Showing posts with label A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Show all posts

August 26, 2022

58.THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 
BY 
H. G. WELLS
58.THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

There is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we have here called the mechanical revolution, which was an entirely new thing in human experience arising out of the development of organized science, a new step like the invention of agriculture or the discovery of metals, with something else, quite different in its origins, something for which there was already an historical precedent, the social and financial development which is called the _industrial revolution_. The two processes were going on together, they were constantly reacting upon each other, but they were in root and essence different. There would have been an industrial revolution of sorts if there had been no coal, no steam, no machinery; but in that case it would probably have followed far more closely upon the lines of the social and financial developments of the later years of the Roman Republic. It would have repeated the story of dispossessed free cultivators, gang labour, great estates, great financial fortunes, and a socially destructive financial process. Even the factory method came before power and machinery. Factories were the product not of machinery, but of the “division of labour.” Drilled and sweated workers were making such things as millinery cardboard boxes and furniture, and colouring maps and book illustrations and so forth, before even water-wheels had been used for industrial purposes. There were factories in Rome in the days of Augustus. New books, for instance, were dictated to rows of copyists in the factories of the book-sellers.

The attentive student of Defoe and of the political pamphlets of

Fielding will realize that the idea of herding poor people into

establishments to work collectively for their living was already

current in Britain before the close of the seventeenth century. There

are intimations of it even as early as More’s _Utopia_ (1516). It was a social and not a mechanical development.

Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and economic

history of western Europe was in fact retreading the path along which

the Roman state had gone in the last three centuries B.C. But the

political disunions of Europe, the political convulsions against

monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the

greater accessibility of the western European intelligence to

mechanical ideas and inventions, turned the process into quite novel

directions. Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to Christianity, were

far more widely diffused in the newer European world, political power

was not so concentrated, and the man of energy anxious to get rich

turned his mind, therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave

and of gang labour to the idea of mechanical power and the machine.



The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical invention and

discovery, was a new thing in human experience and it went on

regardless of the social, political, economic and industrial

consequences it might produce. The industrial revolution, on the other

hand, like most other human affairs, was and is more and more

profoundly changed and deflected by the constant variation in human

conditions caused by the mechanical revolution. And the essential

difference between the amassing of riches, the extinction of small

farmers and small business men, and the phase of big finance in the

latter centuries of the Roman Republic on the one hand, and the very

similar concentration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference in the

character of labour that the mechanical revolution was bringing about.

The power of the old world was human power; everything depended

ultimately upon the driving power of human muscle, the muscle of

ignorant and subjugated men. A little animal muscle, supplied by draft

oxen, horse traction and the like, contributed. Where a weight had to

be lifted, men lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped

it out; where a field had to be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the

Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its bank of

sweating rowers. A vast proportion of mankind in the early

civilizations were employed in purely mechanical drudgery. At its

onset, power-driven machinery did not seem to promise any release from

such unintelligent toil. Great gangs of men were employed in

excavating canals, in making railway cuttings and embankments, and the

like. The number of miners increased enormously. But the extension of

facilities and the output of commodities increased much more. And as

the nineteenth century went on, the plain logic of the new situation

asserted itself more clearly. Human beings were no longer wanted as a

source of mere indiscriminated power. What could be done mechanically

by a human being could be done faster and better by a machine. The

human being was needed now only where choice and intelligence had to be

exercised. Human beings were wanted only as human beings. The drudge,

on whom all the previous civilizations had rested, the creature of mere

obedience, the man whose brains were superfluous, had become

unnecessary to the welfare of mankind.

This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture and mining

as it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For ploughing, sowing

and harvesting, swift machines came forward to do the work of scores of

men. The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and degraded human

beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical

power. For a hundred years power has been getting cheaper and labour

dearer. If for a generation or so machinery has had to wait its turn

in the mine, it is simply because for a time men were cheaper than

machinery.

Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance in human

affairs. The chief solicitude of the rich and of the ruler in the old

civilization had been to keep up a supply of drudges. As the

nineteenth century went on, it became more and more plain to the

intelligent directive people that the common man had now to be

something better than a drudge. He had to be educated—if only to

secure “industrial efficiency.” He had to understand what he was

about. From the days of the first Christian propaganda, popular

education had been smouldering in Europe, just as it had smouldered in

Asia wherever Islam has set its foot, because of the necessity of

making the believer understand a little of the belief by which he is

saved, and of enabling him to read a little in the sacred books by

which his belief is conveyed. Christian controversies, with their

competition for adherents, ploughed the ground for the harvest of

popular education. In England, for instance, by the thirties and

forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes of the sects and the

necessity of catching adherents young had produced a series of

competing educational organizations for children, the church “National”

schools, the dissenting “British” schools, and even Roman Catholic

elementary schools. The second half of the nineteenth century was a

period of rapid advance in popular education throughout all the

Westernized world. There was no parallel advance in the education of

the upper classes—some advance, no doubt, but nothing to correspond—and

so the great gulf that had divided that world hitherto into the readers

and the non-reading mass became little more than a slightly perceptible

difference in educational level. At the back of this process was the

mechanical revolution, apparently regardless of social conditions, but

really insisting inexorably upon the complete abolition of a totally

illiterate class throughout the world.

The economic revolution of the Roman Republic had never been clearly

apprehended by the common people of Rome. The ordinary Roman citizen

never saw the changes through which he lived, clearly and

comprehensively as we see them. But the industrial revolution, as it

went on towards the end of the nineteenth century, was more and more

distinctly _seen_ as one whole process by the common people it was

affecting, because presently they could read and discuss and

communicate, and because they went about and saw things as no

commonalty had ever done before.

57.THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 
BY 
H. G. WELLS
57.THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE 

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the opening years of the nineteenth century, while these conflicts of the powers and princes were going on in Europe, and the patchwork of the treaty of Westphalia (1648) was changing kaleidoscopically into the patchwork of the treaty of Vienna (1815), and while the sailing ship was spreading European influence throughout the world, a steady growth of knowledge and a general clearing up of men’s ideas about the world in which they lived was in progress in the European and Europeanized world.

It went on disconnected from political life, and producing throughout

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no striking immediate results

in political life. Nor was it affecting popular thought very

profoundly during this period. These reactions were to come later, and

only in their full force in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

It was a process that went on chiefly in a small world of prosperous

and independent-spirited people. Without what the English call the

“private gentleman,” the scientific process could not have begun in

Greece, and could not have been renewed in Europe. The universities

played a part but not a leading part in the philosophical and

scientific thought of this period. Endowed learning is apt to be timid

and conservative learning, lacking in initiative and resistent to

innovation, unless it has the spur of contact with independent minds.

We have already noted the formation of the Royal Society in 1662 and

its work in realizing the dream of Bacon’s _New Atlantis_. Throughout

the eighteenth century there was much clearing up of general ideas

about matter and motion, much mathematical advance, a systematic

development of the use of optical glass in microscope and telescope, a

renewed energy in classificatory natural history, a great revival of

anatomical science. The science of geology—foreshadowed by Aristotle

and anticipated by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)—began its great task

of interpreting the Record of the Rocks.
The progress of physical science reacted upon metallurgy. Improved

metallurgy, affording the possibility of a larger and bolder handling

of masses of metal and other materials, reacted upon practical

inventions. Machinery on a new scale and in a new abundance appeared

to revolutionize industry.

In 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt engine to transport and made the

first locomotive. In 1825 the first railway, between Stockton and

Darlington, was opened, and Stephenson’s “Rocket,” with a thirteen-ton

train, got up to a speed of forty-four miles per hour. From 1830

onward railways multiplied. By the middle of the century a network of

railways had spread all over Europe.

Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed condition of

human life, the maximum rate of land transport. After the Russian

disaster, Napoleon travelled from near Vilna to Paris in 312 hours.

This was a journey of about 1,400 miles. He was travelling with every

conceivable advantage, and he averaged under 5 miles an hour. An

ordinary traveller could not have done this distance in twice the time.

These were about the same maximum rates of travel as held good between

Rome and Gaul in the first century A.D. Then suddenly came this

tremendous change. The railways reduced this journey for any ordinary

traveller to less than forty-eight hours. That is to say, they reduced

the chief European distances to about a tenth of what they had been.

They made it possible to carry out administrative work in areas ten

times as great as any that had hitherto been workable under one

administration. The full significance of that possibility in Europe

still remains to be realized. Europe is still netted in boundaries

drawn in the horse and road era. In America the effects were

immediate. To the United States of America, sprawling westward, it

meant the possibility of a continuous access to Washington, however far

the frontier travelled across the continent. It meant unity, sustained

on a scale that would otherwise have been impossible.

