partial revival of the old regime. The middle-class voters who
elected the members of parliament were above all determined against any
return of privilege, either for the nobles or for the clergy. This suited Louis
XVIII well enough; but Charles X's reign was a period of chronic and increasing
conflict between the King, with his aristocratic ministers, and the bourgeois
parliament: a conflict which ended in the July Revolution of 1830.
Charles had hoped that experience would bring the voters round to his views;
when an election in July, 1830. produced a Chamber in which he had only a
hundred supporters and two hundred and seventy-four opponents, he lost
patience. He issued the July Ordinances. The new Chamber was dismissed
before it had even met; a fresh election was decreed under a new electoral law
which would deprive more than half the electors of the right to vote; and a
rigid control of the press was established. This third ordinance was decisive: the
Parisian journalists called on the people to revolt, and the government. taken
by surprise, had not sufficient forces to withstand the attack. Three days'
fighting gave the insurgents possession of Paris, and the parliamentarians
proceeded to form a new government.
2. The Bourgeois Monarchy (1830-1848)
The Revolution of 1830 was a negative rather than a positive revolution: it was
provoked by a belief that Charles X meant to restore absolute monarchy and
the power of privilege. Its immediate result was to throw power into the hands
of the, bourgeois members of parliament. These men were only moderate
liberals: they believed in constitutional government, but not in democratic
government. They amended the Charter in such a way as to make it certain
that the King should henceforth depend on parliament, but they did not extend
the franchise to the people: the solid, sober middle-class, they thought, should
control parliament, and parliament should control the King. As Charles X
preferred exile to such a constitution, they looked round for another King, and
found one in Louis Philippe.
Louis Philippe was the son of that Duke of Orleans who had helped to bring
about the great Revolution: the man who had sat in the National Assembly and
the Convention, who had changed his name to "Philippe Egalite", who had
voted for the execution of his cousin, Louis XVI, and who had nevertheless
been guillotined during the Terror. His son had served in the revolutionary
armies, had escaped from the Terror into exile. but had refused to throw in his
lot with the other emigres or to join in their plots against the revolutionary
governments of France. He was intelligent, therefore, and honest, but also
unenterprising; moderately liberal in his opinions; quiet and unostentatious in
his personal habits (more like a retired tradesman, it was said, than a Duke of
Orleans); in a word, he was the ideal head for a moderately-liberal middle-class
government, and the period of his reign as "King of the French" has been
rightly named "the Bourgeois Monarchy".
The French middle-class, at this moment, were just beginning to appreciate
and profit from the industrial revolution. On the land, in the manufacturing
industries, and in trade, thousands of small capitalists were learning from
England how to develop the resources of their country and at the same time
make money for themselves. From 1830 to 1848 it was these men who
controlled the government, and their interests which the government
protected and fostered; and what they wanted was peace with other nations,
the suppression of troublemakers like republicans and trade-unionists, and
freedom from governmental interference in developing their industrial and
commercial concerns. All three policies proved in the end dis-tasteful to the
French people: from the first it was a question how long France would submit
to the dominance of the bourgeoisie; the answer proved to be eighteen years.
Peace, one would think, ought not to be an unpopular policy; but the
circumstances were unusual. All over Europe liberals everywhere. Louis
philippe, though, had no intention the July revolution in France was followed
by revolts in Belgium, in Poland, and in several of the Italian and German
states and the French, who considered themselves the pioneers and
champions of liberalism, wished to bring_help to liberals everywhere. Louis
Philippe, though, had no intention of antagonizing Austria. Prussia and Russia
by posing as a champion of liberalism; still less did he wish to renew the
revolutionary crusade of 1792. He did help liberal movements where he could
do so discreetly and without fuss: he joined England, for instance, in procuring
the independence of Belgium - but he allowed England to take the lead, and
himself observed a studied moderation in word and action. The French did not
like this at all. They liked still less the way in which their King yielded to
England in the matter of Mehemet Ali. This Pasha of Egypt was a great
admirer of Napoleon: he had reformed the government of Egypt on the lines
laid down by Napoleon during his Egyptian campaign, and the French
approved of him and assisted him; but when he became ambitious to extend
his domains at the expense of his overlord, the Sultan of Turkey. England
intervened. If Turkey were weakened. Russia would be correspondingly
strengthened, and would doubtless renew those designs on Constantinople
which England was determined to prevent. So England vetoed Mehemet Ali's
ambitions. The French were highly indignant: and, when it became clear that
Louis Philippe would rather abandon Mehemet Ali than risk war with England,
they turned their anger against this "shopkeeper king" who was letting down
the honour of France.
What made all this particularly dangerous to Louis Philippe was the
simultaneous revival of the "Napoleonic legend". The French were now far
enough removed from the days of the Empire to have forgotten Napoleon's
errors and tyrannies, and to remember only his greatness and glory: especially
they remembered that, under Napoleon. France had been really the pioneer of
reform and the mistress of Europe. The contrast with Louis Philippe was too
obvious. And the contrast was continually emphasized. In 1840. just when the
Egyptian business became serious. Napoleon's remains were brought home to
France and interred with great pomp, in the midst of immense popular
enthusiasm, under the dome of the Invalides. In the same year, the historian
Thiers (himself one of the makers of the July Revolution) began the publication
of his great work, :The History of the Consulate and the Empire": a panegyric
of Napoleon's achievements. Meanwhile, Napoleon's nephew Louis was
developing a very clever propaganda, designed to make possible the revival of
the Empire. In 1840, Louis Napoleon even attempted an insurrection. He
failed, and was imprisoned in the fortress of Ham: but his spectacular escape six
years later appealed more than his books to the people of France. The pacific
policies of Louis Philippe did not appeal to them at all.
During these years of peace, the industrial and commercial development of
France was being pushed forward: but this, too, had unexpected results. The
wealth of France increased, but so did the proletariat: a proletariat unprotected
by social insurance or factory acts, and forbidden even to form trade-unions,
and therefore a proletariat seething with discontent and ripe for rebellion. And
just at this moment Louis Blanc, a journalist with a touch of genius, was
putting forward his theory of socialism: telling the workers that the
government should provide employment for all who needed it in "National
Workshops", which should be managed by the workers themselves. The effect
was considerable. The proletarians had now something to strive for; and,
though they were still only a fraction of the people of France, their
concentration in the cities made them formidable.
More important than all this was the growing feeling among the French that
the bourgeois monarchy was not the kind of government they wanted: that it
was not really a liberal and representative government at all. Men began to say
that they had not overthrown Charles X and the aristocrats to put in their place
Louis Philippe and the bourgeoisie. Elections came and went, but the same
faces appeared in parliament; ministries were formed, and fell, and were re-
formed, but always among the same small group of politicians. The people as a
whole (including many of the bourgeois themselves) had no voice. A small
group of capitalists, without even noble birth or titles to distinguish them, had
constituted themselves a ruling class, and were gaily sharing out among
themselves the plums and the profits, while bitterly resisting any interference
from outside their own circle, and repressing any effort of the lower classes to
better their condition. The French would not long bear this.
During the 1840's, the opposition to Louis Philippe grew steadily. Republicans
like Aragot and Barrot, Catholic liberals like Lamartine and Montalembert,
socialists like Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin were being drawn together by a
common hostility to the bourgeois monarchy. In 1847 this hostility began to
show itself in the organization of public "banquets", attended sometimes by
thousands of people, at which republican toasts were drunk and fiery speeches
made against the government. At length the government took alarm. A
banquet to be held in Paris on February 22nd. 1848. was prohibited. The
opposition decided to stage a procession of protest; the government called out
troops to keep order. There was some rioting and bloodshed, and the troops
showed themselves unwilling to fire on the people. This was decisive.
Barricades appeared all over Paris, and during February 23rd and 24th the
insurgents. with hardly any fighting, got control of the whole city. Louis
Philippe abdicated and fled. The liberals, led by Lamartine. set up a provisional
government: the socialists, led by Louis Blanc, proclaimed France a republic.
3. Liberals and Socialists
The fall of Louis Philippe was thus easily accomplished: but his conquerors
were far from agreeing among themselves. Between February and June. 1848.
there took place in Paris the first open conflict between liberalism and
socialism. In February the socialists were in a strong position, for most of the
workers of Paris the men who had actually overthrown Louis Philippe
were behind them, and Louis Blanc was able to force Lamartine to recognize
the "right to work", and therefore to undertake to provide work for the
unemployed: but he could not prevail on him to establish the permanent
"national workshops" which the socialists desired. The unemployed were
indeed formed into gangs to do such public works as pulling down the old
fortifications of Paris, and these gangs were called national workshops, but they
were not at all the sort of national workshops which Louis Blanc desired. They
did, however, attract a growing number of unemployed into Paris much to
the alarm of the liberals.
Meanwhile, it had been decreed that a National Assembly should be elected, by
manhood suffrage, to draw up a new constitution. The election took place at
the end of April, and was disastrous for the socialists. For the people of France
as a whole, and the peasants in particular, were not at all attracted to socialism,
and in the new Assembly the socialists formed a tiny minority: there were even
more royalists than socialists. and more republican liberals than either. The
liberal majority at once began to demand the abolition of the national
workshops and the dispersal of the unemployed. Lamartine, who foresaw the
conflict that would ensue, resisted this demand for several weeks, but only
succeeded in weakening his own position; on June 21st the national workshops
were abolished: the unemployed were either to join the army or be sent away
from Paris to work on the frontier fortifications.
The workers of Paris at once rose in revolt. The government gave the liberal
General Cavaignac plenary powers to suppress them. He did so in the terrible
"June Days", during which ten thousand of the rebels fell, and the casualties of
the army and the National Guard were also very heavy. The Archbishop of
Paris, exposing himself to try and bring about a truce, was among the dead. But
the insurrection was crushed, and the liberal government pursued the
surviving rebels with implacable resentment: four thousand of them were
transported to penal servitude.
These events left a permanent mark on French society. They made a rift
between the industrial proletariat and the rest of the nation which has never
been healed, and thus added one more to the divisions which were already
distracting France: and this division became increasingly important as the
proletariat grew in numbers and improved in organization. The French trade-
union movement was henceforth inclined towards violent and revolutionary
courses, and the opposition between trade-unionists and employers was
correspondingly embittered. Moreover, the liberals themselves were split into
factions. Some became intensely suspicious of the proletarians, and determined
to prevent them from having any political power; others, more faithful to their
democratic principles, thought that the proletarians ought to be represented in
parliament like anyone else, and that, if they were, they would learn by
experience the errors of socialism. These dissensions did no good to either
liberals or socialists, but they opened the way to power for a third party.
After the June Days, the Assembly set to work to make a constitution: the
constitution of the Second Republic. It did not last long, and most of its details
are unimportant. What is important is that the principle of the division of
powers was reaffirmed, and that this division was secured by putting the
legislative power into the hands of an Assembly elected by manhood suffrage,
and the executive into the hands of a President, equally elected by manhood
suffrage. This was borrowed from the constitution of the U.S.A.; but the
French liberals did not sufficiently consider the great differences between the
French and the American peoples and their histories. When the first
presidential election was held, in December 1848. the man chosen as President
was not a republican at all he was not even properly speaking, a liberal: he
was Prince Louis Napoleon. And his victory was decisive: he received five and
a half million votes, as against Cavaignac's one and a half million and Ledru-
Rollin three hundred and seventy thousand.
4. Louis Napoleon
This man is more important than is usually recognized. His uncle, the great
Napoleon, had already shown how democratic forms (plebiscites, for instance)
can be used to establish and support a dictatorial government; but Napoleon's
triumph was due to his transcendent genius; his nephew showed how a man of
only moderate talent could achieve the same result, and he was the spiritual
ancestor of the "popular dictators" of the 20th century, of whom the most
famous are Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Great genius is not always needed to
captivate the hearts of a people: if a man can get himself accepted as the
representative of some great cause, if he can .establish for himself a popular
legend (a "myth", as it is sometimes called) which appeals to a whole nation,
then he may be swept into power by a wave of popular enthusiasm, and will
retain power at least as long as he can maintain that enthusiasm. Louis
Napoleon Buonaparte was the first politician in modern times to perceive and
exploit this possibility.
He was born in 1808 in the palace of the Tuileries, the son of Napoleon's
brother Louis and Napoleon's step-daughter. Hortense Beauharnais. Exiled like
the other Buonapartes after 1815, he was brought up in Switzerland. His
mother looked after his upbringing: she was a woman of decided views and
strong intelligence, and her son derived many of his ideas from her teaching.
He served his military apprenticeship in the Swiss army, and showed some
talent: he even wrote, a book on infantry tactics, which was good enough to be
for some years a standard textbook. He served also an apprenticeship to re-
volution by joining the Italian secret society called the Carbonari; he even took
part in a rising at Rome in 1821, and was only delivered from an Austrian
prison by the entreaties of his mother. Thus, when the death of Napoleon's
only son in 1832 left him heir to the Buonaparte claims, he had already some
reputation as a soldier and a revolutionary. In 1836 he appeared suddenly in
Strasbourg and attempted to raise a revolt against Louis Philippe: it was a
complete fiasco, and the French government contemptuously dismissed him
into exile again. He made another attempt in 1840. at Boulogne, which was an
equal failure: but this time Louis Philippe took him seriously. and he was
imprisoned in the fortress of Ham, whence he made his famous escape in 1846.
He went to England then, and was there when the revolution of 1848 gave him
his opportunity.
The Legend
The Napoleonic legend would have had a powerful influence in France even if
Louis Napoleon had never existed. After all, people had only to look round
them to see the practical benefits. which Napoleon had given to France; and it
was undeniable that, under him, France had reached a pinnacle of power and
glory. Under Louis Philippe. French national feeling, starved by the
government's tame policies, showed itself in what became almost a worship of
Napoleon: a worship fed by many who were afterwards bitter enemies of Louis
Napoleon, such as the poet Victor Hugo and the politician and historian
Thiers. They had reason to hate him, of course, since what he did was to take
this legend of the glory of France and use it to glorify himself: he raised himself
to power on his uncle's shoulders; but he could not have done so had he not
been clever enough to turn the Napoleonic legend into a practical programme.
In 1839 he published a book called "The Napoleonic Ideas", in which this
programme is summed up. Napoleon, he said, was the son of the Revolution,
and his lifework had been to safeguard and fulfil the Revolution: to fulfil it by
establishing those great reforms in which the principles of liberty, equality and
fraternity were given practical expression; to safeguard it by defeating its two
great enemies: disorder, and the embattled forces of the Old Regime. He had
defeated these enemies in France, and he had very nearly succeeded in
defeating them throughout Europe; but in the end the forces of the Old
Regime had proved too strong and had dragged him down with his work half
done. Hence he had never been able to establish liberty, which he had intended
to be his crowning work; instead, the nations had again been enslaved by
Metternich and his associates. As for France, ever since 1815 she had been torn
by faction: let the French give up these futile squabbles and restore the Empire,
and France would become once more united, strong and prosperous, and the
leader of Europe; and then, at last, it would be possible to crown the work of
the Revolution by establishing a regime of perfect liberty: liberty and order
combined.
This was a very attractive programme for the French; and, as you can see,
there was enough truth in it to make it plausible; but Louis Napoleon did not
stop there. He was well aware of the social and industrial changes that were
taking place, and realized that he must have some plan for dealing with them.
He studied the new industrialism in England and the U.S.A.; from his prison at
Ham he even corresponded with socialists like Proudhon and Louis Blanc; and
at length, in 1843. he published. his views in "The Extinction of Pauperism". In
this book he acknowledged the evils of industrialism, and especially the
recurrent, crises which produced unemployment. He concluded that the liberal
policy of uncontrolled private enterprise was unsatisfactory. Socialism,
however, he rejected as impracticable. It was not, he thought, the State's
business to run industry, but it was the State's business to stimulate industry
and direct it into the right channels. By public works, by subsidies, by providing
credit, by lowering tariffs, and so on, the State should see to it that the
resources of France were continually developed and the trade of France
continually expanded; and thus there would be no crises and no
unemployment, but a constant growth of wealth for all classes. This was an
economic programme which appealed at once to the capitalists, the proletariat
and the peasants.
It is not surprising, then, that through the 1840's Louis Napoleon's popularity
continued to grow. He steadfastly refused, though, to form a political party of
his own, or to allow his supporters to form one; for he insisted that the
Napoleonic idea was to unite all parties, all Frenchmen, in support of a truly
national government. He took no direct part in the overthrow of Louis
Philippe; and, since the provisional government opposed his return to France,
he remained in England after the revolution. Thus, luckily for himself, he was
out of France during the struggle between the liberals and socialists, and
escaped the necessity of taking sides. When, however, he was elected by
several departments to the National Assembly, his return could no longer be
prevented; he received a tumultuous welcome, and at once began campaigning
for the presidential election. We have already seen his overwhelming success;
in December, 1848, he became President of the French Republic.
He at once set to work to consolidate his popularity for the next step. He won
the support of the clericals by increasing the influence of the Church in
education, and (a strange thing for a former Carbonaro) by sending a French
army to Rome to suppress a revolution against Pius IX. He won the support of
the capitalists by his outspoken enthusiasm for the development and expansion
of French industry, while at the same time conciliating the proletariat by
introducing a scheme for insuring the workers against old age (and later,
against industrial accidents): a small and imperfect scheme by modern
standards, but notable as the first serious effort to provide security for the
industrial wage-earner. He also proclaimed, however, his opposition to
socialism and his determination to preserve order. and this won him the favour
of the conservative peasantry, the backbone of France. And behind all this was
the glamour of his name, and the power of the Napoleonic legend which he
himself had done so much to foster.
The members of the Assembly watched with alarm his growing popularity and
his evident intention of reviving the Empire; yet it was they themselves who
provided him with the opportunity for taking the decisive step. Since the
struggle of 1848 they had come to dread the proletariat. They feared what
might happen if the workers, whose numbers were rapidly increasing,
managed to achieve political power. They therefore proposed, in 1850, a
scheme for once again limiting the franchise, in such a way as to deprive about
three million wage-earners of the right to vote. Louis Napoleon at once saw his
chance. He interposed his presidential veto; he proclaimed himself the
champion of democratic rights against a reactionary, bourgeois Assembly. In
the struggle which followed, it became evident that the mass of the people
supported the President; and it was thus as the defender of liberty that he
carried out, in December 1851, the coup d'etat which made him master of
France.
He did not at once proclaim himself Emperor. He first sought the approval of
the people for a new constitution, which made him President for ten years, and
gave him the assistance of a legislature elected by manhood suffrage, but
strictly subordinate to him. The people voted overwhelmingly in favour of it.
Another year was spent in consolidating the position and fanning up
Napoleonic ardour in France; then, in December 1852, the President assumed
the title of Emperor, and another plebiscite gave him another enormous
majority. France had once more an Emperor Napoleon.
The Second Empire
When a politician achieves power on the strength of a "legend", his ultimate
success depends on his ability to live up to his legend, or at least persuade the
people that he is living up to it. Napoleon III had assumed the mantle of his
uncle, and after 1852 his task was to wear that mantle successfully, or at least
impressively . He was not without qualifications for doing so. He had
considerable organizing and administrative ability; he had, too, the politician's
quick and supple mind, and power of understanding and influencing others,
and so he was able to attach to his cause a number of really able followers, and
even make them his devoted friends. He suffered, however, from three great
defects. In the first place, he was too much of a politician: too fearful of
opposition and too anxious to please or placate everybody. He had not his
uncle's resolution and ruthlessness and power of bearing down opposing minds
and bending them to his own; he could attract, but not dominate. He wanted,
therefore, to please all the people all the time, and in the long run that is not
possible. His second defect followed from this: a lack of resolution, in the sense
of an unwillingness to take risks, an inability to choose a policy and drive it
through to success in spite of all dangers and difficulties. Any strong policy will
encounter dangers and difficulties; but when Napoleon III encountered them,
he was apt to become disheartened and irresolute, and to abandon his purpose
half-achieved. Moreover (and this was his third defect), he lacked foresight. He
concentrated so much on the immediate preparation of his enterprises as to fail
to perceive their ultimate results, so that he was continually being surprised by
events: events which he should have expected, but did not. These defects need
not have been fatal to him, had he been content to remain a democratic
politician; but he had chosen to play the part of a Napoleon, and in that role his
timidity, irresolution and lack of foresight were disastrous.
Yet his actual administration of France was sound and successful. He had
promised to make France prosperous and to see that there was employment
for all; and these promises he fulfilled. Without any socialistic experiments,
with a minimum of government interference in industry, he developed France
as she had not been developed since the days of the great Napoleon. By
lowering tariffs, by granting subsidies, by holding the great Paris Exhibitions in
1855 and 1867, by improving communications (the French railway-system, in
particular, was re-designed and amplified), by vast programmes of public works
(the most famous of which was the re-making of Paris by Baron Haussman): in
these and in other ways he showed how much the State could do without
overstepping the bounds of liberal economics. Most important of all, he
founded the "Credit-Foncier".
Credit is the life-blood of modern commerce; for the vast expansion of industry
which Napoleon III desired there was needed an equally vast expansion of
credit. The existing banks were inadequate to provide it. Therefore a new
system of loan-banks were instituted, the "Societes de Credit Foncier",
capitalized and guaranteed by the government, and obliged to advance loans
on reasonable security and easy terms. The Bank of France was also expanded,
and the brothers Pereire were encouraged to establish their "Credit Mobilier".
But the Credit-Foncier system was the most important of these, for it enabled
small producers and farmers to obtain the credit they needed in order to
improve their businesses and compete in the modern world, and so preserve
the French middle-class from being swallowed up in those immense
monopolies which industrialism has tended to produce in most countries, and
which have been fatal to liberalism in economics.
One may say, in fact, of Napoleon Ill's internal policy as a whole that it is the
most successful example of liberal economics in the 19th century. If the
workers did not profit by it as much as the capitalists, they nevertheless
profited greatly; and, as their misery and discontent diminished, the fear of a
working-class revolution diminished too. Of course, this cut both ways. Men
who were prepared to put up with the Emperor's personal dictatorship, his
control of the press and so forth, as long as they thought these things necessary
for the preservation of order, began to object to them when it became clear
that order was not going to be disturbed. As conditions in France improved, a
liberal opposition began to arise. It would hardly have proved important,
though, but for happenings outside France.
Napoleon III's foreign policy is the despair of every historian. One cannot make
head nor tail of it. The man who was so sound a planner and administrator,
and so clever at reconciling conflicting interests inside France, appears to lose
all sense of realities when he engages in foreign affairs. He makes an enemy of
Russia in alliance with England, he makes an enemy of Austria in alliance with
the Italian nationalists; he then antagonizes the Italian nationalists by
occupying Rome on behalf of the Pope, and antagonizes England (to say
nothing of the United States) by a hare-brained expedition to Mexico. He is
thus left isolated to face the challenge of a nationalist Germany led by the
greatest statesman of the century, Bismarck, and is hopelessly defeated, and his
reputation and his Empire disappear together. The simplest explanation is that,
while he felt he must fulfil the Napoleonic role he had imposed on himself, by
playing a brilliant and "progressive" part in world affairs, he knew in his heart
that he was not qualified for the task, and so his whole approach to foreign
affairs was fumbling and uncertain: a strange mixture of adventurousness and
timidity, without any guiding plan but the desire to win much glory at little
cost. He would take no great risks; he would commit himself to no definite,
irrevocable policy; and yet he would persuade the French that France was once
more the premier nation in Europe. This is, I say, the obvious explanation; but
it is not the full truth. The full truth about the complex and baffling personality
of Napoleon III has yet to be discovered.
As Emperor, his first serious venture into foreign affairs brought France into
the Crimean War. We shall consider this war more in detail in its proper place;
here it is enough to say that the Czar of Russia was trying to expand Russian
influence over Turkey so as eventually to get control of Constantinople, which
England was determined to prevent. One of the weapons the Czar was using
was the right he claimed of "protecting" the Orthodox Christians who lived
under Turkish rule. Now, the Holy Places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem were in
the Turkish Empire, and the Orthodox claimed the right to control them; but
this claim was disputed by the Latin Christians, the Catholics. The Czar
naturally backed up his co-religionists; and Napoleon III thought to win the
favour of the French clericals by backing up the Catholics; he may also have
thought of avenging his uncle's defeat in the Russian campaign of 1812. At any
rate, he allied himself with England and was drawn into war with Russia in
1854. In spite of mismanagement, the war turned out fortunately for him. The
French did better than the English; the Russians were defeated; the final
successful assault on Sebastopol was made by French troops; and the peace
congress was held at Paris under the Emperor's presidency. This was all very
gratifying for the French. Few realized that all France had really gained from
the conflict was the enmity of Russia.
The enmity of Austria was gained in a somewhat more reasonable way. The
Italian liberals and nationalists had lately found a leader in the Prime Minister
of Sardinia, Cavour. Cavour understood that the freeing and unifying of Italy
depended on the ejection of the Austrians from Lombardy and Venetia, and
that the Austrians could only be ejected by some strong power. Napoleon III
was the obvious choice for the task. He was never tired of proclaiming that the
Napoleonic Empire stood for freedom and nationality; he had himself been a
member of the Carbonari; and he was known to cherish hopes of "doing
something" for Italy. In 1858 an attempt on his life by a disappointed Italian
patriot, Orsini, stirred up his conscience about Italian affairs; and at the end of
that year he made a secret agreement with Cavour to the following effect: that
the Austrians were to be driven out of Lombardy and Venetia, and that France
was to receive in return the small frontier districts of Nice and Savoy.
In 1859 Cavour deliberately provoked Austria into declaring war on Sardinia;
and then the secret treaty was revealed, and the French struck in to the aid of
the Italians. The French army, reorganized since the Crimea, advanced into
Italy, won the hard-fought battles of Magenta and Solferino, and bundled the
Austrians out of Lombardy. And then, to everyone's amazement, Napoleon
called a halt. Without any word to Cavour, he signed a treaty with the
Austrians at Villafranca: a treaty by which Lombardy was indeed to be handed
over to Sardinia, but Venetia was to remain in the possession of Austria. This
done, he declared the war at an end and withdrew his troops to France with
the significant exception of a contingent which was left in Rome to defend the
Papal States. He left behind him embittered Austrians and furious Italians.
His reasons for this breach of faith were both military and political. The battle
of Solferino had been won only with difficulty and at heavy cost; he had now
to tackle the Quadrilateral, the famous group of fortresses centering on
Mantua, which together formed one of the strongest positions in Europe; and
some of the other German states were talking of coming to Austria's assistance.
On the other hand, Cavour was stimulating revolts in the other Italian states,
and it was clear that he was aiming at nothing less than the unification of all
Italy and Sardinia; and the French Catholics, seeing that this would mean the
seizure of the Papal States, were making vigorous protests. So Napoleon made
a compromise settlement which left everyone dissatisfied: Austrians, Italians,
liberals, nationalists, clericals and anti-clericals. After 1859 the opposition to
him steadily increased, and more and more people began to suspect that he
was a figurhead rather than a real Napoleon. Indeed, the Italian War is a
perfect object-lesson in his defects: his lack of foresight, his irresoluteness in the
face of unexpected difficulties, and, above all, his painful desire to placate all
parties. On the other side of the Rhine, one Otto von Bismarck observed these
things.
Bismarck was a Prussian. In 1862 he was to become Prime Minister of Prussia,
and he was as determined to unite Germany under Prussia as Cavour was to
unite Italy under Sardinia. He had, however, one great advantage over Cavour:
Prussia was already a strong state, and he was sure that, with proper
organization, she would be able to dominate Germany without any foreign aid.
She would be able to defeat Austria and drive her out of the German
Confederation, and then unite the other German states in a common
nationalist crusade against France. While the cleverest statesman in Europe
was thus laying his plans, Napoleon III was entangling himself in the Mexican
Expedition.
Mexico had long been in a state of chronic disturbance. In 1861 an adventurer
named Juarez succeeded in setting up a dictatorship, and signalized his success
by large confiscations of property and by repudiating Mexico's foreign debts. In
the United States the civil war between North and South had just broken out,
so no intervention was to be looked for from that quarter. France, England and
Spain therefore arranged a joint intervention, seized the Mexican custom-
houses, and held them till Juarez promised to recognize the debts. Then
England and Spain withdrew. But Napoleon III then had a brilliant inspiration:
why should not Mexico be made a dependency of France, and a centre of
French expansion and influence in the New World? Juarez' irregular levies
could hardly resist the French army, and the civil war raging in the United
States would make impossible the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. To
avoid accusations of imperialism, he would not annex the country outright, but
would establish an "Empire of Mexico"; though, since the new empire would
depend on the support of French troops, it would really be an appanage of
France. And Napoleon hoped to regain the friendship of Austria by offering the
crown of Mexico to the Austrian Emperor's brother, the Archduke Maximilian.
The scheme went hopelessly wrong. Maximilian was indeed established as
Emperor in Mexico city; but Juarez and his men then took to guerilla warfare,
and the Mexican guerillas proved as great an embarassment to Napoleon III as
the Spanish guerillas had been to Napoleon I. The conquest of Mexico was still
far from complete when, in 1865, the American civil war ended in the total
victory of the North; and the United States government, with a large and
veteran army at its disposal reaffirmed the Monroe Doctrine and requested the
withdrawal of French troops from Mexico. Faced with this situation, the
French Emperor again lost heart and gave up his plans. The last French troops
left Mexico in 1867; and Maximilian (who refused to desert those Mexicans
who had put their faith in him) was defeated by Juarez, captured and shot.
It was a catastrophe for Napoleon. The Austrians naturally detested him even
more than before, for his "desertion" of Maximilian. But the effect on the
French was much more serious. The burning humiliation of the failure to
defeat the Mexican guerillas, and still more the tame withdrawal at a mere
"request" from the U.S.A., without even an attempt to fight, roused for the first
time a genuine national opposition to Napoleon in France. The French were
no longer content to entrust to him their destinies. There was a widespread
demand that he should abandon his personal power and establish a
constitutional government; and, broken by lost hopes and by failing health, he
consented. In 1869 the "Liberal Empire" was constituted, with a Prime Minister
and Cabinet no longer dependent on the Emperor, but responsible to the
Assembly. Whether this experiment would have saved Napoleon's throne we
cannot tell, for in the following year Bismarck dealt him the fatal blow.
The story of how this was done belongs rather to German than French history:
Napoleon was only the victim. Bismarck began by having the Prussian army
reformed till it became the the best in Europe. He then picked a quarrel with
Austria, having first made sure of Napoleon III's neutrality by vague promises
of concessions to France in the direction of the Rhine. Napoleon, glad enough
to see Austria and Prussia at war, and expecting a long conflict which would
give him a chance of profitable intervention, agreed to stand aside. But when
the war came, in 1866, the new Prussian army beat Austria in seven weeks, and
France was left lamenting. Bismarck, moreover, by revealing Napoleon's hopes
of expanding towards the Rhine, made the other German states highly
indignant with France, and brought them to ally themselves with Prussia.
It remained only to find an occasion for provoking France into war. The
occasion arose in 1870, when, after a revolution in Spain, the Spanish throne
was offered to a Hohenzollern, a cousin of the King of Prussia. The French
took alarm at once, and, after some busy diplomatic exchanges, the Spanish
offer was refused; but when the French government pressed the King of
Prussia to give a further guarantee, that no Hohenzollern would ever accept
the throne of Spain, the King very naturally refused to consent. His telegram to
Bismarck anouncing this refusal was altered by Bismarck so as to make it sound
insulting to France, and was then published; and it aroused such a storm of fury
that Napoleon III was reluctantly forced to declare war on Prussia.
What is ironical about this is that, almost alone in France, the Emperor had an
adequate idea of the superiority of the new Prussian army, and was actually
engaged on a plan for reforming the French army when he weakly consented
to the declaration of war. Disaster was the result. The French were almost
everywhere defeated. Within two months the main French forces were put out
of action: one army, under Marshal Bazaine, being driven into the fortress of
Metz, and a second, under Marshal MacMahon, being surrounded and forced
to surrender at Sedan. The Emperor himself was at Sedan. He exposed himself
recklessly, in the hope that a glorious death would restore to his family the
affection of the French people; but he was disappointed of this hope, and had
to yield himself a prisoner to the King of Prussia. As he had foreseen, the news
led to the downfall of his House. A provisional republican government was set
up at Paris to carry on the war; the Emperor's wife and son fled to England,
and since then no Buonaparte has ruled in France.
The frightful suddenness and completeness of this catastrophe, so shocking and
shameful to the people of France, has made historians unjust to Napoleon III.
The really good work he did for France has not been appreciated. The fact that
he laid the foundations of a new colonial empire has been obscured: yet it was
he who completed the conquest and organization of Algeria, it was under him
that General Faidherbe made Senegal a model colony, and that the French
appeared in Indo-China and New Caledonia. It is fair to set these successes
against the Mexican fiasco. Yet the final disaster was decisive and irremediable.
The French have never since then had the slightest temptation to put
themselves under a Buonaparte; indeed, the very idea of popular dictatorship
went out of fashion in Europe till the 20th century. As for France, we shall see
later how she exchanged the Second Empire for the Third Republic.
37. Revolution In Italy (1815-1870)
The Italian peninsula had not been united under one government since the
reign of Justinian. Even Charlemagne had not succeeded in holding the whole
of it, and after his death Italian unity had become a dream: a dream indulged in
sometimes by Holy Roman Emperors, or by patriotic poets like Petrarch, but
never more than a dream. Italy became, as Metternich said, "a geographical
expression". She was politically negligible: divided into a dozen states, none of
which was big enough to really count in Europe, and none of which had any
notion of pursuing a national policy.
Napoleon I began the transformation of Italy. Though he did not give her
complete unity, he did break down the old divisions between the Italian states.
He did, too, give the Italians efficient and orderly government, introducing to
them the Napoleonic reforms. And he did much to arouse a national spirit in
Italy, especially by driving out the Austrians and by incorporating Italians into
his victorious armies. (The Italians, of course, regard Napoleon himself as an
Italian: he did not seem to them, as he did to the Spaniards, a foreign
conqueror.) Unfortunately, he also quarrelled with the Pope, and go
introduced into Italy the feud between clericals and anti-clericals.
The Congress of Vienna re-established, as far as possible, the old system:
division, absolutism, inefficiency, and the dominance of Austria. Austria ruled
directly in Lombardy and Venetia, and through Hapsburg princes in Parma,
Modena and Tuscany; as the chief Catholic power in Europe, she had great
influence with the Papal government; and in the south. Ferdinand of Naples
never forgot that he owed his throne to Metternich. Even the King of
Piedmont-Sardinia, being very much an anti-revolutionary, was favourable to
Metternich's policies. The growing national feeling of the Italians was bound to
find this foreign domination (by Germans, of all people!) intolerable.

