If Louis had been wise enough to go along, who can say what would have happened? But he wasn’t. The king and queen fled Paris, disguised as a valet and a governess, but an official recognized them, and soldiers took them back to Paris. A year and a half later revolutionaries tried the king for treason, convicted him, and chopped his head off. Eight months later they also killed the queen. They decapitated both with a guillotine, a new device that was said to slice off heads humanely.
In 1793 the Revolution reached its radical extreme, called the Reign of Terror. Other nations had been waging war with France to put a king back on the throne. Fearing enemies both in and outside France, revolutionaries handed almost all power to a twelve-man body called the Committee of Public Safety. It leader was Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer who powdered his hair and dressed in knee breeches like the hated gentry, but who preached of terror. “Terror is nothing but justice, swift, severe, and inflexible…. Terror is the mainstay of a despotic government…. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”
Whatever that may mean, he meant it. Within a year, the guillotine and older methods took the lives of nearly twenty thousand “enemies of the people.” Some of these were truly foes, who fought against the revolution sword in hand. Many priests and noblemen were guilty mainly of not fleeing France when they could have. As the months went by, many victims of the terror were moderate revolutionaries, guilty of such crimes as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion, depraving morals, and harassing patriots.
In July of 1794 the moment came when everyone had witnessed too much terror, too much blood. Even those in power, close to Robespierre, were fearful they would be the next to lose their heads. Suddenly, with little talk, many changed their minds about the Terror. On July 27, Robespierre wanted to address the legislature. Shouts rang out: “Down with the tyrant!” The chairman refused to give him the floor, and the members ordered his arrest. On the following day the guillotine took Robespierre.
With his death the Terror stopped as if a cooling rain had swept through France. The Revolution now was near its end, and moderates took charge. They wrote a constitution that preserved the republic (that is, no king) but put it in the hands of wealthy men. Their biggest mission was to beat the enemies of France abroad.
The wars that followed ended France’s revolution and, at the same time, spread it over Europe. In 1799 a brilliant young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, made himself the military dictator of France. He enacted codes of laws that partly carried through the Revolution and in parts denied it. Then he conquered most of mainland Europe. He introduced his Code in many countries and claimed he brought them France’s proudest boast, equality. (He could hardly say he brought them liberty.) But in 1815 Prussia (Germany) and Britain crushed him on a battlefield in Belgium, and penned him on a lonely South Atlantic island. He and it were both extinct volcanoes.
In later decades, France had other revolutions, lesser versions of its big one. With many leaps and many backward falls it moved toward democratic government.
AS WE KNOW, back in the 1500s much of South America and a sizable chunk of southern North America fell to Spanish conquerors. Spain’s America was vast; it stretched from California to the southern tip of Argentina. Spain ruled it as four provinces, whose capitals were in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina.
After the conquests, the region drowsed for three hundred years. Spain sent only a sprinkling of its people to its colonies. Governors and troops went out to rule, priests to rescue souls, and businessmen and ranchers to get rich in sugar, coffee, timber, and tobacco. But the colonies were huge and the jungles dense. The Europeans touched the lives of Indians only on the seacoasts or where the soil was rich and worth exploiting.
Between the whites and Indians was a gulf as deep as the Andes were high. The whites had money, rifles, ships, and books; the Indians had ignorance and hunger. But the whites were also split, and this would be important in the Latin revolutions. On one hand were the Spanish governors, priests, and soldiers. They were transients; they came from Spain and later would return there. They were loyal to their king in faraway Madrid and to old and settled ways.
On the other hand were “Creoles,” the white men born and raised in Spain’s New World. They loved the Old World well enough, but their destinies were in the New. For that reason, news of revolutions that had shaken France and North America excited them.
Independence fever in Spanish America started in the early 1800s. Across the ocean, Napoleon was conquering much of Europe. The king of Spain and Spanish America had weakly given up his throne and allowed Napoleon to name his own brother king of Spain. For white Spanish Americans, to have a Frenchman on the throne of Spain was shocking. Faced with this appalling fact, Creoles in cafés and universities talked with passion of democracy and independence.
Our tale begins in Mexico, the only place in Spanish America where Indians got deeply involved in a revolt. Even here it was a Creole, not an Indian, who lit the fire. In 1810 Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a well-read small-town priest, learned about Napoleon’s takeover in Spain. Did he really care about that far-off event, which meant so little to the humble people of his parish? Most likely not, but he saw an opportunity. He urged the local Indians and mestizos (people partly Spanish, partly Indian) to expel their Spanish governor. Hidalgo had no program, no thought of a republic or a constitution, but his oratory reached a lot of ears. His hearers shouted, “Long live America! Death to foreign tyrants!”
Indians and mestizos everywhere in Mexico took up that cry and swarmed along the country roads. Soon Hidalgo had an “army” of 6,000, armed mostly with slings and clubs. They stormed the mountain town of Guanajuato (famous for its silver mines and handsome churches), massacred its Spanish guards, and sacked it. In other places also, violence occurred, and on both sides of the struggle priests were often leaders. In one town a pro-Spain priest sliced their ears off Indians and wore them on his sombrero.
