Europe: A History (123 page)
The theories of Locke and Montesquieu were widely disseminated by the
Encyclopédie
, especially in entries such as ‘Political Authority’ and ‘Natural Liberty’. They encouraged democratic tendencies and, some would say, revolution.
Rationalist history-writing came to the fore. History moved from the mere relation of events in chronicles or diaries, and from the advocacy of the ruling church or monarch, to become the science of causation and change. Bossuet’s so-called
Histoire universelle
(1681) or the Earl of Clarendon’s
History of the Great
Rebellion
(1704) still belonged to the old tradition, as did numerous Catholic and Protestant accounts of the religious wars. But in the eighteenth century several people turned their hand to history of the new sort. Bayle’s
Dictionnaire
(1702) consisted of alphabetical entries on all the great names of history and literature, and examined with implacable scepticism the certainties and uncertainties in the received information about each of them. It showed that no historical fact could be accepted without evidence. Vico’s
Scienza nuova
(1725) introduced the theory of history moving in cycles. Montesquieu’s
Considérations
(1734) on the ancient world introduced the idea of environmental determinants, whilst Voltaire’s studies of Charles XII or of Louis XIV introduced the factors of chance and of great personalities. Hume’s treatise on
The Natural History of Religion
(1757) broke the sacred sod of religious history. All rejected the role of providence as an explanation for past events, and in so doing were returning to habits of thought not exercised since Machiavelli and Guicciardini. They were all susceptible to the newfangled notion of progress, whose classic exposition was made at the Sorbonne by the young Turgot, in a long Latin discourse read in two parts on 3 July and 11 December 1750:
MARKET
D
R ADAM
SMITH
(1723–90) was the ultimate absent-minded professor. He once brewed an infusion of bread and butter and pronounced it a very bad cup of tea. He became one of the sights of Edinburgh, where he was given to rambling the streets in a trance, half-dressed and twitching all over, heatedly debating with himself in a peculiar affected voice and careering along with his inimitable ‘worm-like’ gait. He once walked straight into a tanning pit in full discourse. Virtually unmarriageable, he always lived with his mother. It is nice to think that this charmingly chaotic character should have set about putting intellectual order into the workings of everyday life.
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Together with his friend David Hume, Smith was one of the stars of the Scottish Enlightenment in an era when English academic life slumbered. He was in close touch with Johnson, Voltaire, Franklin, Quesnay, Burke. When the elderly professor was received by the King’s ministers, they all rose to their feet. ‘We all stand, Mr Smith,’ said William Pitt, ‘because we are all your scholars.’
Smith’s career started at the age of 28 with the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, where he published his
Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759). It was an enquiry into the origins of approval and disapproval. He entered the realm of economics by asking himself about the implications of human greed, and how self-interest could work for the common good. The 900 pages of
The Wealth of Nations
(1776) were essentially an extended essay in pursuit of that quest. It shattered the protectionist philosophy of mercantilism, which had reigned supreme in economic thought for 200 years. Smith’s speculations led him to postulate the existence of ‘society’, in whose mechanisms all people participate, and to formulate the laws of ‘the market’. He outlined the workings of production, of competition, of supply and demand, and of prices. He paid special attention to the organization of labour. This is shown in his famous description of a pin factory. Rationalized tasks and specialized skills enabled the workforce to produce 48,000 pins a day, where each of the workers might individually produce only two or three. He also stressed the self-regulating nature of the market, which, if unhindered, would foster social harmony. He identified two basic market laws—the Law of Accumulation and the Law of Population. ‘The demand for men’, he wrote rather shockingly, ‘necessarily regulates the production of men.’ His watchword was: ‘Let the Market Alone.’
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The science of economics has been exploring the issues raised by Smith ever since. The trail leads from Ricardo, Malthus, and Marx, via Hobson, Bastiat, and Marshall, to Veblen, Schumpeter, and Keynes. In Smith’s hands it was a branch of speculative philosophy; and its greatest practitioners have recognized the fragility of their conclusions. In the popular mind, however, economics has greater pretensions. It has moved into the void left by the decline of religion and the moral consensus; and it is increasingly seen as the main preoccupation of public policy, a panacea for social ills, the source even of private contentment. From being a technical subject, explaining human society in the way that medicine explains the human body, it threatens to become an end in itself, laying down goals, motives, incentives. Smith, the moralist, would have been appalled.