In all the Italian states, after 1815 absolutism reigned unchecked. The Austrian
dominion of Lombardy-Venetia was probably the most efficiently governed,
but it was a perfect example of a "police-state". In Sardinia. Parma and
Modena, an old-fashioned, inefficient and irresponsible bureaucracy held sway.
Tuscany had a relatively good "paternal" government. The papal States were
ruled by a bureaucracy of clerics, well-meaning but very inefficient. The
government of Ferdinand of Naples had the reputation of being the worst in
Europe. Men 'who had enjoyed the benefits of Napoleonic rule were not likely
to sit down quietly under the restoration of the old regime at its worst.
The consequent revolutionary movement for an independent, liberal and
united Italy falls clearly enough into three periods: the period of the secret
societies (1815-1831); the period of Young Italy (1831-1849); and the period of
Cavour and his followers (1850-1870). The Italians have always been addicted
to forming secret societies, and in the troubled period of the Revolution and
Napoleon such societies became very numerous. When the old regime was
restored, many of them devoted themselves to conspiring for liberalism:
especially the most famous of them all, the Carbonari, or "charcoal-burners".
(Charcoal-burners, of course, generally carry on their trade in comparative
isolation and secrecy, among the forests; and perhaps the Carbonari originally
pretended to be genuine charcoal-burners.) They were the most successful of
the revolutionary groups, and attracted the most notable members, including
Louis Napoleon and Mazzini.
The efforts of these secret societies produced an almost continuous series of
plots, riots and outright rebellions in nearly every part of Italy notably in
1820-21 and in 1830-31 none of which had any success. The defect of a secret
society is that it can never be very large; the more it grows, the more difficult it
becomes to keep its existence and operations secret, and to exclude spies and
traitors from its ranks. Thus the rebellions contrived by the Carbonari and their
like could only be small and local affairs. It was not possibly for them to
organize a .really widespread movement, or to gain the support of the mass of
the people. One of the Carbonari, Giuseppe Mazzini, perceiving this,
determined to set to work in a new way, and founded the society of "Young
Italy".
Mazzini was a remarkable propagandist. A man completely devoted to
liberalism in its most extreme form, with a passionate desire to see established
in Italy a perfect republic, he had also the power to communicate his devotion
and his passion to others - especially to the young. His appeal to older and
more experienced minds was less effective, for like most fanatics, he lacked
balance: he could neither love nor hate in moderation: and it was unfortunate
for Italy that he hated monarchy and the Church as much as he loved
republicanism. He was unpractical, too: no organizer and no politician. But he
was a superb journalist, and could express his burning enthusiasm for the
freeing and uniting of Italy in moving and memorable words.
He early decided that the secret societies were working on the wrong lines and
would never come to anything, for they were making no appeal to the people
of Italy. True to his liberal creed, Mazzini believed that the salvation of Italy
could only come from the people, through a general rising of the whole nation:
and he realized that that could not come about till the whole people were
stirred to enthusiasm for the idea of an Italian republic. "Young Italy" was
designed to do this stirring.
It was hardly a "society" in the strict sense, therefore, and it was certainly not a
secret society. Its members were propagandists: men who had been infected by
Mazzini with his own enthusiasm, and who pledged themselves to spread the
same enthusiasm throughout Italy. It was a movement directed towards
educating men's minds, and particularly the minds of the young, the "fathers of
the future". Its success was remarkable. Founded in 1831 (and Garibaldi was
one of its first members) it is said to have had sixty thousand members by 1833.
This is doubtless an exaggeration, but the reality was solid enough. Precisely
because it had so little organization, and precisely because its work was
propaganda rather than plotting, the authorities found it very difficult to deal
with.
Its members set an example, too, which others followed. Writers like Silvio
Pellico, Massimo d'Azeglio, Manzoni and Gioberti, who by no means agreed
with all Mazzini's opinions, were yet stimulated by his enthusiasm into
publishing works of their own: works which all tended to rouse fresh zeal for
the causes of Italian freedom and unity. By 1848, one may say, the work of
propaganda had been done: by that time most educated Italians, and many of
the uneducated, were convinced that the existing governments must be
overthrown or transformed, and that Italy must be united.
Unfortunately, they did not agree how all this was to be brought about. Some
wanted a federation, which would conserve the existing states; others wanted a
union. Many were convinced republicans like Mazzini, and wanted neither
Pope nor King; others preferred the idea of a liberal monarchy under (say) the
King of Sardinia: still others, like Gioberti, proposed a federation under the
presidency of the Pope. The position of the Papacy was, indeed, a major
difficulty. The Popes had taken charge of Rome after the breakdown of the
Roman Empire, and had gradually established an independent state across
central Italy. As head of the Church, it was absolutely necessary for the Pope
both to be and to seem independent of any secular government (the Avignon
Captivity had been a sufficient warning in this matter); and, in any case, the
Papal States had belonged to the Papacy for a thousand years. Yet, as they
stretched across the peninsula from sea to sea, Italy could hardly be united
without them. Rome, too, was the natural capital of a united Italy, and Italian
patriots could hardly be expected to accept its exclusion. Gioberti's plan was
put forward to solve this problem. It involved, of course, the liberalizing of the
Papal government: but this seemed to become possible in 1846, after the
election as Pope of Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, Pius IX. He was known as a man
of generous feeling; he opened his reign with an amnesty for political prisoners,
and was clearly prepared to grant some liberal reforms. Such was the situation
in 1848.
The Revolutions of 1848
A rebellion broke out in Sicily in January. In the ordinary course of events, it
would have led to nothing:no-revolutionary movement in Italy could hope to
succeed unless Austria, and Metternich, were rendered powerless. But 1848
was to be a "year of revolutions", News of the February revolution in France
proved a trigger which released the long-suppressed forces of liberalism and
nationalism throughout central Europe. In March, a revolt in Vienna itself
forced Metternich to flee for his life from Austria, and other revolts in Hungary
and Bohemia temporarily paralysed the Austrian government. Thus the Italians
got their chance.
The revolt in Sicily was repeated at Naples, and King Ferdinand was .forced to
grant a liberal constitution. In March, both Pius IX and Charles-Albert of
Sardinia of their own free wills granted constitutions to their subjects. The
Dukes of Parma, Modena and Tuscany were forced to follow suit. Uprisings
against the Austrians in Lombardy and Venetia seemed at first completely
successful, the Austrian troops being forced to withdraw into the famous
Quadrilateral: the fortresses of Mantua, Verona, Peschiera and Legnano.
Finally, the King of Sardinia declared war upon Austria, and .thus placed
himself at the head of the liberal and national movements by taking on himself
their defence against the ineyitable Austrian counterattack.
The failure of these bright beginnings was due to four things: the courage and
skill of the Austrian commander Radetzky; the slowness and vacillation of
Charles-Albert; the failure of the Neapolitans and of Pius IX to support Charles-
Albert; and the quarrels among the revolutionaries - particularly the rash
insubordination of the Mazzinians.
Radetzky withdrew safely into the Quadrilateral, and organized the defence of
those fortresses while awaiting reinforcements from Vienna. Charles-Albert
skirmished about and wasted his opportunities. In July, Radetzky was able to
emerge, win the battle of Custozza, and re-occupy Milan; after which Charles-
Albert foolishly asked for an armistice, which the Austrians were very willing
to grant. Meanwhile, at .Rome and Naples things were going to pieces. The
Neapolitan liberals, having got their constitution, had no notion of how to
make it, work. They occupied themselves in futile squabbles; they failed utterly
to maintain law and order, and even to come to terms with the rebels in Sicily,
who were now demanding complete independence; and they succeeded in
thoroughly disgusting the whole population except the Neapolitan mob. At
Rome it was the Mazzinians who made trouble. Pius IX's own attitude was
doubtful: he wanted to be liberal, he wanted a federation of Italy; but he could
not bring himself to declare , war, especially on a great Catholic power like
Austria, and to grant liberal concessions might mean putting power into the
hands of those who wished to overthrow the Papal monarchy altogether and
set up a republic. The Pope tried to steer a moderate middle course. This only
made the Mazzinians more-furious and more violent. At length, in November
1848. the Pope's Prime Minister (himself a sincere and generous liberal) was
murdered, -as he was about to open parliament, by a Maz-zinian assassin. This
.murder was the turning-point in the mind of Pius IX. Ten days later he fled
secretly from Rome to Gaeta, and thence appealed to the Catholic world for
help. Meanwhile the Mazzinians seized power in Rome and proclaimed the
Roman Republic.
Their folly received its due reward. Louis Napoleon, just ejected President of
the French Republic, eager to diminish Austrian influence in Italy and to please
the French Catholics. sent an army to Rome. The republicans fought bravely
under Garibaldi, but were defeated, and the Pope was restored. In Naples. King
Ferdinand dissolved the Neapolitan parliament amid almost general approval,
and proceeded to a merciless suppression of the Sicilian rebels. The Austrians
had already suppressed the liberal constitutions in Parma, Modena and
Tuscany; and when Charles-Albert, after the armistice, ventured to renew the
war, he was totally defeated at Novara (March 23rd, 1849), and forced to
abdicate in favour of his son. Victor Emmanuel II. Venice continued to resist
till August, and then was forced to surrender.
Out of this fiasco came one great gain and one great loss to the revolutionary
movement. The gain was that the Kingdom of Sardinia (which alone retained
its liberal constitution) began to be acknowledged as the head of the whole
movement, which thus became more united and national. The loss was that
the Pope turned definitely against liberalism. Pius IX had been shocked and
disgusted by. the disorder, violence, and anti-clericalism of the revolutionaries:
thenceforth he sided with those who held that the revolutionary ideas were
essentially disruptive, destructive, and anti-Christian. This split the Italian
people in two; and the .division, though in another form, persists to this day.
Cavour and Garibaldi
The actual achievement of Italian unity was the work of these two very
different men. Count Camillo Cavour (1810-1861) was a Piedmontese
nobleman. His part in the movement was that of a practical statesman: he was
neither an idealist like Mazzini nor a warrior like Garibaldi; though he was
quite ready to make use of such people when convenient. He was something of
an economist; he has been called "a patriotic businessman". His great merit
was his strong practical sense . and grasp of realities: all the other Italian
revolutionaries seem amateurs or visionaries in comparison. His great defect
was his complete unscrupulousness in political matters: Italian politics have
suffered from his bad example ever since.
He joined the Sardinian government in 1850, and became Prime Minister in
1852. His object from the first was to .guide .Sardinia to the headship .of a
united Italy. For this, he thought, three things were necessary: that Sardinia
should become the centre and support of all who hoped for Italian liberation
and unity; that Austria should be driven out of Italy; and that the temporal
power of the Pope should be destroyed. For the first, he relied especially on a
policy of economic development under a moderate constitutional liberalism, so
as both to appeal to the bourgeoisie, the real strength of the revolutionary
movement, and to allay the fears of those who had been alarmed by the
excesses and follies of so many of the 1848 revolutionaries. He would make
Sardinia a model liberal state, which would foreshadow and make attractive a
future Kingdom of Italy. In this he was eminently successful (though he never
succeeded in winning over Mazzini, who remained obstinately republican). To
drive out Austria, he decided he must get the help of England or France; we
shall see shortly how he succeeded. As for the Pope, he determined to begin by
pursuing a strongly anti-clerical policy in Sardinia: reducing the power and
influence of the Church as much as possible, confining her activity to purely
religious matters; so that the Italians (who were mostly devout Catholics)
should get accustomed to the anti-clerical idea that the Church should be a
purely "spiritual" society, and should abandon all political and economic
questions to the care of the State. Thus he could affirm that the Pope should be
a purely "spiritual" ruler, and that the Temporal Power was a useless
anachronism, harmful to the Church as well as to Italy. This campaign had
considerable success both inside and outside Italy; of course it also deepened
the already deep cleavage between clerical and anti-clerical, and made Pius IX
still more determined to maintain the Temporal Power.
In 1854 Cavour took the surprising step of joining the Anglo-French alliance
against Russia, and sending sixteen thousand Sardinian troops to fight in the
Crimea. Sardinia had no quarrel with Russia; but Cavour hoped to win the
friendship England and France, and to obtain the help of one or both of them
in driving out the Austrians. He would have preferred England; but the English
would not play his game. They were generally in favour of liberal and
nationalist movements; they were prepared to give Cavour diplomatic support;
but they were quite determined not to get themselves entangled in any
Contmental struggle. Cavour therefore fell back on France; and we know how
he was able to draw Napoleon III into war with Austria in 1859.
Cavour, however, was playing a double game. While pretending to Napoleon
III that his only object was to drive the Austrians out of Italy, his real purpose
was to establish a united Italy under the King of Sardinia, and for this he was
subsidizmg revolutionary movements in Parma, Modena, Tuscany and the
Romagna (the northern section of the Papal states). After the first victories
over Austria, revolutions were promptly organized in these four regions, and
the revolutionaries petitioned for union with Sardinia. But Cavour had
overreached himself. Napoleon could not prevent Parma, Modena, Tuscany
and the Romagna from uniting with Sardinia; but he could, and did, call a halt
to the war with Austria, leaving the Austrians still in possession of Venetia; and
he could also maintain a French garrison at Rome to safeguard the position of
Pius IX. The unification of Italy seemed further away than ever.
Garibaldi
It was now that Garibaldi made his great contribution to the cause. Giuseppe
Garibaldi was neither a philosopher like Mazzini nor a politician like Cavour
indeed, he greatly disliked all politicians, and Cavour in particular; he was a
pure fighter, and the most picturesque figure in the Italian revolution. In 1831,
as a young sailor in the Sardinian navy, he was captivated by Mazzini, joined
Young Italy, and devoted himself to the ideal of a liberal and united Italy. Not
content to be a mere propagandist, he instigated a mutiny in the navy and was
condemned to death, but escaped and fled to South America, where he joined
and led the Italian Legion which played a prominent part in the troubled
history of Latin America fighting always, so Garibaldi maintained, on the
side of liberty. After fourteen years of this, and after gaining a considerable
reputation as a leader of men, he returned to Italy to help in the revolutions of
1848. Unfortunately, his devotion to Mazzini led him to join in the foolish
revolution at Rome, and his talents were wasted in a valiant but vain defence
of the "Roman Republic" against the French. Forced again into exile, he spent
five years in the United States; but in 1854 he ventured to return to Italy. In
1859 he did good service against the Austrians as commander of a detachment
of Alpine troops; but Napoleon Ill's defection, and Cavour's acceptance of the
Villafranca Treaty disgusted him, and he determined thenceforth to act on his
own.
In 1860 another revolt broke out in Sicily. Garibaldi managed to collect a band
of one thousand and seventy-two devoted followers (the famous "Thousand",
the "Redshirts") and sailed from Genoa in ten small ships to help the rebels.
Cavour, well aware through his spies of the whole business, allowed it to go
forward, but stood ready to disavow Garibaldi if the attempt should prove a
failure. Now, however, the results of thirty years' propaganda began to appear:
the Neapolitan troops were unwilling to fight their fellow-Italians, and a skilful
and brief campaign made Garibaldi master of Sicily. When he crossed into Italy
he met with even less resistance; and, having occupied Naples, and being
intoxicated by his astonishing success, began to talk of marching on Rome.
Cavour was now in a difficult position. Garibaldi had not yet handed over his
conquests to the King of Sardinia; as a good Mazzinian, he might prefer to
declare a republic; and further, if he attacked the French in Rome he would
certainly be beaten, and his whole achievement would perhaps be destroyed.
Cavour therefore advised his King, Victor Emmanuel, to lead the Sardinian
army down into Neapolitan territory along the Adriatic, by way of the
Marches, carefully avoiding Rome and the French for he shrewdly
calculated that Napoleon III would not fight so long as the Pope was allowed
to retain Rome. This risky move was completely successful. The appearance of
Victor Emmanuel in Naples changed the whole situation. Garibaldi readily
handed over his conquests to the King, and most unwillingly gave up his
designs on Rome; and the net result was that, by the end of 1860, a kingdom
had been formed under Victor Emmanuel which included all Italy except
Venetia and Rome.
Cavour died in 1861. But his work was done. Indeed, the acquisition of Venetia
and Rome was made possible by an admirer and imitator of his, the Prussian
Bismarck. Bismarck was glad to have the help of the Italians against Austria in
1866, and one result of his victory was that the Austrians handed over Venetia
to the Kingdom of Italy. In 1870, when Bismarck invaded France, the French
troops were withdrawn from Rome, and the Italians took advantage of their
opportunity. Pius IX made only a token resistance, and then withdrew into the
enclosure of the Vatican; and Rome became the capital of a united Italy.
38. The Austrian Empire
In the 19th century the Austrian Empire was a survival from a different age. A
conglomeration of peoples and territories, assembled by the House of
Hapsburg at various times and by various means, differing in languages, laws
and institutions, and only linked by a common allegiance to the person of the
Emperor, it was the very opposite of a modern national state. Its centre was
the Arch-Duchy of Austria, inhabited by men of German race and speech: the
ancestral domain of the Hapsburgs, containing the imperial capital, Vienna. To
the north lay the Kingdom of Bohemia: the Bohemian plain, inhabited mainly
by Czechs, and the surrounding mountains, inhabited mainly by Germans.
Eastward lay the Kingdom of Hungary, also a plain with mountain borders. In
the plain dwelt the Magyars, the chief race of Hungary; to the south of them
were Slovenes and Croats, to the east (in Transylvania) Roumanians, and to
the north, in the skirts of the Carpathian mountains, Slovaks and Ruthenians.
North of the Carpathians lay the former Polish province of Galicia, the
Hapsburg share of the partitions of Poland. South-west of Austria, across the
Alps, were the Italian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia. Germans, Magyars,
Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Roumanians, Croats, Slovenes, Italians: the old
Austrian Empire was well described as "a racial museum".
How had it been possible for the Hapsburgs to win and hold the allegiance of
these peoples? There were five main reasons. The first was the power and
prestige of the Hapsburgs themselves: Austria was for long the chief state in the
Holy Roman Empire, and the ruling Hapsburg was normally elected Emperor.
The second was the fact that the Hapsburgs were the main leaders in the
defence of central Europe against the Turks: all who feared the Turks looked
for help to the Hapsburgs. Thirdly, since the Reformation the Hapsburgs had
become the chief defenders of Catholicism: those who feared the advance of
Protestantism in central Europe naturally looked to them. Fourthly, the
cultural superiority of Austria had its effect: Vienna was, after all, one of the
great intellectual and artistic centres of Europe. Finally, the aristocratic social
system of the Empire played its part. It was not necessary for the Emperor to
be popular: as long as he had the support of the great Hungarian and
Bohemian nobles, who formed with the Austrian nobles a kind of common
ruling-class for the Empire, his position was secure.
By 1815, however, the situation was strangely altering. The Holy Roman
Empire was gone, and Prussia was becoming strong enough to dispute
Austria's dominance in Germany. The Turks were no longer a menace. Neither
was Protestantism any longer a danger to Catholicism; and besides, the growth
of the Enlightenment had diminished the influence of religion. As for culture,
the Magyars and the Czechs were busily reviving their own national cultures,
and were aspiring to make Budapesth and Prague the rivals of Vienna; while
the Italians, of course, looked on the Austrian pretensions to culture with
contempt imagine, they said, comparing Vienna with Venice! In fact, just
when liberalism and nationalism were growing strong, the forces that had
hitherto upheld the Austrian Empire were growing weak. Something might yet
have been done, if the Austrians could have brought themselves to look for a
new basis for their empire: if, for example, they had been prepared to admit the
other races into a sort of federal partnership. There were, after all, many
advantages in belonging to the Austrian Empire: military strength, freedom of
trade, and so on; but the Austrian government was not willing to make any
concessions to liberalism or nationalism, and so the subject races gradually
came to believe that their only hope of freedom lay in the disruption of the
Empire. It would be unfair to blame Metternich alone for this; but he was, after
all, the principal Austrian statesman after 1815, and the policy of suppressing
liberalism and nationalism was particularly his policy, and he either could not
or would not make, as Talleyrand said, "the concessions necessitated by the
spirit of the age".
One of the difficulties about a policy of suppression is that it is very hard to
maintain constantly and completely: especially for a genial and easy-going
people like the Austrians. In fact it was not maintained. There was a strict
censorship of the Austrian press; but foreign publications were imported
without much trouble. Teachers and university professors were supposed to be
carefully supervised; but in practice they said pretty much what they liked, at
least so long as it was not too obviously revolutionary. The "Metternich
period" (1815-48) of Austrian history, on the surface a period of pure reaction,
was actually a period of only half-concealed revolutionary propaganda; so that
by 1848 the Austrian dominions were as well prepared for revolution as the
states of Italy.
1848 in Austria
In Austria, as in Italy, the news of the February revolution in Paris brought
matters to a head. In Vienna itself, on March 12th, the university students drew
up a petition for a constitution. A vast crowd nocked into the streets to support
it. Troops, called out to preserve order, clashed with the mob, and five citizens
were killed. The people were infuriated; Vienna's civic guard (middle-class
citizen soldiers) joined them; Metternich's palace was sacked, and he himself
forced to flee the city in disguise; and the Emperor was faced with the
alternatives of granting a constitution or making war on his own capital. He
chose to grant a constitution.
At the same time the Magyars were moving in Hungary. Led by nobles like
Francis Deak, Louis Kossuth and Count Batthany, a mass-meeting at
Budapesth formulated the March Laws, which established a liberal and self-
governing constitution for Hungary. The Hungarian Diet was persuaded to
pass these laws and to present them to the Emperor for ratification; and the
Emperor helplessly agreed to them on March 31st.
A precisely similar movement took place in Bohemia. The liberals there, both
Czech and German, demanded a separate liberal constitution for Bohemia, and
the Emperor agreed to their demand on April 8th. He had thus committed
himself to granting three constitutions, for Austria proper, for Hungary, and
for Bohemia, and had thus consented to transform the Empire into a
federation. Meanwhile, the Italians in Lombardy and Venetia were in open
revolt, and demanding complete independence; and the King of Sardinia had
declared war on the Emperor in their support.
Yet all these revolutions failed. The first reason for this was that the
revolutionaries could not agree among themselves, so that the working of the
new constitutions was continually hampered by internal squabbles. A more
important reason was the quarrels that broke out between the various races.
The Germans in Bohemia, for instance, wanted liberty for themselves, but
were not so keen on liberty for the Czechs; so the Czechs summoned at Prague
a Pan-Slav Congress, of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians and Croats, to try
and get "justice" for the Slav races in the Empire. The Magyars in Hungary
were even less willing than the Germans to recognize the rights of the other
races, and it was not long before the Croats were in open revolt against them.
And neither the Germans nor the Slavs had much sympathy with the Italian
demand for total independence. The Emperor could, and did, take advantage
of these divisions. Finally, and most important of all, the army remained
completely loyal. The Austrian army was not, of course, a national army, but
an army of long-service professional troops drawn from all quarters of the
Empire, and commanded by officers from the nobility. The men remained
loyal to their officers, the officers remained loyal to the Emperor.
The continual and growing disorder in Vienna made it easy for the Emperor's
advisers to persuade him to trust himself to the army. In May, 1848, he fled to
the mountain-city of Innsbruck, whence he issued an appeal "from the
turbulence of the capital to the loyalty of our beloved provinces" (thus,
incidentally, following the advice which Mirabeau had given to Louis XVI).
The Emperor being now in safety, Radetzky was reinforced in Italy and
Windischgratz in Bohemia, and Jellachich was commissioned to lead the
Croats against the Magyars. In June the Czechs broke out into rioting, and
Windischgratz took advantage of this to seize Prague, to disperse the Pan-Slav
Congress, and to declare martial law throughout Bohemia. In July, Radetzky
defeated the Italians at Custozza and recovered Lombardy. In October,
Windischgratz and Jellachich converged on Vienna, defeated an attempt by the
Magyars to relieve it, captured the city and overthrew the liberal government.
In December the Emperor abdicated in favour of his son, Francis Joseph, who
was bound by no promises to the revolutionaries, and could therefore revoke
the constitutions which his father had granted.
It only remained to deal finally with the Italians and the Magyars. How
Radetzky won the battle of Novara, and then recovered Venice, we have seen
already. The Magyars proved a tougher problem: hampered though they were
by the opposition of Croats, Slovenes and Roumanians, and by quarrels among
their leaders, they held out for several months; until the Czar of Russia
intervened against them "on behalf of legitimate government". The Russian
invasion made the Magyar position hopeless, and by the end of August, 1849,
Hungary was once again subject to the Emperor.
The old Austrian government had thus triumphed everywhere; the first great
challenge of the revolutionary forces had been met and defeated. And not
merely in the hereditary domains of the House of Hapsburg: Austrian
dominance had been re-established in Italy and, as we shall see in the next
chapter, in the German Confederation for the efforts of German liberals and
nationalists to transform the Confederation into a liberal and united Germany
failed as hopelessly as the similar efforts of the Italians. For the revolutionaries,
it was defeat all along the line. Metternich himself returned; and, though he
was not restored to power, the younger men who replaced him round the
young Emperor were more uncompromisingly anti-revolutionary even than
he.
Yet this triumph proved in the long run a disaster rather than a benefit. It did so
precisely because it confirmed the conservatives in their belief that these silly
revolutionaries could always be held in check if they were dealt with firmly
enough. Instead of making concessions to the reasonable complaints of their
subject-races, the Austrians after 1849 rather withdrew from them what scraps
of independence they had had before. Discontent was not appeased, but
increased. No doubt this discontent could have been repressed, had the
Austrians been ruthless enough, and efficient enough, to establish a thorough-
going police-tyranny such as the Communists were later to establish in Russia;
but the Austrian government, to do it justice, was not prepared to go so far,
and did not, in any case, think it necessary to do so. Therefore the
revolutionary movements gradually revived. Abroad, too, Austrian credit
declined; for refugees like Kossuth from Hungary and Rossetti from Italy
spread blood-curdling stories about Austrian tyranny: stories that were often
exaggerated, but were accepted because the Austrian government failed to
develop any counter-propaganda. In England and France, in particular, Austria
became unpopular. This might not have mattered so much if Russia had
remained friendly. But the Czar was outraged by Austria's attitude in the
Crimean War. Austria did not join in the war, but her statesmen decidedly
favoured Turkey rather than Russia, and went so far as to concentrate an army
on the Transylvanian border to prevent Russia from advancing in the Balkans.
Nicholas I and Alexander II never forgot this "ingratitude". Austria was isolated
in Europe.
This explains why, in 1859, Cavour and Napoleon III were able to make war in
the confident hope that Austria would receive no help from other nations. It is
true that, owing to Napoleon's irresolution, the war was broken off, and
Austria was only obliged to surrender Lombardy; but her dominance of Italy
was irretrievably destroyed. A Kingdom of Italy was formed, naturally hostile
to the Austrian Empire; and even then the Emperor and his advisers did not
perceive the necessity, or the advantage, of appeasing this new power by the
voluntary cession of Venetia.
They were forced, however, to make concessions in another direction. The
Magyars of Hungary were the most nationalist and the best organized of the
subject-races; they had for centuries had a sort of constitution of their own; in
1848 they had insisted on liberalizing this constitution and making it more
independent of Austria, by the March Laws; and they had fought harder than
anyone else for the maintenance of these reforms. They had been crushed, as
we know, with the help of Russia, and reduced to strict subjection; but they did
not give up their hopes. A Magyar rebellion remained a constant possibility,
and after the Italian defeats the Austrian government, perplexed and half-
bankrupt, reluctantly admitted that the Magyars must be appeased. In 1860 a
limited constitution was granted to Hungary.
It did not satisfy the Magyars, who wanted the March Laws to be revived; but
it did give them a greater chance to agitate and press their claims against
Austria. And now there came to the front the greatest of their leaders, Francis
Deak, Deak was a moderate man. He did not wish to destroy the Empire, for
he recognized its value; he wished to obtain home-rule for Hungary within the
framework of the Empire. He had taken a prominent part in the events of 1848;
but he had broken with Kossuth and the other extremists when they decided to
depose the Emperor and declared Hungary independent. Therefore the
Austrians had not molested him after their victory, but had allowed him to
retire into private life. Under the constitution of 1860 he entered politics again,
and soon became the chief leader of the Magyars.
He did not believe in violence. With the full support of his people, he
developed a campaign of peaceful agitation and "non-cooperation" which the
Austrian officials found very difficult to combat. They could not brand Deak
and his followers as rebels or revolutionaries; yet it soon became obvious that
Deak had far more power in Hungary than the imperial government. "The
Austrians", it was said, "ruled by courtesy of Deak". And Deak kept calmly and
peacefully reiterating that what the Magyars wanted was just home-rule for
Hungary. This was the situation when Bismarck began to play his hand.
As Prime Minister of Prussia, Bismarck was determined to do in Germany
what Cavour had done in Italy: to destroy Austria's dominance and to make a
united Germany under Prussia, as Cavour had destroyed Austria's dominance
in Italy and made an Italian kingdom under Sardinia. Bismarck had this
advantage over Cavour: that Prussia was a strong state in her own right, and
needed no outside assistance in dealing with Austria; it was enough for him
that Austria should be isolated. Austria was isolated already; and Bismarck's
diplomatic skill was able to keep her so; the Italians, indeed, were willing to
join in war against her in the hope of getting Venetia.
The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 lasted only seven weeks. In that short space
the Austrian army was totally defeated, and the Emperor had to agree to a
treaty by which Austria consented to withdraw from German affairs and to
yield up Venetia to Italy. At that moment of Austria's collapse, the Magyars
could have had their independence for the taking. Many of Beak's followers
urged him to take advantage of the chance. But he would not. He stood by his
principles. He demanded no more in the hour of Austria's humiliation and
weakness than he had always demanded. But now it was easy to get the
Austrians to give in. A conference between Austrians and Magyars drew up the
Ausgleich, or Compromise, of 1867.
The Ausgleich changed the Austrian Empire into the Dual Monarchy of
Austria-Hungary. The Emperor was still recognized as King of Hungary; but
Hungary and Austria were given separate constitutions and he was to rule
Hungary through the Hungarian constitution and by a Hungarian ministry. It
was agreed that some departments of government (particularly those of
foreign affairs, defence, and finance) were of common concern to both parts of
the Empire; these were to be controlled by a joint commission of Austrians and
Magyars, meeting alternately at Vienna and Budapesth.
By forming a firm partnership between the German and Magyar races, the
Ausgleich prolonged the life of the Empire for fifty years. Its weakness was that
it made no concessions to the other races. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Roumanians,
Croats and Slovenes remained unsatisfied; and the Magyars had no more desire
than the Germans to try and satisfy them. In 1867 these other races were weak,
undeveloped and ill-organized; but as their national feelings continually grew,
they became a cause of ever-increasing weakness and disorder. Austria-
Hungary remained an apparently great power down to 1914, but it was white-
anted from within, and under the fearful strain of the First World War it flew
to pieces: a catastrophe disastrous for its own peoples and for the whole of
Europe. It is most curious that the Austrians were never able to develop a form
of federalism, for they have at their back-door Switzerland, the most successful
federation in Europe's history; the fact remains that they failed to do so, and
they and all of us have suffered from their failure.
39. Revolution In Germany
At the beginning of the 19th century, the name "Germany" was, like "Italy",
little more than a geographical expression. The peoples of German race and
speech, who had occupied the greater part of central Europe by settlement or
conquest, were still divided among more than three hundred independent
states. They had never achieved a true political unity, and therefore they had
never produced the impact on European affairs which their numbers, their
energy and their genius seemed to warrant. At long last, in the 19th century,
the spirit of nationalism succeeded where other forces had failed, and "the
Germanies" were transformed into Germany: a fateful event for the Germans
themselves, for Europe, and for the world at large.
To understand how this happened, and why it took the form which it did, one
must know something of the influences which kept the Germans so long
divided. There were, to begin with, geographical differences. In the north there
is the great plain which flows out of Russia and Poland and along the Baltic
shore, dipping into the North Sea at the Netherlands, and then spreading along
the Channel coast of France; a plain open at both ends: rather narrow at the
western end, but growing broader and flatter and less defensible as you go east,
till it merges into the interminable Russian steppe. South of this rise the central
highlands: more rugged, more beautiful, and less open to invasion; trenched by
the deep and fertile valleys of their great rivers, Rhine, Weser and Elbe; looking
northward to where those rivers wind across the plain into the North Sea. And
south again, and still more rugged and beautiful, Austria: Austria, which lies
across the European watershed, and looks not north, but south and east down
the broad Danube; Austria, the "East Mark", at once the bastion and sally-port
of the Germans; Austria, half-fascinated by the warm glow of the East and of
the Mediterranean,
"Whence every year gives back the sunshine and the Spring".
Into these lands had come the wandering German tribes; when, we hardly
know. We do know that some of them, like the Franks, took part in the
breaking of the Roman Empire, while others continued a half-nomadic life
between the Rhine and the Elbe; we know that these tribes were made
Christian by St. Boniface and his successors, and began to be a settled and
civilized people; we know that Charlemagne reduced them to order, and
organized them into "counties" and "marches" like the rest of his empire; and
we know that, when his grandsons divided his empire, this eastern part of it
became a separate kingdom.
In Germany, as elsewhere, the dukes, counts and markgrafs took advantage of
the confusion that followed Charlemagne's death to make themselves
practically independent; and when the line of Charlemagne died out, they took
the fatal step of making the monarchy elective. In chapter XI I have told how
the strong kings of the Saxon House began to overcome this difficulty, but also
how, seduced by the attractions of Italy, they undertook to revive the Roman
Empire. The mediaeval period was filled with a double effort on the part of the
Holy Roman Emperors: to build up their power over the other German
princes, and to assert their imperial rule over Italy and their supposed imperial
prerogatives against the Papacy. The attempt to do both resulted in failure in
both.
The growth of trade and of civic organization added a new source of disunion.
Whereas in other countries the cities tended to support the kingly power
against that of the feudal nobility, the cities of the Empire (not being able to
rely on the Emperor's protection) looked for safety to their own independence,
and made themselves really "free cities": nominally governing themselves in
virtue of imperial charters, but in fact self-dependent and self-controlled. The
cities of the Hanseatic League were wealthier and more powerful than the
Emperor.
The Reformation introduced a new element of discord, and ruined the efforts
of the two Emperors, Charles V and Ferdinand II, who might have made a
united Germany. The Germans of the northern plain on the whole turned
Protestant; the Germans of the southern uplands on the whole remained
Catholic; and neither could overcome the other. The drawn struggle of the
Thirty Years' War reduced Germany once more to a loose confederation, still
called the Holy Roman Empire, but (in Voltaire's words) "neither Holy, nor
Roman, nor an Empire". The Hapsburgs were still the most powerful ruling
family, and the traditional leaders of the Germans; but in the 18th century the
rise of the Prussian Hohenzollerns threatened even this leadership, and, by
emphasizing the difference between north and south, seemed to destroy any
prospect of unification. This was the state of Germany when Napoleon
appeared on the scene.
Napoleon did five things for Germany. Firstly, he destroyed the fiction of the
Empire: or rather, he showed it up as the fiction that it was, so that the
Hapsburgs themselves abandoned it. Secondly, he wiped out most of the states
in Germany, reducing them in number from over three hundred to a mere
thirty-eight. Thirdly, he introduced the Napoleonic reforms: directly, in the
parts that he directly controlled, and indirectly, by imitation, in Prussia (and
even, to some extent, in Austria). Fourthly, his armies spread the ideas of the
Revolution throughout Germany. Lastly, and much to his own surprise, in his
later years he aroused a nationalist spirit of opposition to him in Germany. By
1815 the Germans had begun to consider themselves one people, and to wish
for some form of government that would express this unity.
Their divisions, however, persisted. After 1815, one may say that the Germans
were divided into three main groups, each with its own solution to the
problem of German unity. In the south were the Austrians, the traditional
leaders of the Holy Roman Empire, the traditional bulwark of central Europe
against the Turks and of Catholicism against Protestantism. Economically and
socially, they were a people of peasants and nobles, with but a weak middle-
class; politically, they were imperialist rather than nationalist, and were
hampered in German affairs by being tied to so many subject-races; they had a
high cultural tradition, and Vienna was still a sort of cultural capital of
Germany. Then there were the people of central and western Germany: of
Saxony, Bavaria, Baden, the Rhineland, and a dozen little states. These had
preserved much of the old spirit of German individualism: the spirit of the "free
cities"; and they had long been wide open to French influences; and so they
absorbed early and easily the ideas of the Revolution. They had, too, a strong
commercial middle-class. But their religion (for they were mainly Catholic) and
their high standard of culture (in Goethe and Beethoven they had the greatest
writer and the greatest musician in Germany) made them lean towards Austria
rather than towards Prussia.
The Prussians were essentially the Germans of the eastern frontier. Living on
that broad, bare, northern plain, they had been formed by a long and bitter
struggle with the Slavs, and their traditions and organization were simply
military. The King of Prussia was a commander-in-chief, and as such had more
control over his people than any other German ruler. Under him was a military
aristocracy, the "Junkers", who owned the great estates into which most of
Prussia was divided, and who severely controlled the peasants who formed the
bulk of the population. There was little culture in Prussia; and, though there
was a middle-class of some importance in the Baltic cities and in Berlin, it was
not permitted any influence in the state. Prussia was strongly Protestant, and
therefore could not be much liked by the Catholic Germans; but even among
Protestant Germans (in Saxony and Hanover, for instance) it was disliked for its
militarism and lack of cultural refinement. It was the most unpopular state in
Germany. By the Treaty of Vienna it had acquired the Catholic Rhineland, but
this did not change its essential character.
From these divisions arose three schemes for Germany. The Austrian plan was,
naturally, for a loose confederation like the old Holy Roman Empire, under
Austria's presidency: a scheme for neutralizing rather than developing German
nationalism. This was Metternich's scheme particularly, and he succeeded in
getting it adopted at the Congress of Vienna. It was most unsatisfactory to
German liberals and nationalists, who were so strong in central and western
Germany. They wanted a real German state: a federal and democratic state,
but still a united nationalist state; and in 1848 they attempted to make one, but
failed. The Prussian scheme developed slowly, and would perhaps never have
come to fruition but for Bismarck. It was, as you might expect, a scheme for an
autocratic, militaristic union under the House of Hohenzollern.
1848 in Germany
Between 1815 and 1848 Metternich appeared to be having things all his own
way. The King of Prussia, Frederick William III, was a timid, irresolute man,
fearful of change, and easily dominated by the superior judgment and will of
the Austrian Chancellor. The lesser princes were glad enough to accept the
German Confederation and Austria's presidency, since it left them in practice
free to do as they chose. All that Metternich wanted of them was that they
should agree to suppress the growth of liberal and nationalist ideas, and most
of them had little objection to doing so. In 1819, after some small disturbances,
Metternich induced the Diet of the Confederation to issue the Carlsbad
Decrees: decrees which provided for the close supervision of universities and
for a censorship of the press, forbade the granting of any liberal constitutions,
and set up a permanent committee to study revolutionary movements and to
recommend counter-measures. This was about the only occasion on which the
Diet took any decisive action; and the Carlsbad Decrees remained the official
policy of the German states down to 1848.
They were not, however, very rigidly enforced. Even in the Austrian Empire
liberalism and nationalism contrived to grow, and they grew more easily under
the more genial and less efficient governments in central and western
Germany. There was no Mazzini in Germany, and nothing like Young Italy;
but a host of societies were founded, under more or less thin disguises, to
propagate liberal and nationalist ideas, keeping in touch with one another by
correspondence and by exchanging delegates, and forming in the end a close
network over most of Germany: a network which extended even to Vienna
and to Berlin. In Germany, as in Italy, by 1848 the middle-class as a whole, and
some of the workers and peasants, had become enthusiastic supporters of the
ideas of liberal government and national union.
News of the February revolution in Paris touched off revolutions in every
German state. What happened in Austria we have seen. In all the other states
except Prussia the revolutions were even swifter and less painful than in
Austria: mass-meetings of citizens demanded liberal reforms, and princes
hastened to grant the demands. Only in Prussia was there trouble. Frederick
William IV, who had succeeded Frederick William III in 1840, was a
romantically-minded king, with a great admiration for the Middle Ages (or
rather, for his own idea of the Middle Ages), and a great aversion from most
modern developments. He had a particular horror of the French Revolution.
When, therefore, the people of Berlin demanded a constitution, he at first
refused; but when rioting and street-fighting ensued, and his soldiers and
citizens began killing one another, he repented of his refusal and submitted to
the desired constitution. And so, by April 1848 every state in Germany had
received a liberal constitution.
The revolutionaries went on with plans for uniting Germany. Five hundred
representatives of the chief liberal societies met at Frankfort and arranged to
hold elections all over Germany for a national assembly to draw up a German
constitution. The Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, the only princes
from whom opposition to the scheme might be expected, were rendered
helpless by the recent revolutions in their own states. The elections were held.
The delegates met at Frankfort on May 18th. They nominated the Archduke
John of Austria to be Regent of Germany until the constitution should be
finished and a permanent Emperor chosen, and then proceeded to their task.
The complete failure of this Frankfort Assembly surprised many people at the
time; and yet it was not hard to foresee. The delegates themselves, as a whole,
were not fit men for the work. They included many men of high academic
qualifications, university professors, lawyers, and so forth, but few practical
politicians. The peasants were hardly represented at all, the bourgeois
businessmen scarcely more so; while the nobles, for the most part, simply
boycotted the elections. The members of the Frankfort Assembly represented
the German "intellectuals"; they could not be said to represent the German
people. They acted, too, like intellectuals: that is, they did not act, but talked.
Filled with noble ideas of giving Germany a perfect constitution, they discussed
every point with great thoroughness and at enormous length; and all the while
the conservative opposition was rallying against them throughout Germany,
the various princes were beginning nervously to wonder what power would be
left to them in a united Germany, the King of Prussia was regaining his courage
and his anti-revolutionary sentiments, and above all, the Austrian government
was repressing the revolutions in its Empire and regaining its power of
independent action.
It was Austria, indeed, that presented to the Frankfort Assembly its most
difficult problem. The Austrians proper were Germans, and should
undoubtedly be included in a united Germany; but the bulk of the inhabitants
of the Austrian Empire were not Germans at all, and should undoubtedly be
excluded; yet no Austrian government would consent to let the Empire be torn
in two. After agonizing debates, the Assembly was faced by the new Austrian
Chancellor, Schwarzenburg, with a demand for the inclusion of all the Austrian
territories. Thereupon, but only by a very small majority, the Assembly
resolved to exclude Austria altogether, and to offer the crown of the new
Germany to Frederick William of Prussia. It was a futile gesture. The King of
Prussia's natural timidity, his deference to Austria, and his hatred of revolution,
combined to make him reject this "crown of shame"; his actual reply was that
he would only accept it if the princes of the German states would all agree to
his doing so. After this the Frankfort Assembly, now hopelessly divided, could
only admit its failure and dissolve itself.
The more extreme liberals, made desperate by the imminent collapse of their
hopes, now broke out into open revolt especially in Saxony, Bavaria and
Baden. This settled any doubts Frederick William might have had: without
hesitation he sent the Prussian army to suppress the rebels; and thus, in a
splutter of useless fighting, the liberal movement for the unification of
Germany went down into the dust. Austria insisted that the German
Confederation should be restored without change; and, though Frederick
William was not quite happy at that (for it made Austria once more the
accepted leader of the German states), he had not the determination to resist.
The constitutions which had been granted in the different states survived,
except in Austria; even in Prussia the King allowed the parliament he had
granted to survive, though with reduced power and a restricted franchise; but a
united German state seemed less likely after 1849 even than it had seemed
before.
Bismarck (1815-1898)
Count Otto von Bismarck was a genius. Apart from that, he was a typical
Prussian "junker". That is to say, he was a staunch Lutheran in religion, and a
staunch conservative in politics; his chief loyalty was to the House of
Hohenzollern, and his chief object in life the aggrandizement of that House;
and he thought that this end, on the whole, justified any means. He had also
the traditional Prussian belief in the efficacy and inevitability of armed force.
But, being a genius, he was able to realize that military force alone is of little
effect, and needs to be backed by moral force: it is not enough to conquer men,
they must be converted. The chief moral forces in Germany in his time were
liberalism and nationalism. He chose to make use of the second. He was
naturally anti-liberal; but what really decided him against trying to employ
liberalism was the fiasco of 1848. He had no particular regard for nationalism,
either, but he recognized its strength: he saw that men would fight and die for
it, and he set himself to harness it to the chariot of the House of Hohenzollern.
Prussia must not just conquer Germany, but make the other Germans willing
to be conquered. Bismarck did not want a united Germany, since that would
mean including the Austrians; he did not even want a purely German
Germany, for he included in it, by right of conquest, a number of Poles and
Frenchmen; he wanted a German Empire small enough to be dominated by
Prussia, but as large as possible consistently with such domination.
Incidentally, he wanted an Empire in which Protestants should outnumber
Catholics, for Prussia was Protestant, and a Protestant majority would be a
useful weapon in her hand; besides, he doubted whether Catholics, with their
loyalty to the Pope, could be as loyal to the State as he would wish them to be.
As a statesman his chief gift was his power of seeing through appearances and
grasping realities. He saw, for instance, that Austria's pre-eminence in
Germany was no longer a force, but only a sentiment. Alone in Europe, he
realized that Napoleon Ill's Empire was weak, not strong. He understood, too,
that nationalism was stronger than liberalism, and that German nationalism
would rally round any German state which could defeat France. He was helped
by Austria's neglect of German affairs, and by the folly of Napoleon III in
seeking a frontier on the Rhine instead of supporting Austria against Prussia;
but he knew how to appreciate these factors and take advantage of them. He
also knew how to learn from others, such as Cavour; and he was always willing
to recognize his own mistakes and change his policies accordingly though he
never changed his underlying ends. And he always limited his immediate plans
to what was immediately practicable, and never bit off more than he could
chew at a time. Step-by-step was his method of advancing; of course, this
implies the ability to see what steps will be necessary.
In politics he was entirely unscrupulous (none of the wars he fought was really
justifiable), but he understood the necessity of giving his actions an appearance
of rectitude at the moment. And he succeeded in doing so: succeeded even in
deceiving his own King, an honourable man who would never have backed
Bismarck's designs had he known the full truth about them. The war with
Denmark was ostensibly fought to free the Germans in Schleswig and Holstein
from Danish oppression, but they, and the Danish inhabitants with them, were
then annexed to Prussia. The wars with Austria and France, both of which
Bismarck deliberately provoked, were made to seem defensive wars; and in
both Bismarck posed as the defender of German nationalism against the
polyglot peoples of the Austrian Empire and the designs for a Rhine frontier
cherished by Napoleon III. Even though some of the German princes guessed
what he was after, they could not defeat his astuteness, using as it did the force
of nationalism among their own subjects. In the end they were forced into
joining Bismarck's Empire by fear of being accused of anti-nationalism; they
also thought that, since Prussia must be, after Austria's defeat, the dominant
state in Germany, it was safer to have her powers limited by the terms of a
federal constitution. In point of fact, though, the constitution is the supreme
evidence of Bismarck's genius: it gives an appearance of federalism, and even of
liberalism, but the real power is firmly placed in the hands of Prussia and her
King. Such was Bismarck's mind. Add to all this that he was endowed with
uncommon health and strength, and you have a picture of the most powerful
statesman of the 19th century.
In his youth, his abounding vitality made him wild and riotous; but his
marriage in 1847 steadied him, and he began to take a serious interest in
politics. Throughout the events of 1848 he strongly opposed any concession to
the liberals; by 1850 he had the name of a die-hard. In 1851 he joined the
Prussian diplomatic service, where his talents found their proper field. Eight
years as Prussian envoy at the Diet of the German Confederation gave him a
complete grasp of German politics; three years as ambassador to Russia
introduced him to international affairs. He had just been appointed ambassador
to France, in 1862, when he was abruptly recalled to be made Prime Minister of
Prussia. Nine years later he was Chancellor of the German Empire.
Prussia's position in 1862 was a peculiar one. In many ways she was, of all the
German states, the one best fitted to achieve the unification of Germany. She
was the strongest of them all, with the possible exception of Austria, and she
had a great advantage over Austria in that most of her population was German.
All the other German states except Austria were already united to her in the
"Zollverein". * On the other hand, she was generally disliked in Germany; the
other princes were traditionally suspicious of the ambitions of the
Hohenzollerns; and under the rather timid rule of Frederick William IV, her
military strength had been allowed to decline, and she had become accustomed
to taking second place to Austria in German affairs.
Footnote:
* After 1815, Prussian territories were scattered across north
Germany. Therefore a new customs policy became necessary.
The Prussian Minister von Maasen, reduced import duties so as to
make smuggling unprofitable, and established free trade within
and between Prussian territories, but levied very high duties on
goods in transit across Prussian land. As Prussia commanded the
main German trade-routes, other German states were gradually
forced to enter a customs-union with her. This was the
Zollverein. It began in a minor way in 1819, but became fully
established in 1834-36, when Bavaria, Saxony, Wurttemburg,
Thuringia, Baden, Nassau and Frankfort entered it. Thenceforth
Prussia dominated the commercial life of Germany. But for many
years the Prussians were slow to grasp the opportunities thus put
Into their hands.
In 1858, however, Frederick William had become insane, and his brother and
heir took over the government. William I was a typical Hohenzollern: not
clever, but very hard-working; strictly conservative in his political ideas; and,
above all, a soldier: as passionately absorbed in military affairs as Frederick
William I and Frederick II had been. He began his reign with a determination
to thoroughly re-organize the Prussian army. He first appointed two able men
to control it: von Moltke as chief of staff, and von Roon, a superlative
organizer, as war-minister, and bade them work out a plan of military reform.
When they had done so, William laid the plan before the Prussian parliament
and asked it to vote the necessary money. Then the trouble started.
The lower house of the Prussian parliament was hardly a democratic body. Its
members were, however, liberal enough to believe in parliamentary rather
than absolute government, and they thought, quite correctly, that William I
did not agree with them. After some uncertainty, they determined to make the
army reforms a test case: in 1861 they refused to vote any more money for
them. William dissolved parliament, but the elections gave the liberals a still
larger majority: a majority pledged to make the King submit to parliamentary
government. Except von Roon, the King's ministers wavered, fearing a
repetition of 1848; William himself thought of abdicating; but von Roon
persuaded him to send for Bismarck and give him a free hand.
Bismarck appreciated the situation correctly. He understood very well that the
liberals would not push their opposition as far as revolution; and, as he himself
announced in his first speech: "Not by speeches and majority resolutions are
the great questions of history decided that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849
but by blood and iron". Apart altogether from the King's policy, Bismarck's
own plans demanded a strong army, and he was determined to have it. When
parliament persisted in refusing supply, he collected the taxes in spite of it, and
defied the liberals to do their worst. As he had foreseen, they talked and did
nothing. The Prussian army was re-organized according to plan, and was made
the best in Europe; and with that German liberalism became a lost cause.
Three steps, three wars, led to the making of the German Empire: war with
Denmark in 1864, war with Austria in 1866, and war with France in 1870. The
Danish war broke out over the Schleswig-Holstein question. The duchies of
Schleswig and Holstein lie between Denmark and Germany, Schleswig being
partly Danish in population and partly German, Holstein almost wholly
German. In 1852, after a disputed succession, the King of Denmark had been
recognized as Duke of Schleswig and Holstein, but on condition that he ruled
them by their own governments, separately from Denmark. In 1863 a new
King of Denmark, Christian IX, decided to abolish the separate government of
Schleswig, and incorporate it into the Danish kingdom. This proposal aroused
intense anger throughout Germany, and a demand that the German
Confederation should act to prevent it. Bismarck had not wanted to begin
operations so soon, but he made a virtue of necessity, and Prussia stood forth
as the champion of German nationalism against the Danes; Austria, not daring
to outrage German feeling by standing aside, consented to act with Prussia;
and the result was a brief war in which Austria and Prussia jointly defeated the
Danes and occupied the duchies.
What was to be done with them? Bismarck meant to get both of them for
Prussia. He knew that Austria would not agree to this, and he saw that the
future of the duchies would give him a useful pretext for the war he meant to
provoke with Austria. But he was not ready for that war yet. At the moment he
persuaded Austria to agree to a temporary arrangement by which Austria
occupied Holstein and Prussia Schleswig.
Meanwhile he set about isolating Austria. Russia was safe: she had quarrelled
with Austria at the time of the Crimean War, and Bismarck was a personal
friend of the Czar's, and had earned his help by offering him help against a
Polish rebellion in 1863. Italy would not help Austria on the contrary, she
would be willing to fight against her for the sake of getting Venetia. England
would not intervene in any Continental struggle unless she were seriously
provoked. France was the only danger. Napoleon III would certainly not want
to see Austria crushed by Prussia; still less would he want to see a Germany
united under Prussia. He had to be deceived; and Bismarck deceived him. It
was the easier because he did not then realize any more than anyone else
outside Prussia the new strength of the Prussian army. In a meeting at Biarritz
in 1865, Bismarck assured the Emperor that, if there were a war, and if Prussia
increased her territory in consequence, France would be allowed to take
"compensation" in Belgium perhaps? Or along the Rhine? Nothing definite
was said, but Napoleon III went back to Paris smacking his lips over the
prospect of a long and exhausting struggle between the two great German
powers.
The steps by which Bismarck provoked Austria into declaring war on Prussia
are very interesting, but too complicated to set out in detail. Austria did declare
war in June, 1866, and most of the smaller German states stood with her. It
made no difference. Against all expectation, the Prussians scored an immediate
and overwhelming victory. After the decisive battle of Sadowa (or Koniggratz),
the Austrians lost heart and asked for peace. The war had lasted just seven
weeks.
Bismarck was already thinking of war with France, and therefore gave Austria
an easy peace. The only territory Austria lost by the Treaty of Prague was
Venetia, to Italy. But the German Confederation was dissolved, and Austria
was excluded from German affairs. Prussia annexed Schleswig, Holstein,
Hanover, Hesse and Frankfort, and formed the other states north of the Main
into the North German Confederation. The states south of the Main (Bavaria,
Wurttemburg, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt) remained independent and
formed the South German Confederation; but Bismarck secretly revealed to
them Napoleon Ill's demands for "compensation", and persuaded them to form
a defensive alliance with Prussia.
There was another result of the war: the Prussian liberals were swept off their
feet by a wave of patriotic fervour from which they never recovered. Bismarck
became a hero. He was able to restore the Prussian constitution (such as it
was), and to ask and obtain an indemnity for all the illegal acts he had
committed during the past four years. As he had foreseen, national feeling
proved stronger than liberal feeling in the long run. He never again had serious
trouble with the liberals.
He was now ready to tackle France. In one way, France was an easier prey than
Austria, for Napoleon III had already isolated himself very thoroughly: no
other state was willing to help him, or sorry to see him fall. We have seen how
Bismarck was able to trap him into a forlorn declaration of war; this made him
technically the aggressor, and so the forces of all the German states except
Austria marched together against France, with the Prussian von Moltke as
commander-in-chief. Yet France proved a tougher nut to crack than Austria.
The regular armies of Napoleon III, imperfectly organized and weakly led,
were defeated with comparative ease; the Emperor himself was captured and
Paris invested. But then there came a check. The head of the new provisional
government, Gambetta, escaped from Paris by balloon, and set himself, like
Danton in 1792, to organize a national rising against the invader. The Germans
found themselves opposed by a patriotism even stronger than their own. Paris
held out; and the new French levies, half-trained and poorly supplied, fought
with desperate heroism to redeem their country. They did indeed redeem the
honour of France, though, in the end, they too had to admit defeat. On
February 1st, 1871, an armistice was arranged.

But already Bismarck had attained his main object. As he had foreseen, the
German victories aroused a wave of national enthusiasm throughout
Germany, and an almost universal demand for real national unity. Bismarck
and Moltke were now German, and not merely Prussian, heroes. Those
princes who were still reluctant to submit to Prussia dared not oppose the
blazing fervour of their subjectc; they made a virtue of necessity, and on
January 18th, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, William I
of Prussia was crowned Emperor of Germany.
This was Bismarck's greatest triumph. Yet, strangely it was immediately
followed by his worst blunder: the Treaty of Frankfort with France. He had
treated Austria with a wise forbearance; he treated France with a most
unstatesmanlike severity. Not only did he impose an enormous indemnity (five
milliards of francs (about 200,000,000 in the money of those days) but he
forced the French to hand over to the German Empire the provinces of Alsace
and Lorraine. He wanted these provinces for military reasons to obtain a
more defensible frontier, and for economic reasons to get the iron of
Lorraine. He claimed that the provinces were "historically" German, and that a
majority of their inhabitants were German-speaking (though most of them,
whatever their language, wanted to remain French); yet his taking of them was
an outrage against nationalism. He stirred up in France, against his German
Empire, the very force by which he had made that Empire; he made certain
that his new Germany would have a permanent and passionate enemy across
the Rhine; and we shall see later how this enmity hampered and imperilled his
whole achievement. He seems afterwards to have recognized and regretted his
error; but he could not then undo it.
40. The Eastern Question
During the 19th century, one of the chief troubles of European statesmen was
the Eastern Question: what was to become of the Balkan peninsula? This was
part of a much larger question: what was to become of the Ottoman Empire?
The root cause of the trouble was that the Ottoman Turks were losing their
grip. From their base in Asia Minor they had succeeded in dominating a great
part of western Asia, northern Africa and eastern Europe; a succession of
warlike Sultans with a strong military establishment had made the Ottoman
Empire the master-power throughout the Near East; but now that was ending.
Since the 16th century, Spain, Austria, Poland and Russia had in turn checked
them and destroyed their hopes of further conquest; the warlike Sultans had
given place to a race of effeminate weaklings wallowing in the luxuries of
Constantinople; the military establishment had been allowed to grow obsolete
and to decay. Taking advantage of this weakness at the centre, the local
governors, the "Pashas", were everywhere moving towards independence, the
conquered peoples everywhere dreaming of revolt; and neighbouring states
were covetously eyeing those parts of the Empire that would be useful to
them.
The situation in the Balkans was further complicated by the extraordinary
mixture of races that inhabit it. In the south, and in the islands, live the Greeks,
who are themselves of mixed ancestry, but who choose to consider themselves
the descendants of the ancient Greeks, and to speak a language founded on
ancient Greek. In the north-east live the Roumanians, another mixed race, who
choose to consider themselves the descendants of the old Roman settlers in
Dacia, and speak a language with Latin affinities. In the south-east towards the
Black Sea, live the Bulgars, descendants of Slav invaders with a Slav language.
In the north-west are the Serbs, with their cousins the Croats and Slovenes:
also Slavs, but with a different language and different traditions from those of
the Bulgars. In the west, by the Adriatic, are the Albanians: different from all
the rest, and perhaps descended from the aboriginal inhabitants of the Balkans.
Most of these peoples are Christians of the Orthodox, or Greek, persuasion;
but the Croats and Slovenes are Catholics, and many of the Albanians are
Moslems.

The decline of the Ottoman power was thus bound to lead to trouble in the
Balkans. The discontent of the Balkan peoples with Turkish misrule,
exasperated by the bitter hatred between Christian and Moslem, would now, in
the 19th century, be further stimulated by the appearance of liberalism and
nationalism. Nationalism would also deepen the divisions between the Balkan
peoples themselves: in proportion as they became independent of the Turks,
they would begin to quarrel with one another. Moreover, liberalism would
bring with it, as it did everywhere else, political divisions between various
parties, so so that each Balkan race would be torn by internal conflicts. Nor
would they be left to settle these troubles themselves. Four great European
powers, Russia, Austria, England and France, were interested in what became
of the Balkans. Russia, that great landlocked empire, still wanted a satisfactory
outlet to the sea, and the Russians had long set their hearts on Constantinople;
they had a good excuse for interference, too, since they were Orthodox
Christians like the Balkan peoples, and to attack the Turks was a sort of
crusade. As Slavs, moreover, they were drawn to help their kinsfolk, the
Bulgars and Serbs. England and France, on the other hand, were resolved that
Russia should not have Constantinople, since that would introduce a third
great naval power into the Mediterranean. The English and the French could
and did quarrel among themselves about Mediterranean affairs, but they
wanted no third party intervening to make matters worse.
As the century wore on, the English became further worried about Russia's
advance southwards towards India. The obvious policy for England was to
preserve the Ottoman Empire as a buffer-state against Russia; unfortunately,
though, no European state could indiscriminately support the tyranny and
brutality of Turkish rule. So England's policy became, to support the Turks as
far as possible, but, if the Balkans must be freed, to see to it that they became
really independent: as independent of Russia, or of Austria, as they were of
Turkey. In any event, "the Russians shall not have Constantinople". Austria
had her own point of view. She was concerned for her great trade-artery, the
Danube: if any power were to replace the Turks along the lower Danube, she
wanted it to be Austria, not Russia. And she certainly did not want the Balkans
to be freed, for there were Roumanians, Croats and Slovenes in the Austrian
Empire, and if their kinsmen over the border were freed who knew what they
would do? Nationalism in the Balkans was as dangerous as nationalism in the
Austrian Empire itself.
The Greek War (1821-1829)
In actual fact, the first successful revolt was that of the Serbs, who succeeded in
extorting a partial autonomy from the Turks in 1817; but the Greek revolt is
more important and much more illuminating: all the factors in the problem
can be seen at work in it. The mainland Greeks are a race of mountaineers; the
island Greeks are seafarers. The decline in the military power of the Turks
enabled patriotic brigands to operate in the Greek mountains, while the decay
of the Turkish fleet put the command of the Greek seas into the hands of the
islanders. Meanwhile, the Greek students trained in western universities had
begun to revive the memory of the classical glories of Greece, and it was one of
these, Korais, who constructed the modern Greek language, from a
combination of classical Greek with the current dialects. Thus a Greek
nationalism appeared. There arose, too, in western Europe the movement
called Philhellenism, which identified modern Greece with ancient Greece, and
aroused in the classically-educated ruling-class of Europe an enthusiasm for the
liberation of Greece. (Byron and Shelley are the most famous of English
Philhellenists, but there were many others, enthusiasts and adventurers, who
were ready to work and fight in the cause.) The Orthodox Church supplied the
crusading element, and brought Greece the sympathy of the Russians who
would in any case be tempted to take advantage of any movement that would
weaken Turkey's grip on Constantinople and the Straits.
In 1814 a secret society was formed, the Hetairia Philike, which gradually
organized the Greeks into a great armed conspiracy, religious and nationalist.
In 1821 the moment seemed to have arrived, the Turkish government being
occupied in suppressing the rebel Ali, Pasha of Janina; and Archbishop
Germanos raised the Greek standard at Patras in the Morea. All over the Morea
the Greeks rose against the Moslems and slaughtered them. The Turks replied
by hanging the Patriarch of Constantinople and killing whatever Greeks they
could lay hands on; but they could not match the Greeks in battle, and they
must soon have been beaten but for the divisions that arose among the Greeks
themselves. As it was, in 1824 the Sultan despaired of re-conquering them, and
appealed to his powerful and dangerous vassal, Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt,
whose well-trained army and navy soon began to turn the scale against the
Greek irregulars.
Yet now the Turks made a mistake which they were often to repeat: having the
upper hand, they began waging a war of extermination, and their savagery so
aroused Western feeling against them that European intervention became
inevitable. Nicholas I of Russia, in particular, declared that he would not stand
by and see his co-religionists massacred; and, to prevent Russia from
intervening alone, the English and French governments, in 1827, reluctantly
agreed to act. A joint Anglo-Franco-Russian fleet was sent to Greece, and the
three governments suggested an armistice. The Greeks accepted the
suggestion, the Turks refused it. Thereupon the Allied squadron moved into
Navarino Bay to over-awe the Turk-Egyptian fleet; shots were fired, battle
followed, and the Moslem fleet was wiped out. This event practically settled
the war.
Yet Greece's troubles were only beginning. Two years were spent by the
European powers in negotiating about the ultimate form of Greek
independence, while the patriotic brigands went back to brigandage, and the
Greek factions fought among themselves. At last it was decided to make
Greece an independent monarchy under a Bavarian prince, Otto. His rule was
most unpopular. Since he could do nothing with the Greeks, he tried to rule as
an absolute monarch, with Bavarian advisers. There were revolts against him
in 1834, 1836, and 1843. By the last of these he was forced to grant a
constitution. But the Greek character was not yet constitutional, and violence,
intrigue and bribery became the normal accompaniments of Greek politics. In
all these troubles Greek history is typical of the history of the other Balkan
peoples.
The Crimean War (1854-56)
At the time of the Greek settlement, Russia had insisted that the two
Roumanian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia should be given a sort of
semi-independence of Turkey: a sign that Russia was already hoping for, and
working for, the complete disruption of the Turkish Empire in Europe. For
some years, however, her designs were delayed and confused by the affair of
Mehemet Ali. Mehemet Ali was a clever and ambitious adventurer, Albanian
by birth, who had fought against Napoleon in Egypt, and who, after the
departure of the French, had raised himself by very devious means to the
position of Pasha of Egypt. The story of his ten-year quarrel with the Sultan,
and of the consequent diplomatic manoeuvres of Russia, England and France,
is interesting; but, as it led to no permanent result, is not historically important.
In the end, in 1841, Mehemet Ali was forced to content himself with being
acknowledged hereditary Pasha of Egypt. When he was thus disposed of, the
Eastern Question began to move in the direction of the Crimean War.
Nicholas I had now come to a definite conclusion. The Ottoman Empire, he
thought, was bound to go to pieces before long, and the powers concerned,
especially England and Russia, should come to some agreement about the
division of the spoils. He himself wished to have a kind of protectorate over the
Balkans, with control of Constantinople and the Straits; England could have
Egypt and Crete, which would safeguard her position in the Mediterranean.
Unfortunately for this scheme, the English had no desire to undertake any such
new commitments, and they were advised by their ambassador at
Constantinople, Stratford Canning, that Turkey was in no immediate danger of
collapse; so they rejected the Czar's proposals decisively.
Stratford Canning, the most brilliant and indefatigable of ambassadors, with a
profound knowledge of Turkey, now practically took over the direction of
English policy. He was convinced that the Turkish Empire could and should be
preserved, provided that Russian intervention was prevented. He therefore
strove to get the Sultan both to reform his government and to stand firm
against Russia, and at the same time committed the English government to
support the Sultan. But, though he was right in thinking that Turkey was not
so weak as the Russians hoped and believed, he was wrong in thinking that the
Turks could be persuaded to reform. In particular, he could not get them to
stop the misgovernment and oppression of their Christian subjects in the
Balkans. This oppression was the immediate occasion of the Crimean War.
In March, 1853, the Czar declared that the outrages against his fellow-
Christians were intolerable, and demanded that the Sultan should recognize
Russia as the "protector" of all Christians in the Ottoman Empire. As this
would have given Russia an almost unlimited power of intervention in the
Balkans, Stratford Canning persuaded the Sultan to refuse. Russia thereupon
invaded the Roumanian provinces of Turkey. The English government now
discovered that its ambassador had committed it far more deeply than it would
have wished to the support of Turkey: not for the first time, England had
blundered into war. It was fortunate for her that Napoleon III had his own
reasons for joining in: a desire for glory, a desire to avenge his uncle's defeat by
Russia, a desire to pose as the protector of Catholic, as against Orthodox,
Christians in the Ottoman Empire; besides the determination which France
shared with England to keep Russia out of the Mediterranean. Austria, too,
though unwilling to fight, threatened to do so if Russia persisted in advancing
towards the Danube.
Thus, early in 1854, Russia found herself at war with England, France and
Turkey, and threatened by Austria if she did not withdraw from Roumania.
She did withdraw. The English and French decided, however, that the menace
to Turkey could best be dealt with by destroying the Black Sea naval base of
Sebastopol, and so the seat of war was transferred to the Crimea.
The mismanagement of this war has become proverbial. It was forty years
since any of the nations concerned had fought a major war, and their armies
were ill-equipped both mentally and materially. There was a super-abundance
of bravery the charge of the Light Brigade is only one out of many examples
but brains and blankets were in short supply. The Russians failed to prevent
their enemies from landing fifty thousand men on Russian soil, and from
investing Sebastopol; but so slow were the Allies to seize their opportunities
that they found themselves involved in a winter campaign for which they had
made no provision: involved also in cholera, dysentery and other diseases,
equally unforeseen. However, they repaired their deficiencies more swiftly and
effectively than the Russians the institution of a regular nursing-service by
Florence Nightingale was perhaps the chief result of this war and in 1855
they renewed the struggle with more success. The death of the Czar Nicholas
in February helped; and the surrender of Sebastopol in September made all
parties willing to make peace.
The Treaty of Paris was signed in March, 1856. It contained five main points.
The integrity of the Ottoman Empire was guaranteed. The Black Sea was
"neutralized": no ships of war were to enter or leave it, and no forts nor
arsenals were to be built on its shores. The navigation of the Danube was
declared open to all nations, and an international commission was set up to
supervise it. Russia had to surrender any claim to "protect" Christians in the
Ottoman Empire, but the Sultan was made to promise that Christians would
be given equality of status with Moslems. The provinces of Moldavia and
Wallachia were declared independent, like Serbia, but for a vague suzerainty of
the Sultan. (They united in 1858 to form the Kingdom of Roumania.)
Later historians have almost all condemned the Crimean War as fruitless and
unnecessary. Fruitless it was not: Russia's ambitions were checked for twenty
years; unnecessary perhaps it was: we shall see how the next Balkan crisis was
effectively managed without a European war; but it may be that the memory
of the Crimea helped to produce this result.
The Congress of Berlin (1878)
After 1856 Russia had to renounce her Balkan policy for a time; in any case the
new Czar, Alexander II, was at first engrossed in schemes for the internal
reform of his country. But the check was a brief one. In 1870 he took advantage
of the Franco-Prussian War to denounce the Treaty of Paris and reestablish a
Black Sea fleet England vainly protesting. But even before that, Russian
agents had again become busy in the Balkans.
This time they were concentrating on the Bulgars. They had tried the
Roumanians, who owed so much of their independence to Russia; but the
Roumanians proved unexpectedly stubborn, unwilling to be guided by Russia,
or to act as Russia's tools; it was thought that the Bulgars, being Slavs, would
be more friendly and more amenable. So they were, but they also proved
difficult to rouse; and it was not they, but the Serbs, who set the Balkans
boiling again.
Late in 1874, the exactions of Turkish tax-gatherers provoked a local revolt in
Herzegovina. It spread rapidly throughout that province and into Bosnia, and
in 1875 the Serb states of Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey in
support of their fellow-Serbs. This news roused the Bulgars. But their revolt
was ill-prepared and badly-organized, and they were much more easily
accessible from Constantinople than the Serbs, and they were soon put down.
Yet the Turkish authorities then perpetrated another of those criminal blunders
which blot the whole history of their dealings with subject-races: they ordered,
or permitted, the series of massacres known to history as the Bulgarian
Atrocities. About twelve thousand Bulgars, men, women and children, were
murdered.
The results were immediate and long-lasting. Russia was given excellent reason
for intervention, and those governments notably England's which would
have liked to prevent her, were paralysed. Gladstone, in fact, the leader of the
then great Liberal Party, brought out a flaming pamphlet against the Turks,
and followed it up with a propaganda campaign which swept the country;
Disraeli, the Conservative leader, who was then in power, found that for the
moment his hands were tied: he could not support Turkey. Diplomatic
conferences held at Constantinople and London only delayed the inevitable,
and although a "palace revolution" replaced the old Sultan by Abdul Hamid,
who made lavish promises of reform, it was too evident that these promises
were worthless. In April, 1877, Russia and Roumania declared war on Turkey.
The result was inevitable. The Turks fought better than was expected
Osman Pasha's defence of Plevna held up the Russians for five months but
when Adrianople fell in January, 1878, they admitted defeat and sued for peace.
But now it was the Russians' turn to blunder. By the Treaty of San Stefano they
forced the Turks, among other concessions, to agree to the setting up of a great
Bulgarian state: a state including not only Bulgaria proper, but also the greater
part of Macedonia and Thrace, inhabited and claimed by Greeks, Serbs and
Albanians. This would make the Bulgars the most powerful of the Balkan
peoples: the Russians hoped through them to dominate the Balkans. But the
Czar had overplayed his hand. England and Austria, who could not reasonably
have objected to an independent Bulgaria, could and did reasonably object, on
behalf of the other Balkan peoples, to the overgrown Bulgaria of San Stefano.
They insisted that the treaty should be revised. Bismarck, rather reluctantly,
agreed with them, and suggested a European congress to settle the matter. The
Russians gave way; the Congress of Berlin met; and the Treaty of Berlin was
signed in July, 1878.
This treaty divided the new Bulgaria into three parts: Macedonia and Thrace,
which were returned to Turkey; Eastern Roumelia, which was given a sort of
home-rule under Turkey; and a small state of Bulgaria, which was given
practical independence, though still tributary to Turkey and under Turkish
suzerainty for what that was worth. Turkey was made to acknowledge the
complete independence of Roumania, Serbia and Montenegro, each of which
states received a small increase of territory. Austria was given a protectorate
over Bosnia and Herzegovina: the two provinces remained formally Turkish,
but were to be governed by the Austrians. Russia was allowed to take
Bessarabia from Roumania, and Kars and Batum from Turkish Armenia;
England, by special arrangement with Turkey, was allowed to garrison Cyprus.

