france

France and England Compared

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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.

*

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.

Napoleon

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Mr Justice T W Smith was regarded as the leading judge on our Supreme Court in his time.  He declined a knighthood.  They were not then automatically granted to those appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but were in the gift of the government.  Smith, J thought that may be seen as an inducement to judges not to offend government.  He referred to what Napoleon said when asked why he had reinstituted a titled aristocracy.  ‘Because it is by such baubles that men are governed.’

François Furet was a leading historian of France.  One of his works is Revolutionary France, 1770-1880.  It gives perspective to the events known as the French Revolution – a consummation devoutly to be desired.  It runs to 537 pages of text.  Eight of those pages are devoted to the coronation of Napoleon, and they show in detail just what Napoleon meant by the ‘baubles’ by which men are governed.

Everything was researched and rehearsed in exquisite detail so that the Corsican could place the crown on his own head – and slight the pope.  He was following in the path of the Holy Roman Empire, and Charlemagne the Great.  But he would not grant latterday homage to Charlemagne.

I have raised myself up to my actions.  He [Charlemagne] stayed at the point where birth placed him.  To reign in France, one must be born in grandeur, have been seen from childhood in a palace with guards, or else be a man who is capable of standing out from all the others….Right of inheritance, if it is to be successful, must pass to children born in the bosom of greatness.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of megalomania.

The coronation took place in Notre Dame on 2 December, 1804.  Louis XVI had been executed on 21 January 1793.  In the history of the entire world, had there ever been such a reversal?  The Emperor claimed, and could enforce, powers the Bourbons could hardly dream of. 

But after his final defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon left five million dead, France in ruins, and the shell of an army he had abandoned twice.  He lost because he could not stop fighting, and the nation of France was fractured for the rest of the nineteenth century.  It endured appalling revolutionary schisms in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  The last led to the nation’s worst defeat in war at Sedan.  France just survived the First World War, and then participated in the mad lust for revenge that led to the Second.  And just recently, the gillets jaunes showed that the readiness to revolt can outweigh dreams about the Emperor and la gloire.

In the space of one generation, France had gone from dreaming of a whole new regime according to the philosophical gospel of Rousseau to a rampant evangelical nationalism under a foreign emperor, and the result was a tragic mess.

Writing when the fulness of this tragedy had been revealed, Hippolyte Taine was understandably bitter.  Taine completed his vitriolic history of the Revolution at an ugly time for France, in 1884, when the nation was still trying to achieve a settled state, and was still recovering from the most recent aftershock, the appalling events of 1870.  The book concludes after looking at the bequest of Napoleon by saying:

In this philosophical barracks we have lived for eighty years.  Those barracks had seen ‘the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of government’ – ‘Never were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism….’

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre said this of Napoleon at the end of a two-volume history of his life from 1799 to 1815:

Nor was it an accident that led to the dictatorship of a general.  But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation.  Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of ‘la guerre éternelle’ [eternal war]…

The great Napoleonic achievement – the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire – ended in failure.  Hence the imagination of the poet has tended to see the Emperor as a second Prometheus whose daring was punished by the heavenly powers, and as a symbol of human genius at grips with fate….But a military dictatorship did not of itself necessitate the re-establishment of a hereditary monarchy, still less an aristocratic nobility.  Nor was the best means of defending the natural frontiers to be found in expanding beyond them and so giving rise to coalitions in self-defence.  Yet this was what Napoleon was personally responsible for setting in train.

….He had in fact become more and more hostile to the Revolution, to such a degree that if he had had the time, he would in the end have partly repudiated even civil equality; yet in the popular imagination, he was the hero of the Revolution….He had instituted the most rigorous despotism; yet it was in his name that the constitutional reign of the Bourbons was opposed….

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind.  His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination.  Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercize for ever more on the individual person.  For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come…to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Now, most us find it hard to be ‘romantic’ about war or death, and standing in ecstasy before the tomb might be reserved to those people in France who prefer romance to the frightful history of France after Napoleon.

I had wondered why the French celebrate Bastille Day.  I was there at the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysee when it looked like the masses might scale the fortress.  It would be idle to dream of equality at that address.  But they did start beheading people in public in Paris on 14 July 1789.