Hidalgo’s army grew to 80,000, and he led it to the gates of Mexico City. There he halted for a while, uncertain what to do, and so he lost his chance. Many of his troops went home, and the rest were crushed in battle. The Spaniards shot Hidalgo. In ravaged Guanajuato they displayed his head inside an iron cage.
José María Morelos, a mestizo priest, tried to carry on. Unlike his friend Hidalgo, Morelos had a program, an astonishing agenda. He insisted on equality of Indians and whites, confiscating huge (and mostly Spanish-owned) estates and sharing them among the peasants, and a law that every able-bodied adult must work. What a program! Morelos wanted not democracy alone, but something near socialism, whose day would only come a century later. For all the whites in Mexico, royalists and Creoles alike, his program was unthinkable. Spanish forces crushed his army. They defrocked the rebel priest and shot him.
As it happens, only a few years later Mexico was freed from Spanish rule. But independence came about through cynical opportunism, not because of a popular democratic movement. In the century that followed, wealthy despots ruled the country. The Mexican revolt had really ended when a Spanish firing squad shot Morelos in the back.
Everywhere else but Mexico, Indians played only a minor role in the Spanish American revolutions. Creoles instigated them, and Creoles largely carried them out. The greatest of these Creoles, part George Washington and part Napoleon, was Simón Bolívar.
This dazzling man was born to wealth in Venezuela, at the northern end of South America. While he still was young Bolívar (boe-LEE-var) pursued women, married one (who died quite soon), read a lot, and traveled everywhere. Legend has it that in Rome, standing on the top of Monte Sacro, Bolívar made a vow to free his native land. He sailed back home, and in his later twenties led a little force of Venezuelan rebels against the Spanish. He proved to be a daunt-less, dashing leader — and a cruel one sometimes, capable of slaughtering his prisoners.
In 1819, while Spanish troops still held most of Venezuela, Bolívar formed a plan to free Colo
mbia, Venezuela’s next-door neighbor. Colombia was the center of what was now Spain’s northernmost province (after losing Mexico). With 2,500 men, including British mercenaries, Bolívar began to cross the Andes. This was a terrifying challenge. Other Spaniards thought these mountains were impassable. Hannibal, two thousand years before, and Napoleon, quite recently, had crossed the Alps at the awesome height of 8,000 feet. Bolívar and his men dragged their cannons and themselves along the icy brinks of cliffs at heights of up to 12,000 feet.
Heights like those aren’t made for humans; they give them nausea, driving headaches, and pounding hearts. The weary soldiers punched each other just to keep themselves awake. A hundred men and all the horses died, and when the survivors reached Colombia they were exhausted and many of them were sick.
But they recovered. After resting they fought and routed a Spanish army half again as big as theirs. The Spanish governor fled, and a rebel assembly named Bolívar president of a nation that combined three territories: Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. However, Spaniards still held the latter two. Bolívar returned to Venezuela and beat the Spaniards there, and then he drove another Spanish army out of Ecuador.
While Bolívar “liberated” the north of South America, General José de San Martín had done the same for the south. Though born in Argentina, San Martín had lived in Spain since childhood. He studied at a Spanish military school and for twenty years commanded Spanish troops. But he had a change of heart (no one knows just why) and sailed back to his native land. There he joined some rebels who had thrown out Argentina’s Spanish governor.
San Martín took on the next big task of liberation, the conquest of Peru. He quickly decided that for his army the pathway from Argentina to Peru led through Chile, on the other side of the Andes. Two years before Bolívar did it in the north, San Martín led a force across the mighty Andes. In bitter cold his army crossed the mountains at heights of 10,000 to 12,000 feet, with condors soaring overhead poised to pick their flesh. Once in Chile, they freed it from the Spanish. From Chile they sailed northward to Peru and drove the Spaniards out of Lima.
Now the general ran into problems. One was that the still imposing Spanish army waited for him in the nearby mountains. Another problem, even more disturbing, was how to rule Peru. San Martín was patriotic but he had no faith in representative government — not in Peru, with its small elite of noisy Creoles and multitudes of unschooled Indian peasants. He let the Creoles know what he believed: Peru required a king. “Every literate man who knows his country and desires order,” he said, “will naturally prefer a monarchy to the continuation of disorder and confusion.” But the Creoles disagreed. While they argued, San Martín was acting governor, and the Creoles found him distant and domineering. They called him “King José,” and even his friends abandoned San Martín.
Burdened with these problems and depressed, he sailed to Ecuador to meet triumphant Bolívar. Probably he wanted men and arms. The meeting of the hero of the south with the hero of the north was a failure. Magnetic Bolívar and distant San Martín had nothing in common. Bolívar didn’t want to help the general take Peru; he wanted the glory of the final triumph for himself. He refused even to let San Martín serve as officer under his own command.
They also disagreed about the shaping of Peru. As we mentioned, San Martín opposed a republican, or representive, government, while Bolívar, high-mindedly but unwisely, demanded one. “Once the idea of a republic has taken root,” he said, “it cannot be extin-guished.” San Martín hurried back to Lima, where, sick and disappointed, he resigned. He later sailed for Europe, where he died in exile.
