Cross and Tricolour had become opposing symbols for millions of Europeans by the end of 1793. In France, the fatal split between Church and Revolution, opened wide by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, now seemed unbridgeable (see Vol. VIII, Chapter XXIV). In 1790 it had seemed self-evident to the Constituent Assembly that the Gallican Church should be reorganised and brought into line with the democratic institutions of the new France, that her officers should be elected by the people, and be independent of alien control. But this had raised the crucial question of competence and authority. What right had even a national assembly so drastically to reorganise a branch of a Catholic Church? Tragically, the first principle of the Revolution, the sovereignty of the people, was pitted against the basic conceptions of catholicity and tradition which Rome considered fundamental to the very essence of the Church as a spiritual society. Belatedly, Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution. The clergy who refused the oath to it were proscribed, driven into exile, or to a clandestine ministry, and often into furtive and provocative counter-revolution. In their turn too, the ‘patriotic clergy’, the Constitutionals who took the oath, fell foul of the Revolution, especially after it swung to the left on 10 August 1792. Many resented the relentless demands made on their conscience: the introduction of the état civil, the encouragement of clerical marriage, the execution of the king. On the other hand, the revolutionary leaders grew more disillusioned with the results of the Civil Constitution, which had disrupted the patriotic cause and issued in schism and public disorder.

In 1834 it seemed to Chateaubriand that ‘Europe is racing towards democracy…. France and England, like two enormous battering-rams, beat again and again upon the crumbling ramparts of the old society.’ Certainly the powerful influences of political and economic liberalism, stemming largely from the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution, had already begun to affect Europe. By 1830 England was transmitting to Europe and overseas—by direct influence or by example—new methods of production, new economic policies, and new social attitudes that favoured rapid economic growth. England, indeed, was ‘the engine of growth’ that forced European and world development, mainly by the expansion of international trade and by the emigration of men and capital. The long-term result was increased international specialisation and interdependence, and the creation of a world network of trading and financial relations, but national changes by 1830, except in England and in Belgium, were not dramatic. In spite of focal points of development in the coal fields of England and Belgium, and in spite of universal pre-occupation with industry, still over the vast area of Europe men's way of life and men's way of earning a living remained much the same as they had been for centuries, especially in southern, central and eastern regions. In 1826 a Belgian deputy, with his eyes on the growing industries of his own country, proclaimed that: ‘All nations have turned their eyes towards industry, the sure and inexhaustible source of wealth; and toward foreign trade, which can give immense extension to industry.’

Although this period was one of the most brilliant and productive in the history of European art, its achievements do not appear as the expression of a single religious or philosophical principle. No period seems so full of contradictions in its aims, its personalities and its modes of expression; these contradictions are at once apparent from a comparison between the work of David and Prud'hon, Turner and Constable or Delacroix and Ingres. In architecture a similar gulf appears between the supreme urbanity of Carlton House or Malmaison and the cyclopean fantasies of Boullée or Ledoux. Anomalies multiply as the period develops; in ten years Jacques-Louis David progressed from the role of official painter under the Convention to that of premier peintre de l'Empereur. Ingres, denounced at first as ‘Gothic’ and as a barbu, came to be regarded as the arch-priest of academic convention, while the erudite and aristocratic Delacroix became the pre-eminent exponent of colour, violence and exoticism.

At the opening of the period these complexities are not fully apparent. The outstanding artistic event of the last quarter of the eighteenth century was the appearance of David's Oath of the Horatii (shown in Paris, 1785). In this picture the severely monumental style which had died with Nicholas Poussin was so powerfully revived that it dominated French art for a whole generation. Its subject—exemplary civic virtue and disdain of private misfortune—foretells David's personal role as a revolutionary. Its grave, simplified manner, its extreme clarity of space and the calculated grouping of its major figures in superimposed lateral planes, terminated the rococo taste which had survived three generations.

Great Britain's vast territorial gains from the Seven Years War made it necessary for her to tackle in earnest the task of imperial reorganisation, tentatively begun a decade earlier. The acquisition of French Canada, the Floridas, and virtually all the territory between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi river not only doubled the size of the British possessions in North America, but created new and complex problems of organisation, administration and defence. The empire was called upon, firstly, to assimilate some 80,000 French-Canadians, alien in language and religion, and unfamiliar with British law and forms of government. The acquisition of the vast trans-Allegheny wilderness demanded a coherent western policy, which took into account the conflicting needs of land settlement, the fur trade and the Indians. Above all, the sudden transformation of Britain's American possessions from a commercial into a territorial empire necessitated a reformed system of internal and external defence.

