The Lectures on Foreign History, 1494 – 1789, by J M Thompson (see below) may be the most read history book on my shelves. It fills in a lot of holes, but I want to set out some observations of the author in the final lecture on the events leading to what is known as the French Revolution. They illuminate major issues in the history of England that, in my view, still set us apart today from the U S.
French writers, unlike the English originals, had no practical experience of politics, and had not experienced a revolution. ‘They tested their politics not by the experiment of self-government, but by the uncertain analogies of Greek and Roman history’. Here is the age-old divide between the love of theory over the channel and the commitment to hard experience by the Anglo-Saxons. It is fundamental and too little noticed.
Dr Johnson was cryptic about class and hierarchy. ‘The great in France live very magnificently, but the rest very miserably. There is no happy middle state as there is in England.’ This too is fundamental. He might have added that the English aristocracy paid its way, in more ways than one, while the effete French refused point blank and got blotted out for their trouble. While the English nobles in the 17th century joined with what the French called the bourgeoisie to bring the Crown to heal, the French nobles indulged in the Fronde, which delivered the Sun King and an absolute monarchy that a Tsar might have marveled at. There is a chasm of difference between the two nations.
When the French Revolution came, its first practical reforms followed the English model, but its abstract Declaration of Rights was borrowed from America. There lay just the difference between the two.’
A ‘mixture of arbitrariness and impotence was the tragedy of Louis XVI’s government.’ That is spot on – in every page of Carlyle.
The French were nothing like a unified nation with a uniform law – that England had been building at least since Magna Carta in 1215. (Before they achieved Home Rule for religion in 1534.) Voltaire remarked that ‘you changed your laws, your horses, at every stage of the road’. (He also accused his countrymen of being ‘so full of vehemence, so free of depth.’)
‘Unjust taxation, because the privileged classes were largely exempt, and the wealthy could afford to compound with the tax-collector, whilst the poor and underprivileged were fleeced in proportion to their apparent means – one must either be very rich, or pretend to be very poor.’ This is another fundamental difference between the two hierarchies, and the world’s richest man now, in a rare lucid moment, might glimpse the truth of the real world.
‘Social disunity, then, and social unrest were the most fundamental causes of the Revolution. The order of social privilege should correspond to the order of social service; in eighteenth century France the one exactly inverted the other.’ (My emphasis.) I have always been leery of the phrase ‘ruling class’, but the above seems to be a fair description of the U S ruling class now, especially the revolting robber barons intent on obliterating – with a chain saw Texas and Deliverance style – as much of the order of social service as they can lay their polluted mits on.
This leads to the grand finale. Speaking of England, Dr Thompson said that the ‘political spirit of the eighteenth century was based not on the equality, but on the harmony of classes. Poor and rich together took a patriotic pride in ‘our free constitution which they continually contrasted with the slavery of continental countries’. …. What prevented revolution in England was the social duties of the rich and of the political rights of the poor: it was the absence of this recognition which made the French Revolution inevitable. Liberty does not depend on the institutions of a country, but upon the spirit in which they are administered. Democracy is not a constitution, but a state of mind.’
‘It is as difficult for a nation to change its character as it is for an individual’.
These are piercing insights. As
it happens, the three passages I have emphasized represent just about all I have learned in seventy years of looking at the past. The French term is noblesse oblige, and what counts is a state of mind. If the descendants of slave driving Puritans ever had it – which I doubt – they have certainly now spat it out. And they have done so with their eyes wide open and their minds utterly closed.
The following note is from A Curated Library.
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LECTURES ON FOREIGN HISTORY 1494 – 1789
J M Thompson
Blackwell, 2nd Ed, 1944, rebound in half claret leather with cream label.
The author wrote extensively on the French Revolution. I have read and enjoyed everything he wrote on that period. A tutor at Cambridge understood my respect. He said that the author wrote at a time when style mattered.
