It all started in the late seventeen hundreds when France was a prosperous state, and one of the most powerful nations in the world. Louis XIV (1661 to 1715), the Sun King, pushed the boundaries of France to the Rhine River, and the luxury of his court was unmatched in Europe. However, novel ideas were starting to challenge monarchies. The Enlightenment was taking hold of the intellectual minds in Europe, and they questioned everything. Reason was their god, and they knew no other. To these intellectuals, “reason” consisted of applying empirical methods to all matters (some said apply the “methods of Newton,” but that was the scientific method), and under this analysis the “divine right of kings” was suspect.[108]
The expansion of France under Louis XIV, plus his extravagant lifestyle, drained the state treasury. As time went on, French kings refused to reduce their lifestyles. The French court and nobility were well-known for beauty and pageantry—all very expensive. Unfortunately, the tax situation was mediocre due to several exclusions from the tax rolls, the Catholic Church being the largest, followed by exclusions for the nobility. As Louis XVI ascended to kingship, the financial situation was atrocious. Making a bad situation worse, the 1780s had seen a series of meager harvests, and the poor were doing without food. Additional tax money is hard to find amongst the starving. Casting about for a way to get taxes from Church holdings (which were extensive in both land and buildings[109]) and the wealthy nobility, Louis XVI decided to call together the Estates-General in May of 1789 (the same year the USA adopted its Constitution). The Estates-General was a gathering of the three classes of society in a national assembly, and in theory it possessed the power to impose taxes where the king could not. Unfortunately, for Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette he had called together a group of men who would lop their heads off.
After the Estates-General assembled an impasse soon arose. The First and Second Estates were comprised of the clergy and the nobility, and they refused to allow any kind of tax change, especially in exemptions, because their taxes would increase from zero to something, and that something might be a lot. The clergy also feared the seizure of Church land. The Third Estate was comprised of everyone not in the First and Second estates and represented ninety plus percent of the population. The Third Estate stormed out of[110] the Estates-General in an unhappy mood, and formed the National Assembly. Shortly thereafter unrest increased and a Paris mob stormed an old jail called the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and released its prisoners—all six of them. During the storming of the ancient jail the army was mustered to suppress the rioters, but the military refused to fire on the starving public and joined the revolt. That was the end for the monarch of France. This event is often used to mark the start of the Revolution. The National Assembly decided to transform France into a constitutional monarchy. They promptly freed the peasants by abolishing serfdom, confiscated all the lands, buildings and money of the Catholic Church in France, and acted as if King Louis XVI was a criminal. The pope rejected the idea that a government could seize Church property, thereby raising the issue of authority. Who owned the land, the French National Assembly or the Church? The fellows with an army easily answered that issue, and the Church lands were lost. The word flew across Europe about the new government in France, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and other pronouncements indicating the age of monarchs and popes was over and the age of the people was dawning. Unfortunately, it was a red dawn.
We should pause to note that the French Revolution differed extensively from the American Revolution even though tax policies started the trouble both times. The American Revolution started because England was pushing Americans around, and they objected with gunfire. The settlers wanted Parliament to leave them alone. It was a war of independence from Great Britain more than a revolution. A revolution aims at the ruling government and its desire is to replace that government with another. In America’s case the revolutionaries wanted to keep their local government and get rid of the overseeing government in England. In France, the Revolution was started by bad economic times and starving peasants, then expanded to answer the question “who had the ultimate right to rule?” The people won, and the assembly of the people took over from the king—for awhile. The goal of the uprising was to oust King Louis XVI and replace him with a different kind of government. They did not want a new king, they wanted a new state. And that the French revolutionaries both compelled and received . . . in spades.
Intellectuals across Europe saw the French Revolution as a wake-up call for the monarchs who continued to rule most of Europe, and not benevolently. The peasants everywhere wanted a change, and the French model seemed a good place to start. This alarmed every government in Europe. The radical ideas of the French Revolution might overthrow the conservative governments. As the danger was amplified through increasingly radical words and actions from Paris, the governments of Europe began preparations for the coming storms. The popularity of the French Revolution with the peasants and intellectuals of many nations, and growing threats against the Revolution from neighboring realms, triggered the French decision to export the Revolution. This in turn led to the pitiless wars of the 1800s often called the Napoleonic Wars.