British efforts to solve these problems led directly to the break-up of the empire. The reformation of the old colonial system, and the attempt to force the colonists to contribute directly to the upkeep of the enlarged empire, compelled colonial leaders to re-examine their position in the imperial structure and to question the constitutional basis of British demands. Such a reaction was, perhaps, inevitable. Because of their remoteness from England and because of British preoccupation and neglect, the American communities had long enjoyed a substantial measure of political and economic freedom. This they had come to regard as their inalienable right.

It was the remarkable destiny of the Habsburg monarchy, after passing, between 1780 and 1792, through the most changeful twelve years (in internal respects) of all its history, to pass the next fifty-six in most respects in a condition of suspended animation as near-complete as the considerable ingenuity of its rulers could contrive. The prime responsibility for this unquestionably belongs to its monarch, Francis, whom the Emperor Leopold's untimely and unexpected death on 1 March 1792 brought, at the unripe age of twenty-four, to a throne which his physical presence was to occupy for forty-three years and his ghost for thirteen more. Francis had inherited none of his father's constitutional beliefs. Like his uncle Joseph, who had had him brought to Vienna as a boy and educated there for his future duties, he was by conviction a complete absolutist. He believed that government should be the expression of the monarch's will, and that the proper vehicle for expressing it was a bureaucracy taking and executing the monarch's orders. The supreme, if not the sole civic duty of those over whom he ruled was to be good subjects to him, and the criterion of political institutions and of social conditions was their aptitude to produce this effect.

It would not, indeed, be fair to deny to his despotism at least a negative benevolence. Personally virtuous and unpretentious, and possessed of a high sense of rectitude, he held that a monarch had, in return, a duty towards his subjects to observe justice towards them and to enforce it between them, and that he must not squander their lives on an acquisitive foreign policy, nor their property on his pleasures.

In the fifty years between the founding of St Petersburg and the end of the Seven Years War, the river fortress and business capital planned by Peter the Great had been transformed into a rambling showplace of luxury and leisure. The Russian nobility, conscripted by Peter into life-time service in the armed forces or the administration, had since 1735 evaded more and more of their responsibilities. In February 1762 they had been relieved of their obligation to serve the state at all: and, while many of them were content to slip backward into the unimaginable idleness of provincial life, families which remained at court and in the capital seemed determined to spend their way into extinction. The modest buildings erected by Peter's architects had been surrounded and outnumbered by new palaces for monarch and members of the court alike, designed on more expansive lines by Rastrelli and his compatriots from Venice. Thrift was not highly regarded as a virtue in a period when unspent fortunes might be confiscated overnight after a palace revolution.

But St Petersburg was only the shop-window of the new empire. For the trappers scattered in settlements along the northern rivers, for the peasants who struggled to win a livelihood from the unyielding soil of central Russia, life had changed little from the days of Muscovy, except that taxes were higher and each village had to surrender more of its men-folk for the army. Peter's plans to create a new system of local government, new law-courts and a country-wide network of elementary schools had all been abandoned through indifference or lack of funds.

The Seven Years War and the American War of Independence were both primarily maritime struggles, but the strategic principles so successfully employed by the British in the first war were almost totally lacking in the second. The hinge of British naval strategy in the eighteenth century was the blockade of the principal fleets of France by stationing forces off Brest and Toulon. This strategy, adumbrated by Vernon and Anson, imposed by Hawke and Boscawen, and later brought to perfection by St Vincent and Cornwallis, prevented enemy fleets replenishing the French colonies overseas to any considerable degree, while at the same time it permitted the employment of conjunct operations (as they were called) for the conquest of outlying territories. When Keppel failed to force a decision off Ushant on 27 July 1778, and when Byron was dispatched too late to intercept D'Estaing's fleet from Toulon, French naval forces were not only able to co-operate with the American colonists but to appear in the Channel unopposed. Of all the leaders at that time, George Washington appears to have had the best understanding of the implications of sea-power. In his correspondence with De Grasse he frequently stresses the fact that French financial and naval aid alone enabled him to prosecute the war with success. ‘You will have observed’, he wrote after the brilliant combination of the French fleets with the American forces on land had ensured the surrender of Yorktown, ‘that what-ever efforts are made by the land armies, the navy must have the casting vote in the present contest.’

