War and Peace in Europe 1815-1870

E. L. Woodward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429620027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Published in 1963: The three essays bound together in ths book are based upon lectures given by the author as a Univesity Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford. The Lectures were not intended as a substitute for the excellent textbooks of modern European history published in recent years. The choice of subject and more of treatment were determined by the questions of students and others attempting to find in this history of modern Europe something more than a chronicale of events, a list of dates and names, a catalogue of political and consititutional changes.

FRENCH HISTORY AND FRENCH MEMOIRS 1815-1850

I

OUTLINE OF FRENCH HISTORY 1815-1850

IT is usual to speak of the years between 1789 and 1815 as the most disturbed and the most ‘creative’ period of modern French history. The directing ideas of the French Revolution did not appear for the first time in Europe in the year 1789; these ideas had already left the field of academic study and entered the market-place. From this point of view the importance of the French Revolution lies not in its political originality but in its political completeness. This completeness was not merely formal. Many of the accidents of the old régime were restored after the fall of Napoleon; but the substance had changed. Human nature in 1815 was no different from human nature in 1789. Twenty-five years of proscription, civil war, and foreign conquest had affected the composition of the French people; circumstances had favoured the survival of certain types of character, and condemned others to a violent death without posterity. This ‘malselection’ was not without precedent in French history. Wars of defence and conquest, wars of religion, the insistence of the Catholic church upon the celibacy of the clergy, the strength of the monastic orders, had been factors operating for centuries upon the character of the population of France. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes had taken from France and added mainly to Germany and England some four hundred thousand exiled French citizens. It is not unlikely that throughout the middle ranks of society the average level of strength, ability, and determination of will was stronger among those who left France than among those who remained. During the Franco-Prussian war the German civil and military governors of Amiens were of French Huguenot descent. Cavour, the second or third statesman of Europe during the nineteenth century, came of a French Huguenot family on his mother’s side.

The Revolutionary Tribunals continued the work of Louis XIV, though on a smaller scale; the revolutionary wars, and the campaigns of Napoleon, particularly the later campaigns which took unmarried conscripts from their villages, continued among a lower class the destructive work of the Terror. Yet against this elimination of the most vigorous of body and most independent of mind must be set the numbers of the French population, and the good fortune that many of the victims of war and the guillotine left behind them children for France. These acts of violence within and without France between 1789 and 1815 were signs of the completeness of the political change brought by the revolution. The principle of the sovereignty of the people might find expression in different forms; its future was certain. Sooner or later this principle would become part of the framework of all civilised societies. Never again would the concepts of the political inequality of men and the divine authority of a single family or priestly caste provide the foundation of a modern state over a long period of time. Sooner or later the political rule of the middle class which had established itself upon the ruin of the aristocracy would appear as an intermediate stage in the realisation of popular sovereignty. The ruthlessness with which the new ideas were enforced was evidence of their novelty—their novelty as a practical standard for the lawgiver; they had found a place which they would hold for good and all.

Historical accident connected the revolution with Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon claimed to have saved the revolution and stamped Europe with its impress. For all his praise of himself, Napoleon was not ‘necessary’ to the revolution, neither was he a new portent in history. There is a sense in which Napoleon stereotyped the political character of the revolution, and checked its further development. Ideas lose as much as they gain from the service of field-marshals. There had been great conquerors before the eighteenth century. The uniqueness of Napoleon Bonaparte is historical not personal. Napoleon was the last of his kind. Other men may be born with a talent no less splendid; other rulers of men may possess Napoleon’s power of concentration and indifference to ordinary forms of good and evil. The conditions under which they will manifest their genius are for ever changed. The government of the world is beyond the control of one man; the domination of another Napoleon is as unlikely as the success of another Jenghis Khan. The area of modern culture exceeds the reach of a single conqueror. The achievements, the formulae of civilisation are not stored in a few monasteries; the achievements of civilisation are not limited to a few walled towns or narrow kingdoms surrounded by hungry barbarians or an uncharted sea. Wars there may be; conquerors there may be. There can be no one master of the world. We are more secure than the Greeks, or the Incas, or the Caliphs of Baghdad. Destruction may indeed come to us through an accumulation of little faults; a disregard of the old wisdom that men, not walls, make the city; a physical and nervous weariness of body and mind before the weight of knowledge to be mastered and discipline to be learned. The process of degradation may include catastrophe; catastrophe sudden and irretrievable is not the greatest of our dangers. Cum in profundum venerit, contemnit. This may be the judgment upon the last generation of men.

