Strangers Nowhere in the World

The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe

Margaret C. Jacob

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812294231
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

The mingling of aristocrats and commoners in a southern French city, the jostling of foreigners in stock markets across northern and western Europe, the club gatherings in Paris and London of genteel naturalists busily distilling plants or making air pumps, the ritual fraternizing of "brothers" in privacy and even secrecy—Margaret Jacob invokes all these examples in Strangers Nowhere in the World to provide glimpses of the cosmopolitan ethos that gradually emerged over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Jacob investigates what it was to be cosmopolitan in Europe during the early modern period. Then—as now—being cosmopolitan meant the ability to experience people of different nations, creeds, and colors with pleasure, curiosity, and interest. Yet such a definition did not come about automatically, nor could it always be practiced easily by those who embraced its principles. Cosmopolites had to strike a delicate balance between the transgressive and the subversive, the radical and the dangerous, the open-minded and the libertine. Jacob traces the history of this precarious balancing act to illustrate how ideals about cosmopolitanism were eventually transformed into lived experiences and practices. From the representatives of the Inquisition who found the mixing of Catholics and Protestants and other types of "border crossing" disruptive to their authority, to the struggles within urbane masonic lodges to open membership to Jews, Jacob also charts the moments when the cosmopolitan impulse faltered.Jacob pays particular attention to the impact of science and merchant life on the emergence of the cosmopolitan ideal. In the decades after 1650, modern scientific practices coalesced and science became an open enterprise. Experiments were witnessed in social settings of natural inquiry, congenial for the inculcation of cosmopolitan mores. Similarly, the public venues of the stock exchanges brought strangers and foreigners together in ways encouraging them to be cosmopolites. The amount of international and global commerce increased greatly after 1700, and luxury tastes developed that valorized foreign patterns and designs.Drawing upon sources as various as Inquisition records and spy reports, minutes of scientific societies and the writings of political revolutionaries, Strangers Nowhere in the World reveals a moment in European history when an ideal of cultural openness came to seem strong enough to counter centuries of chauvinism and xenophobia. Perhaps at no time since, Jacob cautions, has that cosmopolitan ideal seemed more fragile and elusive than it is today.

Chapter 1

Censors, Inquisitors, and Cosmopolites

Cities are, and were, the natural habitat of the cosmopolitan. In the course of the eighteenth century urban size grew. By 1750 Dublin and Amsterdam were at about 200,000 people, London well over 500,000, Berlin and The Hague had about 35,000 souls, while Avignon in the south of France barely housed 25,000. While all these other cities were presided over by lay magistrates, Avignon was ruled by Catholic clergymen. It existed as papal territory by virtue of a historical accident. Although in no sense a nation, this ecclesiastical state nonetheless policed mores and focused in particular on religious boundaries that it wished to enforce. Some Avignonese did in turn transgress, but in ways that might have gone unnoticed by state authority elsewhere, say in Paris. Thus, while we have the papal inquisitors of Avignon to thank for this unexpected glimpse at cosmopolitan behavior in the city, we do not want to imagine these watchdogs as utterly unique. Everywhere in early modern Europe the guardians of authority sought in some manner to shape mores and behavior, and none of that pressure was intended to further the goal of making people more cosmopolitan.

Amid the cloak of anonymity and the mingling permitted by urban trade, men and some women in all these cities found themselves in situations with unprecedented possibilities for talking, card playing, drinking, clubbing, or just mixing with relative strangers. In different cities we can see the socializing, the convivial and respectful mixing of people with vastly different backgrounds, often accompanied—and this became increasingly important—by some kind of structure or set of known rules and specific intellectual interests. To catch the nuances and varieties of cosmopolitan behavior, and what made it so threatening to the authorities in some places and not others, we need cases to study where it was highly suspect, spied upon, and when possible persecuted.

We especially want to observe cosmopolitan behavior in a place like Avignon, where national identity figured little, if at all, in the strictures of those who disapproved. The activities of the Roman Catholic Inquisition in Avignon as it suppressed the cosmopolitan will concern us in some detail shortly. They are important precisely because they occurred in French territory (ungoverned by the French king), and not in Spain or Italy where the Inquisition is generally assumed to have worked effectively to stifle dissent or to inhibit many forms of secular fraternizing throughout much of the eighteenth century. As a consequence, Spanish social life outside the home centered on pious associations or confraternities fostered by the baroque Catholicism so popular there.¹ But Catholic Europe could also be a study in contrasts.

Avignon was different from both Spain and France. On the northwest side of Avignon the Rhone river—about the width of a New York City block—separated it and its province from all of France. The differences between what got persecuted in papal Avignon—as opposed to France—have much to tell us about the relative freedoms that could emerge, or be stifled, in any early modern European setting.² But lest we think of Avignon as the only hotbed of repression, the security interests of a variety of churches and states, regardless of the structure of their authority systems, first need to be addressed briefly. All could work to inhibit cosmopolitan border crossing.