This treaty was a series of compromises which settled nothing finally and
satisfied no-one completely. Bulgaria was now unduly limited; Roumania
resented the loss of Bessarabia; the Serbs objected to the Austrian protectorate
over Bosnia and Herzegovina; the rivalry between Austria and Russia was
intensified. On the other hand, everyone got something out of the treaty, and
this settlement at Berlin lasted for thirty years much longer than other
Balkan settlements.
This was the last occasion, though, on which an English government
intervened in Balkan affairs on behalf of Turkey. After the Bulgarian Atrocities,
the English Liberal Party remained definitely anti-Turkish, and put forward as
its policy the complete independence of the Balkans. The Conservatives slowly
came round to the same view. The Armenian massacres of 1895, and the
Macedonian massacres of 1903, showed that it was hopeless to expect reforms
from the Turks; and at the same time the Balkan nations showed no disposition
to be influenced by Russia. The Bulgars proved just as intractable as the
Roumanians: various efforts made by Russia to dominate Bulgaria only
produced revolts and the growth of anti-Russian feeling. So it happened that
when, in 1885, the Bulgars of Eastern Roumelia insisted on joining their
brethren in the Kingdom of Bulgaria, an English Liberal government supported
the move in the teeth of Russia's opposition.
The Turks soon saw that they could no longer rely on England, and looked
round for another ally. After 1890 they found one in Germany. We shall see
later how, after Bismarck's dismissal, the Germans went over to a "forward"
policy of commercial and colonial expansion. The Ottoman Empire seemed to
offer a great field for German enterprise, and so Germany replaced England as
Turkey's friend, adviser, and commercial developer. Austria, of course, stood
with Germany. By 1900 it was already clear that England was being drawn
towards Russia in opposition to Germany and Austria. We shall see how this
situation helped to produce the First World War.
41. Russia
Russia in 1815 was still very like the Russia of Peter the Great. Peter's
westernising reforms had been confirmed and consolidated by his successors,
and notably by Catherine the Great, but they had not been extended.
Politically. Russia was still a pure despotism: the Czar holding absolute power,
and exercising it through a civil service recruited chiefly from the land-owning
aristocracy. This aristocracy had become outwardly westernised, in dress,
manners, and general culture, but had remained little affected by western ideas
certainly not by the ideas of the Enlightenment. The civil service it supplied
was not conspicuously less efficient or more corrupt than other 18th century
civil services; but it was very inefficient and corrupt by the Napoleonic
standards which the rest of Europe was about to adopt. So. too, was the army:
powerful in numbers. very weak in organization, and urgently in need of
reform.
Socially and economically, there was still more need for reform. The
population of Russia numbered about a hundred million. It was divided into
two classes: the comparatively small group of semi-westernised nobles, and a
vast, poor, ignorant mass of peasants, working on the great estates of the
nobles and the Crown. The only effect on these of Peter the Great's reforms
had been to make many of them into serfs: tied to the soil they worked on and
completely subject to the masters they worked for. They still kept the memory
of an earlier age of freedom, and hated serfdom; but they could not help
themselves. Serf-riots were frequent; but they were sporadic, local. and easily
suppressed. There was no middle-class to lead them or to urge reform: no
independent farmers, manufacturers, merchants, such as made the American
and French Revolutions. Communications over Russia's vast spaces were very
poor; industry was mostly local, carried on by the serfs for their lords; trade
was mainly in the hands of foreigners and Jews. The peasants had no unity, no
knowledge, no leaders. Besides their hatred of serfdom they had two other
passions: an intense devotion to the Orthodox Church and an intense loyalty to
the person of the Czar; and in all three of these passions they resembled
peasants of mediaeval Christendom rather than citizens of a modern state.
Russia had, indeed, immense reserves of energy and intelligence in her people,
as she had huge material resources in her vast territory; but they were idle and
useless for want of development.
In these circumstances, any movement for reform would have to come from
above: from the intellectuals among the aristocracy the "intelligentsia". In
one respect, these served their country well: they created and fostered a great
literary development. Poets like Pushkin and Lermontov, novelists and
dramatists like Turgeniev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, made the 19th
century the golden age of Russian literature, and provided the intellectual
stimulus without which any other development is hardly possible. On other
matters, unfortunately, the intelligentsia could not agree. They were so much
divided that one can hardly say they formed parties; but, roughly speaking,
they fell into two main groups: the "westernisers" and the "Slavophils". The
westernisers generally favoured the revolutionary ideas of liberalism and
nationalism: freedom of speech, constitutional government, even liberty for
such subject-nationalities as the Poles and the Finns. The Slavophils despised all
that: they looked on the Slavs as the chosen race, and on the Russians as the
perfect Slavs. They thought that Russia had no need to borrow ideas from
other races, but should develop her own traditional institutions, even going
back behind Peter the Great's reforms; they thought, too that it was Russia's
mission to unite all the Slav peoples into one empire, and make them all
perfect Slavs an idea that became famous as "Pan-Slavism".
The Czars should have made it their business either to reconcile or decide
between these tendencies; but they did neither. They leaned now to one and
then to the other; some-times they suppressed both. They followed no firm
policy. This vacillation at the top explains the increasing confusion in Russia
during the 19th century; it was also the main cause of the ultimate catastrophe.
Alexander I (1801-25) was an extreme example of this: at first an enemy of
Napoleon, then his enthusiastic admirer, finally his enemy again; forming the
Holy Alliance, but doing nothing to make it effective; coquetting with liberal
ideas, and even going so far as to grant his Polish and Finnish subjects
constitutions of their own, but then becoming frightened of revolution, and
swinging back to censorship and repression and a whole-hearted support of
Metternich. His hesitations were disastrous. Those Russians who, during the
Napoleonic wars, encountered and were converted to liberal ideas, were first
encouraged and then exasperated: more conservative Russians were alarmed
by Alexander's liberalism and only partly reassured by his later reaction: all
were disturbed and confusedi and felt that anything might happen, that
nothing was secure. The only consistency Alexander showed was in foreign
affairs: in seizing for Russia anything he could get. He took advantage of his
alliance with Napoleon to get Bessarabia from Turkey; at the Congress of
Vienna he obtained Finland and the greater part of Poland; and in that sort of
reform his successors were all equally consistent.
On Alexander's death a small group of aristocrats, chiefly officers in the army,
attempted an insurrection to obtain a constitution. This "Decembrist"
conspiracy never had the slightest chance of success, and was easily, and
ruthlessly, suppressed: but it gave Nicholas I (1825-55) some justification for the
policy he meant in any case to pursue: the policy of the "Nicholas System".
There was no vacillation about Nicholas: he was a soldier, and believed firmly
that order is heaven's first law, and that only a complete autocracy could
maintain order in Russia. He would tolerate no criticism of his government
from either westernisers or Slavophils, and by a strict censorship and passport-
system he tried to insulate Russia altogether against Western ideas. To
maintain his system he set up the Third Section of the Imperial Chancery: a
very efficient secret-police organization ("the only really efficient department
in Russia"); and this became, and has ever since remained, the fundamental and
essential means of government in Russia. It was given power to arrest,
imprison, exile and even execute, without recourse to the ordinary courts:
and", though few people were executed under Nicholas I, more than a hundred
and fifty thousand were exiled to Siberia. Yet opposition was only suppressed,
not destroyed. The Nicholas System did not convert the intelligentsia: it only
maddened them; and it did not reform the administration, but only petrified it.
In foreign affairs his failure was apparent even before his death. His darling
dream was to preside over the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire and to
secure Constantinople for Russia; and we have seen already how that dream
led him into the disastrous Crimean War. His general European policy was to
oppose liberalism and nationalism: between 1825 and 1848 he was Metternich's
chief standby. In 1830 he wished to suppress the revolutions in France and
Belgium, and proposed to use the Polish army for that purpose. The Poles,
however, would not have it: they rose in rebellion: and by the time he had
suppressed them Nicholas' chance had gone by. He continued to support a
losing cause, and in 1848 he gave the Austrian government decisive help
against the Hungarian rebels; but he may have regretted this when he saw
Austria's very unbenevolent neutrality during the Crimean War. In one sphere,
however, he had some success: it was he who began in earnest the
development of Siberia, and not only by sending exiles there. He firmly
secured the Pacific coast, and began to subdue the wild tribes of Turkestan.
Siberia was to prove, in the end, more valuable to Russia than all the Balkans.
When Nicholas died, the disasters of the Crimea had made obvious the need
for reform; Alexander II (1855-81) had the task of undertaking it. He was not a
soldier like his father, but a quiet, gentle, cautious, and perhaps rather timid
man; yet he faced his task with unusual steadfastness and intelligence. He had,
we may say, three principles: that Russia must be reformed; that, to avoid
revolution, reforms must be imposed from above, by the government,
according to carefully-prepared plans; and that they must be introduced very
gradually and with great moderation, to avoid confusion and disorder. These
principles explain what many find puzzling in the conduct of Alexander II: the
long delays, the hesitations, the apparent checks and movements of reaction;
reform without revolution, he thought, could only be carried out in Russia
with extreme caution and care.
The manner in which the serfs were emancipated is typical. It was clear that
this was the fundamental reform. Alexander appointed a commission to
consider it in 1855; but only after five years of planning did he issue the Edict of
Emancipation in 1861; and five more years were occupied in carrying it
gradually into effect. The details were carefully regulated. The former serfs had
to be given land to live on; therefore the estates had to be divided between
lords and peasants. The lords had to be compensated for their loss of land and
labour; so the government issued bonds to them, which were to be paid off by
the peasants in instalments over a period of forty-nine years. To make sure that
the payments would be made, responsibility for paying them was placed, not
on the individual peasants, but on the "mirs". the village communities to which
all peasants belonged: so the mir came to have much more control over its
members, and it was hoped that this would help the serfs, who had so little
experience of managing their own concerns.
The effects of this gigantic change were rather disconcerting. Many of the
former serfs did fail to make a success of their new life: they got into debt. had
to give up their land, and either became mere labourers or drifted into the
towns to become the beginnings of a proletariat. The majority were more
successful, and yet they were not content. They always maintained that their
share of the land was too small, and that the compensation due to the lords
was too great; and the more prosperous quickly came to resent the control of
the mirs. In general, the peasant became more prosperous, more active and
more intelligent; but, precisely because of that, he became more conscious of
his grievances and more vocal in demanding remedies. Emancipation in the
long run worked a great improvement in the Russian people; but it did not
make them more docile nor more contented.
Nevertheless, Alexander II continued his plans. The legal system began to be
examined almost as soon as he succeeded to the throne; but it was not till 1864,
after long investigation. that he approved a new system. The principal changes
introduced were that all Russian subjects were to be equal before the law, that
judges were to be independent of the government, that trials were to be held in
public, and that trial by jury was established. These were enormous changes;
yet, as one would expect from Alexander, they were restricted by important
reservations: the most important, that the secret police retained their special
jurisdiction, and that therefore political offenders did not come under the new
courts. The very magnitude of his reforms made Alexander insist on main
taining the authority of the Crown, as essential for the preservation of order.
Yet he went on to establish, between 1864 and 1876, elected local
governments, called "zemstva". A zemstvo was something like a county
council: it dealt with local problems like the maintenance of roads, sanitation,
primary education, the election of justices of the peace, and so on. Its members
were chosen by the village mirs and by the local assemblies of the nobles. Its
powers were limited (once again, how characteristically!) by the fact that the
governor of the province had a power of veto over its proceedings. Yet the
zemstva gave, as they were intended to do, practical experience of the practical
problems and methods of government: their importance in the political
education of the Russian people cannot be overestimated. It was not long
before their members began to demand a national assembly. Alexander at first
rejected such demands; but by 1881 he was contemplating summoning some
such body, when death prevented him.
There was another reform, the importance of which is often overlooked. In
1874, after twelve years of investigation and experiment, universal military
service was instituted: an institution which in a few years' time gave Russia a
national army. In British countries conscription has usually been considered
tyranny; the continental tradition is the opposite: that the best safeguard
against tyranny is to make the army "the nation in arms". This was the most
daring of Alexander's reforms, and some would say the most effective.
Certainly its effect was great: the later development of the Russian people, the
later history of Russia, would have been quite different without it.
Some historians have said that Alexander II's reign falls into two parts: a period
of reform and a period of reaction. This judgment misrepresents both his
character and his policy. He always persisted in his schemes for reform; he
always insisted that these reforms could not safely be carried out unless the
Czar's authority remained supreme and unchallenged. What is true is that, at
the beginning of his reign, he had hoped to be able to rule more mildly, with
less use of censorship and the Third Section, than his father; but that the
activity of opposition groups, and particularly of the Nihilists, made him
reluctantly increase the severity of his rule as time went on.
The westernisers in Russia were disappointed with his re-forms: they were too
gradual, and produced too little immediate effect, for men who were admiring
the swift progress of liberalism in other countries. A small group of these
westernisers fell into a mood of despair. They felt that nothing was right with
Russia, that nothing satisfactory would be done unless the whole existing
system was swept away and reduced to nothing. Hence they called themselves
Nihilists. They might have been harmless enough had they not come under the
influence of men like the anarchist Bakunin (the man who was too
revolutionary for Karl Marx) who enticed them into using practical methods of
annihilation: the pistol and the bomb. There were only a few of them; but even
a few individuals, perfectly ruthless, and determined to make government
impossible by assassinating government officials, can do a deal of harm.
Alexander II was forced to rely more and more on the Third Section.
He also had trouble with the Poles but in this he resembled all his predecessors
since the partitions. The Poles would not be content till they had regained their
independence. They rebelled against Alexander in 1863; and he, when the
revolt had been crushed, attempted to divide them by freeing the Polish serfs
and favouring them at the expense of their lords: a policy which might have
been more successful if he had not at the same time antagonized all Poles by
persecuting the Catholic Church. This was stupid; but in their dealing with
Poland all Russian governments have always been stupid.
The main plank in Alexander's foreign policy was his friendship with Bismarck,
joined with a desire to keep on good terms with the new German Empire so as
to keep it from supporting Austria in Balkan affairs. Bismarck took advantage
of this to draw Alexander into the League of the Three Emperors. This alliance
was strained, but not broken, by the events which led up to the Congress of
Berlin. With regard to that, we have seen what a golden opportunity was
offered Russia by the Bulgarian Atrocities, and how Alexander, after defeating
Turkey, overplayed his hand at the Treaty of San Stefano. He achieved more
success in Siberia and central Asia. In Turkestan, Samarkand and Bokhara were
occupied, and the Russian boundary pushed south to Afghanistan; and in
Siberia the Amur region was secured, and the port of Vladivostok was founded
on the Pacific coast. Russia-in-Asia had become as extensive as Russia in
Europe - though not, as yet, so important.
Alexander II was killed by a Nihilist bomb in 1881. It was the fourth or fifth
attempt on his life, and its success was disastrous. For his son and successor
was a different kind of man altogether, and under him the policy of the Russian
government went once again into reverse. Alexander III (1881-94) was another
Nicholas I - - a soldier, believing in order and discipline as the supreme
necessities, and confirmed in his belief by his father's murder. He ruled in
military fashion: not destroying his father's reforms, but circumscribing and
restricting their operation, imposing a rigid censorship, and making great use of
the secret police. Under his chief of police. Plehve, arbitrary arrest and
imprisonment became commonplaces.
He was, too, a strong Slavophil, determined to "russify" all his subjects. No
language but Russian was tolerated, no religion but the Russian Orthodox
faith. Catholics in Poland. Lutherans in the Baltic provinces, and dissident sects
among the Russians themselves, were all alike persecuted. Jews were especially
penalized: segregated into particular districts, for-biddn to acquire land, their
entrance into secondary schools and universities severely restricted. Indeed, in
his hatred of the Jews Alexander III was even ready to connive at disorder: anti-
Jewish riots "pogroms" were tolerated and even encouraged.
This repressive policy achieved some outward success. Nihilism practically
disappeared though perhaps the stupidity of the Nihilist programme was as
much responsible for this as the efforts of the police. But the general discontent
in Russia was only driven underground, not appeased. Alexander III did
nothing to remove the essential causes of discontent: on the contrary, he
introduced a fresh revolutionary element by his encouragement of
industrialism.
His reasons for doing so were military. By 1880 it was quite clear that without
railways and steelworks and munition factories no nation could in future wage
war successfully; and for this reason, apart from any other consideration, the
governments of all the great powers were encouraging their industrialists to
expand. In Russia the government had to do much more: partly because of its
all-controlling position, still more because of the lack of capital and capitalists
in the country. Capital, industrial managers, engineers and so forth had to be
obtained from abroad; and only the government had the necessary credit and
could give the necessary guarantees. Alexander II had already extended the
Russian railways; under Alexander III industrialization became the settled
policy, in spite of heavy financial losses and strong opposition from the
conservative Slavophils. The Czar was a soldier, and could see what had to be
done. And, as far as production was concerned, the policy was successful:
between 1881 and 1904 the production of coal increased sixfold, and of iron
fourfold, the number of factory workers doubled, and the number of city-
dwellers rose to nearly twenty million.
Nearly all this development was government-inspired, and much of it was
government-owned. Count Sergius Witte, the man chiefly responsible for it --
he was at first head of the railways department, and then, from 1893 to 1904,
minister of finance was an industrial enthusiast, and he saw very well that
only the government could carry out his grandiose plans. So he extended
government control even more than was necessary. Russian industry was, in a
sense, "socialized" from its birth, and the industrial revolution did not produce
in Russia a wealthy liberal-minded middle-class. It did, however, produce a
proletariat: and these factory-hands, crowded together under appalling
conditions in the industrial cities, were much more easily reached,
propagandized and organized than the peasants. After 1890 revolutionary
agitation, and especially socialist agitation, developed rapidly, and began for
the first time to become really dangerous.
In foreign affairs, Alexander III did one thing of supreme importance: he broke
the alliance with Germany, and replaced it by an alliance with France. He had
never liked the German alliance; he was not, like his father, a personal friend of
Bismarck, and he suspected the latter of favouring Austria's designs in the
Balkans at the expense of Russia's. Bismarck managed to cajole him; but after
Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 his suspicions became certainties. Kaiser William II
made no secret of his Balkan plans, and Alexander III thereupon approached a
delighted France. In 1893 France and Russia signed a defensive alliance against
Germany.
Thus Alexander III, who meant to be so thoroughly conservative, proved in
reality more revolutionary than his re-forming father. By his Slavophil
repression he increased the discontent in Russia; by industrialization and
especially by giving Witte his head he provided for the rise of socialism; and
by making the alliance with France, he took a long step towards the First
World War. The harvest was to be reaped by his unhappy successor.
42. The English Century
The 19th century, and especially the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), is the
age of England: not only because in that age she reached the apex of her power
and glory, and far outdistanced her continental rivals, but also because she was
accepted as an example by all Europe a model upon which other nations
endeavoured to form themselves. The industrial revolution was of her making;
she developed liberalism, both in economics and politics, more fully than any
European country except France; her national unity, based on an intense and
universal national patriotism, was the envy of all other nations; she was the
pioneer, and the most successful exponent, of imperialism. Yet she avoided the
troubles that these things produced elsewhere. She carried through the most
enormous changes without revolution or civil war, and with a minimum of
disorder; she was almost completely free of anti-clericalism and socialism; with
the short exception of the Crimea, she was not involved in any European war:
she was envied by other nations, but neither hated nor feared.
I say "England", and not "Britain" or the "United Kingdom"; for it is one of the
marks of the period, and one of the reasons for England's success, that the
English now became definitely dominant over their fellow-inhabitants of the
British Isles. Population figures are the clearest indication of this. In 1800 the
Irish, Scots and Welsh together outnumbered the English; by 1900 the English
were three times as numerous as all the rest combined. The growth of wealth
was even more disproportionate; nor had the others any great superiority in
intelligence or enterprise to make up for their lack of numbers: the great
writers, scientists, statesmen, soldiers, financiers and business-men of Victoria's
reign were for the most part English. Scotland and Wales came to seem little
more than offshoots of England. The Irish resisted assimilation better; but they
were quite unable, in this century, to seriously disturb the confident
dominance of the ruling race.
The main credit for England's rise to greatness must go to the English
aristocracy. The powerful landowers who had made themselves masters of
England after 1688 were more powerful than ever in 1815. They had made
Parliament their instrument, and through it had given England a stable, sober
government which was generally accepted. They had carried through to
victory the long wars with France, and had developed a great colonial empire
and a vast overseas trade. (A foolish obstinacy had cost them the American
colonies, but they were not going to repeat that error.) They had made the
agricultural revolution and had enclosed the common lands, greatly enriching
both themselves and their country though at the high cost of destroying the
English peasantry. Yet the dispossessed peasants were soon absorbed by the
new industries, and these, too, were due to the aristocrats: for it was they and
their policies that had developed England's commerce, and thus provided the
capital needed for the industrial revolution. In 1815 they had just scored their
biggest triumph, the defeat of Napoleon; in their pride and power they seemed
fit rulers and representatives of a great people, and their people accepted and
reverenced them as such.
In the next twenty years, however, they were faced with an immense and
complicated crisis. On the one hand, they were faced with discontent among
the new middle-class, the capitalists. Swollen in numbers, and still more in
wealth, these men were no longer willing to take a back seat in national affairs
and leave government to the landowners. In former times an occasional
mercantile or manufacturing family the Pitts, for instance had been able
to buy itself into the aristocracy by acquiring a landed estate; but that was no
longer a possible outlet: there were too many of the new industrialists, and few
of them aspired to become aristocrats. They wanted their own class and their
own industrial towns to be represented in Parliament, and not just the ancient
boroughs controlled by the landowners. They also wanted free trade. They
were making vast quantities of goods for which there was an eager demand in
foreign countries; but foreigners could not import them unless they in turn
were able to export their goods mainly primary products to England.
English capitalists were thus persuaded by their own self-interest into
liberalism; but the interests of the aristocracy lay in preserving their own
control of Parliament and in protecting English agriculture against foreign
competition.
On the other hand, the capitalists themselves were rousing violent discontent
among the workers. The labouring-class of England was being transformed
or degraded into a factory-employed proletariat; and we have seen what
conditions in the new factories and industrial towns were like. There was a real
danger of revolutionary violence from this cause; but, quite apart from that, no
government could tamely look on while the mass of its people was reduced to
destitution, the national health wrecked and the national strength ruined. The
more enlightened capitalists realized this as well as anyone; but they could not
by their individual efforts change the system: only a national authority could
do that.
Thus there were present in England nearly all the elements which led in other
countries to conspiracies, assassinations, revolutions and civil wars; yet the
English avoided all these troubles they carried through a complete
transformation of their political, economic and social systems at the expense of
nothing worse than a few riots. The chief reason for this was the political
wisdom of the ruling-class; it was assisted, though, by two other forces: an
intense national patriotism and a profound religious feeling. Nationalism was
no new thing in England: it had long since become part of the English soul; and
during the 19th century it became ever stronger, giving the English a unity
which was the envy and the despair of other nations. The religious feeling
stemmed particularly from John Wesley's Methodist revival in the previous
century; by 1815 it had permeated all the Protestant sects (and England was
overwhelmingly Protestant) and had affected all ranks and classes. It is notable
that nearly all the great English reformers of this century (Wilberforce,
Shaftesbury, Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, to name a few at random) were
deeply and unashamedly Christian; a French observer, Montalembert, said that
the English were, after the Russians, the most religious people in Europe.
The Compromise
After 1815 there was a severe economic crisis: a dislocation caused by the end
of the long war. It produced a wave of strikes, riots and protest-meetings, met
by the government (in which Castlereagh was the dominant personality) with
severe repression. Had this policy been continued, England would certainly
have had a revolution. But in the 1820's new men came into power, such as
Canning, Huskisson and Sir Robert Peel, and they began to work out the
compromise which was to lead England out of her troubles. This compromise
was never formally stated, and was only gradually adopted; various points in it
were strongly opposed by many landowners, or capitalists, or workers; but it
was accepted by the majority, and became the basis of a new order.
In the first place, it was agreed that the capitalists should be admitted to
Parliament and to the ruling-class. The essential step in this direction was the
First Reform Bill of 1832, which destroyed the "rotten boroughs" (i.e., decayed
boroughs whose parliamentary seats were controlled by local landlords) and
transferred their seats to the industrial towns, and therefore to the
industrialists. The franchise was still restricted; but two later Reform Bills, in
1867 and 1884, extended it till practically every adult male had a vote. This did
not mean that the poor were represented: it was so expensive to be a member
of Parliament (especially as members were not yet paid) that only a rich man,
or a man backed by the rich, could afford to stand for election. The real result
of the Reform Bill was that henceforth the English ruling-class was determined
simply by wealth, not by inherited titles or land. Later the custom was adopted
of conferring titles on successful capitalists so as to get them into the House of
Lords. And in time, of course, the industrial interests came to predominate
over the landowning interests.
This is shown clearly in the second point of the compromise, the establishment
of free trade. Long ago, in 1776, Adam Smith had demonstrated the theoretical
superiority of free trade over protection in his "Inquiry into the Nature and
Growth of the Wealth of Nations". Two considerations had hindered the
practical application of the theory: the necessity of preserving England's sea-
power, and therefore of protecting English shipping against foreign
competition by the Navigation Acts, and the necessity of safeguarding the food-
supply, and therefore of protecting English agriculture by the Corn Laws. But
after 1815 the case was altered. One result of the Napoleonic War was to give
England the bulk of Europe's carrying-trade, and put her shipping in so
superior a position that it no longer needed protection; while at the same time
the command of the sea, plus the ever-increasing flow of manufactured goods,
seemed to make it possible for England to buy food abroad to any extent and in
any circumstances. Protection came to seem absurd. Yet the struggle for the
repeal of the Corn Laws was long and bitter. Only by degrees did the power of
the capitalists (backed, for what that was worth, by the workers, who were
promised cheaper food) overcome the resistance of the landowners. The actual
repeal, in 1846, was forced through Parliament by the shocking disaster of the
Irish Famine ironically so, since the Famine was not due to the Corn Laws,
but to the extortion and selfishness of the Irish landlords. It was decisive,
however; and once the free importation of food had been secured, complete
free trade followed easily.
Meanwhile, the capitalists had to yield something to the compromise, and that
something was their agreement to "social legislation": factory-acts and the like.
We need not repeat here the evils of the early factory-system, nor the efforts
largely ineffective of well-meaning factory-owners to get rid of them. It was
reluctantly agreed at last that government-action was needed; and a group of
reformers, among whom Shaftesbury is the most famous, got the factory-acts
through Parliament: acts for the control of female and child labour, the
restriction of working-hours, the lighting and ventilation of factories, the
protection of the workers from accidents, and so on. The most important
feature of these acts was the provision of government inspectors to see that
they were obeyed: the principle was admitted that government should
supervise and control working-conditions a principle which was gradually
extended, through public-health and education acts, to cover the whole life of
the people.
Another concession which the capitalists were forced to make was the
legalization of trade-unions, and therefore of strikes. Early attempts to suppress
them failed. It became clear that the trade-union movement, unless it were
legalized, would become an underground and revolutionary movement. The
ruling-class realized this, and acted accordingly. Trade-unions were legalized as
early as 1824, and so in England they never did become revolutionary they
were not even much influenced by socialism before the end of the century.
They formed an industrial force, giving the workers a satisfactory feeling of
strength and solidarity; but they were no more violent than joint-stock
companies.
Yet more needed to be done. Before the 18th century enclosures, the mass of
the English people had lived in village communities, working together and
sharing the use of the common-lands. The enclosures broke up those
communities. Even the workers who remained on the land became mere
labourers, dependent almost entirely on their weekly wages. Accident,
sickness, or trade-crises brought them face-to-face with starvation. The old
parish-system of poor-relief was quite inadequate to this situation, and a new
system was set up by the Poor Law of 1834. This law replaced the old parish-
relief committees by Boards of Guardians representing unions of several
parishes; and each union was made to set up a Workhouse for the destitute.
The food, lodging and work in the workhouse were deliberately made poor
and unattractive: the object was to prevent starvation without encouraging
idleness. The net result was that the poor were compelled to work but not
permitted to starve. When, much later, old-age pensions and workers'
insurance were introduced, the same idea was followed with the same result:
pensions and benefits were kept well below the current rate of wages.
These changes together produced a new social pattern. The mass of the people
became employees: a wage-earning proletariat bound to work for their
employers, but also supervised and looked-after by the State. At the other end
of the scale was the ruling-class, the employing-class, of landowners and
capitalists, among whom the capitalists were steadily becoming dominant. In
between was a middle-class of professional men, shopkeepers, tenant-farmers
and the like, whose incomes were large enough to give them a certain
independence, but not large enough to carry them into the ruling-class.
These divisions were stabilized by a new educational system. The aristocracy
had previously patronized boarding-schools, like Eton and Harrow, some of
which were of very ancient foundation. The growth of the new capitalist class
greatly extended the demand for this kind of pre-university education: the
older schools were expanded, and new ones were founded all over the
kingdom. Though called "public schools", they were really private schools,
subsisting on the benefactions of the rich and on the high fees they charged,
and managed by their own boards of governors quite independently of the
State. Intellectual formation in these schools was still based on the classics,
though with increasing attention to "science" as the century wore on; religious
formation was in Anglicanism, the national form of Protestantism; and they all
laid great stress on physical training by means of compulsory games: it was
through them that cricket and rugby football became national English
pastimes. No better method could possibly have been devised for forming and
unifying the new ruling-class; yet it was typical of England that the growth of
the public schools was spontaneous, and was not directed from above: the
capitalists wanted to be assimilated into the old aristocracy, and the aristocracy
was not unwilling to assimilate them. The grammar-schools, too, the local day-
schools patronized by the more successful middle-class families, turned
themselves as much as possible into imitations of the public schools.
This left the mass of the people uncatered for except by haphazard private
charity. In the early days of industrialism, of course, child-labour left little place
for the education of the poor. But, as the factory-acts gradually raised the
permissible age of employment, it became clear that something must be done
for unemployed children they must not be allowed to grow up idle, and
therefore they must be educated. To meet this need, a national system of free
and compulsory education was worked out, to be imposed on the children of
the poor. The training given in the new schools was only "elementary": it was
intended to form men who could vote and read the newspapers, but who
would still be members of the working-class; and in this aim it was highly
successful.
It should now be clear how the English aristocracy brought England safely
through the storm and stress of the 19th century: on the one hand, they
admitted the new-rich capitalists into the ruling-class; and on the other, they
saw to it that the new working-class of wage-earners was sufficiently, though
not superabundantly, provided for, both in sustenance and education. And they
adopted whole-heartedly, as England's policy, the expansion of industry and
trade, by which the wealth of England increased enormously, and the standard
of living, even of the poorest, rose steadily; till by 1900 the average Englishman
was probably better off, in a material sense, than in any previous age. The
English had come to be divided into two main classes, employers and
employed; but there was no deep-seated hostility between them. If the
employed were not contented, they were not discontented to any
revolutionary degree: they hoped to go on improving their position within the
existing system, but they did not dream of overthrowing that system. The
ruling-class was divided into the Liberal and Conservative parties; but these
names meant little, the differences between the two were only superficial, and
the people voted for the one or the other according as the one or the other
appealed more strongly at the moment to their feelings. Contrast this with the
struggles in France between monarchists, republicans and Buonapartists,
between socialists and liberals, between clericals and anti-clericals!
Foreign Affairs
As an island lying off the coast of Europe, and relying for her wealth on a
worldwide commercial and colonial development, England had two main
objectives: to maintain the "balance of power" on the Continent, and to
preserve the mastery of the sea. These two objectives were interconnected: if
any great power, or group of powers, came to command the Continent, it
would be able to threaten both England's independence and her maritime
supremacy; it was always to England's interest that any great power or
combination in Europe should be balanced by another power or combination.
After 1815, England was faced by the Metternich system. At first, when this
system seemed to be merely a device for preserving in tranquillity the balance
of power and the Vienna settlement, the English were well pleased with it;
when Metternich showed that he meant to use it as a means through which a
league of great states was to dominate the Continent, the English, led by
Canning, opposed it uncompromisingly. They proclaimed the principle of
"non-intervention": no power, or group of powers, should intervene in the
internal affairs of any state. This opposition had much to do with the collapse
of the Metternich system.
What was more, it led England to champion the revolutionary forces that were
opposed to Metternich. England would not intervene forcibly on their behalf,
but Continental liberals and nationalists could count on sympathy, and on
diplomatic and financial support, from England. The men and parties who
were gradually coming into power all over Europe looked on England as the
representative of progress, just as they looked on Austria as the representative
of reaction. Moreover, England, for her own interests, was opposed to the
most reactionary power in Europe, Russia; and Protestant England, having
little sympathy with the Pope, looked favourably on Continental anti-
clericalism. Without ever needing to intervene in Continental troubles,
without any entangling alliances, the English were able to influence European
affairs in the way they desired, and still preserve complete freedom of action.
Meanwhile, they could devote their real efforts to commerce and colonies, and
the dominion of the sea. In the 18th century, France had disputed their
supremacy in these fields; but the Revolution had ruined the French navy, and
the English took such advantage of this fact that they emerged in 1815 as
unrivalled masters of the sea, both navally and commercially a position
which they retained till the end of the century. They retained it partly by the
high quality of their navy: in training, organization and fighting-spirit, the finest
instrument of war since the army of the Roman Empire; but they retained it
still more by the wisdom and moderation with which they exercised their
enormous power. England might have become the bully or tyrant of the seas;
she became known, instead, as "the policeman of the seas": suppressing piracy
and the slave-trade, exploring and charting dangerous coasts, establishing
navigational aids, and in general enabling the ships of all nations to go safely on
their lawful occasions. No nation had any reason to object to English sea-
power: the oceans had never known such peace. Typical is the way in which
English sea-power was used to support the Monroe Doctrine: not to dominate
the American continent, but to safeguard it from foreign intervention, and to
enable its states to pursue their task of peaceful development in security.
The British Empire itself developed continually. Canada, South Africa,
Australia and New Zealand were colonized; the natives of India, Burma,
Malaya, Nigeria, Rhodesia, Egypt and the Sudan, and a score of other
territories, were brought under English rule. And here, too, the same
moderation was shown: the white dominions were encouraged to become self-
governing as soon as possible; the coloured races were encouraged to expect
self-government as soon as they were sufficiently "advanced" to undertake it,
and meanwhile the English ruling-class provided an endless succession of
competent administrators and educators to enable them to advance. Of course,
mistakes were sometimes made, and troubles ensued: big ones like the Indian
Mutiny, small ones like the Canadian rebellion of 1837, or the Eureka Stockade
affair in Australia in 1851; but still, the general picture is one of constantly-
increasing prosperity and contentment till the end of the 19th century.
Shadows
Against all these successes must be put one hopeless and disastrous failure
Ireland. The ruling-class in Ireland was in a very different position from that of
the ruling-class in England. During the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, and
the Cromwellian and Williamite wars, the native Irish aristocracy had been
forcibly dispossessed, and their lands handed over to English and Scottish
settlers: men alien in race, speech and religion from the Irish people. This new
ruling-class was never assimilated. Its members despised the native Irish,
disdained their language, and bitterly persecuted their religion. The Irish never
regarded them as anything but alien usurpers. As time went on they found the
Irish atmosphere less and less congenial, and many preferred to live in England,
using agents to screw as much money as possible out of their tenants. Where
an English landlord looked well and thoroughly after his estate, and constantly
improved it, an Irish landlord let his estate go hang as long as the rent came in.
Tenants who improved their holdings were rewarded by having their rents
raised; tenants who did not pay the rent were instantly evicted they had no
leases. The Irish tenant-farmer was a mere proletarian, with no security, and
with no factory-acts to protect or assist him. This wretched system naturally
produced diminishing returns, and the feckless and improvident Irish
landowners fell into chronic financial difficulties, to which their only response
was to try and screw more money out of their unfortunate tenants. The only
part of Ireland that escaped these evils was the north-east corner of Ulster,
where not only the native landowners, but the native peasants, had been
cleared out and replaced by Scotsmen there, the rulers and the ruled were in
sympathy with each other.
The fatal error which the English made was to back up the Anglo-Irish
landlords against the Irish people. Class-feeling and religious sentiment alike
prompted them to this, and they persisted in it even after the dreadful Famine
of 1846-8 had shown up the hopeless folly of Irish landlordism. They lost, in
consequence, any chance of persuading the Irish people to become, like the
Scots and the Welsh, contented subjects of the United Kingdom. A succession
of leaders (parliamentary, like O'Connell and Parnell, or revolutionary, like the
Young Ire-landers or the Fenians) so worked on Irish feeling that by 1900 the
Irish were massively and unchangeably determined on securing an
independent Ireland. English opinion was by then beginning to change too
late. By that time no concession could have won the Irish over. And, what was
worse, the vast emigration that followed the Famine carried millions of angry
Irishmen abroad, especially to the U.S.A., where they formed determined
centres of opposition to English policies and interests, and of anti-English
propaganda.
About 1880 another shadow appeared. Even after the repeal of the Corn Law,
English farmers had been able to compete effectively with their Continental
rivals; but now a new form of competition appeared. Settlers in the United
States, Canada and Australia, cultivating virgin soils on a very large scale with
the latest mechanical devices, could easily undersell the English grower. By
1885 the price of wheat had fallen by 50%; and English agriculture went down
into ruin. This completed the transformation of the English into an urban
proletariat ruled by capitalists; more dangerously, it made England utterly
dependent on her foreign trade and investments, so that command of the sea
became literally vital to her if she lost it she would starve. In the 20th
century this dependence was to be her main danger.
At the same time, England began to be affected, like the rest of Europe, by a
decline in religious faith. We shall consider the reasons for this in the next
chapter. Its immediate results were small, for traditional standards of morality
at first survived the decay of the faith which had produced them; but even as
early as 1900 the ruling-class was clearly losing its seriousness and sense of
responsibility. The 19th century capitalist was a man who worked hard and
lived soberly; his 20th century successor preferred ease, luxury, and
ostentation. He was a less "puritanical", if you like, but also a far weaker man.
And his employees in England, and his subjects abroad, respected him less, and
saw no reason why leisure and pleasure should not be theirs, too.
Nevertheless, as long as Queen Victoria lived, there would be no "official"
recognition of this change. The old Queen lived by the standards of her youth,
and her vast prestige imposed them on the nation at large. Her long reign,
from 1837 to 1901, was not the least of England's advantages during this
English century. When she died, seven kings rode in her funeral; and that fact
sums up as well as anything the achievement of her reign: the pride, the
majesty, and the power of the English nation.
43. The Rise Of Materialism
Materialism is the belief that nothing exists except matter, its movements and
modifications, and that these modifications are ruled by unchanging and
unchangeable mathematical laws. For a materialist, thought is only the
offspring of matter: thoughts are no more than (as it were) sparks struck out by
the collisions of material atoms in the brain; intelligence is not a directing force,
but only, at most, a reflecting force. There is no God, therefore no creative
intelligence making and organizing the universe; there is no soul in man,
distinct from his body; free-will is a chimaera, and life after death a fairytale.
The temptation to materialism is obvious: matter impresses itself on us so
vividly through our senses that spiritual things ideas, for example are apt
to seem dim and shadowy in comparison. There have always been a few
materialists among European thinkers. But till the 19th century there were
never more than a few, because of the great difficulties that arise when one
tries to explain the whole universe and everything in it in terms of mere matter
and material forces. To the Age of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the
chief of these difficulties seemed to be the evidence in the world of pattern, or
design. Every living thing, for example, is composed of a vast number of
different parts, all of which are organized so as to form one whole, each part
acting in its own way for the good of the whole: eyes, ears, heart, lungs,
stomach, etc., etc. all complex, all different, yet all together combining in a
perfect pattern to make one being. So, too, different beings seem ordered to
one another's support: as, the sun warms the earth and evaporates ocean-
waters into clouds, which give rain, which enables plants to grow, on which
animals feed, and so on. These are very crude examples; a closer examination
of nature shows ever more evidence of this inter-action and interdependence of
creatures; and the materialist's difficulty is to explain how this pattern could
arise from the action of blind material forces, undirected by any intelligence.
Christianity, of course, reinforced such difficulties; but even men like Voltaire,
who doubted Christianity, rejected materialism; and in 1802 an Anglican
divine, William Paley, published his "Natural Theology", in which the
"argument from design" is so clearly and cogently set forth that it was widely
hailed as having exploded materialism finally. But developments in the 19th
century changed men's minds again.
Most of the 19th century scientists were not materialists; yet the progress of
science had much to do with disposing men's minds to accept materialism. The
other elements of culture theology, philosophy, the arts were thrown
into the shade. Men seemed to quarrel endlessly about them without coming
to any conclusion; science, on the other hand, advanced with speed, certitude,
and power. New scientific discoveries were constantly being made: discoveries
which seemed based on the indisputable evidence of actual observation, actual
experiment; discoveries which proved their worth by giving men actual power
and wealth as Faraday's experiments with electricity led to the dynamo, and
the dynamo to electric lighting. More and more men came to think that
science, the study of matter, was the true and certain way to knowledge, and
so to power, and so to wealth and happiness for mankind.
The new inventions and techniques led, further, to a rapidly-increasing
demand for men with a scientific and mechanical training. The old "humanist"
ideal began to be despised; there was an insistent cry that education should
become more "practical": that it should be based on the study of science. A
new kind of educated class began to appear: men crammed with scientific
knowledge, skilled in the handling of machinery, and in the techniques of
observation and experiment, but very imperfectly educated in other directions,
and one-sidedly enthusiastic for the further progress of science. They might not
be formal materialists; they might not openly say that science was the only sure
way to knowledge, and that scientific truth was the only truth that mattered or
that men could discover; but they behaved as though they believed these
things. They, and still more the half-educated mass, dazzled by their
triumphant progress, were ripe for materialism.
Even the arts succumbed to this influence. It is no accident that the 19th
century is the age of "naturalism" and "realism" and "impressionism": art based
on the close observation and reproduction of what actually exists and happens,
or on the actual appearances of things, the immediate impressions they make
on an observer. It is no accident that, while the architecture of the century is
almost uniformly bad, its engineering is almost uniformly good: men were
devoting their brains and skill to engineering rather than to architecture.
Men were thus already being "conditioned" to materialism, when certain
scientific discoveries and theories began to shake the belief in the necessity of
"design" in nature. In 1830 Sir Charles Lyell began the publication of his
"Principles of Geology", in which he proved two fundamental points: that the
earth is far older than had been previously supposed, and that its present
appearance and character can be explained simply by the operation of natural
causes wind and water, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so forth. Land
and sea, mountain and plain, river and lake, coal and diamonds, could equally,
it seemed, be explained by purely natural forces, acting under the direction, not
of a supernatural designer, but simply of the law of gravity. Men who had been
accustomed to think of the world as having been created directly by God in the
space of six days were shaken by Lyell's evidence.
Much more shattering was the impact of Darwin's and Wallace's theory of the
evolution of living things by "natural selection". There was nothing very new
about the idea of evolution itself: the idea, that is, that the existing species of
living things have developed out of previous species, and all of them, perhaps,
from some originally very simple form of life. The idea had never been taken
very seriously perhaps because no-one had been able to point out any force
or combination of forces capable of producing the vast transformations that
evolution demands; it was easier to believe that each species had been specially
created. Charles Darwin changed all that. In his "Origin of Species" (1859) and
"Descent of Man" (1871), he not only put forward a great mass of evidence
about the resemblances between different species, so as to make the
evolutionary theory much more plausible; he also gave it an explanation which
was simple, natural, and at first sight entirely convincing. This explanation was
"natural selection".
No two living creatures are exactly alike: small variations, in colour, speed,
length of hair and so on, occur continually without apparent design. Further,
there is a struggle for existence between living things, and it is those best fitted
to compete which survive longest and have most offspring. Therefore, said
Darwin, animals born with a favourable variation will eventually supplant
those born without it; and the accumulation of millions of variations through
millions of generations will explain the appearance of new species without any
need for the intervention of a creative designer: "chance variations" and the
"struggle for existence" suffice; all existing forms of life have been evolved
from more primitive forms by this natural selection of the fit from the unfit.
It is a little difficult nowadays to understand why this theory had such an
immense effect. It is not a sound theory: within fifty years it was so riddled
with criticisms that no-one any longer accepted it in its original form; but by
that time it had done its work. It had pointed the way to a materialist
explanation of life; it had seemed to explode the "argument from design"; and
all those who were longing for just such an explanation seized on it with
enthusiasm. I have said that the age was ripe for materialism; and Darwinism,
however it had to be modified later on, made it possible for an intelligent and
educated man to be a materialist.
I have laid stress on Lyell and Darwin, on geology and biology, to the unjust
exclusion of other sciences and scientists; but I have done so because it was
their work which seemed at the time to raise most difficulties for Christianity.
It seemed, in particular, to overthrow the traditional idea of creation. Most
Christians still pictured creation as it is pictured in the first chapter of Genesis:
they imagined the Almighty making and ordering the world, producing one
group of creatures after another, creating man finally as the crown and master
of this world all in the space of six days. Theologians knew, of course, that
this was only a picture, not necessarily a literal, historical account of God's
operation; but in practice they had come to accept it as historical because there
seemed no reason why they should not; and the mass of Christians made no
distinction between the picture of creation given in Genesis and the idea of
creation accepted by all Christians.
This traditional picture was now destroyed. It was clear that the world had not
been formed in six days, but over a very long period of time, and that it had not
been formed directly by Divine power, but by natural forces working
according to natural laws. If evolution was true, even living creatures, even
man himself, had been formed in the same way; and what then was to be said
of the Fall of Man? There appeared to have been no fall, but a continual rise,
culminating in the civilized, scientific man of the 19th century. In reality the
new discoveries and theories were not so devastating as they looked. To say
that the world has been formed by natural forces according to natural laws
does not explain the origin of these forces and laws; no material forces can
explain the appearance in man of a spiritual soul; a physical evolution does not
exclude the possibility of a spiritual fall. But such considerations were not at
first clearly seen; to those whose imaginative pictures of God's working had
been so rudely torn up, all religious belief seemed to be thrown into doubt.
Doubt was extended further by the application of textual criticism to the Bible.
The traditional authorship and dates were attacked on what seemed (and
sometimes was) good scientific evidence. Those who believed that Moses had
written every word of the Pentateuch, or that Solomon had written the books
of Wisdom and Proverbs, suddenly found themselves being laughed at for their
credulity. Much of this "higher criticism", especially of the New Testament,
was wildly exaggerated: the German Strauss, for instance, affirmed that the
Gospels had not been composed till after 150 A.D. a judgment now
universally rejected. But much of the criticism was sound, and for all of it the
critics claimed the support of science, with all the immense prestige that that
meant in the 19th century. To many, the very foundations of Christianity
seemed shaken; and many were not sorry that they should be.
For Christianity is a difficult religion. It makes great demands on human
nature, both in faith and morals. Except by a few, it has never been very well
observed. The new developments did not really make it more difficult to be a
Christian, but they made it much easier than it had been to be a materialist or
an agnostic; and, human nature being what it is, an increasing number of
people took advantage of the fact. By degrees, Christian faith and Christian
morality were wholly or partly abandoned by large numbers of people all over
Europe.
In Catholic countries the effect was to deepen and strengthen the existing
opposition to the Church. Catholics, believing as they do that the Church has
Divine authority to teach the truths of Christianity (for example, by
interpreting the Bible). were not much disturbed by the new ideas. They
believed that the Church would meet the new difficulties by interpretation and
definition, as she had met the Protestant difficulties in the 16th century. They
were not disappointed. Eight hundred Catholic prelates met at the Vatican
Council, summoned by Pius IX in 1869, and they did two things. First, they
clearly explained the relation between faith and reason the different spheres
and powers of each, and how they interact on and assist each other; and they
affirmed particularly that the truths of science and faith cannot contradict each
other, so that any apparent contradiction can and must be solved by closer
investigation; neither faith nor reason can be rejected. Second, they affirmed
the infallibility, not only of the whole Church, but of the Pope her Head: that
when, as Head of the Church, speaking to the whole Church, he defines a
doctrine of faith or morals to be held by all, he is Divinely safeguarded from
teaching error. Thus the Catholics took their position and closed their ranks.
But not a few fell away; and, as I have said, the opposition to the Church
became stronger, the cleavage between Catholic and anti-Catholic deeper and
more bitter, as the 19th century passed into the 20th.
The effect on Protestantism was more profound. Protestant faith rested, not on
the teaching of an infallible Church, but on the words, privately interpreted, of
an infallible book the Bible. When the traditional interpretation of the Bible
was shaken, and even its authenticity questioned, there was no Protestant
authority to supply a new interpretation or to deal with the "higher criticism":
each individual had to do his best for himself. Some gave up faith and became
agnostics; some, the "Fundamentalists", simply closed their ears to the new
developments (but this attitude became increasingly hard to maintain as time
went on); some tried to "Catholicize" their churches in varying degrees, like
the High Church group among the Anglicans. But most accepted the fact that
their traditional certainty was gone, and re-made their religious ideas
accordingly. They began to say that religion was evolving like everything else;
that the Bible, even the New Testament, was only a "primitive" statement of
religious truth, which needed to be developed and corrected by successive
generations of men; that final certainty in religious matters was not to be
expected, and was not perhaps desirable: "honest doubt" was a sounder
attitude than "blind faith". And this honest doubt extended, of course, to
Christian morality as well as to Christian faith. The change was slow, as all
such changes are, for traditional habits of thought and life are not easily cast
off; but by 1900 it was already apparent that the practical influence of
Protestantism was suffering a great decline; for a religion that speaks with an
uncertain voice may be nominally accepted, but will not have much practical
effect on the lives of the generality of its adherents. For the first time since the
fall of Rome, large numbers of Europeans were losing confidence in their
religion.
Marxian Socialism
Only the intellectuals were affected at first; but the change was bound to
spread gradually downwards. The man who did most to spread it, who did
most to make materialism really popular, was Karl Marx. He influenced many
more than those who adopted his theories; and his success as a socialist was
due very much to the fact that his brand of socialism was materialist and (as he
said) "scientific".
He was born, a German Jew, in 1818, and as a young student devoted himself
to philosophy. But he found his real interest in economics, and a study of the
new industrialism turned him into a social reformer. In 1844 he met Engels, a
young German industrialist whose anger had already been aroused by the
conditions of the factory-workers; and Marx and Engels formed a partnership
which lasted for the rest of their lives. In 1847 they published the first
statement of their ideas in "The Communist Manifesto", which fell completely
flat. After the failure of socialism in 1848, Marx retired to England, where with
the help of Engels he spent the rest of his life in amassing a vast quantity of
facts about the industrial revolution and its effects, and embodying them in a
monumental statement of his socialism, "Das Kapital", of which the first
volume was published in 1867. He also made various efforts to organize the
workers in support of his views, but with little success. He died in 1883, having
achieved, apparently, nothing.
Yet men were reading him. The first claim he made for his doctrine was that it
was "scientific": based on the evidence of observed facts. He blamed the
earlier, "utopian" socialists, very justly, for spinning airy theories without
considering the facts about human nature and history and industrial
organization. Marx avoided this error. Like Darwin, he had a passion for facts,
and he amassed them in huge quantities, and set them forth as illustrations and
proofs of his theories. This was what attracted readers to "Das Kapital". It was
the first book on social reform with an apparently scientific basis, and it
profited greatly from the prestige which science had acquired in the later 19th
century.
It is impossible to make an adequate summary of this vast work in a few pages;
but the following are the principal points of Marxism. Firstly, since man is
merely material, he has no future life, but must find satisfaction and happiness
in this world: this is his end, and whatever helps him towards it is good, and
whatever hinders him in attaining it is evil. Secondly, since man is merely
material, he has no free-will, but is the slave of material forces like any other
animal. He is formed by his environment: that is, by the society in which he
lives; a well-organized society will produce good men, a badly-organized
society will produce evil men. (The slums of the industrial cities provided Marx
with plenty of evidence on this point.) It is therefore useless to try, like
Christianity, to produce perfect individuals in an imperfect society; the thing to
aim at is the perfect society, which alone can produce perfect individuals.
Everything must be sacrificed for the sake of making a perfect society.
Society exists to enable men to satisfy their wants by producing goods:
individuals must live and work together, because they cannot survive as
isolated individuals. A perfect society is one which adequately satisfies the
wants of all its members; it is a society, therefore, which has a perfect method
of making and distributing goods.
How is such a method of production to be attained? It will be attained, said
Marx, by the inevitable working of the economic forces which have
determined all history. Since man is merely material, the only force that moves
him is the desire for material, economic satisfaction; and all movements and
conflicts in history religious, artistic, political or social are simply
expressions of this desire. (Thus, Christianity was simply a rising of the slave-
population of the Roman Empire against its masters.) But no human
movement can be successful, unless it has the secret of a new and more
efficient mode of production. What happens in history is this: a group of men
discover an improved method of production; with its aid they overthrow the
existing ruling-class with its outmoded method, and establish themselves as a
new ruling-class, reforming society according to their new method: thus
masters and slaves were replaced by feudal lords and serfs, and they in turn by
capitalists and proletarians. History is made by a series of such class-wars.
The latest of these changes has been the overthrow of "feudalism" by
"capitalism". The existing capitalist society has the most efficient production-
method yet devised, producing an immense quantity of goods; but it is not a
perfect society, since its method of distribution prevents it from satisfying the
wants of all its members. Therefore it is doomed to destruction; and in fact, it
has within it the causes of its own decay. The chief of these is the profit-motive.
The efficiency of capitalism depends on the insatiable greed of the capitalists
for profits; but this in turn has three destructive effects.
The first is competition, which makes social co-operation impossible. Fierce,
cut-throat competition between individual capitalists, and groups of capitalists,
and above all between capitalist states, struggles for markets and raw materials,
will lead to increasing conflicts and wars, which will be ever more destructive
as the very efficiency of capitalism enables it to produce ever deadlier weapons.
The second effect is the trade-crisis. Owing to their thirst for profits, the
capitalists will only pay their workers enough for their bare subsistence. Thus
the workers cannot buy the goods produced, and so there occur recurrent
crises of over-production. These crises can be relieved for a time by opening up
new markets in "colonial" countries; but the time will come when these
countries will themselves go capitalist, and then there will be no possibility of
relief: the system will just grind to a stop because the goods cannot be sold. But
before that, probably, the third effect will have intervened: the discontent of
the proletariat, on whose labour the whole system depends, but who get only
the most meagre share in distribution. This class will rise against the capitalists
and will overthrow them, and will replace their method of production by a
new one, a Communist one. All productive property will be owned in
common, and all men will work together in cooperation, and all will receive
equal shares of the fruits of their labour. Thus both production and satisfaction
will be raised to the highest possible point, and thus will appear the perfect
society of the brotherhood of man, in which (in the absence of competition and
private profit) there will be no conflict; and even government will become
unnecessary and will "wither away". As there will be only one class in the new
society, there will be no more class-warfare, but a permanent state of
satisfaction and happiness.
All this is bound to happen nothing can stop it. Yet its progress can be
speeded up; and hence follows a practical programme for Marxists. They
should work to intensify the class-war and the difficulties of capitalism, by
fomenting strikes, revolutions, colonial rebellions, even wars. For this purpose
the proletariat all over the world should be organized into a Workers'
International. And anything which tends to diminish the class-war, or to
distract the proletariat from the aim of world revolution (e.g. social services
and social security, industrial arbitration, patriotism, religion), is an obstacle to
progress, and must be removed or rendered impotent.
The reasons for Marx's influence will now be obvious. Like other socialists, he
predicted a golden age; but he claimed that his prediction was a scientific
forecast based on hard facts, and thus gave his followers an absolute confidence
in victory. He gave them also a practical revolutionary programme. Even those
socialists who did not accept his full doctrine were strongly influenced by it;
and socialism, spear-headed by Marx's Communists, became a really powerful
and practical movement. But the opposition to it was also strengthened.
Liberalism was already its enemy, and now nationalism was raised against it,
and religion too: the Catholic Church, in particular, became an
uncompromising foe. Many workers, accordingly, rejected Communism:
instead of uniting the proletariat, Marx's doctrines split it into factions, the
majority of wich were anti-Communist. Yet the fact remains that Marx greatly
stimulated both materialism and socialism, and brought a new and very
dangerous revolutionary force into European society.
44. Germany Versus France
After 1871 the enmity between Germany and France became the main focal
point of European politics. There were other foci, of course, like the Balkans;
but this was something fixed and unalterable. France would not forgive the
humiliation of her defeat nor the loss of Alsace and Lorraine; Germany
continued to suspect France of wanting, not only to get revenge and to recover
the lost provinces, but also to destroy the union of Germany, Bismarck's
German Empire. This enmity was the whirlpool's centre round which
everything else came to revolve: round which eventually gathered the two
camps which plunged Europe into the First World War.
1. Imperial Germany
Germany appeared far the stronger; and this was due mainly to Bismarck. He
knew well that the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 was only a
matter of words, and had still to be transformed into reality; he set himself to
achieve this, and his success in doing so is more notable even than his bringing
about of the proclamation itself. He had in his favour the strong nationalist
feeling which he himself had done so much to arouse; he had against him the
religious and social divisions between Catholic and Protestant, between
capitalist and worker, together with some remnants of liberalism, and also the
local patriotisms which were still strong in many of the German states. He set
himself to overcome these.
His first, and perhaps his greatest, achievement was the imperial constitution.
His object in composing this was to give a certain appearance of federalism,
and even of liberalism, while seeing to it that the realitities of power were
concentrated in the hands of Prussia, and of Prussia's King, the Kaiser. The
legislature consisted of two Houses, the Reichstag and the Bundesrat. The
Reichstag was apparently quite democratic: elected by manhood suffrage from
the whole of the Empire; but its powers of action were so restricted that in
practice it could only debate: it could not overthrow the Chancellor or his
cabinet, and it could be dissolved by the Emperor at any moment, if the
Bundesrat agreed. This Bundesrat was a very different affair. It was a federal
House. Its members were not elected, but nominated by the governments of
the States. Each State was represented in it according to population; so that
Prussia, the largest, had seventeen members, Bavaria, the next in size, had six,
and most of the others had only one. Thus the Bundesrat was not at all
democratic, and was dominated by Prussia; and this was the chief legislative
House: compared to it the Reichstag was a cypher. The executive power was
still more firmly in the Kaiser's hands. He appointed the Chancellor, who
controlled all civil affairs, and the Chief of the General Staff, who controlled all
military affairs, and he could dismiss them at will; the legislature had nothing
to do with these, or with any other appointments to civil or military office.
Local patriotism was conciliated by allowing the States considerable power in
their private affairs; but Bismarck saw to it that the really important things, like
commerce, foreign affairs and the army, were controlled by the central
government. Thus he made the Empire a reality: a strong, centralized and
Prussianized state, developing continually, until men almost forgot that there
had ever been any other Germany.
Meanwhile, he was also trying to suppress or control all elements that might
tend to disrupt or weaken the Empire; and this led him into two great conflicts,
with the Catholic Church and with socialism. To both these he had the same
fundamental objection: their internationalism, which was bound, he thought,
to weaken the nationalist spirit on which the new Germany depended. The
Lutheran Church was a state church, content to accept the State's guidance,
and Bismarck, himself a good Lutheran, could have no quarrel with it; but
Catholics gave their religious loyalty to a foreigner, the Pope, and Bismarck
was not prepared to tolerate any such division of loyalties in his Empire. When
the Catholics, to defend their interests, formed their own political party, the
Centre, and elected sixty members to the Reichstag, he determined to strike.
In 1873 he began an outright attack by passing the "May Laws", the terms of
which show clearly what he was after. First the Jesuits, then other religious
orders of teachers, were expelled; Catholic schools were placed under State
supervision; ecclesiastical seminaries were to be state-controlled; no priest
could exercise his ministry till he had attended a German university and passed
an examination in German history and philosophy; no-one could be appointed
to any spiritual office unless he was authorized by the State; and so on. The
Catholics refused to obey. Thousands of them, bishops, priests and laymen,
were fined and imprisoned, year after year; but they still refused to obey. At
length Bismarck realized that he was doing the opposite of what he wanted:
dividing the Empire instead of uniting it. It was a mark of his greatness that he
was always ready to learn from his mistakes; and now, bitter though he found
it, he resolved to come to terms with the Catholics. The death of Pius IX in
1878 provided the opportunity; and, by agreement with Leo XIII, most of the
May Laws were gradually repealed.
But Bismarck was never the man to give something for nothing. He bargained
for the support of the Centre Party, especially against liberalism and socialism;
and he got it. The Catholics became his valuable allies, and he was thus able to
retreat in good order, even with a semblance of success. Certainly the
Catholics became thenceforward rather a source of strength than of weakness
to the German Empire; but it is questionable whether the persecution of the
"Kultur-kampf" was needed to achieve this.
Meanwhile, a precisely similar struggle had been begun with the socialists.
Bismarck had done much to stimulate industry in Germany; but with
industrialism had arisen a proletariat, and in the proletariat, socialism. The
German socialists, who called themselves Social Democrats, were not out-and-
out Marxists, but they had been much influenced by Marx, and they were
much more practical and better organized than earlier socialists had been. To
Bismarck their opposition to nationalism and militarism made them a cancer in
the Empire, and by 1878 he had determined that they must be eradicated. As
with the Church, he began by trying brute force. A series of drastic laws was
passed (often called the "exceptional laws" because they "excepted" socialists
from the civil rights conferred by the constitution); and in accordance with
these laws socialist meetings and clubs were broken up, newspapers and
pamphlets suppressed, leading socialists fined and imprisoned, and so on. This
harsh treatment was meant to provoke the socialists into revolts, which would
give Bismarck the excuse for persecuting them more thoroughly still.
His calculation proved false. The socialist leaders, men like Liebknecht and
Bebel, were wise enough to see through his design, and strong enough to hold
their followers in check. Like the Catholics, they opposed to Bismarck's attack
a firm but passive resistance; and the Social-Democratic Party not only
continued to exist, but continued to increase. Once again Bismarck saw his
mistake and changed his plan. Without withdrawing the anti-socialist laws, he
decided to cut the ground from under the socialists' feet by appeasing the
discontent of the workers and binding them closely to the State. In a speech in
1884 he said: "Give the workingman the right to work as long as he is healthy,
assure him care when he is sick, assure him maintenance when he is old. If you
do that .... I believe the gentlemen of the Social-Democratic programme will
sound their bird-calls in vain". He might have added: the workers will feel
themselves secure, but they will also feel that their security depends on the
State, and so will be anti-revolutionary.
Bismarck had already done much to stimulate industry: he devoted the French
indemnity after 1871 mainly to providing credits for this end; but between 1881
and 1889 he did much more. He not only encouraged private enterprise, but
vastly expanded governmental works: State railways, canals, forests, mines and
factories, not competing with but supplementing private enterprise, so as to
secure a constant high level of employment. More important, he abandoned
free trade for protection, so as to safeguard agriculture as well as the new
manufacturing industries breaking the liberal opposition with the help of the
Centre Party. More important still, he established a vast system of compulsory
State insurance for the workers: out of a fund provided mainly by the State, but
to which employers and employees had also to contribute, the workers
receiving payment in sickness and pensions in old age. As he had foreseen,
these measures took most of the sting out of socialist propaganda. Indeed, in
time they altered the very programme of the German socialists: from a
programme of overthrowing the capitalist state to one of securing ever-
increasing benefits for the workers from the State in fact, a programme for
establishing what we call the Welfare State. The Social-Democratic Party
continued to grow; by 1900 it had become the biggest political party in
Germany; but it had ceased to be a revolutionary or anti-nationalist party.
When war broke out in 1914, the socialists marched with the rest to the tune of
"Deutschland Uber Alles".
Two more points are worth making about this. Firstly, Bismarck borrowed
much of his programme from Napoleon III; but, while Napoleon was careful to
maintain economic liberalism, Bismarck was equally careful to destroy it. (For
the same reason he encouraged the "Kartells": combinations of industrialists,
like the American Trusts, intended to eliminate competition and establish
monopoly.) Secondly, from the new tariffs and State enterprises he secured a
large revenue, which rendered the imperial government still more independent
of parliament. Bismarck was, indeed, the great anti-liberal of the second half of
the 19th century, as Metternich had been of the first half; and Bismarck was
successful, because he adopted new methods in accordance with a changing
world. He was, as much as Marx, a pioneer of the anti-liberalism of the present
day.
Foreign Policy
While the new Germany was thus being firmly established, Bismarck's foreign
policy was to safeguard it from external attack. He knew well that France was
his chief danger. He had hoped that the heavy defeats of 1870-1, and the huge
indemnity he had imposed, would keep the French subdued for a generation;
but in fact they made a remarkable recovery, paying off the indemnity within
two years and setting to work to build up their shattered military strength. By
1875 Bismarck was so alarmed that he contemplated another war to crush
France finally; but when both Russia and England firmly told him that this
would not be permitted, he began, with his usual good sense, to frame another
policy to build up a system of alliances which would keep France isolated,
and therefore harmless.
Russia, Austria, Italy and England were the powers to be taken into account.
But England would not join any Continental alliance, and Italy was not yet
strong enough to count for much. It was mainly a question of binding Russia
and Austria so closely to Germany that neither would become an ally of
France. The difficulty was that, since Austria and Russia were rivals in the
Balkans, to make an ally of one seemed certain to make an enemy of the other.
Bismarck overcame the difficulty. He determined to make Austria his chief ally,
and with that object supported her interests against Russia's in 1878 at the
Congress of Berlin. The Russians at once began talking of an alliance with
France. But Bismarck cleverly represented to them that he alone could
moderate Austria's Balkan ambitions, and that he would do so provided
Russia gave him no cause to do otherwise. So he was able in 1879 to form the
Dual Alliance with Austria, and yet in 1881 to reach a firm understanding with
Russia. From the colonial schemes of France he drew another advantage. The
French were expanding their empire in North Africa, and Bismarck secretly
encouraged them to do so, knowing that they would come into conflict with
both Italy and England. In fact, Italy and France both had their eyes on Tunisia;
and when France occupied it in 1881, it was easy to draw a resentful Italy into
the anti-French group, and to turn the Dual Alliance of 1879 into the Triple
Alliance of 1882. Thus Bismarck's Germany became not only secure, but the
centre of European diplomacy. Her relations with Austria, Italy and Russia
made her the arbiter of central Europe, and Bismarck's obvious intention of
keeping the peace ensured him the favour of England. France remained alone.
After Bismarck
In 1890 Europe was astonished to hear that Bismarck had resigned. He had, in
fact, been dismissed. William I, the man he had made Emperor of Germany,
had died in 1888, and his son Frederick had outlived him by but three months;
his grandson, twenty-eight years old, became the Emperor William II. This
young man was both clever and determined. William I had been ready, as a
rule, to allow Bismarck to govern; William II had his own ideas. On three
points in particular he differed from Bismarck. Bismarck was still persecuting
the socialists; William wished rather to tolerate them. Bismarck was restraining
Austria in the Balkans, and so placating Russia; William wished rather to
advance Germany's and Austria's interests regardless of Russia. Above all,
Bismarck was opposed to Germany's becoming a great colonial and naval
power; William wished her to become both.
This last point needs some explanation. The desire for colonies had become a
rage in Europe since 1870: England, France, Italy and Russia had all been busily
staking claims here and there in Africa and Asia; but Bismarck had refused to be
drawn into the race. He believed that colonies were a waste of men and
resources, and that Germany could be a great commercial power without
them; and he foresaw that colonies would lead to a navy, and that a German
navy would mean trouble with England. Germany's future, he thought, lay on
land, in the development of central Europe. But the German people, and
especially the wealthy capitalist class which he had done so much to
encourage, did not agree with him. They pointed to the wealth which little
Belgium was drawing from the Congo, and little Holland from the East Indies,
and to the vast success of the British Empire, and demanded indignantly why
Germany should be left out in the cold. Bismarck gave way up to a point. At
the Colonial Congress of Berlin in 1884 he established Germany's claim to
three sections of Africa; but he would not undertake any great expenditure to
develop them, and he certainly would not build a fleet to defend them. William
II, however, was an ardent imperialist. On this point alone, he and Bismarck
would sooner or later have clashed; and there could only be one outcome: the
Emperor could dismiss the Chancellor whenever he chose. In 1890 Bismarck
was forced to resign, and he spent the last eight years of his life in retirement,
bitterly, and as a rule justifiably, criticizing the policies of his successors.
On one point he was certainly wrong. The Social-Democrats, no longer
persecuted, did indeed increase in numbers -by 1914 they were polling over
4,000,000 votes. But they gave up almost all their revolutionary tendencies.
Under a new leader, Bernstein, they became "revisionists"; and they "revised"
the old Marxian programme till it meant little more than an improved version
of Bismarck's own social legislation. On the other two points, though, William
II's policies were really disastrous. In 1884, to quieten Russia's doubts about the
Triple Alliance, Bismarck had made with her the secret "reinsurance treaty".
This treaty was renewed in 1887; but in 1890 it was quietly dropped. William II
soon made it clear that he was not only going to support Austria in the
Balkans, but that he meant the whole of the Near East to become a German
"sphere of influence". He took Roumania and Greece under German
protection (he was related to the kings of both countries); and, above all, he
entered into a close friendship with Turkey. Germany replaced England as
Turkey's bulwark against Russia, and she prepared to develop the Turkish
Empire in her own interests by such schemes as the Berlin to Bagdad railway.
Russia took the hint. Within two years after Bismarck's dismissal she had
reached an understanding with France, which blossomed into an open and
formal alliance in 1895. France was no longer alone.
The obvious thing for Germany to do was to turn to England. And England
was ready to respond. The English were getting nervous of their traditional
isolationism, and were realizing that they had not one sincere friend in Europe.
William II could have obtained their friendship easily, by adjusting slightly his
colonial ambitions and by giving up his scheme for a great German navy. But
he would not. The English, already feeling the pinch of competition from
Germany's vastly-expanding industry and commerce, now found themselves
threatened in their most vital spot by the building of a German High Seas Fleet.
They were much slower than Russia to take the hint. Very reluctantly did they
become convinced that they must patch up their differences with France and
Russia; and even then they would not make formal alliances, but only an
"entente", or "understanding": with France in 1904, with Russia in 1907. It was
sufficient. In less than twenty years William II had succeeded in dividing
Europe into two camps, equally matched: Triple Alliance and Triple Entente.
"It is not the iniquities but the follies of men that produce the great disasters".
France: The Third Republic
Compared with Bismarck's Germany, the Third Republic looked almost as
flimsy and ramshackle as Austria-Hungary. It had inherited all the disputes of
previous regimes: the political quarrels of republicans, monarchists and
Buonapartists, the politico-religious quarrel of clericals and anti-clericals, and
the politico-social quarrel of capitalists and proletarians, complicated and
embittered by the rise of anarchism and Marxism. But it had four great assets:
the strong administrative system left by the two Napoleons; a sound industrial
development; a vigorous and independent peasantry; and above all an intense
patriotism: after 1871 most Frenchmen, in spite of their domestic quarrels, still
put France first.
The Republic began its career in blood: in the horrible affair of the Commune.
When France finally accepted defeat in 1871, the provisional government
which had been set up after Napoleon Ill's capture at Sedan decreed the
election of a National Assembly to draw up a new constitution. Now, Paris
was, on the whole, republican and socialist, while the rest of France was, on
the whole, monarchist and liberal. The majority of the Assembly consisted of
liberal-monarchists. So the republican-socialists of Paris adopted the old
scheme of federalism which had been advocated by Rousseau: France should
become a federation of "communes", or municipalities; and thus Paris would
be free to establish its own regime independently of what the rest of France
did. This scheme horrified most Frenchmen, who were convinced, after the
defeat by Germany, of the absolute necessity of national solidarity and unity;
and so, after some fruitless negotiations with the National Assembly, the
Parisian "Communards" rose in revolt. The weeks of desperate street-fighting
which followed did more damage to Paris than the German bombardment had
done; but a worse result was the intensely bitter feelings aroused. The
atrocities perpetrated by the rebels, and the savage severity with which the
revolt was crushed and the rebels punished, added one more to the causes of
division in France.
The provisional government, under Thiers, then occupied itself in paying off
the indemnity of 10,000,000,000 francs, and so getting rid of the Germany army
of occupation. That this was done by 1873 shows both the strength of French
patriotism and the fundamental soundness of France's economic system. It
alarmed Bismarck.
He was somewhat reassured by the squabbles in the Assembly over the new
constitution. There were four main groups: the republicans; the Buonapartists,
supporters of Napoleon's Ill's son; the royalist supporters of the Bourbon
claimant to the throne, Charles X's grandson; and the royalist supporters of the
Orleanist claimant, Louis Philippe's grandson. The royalists had a majority, if
only they could have agreed. They did at length come to an arrangement:
Henri, Comte de Chambord, the Bourbon claimant, who was childless, should
take the throne; but when he died the Orleanist Comte de Paris should succeed
him. But the Comte de Chambord ruined all plans by making demands which
it was obvious the French people would never accept: for example, the
replacement of the tricolour flag of the Revolution and Napoleon by the white
banner of the Monarchy. Thus the deadlock continued; and meanwhile the
constant bickering was swinging French opinion towards republicanism. In any
case, France had to be given some permanent form of government. At last the
Assembly was persuaded, without making a formal constitution, to pass a
number of "organic laws" establishing various organs of government. There
was set up a Chamber of Deputies, elected for four years by manhood suffrage,
which possessed the chief legislative power, and to which the executive (the
Premier and his Cabinet) was responsible. There was set up a Senate, elected
for nine years, chiefly by delegates from the municipal councils; which acted
chiefly to review and amend legislation passed by the Deputies. There was set
up a President, elected for seven years by both Senators and Deputies: who
was the titular head of the State, but who, as he was elected by the politicians
and not by the people, had little practical power or influence the politicians
would not be likely to elect a Louis Napoleon.
This constitution was a compromise which satisfied nobody. It was intended as
an interim expedient, until some party or other should get sufficient support in
the country to be able to change it. It was deliberately made weak, so as to be
easily changed when the time came. It lasted till 1940, because no party ever
became strong enough to change it, and because as time went on professional
politicians developed a vested interest in preserving it. It never won the hearts
of the French people; indeed, they soon came to despise it; but they could
never agree on anything to replace it with.
Had there been but two or three parties in France, this constitution might have
worked well enough; but then it would never have been set up. The
multiplicity of parties which made it necessary also made it inefficient. Every
French Cabinet rested on an unstable coalition of several parties, each with its
own axe to grind; a Premier who managed to hold office for as long as six
months was unusually lucky or clever. This was not quite so bad as it sounds,
for successive coalitions might include several of the same parties, so that one
man might hold office (as foreign minister, say) for some years. Yet for most
men political life became just a merry-go-round. This not only deprived the
government of authority; it also made men of talent and character steer clear
of politics, which therefore fell into the hands of "professional" politicians,
whose main object was to benefit themselves. Hence there was an
extraordinary growth of political corruption; and organized groups like the
great steel trust, the "Comite des Forges", or like the Freemasons, were able to
exercise undue influence. It was well for France that the actual administration
lay in the hands of the very powerful permanent officials of the civil service;
but a civil service which is left too much to itself tends to stagnate.
The Third Republic thus moved from scandal to scandal and from crisis to
crisis. There was the Grevy scandal, when the President's son-in-law was
caught selling membership in the Legion of Honour. There was the much
worse Panama scandal, when the Panama Canal Company, which had received
vast concessions from the government, went bankrupt, and was found to have
had whole squads of parliamentarians in its pay. But the worst effect of this
state of affairs, and the one which produced the most serious results, was the
Dreyfus Case.
After 1871 the French were determined to remedy the defects which the war
had exposed in their army. Under Marshal MacMahon the generals were given
practically a free hand. They imposed on France a five-year term of
conscription, and proceeded to try and make the French army the most
formidable force in Europe. They succeeded very well. But they had one
bugbear: the weakness and corruption of the republican government. This was
a nightmare to the soldiers, and so they naturally leaned towards, and were
supported by, the strong conservative forces of the Right, the monarchists and
the clericals. The generals were determined to prevent the republican
politicians from interfering with the army, and above all to keep from them
any real control over military appointments. This unnatural state of affairs,
with the army independent of the government which nominally ruled France,
was tolerated by the French people, and even by many of the politicians
themselves; but the parties of the Left, republican and socialist, naturally feared
and distrusted the army chiefs, and were anxious to discredit them and to bring
the army under the control of parliament. The importance of the Dreyfus case
was that it gave them their chance. The real issue at stake was not the guilt or
innocence of Dreyfus, but whether the army was or was not to be controlled
by the politicians. The soldiers claimed to represent French unity and
patriotism; their opponents claimed to represent the principles of democracy.
Once the battle was joined, all sorts of other issues became entangled in it; but
this was the main one.
In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew and a captain in the French artillery,
was accused of selling military secrets to Germany. The evidence against him
appeared overwhelming, and he was cashiered and transported. A little later,
however, a Colonel Picquart was appointed to command the counterespionage
service, and he discovered that there was still a leakage of information. He
traced the leak to one Major Esterhazy, and suggested that he was probably
responsible also for the supposed treachery of Dreyfus. But his superiors
refused to reopen the Dreyfus case: they dared not provoke the German
government by laying too much stress on German espionage; and when
Picquart, in defiance of military discipline, persisted in urging the matter, he
was removed from his post and sent to Tunisia. Just or unjust, this was a grave
error. For Picquart would not keep quiet, and the Dreyfus family, wealthy,
patriotic and influential, continued to protest against the verdict; and now it
occurred to the Leftists that they had a golden opportunity of discrediting the
whole system of army administration.
A great campaign of propaganda was started, led by the Leftist and anti-clerical
novelist and pamphleteer, Emile Zola. But the army chiefs unwisely and
unjustly adopted a policy of complete intransigence; they would not allow
themselves to be dictated to: the army must remain independent. Therefore
Esterhazy was brought to trial and formally acquitted. In order to clinch the
matter, new evidence was produced against Dreyfus by Colonel Henry, who
had succeeded Picquart. But a month later Henry committed suicide, leaving a
confession that the new evidence had been forged. This was the turning-point.
It is not known even now who was responsible for the forgeries; but the people
naturally blamed the generals, and public opinion swung round to Dreyfus'
side. An attempt was made at a compromise; Dreyfus was given a new court-
martial, at which he was again condemned, but with what amounted to a
"recommendation to mercy"; and he was then pardoned by the President. But
the Left would not accept this, and they were now able to get sufficient
popular support to insist on Dreyfus' being given a civil trial, at which he was
acquitted.
The results, both military and political, were disastrous. The fact that all France
was split between Dreyfusards and antiDreyfusards is almost a minor point.
The immediate result was the extension of political influence over the army.
Grave injury was done, especially to the intelligence department, which was
held particularly responsible for the condemnation of Dreyfus. The term of
conscription was reduced to two years. Open scandals began to appear, like the
"affair of the lists": lists drawn up by the Freemasons of practising Catholics in
the army, who were to be denied promotion as being clericals, and therefore
untrustworthy. The French army was still suffering from these things when
war broke out in 1914.
The main political result was the formation of the "republican bloc". The
Dreyfusard parties of the Left, republican and anti-clerical, sank their minor
differences to oppose the antiDreyfusard parties of the Right; and, owing to the
way in which the opponents of Dreyfus had been discredited, the Left
succeeded in dominating French politics between 1901 and 1914. This gave an
appearance of greater stability; for, though governments came and went as
rapidly as before, ministerial posts only circulated among a comparatively
small group of Leftist politicians. But this apparent stability only covered over a
deepening of the divisions in France. (For one thing, the republican liberals
were forced to make concessions to the socialists, who thus came to have an
influence out of proportion to their numbers.) Worse than this, though, was
that the Leftists were tempted by their new power to try and impose anti-
clericalism on France: they were tempted, and they yielded to the temptation.
We have seen the beginning of French anti-clericalism in the quarrel between
the Church and the first National Assembly in 1791. Napoleon reckoned that in
his day France was pretty evenly divided between clericals and anti-clericals;
and this continued to be true throughout the 19th century. From time to time
one side or the other attained a temporary advantage: the clericals, for
instance, under Napoleon III, the anti-clericals after his fall; but never did either
win sufficient support to be able to crush the other. Indeed, after 1878 the
quarrel showed signs of dying down. A main objection made against the
clericals was that they, being by tradition royalists, could not be truly loyal to
the Republic. But Pope Leo XIII, the conciliator, pointed out that there was
nothing anti-Catholic in republicanism, and urged the French Catholics to
forget their now out-of-date royalism and rally to the Republic. The result was
most encouraging, and the moderate men on both sides began to get together.
But the explosion of the Dreyfus Case wrecked all prospect of conciliation. Not
merely were passions raised to white heat, but the anti-clericals now for the
first time found enough firm support in the country to enable them, as they
thought, to crush their opponents; and they determined to attempt it. For their
main attack they chose the field of education, which they thought the decisive
point: destroy the Catholic schools, and future generations would be brought
up to be good anti-clericals. Already, in 1881, when France adopted a system of
compulsory primary education, the anti-clericals had been strong enough to
insist on the new schools' being secular: whereas in England the religious
schools had been incorporated into the state system, in France they were
excluded from it. But they still existed, and still educated more than half the
children of France. It was now determined to put an end to them. Between
1901 and 1904 all the religious orders in France were suppressed, their property
confiscated and their schools closed. Education was to be a State monopoly. In
1905 the logical further step was taken of repudiating Napoleon's Concordat;
henceforth the Church would receive no assistance from the State, and it was
confidently expected that the financial burdens thus laid on Catholics would
produce a speedy decline in Church membership.
All such hopes were disappointed. Under the inspired leadership of a new
Pope, St. Pius X, the French Catholics roused themselves to unheard-of efforts
and sacrifices, and the immediate result of the anti-clerical laws was a great
religious revival. Moreover, the ban on religious schools proved impossible to
maintain. Without them the state system was overburdened; and the anti-
clericals themselves became frightened at the vigour of the opposition they had
provoked. The laws were not repealed, but the government winked at the
return of the religious orders and the re-establishment of their schools. The net
result was that the clericals were impoverished and embittered, but not at all
crushed; the anti-clericals had only succeeded in deepening this particular
division among the French, and, unlike Bismarck, they were not sensible
enough to admit their mistake and try to heal the breach.
Something else was frightening the politicians at this time and inducing them
to suspend their attacks on the Church the rise of Anarchism. About the
1870's, the Marxian socialists began to split into three groups: the Communists,
who followed Marx's teaching implicitly; the Reform Socialists, who believed
that socialism could be obtained peacefully, by parliamentary action; and the
Anarchists, for whom Marx was not extreme enough who thought that the
only way to the workers' paradise lay through the immediate violent
destruction of all political authority, and the substitution for it of a purely
economic organization based on the trade-unions. (As the French word for
"trade-union" is "syndicat", this movement is often called Anarcho-
Syndicalism.) Ever since 1848, the persecuted trade-unionists in France had
been inclined to violent courses; after 1900 most of them came under Anarchist
influence; and the result was a series of strikes, culminating in the great
railway-strike of 1910, which was only broken by calling the railwaymen up for
military service and so subjecting them to martial law. In the end Anarchism in
France came to nothing the French workers were too sensible for it to
impose on them for long; but meantime it further embittered the relations
between capital and labour.
At the same time the French found another reason for anxiety: a falling birth-
rate had made the population almost stationary, while the Germans were
increasing by 300,000 a year. The Napoleonic law of inheritance, which forced
the division of the paternal property among all the children, was generally
blamed for this; but in fact France was only the earliest example of a tendency
which was to affect all the white nations, and the causes of which are still
disputed. The growth of materialism, industrialization and the consequent drift
of population to the cities, the increased wealth and comfort of modern living
these and many other reasons have been given. The fact remains that white
people in the 20th century no longer want children as they did in the 19th.
France, the first to suffer from this new tendency, felt her disadvantage keenly,
but found no effective way of dealing with it.
This was one reason why many Frenchmen now became interested in colonial
development: to supplement by coloured peoples the declining manpower of
France. This is not the place to consider in detail the growth of the Second
French Empire; but the gloomy picture we have been painting must be
lightened by this further fact: that between 1871 and 1914 the French secured a
colonial empire which, in size, population and wealth, was second only to
England's. With little help from home, a series of capable soldiers and
administrators men like Faidherbe the maker of Senegal, Gallieni his pupil,
Marchand who marched from Senegal to the Sudan, Lyautey who made
French Morocco gave France such an empire as to arouse bitter jealousy in
German hearts: a jealousy which led to Bismarck's fall and a new German
policy, which in its turn, as we know, brought an end to France's isolation in
Europe by gaining her such powerful friends as Russia and England. So, after
all, forty years after her great defeat, France was in a strong position again in
spite of her internal de-visions, for patriotism was still stronger than they. By
1914 she could contemplate a war with Germany quite calmly, and even with
assurance. That is one of the reasons why war broke out.
45. Feet Of Clay: Italy, Austria, Russia
1. The Kingdom of Italy
After 1870 all the Italians except a few outlying groups were united as subjects
of one King, Victor Emmanuel of the House of Savoy; but they were by no
means yet a united people. They had had no time to become one. The process
of unification had been rushed through in eleven years, and had been
accompanied, not only by great heroism, but also by violence and trickery, and
by a red-hot campaign of propaganda much of it exaggerated and
misleading. Most Italians would have agreed in saying that they wanted liberty
and unity for Italy; but they did not agree as to what those words meant, nor
on the means by which the Kingdom of Italy had been established nor on the
policies which the new state ought to follow.
These disagreements were partly due to the great differences which still existed
between the different parts of Italy. The most obvious of these were the
differences between North and South: between Piedmont, Lombardy and
Venetia on the one hand, and the old Kingdom of the Two Sicilies on the
other. The North had been efficiently governed, whether by the Piedmontese
or by the Austrians; its people were alert, enterprising and educated; its land
was cultivated by prosperous peasants, many of them proprietors; it had
thriving industries. The South had been wretchedly governed; it had little
industrial development; its people were peasants, working for the most part on
vast estates belonging to absentee landlords, and they were disease-ridden,
ignorant, and very poor. It was natural that the Northerners should despise
them, and that the Southerners should repay this contempt with envy and
hatred.
Another division existed among the very men who had helped to unite Italy.
Mazzini's republicanism was by no means dead, and the republicans would
never be satisfied as long as Italy was ruled by a king. They accepted the new
regime as the best that could be got for the moment; but they were not
content with it, and they did not cease to cherish hopes and to form schemes
for overthrowing the monarchy. A greater danger was socialism, growing in
Italy as elsewhere along with the machine-age and the factory-system. As time
went on it found fruitful soil not only in the industrial North, but also in the
peasants of the South, who thought it would bring about the break-up of the
big estates on which they laboured with so little fruit.
But the worst cause of difference was the religious quarrel. Cavour had begun
it by his fostering of anti- clericalism, and the forcible seizure of the Papal States
had made it an open wound. Pius IX would not admit that the seizure was
justified, and excommunicated all those responsible for it. Then, maintaining
that the Pope must be independent of any secular power, he withdrew into the
Vatican, which he continued to rule as a tiny state, defying the Italian
government to infringe its independence. That government attempted to solve
the problem by passing the "Law of Guarantees", offering the Pope possession
of the Vatican and Lateran palaces, the honours due to a reigning sovereign,
permission to communicate freely with other countries, and an annual subsidy
from the Italian State in compensation for his confiscated property. Pius IX
refused: the head of the universal Church could not become the pensioner of a
particular government, nor allow his rights to depend on a law passed by that
government a law which might at any time be revoked. He continued to
refuse to recognize the Italian state, or to permit faithful Catholics to take part
in its political life. Italian governments were thus permanently anti-clerical. Yet
they dared not act strongly against the Pope or the Church, partly because of
the opposition such action would arouse both inside and outside Italy, and
partly because they needed the Church: education, for instance, was poor
enough in Italy as it was, but without the Church schools it would be hopeless.
To the Italians as a whole, who wanted both their religion and their unity, the
situation became a continual nightmare.
Such were the disruptive forces in the new Italy. To counteract them, Italian
politicians relied on two means. The first was a widespread system of political
corruption, to ensure that only the right kind of politicians liberal,
nationalist, monarchical and anti-clerical had any chance of getting into
power. This saved Italy from those continual changes of government which
were the plague of France; but it also prevented the Italian government from
winning the respect of the Italian people. The second means was the constant
stimulation of Italian nationalism. But this led them into efforts to make Italy a
first-class power, which she is too poor and ill-equipped to be: she depends on
foreign countries even for such essential materials as coal and iron. Italian
governments have tended to demand more from the people than the people
are able or willing to give; hence they have often found themselves
unsupported in a crisis.
From 1870 to 1876 Italy was ruled by the group of moderate liberals who,
following Cavour, had actually carried through unification. They framed a
moderate liberal constitution: a parliamentary government with a parliament
of two houses: the lower house elected on a restricted franchise (by about
600,000 voters), the upper house appointed by the King. The lower house was
of course the important one, and the Premier and Cabinet were responsible to
it. At the same time, industrial development was carried on on a large scale: the
railways were nationalized and greatly extended, roads were made and
harbours improved, and so on. A national system of local government on the
French model was set up, and a national army was formed by the institution of
conscription. In fact, the foundations were laid of a modern Italian state.
These men were Northerners. In 1876, however, Agostino Depretis came to
power with Southern support, and he ruled almost continuously till 1887. It
was he who worked out the system of corruption which henceforth controlled
Italian politics, and this explains how he was able to hold power so long. He
also began the attempt to make Italy a great power: joining the Triple Alliance
in 1882, founding an African empire by the occupation of Eritrea. This was all
very expensive, and Italy became the most heavily taxed nation in Europe.
Between 1887 and 1896 a Sicilian, Crispi, carried on and extended the policies
of Depretis. Socialism and anarchism were now beginning to give serious
trouble. As a good liberal, Crispi severely repressed them; he also strengthened
the army, increased taxation, and pursued a vigorous colonial policy. He
intended, in particular, to conquer Abyssinia. But Italy had not the strength for
such an adventure; and Baratieri, the Italian commander in Eritrea, warned
against it. When Crispi insisted, the Italians suffered a severe defeat at Adowa,
and Crispi was swept out of office on a wave of popular hatred.
There followed some years of increasing disorder (strikes and riots, and even
open rebellion at Milan in 1898), which the government countered by military
action, martial law, and savage repression. The culminating point was the
assassination of King Umberto I, near Milan, in 1900. This produced a revulsion
of feeling on all sides, and the years 1900-1914 have been called "the years of
pacification". Pius X at last gave Catholics permission to take part in political
life. Social insurance was established for the workers, factory-acts passed, trade-
unions legalized, and so on. In 1912 manhood suffrage was granted. These
measures relaxed very considerably the tensions in Italian life. But the system
of corruption remained (from 1903 to 1914 Giolitti was its chief manipulator),
and the overgrown nationalist ambitions were not surrendered. In 1912 Italy
seized Libya from Turkey, in pursuit of the design of an Italian empire in
Africa. In 1915 she was to enter the First World War, to endure worse things
than ever before for a very inadequate reward, and to plunge then into the
ultra-nationalist movement of Fascism. But we shall consider these things later.
2. Austria-Hungary
The Compromise of 1867 had given the Austrian Empire a new lease of life by
establishing a partnership between the Germans and the Magyars; but the Slav
peoples had been left out in the cold. By 1900 the Slavs had become much
stronger, and their discontent correspondingly more serious. This one
particularly true of the Czechs. Bohemia had become one of the great
industrial areas of Europe, with the usual increases of wealth and population
and discontent. Besides, many Czechs had emigrated to the U.S.A. and made
money there, and they were more determined even than their countrymen at
home to work for Czech freedom. With the Czechs to lead it, the nationalist
opposition to the existing Austrian regime became increasingly serious.
In the Austrian part of the empire, its effects were masked for a time by the rise
of the Christian Social Party: a Catholic party, led by the Austrian Karl Lueger,
which worked for social legislation and the extension of democracy. Lueger
was inspired by the social teaching of Pope Leo XIII, and for some time in the
1880's and 1890's he achieved a kind of Catholic union among the Austrian
Germans, Poles and Czechs, to work for such objects as factory-acts, the
legalization of trade-unions, social insurance and the extension of the franchise.
After the achievement of these objects, however, the members of the Catholic
union began again to drift apart. The establishment of manhood suffrage in
1907 brought a motley collection of parliamentary representatives to Vienna,
who at once began quarrelling with one another about racial questions; and
these quarrels so paralysed the work of parliament that in practice the Emperor
was forced to go on ruling without it. Democracy in Austria did not work; and
the Czechs in particular began to think and say that freedom could only be
attained by breaking up the Austrian state.
In Hungary these racial troubles were not so obvious, because the Magyar
nobles kept a tight hold over their subjects, refusing any concessions either to
democracy or nationalism, and insisting on trying to "magyarize" everyone in
Hungary. Any opposition to them had to be secret, but it became all the fiercer
for that, particularly among the Croats and the Rumanians, who could see
their fellow-countrymen living in the independent states of Serbia and
Rumania, and longed to join them.
These troubles were stimulated by the growth of Pan-Slavism, strongly
encouraged and supported by Russia. The Czechs even began openly to hail
the Russians as their predestined deliverers from the "German yoke". Thus the
Austrian government came to regard Russia as Austria's most dangerous
enemy, and Russian designs in the Balkans as the most serious threat to the
very existence of Austria-Hungary; and came to think, too, that Austria must
herself advance in the Balkans, and at least get control of Serbia and Roumania,
to save herself from collapse. Thus the Austrians hailed with delight the breach
between Russia and Germany after the fall of Bismarck, and were still more
delighted to find Germany determined to play a big part in the Balkans and to
defend Turkey against Russia. With Germany behind it, the Austrian
government felt that it could take a strong line, and did so. But this was a fatal
error. It was one of the main causes of the First World War, which destroyed
the Austrian empire for ever.
Russia
Nicholas II of Russia has often been compared with Louis XVI of France. In
private life an admirable and even lovable character (George V of England
called him his favourite cousin), he was quite unfit to be the absolute ruler of a
great country passing through a tremendous crisis. Slow in mind and weak in
will, and confronted by problems and catastrophes which would have proved
too much for many a far greater man, he was bound to rely on the advice of
those about him and .they were the very men who had brought about the
crisis through which Russia was passing. Like Louis XVI, too, he was devoted
to and greatly influenced by a foreign wife: a woman of great determination,
but with little political sense and scarcely any appreciation of the state of affairs
in Russia or of the character of the Russian people. He was a man foredoomed
to destruction; and in the end, like Louis XVI, he was overthrown by a
revolution and murdered by the revolutionaries.
His policies were, naturally, those of his father: industrialization was pushed
busily forward: by 1914 the urban population of Russia had grown to twenty
million: liberal and socialist ideas, and nationalism among the subject races,
were rigidly repressed: the number of exiles in Siberia grew continually;
Catholics and Protestants were persecuted, and Jews still more so. In foreign
affairs, German and Austrian designs in the Balkans were opposed, and the
alliance with France strengthened (French capital played a great part in Russian
industrialization); expansion was pushed further in central Asia and the Far
East particularly in Manchuria, where it began to meet with opposition
from Japan. The character and conduct of the government remained the same:
no change could be expected from Nicholas II.
But the Russian people were changing. The reforms of Alexander II were now
beginning to produce their effects: the people, even the peasants, were now
much better informed, much more conscious of what they wanted and of their
power to attain it, much more able and willing to organize for political
purposes. This was especially true of the proletariat. In the 1890's Marxian
Socialism penetrated into Russia and found support in all the factory-towns; in
1898 the Social-Democratic Party was founded. It is true that the Marxists, in
Russia as elsewhere, soon split up into those who believed in attaining
socialism by peaceful, parliamentary action, and those who thought it could
only be attained by violence; but in Russia both groups were revolutionary as
against the Czarist regime, and each had an essential part to play. The quarrel
between them came to a head at a conference held in London in 1903. At this
conference a minority of the delegates (hence called Men-sheviks), .held that
the Social-Democrats should strive to convert the masses to socialism, and so
establish a "mass-party" like the parliamentary parties of western Europe;
while the majority (called Bolsheviks), led by Nicolai Lenin, maintained that no
such mass-party could make a successful revolution.
For a revolution, said Lenin, you needed above all a small group of directing
brains, and the Social-Democratic Party should be limited to a few carefully-
chosen and specially-trained men: men utterly ruthless, utterly reliable, utterly
de-voted to the cause of socialist revolution. It would be their part to rouse and
direct the masses when the time was ripe, and then to set up the "dictatorship
of the proletariat." After that the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks went their
separate ways. The Mensheviks covered Russia with a network of propaganda:
much as Mazzini had done by means of Young Italy, and with much the same
effects; while Lenin organized his special group of expert revolutionaries (One
of his achievements at this time was the "campaign of expropriations:"
robberies of banks, factories, and government agencies, which both
embarrassed the government and provided funds for the revolutionaries. It was
in this work that a man called Josef Stalin first became prominent.)
Still more important as a preparation for a Russian revolution was the founding
of the Social Revolutionary Party in 1900. The importance of this party was
that it appealed to the peasants, the real mass of the Russian people. Its main
object was to get all the land of Russia distributed among the peasants who
actually tilled the soil; and the peasants, who had never been satisfied with the
division of the land made at Emancipa-tion, and had always maintained that
they were being made to pay too high a price for the bits of land they did get,
were very much attracted by this programme.
All this organization and propaganda was preparing a genuine revolutionary
situation in Russia, like the situation in Italy or Germany before 1848; and in
1905 a revolution did break out, on the occasion of the Russo-Japanese War.
How this war arose we shall see later; it is enough to say here that Russia's
designs on Manchuria had brought her into conflict with the new power of
Japan (the first Asiatic nation to become a great power), that the Czar's
government mismanaged the war rather badly, and that Russia suffered a
resounding defeat. The shame of this roused the whole" nation. Strikes broke
out here and there. In St. Petersburg a procession of strikers was organized to
present a petition to the Czar in his Winter Palace: it was not allowed to
present the petition, and when the strikers refused to disperse, they were fired
on by the Czar's guards and many hundreds were shot down. Then there were
more strikes, peasant-riots,, mutinies in the army and navy; and finally, the
revolutionary parties (working together for the moment) succeeded in
organizing all this discontent into a great General Strike, which brought almost
the whole country to a standstill.
Witte advised the Czar to make concessions, and he did so: little ones at first,
like remitting the arrears of payments due from the peasants for their lands,
granting religious toleration, and permitting the Poles to use Polish in their
schools; but when these proved insufficient (for, although the General Strike
was called off, local strikes and rioting continued), he was brought to go
further: making Witte his prime minister, and issuing the October Manifesto,
in which he engaged to summon a Duma, or parliament, and to make laws, in
future, in consultation with it. The world rubbed its eyes to see Russia going
democratic.
It came to nothing. 1905 in Russia turned out to be like 1848 in. Austria. No
sooner did they appear to have won the game than the revolutionaries again
began quarrelling among themselves: liberals of various shades, Social
Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks could not be expected to pull
together for long, and neither could Poles, Baits and Ukrainians be expected to
agree well with Russians. As the revolutionaries disputed, their opponents took
heart again: and when they raised the cry of patriotism, "the fatherland in
danger", and organized a counter-revolutionary "Union of the Russian
People", they received more support than anyone had expected. Besides, now
that the war was over there were enough loyal troops on hand to suppress any
disorder. So Witte was dismissed, and .replaced by the conservative Stolypin;
and when the Duma met, in May. 1906, it soon became clear that the
government would accept no interference from it. When it persisted in
proposing reforms, it was brusquely dissolved and a new election ordered: and
when the second Duma, in March 1907. proved as liberal as the first, it was also
dissolved, and the electoral law was changed so that in the third Duma the
landowners had a permanent majority.
What would have happened if the first Duma had been allowed a free hand we
cannot tell. Its opponents claimed that the country would have fallen into
complete disorder, and they may have been right; though Russia was to suffer
in the long run far worse disorder than any the Duma could have caused. The
actual result was to make people conclude that there was nothing to be got out
of the Czar except by violence; and the Bolsheviks, who had maintained all
along that the Czar's promises would turn out a mere pretence, increased in
reputation and influence. The real causes of discontent remained, and the
government's only remedy for them seemed to be severer repression: under
Stolypin thousands of people were executed, and many more thousands
banished to Siberia. Stolypin himself was murdered in 1911: but that had no
effect.
The government group had in fact decided that patriotism was the card to play:
they blamed all the recent troubles on their defeat by the Japanese, and they
remembered the support which the "Union of the Russian People" had won.
Their conclusion was that if Russia suffered another such defeat there would
probably be a revolution, but that as long as Russia's foreign policy was
tolerably successful the Czar's authority would be secure. Hence Russia was
glad to add the Entente with England (1907) to the alliance with France; and
the government planned new strategic, railways, reorganized the army and
extended its period of service, and began to construct a powerful navy to
replace the one which the Japanese had sunk. A strong line in foreign policy
seemed necessary to save the internal situation: and when the Balkan crisis of
1914 appeared, and the strong line led straight to war, the Russian government
dared not abandon it.