The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam engine in

its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the _Charlotte Dundas_, on

the Firth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and in 1807 an American named Fulton

had a steamer, the Clermont, with British-built engines, upon the

Hudson River above New York. The first steamship to put to sea was

also an American, the Phœnix, which went from New York (Hoboken) to

Philadelphia. So, too, was the first ship using steam (she also had

sails) to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah (1819). All these were

paddle-wheel boats and paddle-wheel boats are not adapted to work in

heavy seas. The paddles smash too easily, and the boat is then

disabled. The screw steamship followed rather slowly. Many

difficulties had to be surmounted before the screw was a practicable

thing. Not until the middle of the century did the tonnage of

steamships upon the sea begin to overhaul that of sailing ships. After

that the evolution in sea transport was rapid. For the first time men

began to cross the seas and oceans with some certainty as to the date

of their arrival. The transatlantic crossing, which had been an

uncertain adventure of several weeks—which might stretch to months—was

accelerated, until in 1910 it was brought down, in the case of the

fastest boats, to under five days, with a practically notifiable hour

of arrival.

Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon land and sea

a new and striking addition to the facilities of human intercourse

arose out of the investigations of Volta, Galvani and Faraday into

various electrical phenomena. The electric telegraph came into

existence in 1835. The first underseas cable was laid in 1851 between

France and England. In a few years the telegraph system had spread over

the civilized world, and news which had hitherto travelled slowly from

point to point became practically simultaneous throughout the earth.

These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph, were to the

popular imagination of the middle nineteenth century the most striking

and revolutionary of inventions, but they were only the most

conspicuous and clumsy first fruits of a far more extensive process.

Technical knowledge and skill were developing with an extraordinary

rapidity, and to an extraordinary extent measured by the progress of

any previous age. Far less conspicuous at first in everyday life, but

finally far more important, was the extension of man’s power over

various structural materials. Before the middle of the eighteenth

century iron was reduced from its ores by means of wood charcoal, was

handled in small pieces, and hammered and wrought into shape. It was

material for a craftsman. Quality and treatment were enormously

dependent upon the experience and sagacity of the individual

iron-worker. The largest masses of iron that could be dealt with under

those conditions amounted at most (in the sixteenth century) to two or

three tons. (There was a very definite upward limit, therefore, to the

size of cannon.) The blast-furnace rose in the eighteenth century and

developed with the use of coke. Not before the eighteenth century do

we find rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled rods and bars (1783).

Nasmyth’s steam hammer came as late as 1838.

The ancient world, because of its metallurgical inferiority, could not

use steam. The steam engine, even the primitive pumping engine, could

not develop before sheet iron was available. The early engines seem to

the modern eye very pitiful and clumsy bits of ironmongery, but they

were the utmost that the metallurgical science of the time could do. As

late as 1856 came the Bessemer process, and presently (1864) the

open-hearth process, in which steel and every sort of iron could be

melted, purified and cast in a manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard

of. To-day in the electric furnace one may see tons of incandescent

steel swirling about like boiling milk in a saucepan. Nothing in the

previous practical advances of mankind is comparable in its

consequences to the complete mastery over enormous masses of steel and

iron and over their texture and quality which man has now achieved.

The railways and early engines of all sorts were the mere first

triumphs of the new metallurgical methods. Presently came ships of

iron and steel, vast bridges, and a new way of building with steel upon

a gigantic scale. Men realized too late that they had planned their

railways with far too timid a gauge, that they could have organized

their travelling with far more steadiness and comfort upon a much

bigger scale.

Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the world much

over 2,000 tons burthen; now there is nothing wonderful about a

50,000-ton liner. There are people who sneer at this kind of progress

as being a progress in “mere size,” but that sort of sneering merely

marks the intellectual limitations of those who indulge in it. The

great ship or the steel-frame building is not, as they imagine, a

magnified version of the small ship or building of the past; it is a

thing different in kind, more lightly and strongly built, of finer and

stronger materials; instead of being a thing of precedent and

rule-of-thumb, it is a thing of subtle and intricate calculation. In

the old house or ship, matter was dominant—the material and its needs

had to be slavishly obeyed; in the new, matter had been captured,

changed, coerced. Think of the coal and iron and sand dragged out of

the banks and pits, wrenched, wrought, molten and cast, to be flung at

last, a slender glittering pinnacle of steel and glass, six hundred

feet above the crowded city!

