A Criminal History of Mankind (68 page)

The result of increased restraint is an increase in the left-brain’s power of veto. Automatic controls inhibit natural responses, and sex develops an increasing aura of ‘forbiddenness’. If Rousseau had been writing about a French Moll Flanders, no one would have been shocked; Moll is a throwback to the Elizabethan age. But he was writing about a baron’s daughter who lives in a mansion and takes a bath every day. So what Saint-Preux was seducing was not simply a girl; it was a social symbol. By 1760 it was taken for granted that an upper-class girl preserves her virginity as a valuable part of her dowry. Rousseau, with his arguments for free love, was undermining the fabric of society as much as Luther undermined it when he challenged the Catholic Church. Yet, like Samuel Richardson, Rousseau did it all with a demure air of morality. He was, in fact, appealing to another morality that had remained dormant just below the surface since the publication of
Pamela
: the morality of sentiment, the morality of Tristan and Isolde, Aucassin and Nicolette and Romeo and Juliet. What was so shocking - and piquant - was to bring it up to date. Even the celibate Immanuel Kant must have enjoyed identifying himself with Saint-Preux, and relished the sensation of vicariously seducing Julie. Kant’s philosophy was achieving new depths of perception into the human mind; Rousseau was achieving new depths of perception into the human heart. They had as much right to call themselves explorers as Columbus and Drake; and their readers accompanied them on their travels and shared their sensation of discovery.

In 1774, another frustrated lover poured his miseries into a novel about an unhappy love affair, and the book made his name famous all over Europe. Goethe’s
Sorrows of Young Werther
was about an artist who falls in love at first sight and commits suicide when the girl marries another man. There is no rape or seduction: not even the satisfaction of kisses. Then why did
Werther
become a literary sensation - as well as causing an epidemic of suicide? Because it is about a man whose love becomes a fever, an obsession. It was a blast of intense feeling, like hot air from a furnace. In effect, it convinced the intelligentsia of Europe that they were not feeling enough. It encouraged people to pour out their emotions and to burst into tears. When we read the letters written during the next few decades, we feel a little bewildered to read phrases like ‘My friend, I watered your letter with my tears’, or ‘I could not restrain the sobs that rose in me as I recalled our farewell’ - particularly when the correspondents are men. But Goethe had convinced people that they ought to let their feelings go. He also convinced them that they ought to feel ecstasy as they looked at mountains and forests - something that had been almost forgotten since Petrarch startled his friends by climbing a hill to look at the view. The result was that poets suddenly noticed that nature was beautiful - something no one would have guessed from the poetry of Pope and Dryden. Novels of unhappy love affairs poured from the presses, and Europe sobbed convulsively. One of the most popular was Henry Mackenzie’s
The Man of Feeling
, whose sole purpose is to harrow the emotions with a series of sad tales and hard-luck stories; beggars, madwomen, prostitutes, all tell their stories of the hard-hearted world. The hero himself is shattered by the news that his lady-love is to marry another, and there is an affecting scene in which she tells him she loves him just before he dies. He is, says the narrator, the victim of ‘too keen a sensibility’, and this was regarded as being entirely to his credit. Groups of people used to read
The Man of Feeling
aloud to have the satisfaction of shedding tears in public. Fifty years later, a correspondent of Sir Walter Scott describes how she recently attended a reading of
The Man of Feeling
and everyone roared with laughter. Yet this was not a sign that people were becoming more callous: only that they had become inured to Mackenzie’s pathos. A little more than ten years later, they were crying just as uninhibitedly over the death of Little Nell.

In
Fiction and the Reading Public
, Q. D. Leavis has argued that the change was entirely for the worse; that sugary sentimentality and second-hand morality had replaced the racy vigour of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
and
Tom Jones
. But this is only half the story. Bunyan, Defoe and Fielding were objective because they had no alternative; it never entered their heads that literature was a medium for discussing their feelings. For them it was a kind of mirror that reflected the world they saw around them. Compared to Rousseau and Goethe they were in a state of primal innocence. In fact, it would hardly be inaccurate to describe them as ‘pre-bicameral’. It is true that they are bicameral in the sense that they are self-conscious; they are aware of questions of religion and morality. Yet their sense of identity is simple and unambiguous. As you read
Pilgrim’s Progress
, you feel that in spite of his agonies about his salvation, John Bunyan felt he was John Bunyan and nothing but John Bunyan. He accepted his left-brain sense of identity as the total truth about himself. Young Werther, on the other hand, is already concerned about the difference between his identity when he is alone with nature and his identity when he is among other people. And Goethe’s Faust sees his social identity - the grey-bearded professor who is respected by his students - as a kind of grotesque mask, like the
persona
of the ancient Greek actor.