Book Seven - The Expansion of Europe
46. Colonial Empires And Colonial Systems
The chief historical development of the past four centuries has been the spread
of European influence over the whole world, and the consequent drawing
together of all the human race into something like a single civilization. Before
the 16th century, men were divided into separate and mutually exclusive
groups. The great societies of India and China had little intercourse with each
other, and less with Europe; north Africa was Moslem, different from Europe
and still more from central and southern Africa; America was totally unknown
to the inhabitants of the other continents. Europe has changed all that. The
whole world has been more or less Europeanized; and, though we cannot tell
how far this change will prove permanent, nor what its ultimate effects will be,
we can see its importance.
The expansion of Europe has taken five forms: religious, the spread of
Christianity; cultural, the spread of European ideas in art, science and
philosophy; political, the establishment of "colonial empires" by European
governments; economic, the spread of European trade, finance, and methods
of production; and racial, the actual colonization of sparsely-settled lands by
Europeans. In America, north and south, it has taken all five forms, and
America has become practically an extension of Europe. The same is true of
Australia and New Zealand. In Asia and Africa, however, the spread of
Christianity and of European cultural and colonization has been nothing like so
complete.
These continents were not, on the whole, very attractive to European
colonists; they had already large native populations, with, especially in Asia,
ancient and well-established cultures and religions. Asia and Africa have
become pretty well integrated with Europe and America in a world-wide
economic and political system (consider, for example, the actual incorporation
of Africa, India and south-east Asia into European empires, the "westernizing"
of Japan, the admission of Japan and China into the League of Nations, the
universal extension of European trade, banking and finance, the spread of
Communism for Communism is a European thing); but they are far from
being completely Europeanized.
The 19th century was the great age of European expansion, and the mainspring
of the movement at that time was the industrial revolution. This provided
Europeans with a mass of cheap goods which could be profitably exported to
the ends of the earth, with cheap transport to carry these goods, with plenty of
spare wealth, or capital, to finance trade, and with a well-organized banking
and financial system which enabled capital to be moved and applied wherever
desired. It also entailed, however, an increasing need for fresh markets and raw
materials for the continually-expanding industries of Europe, and therefore
stimulated a flow of European colonists and capitalists into the other
undeveloped or less-developed continents. It gave Europeans, for the moment,
a military superiority which made it impossible for Africans or Asians to
exclude them or their goods; while at the same time the disorder and weakness
which reigned in most of Asia and Africa both tempted and compelled
Europeans to military intervention and conquest. Thus the British East India
Company, beginning as a pure trading venture, was gradually and reluctantly
drawn into the conquest of India; the Chinese and Japanese were forced to
open their ports to European and American traders; the native races in Africa
were absorbed into European empires; and so on. But this 19th century
expansion was primarily economic, secondarily political, and only to a minor
extent cultural or religious: "the worst things of Europe", it has been said,
"were exported, rather than the best". We must not exaggerate, though:
European governors did much for the native races they ruled; European
teachers and missionaries had often great influence; and European ideas (the
ideas of liberalism, nationalism and socialism, for instance) were introduced
into Asia and Africa, though it was not till the 20th century that they began to
have much effect.
Colonial Empires
A "colony", properly speaking, is a group of settlers from one country planted
in another, and still remaining subject to the government of their original
country. In this sense, only the Spaniards, Portuguese and English have
founded important colonies in modern times. Nearly all the American colonies,
however, whether English, Spanish or Portuguese, broke away from their
mother-countries and declared their independence between 1776 and 1823; so
that the Spaniards and Portuguese have now only a few minor colonies, while
the English have long since adopted the policy of giving their colonists self-
government whenever they ask for it, so that the former British colonies are
now for the most part "dominions". However, the growth of European
imperialism meant that many of the natives of Asia and Africa came under
European rule, and at present a "colonial empire" has come to mean dominion
by Europeans over non-Europeans, and "colonial systems" are the various
methods used in dealing with these native races.
Before 1914, the important empires were those of the English, French, Dutch,
Belgians and Germans. Of these, the British Empire was the biggest: besides
the "dominions", of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, it
included territory in Asia, Africa and America. In Asia the English held India,
Burma and Malaya. In Africa they controlled a belt of territory stretching
almost from the Mediterranean to the Cape: Egypt and the Sudan, Uganda and
British East Africa, Rhodesia and South Africa; and on the west coast they held
the vast territory of Nigeria, and the smaller ones of the Gold Coast, Gambia
and Sierra Leone. In America they had only a few relics of former greatness:
Jamaica, Trinidad, and some others of the West Indies, British Honduras and
British Guiana on the mainland. They had also a number of island-groups in
the Pacific, like the Fijis and the Solomons.
The French, too, still had some relics of their first colonial empire, in French
Guiana, Martinique, and the other French West Indies; but in the 19th century
they had built up a new and immensely larger empire. In Africa they held,
except for the British territories already mentioned, almost the whole of north
Africa between the Atlantic and Egypt, between the Mediterranean and the
Gulf of Guinea. They had also the great island of Madagascar. In Asia their
chief possession was Indo-China; and they had in the Pacific Tahiti and
Noumea (New Caledonia), and, in partnership with the English, the New
Hebrides.

The Dutch and Belgian empires were less extensive, but immensely rich. The
Dutch had, like the French and the English, some West Indian islands and part
of Guiana; but their chief glory and profit lay in holding all the East Indies
except parts of Borneo, Timor and New Guinea. The Belgians had built up, in
Africa, the extremely large and profitable domain of the Congo.
The Germans, as we know, had come late into the colonial field, and were
badly off. Still, they had three sections of Africa: the Cameroons in the Congo
region, German South-West Africa and German East Africa; and in the Pacific
they had part of New Guinea, Samoa, and the Caroline, Marianne and Marshall
groups. But they were not satisfied, and were hungry for more. So, indeed,
were the Italians, who by desperate efforts had seized Libya and Eritrea and
part of Somali-land; but they were too weak to make their discontent effective.
The Russians, during the 19th century, had taken a firm hold on Manchuria,
and had advanced their borders in central Asia as far south as Afghanistan. But
their Manchurian designs were knocked back by the Japanese in 1904-5; and in
1907, when they reached their Entente with England, they consented to forego
their Persian and Afghan ambitions. Russia was not fit, in any case, to expand
further.
Spain and Portugal (to complete the tale) still held remnants of their former
empires: Spain had a fraction of Morocco, and the Rio de Oro in north Africa;
Portugal had Angola in west Africa, Mozambique in east Africa, part of Timor,
and the tiny territories of Goa in India and Macao in China; but neither Spain
nor Portugal seemed anxious to develop, still less to expand, these colonies.
Colonial Systems
All these nations have had to face the problem of how to deal with their non-
European subjects. Four methods have been tried, which we may call the
methods of segregation, exploitation, assimilation and association.
(Extermination has also been tried on occasion, but hardly deserves to be called
a "method"; owing partly to conscientious scruples, partly to the fact that it is
wasteful and expensive, it has rarely been thoroughly carried out. In the 19th
century, Tasmania offered the most striking example of successful
extermination and in Tasmania there were very few natives to be
exterminated.)
Segregation is the method of allotting to the natives a certain portion of the
land, where they can live their traditional life apart from Europeans. The most
striking example of this method were the Jesuit "reductions" in Paraguay in the
18th century: the Jesuits gathered the natives into settlements from which
Europeans were rigidly excluded; but the suppression of the Jesuits left the
reductions open to European exploiters, who soon destroyed them. At present
the Indian "reservations" in the U.S.A. and Canada are the chief examples: on
these lands the Indians who wish to can continue their traditional tribal life,
while elsewhere the country is Europeanized. This method is only possible
where the natives are few in number and comparatively low in culture: it could
not succeed with thickly-populated or highly-civilized countries. An attempt is
being made to pursue it in South Africa, but it will probably fail: partly because
the negroes are too numerous, partly because the Europeans are not willing to
give up sufficiently large reservations, or to forego their traditional policy of
exploitation.
Exploitation is a policy of keeping the natives permanently subject, and making
them work for Europeans and under European control. All colonial powers
have practised it at one time or another; indeed, one might maintain that for
uncivilized peoples it is necessary at first, while they are being introduced to
civilized modes of living. But it cannot be a permanent policy; for the more the
natives advance, the less they are willing to put up with exploitation, which
thus produces continually diminishing returns. This the Dutch discovered in
the East Indies. Of all the colonial powers, it was the Dutch who most
thoroughly and systematically practised exploitation: they set up a system of
"forced cultures", by which the natives were made to give a fixed amount of
land and labour to cultivating such crops as coffee and spices for the Dutch
export trade. This form of serfdom proved profitable for a long time; but it
eventually aroused so much opposition, even among the Dutch themselves,
that after 1870 it was gradually given up. Holland then began to follow a policy
of association, and became one of the most "progressive" of the colonial
powers.
Exploitation was also the policy originally followed by the Belgians in the
Congo. Ivory was, at first, the chief wealth of the Congo, and to extract the
ivory and so pay for the development of the country, the early Belgian
administrators dealt ruthlessly with the native population: so ruthlessly as to
cause an international scandal. King Leopold, who had established the Congo
as his own private domain, was thereupon compelled to hand over its
government to the Belgian parliament; after which it was transformed into
something like a model colony, run as much in the interest of the natives as in
that of the governing power.
The German colonies had a somewhat similar history. Bismarck, we know,
was not interested in colonies, and it was only with great reluctance that he
consented to the formation of German colonial ventures. All the German
colonies were founded by private individuals and commercial companies, with
a minimum of help from the government. They were expected to be self-
supporting; and the natural result was wholesale exploitation. The early history
of most of the German colonies was one of rapacity and oppression. But, as in
Belgium and Holland, this state of affairs was bitterly attacked in Germany
itself. A government official, Dernburg, was sent out to report on the colonial
administration, and his famous "Dernburg Report", in 1906, moved the
German government to undertake extensive reforms. Unfortunately, these
were only beginning to take effect when the First World War put an end to
Germany's empire.
The French had a colonial policy of their own: assimilation. They liked to
proclaim themselves the heirs of ancient Rome, and they said that, just as the
Roman Empire had turned Asiatics and Africans into good Romans, so the
French Empire would turn them into good Frenchmen. They set up strongly
centralized forms of government, and they imposed on their native subjects
European civilization in its French form: French law, French culture, French
social customs, and so on. They likewise encouraged, though they did not
impose by force, Christianity. Even anti-clerical governments generally
encouraged Catholic missionaries in the colonies as ambassadors of French
culture: "Anti-clericalism", it was said, "is not for export". (But, the natives of
north Africa being mainly Moslems, the missionaries had little success there:
Islam has always been very refractory to conversion. In Indo-China it was a
different story.)
This policy sometimes involved severe repression, but its ultimate object was
to give the natives, as soon as they were sufficiently Frenchified, all the
privileges of Frenchmen. There was no question of imposing a colour-bar.
Algeria, indeed, where numbers of white Frenchmen had settled, was actually
formed into departments, ruled by prefects, electing representatives to the
French parliament, and so on. But Algeria showed also the weakness of the
policy of assimilation: it did not prove possible to give the vote indiscriminately
to the natives, partly because many of them were not fit to exercise it, partly
because many of them did not particularly want to become Frenchmen. By
1914 the French were beginning to revise their ideas, and to move from a
policy of assimilation to one of association; though they still maintained a firm
centralized control over their empire and its development.
Association was particularly the English colonial policy. It arose out of the
principle of indirect rule, first practised by the British East India Company.
That company was primarily interested in trade, not in empire-building; it did
not wish to assume the responsibilities and expenses of government. When it
was forced in self-defence to undertake to establish order and peace in India, it
preferred to do so, where possible by setting up or maintaining Indian princes
who were ready to be friendly with the English and to rule by the advice of
English officials. This crude money-saving and labour-saving policy was
worked out into a definite system by a series of colonial administrators, like
Raffles, the founder of Singapore. The basis of the system was that the natives,
not being Europeans, should not be treated like Europeans; they should be
ruled, as far as possible, by native officials or princes according to native law
and custom, while the colonial power maintained peace and order, repressed
manifest abuses, developed the material prosperity of the country by roads,
railways, irrigation and whatnot, and gradually educated the natives with
the ultimate object of making them capable of governing themselves, and of
forming a "dominion" like Canada or Australia, in the free association of what
came to be called the British Commonwealth of Nations.
This new colonial policy was violently opposed by some. Lord Dalhousie, for
instance, who was Governor-General of India from 1848 to 1856, dogmatically
maintained that British government was better than native government, and
ought always to be preferred to it. But Dalhousie's tactlessness in handling
native prejudices was a main cause of the Indian Mutiny of 1857; and after that
the new policy was followed more and more. What finally established it as the
official policy of the British government was the brilliant success of Lugard in
Nigeria: he transformed a vast jungle-covered country, sparsely inhabited by
warlike and savage tribes, into a peaceful and prosperous domain, with a
minimum use of force and a maximum use of the natives' own tribal
government, law and custom. He has come to be considered the model
colonial administrator.
The policy of assimilation has one big defect. The natives do not advance all at
the same rate, and it generally happens that the more intelligent and active of
them begin to demand self-government long before the colonial power,
looking at the average level, thinks the time is ripe. This leads to disputes, and
sometimes to open conflict, as the English have found in India and elsewhere.
The Dutch have found it so, too. When they gave up their old exploitation
policy, they went in wholeheartedly for association. In the East Indies they set
up a complete system of native schools, farms, banks etc., and even an elected
assembly, the Volksraad a sort of native parliament, though with only
advisory powers. But the more educated of the natives, particularly among the
Javanese, were not satisfied; and the Dutch found themselves faced with a
problem which they had not succeeded in solving when the Japanese invasion
of 1941 put an end to their East Indian empire.
The Colour Question
The whole business of European expansion and colonization has been
hampered and bedevilled, more or less, by the colour question. Europeans are
white; the aboriginal inhabitants of the other continents are black, brown,
yellow or red. Over the last four centuries, the whites have become superior to
the other races in culture, and in material wealth and power; they entered the
other continents as superiors: as conquerors, employers, instructors; and it was
natural that they should insist on their superiority and make the most of it.
There is, however, nothing inevitable about this superiority: it has not always
existed and it will not continue for ever. What has made things difficult is that
many Europeans have not admitted this fact: they have maintained that the
white man is naturally, intrinsically, superior to the black, brown, yellow or red
man, and it is this attitude (which is quite absurd both scientifically and
historically) which has made the trouble. It is quite a recent attitude. We do
not find the Spaniards or the Portuguese, or even the early English and Dutch
colonizers, setting up a colour-bar. But somehow (and it seems that the English
began it) the perception of their artificial and temporary superiority produced
in the Europeans a conviction of natural and permanent superiority; and their
arrogance, and the resentment of the natives, have immensely stimulated the
colonial troubles that all the whites have had to face. Add this colour-jealousy
to the forces of liberalism and nationalism, and you get a very explosive
mixture, as all the colonial powers have found in the 20th century. There are
signs that colour-prejudice is beginning to be broken down; but it will make
more trouble yet before it passes into history.
47. The United States
The United States of America is the most European, as well as the most
successful, of Europe's offspring: European in religion and culture, in race and
speech, in economic organization, in government and law. To begin with it
was, further, an essentially British society in all these respects; but it has been
much altered since then by influences and migrants from other European
states, as well as, very powerfully, by its own circumstances and history. We
shall try briefly to indicate these developments.
The thirteen British American colonies which obtained their independence in
1783 were thirteen separate communities, united only in their common dislike
of interference from England. It was a question whether, when they had won
their freedom, they would choose to form a union or to continue as
independent states. The necessity of mutual support persuaded them to join
together; but when they came to make a constitution, they made a federal one
which left the greatest possible amount of independence to each state: a
balance was to be maintained between state and federal, local and central
government. The same principle of the "division of powers", as Montesquieu
called it, was followed in working out the details of the federal government
itself. Parliament, or Congress, was to consist of two houses: the House of
Representatives, in which each state was to be represented according to its
population, and the Senate, in which there were to be two members from each
state, regardless of population.
The House of Representatives was to have the chief legislative power, but the
Senate, besides having power to review and amend legislation, was given
certain special powers: for example, the power of ratifying treaties. The
executive power was to be in the hands of a President, elected by a college of
electors representing the states in proportion to population. He was to hold
office for four years, and could stand for re-election if he wished. He had full
executive control over civil and military affairs; but he was not allowed to
declare war except with the consent of Congress, nor to make treaties without
submitting them to the Senate for ratification. In emergency, he could make
temporary laws or ordinances; and he had a temporary veto over laws passed
by Congress. Both Congress and President were subject to the chief judicial
body, the Supreme Court, in as much as this Court could declare their acts
constitutional or otherwise, and any acts declared unconstitutional became null
and void. The members of this Court were to be appointed for life, by the
President with the consent of the Senate.
The man before all others responsible for getting this Constitution framed and
accepted was Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, however, was not what we
should call a democrat. The Federalist Party, which he formed and led in
defence of the Constitution, distrusted and feared "the masses", and wished to
keep power voting-power particularly in the hands of men of property.
The attempt to do so failed. It was contrary to that very love of independence
which had pushed the Americans into revolt and had produced the
Constitution itself; it was contrary to the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, the author of which, Thomas Jefferson, became Hamilton's
chief opponent in this and other matters. Jefferson won. The Constitution was
finally ratified in 1788, and that was Hamilton's triumph; but within twenty
years all property qualifications were swept away, and "Jeffersonian
democracy" became a part of the Constitution itself. The United States became
the first thoroughly liberal republic -- with one exception, of deadly augury:
negro slavery was maintained in the southern states.
More than to Jefferson, the triumph of democracy was due to "the frontier".
West of the narrow belt of settled land along the eastern seaboard lay the vast
spaces of the interior: the broad levels of the Mississippi basin, the semi-arid
prairies beyond, the huge mass of the Rockies, the western slopes dropping
down to the Pacific. All this enormous territory was inhabited by a few
thousand Red Indians, with, in the north some scattered posts of the Hudson
Bay Company's traders, and in the south, a few Frenchmen in Louisiana, a few
Spaniards in Texas and California. Trappers, prospectors, farmers, had endless
opportunities open to them. There were no privileges of birth or rank or
fortune along the frontier: only a man's own skill and courage would avail him
there; but skill and courage would avail: there were no social or political
barriers "out west". The settlers pressed on; and in their struggle with forest
and flood, wild nature and wilder man, they learned lessons of self-reliance and
individual enterprise; but they learned also, by practical experience, the
necessity of mutual cooperation in the support of government and law the
prime lesson of democracy. "The frontier encouraged initiative, it broke down
conservatism, it made for social and political democracy, it bred a spirit of local
self-determination coupled with respect for national authority." In a word, it
formed the character of the American people, and in that character a passion
for individual independence and enterprise was equalled by a passion for law:
for strong government based on the people's will . There is a division of
powers even in the American soul.
The frontier also bred ruthlessness: a ruthlessness in exploiting natural
resources (the slaughter of the bison, the felling of the forests, the over-
cropping of the soil that leads to erosion); a ruthlessness in dealing with the
Indians when they tried to defend their hunting-grounds against the white
invasion; a ruthlessness in competition between man and man, as in the range
wars of the "Wild West", or the commercial wars of the Trusts; a ruthlessness
even in enforcing rights and justice, by duelling and lynch-law. But it is fair to
say that this ruthlessness was a passing phase, bred of the extraordinary
circumstances. Not ruthlessness, but enterprise and cooperation, are
characteristic of this people; the deepest convictions of the American soul are
that there is always a new frontier to be conquered, if men will look for it, and
that any frontier can be conquered, if men will combine to conquer it.
Development
During the 19th century the Americans were occupied in a double process of
internal development and the pushing of the frontier to the Pacific. In 1800 the
frontier was still east of the Mississippi. In 1803 Jefferson, as President,
purchased Louisiana from France; in 1819 Monroe purchased Florida from
Spain. In 1804-6 Lewis and Clark crossed the continent to Oregon, and settlers
began to follow along the Oregon Trail. Others moved down into Texas and
California along the Santa Fe Trail. Trouble arose with England about the
boundary between Oregon and Canada, but by 1846 most of the disputed
territory had been occupied by American settlers, and a treaty in that year
defined the boundary in favour of the United States. In the south, matters were
not settled so easily. Texas and California belonged to Mexico. But the Mexican
government, inefficient and corrupt, did not please the new settlers in Texas; in
1836 they revolted, set up a republic of their own, and petitioned to be
admitted as a state of the U.S.A. In 1845 their petition was accepted.
Immediately trouble arose with Mexico about the western boundary of the
new state. In the war which followed (1846-8), Mexico was totally defeated,
and by the peace treaty the U.S. obtained New Mexico and California. Almost
immediately gold was discovered in California, and the greatest gold-rush in
the world's history soon peopled it. In 1850 it was recognized as a state.

Meanwhile, internal development was proceeding in the older states. In 1794
Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, by which cotton fibre could be separated
from the seed mechanically. This vastly increased the supply of raw cotton, at
the very time when the new spinning and weaving machines in England were
increasing the demand. Great cotton plantations, cultivated by negro slaves,
were formed in the southern Mississippi region, and a great export trade with
England developed. In the north, secondary industries grew up: textile
manufacturing in Pennsylvania, where Pittsburgh became the first great
factory-town of the New World. European migrants provided labour for the
new industries, and after 1816 they were protected from British competition by
a tariff. Between 1790 and 1860 the population of the U.S. grew from three
million to twenty-seven million 900 per cent.
Civil War
In 1861 this progress was interrupted by the Civil War. Eleven of the southern
states (Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee,
Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas) seceded from the Union
and formed a confederation of their own. The war was fought (1861-5) to force
them to return to the Union.
There had always been big differences between North and South. The strict
Puritans of New England, the bustling merchants of New York, were a
different breed of men from the aristocratic, slave-owning planters of Virginia
and the Carolinas. Time had increased the gap. The South had become mainly
dependent on growing and exporting cotton, while the wealth of the North lay
mainly in manufactures. Therefore the South believed in free trade, the North
in protection. The labourers of the North were white, and free; those of the
South were negro, and slave; therefore the North was strongly democratic, the
South aristocratic. The Northerners despised the Southerners as a set of lazy-
no-account loafers; the Southerners despised the Northerners as a lot of Yankee
peddlers, void of culture or refinement, and interested only in money-
grubbing.
Slavery was the mark and symbol of the difference. Negro slaves had originally
been introduced because it was thought that white men could not efficiently
work in the fields in the semi-tropical climate of the "Deep South". In 1860
there were four million of them, and the whole economy of the South was
dependent on them. Calhoun, the great advocate of the South, defended
slavery on two grounds: he said that without it, not only the economy, but the
whole structure of society in the south, must collapse; and that the negroes
were too primitive a race for freedom: they were safer and happier and better
off as slaves. Northerners answered that slavery was an outrage on human
nature and directly contrary to the spirit of the Constitution. They pointed to
the abuses of some slave-owners; while the Southerners pointed to the
conditions in Northern factories, and asked who was throwing stones. The
quarrel was exasperated by exaggerated propaganda like "Uncle Tom's Cabin",
and by attempts like John Brown's to raise a slave rebellion. But it would not
have led to war if the Southerners had not invoked the "right of secession".
There were two views of the U.S. Constitution. The Southern view, Calhoun's
view, was that the states were sovereign states, who had freely surrendered
some of their rights for mutual advantage, but who had the power to reclaim
them and to resume their sovereignty if they were not satisfied. The other
view was that the states, in forming the Union, had surrendered all their
sovereignty to the Federal government, and that to refuse obedience to the
Federal government was, for a state as much as for an individual, an act of
rebellion. The Southerners, watching the continual growth of the North in
wealth and population, bearing that in time they would be completely out-
numbered, out-voted, and therefore helpless in Federal affairs, began to talk of
secession, and the Northerners began to call that talk treason. This was the real
issue in the Civil War.
The presidential election of 1860 brought matters to a head. One of the
candidates was Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois: a Northerner, an opponent of
slavery, and still more an opponent of the right of secession. The South bent all
its efforts to defeat him, and failed. The defeat was accepted as a signal that
there was no future for the Southern states in the Union; South Carolina
seceded first, and ten others with her; when Lincoln refused to recognize the
secession, and attempted to relieve the Federal garrison of Fort Sumter, South
Carolina opened fire.
The South was hopelessly inferior to the North in numbers, and still more in
industrial power; but she had the better organization, and at first the better
generals. For a long time Lincoln could find no-one equal to Robert E. Lee or
"Stonewall" Jackson. The South hoped to win either by gaining England's
recognition and assistance, or by inflicting such losses on the North as to weary
it out; but she failed to persuade England to help, and Lincoln's determination
was proof against any disaster. It had need to be. The first invasion of the
South, under McClellan, was beaten by Lee and Jackson in the Seven Days'
Battles. McClellan was replaced by Burnside, who was beaten at
Fredericksburg, and Burnside by Hooker, who was beaten at Chancellorsville.
But meanwhile another Northern general, Grant, was driving down the
Mississippi and cutting the South in two. Lee then boldly undertook an
invasion of the North, but was decisively beaten at the terrible three-day battle
of Gettysburg. This was the turning-point. The North marshalled its superior
resources and closed in on the South by land and sea. The South resisted
savagely, in some of the most desperate fighting of the war; but the time came
when resistance was no longer possible. On April 9th, 1865, Lee met Grant and
surrendered his sword.
On April 14th, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a Southern partisan, John
Wilkes Booth. It was the final disaster for the South. Lincoln, with his good
sense, humanity, and love for the Union, would have treated the defeated
states gently and moderately. After his murder the North burned for revenge.
Gangs of Northern politicians ("carpet-baggers") descended on the ruined
South, determined not only to liberate the negroes, but immediately to give
them the vote and put them in power, while the men who had fought for the
South were disfranchised. The state governments thus chosen were the worst
in America's history: corrupt, extravagant, inefficient, and downright
tyrannical. It was not to be expected that white men would put up with them
for long; and they did not. A secret society, the Ku-Klux-Klan, made politics too
dangerous a trade for negro and carpet-bagger alike; white supremacy was
restored, and has been maintained ever since by various and devious means;
but the struggle had the most evil effects on the relations between white and
negro: effects which still remain.
The chief result of the Civil War was the definite and final establishment of the
Union, together with a considerable increase in the Federal government's
power at the expense of the states. Next in importance comes the abolition of
slavery; though with that comes also the "colour question": the question, still
unanswered, of how negroes ought to be treated. With that, too, comes the
political phenomenon of the "Solid South": the South which always votes the
same way, because white men must stand together to hold the negroes in
check. Economically, the South was ruined for fifty years; but the North was
proportionately developed: not ravaged by war, its industries stimulated by
military demands. And, of course, protection became a settled policy: the U.S.
was going to become a great industrial power.
Post-war Development
1870 to 1900 were years of consolidation and development. Population
increased from thirty-one to seventy-six million, of whom fifteen million were
immigrants: English, Irish, German, Italian, Polish, Czech, Jewish, all sorts.
Gold (in California), silver (in Nevada), copper (in Montana), coal and iron
widely in the east and north, oil widely in the west and south-west, were
discovered and exploited in fabulous quantities. In the west the "cattle-
kingdom" was established, and the cowboy joined the frontiersman as a figure
in American history and folklore. In 1869 the Union Pacific railway spanned the
continent, and in 1883 the Northern Pacific. The Santa Fe and Southern Pacific
lines followed. Settlement went with the railways, and the Middle West
became one of the great food-producing areas of the world. European capital
as well as European labour British capital in particular flowed into the
U.S. to help to finance all these developments.
Till about 1870, development had remained in the hands of comparatively
small operators. After 1870 came the Trusts. Vast combinations of capital were
formed, with the object of obtaining monopolies in some section of the
market, or even over a complete field of production. Carnegie and Schwab
(steel), Rockefeller (oil), Armour (beef), Guggenheim (copper), McCormick
(agricultural machinery). Morgan and Vanderbilt were among the chief names
connected with this process. Undoubtedly the Trusts eliminated much wasteful
competition and concentrated vast sums of capital on useful development; but
they were built up by ruthless methods, an the ruins of thousands of small
businesses, they often exploited the public by high prices, and they oppressed
labour. Monopoly is, in any case, totally opposed to the American ideal of
individual liberty and enterprise. Hence a violent anti-Trust movement sprang
up towards 1900. Theodore Roosevelt, President from 1901 to 1908, passed a
series of anti-Trust laws, aimed at preventing the growth of such large
agglomerations and at prohibiting monopolistic practices. Woodrow Wilson,
President from 1912 to 1920, reinforced these laws. The existence of such great
firms as United States Steel, Standard Oil, or General Motors, shows that these
laws have not been entirely successful; but they have been largely successful in
safeguarding smaller firms and preventing the growth of monopoly, for in
these aims they have the general support of public opinion; indeed, even the
biggest of big businessmen nowadays do not favour monopoly: they value the
stimulus of competition. In spite of Rockefeller and his like, the U.S. remains a
free and competitive society.
In the U.S. as elsewhere, industrialism produced a proletariat, but not, at first, a
labour movement. The existence of the frontier, and the variety and volume of
industrial growth, gave dissatisfied workers opportunities of striking out for
themselves, or at the least of changing their employment. They often did so:
labour in the U.S. became, and is still, more mobile than anywhere in the
world. Besides, the American workers were too independent to combine easily,
even with one another. But after the Civil War, the gradual filling up of the
country, and the influx of a mass of poor and ignorant migrants, restricted the
workers' opportunities, just as the formation of Trusts was greatly increasing
the power of employers. Trade-unions had a stormy history, though. Not only
did employers oppose them bitterly: even many workers, and public opinion
generally, thought them as much a danger to freedom as the Trusts
themselves. They were never formally suppressed, but they had to fight for
survival, and in the struggle they developed a tradition of ruthless violence
which is not dead yet. Organizations like the "Knights of Labour" had a short
way with blacklegs, and were in turn opposed by armed guards, private police,
enrolled by the employers like the notorious "Coal and Iron Police" of the
Pittsburg region. In 1886, however, Samuel Gompers founded the American
Federation of Labour, which gradually introduced a better spirit into labour
conflicts.
In spite of this violence, the American workers were never much tempted by
socialism -- individualism remained the American creed. Nor have the trade-
unions formed their own political party: they have preferred to act as
"pressure-groups", influencing members of the existing parties to pass the
legislation they desire. In the long run, this policy proved very successful,
especially after Franklin Roosevelt became President in 1932: in 1935 the
Wagner Act finally forbade employers to discriminate against unionists. Since
then, co-operation between employers and unions has grown remarkably.
Foreign Affairs
Until the Second World War, the foreign policy of the United States was one of
isolationism: that is, on the one hand of keeping European interference out of
the American continent, and on the other, of keeping the United States from
becoming entangled in European affairs. Washington, the first President, began
this policy: in spite of popular clamour, he refused even to lend American
support to the French revolutionaries; and his fellow-countrymen soon came
to agree with him. During the Napoleonic War, British interference with
American trade led to the foolish and fruitless war of 1812; but the Americans
did not fight it to support Napoleon, but (as they said) in defence of "freedom
of the seas".
In 1823, it looked as though Metternich would intervene to destroy the
independence of the newly-revolted colonies of Spain and Portugal. President
Monroe then stated the firm policy of the U.S. in the Monroe Doctrine: the
U.S. would not interfere in the internal concerns of any European power, and
would not permit any European power "to extend its political system to any
part of this hemisphere". The Doctrine was supported by England (it could not
otherwise have been maintained); and, in spite of their past enmity, this was
the beginning of a tacit alliance between the U.S. and England, whose own
policy of non-intervention agreed well enough with American isolationism.
Their understanding was nearly broken during the Civil War, when England
nearly decided to support the South; but afterwards it was, with some
difficulty, restored.
Up to about 1870, the U.S. were busy above all about internal development.
The Mexican War was only fought to secure Texas and the Pacific coast. An
agreement with England in 1846 settled the Canadian border. In 1867 Alaska
was purchased from Russia. But after the Civil War the Monroe Doctrine
raised a new problem. European settlers and capital were pouring into Latin
America, as into the U.S. But Latin American governments were very
precarious, revolutions were frequent, and European interests often suffered. If
European governments were not to be allowed to interfere in Latin America,
the U.S. must take the responsibility of protecting European residents and
property. During the Civil War England and France jointly intervened in
Mexico to secure the payment of debts owing by the Mexican government, and
though England withdrew when the debt-question was settled, Napoleon III
remained to try and set up the Mexican Empire. After the Civil War he was
compelled to give up his scheme; but the problem remained. Hence the U.S.
began themselves to intervene occasionally in Latin American countries. No
doubt these interventions were not always wise and just; no doubt they helped
the interests of the U.S. more than those of the country concerned; but, on
balance, they helped to bring order into Latin America. Yet the Latin American
states, jealous of their independence, naturally resented them. To remedy this,
and to try and form a common policy for the whole of America, the U.S. began
in 1889 to summon periodic Pan-American Congresses: trying to lead instead
of to drive its southern neighbours. This policy has been more successful.
In 1895 a revolt broke out in Cuba against the Spanish government, and this
led to the war of 1898 between Spain and the U.S. Spain was totally defeated,
and at the peace was compelled to hand over, not only Cuba, but also the
Philippines. Cuba was made an independent republic in 1902, but the
Philippines were retained as a U.S. colony. This startling departure from
traditional policy was the work of Theodore Roosevelt, whom we have already
seen opposing the Trusts. A forceful and resolute personality, he was
convinced that the time had come for the United States to assert themselves as
a great power, particularly in the Pacific. The Hawaiian islands had already
been annexed in 1898; the occupation of the Philippines carried American
power across to the east; and Roosevelt then proposed the making of the
Panama Canal, to enable the U.S. to exert its naval power at will in either
ocean. He carried this proposal, too, and the Canal was opened in 1914.
Nevertheless, he did not convert the Americans from isolationism. When the
First World War broke out, the U.S. took no part in it until the sinking of
American ships by German submarines roused them to fight in their own
defence (as they had been roused by the English in 1812); and when, after the
War, President Wilson helped to found the League of Nations, and tried to
bring the U.S. into it, he found himself deserted by his fellow-countrymen. "No
European entanglements" was still the rule. Indeed, the period between the
two World Wars brought American isolationism to its highest intensity; it took
another World War, and the influence of another and greater Roosevelt, to
change the American mind on this matter.
48. Latin America
The term Latin America is applied to all that part of the American continent
which lies south of the Rio Grande: the America which was conquered and
colonized by the Spaniards (in the case of Brazil, by the Portuguese), whose
peoples speak Spanish or Portuguese as their national languages, and are
Catholic in their religion. Latin America at present comprises seventeen
separate and independent states: first Mexico in the north; then the central
American states (called "jungle republics" for more reasons than one) of
Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama; then the
south American states of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia,
Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. There are also four relics of former
colonial empires: British Honduras, and British, French and Dutch Guiana; but
these are not important.
Besides the differences of speech, race and religion mentioned above, there are
three other major differences between Latin America and the U.S., which
explain why the history of the former has been so different from that of the
latter. The first is this: that, while the English colonists were grouped rather
closely (or at any rate contiguously) along the seaboard of north America, the
Spanish colonists were grouped in various centres scattered widely over the
face of a still largely unexplored continent, united only by the despotic rule of
the King of Spain. When that rule was overthrown, there was no hope of
getting them to form a United States: Bolivar, their great "Liberator", tried to
do so, but failed hopelessly; they at once fell apart, and gradually formed the
multitude of states in which they now are.
The second difference is the survival in considerable numbers of the natives
whom the Spaniards and Portuguese conquered. These natives were much
more numerous, and (some of them) much higher in culture than the "Indians"
whom the English encountered; and besides, the Kings of Spain and Portugal
took much more care than any English government to protect their native
subjects against the rapacity of the white settlers; so that the peoples of Latin
America, though outwardly Europeanized, are much more mixed in race than
the inhabitants of the U.S.A. The third difference lay in their political traditions.
The English settlers had been brought up in a tradition of parliamentary
government; when they revolted from England, they had only to apply this
tradition in a somewhat new form. But the Latin Americans had always been
ruled despotically; when they revolted and established parliamentary
government, they were trying a completely new experiment; and the results
were very disorderly as they were, indeed, in most European countries
when parliamentary government was first attempted. Latin America during the
19th century was affected by the same forces as Europe and the U.S.A.
(liberalism, nationalism, anti-clericalism, industrialism and socialism); but the
effects of these forces were different, as were the human and material facts on
which they had to work.
Before 1808 the despotism of the King of Spain had met with little resistance in
the Spanish colonies. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the Revolution
found a certain response among intellectuals, but not enough for the
government to worry about. What precipitated a change was Napoleon's
invasion of Spain, his deposition of the King and his replacement of him by his
own brother Joseph. The Spanish Americans would not accept a French king;
they at once began to act independently; and this experience of independence
during the six years that elapsed before Napoleon's overthrow made them very
unwilling to submit once again to being governed from Spain. This gave the
liberals their chance. Under the leadership of men like Bolivar and San Martin,
with the help of England (who wanted access to South American trade) and of
the U.S.A. (who wanted to eliminate European influence from the American
continent), the liberal movements were successful. In 1822 Spain was
compelled to acknowledge the independence of all her colonies on the
American mainland, and in 1823 President Monroe stated the Monroe
Doctrine, with the intention of making that independence permanent.
Brazil became independent of Portugal in a somewhat different fashion. When
Napoleon invaded Portugal, the King of Portugal actually emigrated to Brazil;
and when Napoleon was overthrown, he was very unwilling to return. In 1821,
however, he resigned himself to doing so; but he left his son, Dom Pedro,
behind him as regent of Brazil. The Brazilians were incensed at his departure.
They had no intention of being ruled again from Portugal, and they actually
persuaded Dom Pedro to proclaim himself an independent Emperor of Brazil.
The results were most fortunate. Pedro I was no democrat; but he, and still
more his successor Pedro II, gave Brazil a long period of good, orderly,
paternal government, during which she prospered more than any other Latin
American state, and much more than her mother-country Portugal. It was not
till 1889 that the Brazilian Empire was overthrown by a liberal revolution; and
even then Brazil did not fall into the anarchy of some other South American
republics. A series of more-or-less dictatorial presidents carried on the tradition
of orderly government set by the Empire; and Brazil became, what she now is,
the greatest state on the American continent after the U.S.A.
The other Latin Americans were less fortunate. Three forms of conflict soon
appeared among them. In the first place, the liberals fought among themselves
for the control of the government. The main force of the revolts against Spain
had come, not from the people, but from the wealthy landholders (mostly of
Spanish blood) who alone had the education and energy necessary for the task.
But, when independence had been won, these wealthy and powerful families
were not at all prepared to settle down and obey laws made by others, or to
abide by the results of elections. If a law was passed which they disliked, or a
government elected which they disagreed with, they were not willing to work
peaceably for repeal, or to wait for a new election: it was quicker to fight.
Revolution thus became endemic. So did the rigging of elections, since no
political party could afford to see its opponents get into power. And so did
dictatorship, since only by dictatorial methods could a government secure itself
against its enemies, who would certainly overthrow it if they were given half a
chance. To these troubles was added, as time went on, a growing conflict
between aristocrats of pure white blood and the natives and half-castes who, in
many states, made up the bulk of the population.
As is this were not enough, the various states were constantly quarrelling with
one another. Each of them developed a fierce nationalism; and, as the country
was largely unexplored, and the boundaries consequently very ill defined, there
were endless causes of conflict, which usually blossomed into wars. The worst
example of this warlike nationalism was given by the infamous Lopez, dictator
of Paraguay. He cherished a design of making Paraguay a great empire, and
with this object did not hesitate to challenge Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
The war, which ended only with his death in 1870, practically wiped out the
male population of Paraguay, which has remained the most wretched of Latin
American states, as its neighbour Brazil is the most prosperous. This
wretchedness did not prevent Paraguay from fighting (1928-35) a war with
Bolivia for the possession of the jungle country of the Gran Chaco: a war
which only ended with the exhaustion of both sides. But to detail, or even to
mention, all the wars fought in Latin America during the 19th and early 20th
centuries would be merely wearisome. Garibaldi and his Italian Legion found
plenty of exercise for their talents.
More trouble has been caused by anti-clericalism. The causes of quarrel
between liberal politicians and the Church were the same in America as in
Europe though it is also true that many Latin American politicians were
particularly attracted by the prospect of looting the Church's wealth. The
results were worse in America. For the Church (apart from any other
consideration) was the greatest educative and civilizing force in Latin America;
and such a force was very badly needed. The states that indulged in anti-
clericalism harmed themselves even more than they harmed the Church.
Mexico, in which anti- clericalism gave rise to outright persecution,
accompanied by murder and massacre, and leading to revolts and civil wars, is
the worst example.
Socialism did not appear in Latin America till the 20th century. During the 19th
century the Latin Americans were engaged in developing their primary
industries, exporting to Europe such commodities as coffee, rubber and beef,
and receiving manufactured goods in exchange. But of course this could not go
on for ever: secondary industries were bound to be developed sooner or later,
and with them developed all the problems associated with industrialism in
Europe, including labour troubles, socialism and communism. From another
point of view, though, this development has been a source of increased
stability in Latin American politics. The second half of the 19th century
witnessed a great influx of European migrants and capital migrants chiefly
from Spain, Portugal and Italy, capital chiefly from England, France and
Germany; and these European nations were bound to look after the safety of
their nationals, and still more of their investments. Pastoral companies, railway
companies, mining companies, oil companies etc. have not only increased the
wealth of Latin America, but have also forced the various states, to some
extent, to put their houses in order. Revolutions grew less frequent,
dictatorships less arbitrary, as the process of development continued. Latin
America was growing up.
In all this, the influence of the United States has been most important. During
the long period of weakness, disorder and conflict that followed the gaining of
independence, the only thing that saved the Latin Americans from European
intervention and conquest was the Monroe Doctrine: which, backed though it
was by the power of the British navy, would not and could not have been
permanently maintained without the growing strength and determination of
the U.S.A. We have seen how the defence of the Doctrine demanded a good
deal of U.S. intervention as time went on if European nations were not to be
allowed to intervene, the U.S. had to assume the responsibility of protecting
European residents and property. Besides, as the U.S. grew in strength and
wealth, they began to acquire interests of their own in the Latin states: oil-
wells, for instance, in Mexico and Venezuela, and the Panama Canal. On the
whole, this U.S. intervention was very beneficial. Yet, with people so proudly
nationalist as the Latin Americans, it was bound to meet with opposition; and
in the 20th century the United States began to be seriously alarmed at their
growing unpopularity with their southern neighbours. It was this which led to
a change in U.S. policy from intervention to co-operation: an attempt to work
out a common policy for the whole of America through the Pan-American
Congresses. This change became especially evident after the election in 1932 of
Franklin Roosevelt, who, with his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, pursued
what they call "the good-neighbour policy" towards Latin America. The results
were satisfactory. Yet some Latin American states, particularly Mexico and
Argentina, remain jealous of U.S. influence and suspicious of U.S. designs. As
U.S. capital and enterprise gradually replaced European on the American
continent, it became necessary for U.S. governments to tread delicately if they
were not to arouse a dangerous nationalist opposition to themselves south of
the Rio Grande.
49. East And West
The lure of the rich Eastern trade had been one of the main impulses which
had moved Europeans in the 15th century to begin their voyages of discovery;
after the success of Vasco da Gama, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English
merchants had established chains of trading-posts in the Eastern seas, especially
on the shores of India and the East Indies, and Christian missionaries had
followed St. Francis Xavier along the trade-routes. They had tried, too, to open
up China and Japan; but in these countries, after some initial success, they had
found themselves opposed by suspicious and hostile governments, and almost
entirely excluded. In southern Asia they maintained the footholds they had
won; but here, too, they existed on sufferance, the native governments being
still quite strong enough to expel them if they gave trouble; it was not till the
18th century that the balance of power began to shift decisively in favour of the
Europeans, and that they were able to begin thoroughly to exploit the
possibilities of the situation.
It would be impossible to give an adequate account of European dealings with
and adventures in the whole of Asia; we shall therefore confine ourselves to
three countries, all of whom have become, through European influence,
important in the modern world: the countries of India, China and Japan.
India
Everyone has noticed the resemblance between Italy and India: India is like
Italy on a gigantic scale. It is a long southward pointing peninsula, with a large
island at its toe; it is cut off from the rest of Asia by gigantic mountain ranges;
south of the mountains lies a broad and fertile plain, watered and drained by
the Indus and the Ganges; and south again are the highlands of the Deccan,
which occupies most of peninsular India. But the resemblance between Italy
and India is merely physical.