We have given these particulars of the advance in man’s knowledge of

the metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration. A

parallel story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and tin, and

of a multitude of metals, nickel and aluminium to name but two, unknown

before the nineteenth century dawned. It is in this great and growing

mastery over substances, over different sorts of glass, over rocks and

plasters and the like, over colours and textures, that the main

triumphs of the mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved. Yet

we are still in the stage of the first fruits in the matter. We have

the power, but we have still to learn how to use our power. Many of

the first employments of these gifts of science have been vulgar,

tawdry, stupid or horrible. The artist and the adaptor have still

hardly begun to work with the endless variety of substances now at

their disposal.

Parallel with this extension of mechanical possibilities the new

science of electricity grew up. It was only in the eighties of the

nineteenth century that this body of enquiry began to yield results to

impress the vulgar mind. Then suddenly came electric light and

electric traction, and the transmutation of forces, the possibility of

sending power, that could be changed into mechanical motion or light or

heat as one chose, along a copper wire, as water is sent along a pipe,

began to come through to the ideas of ordinary people....

The British and French were at first the leading peoples in this great

proliferation of knowledge; but presently the Germans, who had learnt

humility under Napoleon, showed such zeal and pertinacity in scientific

enquiry as to overhaul these leaders. British science was largely the

creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen working outside the ordinary

centres of erudition.

The universities of Britain were at this time in a state of educational

retrogression, largely given over to a pedantic conning of the Latin

and Greek classics. French education, too, was dominated by the

classical tradition of the Jesuit schools, and consequently it was not

difficult for the Germans to organize a body of investigators, small

indeed in relation to the possibilities of the case, but large in

proportion to the little band of British and French inventors and

experimentalists. And though this work of research and experiment was

making Britain and France the most rich and powerful countries in the

world, it was not making scientific and inventive men rich and

powerful. There is a necessary unworldliness about a sincere

scientific man; he is too preoccupied with his research to plan and

scheme how to make money out of it. The economic exploitation of his

discoveries falls very easily and naturally, therefore, into the hands

of a more acquisitive type; and so we find that the crops of rich men

which every fresh phase of scientific and technical progress has

produced in Great Britain, though they have not displayed quite the

same passionate desire to insult and kill the goose that laid the

national golden eggs as the scholastic and clerical professions, have

been quite content to let that profitable creature starve. Inventors

and discoverers came by nature, they thought, for cleverer people to

profit by.

In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German “learned”

did not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning. They

permitted its development. The German business man and manufacturer

again had not quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his

British competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a

cultivated crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede,

therefore, a certain amount of opportunity to the scientific mind;

their public expenditure on scientific work was relatively greater, and

this expenditure was abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the

nineteenth century the German scientific worker had made German a

necessary language for every science student who wished to keep abreast

with the latest work in his department, and in certain branches, and

particularly in chemistry, Germany acquired a very great superiority

over her western neighbours. The scientific effort of the sixties and

seventies in Germany began to tell after the eighties, and the German

gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical and industrial

prosperity.

A fresh phase in the history of invention opened when in the eighties a

new type of engine came into use, an engine in which the expansive

force of an explosive mixture replaced the expansive force of steam.

The light, highly efficient engines that were thus made possible were

applied to the automobile, and developed at last to reach such a pitch

of lightness and efficiency as to render flight—long known to be

possible—a practical achievement. A successful flying machine—but not

a machine large enough to take up a human body—was made by Professor

Langley of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early as 1897.

By 1909 the aeroplane was available for human locomotion. There had

seemed to be a pause in the increase of human speed with the perfection

of railways and automobile road traction, but with the flying machine

came fresh reductions in the effective distance between one point of

the earth’s surface and another. In the eighteenth century the

distance from London to Edinburgh was an eight days’ journey; in 1918

the British Civil Air Transport Commission reported that the journey

from London to Melbourne, halfway round the earth, would probably in a

few years’ time be accomplished in that same period of eight days.

Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions in the

time distances of one place from another. They are merely one aspect of

a much profounder and more momentous enlargement of human possibility.

The science of agriculture and agricultural chemistry, for instance,

made quite parallel advances during the nineteenth century. Men learnt

so to fertilize the soil as to produce quadruple and quintuple the

crops got from the same area in the seventeenth century. There was a

still more extraordinary advance in medical science; the average

duration of life rose, the daily efficiency increased, the waste of

life through ill-health diminished.

