Europe: A History (155 page)

Naturally, most Europeans did not realize how great was the power which had been put in their hands. The rash and the ambitious sought to exploit it to the full; the wise sought to use it with caution. The British, the early leaders, had little choice but to step warily in Continental affairs. So too did Otto von Bismarck, creator of the most powerful industrial and military unit of the age. The Iron Chancellor turned Germany into a great power, but not a universal menace. His best-known phrases about ‘iron and blood’ (1849) or ‘blood and iron’ (1886) were spoken about budgets and social affairs, not war. As the century’s greatest statesman, he even grasped the limitations of statesmanship itself, not aspiring ‘to control the current of events, only occasionally to deflect it’. ‘In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister’, ran one of Goethe’s epigrams (The master triumphs by holding back, or Genius consists of knowing when to stop).
¹
Bismarck’s successors did not practise such restraint.

Contrary to some expectations, Europe’s brush with modern power revived its Christian culture. The ‘Railway Age’ was also the age of muscular Christianity. Engineers went out into the world in the company of missionaries. People who felt their own vulnerability in a fast-changing world hankered after earlier models of piety and discipline. Despite the mindless machines, and in line with the growing wave of Romanticism, they felt more need for divine reassurance, a greater readiness to accept the supernatural, an eagerness to experience ‘the depth
of their being’. When they died, they were not averse to seeing their life as a journey on the ‘Spiritual Railway’:

The Line to Heaven by Christ was made
With heavenly truth the rails were laid,
From Earth to Heaven the Line extends,
To Life Eternal where it ends…
God’s Love the Fire, his Truth the Steam
Which drives the Engine and the Train.
All you who would to Glory ride
Must come to Christ, in Him abide
In First and Second, and Third Class
Repentance, Faith, and Holiness…
Come then, poor Sinners, now’s the Time
At any station on the Line,
If you’ll repent and turn from sin,
The train will stop and take you in.
²

The initial circumstances of nineteenth-century Europe were crucial. The forces for change could only operate within the political and international framework that came into being at the end of the revolutionary wars. And that framework was given a very particular twist by the extraordinary events of 1815.

In February of that year, at the moment when the Congress of Vienna was failing to agree on a settlement, the revolutionary genie slipped once more from the bottle. Napoleon escaped from Elba. In the subsequent ‘Hundred Days’, Europe had to face the spectre of revolutionary war all over again. The shock was tremendous. If the political mood among the victorious powers in 1814 had been cautious, in 1815 it became downright reactionary. It created a climate in the subsequent decades where any sign of changes was instantly suppressed.

The
Cent Jours
, therefore, electrified Europe. Within three weeks of his lonely landing at Antibes on 1 March, Napoleon had crossed the Dauphiné Alps, won over Marshal Ney, who had been sent to ‘bring him back in a cage’, and entered Paris in triumph, forcing Louis XVIII to flee. Within three months he had reformed his army and left Paris to attack the forces of the Coalition which were gathering on the northern frontier. His strategy was simple—to pick off the Allies one by one before they could coalesce against him. On 16 June, at Ligny, he defeated the Prussians, but did not prevent them from retiring in good order. On 18 June he confidently attacked the British at Waterloo near Brussels. But the ‘thin red line’ of the Duke of Wellington resisted all the furious charges of the French in a day of unrelenting slaughter; and Blücher’s Prussian cavalry, riding over the horizon in the late afternoon, swept the French from the field. Napoleon, after his sixtieth set battle, was finally swept from the field of history. On 22 June he abdicated yet again; on 15 July, a fugitive at Rochefort, he surrendered to Capt. Maitland of HMS
Bellerophon
. He was taken to Plymouth, and thence to the remote island of St Helena. This time he didn’t escape. Writing his memoirs, he
predicted that within ten years Europe would be either ‘Cossack or republican’. When he died, ‘it was not an event’, Talleyrand said, ‘only a news item’,
[ECO]

Reconvening after Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna met in chastened mood. The representatives of the victorious powers could not be accused, as in the previous year, of‘dancing instead of making progress’. They were ready to risk nothing. They were determined, above all, to restore the rights of monarchy—the sacred institution considered most threatened by the Revolution. In so doing, they paid little attention to the claims either of democracy or of nationality. They resolved their differences by compensating the disgruntled at the expense of the defeated. A German Confederation of 39 states was to take the place of the Confederation of the Rhine and the Holy Roman Empire (see Appendix III, p. 1299). Prussia, which had been pressing for Alsace, Lorraine, and Warsaw, was given half of Saxony instead. Austria, which had lost its stake in the Netherlands, was given much of northern Italy. The United Provinces, which had lost the Cape of Good Hope, was given the Austrian Netherlands. Sweden, which had lost Finland, was given Norway. Russia was confirmed in its possession of Finland, Lithuania, and eastern Poland, and was given a separate kingdom of Poland round Warsaw, where the Tsar could be king. Britain contented itself with a bag of islands from Heligoland to Ceylon. A gaggle of antiquated monarchies was restored to Naples, Madrid, and Turin—but few of the old republics were allowed to revive. As Tsar Alexander remarked, ‘Republics are not in fashion’. An exception was made for the Republic of Cracow, a city claimed by Prussia, Russia, and Austria and withheld from all of them.