Metternich was wrong in calling Italy a "geographical expression", but he
would have been right in so naming India. There is in India a greater diversity
of races, languages and religions than in the whole of Europe. The races are
usually classified in three main groups: the aboriginal Dravidians, the Aryan
Hindus, and the Persians, Afghans and Arabs who had at various times
followed various invading conquerors into northern India; but each of these is
subdivided into innumerable smaller groups, differing from one another in
custom, culture and language, and ranging from the primitive tribes of the
mountains or the jungles to the sophisticated and highly civilized builders of
Agra and Delhi. As for religion, about two-thirds of the inhabitants are said to
practise the Hindu or Brahmanic religion, and most of the other third the
Moslem religion; but even the Moslems are divided into sects, and as for the
Hindu sects, they are too numerous to be classified, and many of them, like the
Sikhs, are really separate religions. Christians form another minority group,
and are also divided into Catholics and various Protestant sects. Besides all this,
the Hindus who make up the majority of the population are divided by caste-
system into a large number of mutually exclusive groups. (The present
nationalist government of India is attempting to break down the rigidity of the
caste-system, to impose one national language, and in other ways to unify the
country; but it is too soon to judge what success this programme will have.)
In the 16th century India had been held in an uneasy and precarious unity by
the power of the Moguls: descendants of Moslem conquerors who had
marched down out of Persia and imposed themselves on the native Hindu
rulers. In chapter 23 we have seen how, in the 18th century, this Mogul empire
began to break down, how the French took advantage of the consequent
confusion to try and get rid of their rivals the English, and how the English, led
by Clive, turned the tables on them. The British East India Company thus
became responsible for the government of two extensive Indian provinces, the
Carnatic and Bengal.
The directors of the Company would have been glad to stop there. They were
merchants, not soldiers nor politicians, and they had no desire for conquest nor
for the responsibilities of government. Repeatedly they urged the governors
they sent out to pursue a peaceful and economical policy. But such orders
could not be obeyed. The British provinces were continually threatened by the
designs of hostile neighbours like the Nabobs of Mysore, or by the raids of
plundering tribes like the Mahrattas; peace and order could only be secured by
war and conquest; and besides, it was impossible for Europeans to view
without impatience and indignation the hideous confusion and distress that
prevailed in most of India believing as they did that they themselves, if only
they had a free hand, could give India a peace and a prosperity which she had
never known, while at the same time extending the power and increasing the
wealth of England. Thus the English were led step by step along the road of
conquest, and they found no secure resting-place till they had reached the
mountains, and had rounded off their achievement by acquiring Burma,
Kashmir and Baluchistan, and by making firm treaties with the mountain-states
of Afghanistan and Nepal. On the whole of the vast territory they imposed law
and order; they suppressed various abuses, such as thuggee and suttee; and
they developed the country by roads and railways, by irrigation schemes, by
mining for coal and iron in general, by applying to India the techniques of
the industrial revolution.
All this was not done without trouble and opposition, which culminated in the
Mutiny of 1857. It is called the Mutiny because it began among the native
troops employed by the East India Company; but its causes were many and
various, and it is best described as the last violent reaction of traditional India
against the process of Europeanization. It was totally defeated; but as a result
the English revised their methods. The East India Company was abolished, and
the government of India entrusted to a Viceroy appointed by, and directly
responsible to, the English government; and he was assisted by a civil service,
recruited in England through very stiff competitive examinations, which was
probably the most highly qualified and best organized in the world. The new
government was much more cautious and understanding in its dealings with
the Indians than the Company had been; in particular, it followed more closely
the principle of indirect rule that is, of ruling through natives as much as
possible. The immediate results of these changes were very good, and for fifty
years after the Mutiny India enjoyed a tranquility and prosperity hitherto
unknown. The most striking consequence of this was the fall in the death rate:
the population increased from two hundred and fifty to three hundred million.
In the next fifty years it was to grow to four hundred million.
But the English had also introduced English education, and the Indians
educated in the new schools (though only a small minority of the population)
soon learned the ideals of liberalism and nationalism, and began to demand
democratic government and independence for India. The English always
insisted that they meant to grant these demands as soon as possible, but that
they could only do so gradually; the racial and religious divisions in India, the
caste system, the lack of education, all seemed to show that the introduction of
democratic government must take a long time. After 1900 the educated Indians
became more and more impatient, and began to demand that the English
should "quit India" and leave the Indians to work out their own salvation. A
few of the extreme nationalists even began to imitate the Russian nihilists in
using the weapon of assassination.
The English still maintained that only confusion and civil war would follow if
they relaxed their grip on India; but they at length decided that something
must be done to give an outlet, or safety-valve, to India aspirations. Indians
were already being admitted to the civil service; but the "Morley-Minto
reforms" of 1909 were intended to provide a sort of introduction to
parliamentary government to those who wanted it. The Viceroy and the
provincial Governors were already assisted by advisory nominated Councils;
the Morley-Minto reforms provided for a great increase in the number of
native members of these Councils, some of whom were to be elected, not
nominated. The scheme was not a success. The Indian members, not satisfied
to be merely advisers, naturally took advantage of their position to criticize and
hamper the work of government. The English were still fumbling for a better
scheme when they were plunged into the World War in 1914.
China
The Chinese are the oldest of civilized peoples. The origins of their high
culture are unknown; but its main outlines were already clear three thousand
years ago, and it was given its own definite and peculiar form about the 6th
century before Christ, through the work of the great teachers Mencius, Lao-
tse, and above all Confucius the most successful moral, social and political
philosopher in the history of the world. We have no space to consider his
system (though it is well worthy of detailed study); but the impress of his
teaching, combined with long years of isolation from foreign influences,
developed in the Chinese a character all their own, very different from that of
other peoples, and particularly different from that of Europeans. They were
unwarlike - - not from any lack of courage, but because they hated war and
despised soldiers; but they were very industrious, very highly skilled in all arts
and crafts, and excellent traders and diplomats. For defence they depended on
their diplomatic skill and on their high prestige: for they had been
acknowledged by their neighbours for centuries as the model of civilization.
They were therefore proud and exclusive: they considered all other peoples
their inferiors, and expected them to behave as such; and hence they were
bound to feel an antipathy towards Europeans, who would not admit these
pretensions.
Their government was a federal one. At the head of it was the Emperor, the
Son of Heaven, who ruled absolutely and by divine right. He appointed the
governors of the provinces. These governors and their officials were members
of a ruling class or civil service composed of scholars, admission to it being
obtained by competitive examinations in the Chinese classics. They were
therefore highly cultured (the most cultured civil servants in the world, with
good right to look down on most of the foreigners they met), but they were
often inefficient and generally corrupt. (At the same time, this charge of
corruption, often and justly levelled at Chinese officials, need not be taken too
seriously. Money was for the Chinese a principal weapon in trade,
government, diplomacy and war: what we should call bribery was the
admitted accompaniment of all transactions: a practice hateful to Europeans
who have a different tradition, but taken for granted by the Chinese.) Each
province was ruled independently of the others, having its own government,
army, laws, customs, and often even language for though the Chinese have
a common literary language and a common script, their local dialects differ
very widely both from the literary language and from one another. The unity
of the Chinese empire was thus more apparent than real; the actual control of
the Emperor over the provinces, and particularly over outlying provinces like
Mongolia, Tibet, or Burma, was often very slight, and his power to resist a
rebellion or an invasion was slighter still.
We must add that Chinese civilization, high though it was, had fallen into a
state of stagnation: Chinese pride had stiffened into a rigid conservatism, and
enterprise was unknown. This was especially obvious in the economic state of
the Empire. An enormous population lived in extreme poverty, cultivating the
soil by methods almost as old as the soil itself, while immense resources and
possibilities of wealth were left unexploited. Europeans naturally viewed this
scene with a mixture of avarice and indignation.
European traders and missionaries had gained a precarious footing in China in
the 17th century; but it was a very precarious footing, liable to be disturbed at
any moment by the caprices of Emperors or governors or local officials. They
were not likely to put up with this situation any longer than they had to; and
as, in the 19th century, the European nations developed their strength, they
proceeded to make that strength felt in China as elsewhere. The first result of
this was the Opium War of 1840-1842.
European traders, chiefly English, had managed to establish a depot in Canton,
through which they imported opium from India and exported tea to England.
The import of opium was forbidden by the Chinese government; but the
traders had been able to bribe the Cantonese officials into winking at it, so that
the trade had grown to immense proportions and become extremely valuable.
In 1840 the Emperor sent a special commissioner to Canton to suppress the
traffic. He at once and without warning attacked all the English ships at
Canton, confiscated all the opium on board (to the value of about 3,000,000),
and imprisoned several Englishmen in Chinese gaols. At this the British
government protested, and when its protests were disregarded sent a naval and
military force to the Chinese coast.
The Chinese were easily and hopelessly defeated, and forced to consent to the
treaties of Nanking and Canton, in the following terms: Hongkong was ceded
to England; an indemnity was paid for the losses suffered by English traders;
the ports of Canton, Foochow, Amoy, Ningpo and Shanghai (henceforth called
"treaty ports") were opened to English traders; and the principle of "extra-
territoriality" was established: British subjects committing crimes in China
were to be tried by British officials according to English law. This affair displays
all the main elements in the Chinese situation in the 19th century; the venality,
but also the high-handedness, of Chinese officials in their dealings with
foreigners; the equal high-handedness of Europeans in dealing with the
Chinese; the utter inability of the Chinese to resist European arms; and the
determination of Europeans not to submit to the peculiarities of Chinese
justice or the barbarities of Chinese punishments. Other European nations, and
the U.S.A., soon secured similar privileges; and the history of China in the rest
of the 19th century is simply a history of further outrages against Europeans by
Chinese officials and Chinese mobs, and of further concessions wrung from a
reluctant Chinese government by European arms or threats. The Chinese were
too proud of their ancient culture, and too contemptuous of foreigners, to
strengthen their country by introducing Western reforms; and for nearly forty
years, till 1908, they were ruled by the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, a most
formidable lady who was the very incarnation of opposition to the West. All
that saved China from complete subjugation was her great size and dense
population, plus the mutual jealousies of the foreign powers, which were
cleverly exploited by Chinese diplomacy.
In 1856 England and France, provoked by attacks on Europeans and on
Chinese Christians, made war on China and extorted the treaties of Tientsin,
which opened six more treaty ports, legalized the opium trade, promised
toleration for Christianity, and engage the Chinese government to receive
foreign ambassadors at Peking. Then the borders of the Empire began to be
encroached upon: England occupied Burma, and France Indo-China, while the
Russians obtained practical control of Manchuria and the Japanese of Korea. In
addition, Russia secured a naval base at Port Arthur, France at Kwang Chow
Wan, England at Wei Hai Wei, and Germany at Kiao Chau. In 1894-5 a war
with Japan ended in another defeat for China, and the Japanese took Formosa
and the Pescadores. After this the Chinese began to play off the Russians
against the Japanese, and so helped to bring about the Russo-Japanese war of
1904-5: the only result of which was to leave Japan, instead of Russia, dominant
in Manchuria. Meanwhile the Chinese had made a last desperate effort to get
rid of the "foreign devils". A secret society, the Patriotic Harmonious Fists,
called by Europeans the Boxers, made plans for a general massacre or
expulsion of foreigners. The Boxers were supported by the Empress, but when
they did take up arms in 1900 they were easily and completely defeated
though not before they had murdered a number of Europeans and native
Christians.
After this it became evident, even to the Empress, that some westernization of
China was necessary, and a commission was actually appointed to study
western institutions and to make recommendations. But by this time many of
the younger Chinese intellectuals, educated abroad or in mission schools, had
come to the conclusion that nothing could be done until the imperial
government had been overthrown. The chief of these (a sort of Chinese
Mazzini) was Sun Yat-sen, who had been educated in the U.S.A., and had there
imbibed liberal and nationalist ideas. His propaganda had much to do with the
outbreak of a revolt in the army in 1911. The Emperor was easily overthrown;
but then, as had so often happened in Europe after a revolution, the liberals
proved incapable of setting up a strong government. China fell into a state of
complete confusion. A republican government was set up at Nanking; but
most of the provinces fell under the control of local magnates, "war-lords",
who ruled practically as they liked. This was the state of China in 1914 a
state positively orying out for foreign intervention when the attention of the
European powers was suddenly distracted from it by the outbreak of the First
World War.
Japan
Japan was discovered by the Portuguese in 1542; and, after the first shock of
strangeness had been overcome, proved a far more fruitful field than China for
Europeans and their ideas. The Japanese had not the exclusive pride and sense
of superiority of the Chinese; they knew that their own culture was derived
largely from foreign sources from China in particular, whence their arts and
their writing and many of their religious ideas had come; and, being an active,
intelligent and curious people, they were quite eager to learn whatever could
be learned from the white men. For many years they welcomed an increasing
number of European traders and missionaries; by 1600 there were about a
million Japanese Christians, and a flourishing trade had been developed with
the West.
In the 17th century, however, the Japanese ruling-class began to become
suspicious of European influences and designs began to fear that their native
traditions and even their independence were threatened by these men from the
West; and they turned to a policy of exclusion and isolation even more severe
and complete than that of the Chinese. Christianity was almost crushed out,
and wholly driven underground, by savage and bloody persecution, and all
European traders were excluded except a handful of Dutchmen, who were
willing to buy very limited commercial privileges by ceremoniously trampling
on the crucifix at the command of their Japanese masters. By 1650 Japan had
become once again a practically unknown country.
During the 19th century, European and American shipping multiplied in the
Pacific, and many contacts were made with the Japanese by shipmasters driven
by stress of weather, or wishing to effect repairs or to renew their supplies of
food and water. But the Japanese government still proved completely
inhospitable: orders were given to fire on any foreign ships which approached
the shores. It was not to be expected that the whites would long put up with
this state of affairs. In the end it was the United States which took the initiative.
In 1853 an American naval officer, Commodore Perry, was sent with a small
squadron to insist that Japan should enter into negotiations with the U.S.
government and receive a U.S. envoy. Small as Perry's squadron was, it was
sufficient to over-awe the Japanese authorities, whose military arrangements
were still those of the 17th century. Thus the American envoy, Harris, was able
to negotiate to a treaty in 1858, which opened up five ports to American trade;
and in the same year Holland, Russia, England and France insisted on being
given similar privileges. These concessions were highly unpopular with the
Japanese ruling-class; attacks were made on Europeans, and a French ship was
fired on by the forts of Shimonoseki.
The foreigners retaliated as one would expect: in 1863 a French squadron
bombarded Shimonoseki, and an English squadron Kagoshima; and in the
following year the French, English and Dutch combined to destroy the forts
and arsenals of Shimonoseki altogether. It was clear that the obsolete forces of
Japan were quite incapable of dealing with modern armaments, and it looked
as though Japan would go the way of China. That she did not was due to the
character of the Japanese people.
In fact, the national character of the Japanese was quite different from that of
the Chinese. They resembled the Chinese in their industriousness, and in their
high skill in all arts and crafts; but they were far more energetic, more lively
and curious, and, above all, they had a strong military tradition, and the virtues
they chiefly admired were the military virtues of courage, loyalty and
discipline. Their system of government was feudal, based on military service.
Their ruling-class, the Samurai, was not a class of scholars like the Chinese
mandarins, but a class of hereditary warriors like the knights of mediaeval
Europe. Each province was ruled by a Daimyo, whose power rested on the
local Samurai; and the whole country was ruled by a Shogun, who was really a
hereditary commander-in-chief. There was an Emperor, the Mikado, but he
was a purely religious figure. He was worshipped as a descendant and
representative of the gods, but he took no part in government. Nevertheless,
the worship of the Mikado gave Japanese religion a much more nationalist
flavour than Chinese religion had Confucius has never become popular in
Japan.
When the Europeans returned to Japan, the chief impression they made on the
Japanese was one of military strength, and the Japanese were not long in
concluding that they must either make themselves as strong as the Europeans
or be conquered by them. They determined to be strong. In 1867 the Shogun
and the Mikado both died; and it was the new Mikado, Mutsuhito, with the
help of a group of patriotic nobles, who carried through the political, economic
and military renaissance of Japan. His measures (particularly the abolition of
the shogunate and of feudalism) provoked some resistance, such as the
Satsuma revolt of 1877; but the malcontents were few in number and were
easily suppressed: the mass of the people took to the new state of affairs with
surprising ease and complete loyalty.
The Japanese reformers had almost everything to do; but they were able to
pick and choose from the best that Europe and America had to offer.
Politically, they began by abolishing feudalism, and concentrating all power in
the hands of the Mikado. Serfdom was abolished, and the serfs became peasant-
farmers. Local government was remodelled on French lines, with departments,
districts and communes ruled by government officials. France, too, with her
Code Napoleon, provided much of the new legal system. For the constitution
of the central government, however, a German model was preferred:
Bismarck's imperial constitution, which left the essential powers of
government firmly in the hands of the Mikado; yet, since Japan was not a
federal state, the upper house of the new parliament was imitated from the
English House of Lords: out of the old nobility a new nobility was formed,
with titles corresponding to duke, marquis, viscount and baron, and these
became, as in England, Peers of the Realm.
For the new army, conscription was introduced in imitation of France; but
when the Germans beat the French in 1870, German organization and German
instructors were preferred. For a navy, it was England, of course, that provided
a model: English naval architects were called on to design the ships, and
English officers to train the crews. However, it was obvious that military
development must depend on industrial development; and the greatest efforts
were devoted to industrializing Japan. Here again, the machines and the
factories and the organizers and engineers were at first taken from England;
but the Japanese industrialists soon showed themselves alive to industrial
growth in Germany and the United States, and able and willing to copy from
these countries, too. Throughout the whole story, the astonishing thing is the
way in which the Japanese were able to adopt and adapt themselves to new
ideas and new methods, without losing any of their own individuality. By 1900
they were recognized as one of the great powers; in 1902 England made a
formal alliance with them as the dominant power in the Far East; and yet they
continued to be essentially and thoroughly Japanese. It is worth noting that in
religion and culture the modern Japanese have proved very resistant to
European influences: indeed, in art the influence has been generally the other
way.
Japanese Policy
With their patriotic and militarist traditions, one would naturally expect the
Japanese to have imperialist ideas; but it was industrialization that really made
them imperialists. Japan is not well-endowed with natural resources; even her
cultivable land is not very extensive for her population, and as for coal and
iron, and the other basic requirements of modern industry, they are in very
short supply. Even more than other great industrial nations, Japan needs to
import large quantities of raw materials, and to pay for them by large exports
of goods. Her wealth lies in the industry and skill of her people; and in Japan, as
in Europe, the spread of modern medicine brought a fall in the death-rate and a
consequent rise in population, which seemed to impose a policy of expansion.
For Europeans, migration offered a possible outlet; but not for the Japanese.
They have proved curiously unwilling to colonize, preferring to live and die in
Japan; in any case, they were excluded by law from countries like the U.S.A.
and Australia, whose governments were fearful of the political and economic
effects of Asiatic migration. Thus Japanese imperialism took the form of
looking for places to exploit sources of raw materials and markets for their
goods; and the most obvious field for their expansion was China, which
Europeans and Americans were already exploiting with so much success. The
little kingdom of Korea, tributary to China, was an obvious field for Japanese
enterprise, and so was the neighbouring, and still undeveloped, Chinese
province of Manchuria.
But now the Japanese came up against two obstacles. The first was Chinese
resistance. The Chinese were reluctantly coming to concede the superior
strength of Europeans; but they were not at all disposed to knuckle under to
another Asiatic state especially one which, like Japan, had borrowed its
civilization from China. They therefore attempted to withstand Japanese
designs. The result was the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, in which the
Japanese proved the worth of their new army by totally defeating the Chinese,
and forcing them to hand over the island of Formosa and the important base of
Port Arthur, and to leave Japan a free hand in Korea. Then, however, the
second obstacle appeared: the jealousy of the European powers, and especially
of Russia, who had her own designs in Manchuria. Russia, France, and
Germany combined to moderate the Japanese demands, and Port Arthur had
to be relinquished. To the Chinese, the rivalry between Russia and Japan
seemed a favourable circumstance, and they proceeded to work it up by
granting Russia a lease of Port Arthur. The Japanese were furious. Still, they
tried for some years to come to an arrangement with Russia, on the basis of
recognizing Russia's special position in Manchuria in return for a recognition of
their own special position in Korea. When these overtures proved useless, they
resolved on war.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 is notable as being the first occasion on
which an Asiatic power defeated a modern European state. Yet this point must
not be exaggerated. Russia was torn by internal weaknesses; her political and
military organization was inefficient; without strong leadership, her
commanders in the field were continually quarrelling; her army in Manchuria
had to be maintained and supplied through the single-track trans-Siberian
railway; and her main naval strength, the Baltic Fleet, had to sail more than
half way round the world before it could fight the enemy. Japan, on the other
hand, was fighting close to her bases, had an army and navy trained and
organized on the best models, had a united leadership, and an admiral, Togo,
who was something of a genius. Besides, the Japanese gave themselves another
advantage by making a surprise attack on the Russian ships in Port Arthur
without a declaration of war. Yet the war was not an easy one. The Japanese
captured Port Arthur, but only after a long siege and with heavy casualties. At
the battle of Tsushima they destroyed the Baltic Fleet (the one crushing victory
of the war), but it was hardly in a fit state to fight at the end of its enormous
voyage. They gradually forced the Russians back in Manchuria, and ended by
winning the battle of Mukden but after that battle they were almost as
exhausted as their opponents. The Russians were then willing to make peace,
not because they could not carry on the struggle, but because of their internal
troubles, and because there was, after all, nothing vital at stake in Manchuria;
and the Japanese were willing to meet the Russians half-way, because, in spite
of their victories, they knew that they were nearly at the end of their resources.
By the Treaty of Portsmouth (U.S.A.) Russia ceded to Japan Port Arthur and
the southern half of Sakhalin, and recognized Japan's protectorate over Korea;
but she refused to pay an indemnity, and the Japanese did not dare to insist.
The main effect of the war was to demonstrate that Japan was really a great
power, and to assure her a dominant position at the north end of China. In
1910 she was able to annex Korea outright. But a secondary effect was to teach
the Japanese a severe lesson on the difficulty and expense of modern war, and
to make them resolve to pursue their aims in a more cautious and subtle
manner. Twenty years were to pass before they would again be tempted into
war.
Another effect was to convince the English that they had been right in making
their alliance with Japan in 1902, and they renewed it in 1912. Wiser than the
Russians, they were prepared to concede Japan a predominant position in the
Far East, so long as she would respect their own interests and investments; just
as they had been prepared to concede a similar position to the U.S. in the
American continent. They were going to congratulate themselves still more on
their wisdom after the outbreak of war in 1914.
50. Europe In Africa
Geographically, Africa is divided into five main regions. The strangest of these
is Egypt, the country of the Nile. This unique river rises far to the south,
among mountains which, though they lie near the Equator, are high enough to
be snow-covered every winter; and the melting of these snows provides the
great summer flood which waters and fertilizes the banks of the Nile. Apart
from the Nile and a few oases, Egypt is either arid or outright desert. For all
practical purposes, therefore, it consists of a narrow ribbon of cultivated land
on either side of the river, broadening out into the great Delta on the
Mediterranean shore.
The second region is the north coast, from Egypt to Morocco: fairly well
watered, especially to the westward on the slopes of the Atlas mountains and
their neighbouring highlands in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. South of this
lies the third region, the Sahara: the great desert which stretches across Africa,
north and south of the Tropic of Cancer, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea:
broken only by a few oases and by the Nile. Not all this region is pure desert,
but it is nearly all too arid for permanent settlement and cultivation. Outside
the oases, therefore, it is inhabited only by a few more-or-less nomadic tribes.
South of this again, we come to the region of the great rivers with their tropical
forests the Senegal, the Gambia, the Niger, the Congo centred roughly
round the Gulf of Guinea, and divided from the desert by a belt of somewhat
higher and dryer land, where the tropical vegetation is less dense, and more
easily permits cultivation and grazing. The fifth region lies to the east: a long
belt of high land running from Abyssinia to the Cape of Good Hope, cleft
midway by the lakes of the Great Rift Valley; a region which, though it runs
from well north to well south of the Equator, is for the most part rendered
temperate in climate by its elevation. Apart from the far north coast, this is the
only region that has proved attractive to white settlers.
The first three regions are inhabited mainly by brown-skinned peoples: some of
native Berber stock, others the descendants of invaders like the Arabs. They are
nearly all Mohammedan in religion. Their standard of culture had once been
high: apart altogether from their earlier history, they had shared in the outburst
of culture which followed the first Mohammedan conquests; but the blight
which gradually fell on all Islamic countries had affected them, too, and by the
19th century they were far inferior, both materially and intellectually, to
Europeans. The inhabitants of the other two regions are chiefly negroes,
primitive in culture and pagan in religion. Abyssinia, however (or Ethiopia), is
a striking exception. Its people were converted to Christianity under the
Roman Empire, and have remained Christian ever since; though their long
isolation from Europe has led to a certain degradation and weakening of their
Christian faith and practice. In recent years European Christianity, both
Catholic and Protestant, has made many converts among the pagan peoples,
but very few among the Mohammedans.
In 1800 Europeans probably knew less about Africa than they had known in the
time of the Roman Empire. The Mohammedan conquest had excluded them
almost entirely from the Mediterranean coast, and had thus cut them off from
the interior. You will remember how Prince Henry the Navigator was
stimulated by the hope of getting round the Mohammedans and taking them in
the rear. The Portuguese did succeed in getting down to the Guinea coast by
sea, and began a trade in gold, ivory and slaves; but once Vasco da Gama had
reached India, the superior wealth of the East beckoned them irresistibly; and,
though they did make settlements in Africa (at Angola, the Cape, and
Mozambique), they did not develop them, but used them only as staging-
stations for their ships on the long voyage into the Indian seas. When the
Dutch took the Cape from them, they used it in a precisely similar manner: a
few thousand Dutch settled there, but only in the immediate neighbourhood of
the coast. The English and the French behaved likewise. They established a
few trading-posts round the Gulf of Guinea, mainly to buy slaves for the
American plantations; but they did not dream of exploring or developing that
most unhealthy region. When the English seized the Cape during the
Napoleonic war, they thought of it only as a naval-station on the route to India;
when Charles X of France, in 1830, began the conquest of Algeria, he thought
only of putting down the Algerian pirates and of acquiring glory and merit by a
successful crusade. Men who had all America and Asia open to them thought
little of the possibilities of Africa.
It was the explorers who changed these ideas. Exploration was an important
part of the great scientific movement which filled the 19th century, and the
vast blank spaces on the map of Africa were a perpetual challenge to European
geographers. The English led the way. In 1788 the African Association, founded
by Sir Joseph Banks, undertook a regular programme of sending out explorers;
the English government, and later, other governments, followed this example.
The story is a fascinating one; here we can only indicate the main outlines.
In 1795-7, Mungo Park began the exploration of the upper Niger; in 1805 he
attempted to trace the whole course of the river, but perished. In 1822,
Denham and Clapperton made the first crossing of the Sahara from Tripoli to
Lake Chad. In 1825, Alexander Laing travelled from Tripoli to Timbuctoo,
where he was murdered the first white man to see that enigmatic city. In
1830, Richard and John Lander at last succeeded in tracing the Niger to its
mouth.
While these discoveries were being followed up, another group of explorers
were solving the mystery of the Nile. In 1856-9, Burton and Speke went inland
from Zanzibar and saw for the first time Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria.
In 1860-3 Speke returned with Grant, discovered the outlet of the Nile from
Lake Victoria, and made his way north to Egypt. On his way he encountered
Sir Samuel and Lady Baker, and they, after hearing his story, traced another
branch of the Nile to Lake Albert. As it was already known that the Blue Nile
rose in Abyssinia, in Lake Tana, the mystery was now solved: the great lakes
and lofty mountains of central Africa explained the size and character of the
Nile.
Meanwhile, further south, a missionary named David Livingstone had become
fascinated by the task of exploration. His first essays were made in what is now
Bechuanaland. Between 1849 and 1856 he discovered Lake Ngami and the
Zambesi (the first white man to see the Victoria Falls), and made the first
crossing of Africa from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. The north then called
him, and in 1858 he discovered Lake Nyasa. A third expedition, in 1865, took
him to Lake Tanganyika, where he heard stories of a great river, and marched
west to discover it the Lualaba. He determined to find out where it flowed.
When no word had been received from him for some years, an expedition was
sent out under Henry Stanley to find him; but, though Stanley found
Livingstone (at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika), he could not persuade him to
return: he was still planning to explore the Lualaba. But he died in 1873, just as
he was setting out.
Stanley took up the task. In 1874-7 he made the greatest journey in the history
of African exploration. Starting from Zanzibar, he went first to Lake Victoria,
which he circumnavigated and mapped; then to Lake Tanganyika, which he
served likewise; then to the Lualaba, where he embarked his men in canoes,
and forced his way past a hundred fighting tribes and dangerous rapids, till he
reached its mouth and proved it to be the Congo.
The chief secrets of Africa were now discovered. We should notice, though,
two German explorers: Rohlfs, who in 1865-7 made the first north-south
crossing of Africa from Tripoli by Lake Chad to Lagos; and Nachtigal, who
went from Tripoli to Lake Chad in 1869, turned east into the Sudan, and came
back by Khartoum to Egypt. Paul du Chaillu is famous, too: the first explorer
of what later became French Equatorial Africa. But later explorers were also
administrators and developers: like Savorgnan de Brazza in Equatoria, Lugard
in Nigeria, Karl Peters in East Africa (Tanganyika); the politicians and the
soldiers were taking over from the geographers.
European Conquest and Occupation
Egypt was the first part of Africa to become really important to Europe. Here,
as in so many other ways, Napoleon was the pioneer. He introduced European
ideas into Egypt with such effect that they survived even after he had returned
to France and the army he left behind had been defeated and had capitulated to
the English. An Albanian adventurer named Mehemet Ali, a man of little
education but of extraordinary natural genius, having fought against the
French with little success, had imbibed clear notions of the superiority of
European ways over Oriental. A master of intrigue, he succeeded in time in
getting himself accepted as Pasha of Egypt both by the Egyptians and by the
Sultan of Turkey, Egypt's nominal overlord, and proceeded to set up
something like a Napoleonic system in the country of his adoption. A thorough
and ruthless despot, he nevertheless gave Egypt the most efficient government
it had had for centuries, particularly in the economic sphere: his introduction of
cotton-growing, for instance, laid the foundations of a new period of prosperity
for Egypt. His intrigues and wars against the Sultan need not concern us: they
were checked by English opposition and led to no result; but at his death in
1849 he left his successor a strong and prosperous dominion.
Unfortunately, none of his successors were men of his calibre. They were
despots, and could do as they pleased; they speedily discovered the possibility
of raising loans from European financiers, for which they were able to pledge
anything and everything in Egypt; but, being in reality quite ignorant of the
principles of modern finance, they apparently thought that loans could be
raised indefinitely and without any necessity of repayment. Ismail Pasha,
Mehemet Ali's grandson, showed himself particularly prolific in expenditure
and in loan-raising, and led Egypt over the edge into bankruptcy. In 1876 he
suspended payment on his foreign debts.
This in itself would not have mattered more than similar action by Mexico or
any South American republic; but there was no United States to protect Egypt,
and there was, by 1876, a very cogent reason why European nations might
want to intervene in Egyptian affairs. This reason was the Suez Canal. The
Canal had been proposed to the Egyptian government as early as 1854 by a
French engineer, de Lesseps. The English government, then controlled by Lord
Palmerston, had opposed its making with might and main; for it was obvious
that such a canal would at once become a major artery of international
communications, of especial importance to England, and that England would
therefore be compelled to safeguard it, even at the cost of becoming embroiled
in Egyptian affairs. But the opposition failed. The Canal was finished in 1869,
and at once Palmerston's prophecy began to come true.
In 1875 Ismail Pasha, in desperate straits for money, was offering his shares in
the Canal for sale; Disraeli, England's Prime Minister, promptly bought them
for England, who now became the principal shareholder in the Canal. When
Ismail declared his bankruptcy in the following year, England and France
arranged a joint commission to control Egypt's finances, and Ismail was
formally deposed and replaced by his son. But when it became clear that a
permanent occupation of Egypt would be necessary, and that the Egyptians
would resent such an occupation, the French withdrew, and the English were
left alone to deal with Arabi Pasha's rebellion in 1881, and then to contrive the
best kind of government for Egypt that they could manage. They did, in fact, a
great deal of good for Egypt, in the way of amending abuses and developing
industries; but they remained in a cleft stick. They could not, with any show of
legality, annex the country outright and indeed, they did not want to; yet
they could not leave the Canal unguarded and the Egyptians were plainly
incapable of guarding it; so they were compelled to bolster up an unsatisfactory
native government by means of an armed occupation and neither the
government nor the occupation was popular with the Egyptians. Incidentally,
England's predominance in Egypt caused intense jealousy among other
European powers. Probably every British government since 1881 has heartily
wished, with Palmerston, that the Canal had never been thought of.
And with Egypt came another headache for England the Sudan. The
fighting Sudanese very different from the Egyptian peasants have always
been troublesome to Egypt, and in modern times the fact that the Nile runs
through the Sudan has added a complication the proper development and
regulation of the Nile irrigation-schemes is hardly possible without control of
the Sudan. Mehemet Ali had brought the Sudanese more or less under control,
and in later years a number of Englishmen had been employed by the Egyptian
government to make this control effective and to suppress the still-flourishing
slave-trade. Between 1871 and 1879 Sir Samuel Baker and General Gordon had
ruled the country with much success. In 1881, however, appeared a religious
leader, calling himself the Mahdi, who declared a holy war against the
Egyptians and the English, and succeeded in uniting most of the Sudanese
tribes under his banner. He was so successful that the English, having their
hands full in Egypt, decided the Sudan must be evacuated for the time being.
Gordon, who was sent to arrange the evacuation, delayed too long, was
besieged at Khartoum, and killed after a long and heroic defence. The Sudan, of
course, could not be permanently abandoned, but it was not till 1896 that the
English felt themselves strong enough to undertake its reconquest. In that year
Anglo-Egyptian forces began moving southwards. The decisive victory was
won by Kitchener, at Omdurman, in 1898 only just in time from the English
point of view. For the French also had their eyes on the Sudan; and,
immediately after Omdurman, Kitchener was informed of the arrival at
Fashoda, on the upper Nile, of a small French force under Major Marchand.
The English were strong enough to force the French to withdraw; but they
were henceforth saddled with the necessity of ruling the Sudan a region of
no particular importance or benefit in itself, but vital to the safety of Egypt.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the continent England had become involved in
an equally vexatious, though less serious trouble. The Boers, the South African
Dutch, had never taken kindly to British rule. They had been accustomed to
doing pretty much what they liked, and the imposition of a regular
government, with regular taxation and so forth, did not please them. Nor did
an increasing inflow of British migrants. But it was the British attitude towards
the natives that most annoyed them, and the abolition of slavery in 1833 (with
very inadequate compensation to the slave-owners) seemed to many of them
the last straw. In 1836 they organized the Great Trek, moving north to found
the republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, where they could be
free from British interference and live their own lives in their own way. For
some time this seemed a satisfactory solution, and in 1852, at the Sand River
Convention, it was accepted by the British Government. But then the natives
took a hand in the game.
The Bantu peoples of South Africa were a strong and warlike stock; and one
group of them, the Zulus, had been organized by a great barbarian genius,
Tshaka, into a most formidable power. Having "eaten up" the surrounding
native tribes, they had no doubt of their ability to do the same for the white
men, and the scattered Boer settlements seemed to challenge them to
accomplish the task. The English were in a dilemma: they could not allow the
Boers to be "eaten up", and yet they could not defend them without taking
responsibility for them. In 1877, in face of renewed danger from the Zulus,
they annexed the Transvaal, were immediately faced with a Zulu war, and,
after some reverses, carried it through to victory in 1879. But, with the Zulu
menace removed, the Boers would no longer submit to the loss of their
independence; they revolted, and in 1881 defeated a small British force at
Majuba Hill. The British government, impatient and disgusted with the whole
situation, decided to cut its losses and restore the independence of the
Transvaal; though the result was that the Boers were left as a hostile power on
the frontier of British South Africa.
While all this was going on, the work of the explorers, and especially Stanley's
great journey of 1874-7, had suddenly reversed European ideas on the values
and possibilities of Africa. It was Leopold, King of the Belgians, who was most
immediately and powerfully impressed. Stanley's revelations of the riches of
the Congo basin struck his imagination; in 1879 he formed the "Brussels
International Association for the exploration of central Africa", and proceeded
to develop it into a sort of international company to exploit the whole Congo
region as his own personal domain. Other nations then awoke to the chances
they were missing, and the "grab for Africa" was on.
In the next twenty years most of Africa was divided up among various
European powers. A kind of fever for exploitation and annexation set in, in
which Belgians were soon joined by English, French, Italians, and even
Germans for Bismarck himself found it impossible to suppress the
imperialist fervour of his fellow-countrymen. He succeeded, however, in
preventing its worst effects, at least for the time being. In 1884 when the
competition was becoming fierce, he summoned a European colonial
conference at Berlin, which laid down rules for delimiting "spheres of
influence" and annexations, and for deciding quarrels about precedence and so
forth, and thus prevented fie hectic scramble from degenerating into war. As it
was, all the competitors got something, even if none got all its desires.
France was probably the most successful. The French already had Algeria and
Senegal, both of which had been thoroughly re-organized under Napoleon III.
In 1881, to Italy's disgust, they annexed Tunisia, and began moving southward
to subdue the troublesome desert tribes. After 1878 they became interested in
the Congo region, and soon annexed and developed the French Congo. From
the Senegal they began moving inland towards the Niger; between 1892 and
1894 they conquered Dahomey, and in 1893 occupied Timbuctoo. They hoped
to establish a great French domain from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of
Guinea, and from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. But they were not quite quick
enough. On the Nigerian coast English traders, after sharp competition with
some French rivals, established themselves in 1886 as the Royal Niger
Company, and proceeded in the next fifteen years to gain control of the whole
of Nigeria, which was taken over as a colony by the British Government in
1900.
The English also held on to and extended their former territories on the
Guinea coast: Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast. Next door to the Gold
Coast, too, the Germans acquired Togoland; and between Nigeria and French
Congo Dr. Nachtigal secured for them the much more extensive territory of
the Cameroons. The French drive to the Red Sea was also halted. In 1896
Major Marchand set out from French Congo to plant the tricolour in the upper
Sudan; but he arrived at Fashoda only to find himself forestalled by Kitchener's
victorious army, and to be forced to retreat. Nevertheless, in 1899 three French
expeditions, one from Algeria, one from Senegal, and one from French Congo,
met at Lake Chad, and proclaimed the substantial occupation of most of North
Africa by France. Between 1900 and 1912 the French rounded off their African
empire by acquiring Morocco though not, as we shall see, without serious
opposition from Germany.
In East Africa it was the Germans and the English who were rivals. Inland from
Zanzibar lay the vast regions of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. The English
had long looked on Zanzibar as a preserve of their own, but in the 1880's a bold
German adventurer, Karl Peters, began to intrude. A German East Africa
Company was formed in 1885, and in 1886 the British formed their own East
Africa Company to counter it; and both were soon busy securing rival
concessions and developing them as fast as possible. In 1890, however, the two
governments came to an agreement over the partition of the whole region, the
Germans being given the area between Lake Tanganyika and the sea (which
became German East Africa) and the English the northern areas of Kenya and
Uganda.
Meanwhile the English were also moving again from the south. Here the chief
figure was Cecil Rhodes, a remarkable and not-too-scrupulous financier and
adventurer, who having made a fortune out of the Kimberley diamond mines,
had become an ardent imperialist, longing to build up a great British African
empire. He wanted to unite all the whites in South Africa under the British
flag, and to push north in central Africa, and link up through Uganda with the
Sudan and Egypt. This was the famous "Cape-to-Cairo" scheme. The hostility
of the Boers to the British was an exasperating obstacle. Rhodes determined to
get round it. In 1884 the British Government had occupied Bechuanaland, west
of the Boer republics; in 1889 Rhodes formed the British South Africa
Company, to occupy and develop the vast territory north of the Boers, now
known as Rhodesia. This brought British territory up to the southern end of
Lake Tanganyika - but there further progress was stopped by the agreement of
1890 which established German East Africa.
The Boers were indignant and alarmed at being thus circumscribed, and now
another problem had arisen to exasperate the feelings between the two white
races in South Africa. The immense goldfield of the Rand was discovered in the
Transvaal; and of course a swarm of gold-seekers (adventurers of all sorts, but
mainly of British nationality) flocked into the country. A bitter hatred soon
grew up between them and the Boers, who were determined to hold them in
check and to keep the Transvaal a thoroughly Boer state. The British
Government naturally sided with the diggers; and, after many years of
provocation on both sides, the Boers at last lost patience and in 1899 declared
war, hoping to drive out the British and make South Africa a Boer dominion.
The war was hard-fought; but in 1902 the superior numbers and equipment of
the British prevailed, and the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were
annexed to British South Africa. Yet the English used their victory with
moderation. They granted self-government to the Transvaal in 1906, and to the
Orange Free State in 1907; and in 1909 they approved a constitution for a
Union of South Africa, comprising the two Boer states, the Cape, and Natal.
South Africa thus became a self-governing dominion. But the new state did not
include, all South Africa: Bechuanaland, and Rhodesia remained separate and
so did South-West Africa, which had been annexed by the German
Government in 1884.

England, France and Germany had thus secured substantial shares in Africa.
Italy, less wealthy and powerful, was less fortunate. Many Italians had settled in
Tunisia, and the Italian Government cherished the hope of making this an
Italian colony; its annexation by France infuriated the Italians, and led them
into joining Bismarck's Triple Alliance; but this did them no good in Africa. In
1884, however, England intimated to them that she would not object to seeing
a friendly power established on the Red Sea coast to hold the Sudanese in
check; and the Italians took fresh hope, and occupied Eritrea. They hoped to
make this a stepping-stone to the conquest of Ethiopia (Abyssinia); but they
were disappointed: after some successes, they suffered a crushing defeat at
Adowa in 1896, and they had not the resources to retrieve their position or
continue a forward policy. Later, however, the growing weakness of the Turks
led them to cast their eyes on Libya. In 1911 they ventured to declare war on
Turkey; and this time they were successful, securing not only Libya, but also
the Dodecanese Islands in the eastern Mediterranean, and recovering
something of the prestige they had lost at Adowa. As Libya was mostly desert,
it was little use to them, and the desert tribes of the Senussi gave them a good
deal of trouble; but they had at least the satisfaction of seeing the area marked
Italian on the map.
By 1914, therefore, the only independent states in Africa were Ethiopia and the
little negro republic of Liberia on the west coast, which no-one thought worth
interfering with. The general results of these annexations were undoubtedly
good. It is true that there are evil pages in the history of the white conquest of
Africa: the early history of the Belgian Congo, of the German colonies, and of
the British South Africa Company, was stained by many acts of ruthless
exploitation; but these were temporary evils, and in any case were balanced by
such splendid achievements as those of Lugard in Nigeria and of Lyautey in
Morocco. In many ways the natives profited greatly. They were delivered from
the evils of chronic inter-tribal warfare and of the slave-trade; human sacrifice,
cannibalism, witchcraft and other abuses were suppressed or held in check;
Christianity was introduced, along with western education; and the natives
generally shared (though not always as much as they had a right to) in the new
commercial prosperity which European traders introduced. They suffered in
many ways, nevertheless, from the disruption or modification of their old tribal
ways and traditional habits of thought and action; and, as they advanced in
culture, it became doubtful how long they would or could endure to be in a
position of permanent inferiority to white men. Europeans could hardly
exclude liberal and nationalist ideas from Africa; and in the twentieth century
these ideas were to wreak havoc on the simple colonialism of the men who
carried out so blithely the "grab for Africa". In 1914, though, all that lay hidden
in the future.

Book Eight - Europe in Convulsions
By 1914 it was obvious that Europe was working up towards an explosion, or a
series of explosions. The conflicting forces of liberalism, of nationalism and of
socialism; the disruption of the old-established political, economic and social
systems, and with them of the whole traditional way of living of European
peoples; above all the new uncertainty about religion not merely about this
or that form of religion, but about the very nature of religion, about the very
existence of God: all these things meant that Europeans were now more deeply
divided among themselves than they had ever been before. Two influences,
two impulses, as we know, have always been present in Europe from the time
of its beginning in ancient Greece: the impulse towards unity and the impulse
towards division and conflict; and in the 20th century it began to look as
though the impulse towards division had finally got the upper hand: as though
Europe were going to tear itself to pieces and finally disappear. And, as the
spread of European influence had carried the same disruptive forces over the
world, it was clear that the whole world would be involved in Europe's
conflicts and would be likely to share Europe's fate.
We cannot yet give a full and calm judgment on all this. For one thing, the
convulsions are still going on and their outcome is still uncertain: we ourselves,
our own interests and emotions, are too much involved in the struggle. For
another, many of the documents and records on which judgment must be
based are still kept secret, both by governments and by private individuals. But
the worst obstacle to giving a full and impartial account of the history of our
century is an immense mass of false propaganda. In an earlier chapter I spoke
of the decline in morality which began in the late 19th century. One result of
this was to weaken men's reverence for truth. They would still tell the truth in
normal circumstances; but when they found themselves engaged on the
gigantic life-and-death struggles which we are going to describe, they were
tempted (and many of them yielded to the temptation) to throw truth to the
winds and to put their trust in systematic lying. False propaganda there has
always been, but never on this scale. In some countries (in Germany, for
instance, under Hitler, or in Russia under Stalin) lying became a normal part of
the machinery of government; and as the government controlled all channels
of information, press, cinema and radio, it was able to suppress the truth most
effectively, so that the real facts about many events will perhaps never be
known. But in all countries, both public and private lying has increased beyond
what our ancestors would have thought possible.
In this Book, then, we must be content to give a recital of the facts, as far as
they are known, and leave judgment of them to later historians.
51. The First World War (1914-1918)
It was this war which, so to say, breached the dam and let loose the waters of
disorder over Europe; and the fundamental cause of it was nationalism. There
were in 1914 six major powers in Europe: England, France, Russia, the German
Empire, Austria-Hungary and Italy; and had they all been ready to co-operate
with one another in their common interest, there need have been no war. It is
easy to see now that they could have co-operated, and that if they had done so
it would have been better for themselves and their peoples and the world.
They were not altogether blind to the situation: in 1899, and again in 1907, the
Czar Nicholas II succeeded in getting international congresses held at the
Hague, for the purpose of setting up an international court of arbitration and
securing a reduction of armaments. An international court, the Hague
Tribunal, was indeed set up, but it had no jurisdiction except over
governments that wished to submit to it; and the disarmament proposals failed
miserably, because of the intense mutual suspicion which the national states
had for one another. Five of the great powers were intensely nationalist; the
sixth, Austria-Hungary, felt her very existence threatened by nationalism in her
own territory and in the neighbouring Balkans, and was determined to
suppress it; nationalism was thus, as it had always been, a twofold source of
trouble.
If every great power had been equally jealous of every other great power, their
jealousies would have balanced one another. Bismarck had aimed at just such a
situation, and had succeeded to a surprising extent. We know how German
policy changed after his dismissal, how Russia allied herself with France against
Germany and Austria, and how the German naval programme induced even
England to abandon her "splendid isolation" for the Entente with France and
Russia. After 1904 Europe was practically divided into two camps of
approximately equal strength, and the only question was whether these camps
would recognize the position as one of stalemate, or whether, in pursuing their
rival ambitions, they would blunder into war.
It is not necessary to study in detail the international crises which stud the
years 1904-1914. There were crises in the Far East, over Chinese concessions.
There were crises in Africa: the French occupation of Morocco especially
provoked vigorous protests from Germany in 1905 and 1911; but in each case
England steadfastly supported France, and the German government did not
push its protests as far as war. But, of course, the area most fruitful in crises
was the Balkans, and it was the Balkans that provided eventually the occasion
of the World War.
The Balkan situation after 1900 was complex, as usual. The Turks still held the
central Balkans, including Macedonia and Albania: areas which were coveted
by the independent states of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Bosnia and
Herzegovina, nominally Turkish possessions, were administered by Austria
though inhabited by Serbs; and Austria also ruled the Croats and Slovenes,
whom the Serbs claimed as their kinsmen. Further east, Roumania coveted the
Austro-Hungarian province of Transylvania, the majority of whose inhabitants
were Roumanians. Austria was therefore determined to keep down Balkan
nationalism; and she now had the powerful support of Germany, who had
replaced England as the protector of the Turks, and was wishful to use Austria
and Turkey to make herself the dominant power in the Near and Middle East.
Russia was, as always, aiming at Constantinople, and was therefore opposed to
Turkey, Austria and Germany, and inclined to support the Balkan nationalists;
and England, once Russia's greatest foe, was now coming to think Germany's
ambitions a worse danger than Russia's.
In 1908 there was a revolution in Turkey. A group of reformers calling
themselves the Young Turks, led by one Enver Pasha, seized control of the
government. They were nationalists, and they proclaimed their intention of
transforming the Ottoman Empire into a powerful and efficient modern state.
Immediately, all those who hoped to make capital out of Turkey's weakness
took alarm. Austria at once annexed outright Bosnia and Herzegovina: Russia
protested, but Germany stood by Austria, and Russia backed down. In 1911
Italy proceeded to make successful war on Turkey to obtain Libya and the
Dodecanese Islands. Meanwhile the Balkan states were" conferring: if they
were to drive Turkey out of the Balkans, it seemed that they would have to act
at once. In 1912, Serbia, Montenegro. Bulgaria and Greece sank their mutual
differences and formed the Balkan League to drive Turkey out of Europe and
to divide the spoils. In October they began the First Balkan War. It lasted only
two months: by that time the Turks had been driven back almost to
Constantinople, and the time had come to distribute the spoils.