Nature has given all men the right of being happy… All the generations are linked to one another by a series of causes and effects which join the present condition of the world with all those that have preceded it… and the whole human species, looked at from its origins, appears to the philosopher as an immense whole, which, like an individual, has its infancy and its progress … The totality of humanity, fluctuating between calm and agitation, between good times and bad, moves steadily though slowly towards a greater perfection.
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Historians increasingly applied the social, economic, and cultural concerns of their own day to the analysis of the past. The doings of kings and courts no longer sufficed. Two great monuments of the age were William Robertson’s
History of America
(1777) and Edward Gibbon’s incomparable
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1788). Only one volume of the
History of the Polish Nation
(1780– ) by Bishop Adam Naruszewicz saw the light of day, since the Empress Catherine’s ambassador objected to a description of early Slav history in which the Poles were more prominent than the Russians.
On reflection, one has to doubt whether the sages of the Enlightenment were any more objective than the court and clerical historians whom they so mercilessly ridiculed. Gibbon’s attacks on, say, monasticism, or Voltaire’s ill-informed swipes at Poland, which he used as a whipping-boy to enliven his views on religious bigotry, replaced one form of bias by another. But in the process both the scope and reputation of historiography was greatly increased. In reality, the Enlightenment was full of contradictions. Its leading practitioners held a measure of agreement on aims and methods, but reached no consensus of views and opinions. The two most influential figures, Voltaire and Rousseau, were as different as chalk and cheese.
François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who had assumed the pen-name of Voltaire during a spell of imprisonment in the Bastille, was poet, dramatist, novelist, historian, philosopher, pamphleteer, correspondent of kings, and, above all, a militant wit. Born and educated in Paris, he spent much of his long life in various sorts of exile. His books, printers, and publishers were repeatedly condemned. He hovered on the outer fringes of political and social respectability, and eventually settled, symbolically, on the furthest frontier of France at Ferney, near
Geneva. He left Paris in disgrace at 32 and, apart from three uneasy years as historiographer royal at Versailles in 1744–7, he did not return until the age of 84. He spent six seminal years in England, three at the welcoming court of Stanislaw Leszczyński at Lunéville in Lorraine, and three in Prussia with an admiring Frederick the Great. He was chased from Switzerland for comments about Calvin. At Ferney, 1760–78, where he held court to a constant crush of visitors, ‘Europe’s Inn-keeper’ was hailed as ‘Le Roi Voltaire’; and ‘le seigneur du village’ put his theories into practice: draining the marsh, running a model farm, building a church, a theatre, a silk factory, and a watch works. ‘The refuge of forty savages has been turned into an opulent little town of 1,200 useful persons,’ he noted with pride.
Voltaire’s published works, which fill over 100 volumes, are addressed to the goals of tolerance in religion, peace and liberty in politics, enterprise in economics, intellectual leadership in the arts. The
Lettres anglaises
(1734), which talk admiringly about everything from the Quakers, Parliament, and the commercial spirit to Bacon, Locke, and Shakespeare, gave new food for thought to conventional Catholic circles on the Continent. The
Siècle de Louis XIV
(1751) gave the French a rich but critical view of their recent past. The philosophical novel
Candide ou l’optimisme
(1759) was written in response to Rousseau. It tells the story of the eager young Candide and his enlightened tutor, Pangloss, whose motto is ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. They set out into the world from the Castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh only to meet with every known form of disaster: war, massacre, disease, arrest, torture, treachery, earthquake, shipwreck, inquisition, and slavery. In the end they conclude, since the evils of the world are overwhelming, that all one can do is to put one’s own affairs into order. Candide’s closing words are ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ (we have to cultivate our own garden). The
Traité sur la tolérance
(1763), inspired by the appalling Calas affair in Toulouse, where a Calvinist father was broken on the wheel for allegedly opposing his son’s conversion to Catholicism, was a cry from the heart. The
Dictionnaire
philosophique portatif(i764)
, a pocket-sized rival to the great
Encyclopédie
, is a
tour
de force of irony
and satire. In addition there are a score of tragedies, a vast collection of polemical pamphlets, some 15,000 letters. He died in Paris, having seen his bust crowned on the stage of his latest play. ‘They would come in the same numbers to see my execution,’ he said. And he was still writing verse:
Nous naissons, nous vivons, bergère,
Nous mourons sans savoir comment;
Chacun est parti du néant;
Où va-t-il?… Dieu le sait, ma chère.