Mr Justice T W Smith was regarded as the leading judge on our Supreme Court in his time.  He declined a knighthood.  They were not then automatically granted to those appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but were in the gift of the government.  Smith, J thought that may be seen as an inducement to judges not to offend government.  He referred to what Napoleon said when asked why he had reinstituted a titled aristocracy.  ‘Because it is by such baubles that men are governed.’

François Furet was a leading historian of France.  One of his works is Revolutionary France, 1770-1880.  It gives perspective to the events known as the French Revolution – a consummation devoutly to be desired.  It runs to 537 pages of text.  Eight of those pages are devoted to the coronation of Napoleon, and they show in detail just what Napoleon meant by the ‘baubles’ by which men are governed.

Everything was researched and rehearsed in exquisite detail so that the Corsican could place the crown on his own head – and slight the pope.  He was following in the path of the Holy Roman Empire, and Charlemagne the Great.  But he would not grant latterday homage to Charlemagne.

I have raised myself up to my actions.  He [Charlemagne] stayed at the point where birth placed him.  To reign in France, one must be born in grandeur, have been seen from childhood in a palace with guards, or else be a man who is capable of standing out from all the others….Right of inheritance, if it is to be successful, must pass to children born in the bosom of greatness.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of megalomania.

The coronation took place in Notre Dame on 2 December, 1804.  Louis XVI had been executed on 21 January 1793.  In the history of the entire world, had there ever been such a reversal?  The Emperor claimed, and could enforce, powers the Bourbons could hardly dream of. 

But after his final defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon left five million dead, France in ruins, and the shell of an army he had abandoned twice.  He lost because he could not stop fighting, and the nation of France was fractured for the rest of the nineteenth century.  It endured appalling revolutionary schisms in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  The last led to the nation’s worst defeat in war at Sedan.  France just survived the First World War, and then participated in the mad lust for revenge that led to the Second.  And just recently, the gillets jaunes showed that the readiness to revolt can outweigh dreams about the Emperor and la gloire.

In the space of one generation, France had gone from dreaming of a whole new regime according to the philosophical gospel of Rousseau to a rampant evangelical nationalism under a foreign emperor, and the result was a tragic mess.

Writing when the fulness of this tragedy had been revealed, Hippolyte Taine was understandably bitter.  Taine completed his vitriolic history of the Revolution at an ugly time for France, in 1884, when the nation was still trying to achieve a settled state, and was still recovering from the most recent aftershock, the appalling events of 1870.  The book concludes after looking at the bequest of Napoleon by saying:

In this philosophical barracks we have lived for eighty years.  Those barracks had seen ‘the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of government’ – ‘Never were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism….’

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre said this of Napoleon at the end of a two-volume history of his life from 1799 to 1815:

Nor was it an accident that led to the dictatorship of a general.  But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation.  Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of ‘la guerre éternelle’ [eternal war]…

The great Napoleonic achievement – the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire – ended in failure.  Hence the imagination of the poet has tended to see the Emperor as a second Prometheus whose daring was punished by the heavenly powers, and as a symbol of human genius at grips with fate….But a military dictatorship did not of itself necessitate the re-establishment of a hereditary monarchy, still less an aristocratic nobility.  Nor was the best means of defending the natural frontiers to be found in expanding beyond them and so giving rise to coalitions in self-defence.  Yet this was what Napoleon was personally responsible for setting in train.

….He had in fact become more and more hostile to the Revolution, to such a degree that if he had had the time, he would in the end have partly repudiated even civil equality; yet in the popular imagination, he was the hero of the Revolution….He had instituted the most rigorous despotism; yet it was in his name that the constitutional reign of the Bourbons was opposed….

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind.  His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination.  Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercize for ever more on the individual person.  For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come…to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Now, most us find it hard to be ‘romantic’ about war or death, and standing in ecstasy before the tomb might be reserved to those people in France who prefer romance to the frightful history of France after Napoleon.

I had wondered why the French celebrate Bastille Day.  I was there at the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysee when it looked like the masses might scale the fortress.  It would be idle to dream of equality at that address.  But they did start beheading people in public in Paris on 14 July 1789.