Europe: A History (117 page)

In literature, 1667 saw the publication both of Racine’s
Andromaque
and of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. The former, set in ancient Troy, confirmed the continuing vitality of the classical tradition, as well as the supremacy of French letters. The latter’s matchless cadences confirmed the enduring appeal of Christian themes:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse,…
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And Justine the ways of God to men.
⁶²

Bernini’s creative contemporaries were at every possible stage in their varied careers. In Amsterdam, with
The Jewish Bride
, Rembrandt was painting his last major canvas. In Madrid, Murillo was engaged on a series of 22 paintings for the Church of the Capuchins. In Paris, Claude Lorrain painted
Europa
. In London, in the wake of the Great Fire, Christopher Wren was planning his spectacular series of churches; and Richard Lower performed the first human blood transfusion. In Cambridge, the young Isaac Newton had just cracked the theory of colours. In Oxford, Hooke was proposing systematic meteorological recordings. In Munich, the Theatinerkirche was in mid-construction. In February 1667 Frans Hals, the portraitist, had just died; Jonathan Swift, the satirist, was being conceived.

There can be no doubt that the protracted reconstruction of St Peter’s constituted a central event in the era of Church reform. St Peter’s was not just a building; it was the chief temple and symbol of the loyalty against which Luther had rebelled, and to which the Pope’s own divisions had rallied. It is also true that the building of Bernini’s colonnade marked a definite stage in that story. For the sake of convenience, historians can be tempted to say that it marks the end of the Counter-Reformation. And so, in a sense, it does.

Yet, in reality, the Counter-Reformation did
not
come to an end, just as the colonnade was never really finished. The history of civilization is a continuum which has few simple stops and starts. The Roman Church was already being overshadowed by the rise of the secular powers; but it did not cease to be a prominent feature of European life. The ideals of the Counter-Reformation continued to be pressed for centuries. Its institutions are still in operation nearly 400 years later. Indeed, the mission of the Roman Church will not have ceased so long as the pilgrims crowd into St Peter’s Square, pray before St Peter’s Throne, and mingle with the tourists under Bernini’s Colonnade.

Map 18.
Europe, 1713

*
‘Let the strong wage war. You, lucky Austria, many.’ Attributed to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary.

LUMEN

Enlightenment and Absolutism, c.1650–1789

T
HERE
is an air of naïvety about the so-called ‘Age of Reason’. In restrospect it seems extraordinary that so many of Europe’s leading intellects should have given such weight to one human faculty—Reason—at the expense of all the others. Naïvety of such proportions, one might conclude, was heading for a fall; and a fall, in the shape of the terrible revolutionary years, is what the Age of Reason eventually encountered.

In the periods both before and after, the virtues of Reason were much less appreciated. On seeing his father’s ghost, Shakespeare’s Hamlet had told his doubting companion, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ In the nineteenth century, too, rationalism was out of fashion:

ENLIGHTENMENT
… 2. Shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition, etc.; applied
esp
. to the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th C. 1865.
¹

On the other hand, when judging the period which followed the Reformations, one must remember what Europeans had been contending with for so long. The consensus between Reason and Faith, as promised by the Renaissance humanists, had not prevailed against the world of religious dogma, magic, and superstition. After the Wars of Religion, one can see that the exercise of ‘the Light of sweet Reason’ was a natural and necessary antidote. Indeed, even the full flood of the Enlightenment may only have washed over the surface of continuing bigotries.

Similar problems surround the label of the ‘Age of Absolutism’ which political historians apply to this same period. One might easily be led to imagine that most European rulers of the time either enjoyed absolute powers or at least sought to do so. Such, alas, was not the case. Europeans in the Age of Absolutism were no more uniform absolutists than they were uniform rationalists.

In the century and a half between the Peace of Westphalia and the French Revolution, the map of Europe underwent few radical changes. Each of the wars of the period ended with a certain amount of territorial trading. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713), in particular, caused a stir; and the first partition of Poland-Lithuania (1773) signalled the onset of an avalanche. The unification of the island of Great Britain (1707) confirmed the emergence of an important new unit. But most of the main blocs on the map remained essentially intact. France’s drive to the Rhine was only partly successful; Prussia had to be content with relatively modest gains; the Ottomans’ last great surge was contained and then reversed. Russia alone continued to grow dramatically. None of Europe’s invalids actually perished: Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania all ailed, but all survived.