The Peace of Paris of 1763 brought the first British empire to the summit of its power and glory, and set the problems of diplomacy and imperial organisation which in the next generation became the chief substance of English politics. In America the power of France was broken, but the problem of imperial defence remained, for as the Pontiac rebellion showed, Indian power could still be a menace, and perhaps a stalking-horse for renewed French ambitions. By the proclamation of 1763 the British government sought to keep white settlers out of the Indian hunting grounds where they had aroused great hostility, and in attempting to restrict expansion set themselves in opposition to some of the most powerful forces of American life. A standing army was also to be maintained, controlled from England but paid for by the colonists. To men of influence on both sides of the Atlantic the time also seemed ripe for a reorganisation of the constitutional machinery of the colonies, which had frequently obstructed the efficient conduct of the last war. Hitherto the British government had concentrated upon the control of the maritime and commercial links of empire, and under its system of imperial autarky the American colonies had flourished, rapidly increasing in population, extent and prosperity. To a very late date few Americans openly opposed imperial regulation of this sort, but they distinguished sharply between legislation which sought primarily to regulate trade, and that which sought primarily to raise revenue.

No sooner were the partitions of Poland accomplished than political thinkers and historians began to investigate the circumstances that had brought them about. The accounts and aspersions of eye-witnesses and contemporaries were followed in the next generation by rueful tales of misgovernment and, after the failure of the uprising of 1830–1, the whole question of national existence was sublimated and poeticised. The messianic hopes of the romantic poets were dashed by a series of setbacks beginning with the Galician massacre of 1846 and ending with the disastrous uprising of 1863. Thereafter, as Romanticism finally ceased to be the stuff of poetry, history became the object of serious academic study. Already in 1862 a chair of Polish history had been established in Warsaw, the universities of Cracow and of Lvov followed suit in 1869 and 1882. In 1880 Szujski, who occupied the chair at Cracow, expressed the opinion that if a nation failed to maintain law and order within its frontiers and to defend itself from external aggression, it was bound to become incapable of further evolution and to lose its independence. Poland's downfall had been caused by the Poles' own guilt of several centuries' standing.Szujski was apparently influenced by Darwin, though by no means exclusively so, since this thesis—a theological rather than a zoological concept—had first been adumbrated by the precursor of the 'Cracow school', Kalinka. Having set out to estimate the moral worth of Poland in the reign of its last king, Kalinka reached the conclusion (in 1868) that it was the Poles themselves who caused their country's downfall and that the misfortunes that had since afflicted them were a well-deserved penance

NOTE ON THE FRENCH REPUBLICAN CALENDAR

This calendar was proposed on 20 September 1793 and adopted on 5 October, (with amendments 24 November), retrospectively as from 22 September 1792, the date of the foundation of the Republic; but for this reason it was never used for the year I. Each month had 30 days. In each month there were three décades of 10 days each; the days were Primedi, Duodi, Tridi, Quartidi, Quintidi, Sextidi, Septidi, Octidi, Novidi and Decadi, the last being the official day of rest. At the end of each year five days were added, called jours complémentaires or sansculottides; and a sixth, called jour de la Révolution, was added at the end of each year preceding a leap year (including the year VII, preceding 1800, which was not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar). Consequently, the republican years began on varying dates in September according to the Gregorian calendar, and the succeeding months also. For this reason it is impossible to give concisely a complete concordance, but that will be found in P. Caron, Manuel pratique pour l'étude de la Révolution française (1912), pp. 221-69; or (for the years II-VIII only) in the 1947 edition, pp. 281-6. The following tables show the dates covered by each year, and the order of the months, which began on dates varying between the 18th and the 24th.

When on 16 August 1823 the British Foreign Secretary, with unwonted affability, suggested to the American Minister in London that the two countries might go hand in hand in disapproving French interference with the independence of Spanish America, George Canning was swallowing his distaste for republican principles in deference to the logic of British interests as interpreted by the Liberal Tories. The gesture was motivated both by the problem set by the friends of legitimacy and by a consciousness that British industrialism needed American markets and raw materials. In Washington, President Monroe's first reaction to this proposal was to follow Jefferson and Madison in encouraging a rapprochement with Britain which would benefit American interests in the Atlantic; but the decisive voice was that of the secretary of state. John Quincy Adams ignored Canning's offer and drafted that independent declaration warning the European Powers off the Western Hemisphere which the world came to know as the Monroe Doctrine.

