by Andrew Marr
This was one of the things eighteenth-century absolutism was good at, too. But is it reasonable to bracket together the Mughals in India and the contemporary European rulers under that word ‘absolutism’? Mughal rule had very different religious and philosophical roots from the European or Russian monarchies; nor was there a parallel Indian Enlightenment, despite the religious experimentation of Akbar. Yet the Mughals saw themselves as centralizers and modernizers, bringing a new coherence to the subcontinent. The earlier Mughals were intellectually open and curious. Furthermore, educated Europeans of the time, particularly French observers, were keenly aware of the Mughals as a parallel dynasty from whom lessons might usefully be learned. As at St Petersburg or Versailles, Mughal power mobilized huge manpower and resources to create epics in stone, designed to awe.
The Mughals were, however, symbols – even in Europe – for monarchical extravagance. And despite the steady spread of their imperial domains, the power of their armies and the opulence of their court, they were beginning to show that dynasties must also age. The insolent exuberance of Babur had been followed by the youthful intellectual curiosity of Akbar, then the decline of Jahangir and now Shah Jahan’s expensive addiction to huge construction projects. Just as modern corporations who build spectacular new headquarters with fountains and statues outside them are often said to be heading for failure, for all its beauty, was the Taj Mahal the beginning of a decline? And was there something built into the structure of absolutism that made such decline inevitable?
People wondered, even at the time. Comparisons sprang readily to mind because the Mughal dynasty peaked just as Europe’s age of absolutism started. The Taj Mahal was completed in 1648. Louis XIV’s architects began the great expansion of Versailles a dozen years later. Peter the Great became sole ruler of Russia at the moment the Mughal empire reached its greatest extent. And the reign of the last really substantial Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, coincided with the arrival of Frederick I as king of Prussia and with the beginning of Spain’s Bourbon dynasty. François Bernier, who became Aurangzeb’s personal doctor, wrote to Louis’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert about the astonishing wealth and luxury of the Mughal court, but warned that the system of never-ending taxes and imposts on the Indian peasantry reduced them to effective slavery, and made it hard to improve the land: people who had no stake in the future had no motivation to repair ditches or work harder.9
Aurangzeb had started in the usual way, with the murder of a brother after a war of succession and the incarceration of his father. Europeans were agog: the English poet John Dryden wrote a play about ‘Aureng-zebe’ in 1675, making a hero of the pious Muslim. But the real Aurangzeb would ruin the Mughals. His empire would reach almost all of the Indian subcontinent. It had some of the virtues of absolutist rule – a single legal system, well maintained roads and strong fortresses, standard weights and measures, relatively efficient tax collection, growing trade (not least with the Europeans) and a big standing army, and it kept records. But it became increasingly oppressive.
Aurangzeb had turned his back on the tolerant attitude of earlier Mughals, including his father and his butchered brother. He instituted Islamic bans on alcohol, on dancing and on the writing of history. He sacked the court artists whose delicate miniatures were one of the glories of Indian culture. He created a system of censors and allowed his troops to desecrate or destroy Hindu temples. In a famous though disputed scene, his court musicians, wailing and weeping, conducted a huge burial service with twenty biers: when Aurangzeb asked what was happening, they replied that since he had killed music, they were ‘burying music’. He hoped they buried her deep, he replied.
Like other autocrats, he needed ever greater resources to supply his armies and his bureaucracy, but he failed to achieve the economic growth of more open and outward-looking states. He set out to conquer new territories in the Deccan plain and the Indian south: his most famous conquest was of the world’s greatest diamond mine at Golkonda, which produced the Koh-i-Noor, the ‘French Blue’ sported by Louis XIV himself (it reappeared in modern times as the Hope Diamond), and many others. The mine was protected by an eight-mile wall around a granite hill. The attack, in 1687, was long and bloody, but eventually made Aurangzeb the world’s richest ruler. He was also one of the world’s healthiest rulers, perhaps due to his austere religious ways. He would reign until 1707, dying at eighty-eight while still leading his apparently perennial campaign to subdue all of India.