Now here altogether we have such a change in human life as to

constitute a fresh phase of history. In a little more than a century

this mechanical revolution has been brought about. In that time man

made a stride in the material conditions of his life vaster than he had

done during the whole long interval between the palæolithic stage and

the age of cultivation, or between the days of Pepi in Egypt and those

of George III. A new gigantic material framework for human affairs has

come into existence. Clearly it demands great readjustments of our

social, economical and political methods. But these readjustments have

necessarily waited upon the development of the mechanical revolution,

and they are still only in their opening stage to-day.

56.THE UNEASY PEACE IN EUROPE THAT FOLLOWED THE FALL OF NAPOLEON | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 
BY 
H. G. WELLS

56.THE UNEASY PEACE IN EUROPE THAT FOLLOWED THE FALL OF NAPOLEON  

Two main causes prevented that period from being a complete social and international peace, and prepared the way for the cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency of the royal courts concerned, towards the restoration of unfair privilege and interference with freedom of thought and writing and teaching. The second was the impossible system of boundaries drawn by the diplomatists of Vienna.

The inherent disposition of monarchy to march back towards past

conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain. Here

even the Inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic the Spanish

colonies had followed the example of the United States and revolted

against the European Great Power System, when Napoleon set his brother

Joseph on the Spanish throne in 1810. The George Washington of South

America was General Bolivar. Spain was unable to suppress this revolt,

it dragged on much as the United States War of Independence had dragged

on, and at last the suggestion was made by Austria, in accordance with

the spirit of the Holy Alliance, that the European monarch should

assist Spain in this struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe,

but it was the prompt action of President Monroe of the United States

in 1823 which conclusively warned off this projected monarchist

restoration. He announced that the United States would regard any

extension of the European system in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile

act. Thus arose the Monroe Doctrine, the doctrine that there must be

no extension of extra- American government in America, which has kept

the Great Power system out of America for nearly a hundred years and

permitted the new states of Spanish America to work out their destinies

along their own lines.

But if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at least, under

the protection of the Concert of Europe, do what it chose in Europe. A

popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by a French army in 1823,

with a mandate from a European congress, and simultaneously Austria

suppressed a revolution in Naples.

In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by Charles X. Charles set

himself to destroy the liberty of the press and universities, and to

restore absolute government; the sum of a billion francs was voted to

compensate the nobles for the chateau burnings and sequestrations of

1789. In 1830 Paris rose against this embodiment of the ancient

regime, and replaced him by Louis Philippe, the son of that Philip,

Duke of Orleans, who was executed during the Terror. The other

continental monarchies, in face of the open approval of the revolution

by Great Britain and a strong liberal ferment in Germany and Austria,

did not interfere in this affair. After all, France was still a

monarchy. This man Louis Philippe (1830-48) remained the

constitutional King of France for eighteen years.

Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress of Vienna,

which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings of the monarchists.

The stresses that arose from the unscientific boundaries planned by the

diplomatists at Vienna gathered force more deliberately, but they were

even more dangerous to the peace of mankind. It is extraordinarily

inconvenient to administer together the affairs of peoples speaking

different languages and so reading different literatures and having

different general ideas, especially if those differences are

exacerbated by religious disputes. Only some strong mutual interest,

such as the common defensive needs of the Swiss mountaineers, can

justify a close linking of peoples of dissimilar languages and faiths;

and even in Switzerland there is the utmost local autonomy. When, as in

Macedonia, populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and

districts, the cantonal system is imperatively needed. But if the

reader will look at the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna drew

it, he will see that this gathering seems almost as if it had planned

the maximum of local exasperation.

It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite needlessly, it lumped together

the Protestant Dutch with the French-speaking Catholics of the old

Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and set up a kingdom of the

Netherlands. It handed over not merely the old republic of Venice, but

all of North Italy as far as Milan to the German-speaking Austrians.