And the Message went on to explain:

The conclusion of the Seven Years War inaugurated a period of recovery and reform in many German states. Large areas of central Europe—Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, the Rhinelands—had suffered severely through devastations, looting, requisitions and heavy impositions. Everywhere extraordinary war-taxation had brought about a state of economic exhaustion. For many states reconstruction and reform were a condition of survival.

In Vienna, the exigencies of the war clearly revealed the inadequacy of Haugwitz' work of reform. The effects of the loss of Silesia had indeed been overcome, and a most remarkable increase in revenue had been achieved. Nevertheless, after four years of war, the finances of the Habsburg monarchy were utterly exhausted, the administration had become chaotic, and the brilliant diplomatic perspectives of 1756 were displaced by the fear that Austria would sink to the status of a second-rate power.

The lesson was clear: the reform work of Haugwitz would have to be extended. The initiative for further changes came from the Chancellor of State, Kaunitz, who felt that his foreign policy had been robbed of the success it deserved because of the breakdown in the internal administration. At this stage, Kaunitz confined himself to purely administrative proposals. To promote a greater measure of unity among the diverse Habsburg provinces, more administrative coherence and continuity of policy, he proposed an advisory Council of State (Staatsrat), competent to consider ‘from the centre’ all internal affairs. The Council of State began its work in 1761.

The last, but not the least of Napoleon's victories was won at St Helena. There he created the Napoleonic legend, and there he lived long enough to see his own career in perspective, and to reinterpret it in tune with the forces of liberalism and nationality which were to shape the Europe of the nineteenth century. Bonapartism was thus preserved as a living force, and the foundations of the Second Empire were laid. Though he often complained in exile that his career should have ended at Moscow, the Hundred Days and the ‘martyrdom’ of St Helena gave it the proportions of Greek tragedy, of hubris followed by nemesis. Like the music of Mozart's ‘Don Giovanni’, (which Napoleon heard shortly before the battle of Jena and, rather surprisingly, admired) his personality and career combine classical proportions with a wilder note of romantic, daemonic and unlimited ambition.

The mists of St Helena and the legend still obscure the figure of Napoleon. It is the task of this chapter to present him as the product of his age and also the moulder of it, and to analyse the interaction between his personality and the forces, moral and material, at work in Europe.

Napoleon was born at Ajaccio in Corsica in 1769, the year in which the French occupied the island. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, abandoned the cause of General Paoli, the patriot leader, and rose to high office in the French administration. Through the good offices of the French governor he obtained a place for Napoleon at Brienne, from which he proceeded to the École Militaire in Paris.

To the nineteenth-century historian the French Revolution was largely a battle of ideas and its outbreak the more or less fortuitous climax to a series of political crises—the rejection of Calonne's proposals for tax reform by the Assembly of Notables of 1787, the convocation of the Estates General, and the king's dismissal of Necker on 11 July 1789; while, in the background of events, an undifferentiated mass of peasants and turbulent town-dwellers, prompted by age-old grievances or hopes of easy spoils, waited to settle accounts with seigneurs, tax-collectors and city authorities. During the past half-century, however, this general thesis has been largely modified by the work of such writers as Jaurès, Mathiez, Lefebvre and Labrousse, all of whom have been more or less influenced by Marx's historical methods. As the field of research into the origins of the Revolution has widened, it has been found necessary to pay more attention to social and economic factors in general and, above all, to the particular grievances and social claims of an extremely heterogeneous peasantry and urban menu peuple, whose intervention, therefore, no longer appears as a mere echo or reflection of the actions or speeches of aristocrats, lawyers and journalists at Versailles and in Paris. More attention has also been paid to the ‘feudal reaction’ of the last twenty-five years of the old régime in France and to the aims of the parlements and provincial noblesse, who staged the famous révolte nobiliaire, or aristocratic revolt, of 1787–8; in fact, it has even been claimed that this episode was not merely a curtain-raiser to the events of 1789, but marked the opening shot of the Revolution itself.

The settlement of 1763, which ended the Seven Years War in Europe and overseas, was in many ways the most important of the eighteenth century. The Peace of Paris established Britain as, with the exception of Spain, the greatest colonial power in the world. She was now clearly dominant in North America and had at least the possibility of dominating much of India. Simultaneously the Treaty of Hubertusburg saw the consolidation of Prussia's position as one of the major powers of Europe, if not yet as a great power in the fullest sense of the term. Her retention of Silesia appeared to many contemporaries the greatest military achievement of the age; and the leadership of Frederick II seemed sufficient to counterbalance many of her material weaknesses.