Eventually, he ruled almost a quarter of the world’s people. Yet this long war now seems a great folly, costing far more than Shah Jahan’s building mania had. By bleeding the Mughal state dry it would lead to the rise of British India, a consequence Aurangzeb could not have begun to imagine. His greatest enemy was the Hindu Maratha state based in the hilly Western Ghats and along the coast, which at the time was ferociously led by a military genius called Shivaji, who became a hero to Hindus, and the subject of many tall tales as he led his irregular forces in bold raids. From 1681 to 1707, the Marathas and the Mughals fought a war whose only equivalent in Europe was the long wars of the This, That and the Other Succession. Throughout that twenty-six-year campaign the aged Aurangzeb travelled with a movable capital, a tent city allegedly thirty miles around, with half a million followers and thirty thousand elephants, stripping the land of its produce as they went and helping to spread disease.
Like later generals, he discovered that conventional armies find it a struggle to defeat guerrillas, and the fight against the Marathas began to feel like a war without end. It was spreading a hatred of Islam, rather than affection for it. The conflict brought his empire close to financial collapse, and as taxes rose, revolts spread far beyond the south.
This is about as good an illustration as you could get of the dangers of absolutism. An empire driven by the obsession of a single man, religious in this case, relying on repression and territorial expansion, cannot last long. The parallels with Europe are strong: there too the wars were about succession and religious differences, and would go on almost as long; though, thanks to ocean-going fleets, they would spread much further, including to India itself. As to Aurangzeb, as he was dying he apparently told his son: ‘I came along and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.’
The Mughals would stagger on into the nineteenth century; but they were by now exhausted. When the first adventurers of the British East India Company began to build coastal forts and defeat local armies – along with their French rivals – they would find Mughal India had a rotten door, easy to kick down. Under a pushy upstart called Robert Clive, the British not only barged in with bayonets and cannon, but managed to slip themselves into the Mughal system as tax-collectors for the Agra court. This gave them an instant authority in a strange land, allowing them to steal the Mughal hegemony until they were able to shake them off altogether. Under the Mughal cloak, the East India Company grew into a substitute government. And hidden under the Company’s entrepreneurial activities – and almost equally surprised by the turn of events – was the British Crown.
The British Empire would need to start afresh; for on the other side of the world, its first empire, won in the forests of America, was about to fall apart. Nor would it be long before absolutism in Europe, too, began to disintegrate.
Zozo and Fred
On 20 June 1753 there was a hubbub in the streets of Frankfurt. A skeletal Frenchman, famous throughout the Europeanized world, was trying to escape Prussian agents. They had ransacked his luggage and had orders to shoot him if he should try to flee.
His was a bungled escape; his carriage got caught in a traffic jam of hay-carts. At the city gate he was recognized, stopped and taken back by soldiers to be searched. Strip-searching is rarely dignified. The nicotine-addicted François-Marie Arouet, known to his parents as Zozo but to the world by his pen-name Voltaire, pleaded that he could not live without snuff, but his snuffbox was seized. He was escorted to a local inn, the Goat’s Horn, where his niece, w
ho was also his lover, was nearly raped by a Prussian soldier, while his clothes, cash, silver buckles and gold scissors were stolen.
Voltaire had already been relieved of his prized Order of Merit and the gold key that was his badge of office as Court Chamberlain to Frederick the Great of Prussia. It was Frederick’s agents who had ambushed the philosopher: the king was desperate to get hold of a book of poems and other writings he himself had composed, and of which Voltaire had a rare copy. The writings were too compromising, too radical, for a military monarch. Eventually, the shaken and humiliated Voltaire was allowed to leave for exile in Switzerland. One of the great experiments in enlightened despotism – ideals of freedom and inquiry pursued under the protection of a philosopher-king – had not gone according to plan.
