Europe 1780 - 1830

Franklin L. Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317870944
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Europe 1780--1830 rapidly established itself as a standard introduction to European history in the age of the French Revolution and its aftermath when it first appeared. Now for the first time the book has been fully revised, updated and expanded. The half-century covered constitutes one of the most complex, eventful and rapidly changing of any in Europe's history. It is a period whose emphasis on conflict and political crisis combines daring innovation with the stubborn persistence of many older attitudes and patterns of human behaviour. Professor Ford explores these tensions throughout; and he gives his readers a powerful sense of the extraordinary energy, in every aspect of human activity, that characterised the time.

    1

Introduction

For an age much given to discussing ‘the history of mankind’ an opening word is perhaps in order concerning the scope and intent of the present volume. It is, like its companions in the present series, devoted to European history. Admittedly, the period with which it deals saw Europe’s influence still spreading across the world, continuing a process begun three centuries before with the first modern age of discovery. At the same time, non-European forces were beginning to work back with increased effect upon the old continent and its principal islands. Nevertheless, such a book can scarcely aspire to global coverage when so many European developments must themselves be passed over, or at best treated only briefly. Particularly for an American, who despite inherited attitudes and attachments is bound to look at Europe itself somewhat from the outside, it would be folly to attempt world history as seen primarily from a European angle of vision.

Within these unavoidable limits, we shall be concentrating on a central problem of interpretation, namely, the relationship between Europe before and Europe in the aftermath of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic crisis. Was the quarter-century that began in 1789 the great historical watershed it has often been called? Or were deep currents, running from the eighteenth century on into the nineteenth, strong enough to discredit any notion of a deep cleavage between two different ages as merely an illusion born of too much emphasis on exciting events?

The best way of attacking the question of continuity versus change, in any period, is to give thoughtful attention to the ‘before’, the ‘after’ and the ‘in-between’. Hence, this book involves narration, but narration interspersed with reflections and preceded, as well as followed, by descriptions of European society around 1780, and then again around 1830. The chronicle of public actions – of treaties and battles, legislative enactments and executive decisions – is not ignored. Neither is the record of European thought and artistic accomplishment. For it is an underlying premise of the ensuing chapters that events, abstract ideas and popular attitudes, as well as attempts to capture beauty in colour or form or sound or language have all contributed to, even as they have reflected, the patterns and movements of society in general. If, however, any one theme is accorded special emphasis, it is that of relationships among groups of people, variously defined in legal, economic, honorific and political terms. That, I think, is how the central issue can be most clearly framed. Was European society at the end of our period only superficially different from what it had been five decades earlier? Or had there occurred a transformation so fundamental as to mark the dawning of a new age?

One of the most difficult balances to maintain in a book about Europe, 1780–1830, lies between according due emphasis to France and providing adequate coverage of other regions or states. There are dangers on both sides. It would be a serious mistake to view this period as nothing more than a dramatic segment of French history, in which the other peoples of Europe were compelled or privileged, depending on the historian’s point of view, to play their parts. At the other extreme, another kind of distortion, less apparent perhaps, but no less harmful to full understanding, would result if we were to underestimate the power, by turns destructive and creative, of the French engine throughout this segment of the European past. Close attention will therefore be paid to the France of Louis XVI, of Robespierre, of Napoleon and of the restored monarchy after 1815. We must also, however, try to keep clearly in view affairs and conditions in the British Isles, the Germanies, the Low Countries, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, the Austrian Habsburg lands, Russia, Poland, Scandinavia and southeastern Europe.

Because the period to be examined was so full of violence, innovation and abrupt reversals, there is a natural temptation to visualize its eighteenth-century background in excessively pale colours. In a similar vein, although to a lesser degree, we are sometimes inclined to speak of ‘the nineteenth century’ as though things settled down after 1815.

Actually, of course, the Old Régime had been far from static. It had witnessed, amid intense argumentation and questioning, the rise and fall of kingdoms, churches and social groups. Every state in Europe was in important respects far different in the 1780s from what it had been in 1715, to say nothing of 1648. By the same token, one need only think for a moment of Germany and Italy, France and Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary, as they came to exist by the 1890s, let us say, to realize how much was to change in the three-quarters of a century after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire. The Revolutionary-Napleonic era was, as we shall see, turbulent enough to exercise the most dramatic imagination; but it cannot be fairly described as sandwiched between two other epochs marked by relative calm. By any comparative standard, Europe has never been quiescent.

Our present task requires a different approach, one that involves examining the end of the pre-revolutionary era, then the great crisis itself and finally the emerging outlines of the post-Napoleonic European world. It must be remembered that what we are analysing represents a single slice from the annals of a civilization as self-critical and changing as it has been proud and traditionalistic. When we have finished, it will be time to consider whether the years between the beginning of the 1780s and the end of the 1820s saw a break between an old world and a new one too striking for any historian to ignore. Or did they witness nothing more than the passing disruption of a European system which resumed its earlier characteristics with remarkable speed and completeness once the storm had passed?

