The brief period of thirty years from 1763 to 1793 marks an important phase in the history of science and technology, especially in the foundation of modern chemistry, and in the improvement of the steam-engine by the invention of the separate condenser, an improvement that led directly to the development of steam-power. The bases of the quantitative study of three great departments of physics, namely, heat, electricity and magnetism, were firmly established in these years; and there was much progress in geology and in biology. At the beginning of the period Newtonianism had not only permeated scientific thought but had also already passed beyond the boundaries of the world of science into general thought and literature through the writings of Henry Pemberton in England and of Voltaire and Mme du Châtelet in France. Sciences other than astronomy and mechanics were, however, not so well advanced; and chemistry still explained the material complexity of the world in terms of a small number of ultimate elementary components.

In mathematics and mechanics the researches of this period were characterised by generalisation and deduction. Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) continued the work of the earlier half of the century on the calculus; he extended mathematical analysis and the theory of equations; and in 1788 he published his Mécanique analytique, a work second only to Newton's Principia in the history of mechanics. Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) made further studies on the calculus of variations and other branches of mathematics, as well as contributing to the study of mechanics.

The successive coalitions organised to resist French expansion during the period of the Revolution and the Empire followed a general pattern and policy which had well-established precedents in European diplomacy. Since the close of the Middle Ages any dynasty or state that threatened to achieve a dominant position on the continent had been checked by a coalition of its neighbours. This traditional response, often described as the policy of maintaining a balance of power, operated in an intermittent fashion. It was not a consistent policy but rather a collective response to a recurrent danger. During the intervals when the states of Europe existed in an uneasy equilibrium the balance of power as a principle attracted little attention. Only when some powerful and militant state, by a dynamic expansion of its influence and territory, created a manifest imbalance in the European system, did the remaining states compose then: differences sufficiently to co-operate in restoring a balance. How unstable such coalitions might prove, and how vulnerable they were to dissolution after a defeat or a victory, the vicissitudes of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars repeatedly demonstrated.

Throughout most of the eighteenth century the European system remained fairly stable. From the early years of that century, when the War of the Spanish Succession finally checked the ascendancy France had gained under Louis XIV, until the final decade when the victories of the revolutionary armies again made France a threat, the balance of power in Europe was not seriously disturbed. It is true that the naval, commercial and colonial successes won by Great Britain made the eighteenth century a period of British ascendancy.

POPULATION GROWTH

The estimates of European population in the eighteenth century are subject to a very wide margin of error; direct censuses were few and imperfect, and most of the figures are derived from enumerations of households, which, besides being incomplete, can be translated into total population only by making necessarily arbitrary assumptions about the size of households. While such estimates give a reasonably reliable indication of the approximate size of a country's population, they are a poor guide to the rates of growth within a country, since they reflect changes in administrative efficiency, and their general effect is probably to exaggerate the speed with which population was increasing. There can, nevertheless, be little doubt that population was growing in most parts of Europe in the eighteenth century and that, for Europe as a whole, it was growing more rapidly after 1760 than before.

It is natural in retrospect to interpret this increase of population as the first stage of the sustained and cumulative increase which has marked the last two hundred years, and to seek an explanation in the operation of new influences, such as higher standards of living or improvements in medicine and public health. It should be observed, however, that the population growth in the second half of the century was rapid only in certain parts of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, in Russia, England and Wales and Ireland, and in parts of Germany. Even in these countries the rate of growth in the later eighteenth century was probably not more than 1 per cent per annum except in Russia, certain Prussian provinces, Finland and Ireland.

The fact that the French Revolution was something unprecedented, exceptional, and portentous for the future of Europe and perhaps the world did not escape the notice of some contemporaries. Edmund Burke, its fiercest antagonist, perceived as early as 1790 that he was witnessing the first ‘complete revolution’. Kant predicted in 1798 that such a phenomenon could never be obliterated from the memory of mankind. Some twenty-five years later, Stendhal declared: ‘In the two thousand years of recorded world history so sharp a revolution in customs, ideas, and beliefs has perhaps never occurred before.’ Even so critical an observer as the German nationalist Arndt had to admit in retrospect: ‘I should be very ungrateful and also a hypocrite if I did not avow that we owe an immense amount to that savage and crazy revolution … and that it has put ideas into people's heads and hearts which twenty or thirty years before the event most men would have shuddered to conceive of.’

From the very outset the Revolution had a profound impact on Europe's intellectuals. At that early stage delight by far prevailed upon dismay. Indeed, it was widely felt that a new world was opening to the astonished sight. William Wordsworth immortalised that frame of mind in The Prelude:

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.