In every Western country or colony the secular authorities had views and laws about what could be said and, most important, put into print. In absolutist countries, where central monarchical authority worked often in tandem with the Church, generally control operated more efficiently than it did in republics or constitutional monarchies. But throughout both Protestant and Catholic Europe censorship of books, theaters and newspapers was the norm, not the exception, until well into the nineteenth century, and beyond. One historian has described books in France during the reign of Louis XV (he died in 1774) as “controlled with a severity and minutiae rarely equaled.”³ A survey of a few of the various forms of repression to be found in early modern Europe suggests the way the world might have been if all the protectors of faith, morality, and established customs had gotten their way. Giving some sense of the range of what—and who—bothered them might make the tension between censors and cosmopolites in Avignon easier to grasp.

When social contacts seemed overtly political and dangerous, even conspiratorial, secular authorities sprang into action. The French crown watched for aristocratic cabals; it, and oftentimes the local courts or parlements, also took a dim view of an austere and indigenous religious movement known as Jansenism and its explicit critique of the luxury of the French church and court. In addition, all activity by foreigners was worth knowing about, as was any deviance from expected sexual mores. From the seventeenth century until well into the 1740s, spies followed foreign ambassadors, observed Jewish merchants, investigated homosexual behavior, raided Jansenist bookshops, and generally watched for morsels of information that the authorities might reward. Although relaxed somewhat after 1750, the French system of spying was so elaborate and thorough that people were watched for hours, days, and months. Some reports included juicy details about sexual indiscretions, or letters opened, and spies from other countries being spied upon.⁴ No other spy system in northern and western Europe could quite compare with the thoroughness of the French.

Of course every European state worked actively to suppress presumed threats to its power, especially if they entailed contact with a foreign power. In Britain, after the Revolution of 1688–89, the authorities watched for Jacobites, that is, supporters of the deposed king, James II. Exiled largely to France (where we will meet him in Chapter 2), he and the international activities of his followers, seen as treasonous, were closely monitored well into the 1740s. Even in the relatively open Dutch Republic the oligarchic regents who ran the towns and cities were ready to close down any assembly that seemed to favor the restoration of the stadholder and his court in The Hague. Imported in the 1730s by the British ambassador—who had close ties to the Frisian family waiting in the wings to claim the stadholderate—the Anglophile masonic lodge in The Hague ran afoul of the regents. For a time its assemblies were banished. Persecution of differences, or social mixing, when seen as encroaching upon political authority, was never the exclusive habit of absolutists.

In the Dutch Republic the decade of the 1730s produced a growing panic about economic and moral decline. In 1730–31 a homophobic panic gripped the towns and cities and well over two hundred men were arrested—some even executed—for what the age called “sodomy.”⁵ Less serious persecutions occurred in 1764 and 1776. For a time this mania had a chilling effect on all male sociability outside the home, army, or church. In the privacy of their lodges, freemasons lamented “the slander-sick public . . . the hypocrites, prejudiced writers . . . cursed Inquisition and booming preachers who announce persecution.”⁶ Indeed, the situation for any group suspected of homosexuality in the Dutch Republic was so extreme that foreign commentators discussed it with a mix of curiosity and shock.⁷ Modern historians have seen the panic as part of a larger crisis that gripped the Republic as signs of its economic problems became increasingly visible. Evidence from London and Paris early in the eighteenth century suggests that, just as in the Dutch Republic, the fraternizing of homosexual men in cabarets and specially designated houses had become more commonplace. Most of the time those unlucky enough to be caught elsewhere got away with only fines or brief imprisonments. In all places, however, their activities were illegal and seen as signs of moral degeneration. But in the Republic the persecution was most intense, and for a time all male socializing became suspect, constituting a natural check on the possibility of cosmopolitan encounters.

Oftentimes magistrates who spied a threat in any country were backed by segments of the populace. When public lewdness was seen to be on the increase, even without the assistance of the state, the pious sprang into action. In the 1690s London, and many provincial towns, became home to a vast number of new religious societies for the reformation of manners, and their purpose revolved about the policing of one’s own morality and that of one’s neighbor. Overwhelmingly Anglican in membership, the societies did admit Presbyterians, particularly if they were clergy, and in that one respect they represented a move in the direction of social border crossing into the religiously cosmopolitan.⁸ This outcropping of voluntary policing, or the felt need to suppress “vice,” arose for a variety of reasons, and high on the list was the Anglican reaction to the loss of privileges once enjoyed by the Church of England and removed as a direct consequence of the Revolution of 1688–89. Prior to it, non-Anglicans were persecuted. After the Act of Toleration of 1689 it was no longer possible to stop Presbyterians or Baptists or Quakers from worshiping openly and eventually from establishing their own schools. These privileges were not legally accorded to Catholics or to those who did not believe in the Trinity. In practice, however, they too slipped through the door cracked open by the Act, although more so in Britain than in Ireland. By the 1730s anti-Trinitarianism infected some Protestant congregations. Modern Unitarianism, so vital to the reformist and cosmopolitan political life we will examine in a later chapter, traces its origins to those groups.