(We are born, we live, my shepherdess | How or why we die, it isn’t clear; | Each one took off from nothingness; | Where to?… God knows, my dear.)
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‘I die adoring God,’ he proclaimed, ‘loving my friends, not hating my enemies, but detesting superstition.’
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), born in Protestant Geneva, was still more of a wanderer than Voltaire. He possessed almost the same range of talents, as musician,
novelist, and philosopher, and acquired a similarly formidable reputation. A runaway boy, who spent almost a decade on the open roads of Savoy and Switzerland, he was taken in, at the price of his conversion, by a Catholic lady living at Annecy. Largely self-educated, he made his way in the world as a tutor, composer, ballet-master, as a valet in Paris, as secretary of the French embassy in Venice. His liaison with a simple and uneducated girl, Thérèse Levasseur, and the fate of their five children, who were given in care to the Enfants Trouvés (Foundlings), was the source of much stress, of intellectual speculation, and possibly of his recurrent mental illness. He gained sudden celebrity in middle age by winning a prize from the Academy of Dijon for his
Discours sur les sciences et les arts
(1750), and by producing a popular opera,
Le Devin du village
(1752). Befriended by Diderot, he became by turns star and victim of the Parisian salons until he took once more to the road. Obsessed with a non-existent conspiracy against him, he was driven from refuge to refuge by fears of Voltaire’s partisans and by his own inner insecurities: to Geneva, to Motiers in Prussian Neuchâtel, to an island in the Lac de Bienne, to England, to Bourgoin and Montquin in Dauphiné. His last years in Paris were spent editing his memoirs and the
Rêveries dupromeneur solitaire
(1782). He died in the castle of Ermenonville.
Rousseau’s contrary character used the methods of the Enlightenment to denounce the Enlightenment’s achievements. The Discourse which made him famous argued that civilization was corrupting human nature. His second
Discours sur l’inégalité
(1755) painted an idyllic vision of primitive man and blamed prosperity for all the ills of political and social relations. It united both the radicals and the conservatives against him. The novel
Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse
(1761), a love story set amid Rousseau’s native Alps, forged an unprecedented link between passion, moral sentiment, and untamed nature.
Êmile ou l’éducation
(1762), another prodigious success, outlines the upbringing of a child who is to avoid the artificial decadence of civilization. This child of nature was to learn from God-given experience, not from man-made books; to be happy, he must be skilled and free.
Du contrat social
(1762) was truly revolutionary. Its opening sentence railed at the iniquity of the reigning order: ‘L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers’ (man is born free, and everywhere he is shackled). Its dominant ideas—the general will, the sovereign nation, and the Contract itself—pointed to solutions which would only be effectively defined, not by any ideal ruler, but by the interests of the governed. Whilst Voltaire appealed to the enlightened élite, here was Rousseau appealing to the masses.
Rousseau’s
Confessions
(published 1782–9) analysed the author’s extremely uncharming personality with great charm and candour. He makes an exhibition of his guilt and doubt. ‘He beats his breast vigorously’, wrote one critic, ‘in the knowledge that the reader will forgive him.’ This preoccupation with the contortions of his own psychology was reminiscent of a later age. Rousseau despised his fellow philosophers, especially Voltaire. He was all set to tell the Supreme Being on Judgement Day: ‘Je fus meilleur que eet homme-là!’ (I was better than that man over there!).
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