In Lafayette's library hung appropriately side by side two momentous documents, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, two utterances that have had memorable consequences in the world because multitudes of men have been willing to give their lives that these principles might prevail and multitudes have given their lives that they should not prevail.
Fundamentally this struggle for liberty has been the warp and woof of modern European history and the vicissitudes of the struggle are, in the deepest sense, what I have attempted to set forth in this volume.
Complicated, exceedingly, has been the history of this conflict, and many other elements have entered into the problem and solution. These I have given their due place, but I have also endeavored to keep them in just subordination to the central theme.
As furnishing the background for the story, I have described in the opening chapters the chief features of the eighteenth century, the Old Regime in Europe and in France. That regime was boldly challenged and roughly handled by the French Revolution. I have endeavored to indicate the spirit and meaning of that revolution as well as to describe its stirring events and personalities.. That revolution clashed with Europe and started a European revolution, which has had its ups and downs, its victories and defeats, its varying issues in the different countries. The contest assumed the character of world warfare under Napoleon, who said of himself that he was "the Revolution"and that he had "killed the Revolution." Neither statement was correct; yet each possessed an element of truth. This essential duality of the Napoleonic system, Old Regime and New Regime commingled in impossible union, I have sought to make clear.
Napoleon partially conquered the New Regime, and those who conquered Napoleon and sent him to St. Helena were anxious to conquer it still more. They for a while succeeded, but in the end the new spirit which was abroad in the world was too strong for them and they and their works were severely battered by the widespread revolutions of 1848. To those who are content to look at the surface, the revolutions of that year seemed ephemeral; to those who look beneath they appear anything but ephemeral.
This ebb and flow has been the rhythm of European history since the close of the eighteenth century. The new has indisputably progressed, but it has progressed unequally in the different countries, as was natural and inevitable, since those countries are very dissimilar in character, in stages of development, and in mental outlook. This all-absorbing conflict has not yet ended.
This struggle for freedom has had many aspects. The spirit of nationalism, so prominent a feature of the nineteenth century, has in some cases been an expression of the desire for liberty; in other cases it has been the expression of the old familiar desire for national greatness and power, nothing more. I have attempted in my narrative to show the varying operation of this spirit in the different countries.
Again, where economic and social factors have been formative in national policy, I have described them, as for instance the conditions that prevailed in France before the Revolution, the free trade movement in England, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the Zollverein in Germany, the tariff policies, the labor legislation, and the various measures of social reform which have been a growing feature of the modern world.
In the treatment of the past century I have drawn freely upon my larger work, Europe Since 1815. The numerous illustrations which accompany the text have been selected with reference to their historical importance, and it is hoped that they will render the scenes and persons they portray more actual. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Ernest F. Henderson and his publishers, Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons, for permission to use several illustrations from Dr. Henderson's vivid and illuminating book Symbol and Satire in the French Revolution; and to Miss Louise Stetson Fuller of the Department of History of Smith College for the preparation of the Index.
C. D. H.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, January, 1917
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
This book appeared originally early in 1917. I have since then added an account of the Great War ending with the armistice of November, 1918. I have, however, allowed the earlier chapters to stand as they were written in spite of the obvious incongruity of some of the tenses employed in them. This arrangement is provisional only; meanwhile no one is likely to be deceived or confused, the change in the situation of the world, rendering such formal alterations desirable, having occurred so recently.
C. D. H.
JUNE 6, 1919.
Chapter I
The Old Regime in Europe
Anyone who seeks to understand the stirring period in which we are now living becomes quickly aware that he must first know the history of the French Revolution, a movement that inaugurated a new era, not only for France but for the world. The years from 1789 to 1815, the years of the Revolution and of Napoleon, effected one of the greatest and most difficult transitions of which history bears record, and to gain any proper sense of its significance one must have some glimpse of the background, some conception of what Europe was like in 1789. That background can only be sketched here in a few broad strokes, far from adequate to a satisfactory appreciation, but at least indicating the point of departure.
What was Europe in 1789? One thing, at least, it was not: it was not a unity. There were states of every size and shape and with every form of government. The States of the Church were theocratic; capricious and cruel despotism prevailed in Turkey; absolute monarchy in Russia, Austria, France, Prussia; constitutional monarchy in England; while there were various kinds of so-called republics federal republics in Holland and Switzerland, a republic whose head was an elective king in Poland, aristocratic republics in Venice and Genoa and in the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire.
Of these states the one that was to be the most persistent enemy of France and of French ideas throughout the period we are about to describe was England, a commercial and colonial empire of the first importance. This empire, of long, slow growth, had passed through many highly significant experiences during the eighteenth century. Indeed that century is one of the most momentous in English history, rendered forever memorable by three great series of events which in important respects transformed the national life of England and her international relations, giving them the character and tendency which have been theirs ever since. These three streams of tendency or lines of evolution out of which the modern power of Britain has emerged were: the acquisition of what are still the most valuable parts of her colonial empire, Canada and India; the establishment of the parliamentary system of government, that is, government of the nation by its representatives, not by its royal house, the undoubted supremacy of Parliament over the Crown; and the beginnings of what is called the Industrial Revolution, that is, of the modern factory system of production on a vast scale which during the course of the nineteenth century made England easily the chief industrial nation of the world.
The evolution of the parliamentary system of government had, of course, been long in progress but was immensely furthered by the advent of in 1714 a new royal dynasty, the House of Hanover, the House of still at this hour the reigning family. The struggle between Crown and Parliament, which had been long proceeding and had become tense and violent in the seventeenth century in connection with the attempts of the Stuart kings to make the monarchy all-powerful and supreme, ended finally in the eighteenth century with the victory of Parliament, and the monarch ceased to be, what he remained in the rest of Europe, the dominant element in the state.
In 1701 Parliament, by mere legislative act, altered the line of succession by passing over the direct, legitimate claimant because he was a Catholic, and by calling to the throne George, Elector of Hanover, because he was a Protestant. Thus the older branch of the royal family was set aside and a younger or collateral branch was put in its place. This was a plain defiance of the ordinary rules of descent which generally underlie the monarchical system everywhere. It showed that the will of Parliament was superior to the monarchical principle, that, in a way, the monarchy was elective. Still other important consequences followed