The spirit of the settlement, therefore, was more than conservative: it actually put the clock back. It was designed to prevent change in a world where the forces of change had only been contained by a whisker. The Duke of Wellington’s comment on Waterloo was: ‘a damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. Such was the feeling all over Europe. The issue between change and no change was so close that the victors felt terrified of the least concession. Even limited, gradual reform was viewed with suspicion. ‘Beginning reform’, wrote the Duke in 1830, ‘is beginning revolution.’ What is more, France, the eternal source of revolutionary disturbances, had not been tamed. Paris was to erupt repeatedly—in 1830, 1848, 1851, 1870. ‘When Paris sneezes,’ commented the Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, ‘Europe catches cold.’ French-style democracy was a menace threatening monarch, Church, and property—the pillars of everything he stood for. It was, he said, ‘the disease which must be cured, the volcano which must be extinguished, the gangrene which must be burned out with a hot iron, the hydra with jaws open to swallow up the social order’.
³

In its extreme form, as embodied by Metternich, the reactionary spirit of 1815 was opposed to any sort of change which did not obtain prior approval. It found expression in the first instance in the Quadruple Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain, who agreed to organize future congresses whenever need arose, and then in a wider ‘Holy Alliance’ organized by the Tsar. The former produced the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), which readmitted France to the
concert of respectable nations. The latter produced the proposal that the powers should guarantee existing frontiers and governments in perpetuity.

All this was too much for the British government, which in advising the Prince Regent against the Holy Alliance had put him into the company of the Sultan and the Pope. By British standards, Lord Liverpool’s government was unusually conservative: in its internal policies it was resisting reform on all fronts. But it could not allow the reactionaries of Europe to create the international equivalent of a steam-engine with no form of safety-valve. At each of the subsequent Congresses held at Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822), the British held strong reservations about the successive expeditions for crushing revolution in Naples, Greece, and Spain. On the critical issue of the revolt of Spain’s South American colonies, the British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, joined the US President, James Monroe, in forbidding any sort of European intervention in the Americas. ‘I called the New World into existence’, he told the House of Commons in 1826, ‘to redress the Balance of the Old.’ In effect, he killed the Congress System stone dead. ‘Things are getting back to a wholesome state,’ he remarked shortly before his death. ‘Every nation for itself, and God for us all.’

None the less, the short-lived ‘Congress System’ was important for setting the scene within which nineteenth-century Europe began its stormy career. Despite its failure to create any durable institutions—which had briefly promised to assume the mantle of some premature League of Nations—it set the climate of the conservative Continental order against which all subsequent reformers and revolutionaries had to contend. It delineated the international arena in which the five recognized powers—the Quadruple Alliance plus a reinstated France—were to operate against all upstarts and newcomers for the next century. Despite important modifications, it presided over a map of Europe that was not to change in its essentials until 1914–18.

From the starting-point of 1815 the century evolved through three clear stages, those of reaction (1815–48), reform (1848–71), and rivalry (1871–1914). In the first stage, the conservative fortress held out with varying success until it collapsed amidst the general revolutionary outburst of 1848. In the second stage, the powers reluctantly conceded that controlled reform was preferable to endless resistance. Important concessions were made on all fronts. Constitutions were granted, the last serfs emancipated. Two of the three leading contenders for national independence were allowed to achieve it. In the third and final stage, Europe entered a period of intense rivalry, aggravated by diplomatic realignments, military rearmament, and colonial competition. Forty years of unequalled peace could not restrain the growing tensions which in August 1914 were permitted to pass into open conflict. Europe’s modern and modernizing societies, armed with modern weapons, recklessly entered a modern war whose slaughter made Napoleon’s battles look like skirmishes.

‘Modernization’
, not to be confused with Modernism,
*
is now the preferred sociological term to describe the complex series of transformations which communities undergo on their way from ‘backwardness’ to ‘modernity’. Its starting-point is the traditional type of agrarian, peasant-based society, where the majority of people work on the land and produce their own food; and its destination is the modern type of urbanized and industrialized society, where most people earn their living in towns and factories. It consists of a chain of some 30 or 40 related changes, each link of which forms a necessary component in the total operation. It certainly includes and subsumes industrialization and ‘the Industrial Revolution’, which is now usually taken to be just one vital part, or one stage, of the overall process. ‘No change in human life since the invention of agriculture, metallurgy, and towns in the New Stone Age has been so profound as the coming of industrialisation.’
⁴

By general consent, modernization was first experienced in Great Britain—or rather in certain regions of Great Britain such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Black Country, Tyneside, Clydebank, and South Wales. But it was soon felt on the Continent, especially in locations on or near the great coalfields in Belgium, in the Ruhr, and in Silesia. From these areas of industrial concentration its effects were gradually felt in ever-widening circles, first in the ports, then in the capital cities, and eventually right across the countries which received the industrial stimulus. It could never be complete; but to varying degrees its effects were felt across the face of Europe. When they were felt overseas, either through the colonial end of imperial economies or through local initiative, they were seen as aspects of ‘Europeanization’. In this way, modernization became the focal point not only of a world-wide economic system but equally of the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries.

Modernization, above all, must be seen as a motor of change, not as the static sum of its component parts. This motor, or engine, needs first to ignite, then to accelerate, and finally to reach the critical point of ‘take-off’, when it passes into an entirely different mode of motion. (It can best be likened to the twentieth-century phenomenon of flying, although the example of the early nineteenth-century locomotive is perhaps more fitting.) There is the long period of preparation, when the boiler is lit and a sufficient head of steam accumulated; there is the dramatic moment of departure, when steam pressure is applied to the pistons and the wheels begin to move; there is the phase of consolidation, as the engine picks up speed amidst an array of groans and judders; and there is the glorious state of cruising, when it purrs sweetly along the track with maximum speed and efficiency.