In Britain the pious took offense at others’ new post-1689 freedoms and the heresies they seemed to promote. The proponents of godliness imagined themselves as engaged in a war: “there can be no Neuters in this War, betwixt the Prince of Light, and that of Darkness.”⁹ Interestingly, there was little support for a renewal of religious persecution per se, and the anger among the godly at the loss of control surfaced as a generalized moralizing, a belief that England was descending into license and lasciviousness. The Anglican pious, along with a few non-Anglican moralizing zealots, set themselves upon the task of rooting out public lewdness, swearing, adultery, in short to insure that “in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation” the faithful may “shine as lights in the world.”¹⁰ Interesting from our perspective, as we search for the emergence of structures supportive of civil society, the reforming societies often possessed constitutions. In deepest Yorkshire, societies with rules like “Constitutions of the Society for Suppressing of Vice within the Corporation of Kendal” sprang up to rescue the reprobate.¹¹

The volunteer societies bent upon reforming manners imposed rules to regulate and discipline the lives of their neighbors, and themselves. Good Christians were urged to report and help prosecute Sunday traders, blasphemers, prostitutes, and drunkards. In the forty years the societies flourished about 100,000 people were brought up on such charges.¹² The societies also came dangerously close to involving the state courts in areas that had been traditionally reserved for the clergy to condemn and cleanse. The devout from the lower classes often saw the societies as a form of hypocrisy, and one barber-theologian broke into print to argue that sin had been ordained for a good cause.¹³

Members of the new societies were urged to pray and to attend church, but most particularly to keep themselves away from persons dissolute and disorderly. Keeping to one’s self and one’s coreligionists ensured godliness. Members were admonished not to linger—even in the churchyard—but to proceed promptly to the service, and whenever possible to turn conversation in the direction of the edifying. Drinking in public provoked a particular disdain. Volunteers were told that there was no point in aiming for greater happiness in this world.¹⁴ The purpose of restricting social contacts lay in taking people away from the world while revealing its evils and discontents. Mixing with strangers might mean being hospitable to sinners.

Protestant socializing for the purpose of policing the ungodly is not a form of sociability that can be defined as cosmopolitan, however Godly and goodly it may have been. The social vision being articulated looked inward, to a narrowly defined set of behaviors, and when outward, to the other world beyond the grave. Yet some elements of civility were present: the crossing of religious boundaries between church and chapel and the habit of constitutional formality, of somber clubbing and gathering with a higher purpose. By mid-century the societies for reformation had largely disappeared. When societies intended to police behavior surfaced again in the turbulent 1790s, they focused on political radicals. While they assumed a linkage between radicalism and immorality, they focused their energies upon persecuting the political, leaving the immoral largely to their own devices.¹⁵ In either period the historian in search of cosmopolitan practices must look largely outside of religious assemblies, while always remembering that the pious might be ready to frown in disapproval at what we find.

Early Cosmopolitan Sightings

The societies for the reformation of manners swam against the tide, and they became notoriously controversial. In addition, the pessimism at the root of the attempt to “reform” society stood in marked contrast to the obvious optimism that could be derived from developments in the learning of the day. The 1690s in England seemed like a time of unprecedented intellectual excitement. The laws revealed in Isaac Newton’s Principia, published in 1687, became a subject fit for Anglican pulpit oratory. Newtonian science provoked attention in a wide cross section of English society, and scientific lecturing and experimentation fostered a new sociability. As we shall see in the next chapter, even a full generation earlier, students of nature could also be border crossers. By the second decade of the eighteenth century quite ordinary followers of the new science observed that only “to these our Times” had been reserved the honor of “great improvements,”¹⁶ and crowds of observers paid to watch scientific lecturers.

Some of the earliest cosmopolitan fraternizing that we see in Protestant Europe, in both England and the Dutch Republic, began around science, and literary, philosophical societies sprouted in towns large and small. In a town as small as Spalding in Lincolnshire with its five hundred families, more than three hundred men in total began by 1710 onward to frequent the new and local philosophical society. “Lit-phils,” as they have come to be known, inculcated useful science, letters and politeness to be sure, but they had little to say about private morality. In early eighteenth-century Britain, excessive zeal for religion had come to be far more controversial than enthusiasm for science.

Protestant Europe proved exceptionally receptive to Newton’s science. Across the channel in The Hague, one of earliest groups that sought to disseminate his science set up a secret club, and into it came the young Dutchman Willem ‘s Gravesande. He emerged as the most prominent Newtonian scientist in the generation after Newton (who died in 1727).¹⁷ The members of this little society were all Protestants, and they called one another “brother.” They a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Censors, Inquisitors, and Cosmopolites
• 2 Alchemy, Science, and a Universalist Language
• 3 Markets Not So Free
• 4 Secrecy and the Paradox at the Heart of Modernity (the Masonic Moment)
• 5 Liberals, Radicals, and Bohemians
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments