Europe: A History (125 page)

J. G. Hamann (1730–88), who spent his life in Königsberg and Riga, is often dismissed as an obscure, lightweight philosopher, writing dense, disjointed (and untranslated) German prose in a scatter of minor pamphlets. But his critique of the Enlightenment, which developed Hume’s line on irrationality, was well known to contemporaries and is highly rated by specialists. It
is
even claimed that Hamann ‘lit a fuse which set off the great romantic revolt’:

Hamann speaks for those who hear the cry of the toad beneath the harrow, even when it might be right to plough over him; since, if men do not hear this cry, if the toad is written off because he has been ‘condemned by history’… then such victories will prove their own undoing.
¹⁷

Of course, ideas do not permeate the cultural scene instantaneously. Several figures who were already active and mature in the 1770s and 1780s did not exercise any great influence until later. This is particularly true of Kant and Herder (see Chapter IX).

Many commentators, however, would insist on Rousseau’s inclusion in this company, since Rousseau is often seen as the first Romantic rather than the last of the
philosophes
. (There is no good reason why he should not have been both.) Rousseau’s view of nature as something benign certainly contradicted most of his contemporaries, who viewed it with hostility as something to be tamed and corrected. Rousseau’s appeal to
sensibilité
, the cult of emotion, initiated yet another shift in European manners:

Having the tastes of a tramp, he found the restraints of Parisian society irksome. From him, the Romantics learnt a contempt for the trammels of convention—first in dress and manners … and at last over the whole sphere of traditional morals.
¹⁸

Rousseau’s love for his native Swiss Alps initiated a change in attitudes to the environment which until then was generally shunned in horror. Rousseau’s cult of the common people, though accompanied by a sincere devotion to democracy, is sometimes seen as one of the roots of totalitarianism.

Discussions about Pre-Romanticism usually centre on literary themes connected with the School of
Sturm una; Drang
—so-called after F. M. Klinger’s play of the same name staged in 1777—and with the Theory of Symbols. Amidst that ‘Storm and Stress’ of the 1770s, Germany, long passive, was asserting itself against French rationalism, and European culture was passing into a new era. A major impact was made by Goethe’s first novella,
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(i774)> whose moody adolescent hero commits suicide. In writing the book, Goethe said that he had decided ‘to surrender to his inner self’. It was a very unclassical decision.

Yet no one had a greater impact than a Scots schoolteacher from Kingussie called James Macpherson (1736–96), who pulled off one of the great literary forgeries of all time. He presented his
Fragments of Ancient Poetry
(1760),
Fingal
(1761),
and
Temora
(1763) as the translated works of the legendary Gaelic bard, Ossian. As Dr Johnson realized, they were nothing of the sort. But their melancholic recital of Highland lore was immensely popular, not least in Germany, where Herder was a leading admirer. An Italian translation was said to be Napoleon’s favourite reading.

Classical conventions came under attack in art also. In 1771, at the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy in London, the court painter Benjamin West (1738–1820) displayed a picture celebrating
The Death of General Wolfe
, who had been killed at Quebec twelve years earlier. To the scandal of the viewers, the scene was painted in contemporary dress. The dying general was shown in his regulation red army tunic. Joshua Reynolds, the senior artist of the day, took West on one side and lectured him on the convention of clothing all historic and moralistic scenes in the togas and laurels of antiquity. Paintings that defied the convention would lack the timeless, neutral setting which alone could ensure the transmission of their message. But it was to no avail: Realism had arrived. Whether or not Romanticism had arrived with it is a matter for conjecture.
¹⁹

The French supremacy
in Europe lasted for the greater part of 200 years. It began with the personal rule of the young Louis XIV in 1661 and lasted until the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Indeed, notwithstanding her defeat during the Napoleonic Wars, France was not definitively replaced as the single most powerful state of Continental Europe until her submission to Bismarck’s Germany in 1871. For most of that time Paris was the unrivalled capital of European politics, culture, and fashion,
[CRAVATE]

France’s lengthy pre-eminence can be explained in part by the natural advantages of her large territory and population, and by the systematic nurture of her economic and military resources. It must be explained in part also by the disarray of major rivals: by the decay of Spain, by the ruin of Germany, by the divisions of Italy, by Austria’s preoccupation with the Ottomans. It was certainly assisted by the extraordinary longevity of the ruling Bourbon kings—Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), Louis XV (r. 1715–74), and Louis XVI (r. 1774–92)—who supplied a focus for unity and stability. In the end it was undermined by the growing tensions within French society, and by the appearance of new powers—notably Great Britain, the kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, none of which had even existed at Louis XIV’s accession.

Like all great political organisms, France of the Ancien Régime passed through three distinct phases of growth, maturity, and decline. The first dynamic phase coincided with the central decades of Louis XIV in his magnificent prime, from 1661 to the end of the seventeenth century. The second phase saw France contained by the coalitions raised against her. It stretched from the last disillusioned years of Louis XIV to the death of Louis XV. The final phase coincided with the reign of Louis XVI. It saw the King and his ministers lose control of the mounting problems which led in 1789 to the outbreak of the greatest revolution that Europe had ever seen. For the French themselves, this was the era of
la gloire
.

‘S’agrandir’, wrote Louis XIV to the Marquis de Villars on 8 January 1688, ‘est la plus digne et la plus agréable occupation des souverains.’
²⁰
(Self-aggrandisement is the most worthy and agreeable of sovereigns’ occupations.)