But what is most important about Faust is his underlying conviction that he is not an actor or a professor, but a god:

I, image of the gods, who thought myself

Close to the mirror of eternal truth,

Who bathed in heaven’s light and clarity,

Leaving the earthly part of me behind;

I, more than angel, I whose boundless strength,

Seemed even then to flow through nature’s veins,

And revel in creation like the gods...

(My own free translation.)

This
is the essence of romanticism: the paradoxical feeling that man might, after all, be a god. This is what Mrs Leavis is failing to grasp when she criticises the romantics for retreating into a sickly world of fantasy. Three centuries after the Renaissance, man has again begun to suspect that he has the power to alter the course of nature and to grasp eternal truth.

What has happened, of course, is that man has begun to suspect that ‘other identity’, the being in the other half of the brain. That sense of time flowing at half its proper speed which we experience on reading
Robinson Crusoe
and
Pamela
is ‘right brain awareness’. The left brain is obsessed by time; the right is indifferent to it. In his early letters, young Werther expresses a floating sense of timeless-ness:

The solitude in these blissful surroundings is balm to my soul... My whole being is filled with a marvellous gaiety, like sweet spring mornings...

When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me, when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon, and only single rays steal into the inner sanctuary, when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook, and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities, when I feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart and can sense the presence of the Almighty, who in a state of continuous bliss bears and sustains us - then, my friend, when it grows light before my eyes and the world around me and the sky above come to rest wholly within my soul like a beloved, I am filled often with yearning, and thinking that if I could only express it all on paper, everything that is housed so richly and warmly within me, so that it might be the mirror of my soul as my soul is the mirror of Infinite God... ah, my dear friend, but I am ruined by it, I succumb to its magnificence.

This interminable sentence, with its failure to reach a proper conclusion, nevertheless conveys a sense of floating in blissful ecstasy. It is almost like a radio set that has tuned in to some frequency whose existence we never even suspected.

But the new awareness brings its own problems, for Werther, like Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, suffers from ‘too keen a sensibility’, and it brings him to suicide. This was the dilemma of the romantics. Should they try to pursue these new sensations to their limits, and risk insanity, or would it be more sensible to try to come down to earth and get on with the practical business of living? The new sensibility had turned the artist into a social misfit, an ‘outsider’ who seemed doomed to peer at life through a keyhole. He was, in a word later coined by Karl Marx, ‘alienated’ from his society.

While Defoe, Richardson, Rousseau and Goethe were creating their inner revolution, another kind of revolution was transforming their society.

Because the English had kept out of the Thirty Years War, England in 1700 was already more prosperous than France or Germany, and farmers and businessmen began to concentrate on more efficient ways of production. In 1733 came an invention that revolutionised weaving more than anything since the invention of the flat frame in the fourteenth century: the fly shuttle. On the old loom, two men had to stand on either side to toss the shuttle back and forth. A weaver named John Kay invented a method that would send the shuttle - on small wheels - flying back and forth under blows from wooden hammers. It increased the speed of weaving, but it robbed the two men of their job. Kay became intensely unpopular in Colchester, where he introduced the fly shuttle, and had to move to Leeds. There his fly shuttle was eagerly adopted, but the manufacturers refused to pay him for its use and forced him into expensive litigation that ruined him. In his native town of Bury, his house was wrecked by a mob; he moved to Manchester and was forced to escape hidden in a wool sack. He died a pauper, the first victim of the ‘restrictive practices’ that have continued into the late twentieth century.

Mining was becoming an increasingly important industry; but mines tended to flood with water. In the 1650s, Otto von Guericke had invented a vacuum pump. By the end of the century, a Frenchman named Denis Papin had discovered that a pump could be worked with steam power. The pump was attached to one end of the see-saw, and at the other there was a piston in a cylinder; the piston would be driven up by steam from a boiler and then would descend - driven by a heavy weight - as the steam condensed. Naturally, this was a slow business. Around 1700, an ironmonger named Thomas Newcomen was experimenting with a pump when there was an accident; melting solder allowed cold water to leak into the cylinder, and the piston descended with such a bang that it wrecked the pump. But Newcomen realised that he had discovered a better method of making the piston descend; a little cold water was sprayed into the cylinder at the end of every upward-stroke, and the new engine worked at twice the speed. Newcomen engines were soon in use all over Europe.