A long period of peace, however, could hardly be expected, and indeed was not expected by most observers, after 1763. Neither Britain's colonial and maritime predominance over France nor Prussian security against the Habsburgs was as yet beyond challenge. France's pride had been deeply wounded by her failures during the war. Humiliation and anger were little reduced, desire for revenge on Britain little weakened, by the reflection that much of commercial value—most of her West Indian islands and her trading-posts in Africa and India—had been salvaged from the wreck of her overseas empire. Moreover Britain's successes had aroused everywhere in western Europe a real fear that her sea-power might now be used to give her a monopoly of Europe's overseas trade, and of possibilities of overseas expansion.

When, after the October crisis, the National Assembly followed the French court from Versailles to Paris, it was able quickly to come to grips with the task of devising a new constitution. The danger of counter-revolution had once more receded and by November the food shortage in the capital was over. The timely surrenders of feudal privileges made in the August decrees, officially promulgated on 3 November, allayed peasant discontents at least temporarily and bought time for the lawyers of the feudal committee to consider how total the alleged ‘destruction’ of the feudal régime was to be in fact. A hiatus in the administration of justice and in the conduct of local government was averted by the provisional continuation of existing office-holders. The suspension, on 3 November, of the activities of the parlements removed a possible spring-board for counter-revolutionary resistance in the provinces. Though the October crisis prompted Louis XVI to send a secret and solemn protest against the restrictions forcibly imposed on the crown's authority to Charles IV of Spain, and though, by contrast, it encouraged the Belgian democrats to launch a revolt against the Austrian government in the Netherlands, neither of these repercussions involved much danger of European intervention in France. Most European governments were content to feel that France's political influence on the continent had been extinguished for some time to come. The first serious difficulties in France's foreign relations were in fact delayed till May 1790 and culminated in a solemn renunciation by the National Assembly of aggressive warfare and territorial conquest.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the dominant influence on all the arts was that form of idealism known as Neoclassicism. In France and Germany the ‘excesses’ of the rococo style had, by the middle of the century, produced a general reaction against exuberance and frivolity. That tendency towards classical restraint and harmony which is an essential part of the French tradition of Corneille and Racine, Poussin and Mansart, reasserted itself decisively under the influence of new ideals—the Enlightenment of the Encyclopaedists—and of the new aesthetic theories centred on Rome and best expounded by the expatriate German, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Neoclassicism is, however, more than a resurgence of the eternal classic tendency in European art. The essential thing is that neoclassic theory advocated the return to classical principles by way of a strict imitation of antiquity, now made easier by the increase of archaeological knowledge and especially by the discovery of, and excavations at, Herculaneum and Pompeii. Greek art, though still almost entirely unknown in the original, was now given a leading place in theory, and the climate of nineteenth-century opinion that used the fifth century B.C. as a touchstone of all artistic excellence was prepared in the 1750s. It is evident that so much enthusiasm expended on so few available examples of Greek art led to a kind of hyperdulia—an enthusiasm which is in itself far more romantic than classical; and indeed one of the distinguishing characteristics of Neoclassicism is precisely this romantic approach to antiquity, and especially to ruins.

By the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 the North American mainland was shared between Britain and Spain. France retained only two small islands, St Pierre and Miquelon, off the coast of Newfoundland, at which her fishermen could dry their fish. By 1793 Britain had lost her colonies south of Canada: to the original thirteen, which became independent in 1783 and, hesitantly, united in 1787, two new states had been added (Vermont, 1791, and Kentucky, 1792); and the Floridas, East and West, had been returned to Spain in 1783.

In 1763 the British colonies of the North American mainland extended for sixteen hundred miles along the seaboard, from stormy Cape Breton Island to the humid Okefinokee swamps. At either extremity there was a military outpost. Nova Scotia, which had been captured by Britain in 1710, had been for fifty years a weak imperial base against the French in Cape Breton. Halifax was founded in 1749 as a counterpoise to Louisbourg, and 3000 colonists were sent out. In 1755 the French were expelled from the Acadian settlements on the Bay of Fundy and the Annapolis river. Helped by immigrants from New England, the British numbers grew to 11,000 in 1766 and 20,000 in 1775. A representative assembly was granted to Nova Scotia in 1758. In 1769 Prince Edward Island (formerly Isle St Jean) was given a separate government, and its assembly first met in 1773. There were only a few settlers at St John (originally Parrtown) in 1784 when an influx of 3000 American Loyalists led to the erection of New Brunswick into a separate colony.