The range of political systems was far greater than most textbooks allow (see Appendix III, p. 1265). In this ‘Age of Absolutism’, absolutist states actually formed a minority. Between the completely decentralized, constitutional, and republican confederation of Switzerland at one end of the scale and the extreme autocracies in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Papal States at the other, great variety flourished. Europe’s republics were represented by Venice, Poland-Lithuania, and the United Provinces; the constitutional monarchies at various times by England, Scotland, and Sweden; the absolutist monarchies by France, Spain, and Austria. The Holy Roman Empire, with monarch both elected and hereditary, fell somewhere between the republics and the constitutional monarchies; Prussia, which operated constitutional structures according to an authoritarian tradition, fell somewhere between constitutionalism and absolutism. Even greater variety can be found among Europe’s
Kleinstaaterei
—the hundreds of petty states which the younger Pitt would once call in exasperation ‘the swarm of gnats’. There were miniature city-republics like Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Genoa, or Geneva; there were miniature principalities like Courland; ecclesiastical states like Avignon, and curious hybrids like Andorra.

What is more, many European states continued to be conglomerates, where the ruler had to operate a different system within each of the constituent territories. The kings of Prussia had to conduct themselves in one way in Berlin, where they were imperial subjects, in another way in Königsberg, where they were completely independent, and in yet other ways in possessions such as Minden or Neuchâtel. The Habsburgs could be figureheads in the Empire, despots in Prague or Vienna, and constitutional monarchs after 1713 in Brussels. The British kings could be constitutional monarchs at home and autocrats in the colonies.

There were also important variations over time. England, for example, veered in the republican direction under Cromwell, in the monarchical direction after the restoration of the Stuarts, and back to its greatly admired centrist position after the ‘Bloodless Revolution’ of 1688–9. In the late seventeenth century both the Swedish and the Danish monarchies headed rapidly towards absolutism. In eighteenth-century Sweden the ‘Hats’ and ‘Caps’ moved headlong in the opposite direction. Under John Sobieski (r. 1674–96) Poland-Lithuania still functioned
according to rules of the noble democracy. After 1717 it could only function as a Russian protectorate. In Russia the Tsars acted as unashamed autocrats; in Poland they posed as the champions of ‘Golden Freedom’. Appearances, and simple categories, deceive.

Absolutism, in particular, must be viewed with circumspection. It was something less than the autocracy of tsars and sultans, who faced no institutional obstacle to the exercise of their will. Yet it was something more than the authoritarian spirit which enabled certain monarchs to follow the Prussian example and to dragoon the institutions with which they were supposed to co-operate. It clearly had its roots in the late feudal period, where struggling monarchies had to combat the entrenched privileges both of the provinces and of the nobility, and in the Catholic world, where the Roman Church remained immune from direct political control. It did not usually fit the conditions of either the Protestant or the Orthodox world. At various stages France, Spain, Austria, and Portugal came definitely within its purview. For various reasons Britain, Prussia, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia did not.

Absolutism, one should stress, refers more to an ideal than to the practical realities of government. It was concerned with a set of political ideas and assumptions which came into existence as a corrective to the excessively decentralized institutions left over from the late medieval era. It often stood for little more than the ‘personal power’ of certain monarchs as opposed to the ‘limited powers’ of others whose authority was curtailed by Diets, autonomous provinces, municipal charters, exempted nobles, and clergy. It could not be easily defined, and was often justified more in the panegyrical tones of courtiers than in the detailed arguments of philosophers. It had many a Bossuet or a Boileau, but only one Hobbes. It was probably better illustrated in some of its minor examples, such as Tuscany, than in any of the major powers. Nowhere did it achieve complete success: nowhere did it bring a perfectly absolute state into existence. Yet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it certainly provided a radical force for change. In the eighteenth century, when its influence was becoming more diffuse, it was overtaken by new trends for democracy, liberty, and the general will. The age of the ‘enlightened despots’ was equally the era of British and American constitutionalism.