In 1763, a young Scott named James Watt was repairing a model of the Newcomen engine at Glasgow university when he saw how it could be improved. By cooling the cylinder down and heating it up again, three-quarters of the energy was being wasted. What was needed, he saw, was a pump with two separate chambers - a cooling chamber, and a permanently hot piston chamber. He found a rich partner named Boulton, and in 1769 was able to patent his new engine. And the world entered the industrial age.

It so happened that large numbers of people were available to work in the new factories. Landowners had perfected better methods of farming - fertilisers, the drill-seeder, the horse-drawn hoe. What now stood in the way of efficiency was the enormous amount of ‘common land’ that surrounded most villages. This was usually poor land on which everyone had a right to pasture their animals or grow low-yield crops; moreover, it was often interspersed with the land on which the farmers wanted to carry out their new experiments. Landowners petitioned parliament, and parliament responded by passing ‘Acts of Enclosure’, which required common land to be divided up between various owners, every one of whom had to fence off his portion. The small owners usually preferred to sell out. And the poor who had lived on the commons in wooden huts found themselves homeless. This is why increasing numbers of country folk found their way into the towns and the new factories.

Here conditions were often appalling. Children from five upwards were taken from workhouses and orphanages to labour in the cotton mills for twelve hours a day. The smallest could pick up cotton from the floor. No one was forced to go - they were lured by promises of good food and pleasant working conditions; once in the mills, they were underfed, beaten and even tortured. Those who tried to escape were chained up. Some children even committed suicide. Adult workers laboured for fourteen hours a day, and lived in damp cellars provided by the employers. A labourer from the country might find himself assigned to a straw mattress on which a man had just died of fever. Workers had to watch their wives and children drawn into these conditions and working beside them in the mills and factories. Most of the children died young, or grew up permanently stunted.

Worse still, the new inventions began to make many workers unnecessary, so they were turned out to starve. When new power looms threw Yorkshire workers out of their jobs in the early nineteenth century, their reaction was to form secret societies whose aim was to blackmail the employers into getting rid of the machinery. They called themselves Luddites, after a man called Ned Ludd, who was supposed to have smashed stocking machines in the 1780s. They operated like the Ku-Klux-Klan, sending warnings to mill owners, threatening to smash windows or burn down their mills unless they got rid of their machinery. Many gave way to this intimidation. In 1812, the Luddites intercepted two weaving frames that were on their way to the mill of a man named William Cartwright; they smashed the frames and left the drivers tied up in a ditch. Cartwright appealed to the government for help, and they sent a small consignment of troops. On 11 April 1812, a mob of Luddites smashed down Cartwright’s gates and poured into the mill yard with axes. As they began to chop their way into the building, soldiers fired from upper windows. The mob fled, leaving their wounded behind. But this was only one victory in a bitter war that dragged on for another year. An employer named Horsfall who employed similar tactics was murdered in reprisal; in 1813 there were mass trials of Luddites, with many executions and transportations. It was a tragic and pointless conflict; the workers were unaware that the enemy was not the mill owners but the current of history itself. Almost two centuries later, the British trade unions are still fighting the same Luddite battle.

To understand the bitterness of these industrial conflicts, we need to go back to the age of Louis XIV. Like the Luddites, Louis was equally determined to make time stand still. When his minister Colbert brought prosperity to France by encouraging trade and industry, the king undid the good work by exempting the nobles from taxes and wasting the money on futile wars. Louis died in 1715; and things improved under the regency of the duke of Orleans, then under Louis XV and his minister Fleury, but the disastrous Seven Years War in 1756 led to the loss of most of the French overseas empire. There was a steady rise in the population - from sixteen millions in 1715 to twenty-six millions by the time of the Revolution - which flooded the towns with unemployed farm labourers and beggars. The more enterprising formed into robber bands that terrorised the countryside. While the poor died of starvation, the rich still managed to avoid taxes. So while England became the ‘workshop of the world’, France was torn by social conflicts.

But the major problem was not economic but psychological. The real conflicts of history are caused by men behaving like spoilt children. What infuriated the French peasantry was not the prosperity of the rich, but their arrogance. Louis XIV had never understood that history was being played according to new rules; he behaved as if he were Charlemagne, and his nobility followed his lead. Typical of his ‘Right Man’ attitude was an event that took place in 1661, when the French ambassador in London announced to the Spanish ambassador that if he drove up first to the palace gates his horses’ reins would be severed. The Spanish ambassador reacted by having them reinforced with chains. There was a fight and bloodshed. Louis XIV dismissed the Spanish ambassador in Paris, sending him back to Madrid with a message saying that if the French ambassador was not given precedence at all court ceremonies, there would be extremely serious consequences (meaning war). Spain under Philip IV was not strong enough to defy France; so an envoy was despatched to Louis to concede his demands and make a public apology in front of the assembled court. Louis was behaving like a headstrong brat, as we have come to expect monarchs to behave throughout history. But the world was changing, and Louis’s determination to have his own way led directly to the French Revolution.