In Paris, the National Assembly beheaded the king and his family[111] after an escape attempt. It was probably a sad sight watching the royal family, surrounded by cheering crowds and dressed in peasants’ clothes, put to death because they were of royal blood. There was no other crime except their status. That was enough for the Revolution and the Committee of Public Safety as they began killing anyone of royal blood or royal connection. With France fighting to maintain its national sovereignty, radical elements of the Revolution gained more power, soon beginning the Reign of Terror (1793 to 1794) which took the lives of several extremist leaders of the Revolution. At the height of the terror, George Danton and Maximilien Robespierre led the Committee of Public Safety, supervising a killing machine sweeping through France murdering over 18,000 in Paris alone. Both these men’s heads would roll by the very method, the guillotine, they had used to slay so many others. The extremist journalist and publisher Jean Paul Marat got a killing knife stuck in him by the counter-revolutionary Charlotte Corday on July 13, 1793, leading to increasingly harsh measures by the Committee. Marat was demanding the execution of nearly everyone, and the publisher could rouse the mobs of Paris to zealous action at his whim. Charlotte said she killed one man to save one hundred thousand, and was much later viewed as a hero. Scorned at the time, Charlotte was executed four days after she stabbed Marat. In Paris the government devolved into chaos, while outside Paris European states invaded France trying to bring the Revolution to a halt.
War now seemed to be the only way to protect and spread the Revolution. The National Assembly began drafting citizens of the French Republic (the Revolution’s new name) in mass to fight for the “new” nation. An army made up of large numbers of draftees, rather than small numbers of professional soldiers, was an original concept in the Europe of 1800. Once this large army took the field smaller opposing armies endured defeat after defeat. Under Napoleon Bonaparte with his innovative ideas, the combination of massed armies and inspired leadership proved almost unstoppable.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a low ranking artillery officer in the French Army prior to 1789. Born in Corsica, a French island off the Mediterranean coast, his chances in the old aristocratic French army were nil, but revolutionary France opened the door for the rough but able Corsican. Proving himself on the battlefield, he quickly achieved the rank of general and soon held sway over all the armies of France. By 1799, he established a military dictatorship over France and its (his) conquests. The dictatorship was cleverly masquerading as a continuation of the Revolution and the French Republic. Napoleon had conquered nearly all before him, and he expanded the French Republic (later the French Empire) over the face of Europe.[112] On May 18, 1804, while declaring the French Empire, he crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I. It is important to note that he crowned himself; no priest or gover
nment official put the crown on his head. As such, he claimed no right flowing from god, the church, or anybody else (such as the people of France). By crowning himself he was showing that his person alone was the cause for his becoming emperor. This is very much in line with the Age of Reason. Once more, as in Rome, we go from a Republic to an Empire through the actions of a great general—only very much faster.
The ascension of Napoleon to the crown ended the French Revolution; although, it really ended in 1799 after Napoleon took over as a dictator in everything except name. The French Revolution rocked Europe to its foundations. All the fundamental truths accepted without question for hundreds of years were gone. Critical to European culture was the decreed demise of the Church and the rise of the nation state. After Napoleon, the Church was irrelevant to underwriting a king or queen’s power. The emperor or king or parliament held power because they could and did as they pleased with state power. They determined good and evil by their will alone. The Church lost its lands, and its monastic orders underwent dissolution. God was nothing to the revolutionaries of France.[113]
In May of 1794, the Revolution abolished the Christian Religion. Reason was to control the minds of men, but “reason” led to the Reign of Terror, the murder of the king and queen, and wars that were brutal beyond measure. The new killing fever was not because one god fought another, but because one man fought another over differing views on government. Gods could not stop men from killing, but now that man claimed to be free from gods, he managed to come up with other reasons to kill every bit as motivating as any god had been. Worse yet, as the government of France existed without the sanction of any god, and as it admitted to no god beyond reason, it was freed from all restrictions as long as “reason” justified the actions. Had the revolutionaries acknowledged the existence of God and the relevance of the Bible, Christian moral restrictions would apply; however, with Christian moral restraints removed and replaced by reason it was found that “reason” could justify any action including the Reign of Terror (remember the Sophist?). Reason, it seemed, recognized no absolutes.
France decided all things must be questioned by the light of reason. The French decided history itself must center on their Revolution; thus, they created a new calendar to reflect its central importance. The metric system of weights and measures was adopted, new fashions were invented, and the Napoleonic Code was published just to name a very few of the concepts arising from the French Revolution; on the other hand, for all their thoughts about being the center of the world and their Revolution the focus of history, not much changed. In the end, Napoleon destroyed himself in a series of military blunders rivaling Hitler’s some 124 years later. After a massive attack on Russia and the total loss of his frozen army, Napoleon was sent to the island of Elba and exile. His final gasp was his return from exile followed by France restoring him as emperor (how dumb can people get), the declaration of war on Napoleon by England, Prussia and nearly everyone else in Europe, and the final battle at Waterloo in 1815 where a combination of English and Prussian forces crushed the French. This time Napoleon ended up on a drab Pacific island where he died in 1821, probably from poison slipped into his food by a servant working on the island who hated him.
Figure 32 Napoleon’s Empire 1810
After Napoleon’s fall, the nations of Europe assembled in the Congress of Vienna which sorted out all the trouble caused by the French, re-established the “old regimes” in Europe, and set the foundations for modern Europe. This peace would hold from 1815 to 1914, ninety-nine years in all, and resulted in remarkable prosperity and success for Europe. The Congress of Vienna was historic, and even though small wars occurred during the ninety-nine years, the great powers remained generally at peace saving the world from untold suffering.
