Europe is now divided into twelve powerful, though unequal kingdoms, three respectable commonwealths, and a variety of smaller, though independent states … The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom, or, at least, of moderation; and some sense of honour and justice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the general manners of the times. In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals: in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests. If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the victorious barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilised society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.
Cold, poverty, and a life of danger and fatigue fortify the strength and courage of barbarians. In every age they have oppressed the polite and peaceful nations of China, India, and Persia, who neglected, and still neglect, to counterbalance these natural powers by the resources of military art. […] The military art has been changed by the invention of gunpowder; which enables man to command the two most powerful agents of nature, air and fire. Mathematics, chemistry, mechanics, architecture, have been applied to the service of war; and the adverse parties oppose to each other the most elaborate modes of attack and of defence … Cannon and fortifications now form an impregnable barrier against the Tartar horse; and Europe is secure from any future irruption of barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous. Their gradual advances in the science of war would always be accompanied, as we may learn from the example of Russia, with a proportionable improvement in the arts of peace and civil policy; and they themselves must deserve a place among the polished nations whom they subdue.
Should these speculations be found doubtful or fallacious, there still remains a more humble source of comfort and hope. The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic history or tradition of the most enlightened nations, represent the human savage naked both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and almost of language.1 From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he has gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and various; infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity: ages of laborious ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the globe have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.1
Notes
1 1 I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.
2 1 Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity … They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people … The American savages, who go naked, and live entirely on the products of the chase, have been always impossible to subdue. What yoke, indeed, can be imposed on men who stand in need of nothing?
3 2 I dare not speak of those happy nations, who did not even know the name of many vices, which we find it difficult to suppress; the savages of America, whose simple and natural mode of government Montaigne preferred, without hesitation, not only to the laws of Plato, but to the most perfect visions of government philosophy can ever suggest.
4 1 Lake Moeris, a vast natural phenomenon that Egyptian hydraulic engineering greatly improved on, was long considered to be entirely man made. [Translator’s note.]
5 1 The ‘you’ who is addressed in the opening passages was Voltaire’s deceased partner, Emilie du Châtelet, who seems to have functioned for him as an ideal reader. [Editors’ note.]
6 1 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art), Part 1, Chapter 1.4. [Translator’s note.] (cf. IIC7)
7 1 Quatremère seems to suggest that the modillion‐like effects produced by the ends of supporting timbers in Chinese roofs imitate regular patterns cut from cloth and suspended along a tent roof. [Translator’s note.]
8 1 It would be an easy, though tedious, task to produce the authorities of poets, philosophers, and historians. I shall therefore content myself with appealing to the decisive and authentic testimony of Diodorus Siculus. The Ichthyophagi, who in his time wandered along the shores of the Red Sea, can only be compared to the natives of New Holland. Fancy, or perhaps reason, may still suppose an extreme and absolute state of nature far below the level of these savages, who had acquired some arts and instruments.
Part III Revolution, Romanticism, Reaction
Introduction
Part III covers a shorter chronological span than either of the two preceding parts. It contains textual materials drawn from the period extending from the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789, to the mid‐nineteenth century, marked throughout Europe by the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. The widespread enthusiasm among radicals for the French Revolution decreased markedly, though never entirely, from the early 1790s. This was a response both to the anti‐aristocratic and anti‐bourgeois violence of the new regime and, later in the decade, to its usurpation by Napoleon Bonaparte. By then, the radical and democratic energies unleashed by the revolution had mutated into the programme of a peculiarly hybrid French expansion, simultaneously imperial in fact and anti‐monarchical, democratic, in the identity it claimed. Nationalist reactions against the revolutionary armies in both Spain and Germany, coupled with the alliance of normative European regimes against post‐revolutionary France, gave a second impetus to a long period of warfare, which had begun before the revolution. At bottom, these wars, fought both in continental Europe