It had been arranged that Serbia should get most of Albania, while Greece and
Bulgaria divided Macedonia and Thrace. But now Austria stepped in. The
Austrians were determined that the Serbs should not be allowed access to the
Adriatic; and they were backed by Italy and (of course) Germany. Russia once
more protested on Serbia's behalf, but this time much more vigorously: war
appeared imminent. England then arranged a congress at London, which made
a compromise, but in Austria's favour: Albania was made an independent state.
The angry Serbians insisted on receiving "compensation" in Macedonia; the
Bulgarians indignantly rejected the claim, and started the Second Balkan War,
in which they were opposed and defeated by Serbia, Greece, Roumania, and
Turkey. The net result was extreme tension between Serbia and Bulgaria,
Austria and Russia.
In June, 1914, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was
making an official tour of Bosnia. On June 28th, at Sarajevo, he was
assassinated. The assassin was a Serb, a member of a secret society, the Black
Hand, whose patriotic activities were tolerated, if not encouraged, by the
Serbian government. To the Austrian government this .seemed a heaven-sent
opportunity: the Serbs had put themselves hopelessly in the wrong, and Austria
could therefore stage a definite showdown with Serbia, and, if necessary, with
Russia. The German government was consulted, and promised Austria
unconditional support. On July 23rd, accordingly, the Austrians presented an
ultimatum to Serbia, so severe in its terms that it was obviously intended to be
rejected. The Serbs nevertheless accepted most of its terms, and offered to refer
the others to the Hague Tribunal or to an international congress. Austria
rejected this reply, and on July 28th declared war on Serbia. This was the
decisive action. The German General Staff had already made its attitude clear
by issuing a preliminary notice of mobilization; Russia countered by ordering
full mobilization. But Germany's war-plan depended for its success on her
armies' being mobilized more quickly than those of Russia and France, and so
the General Staff insisted that the German government should immediately
take action. Hence Germany issued an ultimatum to Russia demanding the
immediate suspension of mobilization, and on its rejection declared war on
Russia on August 1st, at the same time demanding from France a statement of
French intentions. The French, who were convinced that they could not allow
Russia to be beaten, replied evasively; whereupon Germany declared war on
France on August 3rd. It was still uncertain what England would do. But
Germany's war-plan demanded a passage through Belgium. The Belgians
refused to grant this, and appealed to England, who had been, with Germany
and France, a guarantor of Belgian neutrality. This appeal decided the doubts
of the English government, which therefore declared war on Germany on
August 4th.
The war thus began with Germany and Austria-Hungary opposed to Russia,
France and England. Italy, the third partner in the Triple Alliance, remained
neutral on the ground that Germany and Austria were waging a war of
aggression; but in May, 1915, England and France persuaded Italy to join in
with them. On the other hand, Turkey joined Germany in November, 1914,
and Bulgaria in October 1915. In 1916 Roumania joined Russia. In March, 1917,
the U.S.A. declared war on Germany. All the British dominions, of course,
were in the fight from the start; and Japan, too, honoured her alliance with
England by declaring war on Germany and attacking German ships and
colonies in the Pacific. It was, in fact, a world war: America and Australia were
the only continents on which there was no actual fighting.
The Germans, owing to their superior armament and speed of mobilization,
held the initiative at the start, and were able to impose their war-plan on the
other combatants. This plan depended on the slowness of Russian
mobilization: it concentrated the bulk of Germany's forces in the West, against
France, hoping to deal a knockout blow there before the Russians could
develop their strength. Against France, the Germans would retreat on the
south and draw the eager French forward into Lorraine; while in the north an
immense German force would wheel through Belgium and northern France,
turn south and then east, and catch the whole French army in an enormous
encirclement: a super-Sedan. France would thus be finished. The little British
Army would be engulfed in the general catastrophe, and it would be long
before England could build up a force strong enough to challenge Germany.
Meanwhile the Germans could dispose of Russia at their leisure.
This plan was bungled. Its author, von Schlieffen, had died in 1912; "and the
man who had to carry it out, the younger von Moltke, had not the nerve for
the task. He was afraid to allow a French advance in Lorraine, and he was
nervous about the Russians; he used troops to guard against these dangers; and
thus his right wing, on which all depended, was left too weak for its task. It
could not take a wide enough sweep, and it could not move fast enough: it was
checked here and there by Belgian, English and French resistance; and the
French had time to recover from their first surprise, to grasp the German plan,
and to prepare a counter-plan. Early in September they were able to launch a
dangerous attack on the exposed German flank; and then von Moltke _lost his
nerve, and ordered his armies to withdraw and take up defensive positions.
This J3attle of the Marne, as it is called, was decisive. The developing Russian
threat soon forced the Germans to transfer large numbers of troops to the east,
and deprived them of the superiority which they needed to crush the French.
They made at first some efforts to outflank their opponents, but they only
succeeded in extending their lines to the Channel, and by November they were
held along a continuous front from the Channel to the Swiss border: a front
which shifted very little during the next four years.
In the east, a somewhat similar result appeared. The Russians invaded along
two lines: into East Prussia and into Galicia (Austrian Poland); in East Prussia
they were heavily defeated and driven out, but in Galicia they succeeded in
driving the Austrians back to the line of the Carpathians before being checked.
But there they were checked, and a line was established in the east as in the
west, from the Baltic to the Roumanian border -- though its extreme length
(900 miles) and the poor communications of the region prevented it from
being, like the Western Front, actually continuous. Meanwhile, Austria's attack
on Serbia had broken down and been repulsed.
On the sea there were no decisive events. The British Grand Fleet,
concentrated at Scapa Flow, dominated the approaches to Germany, and the
German High Seas' Fleet did not venture to come out and attack it. Similarly,
the British and the French dominated the Mediterranean. The German Far East
Fleet, a small squadron of modern cruisers, was forced over to South America
to escape the attentions of the Japanese: it wiped out an inferior British
squadron at the Battle of Coronel, but was then itself wiped out by a superior
British squadron at the Falkland Islands. A few isolated German cruisers, like
the Emden. made sporadic attacks on shipping; but, having no safe harbours or
bases, they were gradually hunted down. By the end of 1914 the British had
secured their own trade-routes and had instituted a blockade of Germany --
though their fear of antagonizing neutral opinion, especially in the U.S.A.,
prevented them from making this blockade really effective.
It was already clear that this was to be a long, exhausting, and bloody struggle.
Never had such masses of men and material been pitted against each other;
never had such destructive weapons been used. The chief feature of the new
conditions of war, was a marked superiority of the defence over the attack. The
modern rifle, and still more the machine gun, gave defenders a vastly increased
fire-power; and the new heavy artillery did not restore the balance, for it was
soon discovered that quite simple earthworks were capable of standing up to a
very heavy shelling. Both sides therefore strove to maintain continuously-
manned trench-systems all along their fronts. The accepted method of breaking
through such a system was to mass a great concentration of artillery opposite
the chosen point, pulverize the enemy lines by days of heavy shelling and then
send the attackers forward behind a moving "barrage", or curtain of shellfire;
but no shelling could destroy the defence: there were always enough machine-
gunners left to give the assault a torrid reception; and besides, the enemy
artillery was not idle. Every battle was therefore a slaughter. One example will
suffice: on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. July 1st, 1916, the British
lost over 60,000 men. The troops engaged in these horrible conflicts showed an
endurance, a devotion, and a heroic courage unmatched in the whole history
of war; but the desperate and deadly character of the fighting made a deep
mark on the minds of all engaged, whether soldiers or civilians: with results
which we shall have to consider.
1915
Seeing that a long war was now inevitable, the Germans determined to begin
by knocking out their weakest opponent, Russia. The Russians were strong in
numbers but weak in armament, and their line was too long to be held in
continuous strength; thus the attack had an advantage in the East which it had
not in the West. Between May and September the Germans won a series of
victories, driving the Russians back 200 miles, taking over two million Russians
in killed and prisoners, and capturing vast quantities of arms and supplies: a
blow from which Russia never really recovered. Yet the main German object,
to knock Russia out of the war, was not achieved: the Russians defended
desperately, and succeeded in maintaining their front, and forcing the Germans
and Austrians to keep vast forces in opposition to it.
Meanwhile the English and French were trying to help Russia. But a difference
of opinion arose as to how this was to be done. The chief military authorities
thought that attacks should be made in France and Belgium; but a minority, of
which the most prominent member was the First Lord of the Admiralty,
Winston Churchill, maintained that an attack should be made on the
Dardanelles, Constantinople captured, and a way opened to reinforce Russia
through the Black Sea. It is generally agreed nowadays that this was the correct
solution; but, awing to the difference of opinion, it was not carried put on a
sufficient scale nor with sufficient speed. The resources of France and England
were divided between the Western Front and the Gallipoli campaign; with the
result that the attacks in both quarters failed. After coming very near to
success, the Gallipoli troops were withdrawn in December, 1915. This is taken
by most historians as a turning point in modern history; for if Constantinople
had been won (as it could have been), then effective help could have been
brought to the Russians, and the Russian revolution and collapse of 1917 would
not have taken place. However, the effort failed; and the attack on the Western
Front likewise failed; and so the only gainers in 1915 were the Germans. In
Qctober. 1915, Bulgaria decided to enter the war on Germany's side; and with
the help of the Bulgarians the Austrians at last succeeded in overrunning
Serbia.
Moreover, in this year the Germans tried a new weapon in sea-warfare: the
submarine. They used it to attack England's commerce, and in this first year of
its operation they sank 396 ships.
1916
This was the year of the great trench-battles. Luckily for the Allies, the
Germans changed their plan, left Russia alone, and decided to try and "bleed
France to death" by a series of enormous attacks at Verdun. From February to
June these attacks continued, with vast losses on both sides, but no significant
gain. The French implored the English to draw off the Germans, so the
English, against their better judgment, launched a similar series of attacks on
the Somme, which lasted from July to December, and achieved equally little
result. Meanwhile the Russians were given time to recover, and in June they
launched a great offensive against the Austrians. Aided by treachery among the
Czechs, they punched great holes in the Austrian lines, drove forward as much
as sixty miles, and persuaded Roumania to join in the war. But then the
Germans, standing on the defensive in the West, were able to bring help to
Austria, to check the Russian advance, and to conquer Roumania.
On May 31st was fought the Battle of Jutland, the only great sea-battle of the
war, when the German High Seas' Fleet was almost caught by the British, but
succeeded in escaping after both inflicting and suffering considerable losses.
The battle itself was indecisive: but, as it convinced the Germans that they
could not hope to defeat the British on the open sea, and persuaded them
henceforth to keep their ships in harbour, it was a strategic victory for England.
More significant was the fact that in this year German submarines sank 964
ships, and food had to be rationed in Britain.
1917
In this year Hindenburg and Ludendorff were given supreme command of the
German forces. They at once took two fateful decisions: to stand on the
defensive in the West while they knocked out Russia, and to declare an
unrestricted submarine campaign: all ships approaching the coasts of France
and Britain were to be sunk at sight. In France they withdrew to a new fortified
line (the Hindenburg Line); and in April a great French attack on that Line
broke down with very heavy losses. To help the French, the British attacked at
Messings (a complete but limited victory) and at Passchendaele (a long-drawn-
out and bloody struggle which achieved little and cost much). Meanwhile
Russia was collapsing. Corruption and mismanagement, joined with a terrible
lack of equipment, had undermined the morale of the Russian army. Mutiny
and revolution took place in March, and the Czar was made to abdicate; but
the revolutionaries failed to establish an effective government, and the Russian
forces gradually went to pieces under the influence of German attacks and
Communist propaganda. In November the Communists were able to stage
their own revolution; in December they asked for an armistice; and in March
they signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which put Russia out of the war. By
this treaty the Germans seized for themselves and Austria the whole of Poland
and Lithuania, and made Finland, Esthonia, and the vast area of the Ukraine
independent states. The severity of these terms was a great mistake: not only
were a million German troops needed to enforce them, but the Allies in the
West were nerved to fight on to the end, seeing what they could expect if they
were defeated.
The unrestricted submarine campaign was another disastrous error. At first it
achieved enormous success, 2000 ships being sunk in this year; but it also
brought the U.S.A. into the war. The Americans had already been exasperated
by German attacks on their ships; in April, 1917, on the advice of President
Woodrow Wilson, their Congress voted for war. This immediately enabled
England to institute a really effective blockade of Germany. But the Americans
had only a small army and it was not till the middle of 1918 that they could
train enough troops to play much of a part on the Western Front.
1918
Germany and Austria had now won in the East; but they were facing slow
strangulation from the blockade, and they had before them the prospect of
becoming more and more inferior in numbers as the American troops came
into the field. Hindenburg and Ludendorf? therefore decided to risk everything
in attempting a quick knock-out of France and England. They had developed a
new technique of attack, which they had tried out very successfully against
Italy at Caporetto, in October, 1917. Italy almost went the way of Russia: the
Italians only saved themselves by rapid retreat to the Piave, where, with
English and French help, they were able to form a new line. But now the
English and the French were to be assailed in the same way.
Between March and July the Germans staged four huge attacks in the West: on
the Somme, at Ypres, and on the Marne. In each case they achieved great initial
success; but in each case their advance was gradually slowed down by stubborn
resistance and by transport difficulties, till at last they were held up and the line
was restored. Nowhere did they achieve the decisive "break-through" which
they needed; but they suffered fearful losses and exhausted their reserves. By
July they were, both in numbers and equipment, inferior to their enemies. And
those enemies had learned one lesson at least from their defeats: they had
established a united command, putting at its head a French soldier, Marshal
Foch; and Foch now organized the final attacks the Hundred Days'
Offensive, July to December, 1918.
Foch designed no decisive break-through, but a continuous series of co-
ordinated attacks. Thus, on July 21st the French attacked on the Marne, and
forced the Germans to rush their reserves to that sector; but then the French
halted, and on' August 8th the English attacked on the Somme, and the
Germans had to move men to meet this threat; while the Americans were only
waiting till the English were held up to launch their own attack further south.
Thus the Germans, nowhere decisively defeated, were yet forced into
continuous retreat; and the morale of their troops began to give way under the
strain, just as the morale of their civilian population was giving way under
starvation imposed by the blockade. By October it was evident that the war
was lost, and the spread of liberal and socialist propaganda raised fears of a
revolution; so the Emperor William II instructed his Chancellor, Prince Max of
Baden, to ask for an armistice. This was signed on November llth, in terms
which left Germany at the mercy of her enemies.
Meanwhile, Germany's allies had been collapsing. In Austria-Hungary,
October, 1918, saw the establishment of separatist governments in Bohemia,
Hungary and Croatia, while the Poles in Galicia joined the new Poland which
was being set up, in the hour of Germany's and Russia's weakness, by Pilsudski
and Paderewski. And the Italians attacked in force and won the battle of
Vittorio Veneto, and the Austrian government sued for peace though not in
time to prevent a liberal and socialist revolution in Vienna itself against the rule
of the Hapsburgs.
The Turks also collapsed. They had repulsed the Gallipoli attack, and had held
in check the attempts of the Russians and the British to advance from Armenia,
Mesopotamia and Egypt; but by 1918 they were exhausted, and in September
of that year the British commander Allenby, helped by the revolting Arabs
under Lawrence, utterly defeated the Turks in Palestine at the Battle of
Megiddo, and soon after received the surrender of Turkey. Peace was at last
restored to the world, by what seemed the complete victory of the Western
Allies.
1919
The statesmen of these Allies proceeded to impose a peace settlement on
Europe. It is known as the Versailles Settlement, though actually five treaties
were signed: the Treaty of Versailles with Germany, the Treaty of St. Germain
with Austria, the Treaty of the Trianon with Hungary, the Treaty of Neuilly
with Bulgaria, and the Treaty of Sevres with Turkey the last one being
replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. It will be convenient to rehearse
the terms of these treaties all at once.
Military Terms: Nearly all the German navy, all German submarines, tanks,
air-craft and heavy artillery, and three-quarters of Germany's machine-guns,
were confiscated. In future Germany was to have only a long-term professional
army of 100,000 men, and a navy of 15,000 without tanks, aircraft, heavy
artillery or submarines. (Similar terms were imposed on Austria, Hungary,
Bulgaria and Turkey.) The left bank of the Rhine, and a thirty-mile-wide strip
on the right bank, was to be a de-militarized zone. And an army of occupation
was to remain on the Rhine for fifteen years, or until the Allies were satisfied
with Germany's payments of reparations Territorial Terms: From the German
Empire. West Prussia and Polish Silesia were given to the newly-erected state
of Poland. Alsace and Lorraine to France, the small territories of Eupen and
Malmedy to Belgium, and all the German colonies to the League of Nations.
The Austrian Empire was broken up into the republics of Austria, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia; while Galicia went to Poland, Transylvania to Roumania.
Bosnia. Herzegovina. Croatia and Slavonia to Serbia (now called Yugoslavia),
and the Trentino and Trieste to Italy.
The Turkish Empire was broken up into Turkey (Asia Minor with
Constantinople) Arabia. Mesopotamia (Iraq), Transjordania, Palestine and
Syria. Of these, Turkey and Arabia were independent states; Iraq and
Transjordania were, in effect, British protectorates; Palestine was a British
mandate from the League of Nations, and Syria was a French mandate.
Russia, now in the throes of revolution and civil war, lost all her western gains
since Peter the Great: Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland became
independent states, and Bessarabia was restored to Roumania.
Economic Terms: Germany was sentenced to pay reparations for the war;
these were at first left vague, but were eventually assessed at 6000,000.000. All
German merchantmen of over 1000 tons, and all German property in Allied
countries, were confiscated. The coal of the Saar basin was to go to France for
fifteen years. An international commission was set up to control traffic on the
German rivers especially the Rhine and the Danube.