The Impact of Empires
1650 to 1950
Empires held by Western European nations had an unqualified impact on world history. The British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Belgium, and the Netherlands’s empires gobbled up much of the world’s surface outside of Europe and the United States, and these empires lasted a very long time.
From about 1650 to 1950 is a general period for the existence of European Empires; thus, Europe had control of most of the world for three hundred years. The growth of these empires was especially rapid. In 1815, about 35 percent of the earth’s habitable area was controlled by Europe, but by 1914, this percentage was at 85 percent. The only non-European nation establishing a modern empire was Japan whose empire was Asian. These empires, especially the English, brought Europe’s technological advancements to all parts of the globe. This in turn brought goods and raw materials from the world to Europe, leading to a general prosperity having a worldwide positive impact. The citizens of the mother countries did not run the empires as a whole. A few government administrators in powerful positions made decisions affecting the daily lives of millions of common folks across the planet. In general, a handful of men positioned at the top of their nation’s officialdom governed the colonies of each imperial power. One order could send out lesser administrators to alter lives across the globe.
One must comprehend the worldwide reach of the empires to understand the world of 1700 and beyond. These empires made England, France, Holland, Portugal, and other European states the center of the world in financial, military, political, and cultural power for more than three hundred years. As such, the political machinations of Europe hit the entire globe. The boundaries of the empires really displayed political considerations in Europe, and they were placed to assist Europeans in governing their empires. As such, the lines drawn by the European Empires were not a fit solution for the situation existing on the ground. Nonetheless, as the empires toppled, the lines established in Europe became the boundaries of modern-day states. The inappropriateness of these boundaries is obvious as vicious wars over the frontiers continue even today.
As the empires flourished, so did the world. Extensive trade, the adoption of the gold standard to ease the payment problems between nations, and increasing prosperity led to more inventions and more infrastructure development in Europe and their empires. England ruled the world because of her powerful navy and extensive empire. Raw materials from the world over hurried to England’s factories for transformation into finished goods ranging from ships to tea. With Britain’s extensive coalfields, energy to fuel its expansion into an industrial giant was easy to find. The United Kingdom became the world’s richest nation, and its wealth was growing constantly during the Age of Empires. The rest of Europe was doing fine as well, and after the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, growth and prosperity were commonplace in the Western world.
(See Figures 19, 20 and 43 for maps of the colonial empires)
The Industrial Revolution
1750 (approximate beginning)
Before the French Revolution, another revolution had started which would have considerably more impact on the world. The Industrial Revolution started about 1750, when water was first used to power new mills for cutting wood, weaving cloth on new kinds of looms, and otherwise putting something other than human or horse muscle to work making products for growing worldwide commercial markets.[114] Since the end of the fourteenth century the population of Europe had been growing, increasing the demand for goods and services.[115]
Numerous inventions marked the new age. The flying shuttle loom was invented in 1733, improving the production of finished cloth goods; by 1740, the processing of cast iron and steel progressed markedly; 1779 saw the first iron bridge constructed in Britain; in1782, James Watt developed the double-acting steam engine; in 1785, the power loom was invented in Britain, and in 1793, Whitney invented the cotton gin in the United States. By 1807 the first commercial steam boat was operating in America; by 1814, the first steam locomotive was running in Britain and by 1825, Britain opened its first railroad. 1837 saw the invention of the steel plow in the US, while in 1839 France photography developed with the daguerreotype. Goodyear vulcanized rubber in Ameri
ca that same year. Moreover, these are only a few of the achievements that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Something invented in England during the Age of Discovery would have an unprecedented impact on the Industrial Revolution—the corporate form of enterprise. Originally, these were companies formed by individuals with the approval of the crown and were given an exclusive area of trade such as the East India Company. These were very successful, and soon private stock corporations began to show they too could achieve success. A corporation normally consists of owners (stockholders) who hire people to oversee the corporation (the board of directors). The board of directors hires the corporation executives (president or chief operating officer, treasurer, sales manager and so forth), and the corporate executives are responsible for making money for the shareholders. If they fail to do so, the board of directors can, and will, replace them with other executives. If the board fails to act rationally, the stockholders can fire the board and hire other people to insure the enterprise makes money. The corporate form of enterprise has shown itself to be a most powerful organizational tool. Repeatedly, corporations outperformed individuals competing against it. One example was Henry Ford. He built the most powerful automotive company on earth which he operated as the sole owner. An upstart company combined many small automotive companies together and adopted the name General Motors, but they also adopted the corporate form of enterprise under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan. Within a few years the men at General Motors had nearly driven Ford Motor Company out of business.
The Super Summary of World History Page 22