Louis XIV, more than any other European monarch, has been taken as the supreme symbol of his age. Reigning for seventy-two years over Europe’s most powerful nation, this
Roi Soleil
, this Sun King, was the object of a cult which coloured the opinions both of his courtiers and of later historians. Ruling over France from his magnificent palace at Versailles, as Philip of Spain had once ruled the world from the Escorial, he was credited with almost superhuman powers. He was, supposedly, the embodiment of the purest monarchy, the most perfect form of absolutism; the architect and inspiration of a model and uniform system of government; the moving spirit of economic and colonial enterprise, the dictator of artistic and intellectual taste, the ‘Most Christian King’ of a Catholic nation that brooked no religious deviation, the doyen of European diplomacy, the
commander of the Continent’s most formidable armies. The myth is not without substance. ‘Le Grand Roi’ was undoubtedly the monarch whom lesser princes loved to emulate. He stamped his personality on his surroundings, and his achievements were not inconsiderable. Yet no man could ever match up to so exaggerated an image. Whilst conceding the grandeur of the experiment, one must also try to see the man behind the royal mask, the suffering land of France beyond the glittering façade of Versailles.

The personality of Louis XIV cannot easily be separated from the theatrical performance which he felt to be an essential part of his trade. He grew up among the horrors of the Fronde, when the foundations of the modern French monarchy had been shaken to the core; and he felt instinctively that he was leader of a nation which longed for order and strong government. Hence the court of Versailles, which he designed and built, was not merely a piece of ostentation. It tied the nobles to the service of king and state. The spectacular royal balls, ballets, concerts, plays and hunts, the fêtes and the fireworks in the Grand Pare, all served to cement the subservience of his leading subjects, and to create a sense of national community. From the day in 1661 when, on Mazarin’s death, he personally assumed the reins of government, he was playing out a role with a purpose. It was not for mere amusement that he appeared as the leading actor in the first great open-air fête of his reign,
Les Plaisirs de l’Îïle Enchanté
(see Plate 47). Louis inherited from his Spanish mother the love of etiquette; and he learned from Mazarin the art of secrecy and dissimulation. Possessed of a handsome and powerful physique, he combined remarkable energies and appetites with a temperament that swung from the gallant and generous to the mean and rancorous. As a horseman, huntsman, trencherman, and sexual athlete, he outclassed his enthusiastic entourage. Yet whilst wining and womanizing with gusto, he could be plotting the ruin of his companions or, as with the great Nicolas Fouquet in 1661, the arbitrary arrest of his leading minister. ‘Le Grand Roi’ was not above pettiness.

As the pupil of Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis had a firm grasp of the instruments that could increase his power. He inherited a huge, servile bureaucracy, a large standing army, a vast central treasury, and a subdued nobility. He further extended his control over a Gallican Church that was already subservient, destroyed the ‘state-within-the-state’ of the Huguenots, subordinated the provinces to his
Intendants
, and ruled without any form of central legislature. But his greatest talent was for publicity. Versailles was the symbol of an ideal which for outshone the facts of French reality. For Frenchmen and foreign visitors alike, the splendours of its ceremonies undoubtedly created the illusion that the
Roi Soleil
stood at the centre of a system of perfect authority. When Louis allegedly walked into the Palais de Justice and interrupted a judge with the comment, ‘L’État, c’est moi’, he may or may not have believed his witticism; but he certainly acted as if he did. Through his long series of flamboyant liaisons, from Louise de la Vallière to Mme de Maintenon, he flouted the moral code of the old
cabale de dévots
, creating a climate where the King’s pleasure was law. Yet behind the façade the grand experiment of absolutism was fraught with failures. Versailles
was not France; the King’s will was widely defied. In a huge country, the means of avoidance were greater than the means of enforcement. The drive for uniformity, powerful though it was, could not iron out all the wrinkles. The Parlement and the provinces persistently jibbed. Louis’s foreign wars brought more debt and humiliation than solid gains.

The government of France, therefore, cannot be understood through any formal analysis of its institutions. The long campaign to re-assert royal authority from the centre was not accompanied by the wholesale abolition of regional and municipal particularities. The great provinces of France remained divided between the
pays d’élection
, where royal officials exercised a large measure of direct control, and the
pays d’état
, which enjoyed a great degree of autonomy. Customary law operated in the north, codified Roman law in the south. Within each of the provinces, a mass of local
libertés, parlements, franchises
, and
privileges
survived; and the nobles retained many of their traditional powers of jurisdiction in their own domains. It was essential, of course, that the central Assembly, or Estates General, should only survive in a condition of permanent suspension, and that the central Parlement in Paris should be schooled to register royal decrees without discussion. The vast army of some 50,000 royal officials, riddled with venality and corruption, pressed like a dead weight on the whole country, as slow to react to royal instructions as to the needs of their local subjects.

The King’s main advantage lay in the absence of any major institution round which alternative centres of authority might have coalesced. Secure from concerted opposition, he was able to construct a small but extremely powerful complex of central organizations run by himself, together with a new network in the provinces which could override local objections. At the pinnacle, the King convened the
Conseil en Haut
(Supreme Council), where he discussed high policy two or three times every week with a small coterie of advisers. Louis made good an early boast to be his own chief minister. In the formative decade after 1661 he worked closely with the favoured triad of Le Tellier, Lionne, and Colbert. The formulation of advice and the execution of policy was entrusted to the Secretariats— initially
Étranger, Guerre, Marine
, and
Maison du Roi
—and to a series of secondary committees—the
Conseil Royal
for finance, the
Conseil Privé
for judicial decrees, the
Conseil de Conscience
for Religion, the
Conseil de Justice
for codifying the law.