by Ian Mortimer
From the 1780s industrialisation was well under way in Britain and beginning to catch the attention of businessmen across Europe. In the first half of the century the annual growth of the cotton industry can be measured at 1.37 per cent per year. From 1760–70 it was 4.59 per cent, the 1770s saw annual growth at 6.2 per cent, and in the 1780s it rose by 12.76 per cent. These significant shifts in industrial output were mirrored across almost all industries. The production of British pig iron increased from 30,000 tons per year in 1760 to 244,000 tons in 1806. The race was on for people to find the innovation that would make their fortune. In the years 1700–9, only 31 patent applications were granted in England; in 1800–9, no fewer than 924 were successful.34 The next century saw even more industrial change, exponentially greater use of coal and increased innovation: in the 1890s, the British patent office received more than 238,000 applications. But the combined industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century had the ‘Columbus effect’ – of not only changing things for ever but showing people the path to the future.
Political revolution
As we have seen, the English Revolution of 1688 had a profound impact on political thinkers across Europe. The very idea that a parliament, representative of the people, could oust a king and select another, and impose on that new monarch a series of limitations on his power, shook the very concept of royal government. However, the English Revolution was primarily concerned with the relationships between the monarch and Parliament and between the government and the people. It was less interested in the way individual citizens stood in relation to each other. It was not until the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century that the idea of the equality of men was formulated and given political force.
The American Revolution began as an attempt by the colonists to resolve a lack of representation in government. It was a long-established principle in England that in return for granting extraordinary taxation, the elected Members of Parliament would have the ear of the king and be able to propose legislation. The American colonists had neither the ear of the king nor any influence over the government’s legislative programme. They had no representatives at Westminster, even though they paid taxes to the British state. This was unconstitutional when viewed in the context of the 1689 Bill of Rights. The idea of the colonies electing MPs to sit in the British parliament had often been discussed but was always dismissed as being impractical. The Stamp Act of 1765, which laid a further tax burden exclusively on them, met with bitter opposition from colonists, who felt it was a violation of their rights as subjects of the English monarch. The Tea Act of 1773, which sought to charge tax on tea shipped to America even though it had been brought from the East India Company warehouses free of duty, met with violent resistance in the Boston Tea Party. An attempt at reconciliation failed, and the Thirteen Colonies (Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island) set up their own governments. Each colony then declared itself a state, and together they formed the Continental Congress. Through this body they declared their independence from Great Britain on 4 July 1776. The text of the declaration began:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The British government did not agree, and sent an army to make its position clear. The war that followed lasted until the Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September 1783. By its terms, the British ceded to its former colonies, which now called themselves the United States of America, all the land east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes. By a separate agreement, East and West Florida were handed over to Spain.
While these events were of huge importance for America and its future development, it was the republican nature of the revolution that had the greatest resonance elsewhere. There had been short-lived republics in the past – for instance, the English Commonwealth (1649–60) and the Republic of Corsica (1755–69) – but otherwise the only established republics in Europe were small: the Italian city states and the Swiss cantons. There was no precedent for the swearing-in of George Washington as the president of more than five million people. This had implications throughout the West – and nowhere more so than in France, which had supported the Americans in their bid for independence.
In France, the call for equality had a different context and meaning. The authors of the American Declaration of Independence had used the term ‘equality’ to express their belief that they had an equal right to the liberties enjoyed by Englishmen. But it applied only to taxpaying citizens; most of the Founding Fathers did not believe that all Americans were equal with each other. Slaves were still regarded as property, and in 1776 the liberty to enjoy your property still took priority over a slave’s right to equal standing. There were some early calls for the emancipation of slaves. In 1780 the state of Pennsylvania passed the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, by which all children of slaves were declared free, so that slavery would gradually die out over the course of a generation without anyone being forced to give up their property. However, the principal slave states in the American South did not follow suit. In France in 1789 there was much less of a conflict between the desire for liberty and equality. The people who demanded their liberty also wanted equality with those who denied them their rights. It was thus a fundamentally different revolution – against their own political structure rather than the imperial dictates of a distant nation.