French-speaking Savoy it combined with pieces of Italy to restore the

kingdom of Sardinia. Austria and Hungary, already a sufficiently

explosive mixture of discordant nationalities, Germans, Hungarians,

Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Roumanians, and now Italians, was made

still more impossible by confirming Austria’s Polish acquisitions of

1772 and 1795. The Catholic and republican-spirited Polish people were

chiefly given over to the less civilized rule of the Greek-orthodox

Tsar, but important districts went to Protestant Prussia. The Tsar was

also confirmed in his acquisition of the entirely alien Finns. The

very dissimilar Norwegian and Swedish peoples were bound together under

one king. Germany, the reader will see, was left in a particularly

dangerous state of muddle. Prussia and Austria were both partly in and

partly out of a German confederation, which included a multitude of

minor states. The King of Denmark came into the German confederation

by virtue of certain German-speaking possessions in Holstein.

Luxembourg was included in the German confederation, though its ruler

was also King of the Netherlands, and though many of its peoples talked

French.

Here was a complete disregard of the fact that the people who talk

German and base their ideas on German literature, the people who talk

Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature, and the people who

talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature, will all be far

better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to the rest of mankind

if they conduct their own affairs in their own idiom within the

ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder that one of the most

popular songs in Germany during this period declared that wherever the

German tongue was spoken, there was the German Fatherland!
In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the current revolution

in France, revolted against its Dutch association in the kingdom of the

Netherlands. The powers, terrified at the possibilities of a republic

or of annexation to France, hurried in to pacify this situation, and

gave the Belgians a monarch, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. There

were also ineffectual revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a much

more serious one in Russian Poland. A republican government held out

in Warsaw for a year against Nicholas I (who succeeded Alexander in

1825), and was then stamped out of existence with great violence and

cruelty. The Polish language was banned, and the Greek Orthodox church

was substituted for the Roman Catholic as the state religion ....

In 1821 there was an insurrection of the Greeks against the Turks. For

six years they fought a desperate war, while the governments of Europe

looked on. Liberal opinion protested against this inactivity;

volunteers from every European country joined the insurgents, and at

last Britain, France and Russia took joint action. The Turkish fleet

was destroyed by the French and English at the battle of Navarino

(1827), and the Tsar invaded Turkey. By the treaty of Adrianople

(1829) Greece was declared free, but she was not permitted to resume

her ancient republican traditions. A German king was found for Greece,

one Prince Otto of Bavaria, and Christian governors were set up in the

Danubian provinces (which are now Roumania) and Serbia (a part of the

Jugo-Slav region). Much blood had still to run however before the Turk

was altogether expelled from these lands.

55.THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD 
BY 
H. G. WELLS

55.THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE  

Britain had hardly lost the Thirteen Colonies in America before a profound social and political convulsion at the very heart of Grand Monarchy was to remind Europe still more vividly of the essentially temporary nature of the political arrangements of the world.

We have said that the French monarchy was the most successful of the personal monarchies in Europe. It was the envy and model of a multitude of competing and minor courts. But it flourished on a basis of injustice that led to its dramatic collapse. It was brilliant and aggressive, but it was wasteful of the life and substance of its common people. The clergy and nobility were protected from taxation by a system of exemption that threw the whole burden of the state upon the middle and lower classes. The peasants were ground down by taxation; the middle classes were dominated and humiliated by the nobility.

In 1787 this French monarchy found itself bankrupt and obliged to call

representatives of the different classes of the realm into consultation

upon the perplexities of defective income and excessive expenditure.

In 1789 the States General, a gathering of the nobles, clergy and

commons, roughly equivalent to the earlier form of the British

Parliament, was called together at Versailles. It had not assembled

since 1610. For all that time France had been an absolute monarchy.

Now the people found a means of expressing their long fermenting

discontent. Disputes immediately broke out between the three estates,

due to the resolve of the Third Estate, the Commons, to control the

Assembly. The Commons got the better of these disputes and the States

General became a National Assembly, clearly resolved to keep the crown

in order, as the British Parliament kept the British crown in order.

The king (Louis XVI) prepared for a struggle and brought up troops from

the provinces. Whereupon Paris and France revolted.

The collapse of the absolute monarchy was very swift. The grim-looking

prison of the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris, and the

insurrection spread rapidly throughout France. In the east and

north-west provinces many chateaux belonging to the nobility were burnt

by the peasants, their title-deeds carefully destroyed, and the owners

murdered or driven away. In a month the ancient and decayed system of

the aristocratic order had collapsed. Many of the leading princes and

courtiers of the queen’s party fled abroad. A provisional city

government was set up in Paris and in most of the other large cities,

and a new armed force, the National Guard, a force designed primarily

and plainly to resist the forces of the crown, was brought into

existence by these municipal bodies. The National Assembly found

itself called upon to create a new political and social system for a

new age.