Moral Terms: Germany was formally proclaimed responsible for the war and
unworthy to hold colonies. Finally, the League of Nations was established.
The men chiefly responsible for these terms were Lloyd George of Great
Britain, Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the U.S.A. All three
accepted the principles of liberalism and nationalism, and were determined to
have them applied all over Europe. In addition, though, Clemenceau was
preoccupied with saving France from a future resurgence of Germany, Lloyd
George with safeguarding England against Germany's commercial and naval
power. Wilson alone had no national axe to grind, but he was determined to
have his favourite dream of a League of Nations established. Hence the
curiously mixed character of the treaties.
The basic principles which governed the settlement were, therefore, liberalism
and nationalism. The idea was to give independence to every nationality in
Europe, and to establish everywhere democratic governments, so that
unavoidable minorities would at least have representation in parliaments.
Hence independence was given to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia and
Finland; and Czechs and Slovaks (since neither could stand alone) were
combined into Czechoslovakia; Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Slavonia
became Yugoslavia ("the Serb, Croat and Slovene State"); and Alsace and
Lorraine were given back to France.
But it is impossible to draw hard and fast frontiers in central Europe: there will
always be a minority on one side or the other. In 1919 the frontiers were so
drawn that all the minorities belonged to former enemy nationalities
Germany, Austria, and Hungary, and also Russia, which, being Communist,
was now looked upon as an enemy. Hence there were Russian and German
minorities in Poland; there were German and Austrian minorities in
Czechoslovakia (especially the Germans of the Sudetenland, which was given
to the new state to provide it with a defensible frontier); there were
Hungarians and Bulgars in Roumania, Bulgars in Greece and Yugoslavia,
Austrians in Yugoslavia and Italy, and even a few Germans in France and
Belgium. These minorities were a source of weakness to the new states, and a
perpetual grievance to Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia.
Furthermore, the new states were fiercely nationalistic, and insisted on trying
to "nationalize" the minorities. They were also jealous of their new-won
independence, and therefore slow to co-operate economically or politically,
with other nations, especially "enemy" nations.
This settlement has been called the "balkanization" of Europe. It was a
settlement which could not endure for long without being policed by a strong
power or group of powers. The League of Nations was meant to dp this duty
(hence it was looked on by the defeated nations as "the watchdog of
Versailles") ; but the strength of the League depended on close and constant
co-operation between its members, and this was not forthcoming. England at
first supplied the want in the Middle East; and France tried to supply it in
Europe forming an alliance with Poland, and the Little Entente with
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Roumania; but these states were uncertain
partners, and the arrangement could only endure so long as the French (and, in
the Middle East, the English), were willing to bear the burden of the great
armaments necessary for its defence. Even so, it could hardly be maintained if
Germany, or Russia, or both, should grow strong again. As it happened, a
weakening of the French and English will to persevere coincided with a return
to power of Germany and Russia.
The faults of the settlement are generally summed up in these terms. Germany
was humiliated and penalized, but her unity, population and wealth were not
seriously impaired. Central Europe and the Middle East were split up into a
number of small and fiercely nationalistic states, the predestined prey of a
strong power. Economically, as we shall see, the .determination to extract
reparations from Germany on such a huge scale was a mistake -- one of the
main causes of the Great Depression. And the fact that the League of Nations
was founded at Versailles gave it a bad start. (The U.S.A., we may remark here,
refused from the first either to sign the Treaty of Versailles or to join the
League of Nations.)
52. The Peace Movement
The history of Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire has been the history
of the development of national divisions: Europe being gradually split up into a
number of separate national states, rigidly partitioned off from one another.
(The Versailles Settlement was, of course, the culmination of this
development.) Many attempts have been made to do away with these
divisions, or to set up some kind of federal unity in Europe. The Holy Roman
Empire was one such attempt; but it was too German to be accepted by other
Europeans: even the Italians, with their tradition of empire, rejected it. For a
time during the Middle Ages it looked as though the Popes would come to be
accepted as the overlords of Europe; but the Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism
and the Reformation destroyed that possibility.
The religious wars ended by making still deeper the divisions in Europe, and
many statesmen in despair adopted the principle of the Balance of Power; they
thought that the best hope of peace lay in establishing and preserving a balance
among the rival national ambitions, so that each should have a reasonable
chance of development. This was particularly the English solution, but many
continental statesmen, like, Metternich and Talleyrand, accepted it. Napoleon
tried to solve the problem by setting up the hegemony of France, but only
succeeded in proving that no one nation could rule over Europe. Metternich
then attempted to establish the Metternich System: European affairs were to be
controlled by the major powers, meeting in frequent congresses. But this, too,
broke down: partly because of the selfishness of the powers, and partly because
Metternich tried to use it as a weapon against the forces let loose by the
Revolution, so that the Metternich System came to be identified with the
defence of the Old Regime. Nevertheless, it gave rise to the 19th century
concept of the concert of Europe, the idea of which was that all important
international questions were to be settled by congresses of the great powers
called for that purpose. This worked fairly well for a time. The Congress of
Berlin in 1878 settled (for a time) the Eastern Question, and the colonial
congress of Berlin in 1884-5 helped to settle the division of Africa. The final
example of such concerted action was the London Congress of 1913, followed
by the Treaty of Bucharest: another attempt to settle the Eastern Question.
Meanwhile the immense growth in the size and destructiveness of armaments
caused by the adaptation of machinery to military purposes began to cause
alarm. In 1898 and 1907 the Hague Conferences were held, to limit armaments
and to establish methods of arbitration for international disputes. The
proposals for disarmament were ineffective, but a permanent international
arbitration court (the Hague Tribunal) was set up, consisting of eminent
lawyers chosen by the various nations (four from each) to which all nations
were invited to submit their disputes for settlement. But in 1914 the Austrians
refused to submit their quarrel with Serbia either to a European congress or to
the Hague Tribunal.
The fearful slaughter of the First World War led to proposals for a permanent
organization, a League of Nations, to prevent future wars. These proposals
were first put forward by private individuals, especially in England and the
U.S.A.; but as they became popular they were gradually adopted by politicians,
until finally Woodrow Wilson made the establishment of a League of Nations
one of his Fourteen Peace Points, and had it written into the Treaty of
Versailles. All the nations that signed the Treaty were therefore included in the
League of Nations - - except Germany, which remained excluded for many
years.
The document which formed the League (its constitution) was called the
Covenant. The following are the main points from this document.
The objects of the League were stated to be twofold: to maintain peace among
its members, and to maintain peace in the world at large. The methods relied
on were as follows. No member was to make war on another member without
first submitting the affair to arbitration or to the Council of the League; all
members must accept the decision of that Council if it was, excluding the
contending parties, unanimous. The League would also offer itself as a
mediator between non-members, would try to promote the conclusion of
agreements to try arbitration instead of war, and would work for a limitation
of armaments.
It was laid down that in future all treaties between members of the League
were to be public, consonant with the terms of the Covenant of the League,
and revisible at the instance of the League.
In taking over the former German colonies, and parts of the Turkish Empire,
the League attempted to introduce a new colonial policy. These territories
were handed out as "mandates" to members of the League. The mandatory
powers were to help the backward peoples of these colonial territories, and
were to govern at their own cost, without profit to themselves, and under the
supervision of the League, to which they were to submit annual reports on
their administration. No military or naval bases were to be established on
mandated territories.
As for membership of the League, any self-governing state might become a
member, if two-thirds of the existing members agreed to its admission.
The "government" of the League was to consist of two "Houses", an Assembly
and a Council. The Assembly consisted of representatives of all the members,
each member having one vote. The Council consisted of representatives of the
great powers (England, Italy, France and Japan), together with four other
members, to be elected every three years by the Assembly. (Later, Germany
and Russia were admitted as permanent members, and the number of elected
members was raised to eleven.)
Disputes might be submitted to either the Council or the Assembly, according
to the will of the disputants. Decisions by either body were not binding unless
unanimous.
The League was also equipped with a Secretariat: a sort of permanent civil
service of clerks and officials, under a permanent secretary-general chosen by
the Council with the approval of a majority of the Assembly. Its work was to
collect information, draw up documents, and perform other secretarial work.
In general, the League tried to popularize, centralize and publicize
international meetings, agreements, and action. In regard to the prevention of
war, it relied on arbitration, on disarmament, and on open (as opposed to
secret) diplomacy. Recalcitrant members were to be penalized by "sanctions":
that is, by the breaking off of diplomatic, financial and commercial relations
with the offender; and by "military sanctions" (that is, war) if necessary. As a
permanent congress for the discussion of international problems, the League
proved very useful; but, except in a few minor instances (such as the dispute
between Finland and Sweden over the Aaland Islands), it proved unable to
impose its will on disputants.
The main cause of its failure was much the same as the main cause of the
failure of the Metternich System: namely, the unwillingness of its members,
especially of the great powers, to submit their own interests to the League's
judgement. The League was supposed to have powers of arbitration; but the
nations were not only unwilling to submit their causes to judgment: they were
also unwilling to back up the League's authority by imposing "sanctions" on
recalcitrant members, which would entangle them (so they said) in quarrels
which were not connected with their own interests. The most notable
examples of refusals to submit were Japan's in 1931, over the invasion of
Manchuria, and Italy's in 1935, over the invasion of Abyssinia. It was against
Italy in 1935-6 that the only serious attempt was made to impose sanctions; it
broke down because the smaller nations were not willing to impoverish
themselves by imposing economic sanctions, and the larger nations would not
take the risk of war involved in military sanctions. Besides this, the refusal of
the U.S.A. to become a member weakened the League, but probably not very
much: in view of the reluctance of the U.S. to undertake any foreign
commitments after 1919, it is not likely that its membership of the League
would have made much difference.
Nevertheless, the League did good work in promoting international co-
operation in non-controversial matters, such as the suppression of the drug
traffic. And three institutions set up under its auspices became important. The
first was the Permanent Court of International Justice, which was intended to
replace the Hague Tribunal. It consisted of fifteen judges, elected by the
Assembly and the Council, each judge serving for nine years. Nations were not
bound to submit disputes to the judgment of the Court, but might bind
themselves to do so if they wished. The object of the Court was not to decide
political disputes, but disputes about the application and interpretation of
international law and treaties. The second institution was the Bank of
International Settlements, which was first established under the Young Plan of
1929, to deal with the collection and distribution of German reparations. It was
governed by a board of directors composed of the respective Governors of the
central banks of England, France, Italy, Belgium Germany, Japan and the
U.S.A., and of nine other members, chosen by these Governors jointly from
lists submitted by them individually. It was empowered to deal, not only with
reparations, but also with all other international settlements, except when the
central banks of the countries concerned objected; it could also issue loans to
countries through their central banks. Since the Second World War, these
functions have been further developed by the World Bank. The third
institution was the International Labour Office, consisting of delegates
representing the workers, employers and governments of the members of the
League. One of the difficulties of improving the conditions of labour in
different countries is that, if one country improves conditions, it may, by
raising costs of production, put itself at a disadvantage compared with other
countries in international trade. The main object of the I.L.O. was to avoid this
by co-ordinating labour policies in different countries. It had considerable
success, especially on the European continent.
The League also did excellent work in co-ordinating the efforts of the various
nations for the settlement of refugees and so on; in fact, it was effective in
promoting international cooperation wherever such co-operation was
obviously in everyone's interest; but when it came up against the spirit of
nationalism it almost invariably failed. This is seen most clearly in the history
of the movement for disarmament.
Disarmament
When the military terms of the Treaty of Versailles were being worked out, a
clause was inserted, at the instance of President Wilson, to the effect that the
disarmament of Germany was only a preliminary to universal disarmament,
and the Allies bound themselves to disarm as soon as possible after the war.
But the various conferences which were held about this between 1919 and 1934
failed almost entirely to achieve anything. Apart altogether from such special
problems as the necessity for a North-West Frontier Force in India, and for a
Foreign Legion, or its equivalent, in French Africa, there were many general
difficulties in the way of disarmament. For instance, the French were unwilling
to disarm on land, because their commitments on the Continent (such as the
Polish alliance and the support of the Little Entente), which they maintained
were essential for their security, demanded large military forces; the English
were unwilling to disarm at sea, because their security, they said, depended on
the safeguarding of their long trade-routes. Attempts to outlaw particular
weapons also failed: the French, for example, refused to give up submarines,
which are pre-eminently the weapon of a small navy; the English refused to
give up bombing planes, because they were useful in keeping refractory tribes
in order.
The Germans always maintained that the failure of the Allies to disarm was a
breach of the Treaty of Versailles, which justified Germany in her efforts (more
or less secret at first) to re-arm. There was a disposition in England and the
United States to admit the justice of this plea; but the French used to reply,
truly enough, that the disarming of Germany had never been thoroughly
carried out, and that therefore this particular clause in the Treaty remained a
dead letter. The truth was that general disarmament was impracticable without
the establishment of some kind of international police-force to safeguard peace:
just as the disarming of individual citizens is impracticable unless there is a
police-force strong enough to secure them from violence. In 1932 France
proposed the establishment of such a force, but the proposal was not accepted;
and indeed, it is hard to see how it could have been put into practice.
In studying the history of the disarmament movement, a distinction must be
drawn between general disarmament and naval disarmament. In the latter field
some results were obtained, perhaps because fewer nations were involved. The
chief events in naval disarmament were the Washington Conference of 1921-2,
the Geneva Naval Conference of 1927, and the London Naval Conference of
1930.
At the Washington Conference the chief nations represented were the United
States, England, Japan, France and Italy. Its chief result was the Washington
Treaty in which three things were agreed to. Firstly, the number of capital-
ships and aircraft-carriers owned by each of these countries was to be kept
proportionate to the numbers held by the others, in the ratio of five to the
United States, five to England, three to Japan, one point six seven to France and
one point six seven to Italy. Secondly, in future no capital ship might be
replaced till it was twenty years old. Thirdly, a "naval holiday" was declared for
ten years, during which no capital ships were to be built. A capital ship was
defined as a ship of more than ten thousand tons, with guns of more than
eight-inch calibre.
The Geneva Naval Conference was an attempt to limit the numbers of
cruisers, destroyers and submarines. It failed, chiefly because the English and
the Americans could not agree on the matter of cruiser-strength the English
preferring light cruisers and the Americans heavy ones.
The London Naval Conference solved the cruiser question by a compromise,
which was accepted by the United States, England and Japan in the London
Naval Treaty. France and Italy also attended the Conference, but failed to
reach an agreement with each other. Japan, too, was already dissatisfied with
her inferiority to the United States and England, and in 1934 she gave notice
that, unless she was granted equality she would withdraw from the Treaty.
This she did in 1937, and by so doing put an end to the possibility of naval
disarmament.
General disarmament had already failed. In 1921 the League of Nations had
appointed a commission to examine the question and to make proposals. It was
immediately seen that the great problem was to provide some security to take
the place of the security given by armaments. With this in view, the
disarmament commisson, in 1923, formulated a Treaty of Mutual Assistance to
be signed by all the powers. But the powers unanimously refused to sign it.
Therefore a second plan was proposed, in the so-called Geneva Protocol: "a
protocol for the pacific settlement of international disputes". This was accepted
by some states, but not by any of the great powers, whose objection was that
they would have to bear the main cost of dealing with any trouble that should
arise, and that they were not willing to get themselves entangled in questions
that did not touch their individual security. Accordingly, in 1925 the League
appointed another commission to prepare for a general disarmament
conference of all the powers, and this preparatory commission drew up a "draft
convention" for the delegates to the conference to consider. The League
ratified this convention in 1930, and appointed February, 1932, as the date of
the opening of the conference itself.
Meanwhile, new efforts had been made to remove international distrust: a
mass of covenants, agreements, pledges of all kinds were signed; but they
remained only scraps of paper. The most famous of these was the Kellogg-
Briand Pact of 1928. Kellogg was then the U.S. Secretary of State, and Briand
Premier of France, and in their pact they agreed not to go to war with each
other, but to settle all disputes by peaceful means. They then invited other
nations to adhere to the Pact. By 1931 sixty-two nations had done so. But the
effect was nil. One result was the appearance of undeclared wars: thus, when
the Japanese wanted to invade China they did not declare war, but asserted
that their action was only "police-action" for the restoration of order, and that
therefore it did not violate the Kellogg Pact.
The Disarmament Conference finally met at Geneva in 1932, as proposed. It
was a total failure. What chance of success it might have had was destroyed
when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. In 1934 it was dissolved.
This is but a brief sketch of the disarmament movement, and gives only a
feeble idea of the multitude of efforts, meetings, proposals, conventions made
by both governments and private citizens during these years. Their utter
failure was due to many things, but most obviously to the continued growth of
nationalism. The tremendous force of national feeling was now reaching its full
strength, and was splitting the whole world into watertight compartments: into
national groups filled with pride, ambition and self-love, and intensely jealous
and suspicious of all other national groups, which were looked on as
competitors and rivals. The most ridiculous, though not the most dangerous,
example of this is the rivalry between England and the United States, which
made it so difficult for them to agree about naval disarmament. If these two
states could not agree, what prospect was there of agreement between France
and Germany? And there was no unifying force, political, economic, social, or
religious, which could counteract the disruptive effect of nationalism. On the
contrary, such developments as the rise of communism and fascism, the
abandonment of free-trade and free migration, the growth of colour-prejudice
and so on, tended rather to assist nationalism and to divide the nations still
further. In spite of their dread of war, the nations could not bring themselves to
trust one another and alas, perhaps they were right.
53. The Decline Of Liberalism
The years from 1919 to 1939 were disastrous ones for liberalism. In 1919 it
seemed to have triumphed: the fall of the Kaiser, the Czar, the Austrian
Emperor and the Sultan of Turkey removed the last of the old autocratic
regimes in Europe, and even in Asia the Manchu Emperors of China had
disappeared. Yet before 1939 liberal government had been abolished in Russia,
Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece and
Turkey; and Hungary Roumania and Bulgaria retained little more than an
appearance of it. Great Britain, France, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries,
Holland and Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland were the only
European countries in which parliaments still functioned freely. And even in
these countries economic liberalism was overthrown: free trade ceased to exist,
and governments began to extend over commerce and industry a closer and
more rigid control than ever before.
The main causes of this collapse of liberalism were nationalism, which put
national strength above individual liberty, and socialism, with its emphasis on
equality; but both were helped by the immense growth of industrialism.
Industry became so vast, and was organized in such enormous combines and
kartels of capitalist power and wealth, that even the most liberal of peoples
came to think that it must be controlled in the public interest and socialists
and nationalists alike took advantage of this necessity. Thus it was that, in
country after country, nationalist and socialist dictatorships came to take the
place of paliaments. The two main "types" of these dictatorships were Russian
Communism and Italian Fascism.
Communism in Russia
By 1914 Russia was growing ripe for revolution. Yet the number of active
revolutionaries was still small, since they had to be recruited from the
educated, the "intelligentsia", who alone could keep in close touch with
western ideas. They were hampered and held underground, too, by the activity
of the secret police. But they had hoped in the inefficiency of the Czarist
government; and the experience of 1905 had shown them that, if the
government made a really bad blunder, they could count on being supported
against it by the mass of the people.
They were, however, divided amongst themselves. There were four main
revolutionary parties. The Constitutional Democrats were liberals, who
thought merely of establishing a constitutional monarchy like that of England,
with a free parliament, freedom of speech and of the press, and so on. The
Social Revolutionaries also wanted a liberal government; but they wanted, as
well, a transference of land from the nobles to the peasants they might be
called the "peasant party". Then there were the Social Democrats: Marxists
who wanted to establish a communist state; but they were themselves divided
into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks wished to attain their end by
parliamentary and democratic methods, and were prepared to co-operate with
the other revolutionaries at least until a liberal government had been set up;
the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, despised them as unpractical dreamers. Lenin
maintained that it was useless to think of establishing socialism through a
"mass-party" appealing for votes, like the political parties of parliamentary
countries: the socialist revolution was so vast that it could only be carried
through by a dictatorship the dictatorship of a comparatively small group of
carefully selected revolutionaries, trained and determined, who would
"liquidate" capitalism and impose socialism. This, he asserted, was what Marx
had meant by the "dictatorship of the proletariat". This idea of government by
a small party, not elected but selected, and admission into which was difficult
to obtain, was a very fruitful one: nearly all the dictatorships set up after 1919
were patterned on it. In this, Lenin was certainly a pioneer.
It was the First World War that gave the Russian revolutionaries their chance.
Russian industry was not capable of supplying the armies on the scale required
by modern war, and the failure of the Gallipoli campaign prevented England
and France from sending sufficient help. This, coupled with the corruption and
inefficiency of the bureaucracy, led to the frightful defeats and losses of the
Russians in 1915-16. The personal weakness of Nicholas II, and his domination
by the Czarina and her friends (including the charlatan Rasputin), impaired the
loyalty of the people. The result was the March Revolution (March lst-14th,
1917), which was a spontaneous outbreak of revolt and mutiny by workers and
soldiers. On March 15th the Czar abdicated, and a provisional government was
formed by a group of Constitutional Democrats, who proclaimed freedom of
speech, of the press, of association and of religion, and freed all political
prisoners. But they did nothing about the land or the factories, and announced
their intention of carrying on the War. Thus they had no authority with the
people. Popular feeling showed itself in the formation of "soviets" (councils of
workmen, peasants and soldiers) all over the country, which demanded land-
reforms, participation by workers in factory management, "democratization"
of the army, and peace. The result was a widespread breakdown of civil and
military authority, with much disorder and violence.
The Cadet government was soon replaced by one of Social Revolutionaries
under Kerensky. He tried to regulate and legalize the seizures of land by the
peasants and of factories by the workmen, but with little success: disorder went
on increasing. One of the generals, Kornilov, made a desperate attempt to set
up a strong government by a military coup d'etat; but the troops would not
follow him. Indeed, they were beginning to be unwilling to follow any officer,
or to go on fighting at all: the German armies were rolling forward against an
increasingly feeble resistance. Yet Kerensky, in loyalty to the Allies, insisted on
trying to carry on the war, and it was this policy which finally ruined him, for
its unpopularity gave the Bolsheviks their chance.
Lenin had returned to Russia in April, 1917. (The Germans had allowed him
free transit through Germany, for they hoped that his arrival would increase
the disorder in Russia.) He was soon joined by Trotsky, who had previously
quarrelled with him, but now came back to his support. These two were the
chief engineers of the Bolshevik revolution. Nicholas Lenin, rightly named
Vladimir Ulyanov, was a member of a noble family, and had been a
professional revolutionary for twenty years, ever since his elder brother had
been executed for an attempt on the life of Alexander III. He was a convinced
Marxist, but also a well-educated and highly-intelligent man, with a particular
gift for grasping the realities of a situation and acting on them. Leon Trotsky,
whose real name was Bronstein, was a Jew: less of a genius than Lenin, but
quick-witted and full of energy, a powerful orator and a first-class organizer,
with a distinct military talent: a sort of pocket-sized Danton without
Danton's humanity, but equally without his sloth. These two were surrounded
by a group of devoted followers of Lenin, all carefully selected: all experienced
revolutionaries, perfectly feerless and absolutely ruthless.
At first they tried the method of direct attack, but an attempted revolution
against the provisional government in July, 1917, was defeated. Lenin then
tried another plan. He perceived that the key to the situation was control of the
soviets, and that the three things the Soviets wanted were the land, the
factories, and, above all, peace. He therefore began a new propaganda,
promising all these, and instructed his followers to join the Soviets, especially
in Moscow and the other cities, and get control of them. (In this work Trotsky,
with his energy and oratory, was particularly valuable.) After four months of
this work, the Soviets seemed sufficiently won over, and in November it was
possible to organize a new revolution, by which the Bolsheviks took over the
provisional government.
They at once proceeded to make peace with Germany. The Germans drove a
hard bargain, and only necessity induced Lenin and Trotsky to sign the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk (March, 1918), by which Russia lost her chief centres of
industry and some of her best agricultural land. But the Bolsheviks were luckier
than they deserved: when Germany collapsed in 1918, they were able to
recover a great part of these losses.
Simultaneously, they were establishing themselves as the permanent, not
merely the provisional, government of Russia. Since arrangements had already
been made for the election of a National Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks
allowed them to go forward; but when it was found that the Social
Revolutionaries had won the election (for the peasants voted almost solidly for
them), the Bolsheviks simply dissolved the Assembly, and summoned instead a
National Congress of Soviets, consisting of delegates from the local soviets.
The National Congress elected a Central Executive Committee, which in turn
elected the People's Commissars, or cabinet ministers. This method of indirect
election prevented the mass of the people from having any influence in the
choice of the government. Moreover, the city soviets were given a majority of
the representatives, and the city Soviets were controlled by the Bolsheviks
the Communist Party, as they now called themselves. Thus the Communist
Party obtained and kept control of the government, and set the example to
Europe of the kind of one-party government afterwards imitated by Mussolini,
Hitler, and other dictators. Membership of the Communist Party was strictly
limited (in 1924 it numbered about 600,000), and its quality was kept up to the
mark by frequent "purges" or expulsions of slack or doubtful members.
Lenin then proceeded to socialize Russia. The extreme disorder into which the
country had fallen forced him to do this more quickly and ruthlessly than he
would have wished. Banks, mines, forests etc. were appropriated by the State.
Factories were turned over to workers' committees, to be run under State
supervision. The Church was deprived of all its property and completely
separated from the State; and, though no formal persecution was instituted, the
Communists tried, by confiscating or destroying many churches, dissolving the
monasteries, and arresting the more active members of the clergy, to hamper
religious life and teaching as much as possible. Private education was
abolished, and a beginning was made of a socialist educational system. All
public debts were cancelled. The Czar, his wife and children were murdered,
and all who opposed the new regime were ruthlessly dealt with.
The results of these measures were an explosion of civil war and foreign
intervention. The causes of insurrection were the discontent of the nobles and
bourgeoisie with the confiscation of their property, a reaction (especially
among the officers in the army) against the disorder into which Russia was
plunged, the hatred of the other revolutionary parties for Communist tyranny,
and the anger of many of the people at the attacks made on religion. The
murder of the Czar also had its effect. The Baltic peoples and the Poles revolted
and demanded independence. England, France and the United States gave
same help to these anti-Communist movements. They were moved to do so by
fear of the spread of Communism, by indignation at the Communist terror, by
the Communists' "treachery" at Brest-Litovsk, and by the repudiation of
foreign debts. But the anti-Communists were divided among themselves and
badly organized, and the Allies were exhausted by the World War, and
unwilling to embark on what might prove to be a conquest of Russia. The
mass of the Russian people, though for the most part unwilling to fight on
either side, tended to support the Communists in the civil war, because they
feared the restoration of the old regime and the loss of their newly-acquired
land; and the foreign intervention enabled Trotsky to appeal to their
patriotism. But Trotsky himself was the chief cause of the Communist victory:
he proved to be a great organizer and a good strategist, and out of the wreck of
the old army he was able to form, first troops of the Red Guards, and then the
Red Army. By the end of 1920 the Communists were secure, and had
established their rule over the greater part of Russia. But Finland, Esthonia,
Latvia and Lithuania successfully asserted their independence, and an attempt
(led by Stalin and Budenny) to re-conquer Russian Poland was disastrously
defeated by Pilsudski at "the miracle of the Vistula". The new states were all
strongly anti-Communist, and the result was that, except for St. Petersburg
(renamed Leningrad), Russia was once more cut off from the Baltic and the
West.
Russia was now re-organized into a Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. This
federal structure was necessary in order to give an appearance of redeeming
the promises of self-government which had been given to the Ukrainians,
Georgians etc. to persuade them to support the Communists. But as, in each of
the new republics, a government was set up like that in Moscow, controlled by
the local Communist Party, and as the local Communists were bound to follow
"the Party line", this federation was hardly a reality.
When the immediate troubles of the civil war were over, it became evident
that the hurried socialization undertaken under the pressure of necessity could
not be maintained. A socialist state requires a large number of efficient
economic organizers, and in Russia the supply was nothing like equal to the
demand. Lenin then decided on what he called the New Economic Policy, or
NEP. Banking, transport and heavy industry were still retained under State
control, but private enterprise was permitted to operate in the spheres of light
manufacturing, retail trading, and so on, and the peasants were confirmed in
the possession of their land. (They were encouraged to give up private
ownership and form collective farms, but very few did so.) The little capitalists
who took advantage of the new decrees were called Nepmen; they were
carefully watched, and any who showed signs of becoming too prosperous
were suppressed. The result of NEP was that Russia began to recover from the
state of almost unimaginable misery into which the revolution and the civil
war had plunged her. Lenin, of course, intended to carry on with socialization
sooner or later; meanwhile, he called in a number of foreign experts to replace
the technicians who had been "liquidated", and to instruct the Communists.
In May, 1922, Lenin suffered his first paralytic stroke. Thenceforward he
carried on with increasing difficulty, and with increasingly long periods of total
or partial paralysis, till his death on January 21st, 1924. A struggle for the
control of the Party and the direction of the revolution then began between
Trotsky and Stalin.
In 1922, Stalin had become General Secretary of the Central Committee of the
Party. This was a position of great power, for the Secretariat, of which the
General Secretary was the head, controlled all appointments; and Stalin used it
to consolidate his personal position by appointing his friends to key positions.
Trotsky was the obvious successor of Lenin as head of the Party, but many of
the older members (who called themselves the Old Bolsheviks, and who had
stuck to Lenin for years through thick and thin) were jealous of Trotsky's new-
found importance, and resented the autocratic ways he had developed during
the civil war. Stalin set out to get these men on his side, even before Lenin's
death. He formed a particularly close alliance with two of them, Zinoviev and
Kamenev, and they endeavoured to discredit Trotsky by "whispering
campaigns" and similar methods among the members of the Party, while Stalin
used his power as Secretary to scatter Trotsky's friends in distant posts. Trotsky
was no intriguer, and seems not to have realized what was going on, and Lenin
was too ill to oversee everything as he had been accustomed to. All the same,
he at length got wind of it, and decided to "discipline" Stalin, but died before he
could do so. After his death, the offensive against Trotsky became stronger.
Trotsky wished to accelerate the pace of the revolution: to carry on quickly
with the socialization of Russia, and at the same time to maintain a vigorous
attack, through the local Communist Parties, on capitalism throughout the
world.
The Old Bolsheviks thought it better to hasten slowly, and Stalin supported
them; though it seems that he was chiefly concerned with ousting Trotsky and
making himself supreme. Open and secret propaganda gradually weakened
Trotsky's influence, and one by one he was deprived of his positions in the
Party. But then the Old Bolsheviks took alarm at the growing power of Stalin.
The inner history of the years 1924-7 is still obscure, but in 1927 we find
Trotsky at the head of a "Left opposition" which includes, apparently, both
Kamenev and Zinoviev. By that time, however, Stalin's grip on the Party was
so firm that they had no chance, and at the end of 1927 Trotsky and seventy-
five others were expelled from the Party. Nearly all of them submitted and
begged for re-admission. Trotsky was at first exiled to Siberia, and then
expelled from Russia altogether (since to execute him would have caused too
great a scandal); he continued to be a thorn in Stalin's side till his assassination
in Mexico in 1941.
Stalin was now in complete control of the Party, and therefore of the
government. His policy has been described as one of "national bolshevism":
that is, a policy of socializing and strengthening Russia, instead of working for
an immediate world revolution; though world revolution continued to be the
ultimate object. At the same time Stalin would confirm and extend his own
power. He was already in control of the Party; the next step was to put the
Party in full control of Russia by a ruthless socialization of every industry,
including even agriculture, and at the same time to develop Russia industrially
into the strongest power on earth. These were the objects of the "Piatiletka":
the Five Year Plans.
The first Plan was opened in 1928. Hundreds of foreign experts were brought
in to plan the new factories, power-stations, railways, canals etc. A labour force
was obtained by socialization. NEP was given up, and all the little capitalists
who had been operating under its protection suddenly found their businesses
confiscated and themselves obliged to work as employees of the State on the
new industrial projects. Forced-labour gangs were also formed from the
prisoners of the State, the number of whom constantly grew as the repressive
measures of the police grew harsher. Among the peasants Stalin began a
process of compulsory collectivization. First of all the more prosperous
peasants were dispossessed, and were sent by trainloads to the new industries
in Siberia and elsewhere. (This was called "the liquidation of the kulaks".) Then
it was the turn of the smaller peasants. They found themselves being pressed,
by every method of persuasion and compulsion, into surrendering their private
holdings and joining collective farms under State control. Many of the peasants
reacted to this pressure by passive resistance. When, for instance, the officials
came to seize their livestock, they preferred to kill them more than half the
cattle and horses in Russia were so killed. When the peasants found their crops
being confiscated, many of them (especially in the Ukraine) determined to sow
only enough to feed themselves. When the officials nevertheless seized the
quota of grain fixed by the government, there followed the frightful famine of
1932-3, in which perhaps five million died. These events compelled Stalin to
pause in his progress, and by the end of 1933 only sixty per cent of the land had
been collectivized at a cost of short rations for everyone in Russia.
Nevertheless the pressure continued, though more moderately; by 1950 only a
few remnants of private enterprise were left in Russia.
In manufacturing and transport, the results of the Five Year Plans were
spectacular. Great advances were made in the quantity of heavy industrial
goods produced, and great works were carried out, such as the doubling of the
Trans-Siberian railway, the Baltic-White Sea canal, and the power-station at
Dniepropetrovsk. It is true that, owing to the lack of skilled workers, the
quality of the goods was at first very poor, and the amount of waste enormous,
to say nothing of the sufferings of the workers; while the concentration on
heavy industrial production led to a serious shortage of consumer-goods,
which persisted down to 1939 and was aggravated by the Second World War.
That War, however, also proved that there had been a very real and important
industrial development in Russia: though it is still impossible to get really exact
information about it.
As time went on, Stalin's government became increasingly a personal
dictatorship, more absolute and more ruthless than ever had been the
government of the Czars. At first, it seems, there was some opposition to this,
and in 1935 Stalin determined to make himself thoroughly secure. He began
the famous series of purges and treason-trials which rooted out all possible
opposition. Almost all the original Bolsheviks were marked down for
destruction, besides thousands of others supposed to be "fellow-conspirators"
with them. They were brought to trial on impossible charges, and were so
dealt with before trial that they were ready to confess their guilt. Then they
were, for the most part, executed. The Red Army was purged in the same way.
All the members of the General Staff except one (Voroshilov), and an unknown
number of subordinate officers, were executed within forty-eighty hours in
June, 1936. (The soldiers, however, were not tried in public, and made no
confessions.) And the same thing went on in every part of the administration,
until by 1939 all positions of any importance were held by Stalin's men. A
complete control of press and wireless enabled Stalin to impose on the Russian
people his own version of these events or indeed of any events; a complete
control of migration (few being allowed to enter Russia, and fewer still to
leave) kept Russia isolated from the rest of the world; and a secret police, much
larger and more efficient than that of the Czars, guarded against any possibility
of revolt.
Only religion continued to survive in spite of Stalin. The Communists had
early determined that a direct and immediate suppression of religion in Russia
would be impossible. They had determined to proceed against it by, on the one
hand, making it difficult and expensive to practice, and on the other, educating
the rising generation in atheism. These measures had great success; yet,
curiously enough, not complete success. Even amongst the young there
continued to exist a hard core of believers who could not be seduced. But, as
the clergy dared not openly oppose Communism or Stalin, the survival of
religion did not seriously trouble the Soviet government; and the Communists
remained confident that, in time, it would wither away. Whether they are right
remains to be seen.
Soviet foreign policy was at first very simple. The Communists believed that
there can be no genuine friendship between capitalist regimes and the
Communists who are fated to supplant them. They believe, too, that
capitalism is bound to destroy itself in the long run by internal dissension and
by war. When, therefore, after the Russian revolution, the Western nations
refused to recognize the Soviet government, Lenin thought it perfectly natural,
and in his turn held aloof from them and from the League of Nations; he also
founded the Third International (the Comintern), to unify the efforts of
Communists all over the world and to direct them in assisting the downfall of
capitalism: by, for example, fomenting strikes and other forms of labour unrest,
by stirring up native peoples in Africa and Asia against the whites, and so on.
Isolationism, plus direct action in every country through the local Communist
Parties, was thus Soviet foreign policy. The one exception was the Treaty of
Rapallo, signed in 1922, with the other "outlaw" country, Germany. By a secret
clause of this treaty, the Germans agreed to supply instructors for the Red
Army, if the Russians would allow a certain number of young Germans to be
trained in the use of tanks, aircraft, and other weapons forbidden to Germany
by the Treaty of Versailles.
This policy was an unqualified failure. It only aroused further enmity against
Russia. In Hungary, for example, a short-lived Communist republic was
crushed, and a strongly anti-Communist government established. In China,
Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang party, after accepting Communist help
for a short time, turned against Communism and became its most violent
opponents. In England, the Conservatives were swept into power on an anti-
Russian vote. Furthermore, the penetration of Japan into Manchuria in 1931-2,
and Hitler's coming to power in Germany in 1933, showed the dangers to
Russia of isolationism. Stalin accordingly adopted what he called "the
outstretched hand policy". Russia began to seek alliances, and in 1934 humbly
begged to be admitted into the League of Nations. A formal alliance was signed
with France in 1935. Local Communists were instructed to give up their
intransigence and to co-operate with other Left-wing groups in order to form
Popular Front governments. This policy had quite striking success, many
people being deceived into thinking that the Communists had suffered a
change of heart; and this greatly helped Communist designs in Spain, France,
and other countries. But when, in 1939, there appeared to be a chance of
starting a war in which the capitalist states would destroy one another, the
temptation was too great to be resisted.
On August 23rd, 1939, Stalin signed a pact with Hitler, the effect of which was
to set the latter free to carry on his projected war against Poland, France and
England. Stalin hoped, of course, that the war would end in the exhaustion of
both sides, after which Communism would get its chance. The event, as we
shall see, belied his hopes. Yet the Communists, as in 1918, were luckier than
they deserved to be; and the Second World War did result in great gains both
for Communism and for Russia, though not in the way the Communists had
prophesied.
Fascism in Italy
Fascism was the first of the anti-liberal nationalist movements. It began as a
protest against the terms given to Italy at the Treaty of Versailles, by which
Italy was refused much of what had been promised her by the Treaty of
London in 1915, when she consented to enter the war. The Fascists went on to
oppose Socialism, which, they said, was disrupting Italy, and with which a
liberal government was not adequate to deal.
The Italians had long been dissatisfied with their parliamentary government:
with its inefficiency, its corruption, its anti-clericalism, and its lack of sympathy
with the grievances of the peasants and the proletariat. This was one reason
why socialism had become strong in Italy before 1914. The Italian Socialists,
however, unlike their brethren in France and Germany, remained pacifist and
internationalist, and strongly opposed Italy's entrance into the war. For this
reason, young Benito Mussolini gave up socialism to become a nationalist and
a soldier. But the Socialists continued to preach the uselessness of the
"capitalists' war", and their propaganda had much to do with the great Italian
defeat at Caporetto in 1917. This disaster produced a temporary reaction
against them, which carried Italy through to victory in 1918; but the hagglings
and disappointments of Versailles seemed to justify the Socialists' outlook, and
in the elections of 1919 they became the strongest party in parliament not
with an absolute majority, but with enough strength to upset the system of
corruption and to prevent the formation of any strong government. But then
there arose a division between the "direct-action" Socialists (who, like the
Bolsheviks, did not believe that anything could be attained by parliamentary
action) and the parliamentary Socialists (who, like the Mensheviks, were still
democrats). The "direct-actionists" were stimulated by the widespread
unemployment and distress which followed the economic dislocation caused
by the war. They began to take strong measures. In 1920 there were 1847
strikes in Italy. In August, 1921, the workers in the iron and steel industry,
fearing a lockout, seized the factories; the example spread, and in September
two hundred other factories were seized. In southern Italy, the peasants began
to seize the estates of the great landowners. The consequent disorder and
violence, which the government seemed powerless to check, gave the Fascists
their chance.
"Fascism" was named from the "Fasces": the bundles of rods which, in ancient
Rome, used to be carried before the magistrates to signify their authority. It
was typical of Mussolini to appeal in this way to Italy's pride in the past glories
of the Roman Empire. He had formed the Fascist Party in 1919, in protest
against the negotiations at Versailles, and against the pacifism and
internationalism of the Socialists. At first he had small success, but the events of
1920-1 brought him many adherents, especially amongst the returned soldiers,
who had no love either for the Socialists or for the industrial workers who had
done no fighting. In 1920 the militant section of the Party, the Blackshirts, were
organized, and began to make systematic attacks on the Socialists: strike-
breaking, attacking Socialist meetings and newspapers, seizing back factories
and so on. A minor civil war took place; but the Blackshirts were better led
than the Socialists; and besides, they began to have the support of most of the
peasants and of nearly all the middle and upper classes, as the upholders of law
and order, which the government seemed powerless to maintain. The army,
too, was in their favour. By October, 1922, Mussolini was able to organize the
"March on Rome": thousands of Fascists converging from all parts of Italy to
occupy the City. This demonstration of strength persuaded the King, Victor
Emmanuel III, to send for Mussolini and ask him to form a government. From
that moment Italy was ruled by the Fascist Party as Russia was by the
Communist Party, though with this difference: that down to 1940 Mussolini
retained the support of a majority of the Italian people.
Mussolini's essential policy was simply to unify, strengthen and develop Italy.
Political unity (in his view) meant the abolition of party strife and of the
political corruption of the old parliamentary system. He passed a law that the
most successful party in an election should receive two-thirds of the seats in
parliament. (At no time after 1922 were the Fascists in danger of not being the
successful party.) Later, in 1934, he abolished parliament altogether and
replaced it by the Chamber of the Corporations and the Fascist Grand Council.
Local government he controlled, of course, by appointing the prefects and
other local officials.
Social and economic unity and strength were fostered, first of all, by simply
forbidding strikes and lockouts, and commanding capital and labour to settle
their disputes by negotiation under the supervision of state officials. Needless
competition between capitalists was also forbidden. Industry and trade were
stimulated by re-organizing the railways, constructing hydro-electric works,
subsidizing the merchant navy, draining the Pontine marshes, and so on. After
1934, control of industry, was vested in the corporations. These were councils,
one for each industry, composed of representatives of the various interests
concerned in the industry (shareholders, labourers, technicians etc.), under the
chairmanship of a State official. In 1934, each Corporation was made to send
representatives to the national Chamber of Corporations, which, together with
the Fascist Grand Council, then took the place of parliament. Mussolini called
this system "corporatism"; but, since the Corporations were strictly watched
and controlled by the State, it was really a form of State Socialism -- a socialism
in which the owners of productive property were allowed to retain their
possessions, but were obliged to employ them in ways determined by the
State.
It must be admitted that this system greatly improved the efficiency of Italian
industry, and enabled it to bear the increased burdens of taxation which
Mussolini's policies entailed. It must be admitted, too, that there was
remarkably little discontent among the workers: though the Socialists
continued to work, more or less in secret, their influence seems to have
declined rapidly after about 1925. The Dopolavoro ("after-work") organization
had something to do with this: an organization for providing cheap recreation
for the workers. This was an idea which Mussolini had borrowed from Russia,
but was able to employ much more extensively than the Russians, as he was
not burdened with the cost of such an enormous transformation of his
country's economy.
Musfolini's most striking success in promoting Italian unity was his solution of
the religious quarrel. He had early determined that anti-clericalism was a
luxury that no Italian government could afford, and he followed a general
policy of supporting the Church, restoring religion in the schools, suppressing
anti-clerical propaganda, and so on. This policy culminated in the Lateran
Treaty and Concordat of 1929, which settled the 59-year-old Roman Question.
The essential points of the settlement were that the Pope was recognized as
independent sovereign of the Vatican City, and accepted a sum of about
25,000,000 as compensation for the loss of the Papal States; the Church was
given full freedom to exercise her ministry, but ecclesiastics were prohibited
from belonging to any political party. After this, though there was still
occasional friction between the Church and the Fascists, it may be said that
religious peace was restored to Italy; and nearly all Italians heaved a great sigh
of relief.
Mussolini's foreign policy was, firstly, to make Italy respected abroad and
secondly, to obtain opportunities for expansion abroad for the rapidly-
increasing Italian population. To attain the first object, he needed military
strength. He greatly improved the existing army and navy. The Italian air-
force, under Balbo, became for the time being the best in Europe: indeed, Italy
was the first nation to realize the possibilities of a great air-fleet. Then
Mussolini acted vigorously whenever Italy's "honour" demanded it. When, for
instance, 1923, an Italian general serving on the Albanian border commission
was murdered by a Greek, Mussolini demanded compensation from the Greek
government; and, when this was refused, sent warships to bombard Corfu so
as to enforce his demands. Whatever the morality of such actions, there can be
no doubt that the Great Powers began to take Italy seriously, as she had never
been taken seriously before she began to look really like a Great Power
herself.
The population problem was more difficult. For years a great many Italians had
been migrating to other countries, especially to the U.S.A. But in 1924 the
Americans suddenly and drastically restricted the number of immigrants they
were prepared to receive; and other countries, like Australia, followed this
example when the Depression began in 1929. This hit the Italians hard. Besides,
Mussolini was not content with the prospect of seeing thousands of good
Italians lost to Italy every year. He tried to accommodate as many as possible
in their own country, by expanding industry and draining marshes; but of
course he thought the best solution would be to build up a colonial empire.
Italy had been promised colonies by the Treaty of London. Actually she
received none: partly, no doubt because of the chaotic situation in Italy when
the Treaty of Versailles was being drawn up. Mussolini tried to get concessions
peaceably, by negotiations both inside and outside the League of Nations; and
England in fact ceded Jubaland (between Kenya and Somaliland) to Italy; but
France refused to yield anything worth while (Mussolini's comment on her
offers was that he was not a collector of deserts). Accordingly, he began to
revive the old Italian policy of expansion into Abyssinia: the only part of Africa
that had not yet been appropriated by any European power. Meanwhile, he
showed what he could do by settling 50,000 Italians on the coast of Libya.
In spite of his outward truculence and "sabre-rattling", Mussolini understood
well the importance for Italy of preserving peace in Europe: Italy, so dependent
on imported raw materials and on the tourist trade, suffers more than most
nations from a state of war. Therefore his policy in Europe, at least up to 1934,
was to preserve the Versailles settlement. As we shall see, he signed the
Locarno Treaties in 1925, and showed himself at first a determined opponent
of Adolf Hitler's schemes. On the other hand, he was exasperated with France
over the colonial question; and his determination to control the Adriatic (e.g.
by "peaceful penetration" into Albania) made Yugoslavia and Greece
suspicious of him. Yet it is true to say that, for many years, European statesmen
were rather glad of the Fascist revolution in Italy, little though some of them
liked its dictatorial views and methods.
The apparent success of Mussolini's Fascism set an example which many other
nations were not slow to follow. It must be admitted that parliamentary
government did not show up well in Europe after 1919, especially in those
nations which had newly gained, or regained, their independence, and had no
parliamentary traditions to guide them. Parliamentary government, in these
states, seemed to be essentially inefficient, or corrupt, or both; and nationalists
soon became fiercely impatient of it and eager to imitate the Italian
experiment. Kemal Ataturk set about reviving Turkey through a Nationalist
party organized on fascist lines; Primo da Rivera replaced the parliamentary
government in Spain by a military dictatorship; Marshal Pilsudski did much the
same in Poland; and everywhere, even where the framework of parliamentary
government was retained, semi-military nationalist parties began to be
organized (like the Iron Guard in Roumania), which obtained an increasingly
powerful influence in their respective states. Meanwhile, liberalism was being
attacked with equal bitterness on its economic side; and here, catastrophe came
to the aid of its opponents: the Great Depression, it may be said, put an end to
economic liberalism, at least in the present age of history.
The Great Depression (1929-34)
Liberal economic theory was to this effect: that a maximum of freedom for the
individual in producing, buying and selling would lead to a maximum of
production, an optimum of efficiency, and therefore a minimum of prices and a
maximum of satisfaction. Leave men free, and each will engage in the business
he is best fitted to engage in and from which he can obtain the most profit, and
will produce, sell, and buy where and how he can do so most profitably; so that
everything will be produced where and how it can be best produced, and will
be sold where the demand for it is greatest that is, where there is most need
for it; while free competition between producers and merchants will keep
prices at the lowest possible level.
Of course this theory was nowhere put fully into practice: its defects were too
obvious. The most obvious of these was the injustice and oppression which
followed it: since men are not, in fact, equal, in a state of free competition the
weakest go to the wall. The workers, for instance, are quite unable to bargain
on equal terms with their employers: quite early in the 19th century it became
clear that they would have to be protected by the State, and hence followed the
first big departure from pure liberalism the Factory Acts. Again, producers
themselves soon discovered that free competition is not always very profitable,
but is often wasteful and therefore uneconomic; and higher efficiency and
greater profits can often be obtained if the producers band themselves together
to form a large-scale organization if possible, to obtain a monopoly. This led
to the growth of Trusts in the U.S.A. and of Kartells in Germany: the Trusts
which the Americans endeavoured to counter by the Anti-Trust Laws, the
Kartells which the German government deliberately encouraged and fostered,
seeing how they promoted the efficiency of German industry, and gave it an
advantage in competition with that of other nations. And here comes in a third
defect of economic liberalism: the advantage which it gives to the richer or
stronger or cleverer nations the disadvantage which weaker or poorer
nations suffer from a state of free trade, and the disadvantage which all nations
suffer if free trade makes them dependent on other countries for the necessities
of life. This was the reason which had prevented free trade from ever
becoming universal. The U.S.A. had never practised it; Germany had
repudiated it under Bismarck; among the great powers only England still
whole-heartedly supported it after 1919.
Nevertheless, up to 1929 liberalism remained the dominant economic theory.
Apart from the socialists, most men thought that economic freedom was a
good thing, and that government interference was an unfortunate necessity,
which ought to be kept to a minimum. The Depression was to change all this:
it was to make people in most countries think that economic freedom was a
dangerous thing, and that it was better, on the whole, for the citizens to have
their production, trade and consumption supervised and controlled by the
government.
A depression was no new thing. We have seen already how one effect of the
industrial revolution, with its continual expansion of production, was that
production tended, from time to time, to outrun consumption, with a
consequent temporary unemployment among producers. Why was this
depression worse than previous ones? In the first place, because the gigantic
growth of world trade had made all countries much more dependent on one
another, so that a serious crisis in one was almost bound to spread to all. In the
second place, because after 1919 after the interruption of the War the
expansion of production was enormous and unprecedented. In the third place,
because of the complication introduced by war-debts and reparations.
At Versailles, the Allies insisted that Germany should pay for the War, and
proceeded to exact great sums from her as "reparations". But they would not
allow these sums to be paid in goods, for to import large quantities of German
goods would throw their own people out of work. So they insisted on being
paid in gold; and Germany had therefore to sell large quantities of goods on
world markets in order to obtain large sums of gold. But the Allies were also
deeply indebted to one another. In the first years of the War the others had
borrowed very largely from England, and later they had all, including England,
borrowed still more largely from the U.S.A. The repayments of these debts
presented the same problem as the payment of reparations. The U.S.A., now
the world's greatest creditor, would not accept payment in goods, but on the
contrary raised its protective tariffs still higher. England and the rest had
therefore to join Germany in a desperate effort to increase their exports so as to
obtain gold gold which was transferred to the U.S., and there, instead of
being put back into circulation by being used to buy goods (for the U.S. had
little they needed or wanted to buy), was buried away. In other words, just as
the supply of goods was being expanded in an unprecedented way, the gold,
the purchasing-power which should have been used to buy those goods, was
disappearing from circulation altogether.
How, then, were production and commerce carried on? For many years, by
means of credit. The use of credit rather than cash had, of course, long been a
commonplace; but now it, too, was expanded unprecedentedly. Groups of
private bankers and financiers issued huge loans, especially to Germany; and
on the strength of these loans production and trade went on merrily for a
time. But then the same difficulty appeared: how were these loans to be
serviced and eventually paid? Only, it soon became clear, by the issue of further
loans. A continually increasing volume of credit was needed to finance a
continually increasing volume of production and trade. But private financiers
cannot afford to increase credits indefinitely without any prospect of
repayment. In a perfectly free-trade world there would have been no difficulty,
for the credits would have been paid for by the goods produced; but the world
of 1929 was very far from being a free-trade world. Sooner or later the bankers
were bound to say: "We cannot afford to grant more credit". Then the
producers who were operating on credit would find themselves unable to go
on; they would go out of business, and their workers would be unemployed.
The consequent fall in demand would bring prices toppling; other producers
would likewise go out of business; and so the thing would spread. That is
exactly what did happen in 1929. It began in the U.S.A., but it soon spread
throughout the world. By 1932 Germany had six million unemployed, England
three million, the U.S. perhaps twelve or fifteen million.
The Great Depression was a turning point in the history of the world. It put an
end and apparently a final end to economic liberalism: the idea that
governments should control and direct industry and commerce became
everywhere an accepted common-place; in the U.S.A., Roosevelt carried
through the New Deal, which would have given the Founding Fathers heart-
failure, and even England surrendered her cherished belief in free-trade. But
more than this: in almost every country there was a swing to extremist and
revolutionary parties and policies. The republican revolution in Spain, the
invasion of Manchuria by Japan, Mussolini's design on Abyssinia, the victory of
the Popular Front in France these and a hundred other events were due, at
least in part, to the Depression. But it was the Communist and the various
fascist parties that benefited particularly from this swing to extremism and
violence; and, of course, its most important immediate result was the coming
to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler.
54. The Doubtful Liberals
1. Germany: the Weimar Republic
The chief feelings in Germany in November, 1918 were those of war-weariness
and of resentment against the Kaiser's government, owing to the losses and
sacrifices of the war (over two million dead), the defeat of the army, and the
semi-starvation caused by the British blockade. When it became impossible to
conceal the fact of defeat, there were rebellions in various parts: naval mutinies
at Kiel, Hamburg and Bremen, Communist risings in Hanover, Brunswick,
Cologne, and especially Bavaria, where a Soviet government was set up on
November 6th. The Kaiser abdicated on November 10th (the day before the
armistice was signed) and fled to Holland. The kings of the other German
states imitated him. The parliamentary branch of the Social Democrats, under
Ebert, managed to set up a provisional government in Berlin, and this was
supported by the army commander, Hindenburg, as being at any rate better
than a soviet regime. The bulk of the army remained loyal to Hindenburg; and
with its help and that of the Free Corps organized here and there for local
defence against Communism, the Social Democrats succeeded in crushing the
Communist attempts at revolution, and in summoning a national assembly to
draw up a republican constitution. This assembly met at Weimar, in the
Rhineland; and hence the new republic was known as "the Weimar Republic".
The new constitution, like the old imperial one, was a federal constitution; but
the powers of the states were greatly reduced in favour of the federal
government in case of emergency the federal government could practically
supersede them. This federal government consisted of a legislature of two
houses, a Chancellor and cabinet, and a President. The two houses were called
the Reichstag and the Reichsrat. The Reichstag was elected by universal
suffrage, under a system of proportional representation: it was the chief
legislative body, and the Chancellor and his cabinet depended on it. The
Reichsrat was a federal body, representing the states, but had little real power.
Executive power was vested in a President, elected for seven years by universal
suffrage. He controlled the armed forces and the civil service, and made all civil
and military appointments. He also appointed the Chancellor. True, he was
expected normally to rule by the Chancellor's advice, and the Chancellor could
normally hold office only as long as he had the support of the Reichstag; but
the President had "emergency powers" which enabled him to dissolve the
Reichstag, or to maintain a Chancellor against its wishes, or even to suspend
the operation of the Constitution.
The Weimar Republic was thus more "unitary" than Bismarck's Empire had
been, and the President was more powerful than the Kaiser. Furthermore, the
system of proportional representation weakened the Reichstag by preventing
any one party from obtaining an absolute majority, so that the republican
governments, based on coalitions, were always changing: a fact which further
increased the power and prestige of the President.
Ebert, the Social Democrat, was elected first President, and in the early days
the Social Democrats were the most important party in the Reichstag. They
were parliamentary socialists. To the left of them were the Communists. In the
centre were the Democrats and the Catholic "Centre" Party, who were
republicans but anti-socialist, and to the right the Nationalists, who were anti-
republican as well as anti-socialist. There were many smaller parties, among
which there soon appeared the National-Socialists, or "Nazis", led by one Adolf
Hitler.
In July, 1919, the new government accepted the Treaty of Versailles, but only
because it had no power to refuse to. The justice of the Treaty was never
admitted by any German. There followed four years of passive resistance,
during which the German authorities placed all possible obstacles in the way of
the fulfilment of the Treaty, especially of the clauses relating to disarmament
and reparations, which latter they insisted they could not pay. The Americans
and the English were inclined to sympathize with them; but the French were
not.
The French had already been trying to set up "separatist" governments in the
Rhineland provinces which they occupied under the Treaty; in 1923, losing
patience with German evasions, they determined to collect their own
reparations by marching into and occupying the great industrial area of the
Ruhr. All the workers in the Ruhr immediately went on strike, and were
supported by the German government. But the expense of this proved the last
straw for Germany's financial system. Inflation of the currency had already
gone pretty far: the necessity of expanding German industry and restoring
purchasing power (all foreign trade and investments having been lost), had
induced a vast expansion of paper-money and credit; the loss of production
from the Ruhr, plus the expenditure necessary to support the Ruhr workers,
led to a fall in the value of the Mark which destroyed all confidence in it, and it
became practically worthless. The consequent confusion and distress nearly
produced complete collapse: Communists and Nationalists were both
preparing revolutions. There might have been a civil war, with incalculable
results. But England and the U.S.A. united to restrain France; and in Germany
the Social Democrats, Democrats and Centre united to support Gustav
Stresemann. Stresemann became Chancellor in August, 1923; and he not only
replaced the worthless currency with the new Reichsmarks, but also persuaded
the Reichstag and the people that the only possible policy for the moment was
to accept, at least in appearance, the Treaty of Versailles.
These four troubled years had produced two important effects. The first was
the practical destruction of the German middle-class, owing to the destruction
of all savings during the inflation. Germany had become a country of
capitalists, peasants and industrial workers, her professional men hanging on as
best they could, impoverished and embittered, and providing many good
recruits to the Communists and the Nazis. The second result was the
predominance of the new army, the Reichswehr. Throughout these years the
Reichswehr proved the mainstay of the Weimar Republic. A long-service
professional army, limited to 100,000 men, it was shaped by its commander,
von Seekt, into the most formidable fighting-force for its size in the world.
Seekt was the first to realize the possibilities in modern war of a highly trained
and mechanized striking- force; and he made the Reichswehr just such a force.
Armoured cars had to take the place of tanks for the time being, and gliders
and civil aircraft used instead of military machines; but the essentials were
there. After the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, selected officers and men were sent
to Russia to gain experience in the handling of the forbidden weapons. The
Reichswehr was also designed to be capable of rapid expansion: each company
in it represented one of the regiments of the old army, and the number of
officers and N.C.O.'s was enormous one N.C.O. for every two privates. The
raw material for expansion could be found in the numerous semi-military
organizations such as the Stahlhelm (a sort of militant league of returned
soldiers), the Communist Red Front, the Nazi Brownshirts etc., which were
tolerated because they gave their members elementary training in drill,
marching and the use of weapons.
Seekt's main political principal was the preservation of German unity as the
foundation of Germany's resurrection. The Army, he said, belonged to the
nation, not to any political party: the soldiers were strictly forbidden to belong
to any party, or even to vote at elections. Therefore he supported the Republic,
and opposed any subversive movements, either from Right or Left. It was this
army that saved Germany from disintegration between 1919 and 1923. But the
result was that the government came to depend on the army, not the army on
the government; and this situation was emphasized when, in 1925, Hindenburg
was elected President. The Weimar Republic lasted as long as the Reichswehr
upheld it no longer.
It was the support of the Reichswehr that enabled Streseman to push through
his policy of Fulfilment. This was a policy of restoring Germany to her
international position by submitting to and fulfilling the Versailles Treaty
but only so far as was necessary to gain admission to the League of Nations and
to get rid of the army of occupation. The three chief steps in this were the
Dawes Plan of 1923-4, the Locarno Treaties of 1925, and the Young Plan of
1929.
Under the Dawes Plan, reparations were to be fixed according to Germany's
"ability to pay". To enable her to pay, a foreign loan of 800,000,000 gold marks
was floated, chiefly in America and England. The repayment of this loan and
subsequent ones, as well as of reparations, obviously depended on the
continued unity and stability of Germany, so that any future adventures like
the French occupation of the Ruhr were ruled out. Germany was heavily
burdened, of course, but the loan provided her with the wherewithal to
develop [her immense productive resources. Future loans were raised with
greater ease and at smaller cost.
In December, 1925, Stresemann achieved a further success in the Locarno
Treaties. These agreements, to which Germany, France, Italy, England and
Belgium were signatories, guaranteed Germany permanently against any
attack by any of the others, and arranged for her admission into the League of
Nations. In return, Stresemann had to accept Germany's western frontier as
defined in the Versailles Treaty, and to agree that Germany would only seek
revision of her eastern frontier by peaceful means. Germany was then admitted
into the League and given a permanent seat on the Council: i.e. made equal to
England, France, Italy and Japan.
Finally, in 1929 Stresemann negotiated the Young Plan which settled definite
terms for the payment of reparations, conceded another huge loan to Germany
(the Young Loan of 1200,000,000 marks), and led to the complete evacuation of
the Rhineland by the Allied army of occupation in June, 1930. Stresemann died
in October, 1929; but he had made Germany once more a Great Power. He
had also, without knowing it, done much to smooth the way for Adolf Hitler.
The Dawes Loan of 1924 was followed by a spate of foreign borrowing by
German authorities, and most of the credit obtained was used in developing
German industry. With the active co-operation and assistance of the
government, German capitalists proceeded to re-equip German industry with
the most modern means of production, and to re-organize and "rationalize" it
so as to avoid all waste and achieve the maximum of productivity. Even before
1914 German industry had been closely organized in Kartells of one kind or
another; now there were formed such immense concentrations of industrial
power as I.G. Farben (chemicals) and Vereinigte Stahlwerke (steel). This
centralization, made by the capitalists, was equally favoured by the socialists, as
simplifying the government's task of eventually taking over industry. The
result was that Germany's productive power was far greater in 1929 than it had
been in 1914. But, as we have seen already, this productive power was directed
above all to making masses of goods for export: Germany's production was out
of all proportion to her consumption, and she depended on foreign markets to
keep her men and machinery employed. Hence the catastrophic results of the
Great Depression.
In Germany, its first result was to destroy parliamentary government. Muller,
the last Chancellor to rule with full Reichstag support, failed to get the consent
of the Reichstag to the economies needed to save Germany from a new
financial collapse. President Hindenburg then invoked his emergency powers
to appoint Bruning, leader of the Centre Party, Chancellor. Bruning succeeded
in getting from the American President, Hoover, a "moratorium" on
Germany's debts, and pursued a policy of drastic economy: cutting social
services, wages, etc., extending government control over industry, and
proposing the confiscation of the great estates of the Junkers and their re-
settlement by peasants. His foreign policy was a continuation of Stresemann's:
he designed particularly to obtain, through the Disarmament Conference, a
recognition of Germany's right to equality in armaments with the other
powers. His economic measures made him intensely unpopular (he was called
"the hunger Chancellor"), but Hindenburg supported him, and the Reichswehr
supported Hindenburg. But a coalition of the Right was formed against him
(Nationalists. Junkers, and the great industrialists), and Hindenburg, himself a
Nationalist and a Junker, was persuaded to dismiss him in 1932. There followed
a series of stop-gap governments of the Right, with presidential support, but
with no majority in the Reichstag or in the country. Meanwhile the people, in
their distress, were turning to the extremist parties: Nazis and Communists;
between 1928 and 1932 the number of Communist members in the Reichstag
rose from fifty-four to a hundred, the number of Nazis from thirteen to a
hundred and ninety-six.
The years 1931-2 were filled with street-battles of growing fierceness between
Communists and Nazis, in which Hitler's Brownshirts proved the more
successful. Since the Communists refused to co-operate with the Social
Democrats, the working-class influence was divided, and the Nazis became the
most important single party. Finally, in January 1933 the Nationalists agreed to
an alliance with the Nazis by which Hitler was to become Chancellor, though
the Nationalists were to have a majority in the cabinet. The subsequent
election was fought with great violence; the Nazis eventually won two
hundred and eighty-eight seats and the Nationalists fifty-one: a bare majority in
a Reichstag of six hundred and forty-seven. Hitler then became Chancellor; and
of course it was not long before, by appointing his own men to all important
positions, he was able to do what he liked, regardless of his Nationalist allies.
The Nazi dictatorship had begun.
National-Socialism
National-Socialism was really the extreme form of nationalism, just as
Communism was the extreme form of socialism. The "socialism" which Hitler
believed in was strictly state-socialism: it was approved of as putting all
economic power in the hands of the State, and thus producing national unity
and strength. Nationalism was, for Hitler, the basic principle of human society.
It rested, he said, on two things: Race and Land ("blood and soil"): mankind
was divided by nature into separate races, and each race should have the
position and territory suited to it. The Nordic, or Aryan, race, of which the
Germans were the chief representatives, was the master-race; hence it was
intolerable that Germans should be subject to non-Germans (Czechs, Poles,
Lithuanians, French), or should be separated from the Fatherland like the
Austrians; and it was intolerable that the German race should be short of
"living-space", while Russians and Poles, and even degenerate Nordics like the
English, had more land than they could use. Even more intolerable was the
existence and power in Germany of international forces like Communism, the
Jews, international finance, and the Church: they must be either eliminated or
very firmly subjected to the German State.
Hence Hitler had three basic policies. The first was to construct a strong,
united Germany; and this involved, in his opinion, the crushing of the
Communists, the Jews, and the Churches, national self-sufficiency and
independence of international finance, the control of capital and labour, and
rearmament. The second was to unite all Germans in the Fatherland, which
entailed acquiring Austria, and the German-speaking areas in Czechoslovakia,
Poland, Lithuania, France and Belgium. The third was to obtain "living-space"
for the new Germany: preferably in central Europe, Poland and the Ukraine.
He would also have liked colonies, but did not think them particularly
important. The fact that these policies would lead to war did not worry him: he
rather approved of war, so long as it was made at Germany's time and on
Germany's terms.
His victory at the elections was followed, however, by a struggle in his own
party: between the "socialists", who thought the first step in making the new
Germany should be an immediate social revolution and the smashing of the big
industrialists and landowners, and the "nationalists", who thought that such a
revolution would divide rather than unite Germany. Hitler leaned to the
nationalist side; but the decisive influence was the attitude of the Reichswehr.
The soldiers were very willing to support Hitler in making a strong and well-
armed Germany, but they were not prepared to support a social revolution. So
Hitler chose the side which would give him their support; and on June 30th,
1934, the leaders of the "socialist" Nazis were seized and executed. Incidentally,
the opportunity was taken of getting rid of many others who might have been
troublesome: prominent Catholics, Democrats, Socialists etc. About a
thousand people were killed, of whom over seventy had been important Nazis.
Henceforth it was certain that militarism would be the chief mark of the new
Germany.
The Nazi Organisation of Germany
Politically, the following were the chief steps. 1. Communism was outlawed,
and Communists were rounded-up and sent to the concentration-camps which
were established for them and for other "enemies of the German people". 2.
All political parties but the Nazis were suppressed. 3. The state governments
were abolished, and Germany ceased to be a federation. She was divided,
instead, into districts, each ruled by a member of the Nazi Party. 4. The Nazi
police (the S.S., also called the Black Guards) and the secret police (the
Gestapo) were given extraordinary powers to arrest, try and punish political
offenders. They were organized by Himmler, who was also made chief of all
German police in 1936. 5. On Hindenburg's death in August, 1934, Hitler had
himself elected President. This automatically made him commander-in-chief of
the Reichswehr, the members of which were made to take a special oath of
loyalty to him. 6. A very strict censorship was established. The Ministry of
Propaganda, under Goebbels, rigidly controlled press, wireless, cinema and
stage. Henceforth few Germans could get any information but what the Nazis
thought was good for them.
Equally drastic economic measures were taken. 1. The heavy industries were
re-organized and "kartellized" still further, to make them more efficient and to
bring them more closely under government control. Profits were limited to six
per cent, but ownership and management were left in the hands of the
capitalists, who had to do the work which the State told them to do. As they
were generally quite willing to do it, there was no need to make industry a
department of state. 2. Strikes and lockouts were forbidden, and trade-unions
and employers' organizations dissolved. To replace them, the Labour Front
was set up, to which all employers and employees had to belong, and which
was financed by contributions from everyone engaged in industry. It was
represented in each factory by a Works Council to settle disputes; if agreement
could not be reached, appeal was made to a local official, the Trustee of
Labour, whose decision was final. The Labour Front also provided, by the
"Strength through Joy" organization, cheap recreation for the workers: travel-
trips, visits to theatres, and so on. 3. German finance was brought completely
under the control of the Reichsbank, of which Hitler's financial adviser,
Schacht, was made president. 4. All foreign trade was rigidly controlled, and
great efforts were made to make Germany self-sufficient by producing oil from
coal, cloth from wood, etc. 5. Unemployment was dealt with by setting on foot
great public works (e.g. the "autobahnen" or motor-roads), and by a
programme (at first secret) of rearmament. Schacht financed these works by
very clever manipulation of the currency so as to produce a "controlled
inflation"; of course this meant a general fall in the standard of living, but
everyone got enough to live on, the unemployed were re-absorbed in industry,
and the factories were kept busy. Schacht's task was made easier by the
government's control of wages and profits; still, he deserves the credit of being
the first to show the possibilities of controlled inflation. Germany's recovery
from the Depression was startling and spectacular. 6. Finally, the Hitler Youth
organization (to which all boys and girls had to belong) and the Labour Service
(six months of open-air work which all young men and women were bound to
undergo) did a great deal for the health and physique of Young Germany.
In most of these measures Hitler was obviously copying Mussolini only
applying Mussolini's ideas more thoroughly, brutally and ruthlessly. In one
point, however, he did not follow Mussolini. Mussolini had come to an
agreement with the Church; Hitler endeavoured to bring both the Catholic
and the Lutheran Churches under Nazi control. This involved him in a struggle
which he dared not push to the uttermost for fear of dividing Germany: a
struggle, therefore, in which he achieved only limited and doubtful success.
2. France: the Search for Security
In proportion to wealth and population, France suffered more than any other
nation in the First World War. Besides the enormous casualties (2,000,000
dead), one-tenth of France had been laid waste, and more than one-tenth of her
wealth destroyed, since the devastation included some of her most important
industrial regions. Hence the overwhelming desires of the French were for
reparations and security, and these, especially the desire for security, governed
French policy after 1919. The thought of another war was a nightmare for the
French, and they sought to avoid it in every possible way.
At Versailles they had tried to obtain the Rhine frontier, but they bad been
refused; they had then tried to obtain from England and the U.S.A. a
permanent guarantee of their eastern frontier, but could not persuade either of
these Powers to give up their traditional policies of non-intervention and
isolationism. This double failure was the ruin of Clemenceau, the Leftist
politician who had led France through the final stages of the War; the 1919
elections were won by a "nationalist" bloc of the parties of the Centre and the
Right, and from 1920 to 1924 France was ruled by Centre-Right governments,
in which the chief figure was Raymond Poincare.
Poincare determined to rebuild the devastated areas by means of loans raised
in England and America, and to recoup France by extracting the maximum of
reparations from Germany. He wished also to weaken Germany by division, if
possible, so he encouraged certain futile "separatist" movements in the
Rhineland. It was he, too, who built up the French system of alliances with the
eastern European "succession-states" which had most reason to fear a revival
of German power. But his efforts to extract reparations led him into occupying
the Ruhr in 1923, and this brought France into conflict with England and the
U.S.A. As her financial position depended on these countries, she was forced to
give up the Ruhr adventure and consent to the Dawes Plan.
This failure led to the defeat of the Centre-Right in the elections of 1924, and it
was replaced by a coalition of the Centre-Left, under Herriot and Briand. This
coalition stood for the idea of reaching security in and through the League of
Nations. Thus it was that Briand helped to negotiate the Locarno Treaties in
1925, and sponsored Germany's admission to the League in 1926. These were
really victories for Germany; but the French were now realizing that they
could not maintain their security by themselves but needed at least the support
of England; and they could only have that support within the League, since to
work within the League had become a principal point of English policy.
In 1926 the Centre-Left coalition broke up. Its fall was due partly to ill-
considered efforts to revive anti-clericalism. The previous government had, in
1921, succeeded in restoring normal diplomatic relations with the Pope, and
the religious quarrel was milder than it had been since the beginning of the
Dreyfus Case. There had also been something of a religious revival in France
during and since the War, and Herriot's attempt to (for example) renew the
expulsion of the religious orders aroused great resentment. But the immediate
cause of the fall of Herriot-Briand was the continued decline in the value of the
franc. France seemed to be about to follow Germany into the misery of
uncontrolled inflation, and the Centre-Left government was afraid of
antagonizing the people if it undertook the needful deflationary measures.
Poincare was then called back "to save the franc", and succeeded in doing so by
rigid economies and a restriction of credit: a success which gave him another
victory at the elections in 1928. When he died in the following year, he seemed
to have made France once more settled and secure. But this was only an
appearance: the old divisions still subsisted, and any calamity was likely to
bring them to the surface again.
After 1929 the Depression struck. Though it was less disastrous to France than
to some other countries, owing to her excellently-balanced economy, it still
caused much distress; and the apparent inability of the government to do
anything about it not only revived the perennial discontent of the French with
their politicians, but led to a growth of the extremist parties: of the
Communists on the one hand, and of various semi-fascist groups (such as the
Croix de Feu) on the other. Discontent with the Republic became once again
the strongest political feeling in France; but once again the discontented could
not agree among themselves. Nevertheless, in 1934 the Stavisky scandal turned
discontent into violence: there was rioting and street-fighting in Paris, and it
became evident that the tensions and divisions in France had become even
worse than before. Events abroad deepened the internal crisis. Hitler's success
in Germany provoked violent recriminations in France; in 1935 Mussolini's
invasion of Abyssinia renewed the disputes; and when civil war broke out in
Spain in 1936, the French took sides over this, too, to such an extent that many
foreign observers (including Hitler) predicted a civil war in France.
The Communists were able to take advantage of these tensions, not only to
increase their own membership, but also to build up the Popular Front: an
"anti-fascist" coalition of the Left under the Socialist Blum. This coalition,
having won the election of 1936, embarked on a programme of social reform:
introducing, for instance, the forty-hour week for factory-workers.
Unfortunately, France was not in a position to stand the expense: her finances
were again thrown into confusion, and many of the reforms had later to be
withdrawn or modified the effect of the whole episode was to increase
discontent, to deepen the enmity between Capital and Labour, and incidentally
to injure industrial production especially in the armaments factories, where
the Communists made it their particular business to provoke strikes and other
labour troubles.
In 1939, therefore, France was more bitterly divided than ever. When war
broke out, her friends hoped that once again, as in 1914, patriotism would
triumph over faction and the French would unite for France; but this time the
divisions had gone too deep, and patriotism was not enough.
England: Marking Time
The main efforts of English governments after 1919 were directed towards
restoring England to the commercial and financial position she had held in
1914, as "the banker and workshop of the world". Much of her trade and
foreign investments had had to be sacrificed to the needs of war, and her
currency had been inflated, like that of nearly every other belligerent, so that
sterling was no longer the international currency which it had been. Therefore
England was faced by a problem of permanent unemployment in some of her
industries: when her armies were demobilized there were over a million
unemployed, and this was not a temporary but a permanent fact, due above all
to the loss of foreign markets.
The prospects of recovery were not bright. True, German competition had for
the moment disappeared; but American and French competition had vastly
increased, and Germany was soon to join in the race again with renewed
strength. Yet the English as a whole could not bring themselves to believe that
their former position was hopelessly lost and that their former policies would
have to be revised; they persisted in being conservative, and for most of the
time between 1919 and 1939 they insisted on being ruled by conservative
politicians.
The wartime coalition government, though led by the Liberal Lloyd George,
owed its strength mainly to the Conservatives; and when it split up in 1922, a
Conservative, Stanley Baldwin, became Prime Minister. However, Baldwin
had convinced himself that England's economic ills could only be cured by
abandoning free trade for protection; when he faced the electors in 1923 with a
programme of "tariff reform" they rejected him decisively; and the Labour
leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was able to form with Liberal support the first
Labour government in English history. Depending on the Liberals, he could
not do very much, and he soon made an even worse mistake than Baldwin by
recognizing the government of Soviet Russia. The Conservatives were able to
exploit the anti-Communist feeling so as to win the election of 1924 an
election in which Baldwin carefully avoided any mention of tariff reform.
There followed five years of staunch conservatism. The chief measure taken
was to restore the international value of sterling by making it once more
interchangeable with gold. The financial position was thus improved, but the
industrial position was worsened, for the increased value of sterling led to a fall
in prices, more unemployment, and a reduction in wages. However, the
people still supported the government, and when a group of trade-union
leaders attempted to organize a general strike in 1926, it failed through lack of
popular backing. All the same, it became evident that the government's policy
was not succeeding. In 1929 Labour again became the strongest party, and the
second MacDonald government took office just in time to meet the Great
Depression.
His remedy for this disaster was the "orthodox" conservative one of economy
in government spending, even including the cutting-down of unemployment
relief; but to this the majority of his party would not agree. He therefore joined
his minority to the Conservatives and a few Liberals to form a "National"
government for dealing with the crisis, and this coalition won an
overwhelming victory in the election of 1931. But its policy proved impossible.
The pressure of reality forced it to abandon the gold standard and allow
sterling to inflate to a reasonable level, to abandon free trade and establish
protection, and to maintain and even increase government spending. To the
astonishment of many, rather good results followed, and the Conservatives
were able to maintain themselves in power till 1939 without much difficulty.
Long before that date, though, foreign affairs had become the main
preoccupation of the English government and people.
It should be noted that during all these years England (and indeed, the English-
speaking countries generally) showed no tendency towards either
Communism or Fascism. The English tradition of parliamentary government
was both ancient and strong, and there were very few Englishmen who had
any desire to depart from it. Communists obtained some influence in the trade-
unions, but they did so by being good militant trade-unionists, not by
preaching Communism; and the tiny Fascist party formed by Sir Oswald
Mosley was rather laughed at than feared. The surest way to extinction for an
English politician was to allow his name to be linked with either of the two
extremes which were so dividing the European continent.
In foreign affairs the English, now as always, desired above all to maintain a
stable balance of power. For this reason, after the first wave of vindictiveness
had passed, they began to regret the harshness with which Germany had been
treated at Versailles, and to wish to restore to her something of the position
which she had lost. Therefore they opposed the early French policy of "getting
tough" with Germany about reparations, and Stresemann found them very
willing to help in making the Dawes Plan and the Locarno Treaties, and in
getting Germany into the League of Nations. It was to the League that the
English especially trusted to maintain stability in the postwar world: if the
nations could only be brought to negotiate with one another through the
League, international affairs would be kept in order with a minimum of British
intervention.
If support of the League was one main plank of English foreign policy, another
was to maintain a good understanding with the U.S.A. This was now more
difficult than it had been, both because the U.S. were now much stronger than
they had been, and because the U.S. had refused to enter the League of
Nations. The English had to make considerable sacrifices: in 1922, at the
Washington Conference, they had to give up their alliance with Japan, because
the U.S. did not like it; and, though the English were convinced that war-debts
were a millstone round the neck of world trade, yet, because the U.S. was not
prepared to forego them, the English bowed their necks to the yoke, till the
Great Depression made it impossible to continue paying, and gave an excuse to
repudiate the debts altogether. It is curious that, whereas at first the policy of
supporting the League seemed to be paying dividends, while the policy of
standing well with the U.S. seemed to entail sacrifices without any return, in
the long run the opposite proved true. England's trust in the League was badly
misplaced, and led her into exactly the kind of intervention she wished to
avoid; but in the crisis and the war which followed, her friendship with the U.S.
enabled her to survive.
Turning to imperial affairs, here too we find the English attempting to
maintain a traditional policy in a changing situation. The chief change here was
the sudden new strength of nationalism, and the first place it showed itself in
was the old trouble-spot Ireland. At the beginnings of the War the English
government had attempted to pacify the Irish by passing the Home-Rule Act,
which allowed Ireland a limited degree of self-government. This Act was
suspended, however, for the duration of the War. It was known that a strong
party in England, and a majority of the people in the northern Irish province of
Ulster, were opposed to the Act; it was feared that at the end of the War these
opponents would be strong enough to get the Act withdrawn; and a group of
Irishmen formed a revolutionary organization to ensure Ireland's freedom by
force if necessary. In 1916 a few of these men did start an armed revolt. It was
put down within a week, and most of its leaders were executed; but its effect
on Irish feeling was tremendous.
A new Irish nationalist party was formed, given the Gaelic name of Sinn Fein,
and pledged to obtain complete independence for Ireland. At the 1918 election,
this party practically swept the country, and its elected members promptly
proclaimed themselves the government of Ireland. Attempts to suppress it
were resisted by force, and soon a guerilla war was being waged all over the
country. The English government formed a special armed police-force and
attempted to suppress Sinn Fein by terror; the attempt was met by counter-
terror; and the struggle became so discreditable, and aroused such bitter
opposition both in England and abroad (and especially in the U.S.A.), that in
1921 a treaty was signed with representatives of Sinn Fein, establishing an Irish
Free State with the same independence as Canada and the other "self-
governing Dominions" in the British Empire. The Sinn Feiners had, however,
to consent to allow the greater part of Ulster to be cut off from Ireland and
given a government of its own.
One result of this was a re-definition of the status of a "self-governing
Dominion". The Irish insisted that the Free State was an independent nation,
bound only by a "free association" to the other Dominions and to England; and
this idea, supported by Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, was
formally recognized in the Statute of Westminster in 1931; henceforth the
"Empire" was a voluntary alliance, and was given the new name of the British
Commonwealth of Nations.
In the colonies which were not self-governing the same spirit began to show
itself. In India, for instance, new demands for immediate self-government
began to be made; and here, too, the English found themselves unable to deal
strongly with the movement because of the intense opposition which such
action would provoke both at home and abroad. They found themselves being
forced to make concessions to Indian nationalism more rapidly than they had
dreamed of doing. We shall see the results in the next chapter. To sum up, one
may say that England was able, between 1919 and 1939, to maintain a high
position and a relatively high prosperity; but neither was as high as it had been,
and both were maintained with increasing difficulty. One great asset, however,
remained to her: the apparently unshakable unity of her people, and their
refusal to be tempted into extreme or violent courses. In this respect she was
still the envy of all the nations of the continent.
U.S.A. The Isolated Giant
Before 1914 the U.S.A. were already the richest and most powerful nation in
the world; the First World War made this obvious to all; yet between 1919 and
1939 they played but a feeble part in international affairs. This was due to the
strong traditions they inherited from an earlier time, and which, like the
English, they were very reluctant to give up.
The traditional policies of the U.S.A. in the 19th and early 20th centuries were,
in home affairs liberal capitalism (the freest possible scope for individual
enterprise, and a minimum of state interference with the individual), and in
foreign affairs isolationism (the exclusion of European politics from the
American mainland, and a refusal to entangle the U.S. in non-American affairs).
The U.S. broke away from isolationism in 1917 because German submarines
were sinking American ships; and President Wilson, sponsoring the League of
Nations, believed that by persuading the U.S. to join it he could put an end to
that old policy for ever. But tradition was too strong, and was reinforced by
opposition to some of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which the U.S.
Senate refused to ratify. At the elections of 1920 Wilson and his Democratic
Party were defeated, and from then to 1932 the U.S. were ruled by three
Republican Presidents: Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. The Republicans raised
isolationism to new heights: as the party of "big business", they believed in
economic as well as in political isolationism. To stimulate and safeguard
American industry, they raised tariffs higher than ever. They even departed
from the traditional policy of free immigration, and in 1924 a "quota" system
was set up: each European nation was only allowed to send a certain number
of migrants each year. The U.S. were to become a great preserve of growing
wealth and prosperity for their own citizens.
And at first this seemed to be happening: nowhere in the world was there so
rapid an economic development as in the U.S. But the U.S. had emerged from
the War as the great creditor nation; and, as we have seen, the Americans
refused to admit European goods in payment of these debts. Thus they had to
be paid in gold; and thus it became more and more difficult to sell American
goods abroad just at the time when business was booming and the
production of goods swelling ' year by year. We know how this helped to
produce the Great Depression.
The Depression knocked out the Republican Party. In 1932 the Democrat,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, was elected President, and was re-elected in 1936, 1940
and 1944. Not till 1952 was there to be another President from the Republican
Party, and by that time the policies of the U.S.A. had been transformed.
The chief agent of this transformation was Franklin Roosevelt. Unlike his
famous elder cousin, Theodore, he belonged to the Democratic Party. He had
been one of the rising young Democrats in the days of President Wilson, and
had taken a prominent part in Wilson's fight to get the U.S.A. into the League
of Nations. After Wilson's defeat he had accepted isolationism for the time
being, because it had become suicidal for an American politician to do anything
else; but he had not accepted isolationism in his heart, and he was ready to do
what he could to oppose it if the opportunity should arise. But the opportunity
was long in coming. Of more immediate importance was the fact that he did
not believe in the traditional "laissez-faire" capitalism: he was a liberal, of
course, like all Americans, but he did not believe that the government should
simply stand aside and leave economic affairs to run themselves. He thought
that the government should be ready to intervene in economic affairs, when
necessary, in the interests of the people.
He assumed office at the lowest point of the Depression, when it had become
clear that the government had got to intervene, because laisser-faire capitalism
had broken down; and Roosevelt's immense reputation was earned essentially
by the clear, definite and forthright way in which he organized this
intervention so as to transform the American economy. He named his
programme "the New Deal". We cannot go into it in detail libraries have
been written about it; but we can say that it was based on two main principles.
The first was that it was the government's business to spend, and to spend
lavishly, so as to revive and stimulate industry; and this involved a great
increase in taxation, but a still greater use of government credit a controlled
inflation, in fact, such as Schacht was using in Germany; but, unlike Schacht,
Roosevelt did not attempt to direct the actual operation of industry he was
no socialist, but a believer in private enterprise. He did not, however, believe
that industry should be run solely by capitalists: here comes in his second
principle, that the workers should no longer be considered mere employees,
but partners in the business of production; and that they should therefore be
properly organized so as to be able to meet their employers on equal terms.
This was the more important of the two principles of the New Deal. By laws
like the Wagner Act of 1935 (which forbade employers to discriminate against
unionists and set up a Labour Relations Board to look into industrial disputes)
and the Fair Labour Standards Act of 1938 (which fixed a forty-hour week and a
minimum wage of forty cents an hour) the position of labour was transformed.
Employers found it necessary to negotiate with their employees in a new way,
and the consequent improvement in labour relations has really meant a "new
deal".
It was long, though, before Roosevelt could find any support for his desire to
break down isolationism. For years he had to watch isolationism being
strengthened: its high-water mark was reached in the Neutrality Laws of 1935-
37, which prohibited American citizens from trading with or extending credit
to any belligerent, for fear lest such action should involve the U.S. in war.
These laws were passed by Congress in the teeth of the President's opposition.
Their effect was to tie the hands of the American government, so that while
the world was drifting towards war, all that the U.S. could do was to stand on
the sidelines and shout exhortations to other nations. But the aggressive
policies pursued by Japan, Germany and Italy helped Roosevelt in his task of
"re-educating" the American people. After the actual outbreak of war in 1939,
he was able to get the "cash-and-carry" legislation passed, which allowed
England and France to buy arms in the U.S., provided they paid in cash and
took the arms away in their own ships.
In 1940, after the fall of France, he was able to give England fifty American
destroyers in return for rights to set up naval bases in certain British Atlantic
possessions. In 1941 the Lend-Lease Act was passed, giving the President the
power to lend or lease munitions or other facilities of war "to any nation
whose defence is vital to that of the U.S.A." In August, 1941, he was able to
meet Winston Churchill and sign with him the Atlantic Charter, which
embodied the joint aims of England and the U.S. for the post-war world the
terms of the Charter were very general, but its importance lay in the fact that it
provided these two nations with a common policy. Finally, of course, the
Japanese took the mad step of attacking the U.S. and the British in the Pacific,
thus bringing the U.S. into the war. After that, one may say, isolationism was
for all practical purposes dead in the U.S.; it has been as fatal for an American
politician since 1945 to be called isolationist as it was after 1920 for him to be
called anti-isolationist, and the U.S. have become one of the main influences in
the affairs of the world.
55. The Cauldron Of Asia
When war broke out in 1914, the domination of Europe over Asia Japan
excepted -- was still absolute and practically unquestioned: the Asiatic peoples
had not yet begun to move. But they were ripe for movement. They had been
awakened from their long sleep: their traditional ways of life and thought had
been deeply shaken by the influence of the West; and with the breaking of
these ancient moulds, they were being presented with new ideas and new
possibilities of action. They still accepted the fact of European superiority (a
superiority of energy and determination as well as of material power), but they
were beginning to resent it and to question its necessity. They no longer
wanted merely to return to their ancestral ways the Boxer movement was
the last considerable effort in that direction; they admitted the advantages of
Western civilization; but they wished to carry on the process of westernization
by themselves, in their own ways, without surrendering altogether their native
traditions. In fact, they wanted to follow the example of Japan. And the
Europeans themselves, spreading by precept and example the ideas of
liberalism and nationalism, were encouraging them to do so.
The First World War dealt a body-blow to European supremacy. One obvious
reason for this was that the "colonial powers" emerged from it far weaker than
they had been before. Germany was knocked out; Russia was knocked out;
France and England were seriously impoverished. The U.S.A. was not but
then the U.S.A. had never been an imperialist power, but rather the contrary,
at least in Asia. Japan, on the other hand, was stronger than ever. More
important than this material reason, though, was a moral one. Up to 1914 most
Asiatics had looked on Europeans with admiration and respect, even if not
with affection. The war abruptly changed all that. If Europeans could be such
criminal fools, there was no reason why other peoples should respect them:
their superiority was merely one of material force, which could be defeated by
force as soon as Asiatics had learned enough of the science and technical
knowledge of the West. And furthermore, the Europeans were inclined to
agree: shocked by the war, they themselves were losing faith in themselves and
in their "imperial destiny" to guide other races. There had always been many
anti-imperialists in Europe; now, especially in England and France, they began
to become really powerful. The U.S.A. were also anti-imperialist, and so was
Russia for under Communism it became part of Russian policy to oppose
imperialism everywhere, and, though her object in doing so was to spread
communism, not nationalism, in actual fact Russian propaganda played into
the hands of Asiatic nationalists.
Accordingly, between 1919 and 1939 there was an upsurge of "anti-colonial"
nationalism throughout Asia; and by 1939 it had made imperialism of the old
sort impossible.
The Middle East
In August, 1920, the Allied and Associated Powers signed with the Sultan of
Turkey the Treaty of Sevres. This treaty broke up the Ottoman Empire very
thoroughly. The Hejaz (western Arabia, containing the sacred cities of Mecca
and Medina) became an independent state; Palestine, Transjordan, and
Mesopotamia became British mandates; Syria became a French mandate;
Armenia was made an independent republic; Adrianople and Thrace, all the
Turkish Aegean islands, and the west coast of Asia Minor, were given to
Greece; and "spheres of influence" were granted to France and Italy on the
south coast of Asia Minor. Constantinople and the Straits were
internationalized.
The Sultan accepted these terms he had no choice. But a certain tough
soldier named Mustapha Kemal did not. Kemal had won the Gallipoli
campaign for Turkey, and was popular with the Turkish troops; he was already
in disgusted revolt against the Sultan's inefficiency, and had begun to organize
a nationalist group called the People's Party; and at the news of the Treaty of
Sevres, he broke out openly. He was a ruthless determined and efficient
soldier; between 1920 and 1922 he succeeded in crushing the Armenians and
driving out the Greeks, French and Italians from Asia Minor; and it was soon
evident that England, France and Italy, weary of war, were not prepared to
start a new conflict in order to suppress him. So in 1923 they signed with his
government the Treaty of Lausanne. By this treaty Kemal renounced Arabia,
Mesopotamia, Transjordan, Palestine and Syria, but retained Asia Minor,
Constantinople and Thrace. Turkey thus became a compact national state.
Kemal then organized his People's Party like the Italian Fascist Party: a group
of progressive Turks who were determined to nationalize and westernize Asia
Minor, while maintaining their independence of European control. He
abolished the Sultanate, separated the state from the Islamic religion, adopted
the Roman alphabet, the Gregorian calendar, and the metric system of weights
and measures; he abolished the fez and the turban in favour of western
headgear, and forbade women to wear veils; he instituted primary education
for all (the illiteracy rate fell from 95 per cent to 65 percent by 1935), and
developed transport and industries. After 1923 his foreign policy was pacific: he
signed an agreement with Russia, providing for mutual neutrality, in 1925; in
1930 he made an agreement with Greece, providing for a mutual interchange
of populations; in 1932 he entered the League of Nations; and in 1934 he
formed the Balkan Pact with Greece, Roumania and Yugoslavia. He died in
1938; but by that time he had made the new Turkey a strong and stable state,
able to survive the storms of the Second World War.
Mesopotamia and Transjordan
During the First World War the English had deliberately encouraged Arab
nationalism against Turkey. In particular, they had sent Colonel Lawrence to
rouse the tribes of the Hejaz and Transjordan country, and these tribes gave
much help in the final stages of the war against Turkey. In 1919, after much
wrangling between England and France, they were rewarded. The Hejaz was
made an independent kingdom under Hussein, Mesopotamia was given to
Hussein's eldest son Feisal, and Transjordan to Hussein's second son, Abdullah.
Both Mesopotamia and Transjordan were made British mandates.
Mesopotamia soon showed desires for independence. Feisal renamed her Iraq,
and proceeded to act as an independent monarch. This led to trouble with
England; but the English, as long as they retained the control of the oil-wells of
Iraq, were not much concerned with the nature of its government; in 1930, by
the Treaty of Baghdad, they recognized Iraqi independence, and in 1932 they
sponsored Iraq's entrance into the League of Nations. In 1935 the British
garrisons in Iraq were withdrawn. But England retained an alliance with Iraq,
the right to maintain air-bases in the country, and, above all, the oil
concessions.
Transjordan, a much less-developed country with a more primitive people,
proved less troublesome; and the English were able to maintain their
protectorate over it without much trouble down to 1939 though by that
time the disturbances in Palestine were already beginning to make trouble
across the Jordan.
Arabia
The arrangements made for Arabia were soon upset. In central Arabia there
flourished a fanatical Moslem sect, the Wahabis, who were determinedly
opposed to any form of westernization. To these, the agreement between
Hussein and the English appeared an insult to the Moslem religion. They had a
remarkable leader, Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud, who used their fanaticism to make
himself, first king of the Hejaz (driving out Hussein) and then, by 1932, king of
nearly all Arabia. As he showed no disposition to advance beyond Arabia, the
English had no difficulty about recognizing him; but his kingdom was a new
victory for Arab nationalism.
Syria
The French had insisted on being given a mandate over Syria as the English
had insisted on being given a mandate over Transjordan and Palestine, in order
to be able to get at the oil-wells of Iraq. The French would certainly have had
trouble with the Syrians sooner or later, as the English had with the Iraqis; but
the trouble arrived sooner than was necessary when the French sent to Syria as
their High Commissioner in 1925, the unsuccessful and ridiculous General
Sarrail: a "political" rather than a "military" general. His tactlessness soon
roused the Syrians to revolt; and though he was recalled, and order was
restored by 1927, the Syrians henceforth demanded their independence. In
1936, after much rioting and more negotiations, the French agreed to a gradual
withdrawal of their troops and a recognition of Syrian independence; but this
was still incomplete when the Second World war broke out in 1939.
Palestine
The situation in Palestine would in any case have been complicated by
religious differences: Palestine is a holy land for Jews and Moslems as well as
for Christians. But the English had unnecessarily complicated it by the "Balfour
Declaration". In 1917, hoping to get the support of Jewry in the war, the
English foreign minister, Mr. Balfour had agreed that Palestine should become
a "national home" for the Jews. Relying on this declaration, after 1919
multitudes of Jews flocked into Palestine: especially after Hitler began
persecuting them in Germany.
The Jewish population of Palestine rose from 70,000 in 1920 to 500,000 in 1938.
The Jews, more enterprising and industrious than the native Arabs, and
supported by funds from rich Jews in other countries, began buying up land
and developing it at a great rate; so that the native Arabs saw the prospect that
in no long time they would be, in practice, excluded from their homeland.
They reacted by rioting and violence: there were considerable anti-Jewish
revolts in 1929 and 1933. The English tried to mediate between the parties, but
without success. In 1937 they proposed a plan for the partition of Palestine
between Jews and Arabs, but it was rejected. In 1939 they proposed to make
Palestine an autonomous Arab state with guarantees for the Jewish minority,
but this plan was also rejected. When the Second World War broke out the
Palestine problem was still unsolved.
Egypt
During the First World War, the last vestige of Turkish suzerainty was swept
away, when the English renamed the Khedive of Egypt, "Sultan". But this was
far from satisfying the Egyptians. They wanted independence also from English
control. Here as elsewhere, a Nationalist Party appeared. It was led by one
Saad Zaghlul: his exile in 1919 provoked a revolt which was suppressed only
with difficulty. In 1921 the English proposed a compromise: the Sultan Fuad
was to become King of Egypt, but he was to rule under the supervision and by
the advice of the English High Commissioner. The Nationalists were not
content with this. When a new constitution was promulgated in 1923, the
Nationalists at once became the dominant party in the parliament, and
proceeded to press for complete independence. The English were in a
quandary: they did not want to have a hostile Egypt, and yet they did not see
how they could safely relinquish control of the Suez Canal. In 1936 they made
a compromise in the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of that year: England was to
become the permanent ally, not the protector, of Egypt, and she was to
withdraw all her troops except the guard necessary for the Canal. This was the
situation when the Second World War broke out, and it was not satisfactory to
either Egypt or England.
Persia
Before 1914, Persia was practically under the domination of Russia and
England, who had marked out '"spheres of influence" for themselves in
northern and southern Persia respectively. In 1917 Russia's power collapsed,
and the English were too occupied with the war to devote much attention to
Persia; and in these circumstances there rose to power in Persia a soldier, Reza
Pahlavi. In 1921 he made himself master of the capital, Teheran, and set up
there a nationalist government in imitation of Kemal's in Turkey. Indeed, he
was altogether an imitator of Kemal; though as Persia was much less advanced
even than Turkey, he had a more difficult task. In 1925 he had the Shah
deposed, and placed himself on the throne, and from that time forth he strove
to westernize and to nationalize Persia as much as possible. Among other
changes, he altered the official name of the country to Iran, and bade the
Persians think of themselves as the ancient Iranians, the true Aryans from
whom the population of Europe itself had come. Tyrannical and ruthless, he
was yet the best ruler Persia had had for generations. But Persia was poorer
than Turkey, and could not afford to stand altogether by herself; for this reason
he was forced to make concessions to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, so as to
draw profit from the oil-wells in northern Persia. But he chafed under the
necessity, and resented his dependence on English capital, and tried to play off
English influence against first Russia and then Germany. This policy was to
cost him his throne during the Second World War.
India
In 1909, as we have seen, the Morley-Minto reforms granted certain
concessions to Indian nationalism; but for various reasons these concessions
were not satisfactory. Partly for this reason, partly in recognition of the great
services rendered by Indians during the First World War, a more rapid advance
was determined on. The "Declaration of 1917" promised the Indians a gradual
concession of "dominion status". The first step was taken by the Montagu-
Chelmsford Report of 1918. This provided for three changes. A central
legislature of two houses was set up; a lower house of which two-thirds of the
members were to be elected, and an upper house of which half were to be
elected; but the Viceroy was not responsible to the legislature, and could rule
independently of it. In the provincial councils the majority of the members
were to be elected, and these councils were to control all provincial affairs,
except finance and law and order, which were reserved to the governors: a
division which was called "dyarchy". Finally, rural and municipal councils were
placed entirely in Indian hands. It was hoped that this system would give the
Indians education in democracy, while preventing them from making
disastrous mistakes. Further, in 1923 it was decided that henceforth the Indian
civil service should be recruited mainly from among Indians as a result, by
1935 there were only 500 British officials left in India. Provision was also made
to train Indians for higher posts in the Army, and a full-scale military and staff
college was set up at Quetta in 1934.
The Indian nationalists were not, of course, satisfied with these concessions,
and in 1919 they had found a great leader in Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi was a
lawyer, educated in England, who had spent many years working among the
Indian emigrants to South Africa, and had come to the conclusion that
Europeans were not fitted to govern coloured peoples, especially Indians. He
believed it was impossible for the English to work out a scheme of government
for India: they should quit India, and leave the Indians to work one out for
themselves. The government's response was that for the English to quit India
would only produce anarchy. Gandhi, a firm believer in the old Hindu doctrine
of "ahimsa" (non-violence), started a campaign of "civil disobedience" and was
able to cause great embarrassment to the government on account of the
immense influence which his reputation for sanctity gave him over the Hindu
masses. Unfortunately, the growth of his influence, and that of the Congress
Party which followed him, awakened the fears of the Moslems about the fate
they might suffer from the Hindu majority under democratic government, and
they began to raise a cry for "pakistan", or self-government for Moslem India.
Other national and religious groups also began to raise their voices, in spite of
Gandhi's sincere efforts to reassure them. Nevertheless, the English went ahead
with their schemes for introducing dominion status; and, after much discussion
with the Indian leaders in the Round Table Conferences of 1930 and 1932, the
Government of India Act was passed in 1935. This made provincial
government in India completely "responsible", except for certain emergency
powers possessed by the governors. It also sketched out a scheme for a
federation of India, to be set up if and when the various Indian princes and
parties could agree together to establish it. During the next few years the
English made great efforts to bring about such an agreement, but had not
succeeded when the Second World War broke out in 1939.
China
The Chinese revolution of 1911 broke out because of the dissatisfaction of the
Chinese at the inability of the Imperial government to resist the encroachments
of foreign powers on China's territory and sovereignty. An increasing number
of Chinese were receiving a Western education from missionaries, or were
being educated abroad; and they wished China to be reformed on Western
lines, as Japan had been, so that she might become a strong and independent
nation.
The principal revolutionary was Sun Yat-sen, educated in America, who began
propagandizing and organizing the various anti-imperial secret societies, with
the object of overthrowing the Manchu dynasty and establishing a republic.
The revolution actually broke out prematurely, in the army, before the
education and organization of the revolutionaries had gone far enough. The
dynasty was easily overthrown, but Sun Yat-sen and his followers proved
incapable of providing a strong central government, and the various provinces
fell under the control of "war-lords" a war-lord being a politician with a
private army. Yuan Shih-kai, who had been chosen Prime Minister, even tried
to make himself Emperor; but his attempt was a complete failure, and his
death in 1915 added to the confusion. A nominally republican government
continued to exist at Nanking, but its members were always changing, and it
had little power. Between 1912 and 1926 political intrigue, corruption,
brigandage and civil war became endemic in China.
The Japanese thought this a favourable opportunity of obtaining the dominion
of China, especially as the other foreign powers were engaged in the First
World War. In 1915 they presented to the Nanking government the Twenty-
One Demands, which would have given them practical control of the country.
The opposition of the U.S.A. (which believed in maintaining the "open-door"
policy for all foreigners in China) prevented the Japanese from gaining their
end; but they continued to extend their influence in various ways, especially by
subsidizing various war-lords. However, after 1918 the other powers were
once more guarding their own interests, and thus making things more difficult
for Japan.
Sun Yat-sen was still at work. He had established himself at Canton, in the
most "progressive" part of China. He was now receiving help from the Russian
Communists, who had declared themselves the enemies of all "western
imperialism", and who no doubt hoped, through Sun Yat-sen, to set up a
Communist state in China. But Sun Yat-sen was not a Communist. He
organized the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, which set up what was
practically an independent government at Canton: a government which was
rather fascist than communist in form, but more Chinese than either. An army
was trained for the Kuomintang by Russian officers (e.g. Colonel Borodin), and
a capable leader was found for it in Chiang Kai-shek, who also became the
leader of the Kuomintang after Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925.
In 1926 Chiang was strong enough to lead the Northern Expedition, which
conquered central China for the Kuomintang, and re-established the national
capital at Nanking. After a brief settling-down period, the new government
showed itself to be unusually efficient, by Chinese standards, and the foreign
powers, who had at first been hostile to it, found the comparatively orderly
rule of the Kuomintang more favourable to trade than the previous confusion.
England and the U.S.A., in particular, were so impressed that they agreed to a
gradual abolition of the privileges of extra-territoriality, thus recognizing the
sovereignty of Chiang's government. Meanwhile, negotiations were opened
with the northern provinces, and by a mixture of diplomacy and force they
were induced to throw in their lot with the Kuomintang.
But Chiang Kai-shek had three difficulties to face. The first was the
immemorial Chinese tradition of political corruption, and we may as well say
here that he never succeeded in overcoming it. The fact that he was able to
maintain himself at the head of the Kuomintang shows that he was a most
astute politician; but, even so, he could only succeed by permitting bribery on a
considerable scale. His second difficulty was Communism. He had broken with
the Communists in 1927, partly from suspicion of their designs, partly to
placate his more conservative followers, partly to attract the northern
provinces, and partly to please the English and Americans. The result was the
outbreak of civil war between Kuomintang and Communists. The third
difficulty was Japan: the Japanese now saw that China was slipping from their
grasp, and prepared to "safeguard their interests" by direct intervention.
In 1931, the Japanese made the existence of brigandage an excuse for taking
forcible control of Manchuria, where they set up the puppet state of
Manchukuo under Henry Pu-Yi, the son of the former Emperor of China.
China appealed to the League of Nations, which sent out the Lytton
Commission to investigate. This Commission condemned Japan's action, but
the only result was the withdrawal of Japan from the League, whose failure to
back up its commission showed up its weakness. In 1933 the Japanese went on
to occupy Jehol.
Chiang now determined to finish with the Communists, so as to have his hands
free for Japan. He pressed them so hard that in 1935-6 they undertook the
"Long March", transferring themselves bodily to the north-west province of
Shensi; this brought them into contact with Russia, and in the long run made
them stronger than before, though their immediate strength was, of course,
weakened. Chiang prepared to attack them in their new positions. But now he
met with trouble in his own army, in which some of the generals had decided
that the Communists were no longer a menace, but ought to be enlisted in the
struggle against Japan. (Communist propaganda had been urging this alliance
for some time, and denouncing Chiang for not accepting it: it was in line with
the "outstretched hand policy" which was Stalin's official foreign policy from
1933 to 1939.) At the end of 1936, when Chiang was visiting the front, he was
seized by General Chang Hsueh-liang at Sian. There followed certain
negotiations, the truth about which is still unknown; after which Chiang was
released, and his captor submitted to a court-martial, which let him off lightly.
Whatever arrangements were made, they became unimportant six months
later, when Japan started a full-scale invasion of China, and effectually removed
Chiang's attention from the Communists.
At first the Japanese had some success. By the end of 1937 they were in
possession of Pekin, Shanghai and Nanking. By the end of 1938 they had
reached Hankow, had occupied most of the coast-line, and had taken Canton.
Three things prevented them from achieving a full conquest: the immense size
of the country, the skill of the Chinese in guerrilla warfare, and most of all the
fact that the Japanese were not willing to throw in their full forces the
reason for which became clear when they attacked the English and the
Americans in December, 1941.
Japan
Between 1919 and 1939, Japan moved rapidly and determinedly along the road
of imperialism. The reasons for this lay in her history, her character, and her
internal situation. Population was her great problem: her adoption of Western
reforms had so reduced the death-rate and increased the population as to make
her increasingly dependent on foreign markets and raw materials.
Migration was no remedy for this over-population, chiefly because the
Japanese did not want to migrate. It is true that they were excluded from the
U.S.A. and from Australia; but they were not excluded from Manchuria, the
East Indies, or South America. Yet only a few thousands of them chose to
migrate, though at the same time the Chinese were moving in millions.
Therefore the remedy adopted for the population problem was the further
expansion of secondary industries, in which the Japanese, with their tradition of
skilled craftsmanship, excel. To expand industry, new markets and sources of
raw materials were required, and these were at hand in China, in the East
Indies, and in India. Thus the Japanese set out to build up a great trading
empire in east Asia. They are, however, by tradition a military people, and the
temptation to transform a commercial empire into a "real" one was strong. Yet
it might not have been yielded to but for two events: the renunciation by
England of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1922, and the rise of the Kuomintang
to power in China in 1926.
The Anglo-Japanese alliance had first been formed in 1902, and had been
renewed for ten years in 1911. Its value was proved in the First World War,
when it made England's position in the Pacific perfectly secure: the German
Eastern Fleet being forced over to South America, where it was destroyed in
the battle of the Falkland Islands. England had no objection to Japan's being the
dominant nation in the Far East so long as English interests were safeguarded.
The U.S.A., however, were not so accommodating, believing in the "open-
door" or "free-for-all" policy in Asia; and in the preliminary negotiations for the
Washington Naval Conference of 1922, the U.S. insisted that the Anglo-
Japanese treaty should be allowed to lapse. The English reluctantly agreed.
This was undoubtedly a great shock to Japan, and a great stimulus to the
warlike section among her rulers; it also compelled the English to build a naval
base at Singapore.
The rise of the Kuomintang made it clear that China was not going to remain
either politically or economically dependent on other countries. Japanese
financiers and industrialists found the prospects of their economic empire
diminishing, and (though hitherto opposed to the militarists) were slowly
brought to accept a more aggressive policy. The Japanese army and navy
advocated such a policy continually, and continually blamed the Japanese
government for its slowness to move. Indeed, the more hot-headed among the
younger officers were quite ready to enforce their imperialist ideas by political
assassination as in 1932 and 1936, when several cabinet ministers were
murdered, because they were thought not to be sufficiently militant in their
nationalism. It was a group of army officers, acting on their own authority,
who began the invasion of Manchuria; and from that moment Japan moved
forward towards full war with China, and then to her fatal attempt to seize the
whole of east Asia: a case of nationalism gone mad.
Briefly, it may be said that Japan's prosperity depended on the import of large
stocks of raw materials and the export of large quantities of finished goods; and
during the inter-war period the Japanese came more and more to believe that
only military action could secure for them their markets and sources of supply.
This conviction was powerfully supported by Japan's traditional militarism.
Her departure from the League of Nations in 1932 seems to mark her final
acceptance of this policy: the policy of establishing, by force if necessary, "the
Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"; and it was this which led her, first into
war with China, and then into the Second World War.
56. Omens And Portents
After 1919, men had hoped that they were entering on an era of international
stability and prosperity: an era in which peace would be kept by international
co-operation through the League of Nations, while the spread of industrialism
provided an ever-increasing flow of goods for all men. By 1930, however, it
was clear that this was not going to happen at least, not yet. With militant
Communism dominant in Russia, with militant nationalism dominant in half-a-
dozen other countries, with both these movements spreading themselves by
active propaganda all over the world, and with the Great Depression bringing
want and misery instead of the expected plenty, the prospect before the world
began to darken formidably. Yet the situation still appeared far from hopeless,
and as late as 1935 most men were still confident that the worst could be
avoided. Then, however, began the series of events which led up to the Second
World War; and we must now consider these events, their causes and
consequences.
At the beginning of 1935, the international situation did seem fairly stable.
Adolf Hitler was an obvious danger, but he hardly seemed to be in a position to
make trouble. His anti-communism made him a deadly enemy to Russia; and
the other Great Powers, England, France and Italy, were still united in their
determination to preserve the main lines of the Versailles settlement. When, in
1934, Hitler's followers in Austria had attempted a revolution, they had been
suppressed; and Hitler had not dared to aid them, for Mussolini had made it
clear that he would resist any German intervention in Austria by force. When,
in March, 1935, Hitler broke the Versailles Treaty by reviving conscription in
Germany, the governments of Italy, France and England at once held a
meeting at Stresa, and formed the "Stresa Front": an alliance which was
intended to prevent any further Nazi adventures. It looked as though Hitler's
foreign policy had been checkmated in advance. Nor did Communism seem
any longer such a serious menace. Stalin, fearful of Japan and Germany, had
now joined the League of Nations; and Communists everywhere had received
orders to pose as the friends of democracy and of international order. The
Depression, too, was passing away, and with the recovery of prosperity men's
minds were quietening down; perhaps, after all, the crisis would pass. But this
calm was only apparent. Beneath, the forces of conflict were still active; and
what brought them to the surface was the Abyssinian affair.
Abyssinia
One of the main troubles of Italy was over-population. It had been accentuated
by the immigration restrictions imposed by the U.S.A. in 1924. The sufferings
of the Depression (which hit Italy particularly because she was so dependent on
foreign raw materials and on the tourist and luxury trades) drove home this
fact of over-population. Mussolini had already tried many expedients:
increasing the country's production of food ("the battle of the grain"), draining
the Pontine Marshes, settling 50,000 Italians in Libya; but these measures were
insufficient.
Italy had been promised colonies where she joined the Allies in 1915. This
promise was broken at Versailles because of the then chaotic condition of Italy.
Afterwards Mussolini demanded its fulfilment, and England did eventually
cede Jubaland to Italy; but France refused any worth-while concession.
Mussolini accordingly determined to do the best he could with Abyssinia.
Abyssinia (or Ethiopia) had long been recognized as being within Italy's "sphere
of influence" in Africa. Any time after 1890 Italy could have had it for the
taking if she had been strong enough to take it; but her only serious attempt
to do so had been defeated at Adowa in 1896. Mussolini had long cherished
hopes of reversing this defeat; but for years he had too many other tasks on his
hands; meanwhile, to safeguard it from exploitation by other nations, he
insisted on its being admitted into the League of Nations a step which
England had opposed, on the ground that Abyssinia was not a properly
constituted and civilized state. Nor was it. Its government was a curious form
of African feudalism. There was a nominal Emperor, Haile Selassie; but the real
power lay in the hands of the local magnates, who ruled their subjects with a
kind of feudal despotism. The slave-trade flourished, and slave-traders did not
hesitate to raid over the borders into English, French and Italian territory.
(These borders were, in any case, very badly defined.) It was easy, then, for
Mussolini to find a pretext for war with Abyssinia: a "frontier incident" at Wal
Wal in 1935 provided it. He expected to get what he wanted without difficulty;
especially as about half the Abyssinian magnates were in Italy's pay.
But Abyssinia was now, by his own action, a member of the League of Nations.
The supporters of the League had watched with anguish the deterioration in its
prestige, particularly after its failure to uphold the Lytton Commission on
Manchuria. They now determined to make Abyssinia a test case. Haile Selassie
was persuaded to appeal to the League, and all the resources of propaganda
were developed (especially in England and France) to rally public opinion to
the support of this appeal. (The Communists, following their "outstretched
hand" policy, added their efforts to the rest.) The English and French
governments tried to find a compromise in the "Hoare-Laval plan", which
would have given Mussolini substantial concessions in Abyssinia without war;
but such a storm of indignation was raised in England and France by the
Leaguers that Hoare and Laval were hurriedly thrown overboard, along with
their plan. Mussolini refused to wait: it was essential for him to get Abyssinia
conquered before the wet season of 1936, so as not to allow the opposition
time to organize itself. He succeeded; but in order to make sure of success his
armies used gas, which was forbidden by international law, and which greatly
increased the popular anger against him in England and France. Meantime the
governments of these countries had reluctantly agreed to the imposition of
economic sanctions on Italy. But these were a fiasco: many members of the
League would not co-operate, and even England and France would not impose
really drastic sanctions for fear of provoking Mussolini into war. The net results
were that Italy conquered Abyssinia, the League was finally shown up as being
powerless to check aggression, and the Stresa Front was smashed beyond
repair.
A working arrangement between Mussolini and Hitler (the Rome-Berlin Axis)
was established before the end of 1936; and Hitler was now able to go ahead
with confidence. Indeed, he had already begun to go ahead: in March, 1936, he
re-militarized the Rhineland, and France and England, pre-occupied with Italy,
could only protest. In November he threw out the international commission
controlling Germany's rivers. In January, 1937, he formally repudiated the
Treaty of Versailles. The following year was to see Austria and the Sudetenland
swallowed up and the year after, the rest of Czechoslovakia. France, in the
meantime, was weakened by a fierce revival of quarrels between the Right and
Left, beginning over the Abyssinian affair, and intensified by the Spanish civil
war and the election of the Popular Front. England was powerless to act on the
Continent without either France or Italy; in any case, the Abyssinian crisis had
shown up her weakness. All she could do was start re-arming: a process far
from complete in 1939.
Spain
During the 19th century, Spain had been afflicted by much the same forces as
France, but more disastrously, as the Spaniards are even less compromising
than the French. Besides the usual revolutions, Spain had had a ten-year civil
war: the Carlist War, between conservative-clericals and liberal-anti-clericals.
After this, the country had been governed by more-or-less liberal governments,
for the most part inefficient and corrupt, whose particular pastime had been
the spoliation of the Church, which was much hampered in consequence. One
result of this was that when industrialization began (chiefly in Catalonia and
the Asturias), the workers' religious needs were not properly provided for, and
various forms of socialism (particularly the most extreme form, anarchism)
obtained great influence among them. Besides these troubles, the Catalans and
the Basques retained their ancient desires for regional autonomy. The coming-
of-age of Alfonso XIII in 1908 brought better times, for this king was a
consummate politician, and carefully held the balance between conservatives
and liberals. He also kept Spain neutral in the First World War. But the
incompetence and corruption of the continually changing governments
exasperated the people against the parliament, and disastrous defeats in the
Moroccan war in 1922 provoked a revolt in the army, which (with the king's
consent and the approbation of the people) made General Primo da Rivera
dictator in 1923.
Primo's government was at first highly successful. He balanced the budget,
suppressed brigandage and anarchist violence, built roads and railways and four
thousand schools, held great international exhibitions at Barcelona and Seville,
and, in 1926, brought the Moroccan war to a triumphant conclusion. But his
suppression of the Basques and the Catalans, and of freedom of speech, his
arbitrary arrests and increases in taxation, made him many enemies. Tolerated
as long as he brought prosperity, the arrival of the Depression provoked a
wave of opposition to him, and he resigned in 1930, dying the same year. In
1931 the king decided on a return to parliamentary government. But the
monarchy had become involved in Primo's unpopularity, and there was a
widespread call for a republic. In the municipal elections of 1931, the cities
returned large republican majorities. Alfonso abdicated to avoid civil war, and
the republic was established in peace.
But it proved unable to govern. 1931-6 was a period of growing disorder, no
party or group of parties being able to form a stable government. Anti-
clericalism showed itself in the expulsion of the Jesuits, the secularization of
education, and in anarchist and communist attacks on churches, convents etc.
It was soon clear that anarchists and communists were anxious to take every
opportunity of causing trouble: a partial victory of the parties of the Right at
the elections of 1933 was followed by revolts in Barcelona, Corunna, Saragossa,
and a particularly ferocious one in the Asturias. When, in 1936, a Popular Front
coalition won the elections, there was an immediate increase in disorder:
between February and June there were 113 general strikes, 218 partial strikes,
170 churches burnt, and so on. The answer to this disorder was a considerable
growth in the Spanish fascist party, the Falange Espanola. About June there
began a extraordinary wave of assassinations, which the government seemed
powerless to prevent. Finally, Calvo Sotelo, a royalist member of parliament,
was murdered by members of the police-force.
The army-leaders, who had already been meditating a military revolt (a
"pronunciamiento", in the Spanish phrase) to restore order, now decided to
act: four days after the assassination of Sotelo military revolt broke out in
Barcelona, Madrid, Saragossa, Pamplona, Cadiz and Morocco. But the generals
had not reckoned with the communist and anarchist organizations: in Madrid
and Barcelona the revolt was quickly put down; and though elsewhere
(especially in Navarre) it found great popular support, the army found itself
committed to a full-scale civil war. Anarchists, communists, socialists, and
many Basques and Catalans supported the republic; in the opposite camp were
traditionalists, monarchists, Falangists and clericals. The liberals were divided.
It was thus a social, political and religious war.
International intervention began almost at once: it is still impossible to say
exactly when or where. After initial successes, the leader of the insurgents,
General Franco, was checked before Madrid by the first International Brigade:
foreign volunteers organized by communists under a Russian general. Franco
himself accepted help from Italy and Germany: Italy sending about 50,000 men,
and Germany weapons and technicians. At first it seemed as though a
European war would develop. England, however, stoutly insisted on the
principle of non-intervention, and persuaded France, Italy, Germany and
Russia to join her in setting up the Nonintervention Committee, which,
though it did not prevent men and arms from flowing in to both sides, did
deter any of its members from the sort of open intervention which would have
meant open war. As it turned out, Franco achieved final victory early in 1939,
and all foreign troops had left Spain by May of that year. But the Spanish war
contributed greatly to producing the Second World War. It enormously
exasperated political enmities throughout Europe. It split France disastrously
between Right and Left. And Germany was much pleased with the
performance in Spain of her tanks and aircraft, and was encouraged to hope
that they would be equally effective in a larger conflict.
It was essentially a Spanish war, produced by the social, political and religious
conditions inside Spain. But the infiltration of communism and fascism caused
Spain to become a battleground for the wider forces which were already
dividing Europe. Yet the hopes of the victorious parties that they might find
support in Spain were disappointed: in the Second World War, as in the First,
Spain was neutral.
Austria
By the Treaty of St. Germain the Austrian Empire had been broken up into
Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while Galicia went to Poland,
Transylvania to Roumania, Bosnia etc. to Yugoslavia, and the Trentino and
Trieste to Italy. Austria thus became a tiny German republic. The Austrians
promptly voted for union with Germany, but this was vetoed by the Allies:
Italy in particular did not want Germany on the Brenner Pass.
The Austrian republic was hopelessly unbalanced: "a head without a body". It
had a large capital city, Vienna, formerly fed by the trade of a vast empire, but
now left derelict: its great population only saved from starving by the charity of
the Red Cross and similar organizations. Politically, too, the Viennese were
mostly socialist and anti-clerical, with a leaning towards communism; but the
peasants, who made up the bulk of Austria's population, were strongly
conservative and Catholic. Thus the government of Austria was constantly at
odds with the municipality of Vienna.
In 1920-29, the chief Austrian statesman, the leader of the conservative
Catholic majority, was Mgr. Seipel. He succeeded in stabilizing Austria's
economy with the help of large loans raised through the League of Nations;
but the new stability was essentially dependent on the maintenance and
renewal of these loans. The municipality of Vienna also borrowed largely
abroad, and used the money chiefly for slum-clearance, building huge blocks of
workmen's flats, and so providing housing and employment at the same time
though the anti-socialists said that these flats were also designed to be used
as fortresses in the coming social revolution.
The Great Depression hit Austria very hard. The foreign loans dried up, and
starvation appeared once more in the streets of Vienna. Mgr. Seipel died, and
was succeeded as leader of the conservative Catholic majority by Dollfuss, who
had not only to meet an increase of communism, but also the growth of
Nazism. He made it his policy to steer a middle course, relying on financial
support from the U.S.A. and military support from Mussolini; and being able to
inspire confidence in both quarters, he was able to bring Austria through the
crisis without either economic collapse or civil war.
By 1933, however, the political struggle had become so acute that he
determined the unity of Austria could only be preserved by establishing a
"corporative state" in imitation of Mussolini. The trade-unions (which were
hotbeds of socialism) were replaced by "corporations"; parliament was also
abolished, and replaced by a "Chamber of Corporations". The socialists in
Vienna promptly rebelled, and several days of street fighting were needed to
subdue them. The Nazis delayed their revolt till the following year, when an
army of Austrian Nazis was formed in Germany, to march into Austria when
an internal revolt had overthrown the government. The plot miscarried.
Dollfuss was brutally murdered, but the police subdued the conspirators before
they could carry out the rest of their plans. Mussolini swiftly concentrated an
army on the Brenner Pass, and Hitler dared not move to the support of the
Austrian Nazis. Dollfuss was succeeded by Schuschnigg, who was in an easier
position now that both extreme parties had been crushed.
But the Abyssinian crisis spelt the doom of independent Austria. After the
Rome-Berlin Axis had been formed, Hitler had only to choose his time. He
chose it in March, 1938. Having tried in vain by threats and promises to get
Schuschnigg to surrender, he suddenly invaded Austria. Resistance would have
been useless. Schuschnigg accordingly ordered the Austrian troops not to
resist, but he remained at his post and made a formal protest before being
removed to a concentration camp. A few days later, Hitler held a plebiscite in
Austria, which gave a huge majority for union with Germany.
Czechoslovakia
The Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians are three Slav races who inhabit the
north-east provinces of the old Austrian Empire. The Czechs were the most
progressive of the three, and they had been working for independence long
before 1919. Many of them had migrated to the U.S.A., and these "American
Czechs", led by Masaryk and Benes, were chiefly responsible for getting
Czechoslovakia established at Versailles. But the new republic was from the
first a doubtful quantity. Its mountain-border (the Sudetenland), essential for its
defence from Germany, was inhabited mainly by Germans. The Czechs and
Slovaks were not in harmony with each other: the Czechs being progressive,
industrial and inclined to anti-clericalism, while the Slovaks were conservative
and Catholic peasants. The Ruthenians were still more "backward" than the
Slovaks. In fact, the Czechs were only the biggest minority in a country of
minorities; and though by their force and drive they dominated the others, and
though on the whole they ruled well, the others all resented their dominance
more or less. But Czechoslovakia was an essential link in the French chain of
eastern alliances (the "little entente"), and as long as France was strong and
Germany and Russia weak, the new state was secure. When France began to
weaken and Germany to grow strong, the future of Czechoslovakia became
uncertain.
From 1935 to 1939, Hitler conducted his foreign policy with great skill. He
proclaimed that all he wanted was to get rid of the injustices of Versailles, and
to unite all Germans in Germany according to the accepted principles of
nationalism. Many people, especially in England and the U.S.A., agreed with
those aims. He also proclaimed that Germany was the sole real bulwark of
central Europe against Communism; and there again many people were
inclined to agree with him. When he remilitarized the Rhineland, re-
introduced conscription and began re-arming Germany, and even when he
seized Austria, he found plenty of supporters outside Germany a fact which
helps to explain the feeble opposition offered by England and France to these
measures.
So when, in August, 1938, he turned on Czechoslovakia and demanded the
German-inhabited Sudetenland. the demand did not seem extravagant. The
trouble was that he threatened war if the Czechs refused. England and France
had now to decide whether they would fight Germany for the Sudetenland or
whether they would tell the Czechs to give in. It was then that Neville
Chamberlain, England's Prime Minister, flew to Munich, and started the
negotiations which led to the "Munich Settlement", which gave Hitler the
Sudetenland without war. This surrender has been widely condemned; but in
fact there were many reasons for it. Few people were willing to fight a great
war to keep the Sudeten Germans by force in Czechoslovakia; France and
Poland, in particular, were unwilling; the support of the Dominions was
doubtful; the U.S.A. would certainly have remained neutral; Chamberlain did
not trust Russia; England's rearmament was far from complete; most of all,
perhaps Chamberlain still hoped to be able to patch up the quarrel with Italy
and thus restrain Hitler. At any rate, Germany was allowed to occupy the
Sudetenland; in return, Hitler gave a pledge that he would make no further
territorial demands in Europe. "I think", said Mr. Chamberlain on his return to
England, "that it is peace in our time"; and most people agreed with him. One
of the few who did not was Winston Churchill.
A bitter dispute now arose between the Czechs and the Slovaks. The two races
had never got on well together, and now the Slovaks demanded a sort of
autonomy or home-rule for Slovakia. When this was refused, their leaders
appealed for help to Hitler. The result was that in March, 1939, after bullying
the Czech leaders into surrender by the threat of instant war, Hitler practically
annexed the two Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. On paper, this was
a great success; in fact, it was his first great blunder. The annexation of these
non-German territories showed that his nationalist propaganda was a mere
sham; it showed also that his word was worthless. The immediate result was a
complete change of front by England and France: guarantees against
aggression were offered to all Germany's neighbours, and especially to the
Poles, who seemed to be next on Germany's list.
Poland
When an independent Poland was re-established in 1919, European observers
had hailed it as a sort of miracle. Poland had been torn in three by the great
powers of Russia, Prussia and Austria, and she had seemed to have no prospect
of restoration unless all of them could be put out of action simultaneously.
This incredible thing happened in 1919. The Austrian Empire was dissolved;
Germany was defeated and powerless; Russia was torn by revolution and civil
war. The Poles took their chance. Under men like the soldier Pilsudski and the
musician Paderewski, they organized their own government, and laid claim to
all the territory that had been Polish before the first partition of 1772. Galicia
was recovered from Austria; Germany had to resign herself to losing Polish
Silesia and West Prussia, and thus seeing East Prussia once more cut off from
the rest of Germany; but Russia proved more difficult. In 1920 the Red Army
came very near to conquering Poland: Pilsudski only managed to defeat it
before the very gates of Warsaw, in the battle which was called "the miracle of
the Vistula". The Poles then compromised with the Russians, and accepted a
frontier which was somewhat to the west of the old Polish border.
The Poland thus restored was a nation of some thirty million people no
mean state; yet she was not large enough, nor had she the industrial strength,
to rank as a great power. Being, too, but a chunk of the great European plain,
she had no very defensible frontiers. She had therefore to take precautions
against the time when Russia and Germany should recover their strength: for it
was certain that they would not tamely acquiesce in the loss of their Polish
lands, and that Germany, in particular, would not cease to resent the isolation
of East Prussia. Thus the Poles needed both internal strength and powerful
allies. When, therefore, the parliamentary government which they at first
adopted proved weak and divided, Pilsudski replaced it by a sort of semi-
military dictatorship a form of government which the Poles did not like, but
which they accepted because it seemed necessary. For an ally they looked to
France. Poland became the chief link in that string of eastern allies with which
France strove to encircle and confine Germany.