It all began with a financial crisis. Hoping to get approval for his government’s much-needed economic reforms, the king of France summoned a meeting of the Estates General – the first for 175 years. When the representatives of the people, the Third Estate, assembled, they declared themselves to be the members of a National Assembly and that they would proceed with the reform of the government with or without the representatives of the aristocracy and clergy. The king, in an attempt to stop them, closed the chamber. The 577 members of the National Assembly thus met instead in a tennis court on 30 June 1789. There all but one of them swore an oath promising that they would continue to meet until they had forced a constitution upon Louis XVI. Two weeks later, on 14 July 1789, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille – the Parisian fortress-prison that was the symbol of royal tyranny – and killed its governor. Leading noblemen started to flee the nation. Rioting broke out in the capital and spread to the countryside. What had begun as an attempt to impose a constitution on the king and his government turned into a full-scale revolution.
In August 1789 the comte de Mirabeau put forward the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This document, which was approved by the National Assembly on 26 August, drew heavily from the social contract and the concept of natural rights as espoused by Rousseau and other political thinkers before him; it was also influenced by recent debates in America. It included 17 articles, beginning with ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.’ It declared that ‘the aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man . . . liberty, property, security, and resi
stance to oppression’, and that the limits of individual liberty could only be determined by law. It went on to state that the law ‘must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes’, and that ‘all citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations’. It provided for freedom from arrest except for breaches of the law, the prohibition of cruel punishments, the presumed innocence of suspects until proved guilty, freedom from religious oppression, freedom of the press, freedom of personal expression, the accountability of public officials, and a guarantee of the right of property.
All this might have been no more than the culmination of Enlightenment political theory had it not been for what came next. The revolution became increasingly violent. From 5 October 1789, when the Parisian mob marched to Versailles with the city’s cannon to force the royal family to return to the capital, it began to spiral out of control. In 1790 the peerage was abolished and the clergy was legally subjected to the authority of the secular government. Law and order broke down in many places, and massacres – both official and unofficial – took place throughout France. French royal authority, which not so long ago had been the most powerful in Europe, was abolished. The king was tried for treason and executed. Many aristocrats, including the queen, Marie Antoinette, followed him to the guillotine. Church lands were confiscated and the great cathedral of Notre-Dame was rededicated to the Cult of Reason. A new, revolutionary calendar was introduced. In the autumn of 1793 the Reign of Terror began. Many people were arrested under the wide-ranging provisions of the Law of Suspects, passed on 17 September. The anarchic horror of the revolution spread like fire. The state arrested and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of individuals and executed tens of thousands for fear that they might infringe the people’s liberty.
The abuses that followed the Law of Suspects were a national tragedy but they should not distract us from the key point: the French Revolution was not simply a revolution, it was the revolution, the testing of one of the most far-reaching ideas of the whole millennium: namely that one man is worth the same as any other. This was a concept that had not existed in the ancient world, nor in the first millennium AD. While it was a Christian sentiment in origin, no Christian kingdom had ever tried to put it into practice. Yet Western society had been moving in the general direction of social equality for centuries. Changes from each century covered in this book are reflected in the 17 articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The discontinuation of slavery in the eleventh century is highlighted in the first line, that ‘men are born and remain free’. The legal changes of the twelfth century foreshadow the dictum that the sole restriction on liberty should be that of the law, and that the law is enacted to preserve the common good. The thirteenth century’s desire for greater accountability is echoed in the principle that public servants should account for their actions, and that the government should not lock people up without reason. The active relationship between citizens and the state is adumbrated in fourteenth-century nationalism and parliamentary representation. The very concept of individualism, which we first encountered in the fifteenth century, resounds through the document. Sixteenth-century religious divisions are acknowledged in the clause promising freedom from religious persecution. The ideas of John Locke, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract all find their echo in the concept of natural rights, expressed in the second article. Of course it would be wrong to see all this as a continuous and uninterrupted march of society towards something measuring up to ‘equality’. Equality itself is a nebulous concept – it lacks real meaning except when defined in relation to a specific scale of values. But if you could draw a graph of the rights of the ordinary man in relation to those of the rest of his society over the ages, the general trend line would resemble a stretched ‘s’ shape: a curve starting with the discontinuation of slavery in the Middle Ages, rising very slowly from the Black Death to the early eighteenth century, and hitting the start of its maximum incline with the outbreak of the French Revolution at a gradient that it continued to follow for more than a century, only tapering off in the mid twentieth century as equality, or something close to it, was achieved.