James Matthew Thompson lived between 1878 and 1956. His father was an Anglican priest. He studied theology and philosophy at Oxford and was ordained in 1903. In 1906 he became Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford. He challenged orthodoxy, and resigned as Dean in 1915. After the war, he returned to teach history. The lectures in the present book were delivered to first year students during the winter terms of 1921 to 1924. The book of those lectures was first published in 1925. It may lack the complete style of the later works on French history, but it is wonderfully assembled and crisp, and it fills in many holes in the historical knowledge of those who go straight from the Renaissance and Reformation to the French Revolution.
In the Preface, Thompson says that ‘the essence of history is not the learning of facts, but the judging of evidence.’ In the first chapter, he puts that another way.
You don’t study history to learn historical facts, but to acquire historical judgment. It is not learning that makes a historian, but discernment.
That is rolled gold. Two pages later, we get: ‘Politically speaking, England in 1494 is already 400 years ahead of the rest of Europe’. That proposition is not just English hubris.
Since the eleventh century it has been virtually one country under one king – a condition that France and Spain are only just reaching, and which Italy and Germany will not reach for another 400 years. It has the only effective parliament in Europe, and the only limited monarchy which remains limited during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its kings have suppressed the arbitrary power of the nobles without transferring it to the crown. By losing their continental possessions, they have learnt the uselessness of foreign conquest. England in 1494 is peaceful and orderly, and the richest country in northern Europe.
And that’s without mentioning Magna Carta, the common law, habeas corpus, the Inns of Court and the judiciary, or the fact that England would shortly repatriate its church – which would further distinguish itself from Europe, even the Protestant parts.
The cannons of the King of France were inscribed Ratio ultima Regum – ‘the final argument of kings.’
Anyone could learn to fire a gun, and one gunman was almost as good as another. Armies grew bigger. Disciplined masses took the place of erratic heroes. The business of raising and arming troops passed from the feudal lord to the professional soldier, and from the professional soldier to the State.
An Anglican divine may have something to say about the Reformation.
It is always a difficult question, how far it is proper to receive wages for religious work, or to exact payment in return for spiritual privileges. But all conscientious men feel (and they felt the same in the sixteenth century) that it is wrong to make a profit out of religion.
What would the Mormons now say?
It was not merely the demand for books, or the interest in theology, which secured Luther his circulation; but also his style. Michelet compared it to a mixture of Moses and Rabelais [!]. The upshot of Luther’s teaching was to dethrone the Pope and enthrone the Bible. Authority was not destroyed; it was only transferred. Orthodoxy was not impaired; it was refounded on the Scriptures.
You now see why style matters.
You might then wonder on the benefits of a marriage between Germany and Luther.
The lecture on the Netherlands Revolt from Spain is riveting.
Politically, the Revolt leaves all Europe in debt. The success of the northern states gave ‘the right of citizenship to revolutionary principles.’ For the first time since the organisation of the New Monarchies, a whole people had claimed and won its independence…. the Netherlands Revolt was a striking instance of the political results of the Reformation. It showed that Protestantism could give not only the desire for political freedom, but also the resolution to achieve it
As to the Sun King, Louis XIV, French historians believe that in a single generation, six millions of people died of want. The author quotes Acton:
It would be easy to find tyrants more violent, more malignant, more odious than Louis XIV; but there was not one who ever used his power to inflict greater suffering or greater wrong.
Louis XV? ‘…. he was one of the most evil men who ever occupied a throne.’
What is the upshot?
…. we cannot fail to be impressed by the strength of nationalism, and its claim to be the ruling principle of political science. This is the first lesson of modern European history; and none is more necessary nowadays; for it explains the disaster of 1914 – the nemesis of nationalism…
Those remarks were indeed prophetic in 1924. The worst of nationalism was yet to come. It is crude nationalism that now undermines the United States and is undoing the European experiment.
There are times when I think that my fondness for this book, and books like it, is about on a par with my fondness for footy. This book is a must for those who want to try to understand where we have come from and where we may be going.
And it’s worth getting for the Michelet quote on its own. Moses and Rabelais! From a sometime divine.
With Compliments 