Voltaire had fallen out many times with the rulers of his native France. As a younger man, he had been imprisoned in the Bastille for his insolent compositions. But he had known Frederick for much of his writing life and had seen him as a beacon of hope. Eventually, lured to Berlin to work for Prussia’s ruler, Voltaire had become disillusioned, complaining that despite the good conversation and the parties and the music, ‘there are prodigious quantities of bayonets but very few books’.10 Frederick had replied in kind, telling a courtier who complained about his generous treatment of Voltaire, ‘I shall have need of him for another year at most, no longer. One squeezes an orange and one throws away the peel.’11
Frederick became infuriated when Voltaire attacked in print his French minister for science, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, a mathematician with a drink problem who had once seduced one of Voltaire’s mistresses. Voltaire’s diatribe was brilliantly funny, clever and popular, ripping into Maupertuis as a fraud. When he turned on an enemy, Voltaire wielded one of the most lethal pens in Europe. Frederick, however, was also a master of gunnery, and all those bayonets. He ordered the satire to be seized, torn up and burned by the public executioner and told Voltaire he ought to be clapped in irons for his behaviour. Voltaire skedaddled.
Voltaire was undoubtedly one of the most important Europeans of the eighteenth century. His campaigns against Catholic intolerance set the thinking continent alight, just as his tragedies and comedies delighted Paris. His Lettres Philosophiques, a combination of essays on the English and a savage attack on the Catholic thinker Pascal, have rightly been called the first bomb thrown at the ancien régime of absolute monarchs. From a wealthy Paris family of lawyers and court appointees, he became famous as a poet, a playwright, a philosopher, a polemicist, and as a scientist of sorts – forever dangerous, and always, from the viewpoint of those in power, twinklingly unreliable.
The Great Britain that had emerged from its Glorious Revolution was exceedingly important to him. He had fled there after being beaten up by toughs employed by a nobleman he had offended, then finding that his hopes of justice were blocked by the court and the nobility. Britain seemed different – as did Holland, another country of relative freedom and middle-class prosperity. Voltaire put this down, in part, to parliamentary politics, but also to habits of tolerance: ‘If there were only one religion in England, there might be a risk of despotism; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live together in peace and happiness.’
Voltaire was a student of Newton’s, and when he visited England he paid court to her poets, playwrights and politicians, and to the cream of Hanoverian society. There he met Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who had been Princess Anne’s girlish companion so long before; the current Queen Caroline, Swift (who had just written Gulliver’s Travels), Pope, whose Essay on Man he adored, and John Gay, of The Beggar’s Opera. He met Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had been to Turkey and brought back the idea of inoculation against smallpox.
Voltaire admired the freedom of English public life and the way the English honoured artists: Newton was buried in Westminster Abbey alongside monarchs, which would never have happened in France, while a famous English actress, Mrs Oldfield, was also buried with honours. Back in Paris, when she died young, the greatest actress of her day, Adrienne Lecouvreur, was denied a Christian burial – actors were ‘excommunicate’. She was thrown into a pauper’s grave in wasteland at the edges of the city, and sprinkled with quicklime. She too had been one of Voltaire’s lovers, and the contrast shook him.12
For much of his life Voltaire managed to dodge around the restrictions placed on free thought by the French monarchy, darting into the public spotlight with a brilliant new play or a briefly grovelling poem, while publishing his most provocative works anonymously or abroad. For long periods he retreated into internal exile, at a beautiful provincial château where he wrote, performed amateur dramatics and did Newtonian experiments with his almost equally brilliant lover, Émilie du Châtelet; later, he had to retreat further from the reach of the French court, to Switzerland. He could count on the support of the Parisian public, and had some powerful defenders. He was a shrewd investor to the point of sharpness, trading in military supplies and grain, and it is said that he may well have had to leave England early after forging banknotes. In quarrels he was fearless, but he never knew when to call it a day; and he was no saint.