But Hitler's rise to power coincided with a growing division and weakness in
France, and after 1933 the Poles felt themselves once more in danger. Still, they
had one resource: Hitler was a deadly foe of Russia, and Russia of Hitler; and
by playing off the one against the other, Poland might yet survive. This
explains the ten-year Non-Aggression Pact which Poland signed with Hitler in
1934. It was soon apparent, of course, that this was not much of a guarantee.
The Poles were unfeignedly glad to get, after the fall of the Czechs, a firm
promise of help from England and France; and they likewise hoped that Stalin,
for his own sake would not allow Germany to over-run Poland.
Stalin was, indeed, the great enigma. After March, 1939, the great powers of
Europe were once again divided into two camps: Germany and Italy against
France and England; and Russia was the unknown quantity. During that spring
and summer both sides were striving desperately to secure her help, and Stalin
was parleying with them: openly with England and France, secretly with
Germany. At length he chose Germany. Hitler, being quite unscrupulous, had
of course more to offer: a good slice of Poland, and all the Baltic states except
Lithuania, in return for Russia's neutrality; but what most moved Stalin was
probably his belief in the Marxist doctrine that the way to communism would
lie open when the capitalist states destroyed one another by mutual war. He
hoped to see a long struggle, in which England and France, Germany and Italy,
would exhaust themselves; and in their exhaustion communism would
triumph. At all events, in July 1939 the world was stunned by the news that a
pact had been signed between Russia and Germany.
Hitler immediately opened a propaganda attack on Poland. Perhaps he hoped
that the shock of the Russian pact would take the heart out of his opponents,
and that he would be allowed to deal with Poland as he had dealt with
Czechoslovakia. If so, he was mistaken. The Poles are the last people in the
world to give in without a struggle; and, though the English and the French
had plenty of qualms about going to war, they were now convinced that there
was no dealing with Hitler, that he would have to be stopped sooner or later,
and that the longer they waited the harder it would get. Thus, when Hitler
began to make demands on Poland, he was met with a polite firmness that left
him no resource but to negotiate or fight. On September 1st, without a
declaration of war, he invaded Poland. England and France sent each an
ultimatum; when no reply was made, they declared war on Germany.
Mussolini, who in his heart did not want war (at least, not just then), decided to
remain neutral.
57. The Second World War
This war was, like the former one, essentially a nationalist war: the extreme
and revolutionary nationalism of Germany, Italy and Japan being pitted against
the more moderate conservative nationalism of England, France and the U.S.A.
It was secondarily a conflict between the comparative liberalism of the latter
countries and the anti-liberalism of the others though Hitler's invasion of
Russia was to put the most anti-liberal of states on the liberal side, which
meant that there could be no clear-cut victory for liberalism, whatever
happened. A third cause was the intense desire for peace which possessed both
the governments and the peoples of England, France and the U.S.: a desire
which showed itself in a too-great reliance on the League of Nations, in a
failure to check the aggressive designs of the other states in the early 1930's,
when they might have been checked more cheaply, and in a failure to re-arm
rapidly and effectively when it became clear that aggression was on the march.
France was weakened, too, by her internal divisions, England by the
unwillingness of her people and politicians to face the realities of the situation
(Winston Churchill being an honourable exception), and the U.S., in spite of
Franklin Roosevelt's efforts, by their determined isolationism. Hitler seems to
have been convinced, in 1939, that he need expect no serious opposition from
the "democracies"; and the latter were greatly to blame for giving him that
impression. Their faults were, however, faults of omission rather than of
commission: the men positively responsible for the war were, in order of guilt,
Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and the military and naval leaders
of Japan.
To begin with, it was a war between Germany on the one hand, and Poland,
England and France on the other. Mussolini, true to Italian tradition, and
knowing well that Italy was in no condition to stand up to a long conflict,
decided to wait a while and see how the game would go; the Japanese,
occupied in their struggle with China, saw no immediate prospect or profit
from entering this other struggle; the Americans were still determinedly
isolationist; and as for Russia, Stalin, as a true Marxist, expected to see the
capitalist states tear one another to pieces in a war from which communism
would ultimately benefit.
In these circumstances, the military situation was very much in Germany's
favour. Since 1933 Hitler had had time to train a large army and to equip it
with the latest weapons: the latest, because, beginning re-armament from the
ground up, he had no mass of obsolete weapons to scrap and get rid of, His
generals, too, were not hidebound by the traditions of the previous war; they
had worked out new techniques of attack, such as the use of paratroops to
overleap defences, of dive-bombers as a kind of flying artillery, and massed
tanks like the armoured cavalry of former times. With these methods they
were sure they could attack effectively.
The French, on the other hand, remembered too vividly the slaughter of 1914-
18: they were committed to belief in the superiority of defence over attack;
they knew, too, that they would be inferior in numbers to the Germans until
the English had had time to raise and train a large army. Therefore they had
long ago decided to stand on the defensive. Along their frontier with Germany
they had built an immense line of fortifications (the Maginot Line), against
which they hoped the Germans would break their teeth and thus lay
themselves open to a devastating counter-attack; if, however, the Germans
marched through Belgium again, the Maginot Line could be held with a
comparatively small force, and the main French armies concentrated in the
north. Being thus imbued with the defensive spirit, they had not built up a
large air-fleet; and, though they had a good number of tanks, they planned to
use them as supports and protectors of the infantry rather than in organized
masses on their own.
England, of course, had only a small professional army, and it would be long
before she could train enough men and make enough weapons to be able to
intervene decisively on the Continent. Her air-force was also small, though of
high quality; it had the best fighters in the world, with the new invention of
radar to help them to find and destroy attackers; but its bombers were not so
good it was an excellent defensive weapon, but incapable of delivering any
serious assault. England's navy still commanded the seas: even without the
French, it was well able to contain the little German navy, to keep the sea-lanes
open, and to maintain a blockade of Germany. But it could not attack
Germany; and as for the blockade, Hitler did not fear it. His control of central
Europe, his agreement with Russia, and the new methods which German
scientists had perfected of making synthetic rubber and extracting oil from
coal, would enable him, he thought, to defy any blockade. And on the whole
he was right.
Poland and France
In September, 1939, therefore, he knew that there would be no serious attack
from the west; and he used this knowledge to concentrate overwhelming
forces against Poland and to destroy her. The Poles fought bravely, but they
were hopelessly inferior in numbers and equipment; and when, on September
17th, the Russians moved in to occupy that part of Poland which Hitler had
promised them, further resistance became impossible. The last stand ended on
October 6th. Poland was again partitioned. Some Poles escaped through
Turkey or by sea to fight with England and France; some continued to carry on
an "underground" warfare of raiding and sabotage; but as a combatant Poland
had been knocked out.
The Russians proceeded to strengthen their position by occupying Esthonia,
Latvia, Lithuania and part of Finland. In Finland they met with unexpectedly
strong resistance, which they had some difficulty in overcoming; but they did
overcome it, and made themselves masters of the eastern Baltic. Meanwhile,
the Communists in England and France were instructed to condemn the war
with Germany as a "capitalist" war a form of propaganda which had little
effect in England, but was more successful in France.
After the fall of Poland, Hitler offered to make peace, but his offer was rejected.
He then began preparing his campaign against the West. It opened on April
9th, with surprise attacks on Denmark and Norway. Denmark had no chance,
and was quickly over-run; but Norway proved more difficult, and the
Norwegians were helped by a hurriedly improvised Anglo-French expedition.
Yet this, too, failed. German superiority in the air was the decisive factor: it was
impossible for the Allies either to interrupt the flow of German reinforcements
or to maintain their own troops in the face of incessant air-attacks. They
withdrew; and the King of Norway and his government took refuge in
England.
Having thus secured his flank, Hitler launched his main attack. On May 9th,
once again without warning, he struck at Holland and Belgium with
paratroops, bombers, and swift motorized forces. The speed and weight of the
attack completely disconcerted the defenders. The Dutch had no time to carry
out the floodings they had planned: within six days their position was hopeless,
and they surrendered. Meanwhile the English and French had moved quickly
into Belgium, hoping to seize and hold the line of the Meuse; but Hitler had
foreseen this and prepared for it. He now delivered his master-stroke. An
immense armoured force, preceded by dive-bombers, moved through the
Ardennes, broke the French in the region of Sedan, and drove north to the
Channel, while the German infantry flooded through in its wake. The Allied
troops in Belgium were cut off. When, on May 27th, King Leopold of Belgium
decided that he must surrender, all that the British and French could do was to
escape by sea if they could. An evacuation from Dunkirk was most skilfully
arranged and carried out, and 335,000 men were brought off; but they lost
nearly all their equipment for the British, a shattering blow.
The success of the evacuation was partly due to the fact that the Germans were
already re-organizing to attack the main French armies. And it was now
evident that those armies would not fight with the old French spirit: partly
because they felt themselves outclassed by their enemy, but still more because
of the poisonous divisions which had weakened France for so long, and which
had now become too wide for patriotism to bridge. There were whole
divisions in the French army in which the men did not trust their officers nor
the officers their menand none of them trusted their government. The new
German attack met strong resistance in some places, but there were too many
weak spots for any line to be held. By June 15th it was clear that France was
lost.
Reynaud, the Premier, would have wished to fight on in French Africa, but he
could not persuade his cabinet to agree. He resigned, and was succeeded by the
old soldier, Marshal Petain, who at once asked for an armistice. Meanwhile,
Mussolini had decided to join Hitler, and the French found themselves at war
with Italy but not for long. On June 22nd and 24th they signed armistices
with both their enemies. A few Frenchmen, refusing to accept defeat, joined
England in carrying on the struggle; their chief leader was General de Gaulle.
Hitler did not at once attack England: he expected that the English would now
recognize the uselessness of resistance and be willing to make peace. But the
English, unlike the French, were not divided: as so often before, under the
stress of disaster they had drawn together, and they had found a leader.
After the Norwegian debacle Neville Chamberlain's Conservative government
had resigned, to be replaced by a national coalition under Winston Churchill;
and this brilliant, energetic and determined man was henceforth the supreme
director of the British war-effort. Hitler's peace-feelers were spurned.
Germany was strong on land and in the air; but her little navy had suffered
severely in the Norwegian operations. Therefore, though Hitler had promised
in the French armistice terms not to make use of the French fleet, it seemed
likely that he would break this promise like so many others; and after the
hideous collapse of the French army, Churchill did not think the French navy
could be trusted to prevent him. Therefore French ships in British harbours
and at Alexandria were seized or disarmed, and a strong French squadron at
Oran, in Algeria, after refusing either to join the English or to be interned in
some neutral port, was bombarded by an English squadron and for the most
part destroyed. This drastic action came later to seem unnecessary, but it did
not seem so at the time; and at any rate, it served notice that England was
ruthlessly determined to go on fighting. Hitler prepared to invade her.
He could not get command of the sea, but he thought he could get command
of the air, and that this would be enough. In August, the German air-force
began heavy bombing attacks on ports and airfields in southern England, with
the object of drawing the English fighter-squadrons into battle and thus
destroying them piecemeal. What actually happened was the opposite. During
August and September many fierce air-battles were fought, in which both sides
lost heavily; but the losses of the Germans were far the heavier, and it was they
who decided in the end that the struggle must be broken off. This was the
Battle of Britain, one of the decisive battles of the world. For, once Hitler
realized that command of the air was not to be won, he decided it would be
suicidal to launch an invasion; the barges which had been assembled dispersed
again, the German troops settled into winter quarters, and England remained
free.
During the winter Hitler made a new attempt to subdue her by night-bombing
her ports and industrial cities, and by aerial and submarine attacks on her
shipping. This also failed. The shipping losses were severe, but not too great to
be borne. The bombing of cities caused many casualties and much devastation,
but it did not break either England's industrial power or the will of her people
to resist. Indeed, this indiscriminate bombing of cities, which was practised by
all the belligerents, and from which Germany herself in the end suffered more
than any other except Japan, never proved decisive against a really determined
enemy. It was enormously and wastefully destructive, but it was not effective.
The Mediterranean
Italy's entrance into the war was a serious matter for England: her position in
the Mediterranean and the Middle East, including her control of the Suez Canal
and of the Iraq oil wells, seemed doomed and would indeed have been, had
the Italians possessed sufficient resources, or had they been resolute in using
the resources they possessed. As it was, the Italian fleet shrank from an
encounter with the British, the Italian air-force failed to neutralize Malta, and
the Italian army, though it invaded Egypt, did so so slowly and cautiously as to
give time for the little British force there to be built up to a respectable size. In
December, 1940, the British went over to the attack, and between then and
February inflicted a series of heavy defeats on the Italians, capturing 250,000 of
them, and driving their remnants beyond Benghazi. There the Italians were
stiffened by a German force, and the British, weakened by the help they had
meantime sent to Greece, were driven back; but they still held Egypt. At the
same time, the Italians in Abyssinia were being crushed. By May, 1941, all but a
few remnants of them had surrendered, and the Emperor Haile Selassie was
back on his throne. And at the same time the British were tightening their grip
on the whole area of the Middle East by subduing a revolt in Iraq and by
occupying French Syria.
In the Balkans, however, things had not gone so well. The reason why Hitler
had not launched an all-out attack on Egypt was that he had already
determined on invading Russia, and was intent on first safeguarding his flank
by occupying the Balkans. Much to his annoyance, Mussolini had forestalled
him by an Italian invasion of Greece; but the Greeks, with British help, had
checked the Italians and driven them back. This pleased Hitler. He himself, by
a mingling of diplomacy and threat, managed to win to his side or to bring
under his control Hungary, Roumania and Bulgaria. Yugoslavia and Greece
resisted his blandishments. On April 6th, 1941, he therefore invaded these
countries; and once again his superiority in aircraft and tanks brought him swift
success. By April 21st both Yugoslavs and Greeks had surrendered; and in May
a daring paratroop attack gave the Germans Crete. The British navy was able,
however, to evacuate most of the British forces, as at Dunkirk the Italian
navy not venturing to intervene.
Russia
Hitler was now ready to make his great mistake, and on June 22nd he invaded
Russia. He had, of course, always intended to do so sooner or later: quite apart
from his hatred of communism, it was the fertile plains of Russia that he
wanted for the "lebensraum" of the German race, and it was the Russian oil
wells that he wanted to supply Germany's most pressing need. But he had not
meant to attack Russia before finishing with England and France: he had
wished to follow Bismarck's plan of taking his victims one by one. Only after
the Battle of Britain did he decide to depart from this plan.
It was now clear that the conquest of England would be a long and difficult
business, and Hitler did not believe that he had, as yet, resources sufficient to
undertake it. In particular, he did not think that he could build up sufficient
stocks of oil for the immense and widespread campaigning that would be
necessary, and he feared the pressure of the British blockade on Europe's food-
supply. Let him but get hold of the fertile Ukraine and the oil of the Caucasus,
and both these shortages would be remedied. It would be some time yet before
he need fear an invasion from England; and he believed that, if he concentrated
his forces against Russia, he could knock her out as he had knocked out France.
Had he been dealing with any other European state, he would have been right.
But Russia has three great advantages against any invader; her immense size,
the number of her people, and the fact that those people, accustomed from
birth to hardship and bitter toil, have a vast power of endurance. The
Communists had reinforced these advantages by the industrial developments
of the Five-Year Plans, and especially by locating many of the new factories far
from the frontier in the Urals or even in Siberia; they had the advantage, too
(for it is an advantage in total war) of being perfectly ruthless: prepared, for
instance, to order a "scorched-earth" policy, at whatever cost of suffering to the
Russian people. They had one big handicap their unpopularity. Had Hitler
chosen to take advantage of this, to send his troops forward as liberators from
Communist tyranny, he might have had great success; but his nonsensical race-
theory prevented him from doing so. The Nazis treated the conquered
Russians even more harshly than the Communists had done, and raised against
themselves a popular hatred which the Communists were quick to take
advantage of. Indeed, for the duration of the war the Communists dropped
their internationalism and even their opposition to religion, and appealed
successfully to Russian patriotism and to the Orthodox Church.
Nevertheless, they nearly lost. In the first months of the invasion the German
armies moved forward with giant strides. In the north, they cleared the Baltic
coast and invested Leningrad; in the south they inflicted huge defeats
(especially in the battle of Kiev, which is said to have cost the Russians 500,000
men); and in the centre they moved steadily on Moscow. But like other
invaders of Russia, they found that the numbers opposing them did not
appreciably diminish as they went forward, while their communications
became steadily more difficult to maintain. And at the climax of their effort,
when they were making the final attacks which they hoped would carry them
to Moscow, they were struck by the Russian winter for which, with
incredible carelessness, Hitler had neglected to make provision. On December
7th they were stopped within sight of Moscow.
Then the Russians counter-attacked, and for some time the Germans were
hard-pressed. Yet they were not forced into any such disastrous retreat as
Napoleon's. They constructed large fortified areas ("hedgehogs") behind their
front, withdrew into these, and maintained themselves with great skill and
courage. When the spring thaw put an end to operations, they were still
holding most of the ground they had won, and were confident of making a
second successful advance in 1942. By that time, however, the whole aspect of
the war had been changed by the entrance into it of Japan and the United
States.
U.S.A.
When war broke out in 1939, most Americans were still resolutely isolationist:
sympathetic, on the whole, with Britain and France, just as they were
sympathetic with China in her resistance to Japan, but determined not to be
drawn into either struggle. President Roosevelt and the few who thought with
him had to keep most of their thoughts to themselves. To Roosevelt it was
clear that if one great power, Germany, came to dominate Europe, and
another, Japan, came to dominate Asia, the position of the U.S. would be
extremely precarious; he thought it essential to prevent these developments,
but he knew he could not carry his people with him into any programme of
armed opposition to either Germany or Japan. Therefore he set himself to do
two things: to provide all possible aid to the opponents of Germany and Japan,
while at the same time building up the armed strength of the U.S. against the
day when it might become possible or necessary to fight. Yet, so strong was
isolationist feeling, in the first year of the war he could not get beyond the
"cash-and-carry" legislation, which enabled Britain and France to buy
munitions from the U.S., but only if they paid cash and carried the goods in
their own ships.
Then came the tremendous shock of the fall of France. The conquest of
England seemed imminent, and Americans all at once awoke to the serious
consequences that this would produce all over the world. Roosevelt was now
able to give much more help: for example, to send to England fifty over-age
destroyers, while obtaining England's permission to set up naval and air bases
in the Bermudas and the British West Indies. Early in 1941 Churchill informed
him that it would soon become impossible for England to pay for American
munitions; and Roosevelt then designed the brilliant stroke of the Lend-Lease
Act: a law empowering the President of the U.S. to lend or lease war-material
to any nation whose defence was deemed vital to the U.S. Thus he could
support the enemies of Germany and Japan, while at the same time developing
American war-industry, without creating a crushing load of debt such as had
proved so disastrous after the First World War. The Act was passed by
Congress in March, 1941. Its first beneficiaries were the countries of the British
Empire, and China; after June it was extended to Russia. (And it may be
remarked here that Russia could not have held out as she did without the
enormous supplies she received from England and the U.S.: over 4,000,000 tons
of cargo through the Arctic port of Murmansk, and much more by the
southern route through Persia.)
In August, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met in a lonely bay on the coast of
Newfoundland, and there agreed on the Atlantic Charter as a statement of
their joint aims for the post-war world. Its terms do not matter it was a
statement of hopes, most of which were never to be fulfilled. What mattered
was that it proclaimed a common policy for the U.S. and England: the basis of a
practical alliance which was to be maintained thenceforth. And still the U.S.
were not at war! But they were now to be forcibly pulled into it by Japan.
Since 1936 the Japanese had been painfully pushing forward their conquest of
China. Their difficulties were much the same as those of the Germans in
Russia: the size of the country and the multitude of its population; the
assistance that continued to flow in, though not in great quantities, from the
U.S., Britain, and (it is believed) Russia; and the determined resistance of the
Chinese themselves: a resistance which was greatly stiffened by the brutal and
tyrannical behaviour of the Japanese in those parts of China which they had
occupied. By 1939 the Japanese already felt their position precarious. They
depended very much on trade with American, British and Dutch territories
and all these powers, decidedly hostile to the Japanese design of dominating
east Asia, might agree to putting such an embargo on Japanese trade as would
be disastrous to Japanese hopes. Hence the Japanese leaders at length decided
to take advantage of the war in Europe, and of American unprepared-ness, to
launch such an attack as would give them all they needed, and at the same time
put them into an impregnable position to hold their gains.
In November, 1941, a Japanese naval squadron, including two aircraft-carriers,
set sail secretly into the Pacific. By December 7th it had arrived undetected
within striking distance of the Hawaiian islands, where the main bulk of the
U.S. Pacific fleet was lying. Within a few minutes, that fleet was put out of
action. This treacherous stroke was, for the time being, decisive: it gave the
Japanese command both of the sea and of the air in the eastern Pacific, and by
May, 1942, they had conquered the Philippines, the East Indies, Malaya and
Burma, and were fighting to seize New Guinea and the Solomons.
Nevertheless, their action at Pearl Harbour sealed their doom, and that of
Hitler and Mussolini too. The U.S.A. entered the war at a bound: isolationism
vanished overnight. The great man power, and the enormously greater
industrial power, of the U.S.A. were now to be concentrated on the destruction
of Germany, Italy and Japan; and, owing to the preliminary work done by
Roosevelt, they could be mobilized with comparatively little delay.
There had to be some delay, though; and 1942 was a difficult year. The
German submarine campaign reached its peak, and more than 6,000,000 tons
of shipping was sunk. In North Africa, a new attack drove the British back to El
Alamein, within 70 miles of the Suez Canal. In Russia, Hitler's 1942 offensive
carried the Germans to the Volga and to the fringe of the Caucasian oil-fields.
Japan, as we have seen, reached New Guinea and the Solomons on one side,
and on the other, the border of India. It was the most desperate year of the
war; and yet it was the turning-point; for in none of these fields did the enemy
achieve a decisive success. The Japanese were checked in New Guinea by the
Australians and in the Solomons by the Americans; their navy was defeated in
the battles of the Coral Sea and of Midway Island, in which most of their
aircraft-carriers were destroyed; and they found it impossible to invade India
until they had improved their communications. The Germans, too, found
communications their great difficulty: in grasping at both the Volga and the
Caucasus they over-reached themselves. They actually came to the Volga, at
Stalingrad, but they could not muster enough strength there to break the
savage resistance of the Russians. In Africa likewise, the German-Italian
advance was halted by difficulties of supply; and when, after three months of
building up their strength, they again attacked, they found that their opponents
had also been reinforced, and suffered a severe check. As for the shipping
losses, they were just not serious enough to be disastrous: the Allies survived
the danger-period, and in 1943 new swarms of anti-submarine ships and aircraft
began to bring the submarine under control.
Roosevelt and Churchill had resolved almost at once to concentrate on
Europe, and to be content to hold the Japanese until Mussolini and Hitler had
been disposed of; and towards the end of the difficult year this resolution began
to be rewarded. In November the Russians found it possible to go over to the
attack: a whole German army in the Stalingrad region was first isolated and
then liquidated on January 31st its last remnants surrendered. The German
army in the Caucasus only saved itself by a hurried retreat. In Africa, in
October, the Germans and Italians were thoroughly defeated at El Alamein,
and the British kept up the pursuit so well that on January 23rd they entered
Tripoli. Meanwhile, strong Anglo-American forces were landed in Morocco
and Algeria. The French, after some hesitation, welcomed them; and, though
Hitler at once began pouring troops into Tunisia, he could only delay the
inevitable.
In May, 1943, this last enemy army in North Africa surrendered. In July and
August Sicily was conquered, and in September a landing was made in Italy.
Meanwhile Mussolini was overthrown by his fellow-Fascists, and the new
Italian government signed an armistice though this had little practical effect,
for the Germans continued to occupy Italy, and even rescued Mussolini from
the prison in which he had been confined. Still, by October 1st the Anglo-
American armies had reached Naples. And all through 1943 the Russian
advance went on: the thousands of tanks and aircraft, and still more the tens of
thousands of motor-trucks, which the U.S.A. and England were pouring in,
enabled the Russians to keep up a constant pressure, and the Germans found it
impossible to make any prolonged stand. They lost this year Orel, Smolensk
and Kiev; and in the south the Russians approached the frontiers of Poland and
Roumania.
By the end of 1943 the Allies were obviously superior to their enemies. The
great new U.S. armies were completing their training; U.S. industry alone was
now pouring out ships, guns, tanks, aircraft, and all the material of war in
greater quantities than Germany, Italy and Japan put together. The only
question was (as Hitler saw clearly) whether the Allies would remain united.
England and the U.S. clearly would; but would Russia stay with them? Stalin
had already made one bargain with Hitler; the English, and still more the
Americans, feared lest he might be tempted to make another. These fears were
probably groundless; but they had very grave results. For when, at Tehran in
1943, and again at Yalta in February, 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill met Stalin
to concert common policies for war and peace, they thought it necessary to
placate the Communist dictator by consenting that Russian armies should
"liberate" eastern Europe and the Balkans, while the Anglo-Americans
concentrated their efforts in the West. Greece alone, on Churchill's insistence,
was to be liberated by British troops.
In 1944, therefore, on June 6th, the great Anglo-American attack was made in
Normandy. It was made by forces which had complete command both of the
sea and of the air. Hard though the Germans fought, they failed to stop the
landings, they failed to prevent the build-up of strength in the bridgehead, and
they failed to prevent the break-out, which began on July 25th. By August 20th
the Germans in France had been broken, losing 400,000 men, and their
surviving forces were in full retreat. By the middle of September Belgium had
been liberated, and the Germans had been practically cleared out of France.
But now difficulties of supply began to make themselves felt, just as German
resistance began to stiffen again. An attempt to force a crossing of the lower
Rhine at Arnhem was only a partial success, and the Anglo-American armies
found themselves held up for the winter.

Meanwhile the Russians had been going forward. By March, 1944, they had
reached the Roumanian frontier; in April they cleared the Crimea; in June they
reached Vitebsk, and in July, Minsk. By August they were approaching the
Vistula near Warsaw. The Polish patriots then revolted against the Germans.
But the Russians had no mind to assist these patriots, who, they knew, would
as strongly oppose Russian domination of Poland as German; so they halted,
and allowed the revolt to be crushed. Yet they advanced in the south. The
Roumanians renounced their alliance with Germany, and on August 31st the
Russians occupied Bucharest. Thence, by October 20th, they had fought their
way up the Danube to Belgrade, and by December had reached Budapesth. In
October an English force landed in Greece as the Germans withdrew. And in
November the Russians renewed their attack in the north, over-ran all Poland
and East Prussia, and invaded Germany proper.
In December Hitler made his last attack: against the Americans in the
Ardennes. He scraped up enough troops to launch an offensive which at first
looked dangerous, but which in reality was never strong enough to achieve
any decisive success. After hard fighting it was broken, and in the breaking
Hitler lost his last reserves: in the Spring of 1945 he faced a ring of enemies
with nothing fresh to throw against them. In March the Americans and the
British forced the Rhine at several points, and after the initial fighting met little
resistance. In April the Russians reached Berlin, which they captured after
some fierce street-fighting in the ruins of the city. Hitler killed himself just
before the end. Then it was only a question of receiving the surrenders of
German troops, in Italy, Austria, Germany, Holland, Denmark and Norway.
The final surrender was signed on May 6th. Already, a week earlier, Mussolini
had been caught and killed by some Italian partisans.
The Defeat of Japan
Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to postpone the defeat of Japan to the
defeat of Germany. Yet so rapidly were the resources of the U.S.A. brought
into action, and so well were the American forces handled in the Pacific, that it
proved possible to develop major offensives against Japan as early as 1944. The
Japanese had spread their forces too widely: they had established a ring of
island defences from the Aleutians, through the Marshalls, Gilberts and
Solomons, round to New Guinea and the East Indies; and they relied on the
extraordinary tenacity of their troops to make the capture of these positions so
costly that the attackers would exhaust themselves before they could get near
Japan herself. The Americans did not fall into this trap. Instead of attempting to
reduce all the Japanese defences, they planned to approach Japan by seizing a
series of "stepping-stones", using their naval and air power to isolate and
immobilize the other Japanese garrisons. One big advantage of this plan was
that it did not demand any such vast operation as the Normandy landing: the
war in the Pacific was rather a succession of small though savage struggles, in
which the Americans never needed to use large numbers of men, and yet were
able to whittle down the Japanese naval and air forces by inflicting continual
losses which Japanese resources were unable to make good.
Already in 1942 the Americans had landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomons.
During 1943 they achieved control in the Gilberts and in the Aleutians. Early in
1944 they captured bases in the Marshalls; in June and July they went on to the
Marianas, and in September to the Palau Islands, only 500 miles east of the
Philippines. Meanwhile, with the help of Australian forces, the Japanese
garrisons in New Guinea were either isolated or destroyed, and in September
Morotai was taken, 500 miles south of the Philippines. In October it was
possible to mount a really big assault against the Philippine island of Leyte.
Here the Japanese navy made its last great effort: a really powerful fleet was
assembled to attack the invaders. A series of naval conflicts followed, known
collectively as the battle of Leyte Gulf, in which the Japanese were totally
defeated, and suffered such losses that they could never hope to fight another
fleet action. With Leyte in their hands, the Americans went on to Luzon; and
by February 27th, 1945, they had recaptured Manila.
While all this was going on, Burma was being re-conquered. The brilliant
campaign by which a British and Indian army, with assistance from Americans
and Chinese, cleared the Japanese out of Burma, deserves to be remembered;
but, as it did not in the end contribute much to Japan's downfall, we can only
mention it in passing.
Two island groups lead up to the main islands of Japan: the Bonins and the
Ryukyus. The Americans assaulted both. In February and March they
conquered Iwo Jima in the Bonins, and between April and June Okinawa in the
Ryukyus. Already they had begun very heavy bombing attacks on the Japanese
mainland; and now, with the war in Europe over, the time had come to
concentrate all forces for the final conquest. Yet the American leaders paused
before undertaking this stroke: not in doubt of its success, but in horror at its
probable cost. Japanese resistance on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been even
more desperate than usual: the garrisons had fought almost literally to the last
man, and the attackers had suffered 60,000 casualties. It seemed certain that the
cost of invading Japan would be fearful: a million Americans might fall before
the Japanese surrendered. There was a weapon, however, which might prevent
this holocaust.
It had been known for years that a vast explosion, an explosion on a scale
hitherto unimagined, might be produced by atomic fission. Since 1940, British
and American scientists had been working on the problem, trying to forestall
the Germans, who were known to be working on the same lines. However,
the German scientists failed, while the Allied scientists succeeded: and in the
Spring of 1945 the first atomic bomb was detonated. Now the question arose,
whether this bomb was to be used against Japan. The man in whose hands lay
the decision was President Truman of the U.S.A. (Roosevelt had died suddenly
in April, 1945). His military advisers were insistent that it should be used, and
he decided to use it, and by so doing opened a new chapter in the history of the
world. The Japanese were offered, and rejected, terms of peace; then, on
August 6th, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in a couple of
seconds it wiped out half the city. On August 9th a second bomb was dropped
on Nagasaki. On August 10th the Japanese government asked for peace.
Why Germany and Japan Failed
Thus the German attempt to dominate Europe, and the Japanese attempt to
dominate Asia, failed disastrously. The most obvious reason for these failures is
that both Germany and Japan tried to do too much at once. For Hitler to attack
Russia while England was still unconquered was suicidal; for Japan to attack
both England and the U.S.A. before China had been dealt with was equally so.
Both the aggressors had to spread their forces over too wide a field. By 1943 the
Germans were having to hold Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium,
France, Italy, the Balkans, Hungary, Poland, and half European Russia; the
Japanese were spreading out all over the eastern Pacific, as well as holding
Malaya, Burma and half China. Their resources were not equal to the task.
However, what made their position so precarious, and ultimately disastrous,
was something more profound and important than any material weakness: it
was their almost complete failure to win support from the peoples whose
countries they had occupied or conquered. Hitler proclaimed that he came to
establish a "New Order" in Europe: an order in which the old liberal capitalism
would be done away with, and replaced by the kind of national socialism
which he had already set up in Germany. Not a few Europeans were at first
inclined to welcome this idea. In practice, though, it was soon evident that
what this New Order really meant was that the other peoples of Europe were
to become satellites or slaves of the Germans. This lesson was driven home by
the severity with which the Germans ruled the conquered territories: the
ruthlessness with which industries were exploited for Germany's benefit, the
deportation of millions of slave-workers to Germany, the awful crimes of
torture and mass-murder committed by the Nazis against their opponents
the most striking example of which was the extermination of over four million
Jews. These things not only stiffened the determination of Germany's enemies
to fight until Nazism was utterly destroyed; they also provoked in every
German-dominated country resistance movements, the suppression of which
occupied more and more of Germany's over-taxed resources. Even in Germany
itself a widespread underground opposition was organized, which in June,
1944, almost succeeded in assassinating Hitler and overthrowing his regime.
Japan failed in the same way. The Japanese proclaimed to the peoples of Asia
that they were going to overthrow European imperialism; but they, like the
Germans, soon showed that they were going to establish a new and harsher
imperialism of their own. German treatment of the conquered was mild,
indeed, in comparison with Japanese. No Asiatic in his senses would prefer the
rule of Japan to the rule of England or Holland or France. The Japanese did
destroy the old order in Asia, but to their own advantage. They did not suffer
from local opposition as much as the Germans, simply because the Asiatic
peoples are generally less tough than the European; but they quite failed to
provoke (in India, for instance) any serious movement in their favour: the
Indians wanted independence from England, but that did not stop Indian
troops from fighting heroically against Japan. In both Germany and Japan a
crude nationalism proved incapable of founding an empire both forgot the
lesson of Rome, that to conquer people truly you must make them glad to
have been conquered.

-End-