It was a task that tried the powers of that gathering to the utmost.

It made a great sweep of the chief injustices of the absolutist regime;

it abolished tax exemptions, serfdom, aristocratic titles and

privileges and sought to establish a constitutional monarchy in Paris.

The king abandoned Versailles and its splendours and kept a diminished

state in the palace of the Tuileries in Paris.

For two years it seemed that the National Assembly might struggle

through to an effective modernized government. Much of its work was

sound and still endures, if much was experimental and had to be undone.

Much was ineffective. There was a clearing up of the penal code;

torture, arbitrary imprisonment and persecutions for heresy were

abolished. The ancient provinces of France, Normandy, Burgundy and the

like gave place to eighty departments. Promotion to the highest ranks

in the army was laid open to men of every class. An excellent and

simple system of law courts was set up, but its value was much vitiated

by having the judges appointed by popular election for short periods of

time. This made the crowd a sort of final court of appeal, and the

judges, like the members of the Assembly, were forced to play to the

gallery. And the whole vast property of the church was seized and

administered by the state; religious establishments not engaged in

education or works of charity were broken up, and the salaries of the

clergy made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad

thing for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously

underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addition

the choice of priests and bishops was made elective, which struck at

the very root idea of the Roman Church, which centred everything upon

the Pope, and in which all authority is from above downward.

Practically the National Assembly wanted at one blow to make the church

in France Protestant, in organization if not in doctrine. Everywhere

there were disputes and conflicts between the state priests created by

the National Assembly and the recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who

were loyal to Rome.

In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in France was brought

to an abrupt end by the action of the king and queen, working in

concert with their aristocratic and monarchist friends abroad. Foreign

armies gathered on the Eastern frontier and one night in June the king

and queen and their children slipped away from the Tuileries and fled

to join the foreigners and the aristocratic exiles. They were caught

at Varennes and brought back to Paris, and an France flamed up into a

passion of patriotic republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open

war with Austria and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and

executed (January, 1793) on the model already set by England, for

treason to his people.

And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French people.

There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and the Republic.

There was to be an end to compromise at home and abroad; at home

royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out; abroad

France was to be the protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All

Europe, all the world, was to become Republican. The youth of France

poured into the Republican armies; a new and wonderful song spread

through the land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the

Marseillaise. Before that chant and the leaping columns of French

bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies

rolled back; before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far

beyond the utmost achievements of Louis XIV; everywhere they stood on

foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had overrun Savoy, they had

raided to Mayence; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland. Then the

French Government did an unwise thing. It had been exasperated by the

expulsion of its representative from England upon the execution of

Louis, and it declared war against England. It was an unwise thing to

do, because the revolution which had given France a new enthusiastic

infantry and a brilliant artillery released from its aristocratic

officers and many cramping conditions had destroyed the discipline of

the navy, and the English were supreme upon the sea. And this

provocation united all England against France, whereas there had been

at first a very considerable liberal movement in Great Britain in

sympathy with the revolution.
Of the fight that France made in the next few years against a European

coalition we cannot tell in any detail. She drove the Austrians for

ever out of Belgium, and made Holland a republic. The Dutch fleet,

frozen in the Texel, surrendered to a handful of cavalry without firing

its guns. For some time the French thrust towards Italy was hung up,

and it was only in 1796 that a new general, Napoleon Bonaparte, led the

ragged and hungry republican armies in triumph across Piedmont to

Mantua and Verona. Says C. F. Atkinson, [1] “What astonished the

Allies most of all was the number and the velocity of the Republicans.

These improvised armies had in fact nothing to delay them. Tents were

unprocurable for want of money, untransportable for want of the

enormous number of wagons that would have been required, and also

unnecessary, for the discomfort that would have caused wholesale

desertion in professional armies was cheerfully borne by the men of

1793- 94. Supplies for armies of then unheard-of size could not be

carried in convoys, and the French soon became familiar with ‘living on

the country.’ Thus 1793 saw the birth of the modern system of

war—rapidity of movement, full development of national strength,

bivouacs, requisitions and force as against cautious manœuvring, small

professional armies, tents and full rations, and chicane. The first

represented the decision-compelling spirit, the second the spirit of

risking little to gain a little .”

