Ageofabsolutism1012656mbp.Pdf
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
129 365 THE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM 16601815 MAX BELOFF Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration in the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College HARPER TORCHBOOKS y THE ACADEMY LIBRARY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK to P.D.W. TEE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM, 1660-1815 Printed in the United States of America This book was originally published in thf History series of the Hutchinson University Library, edited by Sir Maurice Powicke, in 1954, and is reprinted by arrange- ment with Hutchinson fc? Co., Ltd., London. First HARPER TORCHBOOK edition published 1062 CONTENTS Preface X I The Age Defined 1 1 II The European Scene: 16601789 28 in France 46 iv Spain and Portugal 77 v Prussia and Austria 104 VI Russia and Poland 133 vil The Maritime Powers and the American Revolution 152 viil Absolutism in Transformation: 17891815 170 A Note on Books 1 83 Index 185 MAPS The Great Powers of Europe: 1660 vi-vii The Great Powers of Europe: 1789 180-181 THE GREAT POWERS OF EUROPE : 1660 - Brandenburg Prussia W///f///^ Swedish Empire iiinmiini|p Venice rv^vj 200 400 MILES RUSSIA "GEOGRAPHIA" LTD PREFACE THE suggestion that I might write an essay on the Age of Absolutism was made to me by Sir Maurice Powicke a number of years ago at a time when I was working on the American Revolution. But for his constant and kindly encouragement, I would long ago have abandoned the attempt, deterred by the difficulty of the theme and the doubts which were bound to arise as to the method of treatment. What follows is by no means to be thought of as a compendium of eighteenth-century European history. I have tried instead to emphasize some elements in the society and politics of the period which appear to be of most consequence from the point of view of those whose interest in history is the pragmatic one of trying to understand their own times. To look at a political system from the point of view of the revolution which brought it to an end may seem needlessly perverse: in the space allotted to me, it has certainly meant omitting much which a full portrait of the age would demand. I can only hope that the starkness of outline which such selectivity imposes will help to reveal in their due importance certain aspects of the period which a fuller and more conventional treatment might fail sufficiently to emphasize. I am deeply indebted to Mr. John Bromley, Fellow of Keble College, for his constructive reading of the proofs. I am also grateful to Miss Molly Rubin of St. Hilda's College for assist- ance with the index. M.B. Oxford, October 1953. CHAPTER I THE AGE DEFINED THE choice of an historical period as the subject of a book is itself an intellectual commitment, since the notion of period is arbitrarily imposed upon a continuous development. But it is one of the choices that have to be made, if history is to be intelligible. The problem has often been avoided by recourse to the habit of thinking in centuries a habit that comes naturally to people brought up on a decimal system of numerals. So pervasive is this tendency that some historians have written as though the centuries themselves were the subject of their inquiry, and have attempted to define an "eighteenth century" or "nineteenth century" attitude or style. The phrase fin de siecle meaning decadent is used about writers of the 1890s in oblivion of the fact that the 1790s were for a whole generation of poets an era of rebirth and renewal, when "to be young was very heaven". Equally dangerous are terms that carry in themselves the description of an age and are so broad and general that no precise chronological limits can reasonably be assigned to them. Anyone who is aware of the prolonged and sometimes acrimonious discussions as to when the "Renaissance" took place or as to what centuries fall within the "Dark Ages", can see into what purely verbal entanglements one is ensnared. The period 1660-1815 designated here as the "Age of Absolutism" can easily be assailed as providing* a framework that helps to conceal as many important lines of demarcation as it suggests. And there is much truth in this argument. The historian whose main interests lie in economic life would point out, for instance, that the first half of the eighteenth century saw little change in the techniques of production or in the economic relations resulting from them. In the latter half of the century, however, there took place the first of those major changes that are usually classed together as the "indus- 11 12 THE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM trial revolution", so that at the end of our period the "railway age" with all that the phrase implies is almost upon us. The new science of the demographers has noted that it is at some point within the period probably about 1750 that there begins a considerable acceleration in the rate at which thfe population of Europe increased, after long centuries of relative stability. We may roughly estimate they tell us, the population of Europe in 1700 as 118,500,000, in 1750 as 140,000,000 and in 1800 as 187,000,000. And they are no doubt right in asserting that such a change of which the causes are still obscure, had profound intellectual as well as social effects, so that the middle of the eighteenth century becomes the real turning point. Yet to those who argue in this way, it is possible to answer that the change in the economic structure and in mortality rates rested on technical developments that were themselves the product of major theoretical advances in the natural sciences, and that these were on their way to being accomplished in the middle of the seventeenth century. This scientific revolution that we may try to locate within the familiar history of this island by thinking of the discussions leading to the formation of the Royal Society as taking place during the turmoil of our own Interregnum in the 1650s, increasingly appears to historians as of at least equal importance with the revival of classical studies in Italy two centuries earlier. Nor of course was the development in technique, in the control and utilization by man of natural resources, the only result of this scientific revolution. This was one of the ways in which it reacted upon the problems of society and government. For only the relative peace and stability conferred upon the countries of western Europe by the strong governments of the early part of the "Age of Absolutism" could provide the social atmosphere within which the sciences could flourish, and economic life with them. On the other hand the social impact of economic advance whose benefits were necessarily unevenly distributed as between one class or group and another, presented the biggest of the problems faced by the legislator and administrator. In a relatively static society the prescriptions of monarchical absolutism might have worked better and its institutions have proved fnore durable. And furthermore, this THE AGE DEFINED 13 new pre-occupation with mathematics was an essential element in the novel governmental attitudes of the period. In the second half of the seventeenth century men like Sir William Petty in England and Vauban in France, began to turn to the possibility of using the statistical method for the study and regulation of society, for purposes more far-reaching and subtle than the simple inquiries into individual and local taxable capacity that inspired Domesday Book and the other surveys of the Middle Ages. One can find precedents indeed, for the attention paid by Louis XIV's great minister Colbert to the collection and analysis of statistics. But it was during his period of office that the regularity and continuity of the practice was first established. In an absolute monarchy the purpose of statistical inquiries such as those in the 1690s by the Intendants (chief administrative officers) of the thirty-two "generalities" into which France was divided for governmental purposes was still to aid the monarchy in its task, and their findings were consequently regarded as State secrets, as they continued to be in absolutist Russia well into the nineteenth century. The Swiss banker Necker, who was the French minister of finance in the period immediately before the Revolution was one of the earliest advocates of the publication, and interchange, of statistical information. Because of the popular belief that such knowledge could benefit only the government and not the subject, the collection of this information was unpopular. A bill for a census in Great Britain was rejected in 1753 as dangerous to the liberties of the subject. And although there were partial and inaccurate attempts at a census in countries as far apart as Spain and Sweden, and in various other lands, it was necessary in this field of government as in others, to await the coming of democ- racy to do what the old absolutism had proved too weak to accomplish. The first modern census was that of the United States in 1790; the French Constituent Assembly ordered one in 1791 but it was not carried out properly; and the first real census in France as in Britain dates from 1801. This relative inaccessibility of the necessary information even though compensated for to some extent, by non-official 14 THE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM of investigations such as the celebrated inquiry Gregory King into the population and wealth of England in the reign of William III may help to explain why the theoretical apparatus of economics in its modern sense took so long to develop despite the long history (going back at least to the fifteenth century) of intellectual inquiry into isolated economic phenomena such as foreign exchange rates.