His situation seems strikingly like that of the greatest composers and writers in Soviet Russia, popular with the public but playing a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with the regime. In Voltaire’s world, of course, the normal form of government was some kind of absolutism. Looking at the great continental powers, a betting man would have assumed the future would continue to revolve around courts and all-powerful rulers. An actual, political, revolution was unthinkable. So when Prince Frederick of Prussia had started to write Voltaire fan letters, the future monarch seemed to present some kind of answer. As Mme du Châtelet put it, ‘since it seems that we have to have princes, although no one knows quite why, then at least it would help if they were all like him’.
Frederick too had yearned for English freedom. As a young man he had suffered terribly at the hands of his tyrannical father, Frederick William, who had first established Prussia as a centralized absolutist state. The father believed in absolute duty, military-style discipline and an iron routine. The son, like so many boys and teenagers, was dozy, dreamy, romantic and bookish. He took refuge in music, becoming a virtuoso performer on the French flute, and an addict of French books. Outwardly, he obeyed his father, attended parades and meetings, and accepted the beatings and public humiliation visited on him; but he deployed a form of dumb insolence which further infuriated his father. Frederick was probably homosexual and he certainly showed no interest in women, including his later wife, whom he banished from his court.
Aged eighteen, he plotted to run away from Prussia with a twenty-six-year-old Guards officer called Hans Hermann von Katte, his closest friend, who was said to carry on with the prince ‘like a lover with his mistress’.13 Two years after Voltaire left London, the duo had decided to make for that beacon of relative freedom. But the king had probably been tipped off, and the absconding pair went about their planned flight in a rather lackadaisical way, so that when Frederick sneaked out of the military camp he was quickly captured and brought back. His father ordered him to be imprisoned in a grim military fortress where he was dressed as a convict and cross-questioned with great menace. He was told that he might well be executed on his father’s orders. Von Katte, meanwhile, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military tribunal. Frederick William decided this was not adequate punishment, and suggested the young man have his limbs torn off with hot pincers before being hanged. He graciously commuted this to death by decapitation, but insisted the sentence be carried out in front of his son’s eyes.
On 6 November 1730 von Katte was taken from a cell in the same prison where Frederick was being held, to a pile of sand in the courtyard. The prince’s face was held up to the bars of his cell by two warders, to force him to watch. In an account written by the preacher afterwards, Katte looked around and saw Frederick at his window, saying goodbye to him
with ‘some courteous and friendly words spoken in French’. He then removed his wig, jacket and scarf, kneeled on the sand, called upon Christ, and had his head removed with a single sword blow. Frederick, however, missed the last moment: he had fainted.
As he read his way through the works of Voltaire and other radical French writers, Frederick began to imagine a different way of ruling. One could see this as the traumatized reaction to his father’s cruelty, combined with the radical idealism of youth, but Frederick was serious in his desire to be an enlightened monarch. He himself was a copious writer and, like Voltaire, a compulsive historian of his own times. He regarded German as a barbaric language and always preferred French, just as he liked French music; he even called his pleasure-palace at Potsdam, outside Berlin, Sans-Souci (‘Without a Care’). When he became king, he built on the Prussian tradition of good schools and universities, assembling a court of thinkers and scientists, and began to renovate his cities.
Frederick the Great’s Prussia was not simply the militaristic warrior-state of legend, with its bone-headed Junker landowners flogging their peasants and its young men all in uniform. It saw forward-looking experiments in agriculture, early industrial projects (particularly in the iron and steel industries), reading societies, bookshops, newspapers, philosophical clubs and the growth of a relatively sophisticated civic society. Frederick remained interested all his life in promoting advances in farming, road-building, drainage, the building of factories and the education of the young, just as enlightened autocrats were supposed to. He practised religious toleration. Asked whether this extended to Roman Catholics, he replied that he would build mosques and temples if Turks and heathens wanted to come to Prussia. He banned torture. Visitors to Berlin were struck by the relative freedom of speech enjoyed in cafés and bookshops there.