And while these ragged hosts of enthusiasts were chanting the

Marseillaise and fighting for _la France_, manifestly never quite clear

in their minds whether they were looting or liberating the countries

into which they poured, the republican enthusiasm in Paris was spending

itself in a far less glorious fashion. The revolution was now under

the sway of a fanatical leader, Robespierre. This man is difficult to

judge; he was a man of poor physique, naturally timid, and a prig. But

he had that most necessary gift for power, faith. He set himself to

save the Republic as he conceived it, and he imagined it could be saved

by no other man than he. So that to keep in power was to save the

Republic. The living spirit of the Republic, it seemed, had sprung

from a slaughter of royalists and the execution of the king. There

were insurrections; one in the west, in the district of La Vendée,

where the people rose against the conscription and against the

dispossession of the orthodox clergy, and were led by noblemen and

priests; one in the south, where Lyons and Marseilles had risen and the

royalists of Toulon had admitted an English and Spanish garrison. To

which there seemed no more effectual reply than to go on killing

royalists.

The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering

began. The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood.

The queen was guillotined, most of Robespierre’s antagonists were

guillotined, atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were

guillotined; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine

chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre

lived, it seemed, on blood; and needed more and more, as an opium-taker

needs more and more opium.
Finally in the summer of 1794 Robespierre himself was overthrown and

guillotined. He was succeeded by a Directory of five men which carried

on the war of defence abroad and held France together at home for five

years. Their reign formed a curious interlude in this history of

violent changes. They took things as they found them. The

propagandist zeal of the revolution carried the French armies into

Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, south Germany and north Italy.

Everywhere kings were expelled and republics set up. But such

propagandist zeal as animated the Directorate did not prevent the

looting of the treasures of the liberated peoples to relieve the

financial embarrassment of the French Government. Their wars became

less and less the holy wars of freedom, and more and more like the

aggressive wars of the ancient regime. The last feature of Grand

Monarchy that France was disposed to discard was her tradition of

foreign policy. One discovers it still as vigorous under the

Directorate as if there had been no revolution.

Unhappily for France and the world a man arose who embodied in its

intensest form this national egotism of the French. He gave that

country ten years of glory and the humiliation of a final defeat. This

was that same Napoleon Bonaparte who had led the armies of the

Directory to victory in Italy.

Throughout the five years of the Directorate he had been scheming and

working for self-advancement. Gradually he clambered to supreme power.

He was a man of severely limited understanding but of ruthless

directness and great energy. He had begun life as an extremist of the

school of Robespierre; he owed his first promotion to that side; but he

had no real grasp of the new forces that were working in Europe. His

utmost political imagination carried him to a belated and tawdry

attempt to restore the Western Empire. He tried to destroy the remains

of the old Holy Roman Empire, intending to replace it by a new one

centring upon Paris. The Emperor in Vienna ceased to be the Holy Roman

Emperor and became simply Emperor of Austria. Napoleon divorced his

French wife in order to marry an Austrian princess.

He became practically monarch of France as First Consul in 1799, and he

made himself Emperor of France in 1804 in direct imitation of

Charlemagne. He was crowned by the Pope in Paris, taking the crown

from the Pope and putting it upon his own head himself as Charlemagne

had directed. His son was crowned King of Rome.

For some years Napoleon’s reign was a career of victory. He conquered

most of Italy and Spain, defeated Prussia and Austria, and dominated

all Europe west of Russia. But he never won the command of the sea

from the British and his fleets sustained a conclusive defeat inflicted

by the British Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar (1805). Spain rose against

him in 1808 and a British army under Wellington thrust the French

armies slowly northward out of the peninsula. In 1811 Napoleon came

into conflict with the Tsar Alexander I, and in 1812 he invaded Russia

with a great conglomerate army of 600,000 men, that was defeated and

largely destroyed by the Russians and the Russian winter. Germany rose

against him, Sweden turned against him. The French armies were beaten

back and at Fontainebleau Napoleon abdicated (1814). He was exiled to

Elba, returned to France for one last effort in 1815 and was defeated

by the allied British, Belgians and Prussians at Waterloo. He died a

British prisoner at St. Helena in 1821.

The forces released by the French revolution were wasted and finished.

A great Congress of the victorious allies met at Vienna to restore as

far as possible the state of affairs that the great storm had rent to

pieces. For nearly forty years a sort of peace, a peace of exhausted

effort, was maintained in Europe.