The immediate consequences of the Revolution outside France were many and varied. To contain the revolutionary forces, Austria and Prussia declared war on France in April 1792; Great Britain was drawn into the conflict soon afterwards. The extremism, violence and injustice of the Terror also forced sympathetic reformers in these countries on to the back foot. Organisations such as the London Corresponding Society, whose members wanted to widen political representation to the working classes, had to accept that such a philanthropic vision was premature. The condemnation of the Revolution in the successful book Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by Edmund Burke, and the hard-hitting response by Thomas Paine in the even more successful The Rights of Man (1791) show how deeply opinion was divided. The failure of the French Revolution to address the question of the rights of women brought forth Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and rekindled the debate about women’s position in society. Hence the French Revolution merely marked the start of the most radical gradient of our equality graph. Yet, as with many other developments discussed in this book, it showed the way forward and opened people’s eyes to what was possible. Without the French Revolution, it is very unlikely that European thinkers in the next century would have approached the question of social reform on the basis of the equal value of individuals in society. Nor would political equality have become the moral default position in the Western world.
Conclusion
Had you enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of Europe in 1800, your sharp vision would have noticed little change from what you saw in 1200. The cities would have been larger, and there were certainly more of them, but on the whole, the landscape was still predominantly rural. Even if you had focused on England, you would barely have noticed the gradual proliferation of mills and factories. Perhaps the silver lines of canals here and there would have caught your eye, or the odd mill building or mine workings. But by far the most obvious change would have been the enclosure of the vast majority of the country. No longer was the English landscape a patchwork of large fields consisting of separate strips of land farmed by different tenants. The modern pattern of small enclosures now came to predominate. But we shouldn’t necessarily expect the greatest changes to have left the most obvious physical traces. Like eighteenth-century flying, some great developments did not have an impact on the land so much as on people’s imaginations.
Having said that, it is worth bearing those fields in mind, for they represent the food supply and thus ‘the greatest ongoing challenge facing our ancestors’. In going so far to meet that challenge, the eighteenth century transformed the entire relationship between mankind, our environment and God. Since medieval times, people had kept strict control of their neighbours’ moral behaviour in the belief that immorality in the community would be communally punished by God, through a bad harvest, for example. Thus, if members of a community turned a blind eye to their neighbours’ indiscretions, they too were guilty of a sin and deserving of punishment. However, as the food supply increased and fewer people went hungry after 1710, both these fears and the moralising that accompanied them diminished. At the same time, the enhanced understanding of the relationship between Man and his environment made people separate their belief in God from the causes of adversity. When in France the food supply dried up again in the 1780s, people blamed their fellow citizens rather than God. By this reckoning, the agricultural changes of the eighteenth century not only allowed the population to grow, providing the workforce for the Industrial Revolution; they also made society more tolerant, more permissive and less cruel.
The principal agent of change
None of the great changes of the eighteenth century was dominated by a single individual – at least not to the extent that, say, t
he advance of chemistry was dominated by Antoine Lavoisier. His name has not been mentioned until now – which seems to exclude him from consideration as the main agent of change – but it is probably fair to say that he, along with Isaac Newton, was one the individuals who most affected our understanding of the natural world in this century. But Lavoisier’s career curiously also reflected the undercurrents of the period. He led the way in identifying and systematically arranging the elements, in place of Aristotle’s old system of ‘earth, air, fire and water’. In breaking down compounds to find their constituent units and establishing the relationship of the particle to the whole, he resembled political thinkers like Rousseau, who was breaking down society to understand the relationship between the individual and the whole. Lavoisier’s work on combustion and oxygen naturally led him to investigate respiration as a chemical process, and he demonstrated that breathing was indeed a gas exchange and thus a slow form of combustion. This went a long way to demystifying the processes of the body, secularising the understanding of life very much in the spirit of the editors of the Encyclopédie. He established the law of the conservation of mass, which states that for any reaction in any closed system the mass of the constituent elements must be equal to that of all the products at the end of the reaction. This quantitative approach is reminiscent of that of the economists who were at the same time trying to measure the wealth of nations. In this way, Lavoisier’s work gives weight to the principle that the marquis de Condorcet outlined in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit in 1795: that progress in science will inevitably lead to progress in arts, politics and ethics. Unfortunately, neither Lavoisier’s genius nor the parallels between his work and that of the social reformers was enough to save him. When the volatile substance of the French Revolution came into contact with the fact that he had once had a share in the collection of French taxes, there was an extreme reaction. He was sent to the guillotine on 8 May 1794, at the age of 50: a victim of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. If there was a point at which Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment – thinking for oneself, free from dogma – ceased to apply, that was it.