It is even possible to suggest a precise date for the origin of the Revolution: December 1725. It was in that month that the thirty-year-old dramatist Voltaire was talking rather too freely at the Comedie Frangaise about his prospects of becoming prime minister. An aristocrat, the Chevalier de Rohan, insulted him, and Voltaire replied sharply. A fight was avoided when a lady fainted. A few days later, Voltaire was dining with the Due de Sully when he received a message that someone wished to see him outside. He went out, and was beaten up by hired ruffians, while Rohan stood in the background and jeered.

Voltaire was mad with rage; he rushed indoors and asked the duc to sign a statement about the assault; his host refused to get involved - after all, the aristocracy had a perfect right to have a commoner chastised. And although Voltaire was a favourite at court - the queen was fond of him - nobody was interested in helping him obtain justice. Voltaire took fencing lessons, mixed with ruffians, and dreamed of revenge - which demonstrates that the psychology of men of genius is not so very different from that of criminals like Carl Panzram. The Rohans, one of France’s most powerful families, had him followed by police spies. When they appealed to a minister for ‘protection’, Voltaire was arrested and thrown into the Bastille; he was released only on condition he left the country. He was forced to go into exile in England.

Voltaire’s experience filled him with a seething hatred of the ancien régime, a hatred that turned him into the most witty and venomous satirist in Europe. His criticism of religion and society inspired other reformers - notably, Jean Jacques Rousseau; and it was Rousseau’s book
The Social Contract
(1762) that was mainly responsible for the French Revolution, in which many members of the Rohan clan lost their heads.

Another member of the Rohan family precipitated the scandal that led to the Revolution. Bishop Louis de Rohan was tall, suave and handsome, with a reputation for seduction as formidable as that of Pope Rodrigo Borgia. In 1770, he was bishop of Strasbourg when the next queen of France, Marie Antoinette, passed through the city on her way to meet her future husband. She was a beautiful fifteen-year-old ash-blonde, and Rohan’s susceptible heart was smitten. Unfortunately, it became clear over the course of the next ten years that the queen disliked him - Rohan had been ambassador at the court of Marie Antoinette’s mother Maria Theresa of Austria, and the Austrian queen had taken a strong dislike to him. Between 1770 and 1780, Marie Antoinette did her best to block various appointments, although she was unable to prevent Rohan being made a cardinal.

In 1780, Rohan became the dupe of a beautiful adventuress who called herself Countess de la Motte Valois - she was married to a penniless army officer named la Motte. The countess became his mistress, and somehow convinced him that the queen wanted him to act as intermediary in buying a very expensive diamond bracelet - it cost one million four hundred thousand livres - from two jewellers named Boehmer and Bassenge. In fact, the queen knew nothing of the scheme. Rohan was in raptures at the thought that the queen had changed her mind about him - who knew what was possible now? - and purchased the necklace on credit. At a secret meeting with ‘the queen’ in a garden, he was allowed to kiss her foot - in fact, it was a young courtesan who had been hired to play the part. When the first payment - of 400,000 francs - fell due, Rohan sent the demand to the queen through the countess, and received in reply a forged letter asking him to meet the payment himself. The countess thought Rohan a millionaire; in fact, his extravagance kept him permanently in debt. When he was unable to raise the whole sum, the jewellers applied direct to the queen, whose reaction was to fly into a rage and demand Rohan’s arrest. It was typical of her spoilt stupidity; it would have been better for everyone if she had allowed the matter to be hushed up. As it was, Rohan was arrested, together with the ‘magician’ Cagliostro, in whom he had confided; the countess and her lover were also arrested. (Her husband was in London selling the necklace.) The court case made Rohan a laughing stock, although both he and Cagliostro were acquitted. It also caused deep hostility towards Marie Antoinette, who was booed and hissed by the Paris mob. (No doubt they had heard her famous remark ‘Let them eat cake’ when told that the poor had no bread.) The countess was publicly branded and whipped, arousing widespread sympathy. (She died in London five years later, after falling out of a window when trying to escape her creditors.) The affair of the necklace totally discredited the monarchy - Napoleon later referred to it as the starting point of the Revolution.