If men could wait for inanimate things, many of the changes brought by the revolution and Napoleon might have come to fruition without bloodshed and conquest. A new revolution, on a scale more vast and more impersonal than the art and life of Napoleon, was in process of accomplishment. This agrarian and industrial revolution has extended over a period longer than the political transformation from which it has taken its name. It has not yet reached fulfilment;¹ from the point of view of universal history it has only begun to develop its effects.

The magnitude of these effects has made the work of assimilation most difficult. The new discoveries came when the foundations of the whole order of society were shaken. At the very time when the old problem of the definition of equality, whether its interpretation should be quantitative or qualitative, was undermining the traditional structure of Europe, new productive powers, thrown blindly on the world, added to the confusion of mind and heart. If this were not enough, the fixity of everlasting hope and the certainties of religion were shaken by the discoveries and conclusions of scientists, philologists, and historians. The urgency and difficulty of the problems of the age were immensely greater when the horizon of view was limited to this world, and the songs of revolution no longer ended with the sentence: ‘The King’s Son of Heaven shall pay for all.’

Throughout the nineteenth century the effects of the industrial revolution were mixed with the effects of the political changes introduced in France by the revolution of 1789, and spread over Europe by the soldiers, civil servants, and tax-collectors of Napoleon. After 1815 the energies of Europe flowed back into their normal channels. One of the glacial periods of history was over. It is true that ‘the little kings crept out into the sun again’; their return was a small matter in comparison with the coming of the new industries and the effect of a new economy upon the older political conceptions. The ideas of private property and capitalist control took a new meaning when ownership in business was separated from control. For a time political equality and political liberty appeared terms of mockery; formulae devised in the interest of a dominant class to conceal the significance of economic inequality and economic serfdom. ‘La liberté politique n’est qu’un leurre.’ Men became disillusioned with the results of 1789 before they had worked out the new conditions of political life. In France the completeness of the political revolution made a new generation forget the evils which had been overcome.¹ For a time the political accidents of the Restoration diverted attention from the economic changes. The constitutional battle was fought over again. The revolution of 1830 was necessary before the experiment of constitutional government on a moderate franchise could be given a fair trial. The intensity of the political struggle, the dangers threatening society from the extremes of right and left took up the energies of the political leaders, and blinded them to the economic transformation of society.

This juxtaposition of old and new, this belief in a political future which already belonged in idea to the historical past can be studied in the separate development as well as in the mutual relations of the European states. A study of this kind would begin by taking account of the different stages of culture and political organisation to which the various states had attained at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The nations of Christendom have not undergone a common series of experiences which can be described in terms of simultaneity. The limits of Christendom have shifted; the conditions of the environment have been widely different in east and west. It is possible to think of a time-scale upon which the nations of the western seaboard are older than the nations of the eastern plain. It may seem a paradox to speak of Victorian England or France of the Third Republic as older in political experience than the papacy or the German-speaking countries which were included in the empire of Barbarossa. Yet the political experience of Italy ceased to be fruitful after the century of the Reformation and the political traditions of Germany were dissipated for the most part before the close of the middle ages. In the nineteenth century England and France were chronologically more than two centuries ahead of Germany and Italy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. The Age of European Peace
• II. The Character of European Wars: 1815–1870
• III. Causes Of European Wars: 1815–1870
• IV. Political and Other Factors Making for Peace
• V. Economic Factors Making for Peace or War
• Conclusion
• Historical Material and Historical Certainty the Nineteenth Century
• French History and French Memoirs 1815–1850