With his path to glory cleared, Bolívar went to Lima, where he gathered soldiers, mules, and ammunition. He climbed the mountains and his army won two major battles, after which the Spanish governor surrendered. Bolívar’s forces later beat another Spanish army, the last in South America, in the center of the continent. This area was made a nation, and, in honor of the Liberator, it chose the name Bolivia.
But Bolívar’s triumphs curdled, as had San Martín’s. When he urged the former colonies to unite and form a single nation as long as one and a half continents (from California to Argentina), only four of them agreed, and even they allowed the plan to die. When he wanted the infant nations to appoint presidents who served for life, like kings, and grant the right to vote to only very few, ultra-democrats opposed him. It did no good for Bolívar to argue (as San Martín had done in Peru) that universal suffrage would never work in countries where the masses were so huge and poor and ignorant. Liberal enemies invaded his palace one night, and his mistress barely saved him from their daggers by stalling while Bolívar escaped through a window.
What was worst of all, the nations he had freed from Spain made war on one another. Sadly he concluded that his very presence threatened the peace of the people he had freed. He wrote a friend that “He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.” It was as if he, like San Martín, were one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and he now had reached the final act.
Bolívar had tuberculosis. When his doctors told him he required a healthier climate, he decided he would go to Europe. When he reached his Venezuelan seaport, he learned that assassins had killed his finest general, whom Bolívar had trained as his successor. By this time he was very sick, and he called the trip to Europe off. A friend invited him to his estate, and there he died a few months later.
In the next century and a half, democracy did not take hold in Spanish America. It couldn’t, as Bolívar and San Martín had realized, because the Indians were unschooled and very poor, and one simply couldn’t reach them in the mountains and the jungles. When a revolutionary general entered Bolivia to proclaim the revolution, he spoke to a vast crowd of Indians about liberty, equality, and citizenship. They didn’t make a sound, so desperately he asked them what they wanted. As one they shouted, “Brandy, señor!”
The majority of the better-educated Creoles had no knowledge of self-rule and no desire to try it. So ranchers, miners, businessmen, and generals ran the former colonies to suit themselves. Only in the last half of the twentieth century did democracy take root in much of Spanish America.
SINCE THE 1700S, democratic rule has slowly spread across the world. How this happened is a story full of bloodshed, sacrifices, fuller stomachs, demagoguery, parliamentary maneuvers, assassinations, spreading literacy, deals, elections, coups, revolts, hard-won victories, and many setbacks.
Chapter 14
We make more and live better.
IN THE 1980S and 1990s, a madman in America mailed bombs to businessmen and technologists. These killed three people and injured more than twenty. Later he released a manifesto explaining why he did this. His victims, he declared, were agents of the Industrial Revolution, which he blamed for every evil. “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” he wrote, “have been a disaster for the human race.” This chapter deals with just that subject: what the Industrial Revolution did for — and to — the human race.
FOR MANY THOUSAND years, nearly everybody lived in want. Humans got along on little, and were lucky if they lived long enough to see their hair turn white. The very poor were everywhere; we have met them in this book. In ancient Israel the needy, said the prophet Amos, were “sold for a pair of shoes.” In China nearly all the Chu family starved to death, leaving just one son, who couldn’t pay the cost of burying the others. In France the Cervel family lost the father and two out of three children to hunger and disease. Slaves from Africa were shipped to the Americas owning absolutely nothing.
Not everyone was poor, of course. In ancient Egypt a wealthy farmer might own 1,500 cows. An Egyptian prostitute built herself a pyramid, and later a prostitute in Constantinople owned a chamber pot of solid gold. A Chinese poet of the 700s says that the wealthy wined and dined their guests with “Red jade cups and rare dainty food on tables inlaid with green gems.” At about that time, someone offered Tahya the Barmakid, a wealthy Arab, an enormous sum for a box adorned with pe
arls and precious stones; he wouldn’t sell. Russian grandees who visited London in the 1600s were rich and filthy; they arrived in ballrooms “dripping pearls and vermin.” In the 1700s a Hungarian noble told a wealthy Briton that he had more shepherds than the Englishman had sheep.
Nevertheless, before the Industrial Revolution the living standard everywhere was low. The major reason was that those who made the things one needed most — houses, textiles, tools, and food — produced so little. Not that craftsmen were unskilled — far from it. If you wander through an arts and crafts museum you’ll marvel at the quality of old-time hinges, hammers, swords, and saddles. Their makers knew what they were doing, and they did it well.
But their tools were simple and they worked alone or in small groups, each worker doing all production tasks instead of focusing on one. Therefore they could not produce a lot. With such small outputs, almost everybody lived in want. Little pies mean tiny slices.
Take iron, for example. Iron was essential. Imagine reaping wheat, as prehistoric farmers did, with sickles made of flint, or hanging doors with leather hinges, or guarding horses’ hooves with wooden shoes. Housewives needed iron scissors, cutlery, and pots, and warfare called for iron spears and swords and, later, iron guns and cannons. However, iron making called for lots of trouble. An ironmaster and his helpers roasted ore for hours in a furnace with a charcoal fire. The product was a cubic foot or two of costly iron.
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