2

The Sources

No historian concerned with Europe in the age of the Revolution, Napoleon and the Restoration should complain of special difficulties or claim unique advantages in the matter of sources. He may sometimes envy the medievalist’s concentration on a relatively small number of documents. On occasion he may wish that, like the analyst of very recent history, he could look at motion pictures and hear recordings of his human subjects – or even interview them in person. On the other hand, he may take comfort from the greater range of published sources bequeathed by the period 1780–1830, as compared with earlier times, owing to an undeniable increase in both the quantity and the statistical exactitude of official records dating from this period. By and large, however, the source problems he confronts are shared in one form or another by all students of history.

His chief problems are best characterized by two terms which are only superficially paradoxical: incompleteness and profusion. No matter how many pieces of information the scholar may have available, he is bound from time to time to feel that the few indispensable ones are precisely those he lacks. There will always be gaps in the fullest documentation. On the other hand the researcher cannot escape some degree of consternation when he considers the materials he might, given limitless time and invincible eyesight, bring to bear on any question of interpretation. Total comprehension of the past, like total recall, eludes us.

A volume such as this cannot be based throughout on primary sources. Instead, it must rely upon countless studies which do rest on documentary inquiry. Some of these monographs, as well as certain interpretive works of a more discursive nature, are cited with appreciation in the selective bibliographical essay to be found at the conclusion of the present work. Even a general history, however, profits from some direct reference to primary materials, both for the concrete details they provide and for the sense of the period which they, and only they, can impart. In any event, the reader deserves to be reminded of the various bases on which our knowledge rests. From each major category of evidence a few examples have therefore been chosen for inclusion here at the start.

First in order of generality are wide-ranging collections of texts, such as H. T. Colenbrander’s Gedenkstukken der algemeene geschiedenis van Nederland van 1795 tot 1840 (The Hague, 1905–22). These 22 volumes bring together precious data on almost half a century of Dutch history from archives and private holdings not only in the Netherlands, but also in England, France and other countries. Another vast assemblage of different kinds of papers, in this case bearing on one aspect of a national history, is the Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire économique de la Révolution française (Paris and other cities (1906-), edited by numerous experts under the auspices of a special commission of the Ministry of Public Instruction. This series, which already runs to over 100 volumes, is still being extended. Marc Bouloiseau, for instance, has edited the Cahiers de doléances du Tiers état du bailliage de Rouen pour les Etats généraux de 1789, in four volumes, with Philippe Boudin (Paris-Rouen, 1957–1974).

Few students, of course, have much need for these detailed accumulations of material. Many shorter publications, however, offer the chance to get acquainted with history through original documents, under careful editorial guidance. The Historical Seminar of the University of Bern, for example, has been issuing a series of paperbound books, Quellen zur neueren Geschichte (Bern, 1944–), averaging fewer than 100 pages apiece and valuable for the well-selected texts they include. To illustrate, the first item in the series, entitled Vom Ancien Régime zur Französischen Revolution, contains the electoral regulations for the Estates General of 1789 and sample lists of grievances (cahiers) addressed to that body, as well as the full text of the Constitution of 1791. Other numbers are Europa Politik zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Heft 2); Napo-leonische Friedensvertrdge (Heft 5); and Des Ende des Alten Reiches (Heft 10). A useful volume assembled by an American scholar, J. H. Stewart, is the 800-page Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York, 1951). For Great Britain, the best and newest selection for the period we are interested in is English Historical Documents, vol. XI, under the general editorship of D. Douglas. That particular volume, prepared by A. Aspinall and E. A. Smith (London, 1959), comprises 587 items from the years 1783–1832. (Volume III in the revised edition of this collection will deal with the same period but is not yet available at the present writing.)

An era of revolution, war and repression was inevitably a time of expanding governmental action in almost every European nation. State papers thus represent a major class of sources, subdivided by nationality, by originating agency and by type of activity involved. Legislative records are a rich but unavoidably uneven source of information, being limited to countries which enjoyed some degree of parliamentary rule. In the case of Great Britain, there is no need to elaborate on the importance of William Cobbett’s 36-volume Parliamentary History of England, containing actual speeches in the House of Commons down to 1803, to which has now been added Sheila Lambert’s edition of House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1975). The First Series of Thomas Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates – ‘Hansard’ as we still know it – runs from 1803 to 1820 in 41 volumes and was kept up to date on an annual basis after 1812, when Hansard took over Cobbett’s interest in the enterprise. The so-called New (or Second) Series covers the ten years of George IV’s reign, to 1830, in 25 volumes. Much less familiar, since they deal with the legislature of a short-lived Italian satellite of revolutionary France, are the 11 volumes on the Assemblee della repubblica cisalpina (Bologna, 1917–48), edited bv C. Montalcini, A. Albert, et al. More significant as a national body, but far more difficult for the reader of western European languages to get at, was the Diet of Hungary, summaries of whose debates were translated into German for the benefit of Habsburg officials in Vienna.

As might be expected, legislative documentation for France in this era is particularly voluminous. Beginning with P. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux, who edited the still useful though haphazard Histoire parlementaire in 40 volumes (Paris, 1834–38), and continuing with the Archives parlementaires, Série I: 1787–99, edited by J. Mavidal, E. Laurent, et al. (Paris, 1875–), the publication of such records has proceeded to a point of almost incredible specificity. For example, the Institute for the History of the French Revolution has launched a Recueil des documents relatifs aux séances des Etats généraux, mai-juin 1789, the first volume of which, edited by G. Lefebvre and A. Terroine (Paris, 1953), deals entirely with preparations for the Estates General and with one day’s session, that of the opening on May 5!

In the matter of administrative and legislative documents, an inevitable preoccupation with France – not limited, by the way, to French historians – deserves credit for the publication of countless volumes of Revolutionary and Napoleonic archives. British ministerial papers, of course, have also appeared in print, often as appendices to various special studies, while the notes and memoranda exchanged by public figures, whether German or Russian, Austrian or Spanish, help us to gain partial entry into the once secret council chambers of other governments. Yet despite the need to retain some degree of European perspective, again and again one is forced to return to the massive French documentation mentioned above. It constitutes a phenomenon already visible before F. A. Aulard began publication of the huge Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public (Paris, 1889–1951). Leaving aside later editors concerned with the files of individual prefectures and local governments, the briefest catalogue for France as a whole must acknowledge the efforts of E. S. Lacroix and R. Farge on the Commune of Paris, 16 vols. (Paris, 1894–1914); A. Debidour on the Executive Directory, 4 vols. (Paris, 1910–17); and C. Durand on the Napoleonic Council of State (Gap, 1954).

Public records, broadly defined, comprise many items in addition to minutes, protocols and correspondence. Census reports began to be published in some European countries during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lifting the veil of official secrecy that from time immemorial had concealed virtually all demographic data. Governmental appointments, promotions and reorganizations were regularly announced in such publications as the royal Bavarian Regierungsblatt (1805 ff.). Papers of both official and private origin can frequently be combined to good advantage. We should note as well the rapidly growing body of business archives, ofter published in connection with the histories of famous old commercial or industrial concerns. In their collection, Les patrons, les ouvriers et l’état: Le régime de l’industrie en France de 1814 à 1830 (Paris, 1912), G. and H. Bourgin showed the use that could be made of the texts of prefectorial and police reports concerning labour conditions, together with the proceedings of the Conseil des Manufactures.

At the mere mention of the phrase ‘documentary sources’, the category most likely to spring to mind is undoubtedly that of diplomatic papers. It was such documents or ‘diplomas’ (whence the name) that the learned archivists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries preferred to turn when compiling their pioneer editions. Many dominant figures of nineteenth-century historical writing, from Leopold von Ranke onward, tended to view ambassadorial reports, cabinet instructions to envoys, drafts and final texts of treaties as at once the richest and the most reliable sources for any student of the past. The faith of these historians in the ‘primacy of foreign policy’ was daily reconfirmed by the very nature of their favourite materials. Modern scholarship has tended to be more reserved in its enthusiasm for this admittedly clear, but often thin and lifeless, stream of observations and opinions. Perhaps the decline of secret, round-table diplomacy in our own century has influenced our attitude towards its functions and worth in other times. More likely, the recognition of influences acting upon all governmental policy decisions in ways seldom clear to the diplomatic reporter have diminished the reverence once accorded those neatly tied bundles of foreign office dispatches.

Whatever its cause, however, no such reaction can, or should, rob diplomatic papers of their undeniable value for the study of an age filled, like our own, with international conflict – an age which produced such famous diplomats as Talleyrand and Castlereagh, Capo d’Istria and Czartoryski, Metternich and Canning. The numberless minutes, drafts, instructions and dispatches published in the last 150 years, whether in separate volumes or as documentary appendices to monographic studies, remain indispensable aids to research. The same is true even of such hoary collections of treaty texts as F. de Martens and F. de Cussy, Recueil manuel et pratique des traités (Leipzig, 1846–57) in seven volumes, or single-nation compilations including L. Neumann, Recueil des traités et conventions conclus par Autriche … depuis 1763, vols. I-IV (Leipzig, 1855–58). An illustration of the value of ambassadorial reports for reconstructing more than just diplomatic manoeuvres will be found in Gesandtschaftsberichte aus München, 18I4–1848, edited by A. Chroust (Munich, 1935–51). In these dozen volumes we have, from the separate points of view of the French, Austrian and Prussian envoys to Bavaria, a running analysis of general conditions within that south German kingdom during the first half of the nineteenth century.

It is not always easy to draw a clear line between official sources and other, overlapping categories. Individual correspondence is a case in point. The letters of important public figures generally range all the way from the level of significant state papers to that of trivial...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Sources
• 3. The Old Régime: Society and Culture
• 4. The European State System
• 5. Political Issues in the 1780s
• 6. Upheaval in France
• 7. The Revolution Beyond French Borders
• 8. Bonaparte from Consul to Emperor
• 9. Napoleon and the Nations of Europe
• 10. The Dimensions of Violence
• 11. The European State System after 1815
• 12. Restoration Politics
• 13. Philosophers, Scientists and Historians
• 14. Society and Culture in 1830
• 15. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index