The period from 1789 to 1815—that is, the era of the French Revolution and of the domination of Napoleon—marks one of the most important transitions in the history of Europe. Great as is the difference between the material condition of the Europe of the nineteenth century, with its railways and its electric telegraphs, and the Europe of the eighteenth century, with its bad roads and uncertain posts, it is not greater than the contrast between the political, social, and economical ideas which prevailed then and which prevail now. Modern principles, that mark a new departure in human progress and in its evidence, Civilisation, took their rise during this epoch of transition, and their development underlies the history of the period, and gives the key to its meaning.

The conception that government exists for the promotion of the security and prosperity of the governed was fully grasped in the eighteenth century. But it was held alike by philosophers and rulers, alike in civilised England and in Russia emerging from barbarism that, whilst government existed for the good of the people, it must not be administered by the people. This fundamental principle is in the nineteenth century entirely denied. It is now believed that the government should be directed by the people through their representatives, and that it is better for a nation to make mistakes in the course of its self-government than to be ruled, be it ever so wisely, by an irresponsible monarch. This notion of the sovereignty of the people was energetically propounded during the great Revolution in France. It is not yet universally accepted in all the states of modern Europe. But it has profoundly affected the political development of the nineteenth century. It lies at the base of one group of modern political ideas; and, though in 1815 it seemed to have been propounded only to be condemned, one of the most striking features of the modern history of Europe since the Congress of Vienna, has been its gradual acceptance and steady growth in civilised countries.

The second political belief introduced during the epoch of transition from 1789 to 1815 was the recognition of the idea of nationality in contradistinction to that of the State, which prevailed in the last century. In the eighteenth century the State was typified by the ruling authority. National boundaries and race limits were regarded as of no importance. It was not felt to be an anomaly that the Catholic Netherlands or Belgium should be governed by the House of Austria, or that an Austrian prince should reign in Tuscany and a Spanish prince in Naples. The first partition of Poland was not condemned as an offence against nature, but as an artful scheme devised for the purpose of enlarging the neighbouring states, which had appropriated the districts lying nearest to their own territories. But during the wars of the Revolution and of Napoleon the idea of nationality made itself felt. France, as a nation in arms, proved to be more than a match for the Europe of the old conceptions. And it was not until her own sense of nationality was absorbed in Napoleon’s creation of a new Empire of the West that France was vanquished by coming in contact with the Spanish, the Russian, and the German peoples in the place of her former foes, the sovereigns of Europe. The idea of nationality, like the idea of the sovereignty of the people, seemed to be condemned in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna. The Catholic Netherlands were united with the provinces of Holland; Norway was forcibly separated from Denmark; Italy was once more parcelled out into independent states under foreign princes. But the Congress of Vienna could not eradicate the new idea. It had taken too deep a root. And another striking feature of the European history of the nineteenth century has been the formation of new nations, resting their raison d’Être on the feeling of nationality and the identity of race.

The third modern notion which has transformed Europe is the recognition of the principle of personal and individual liberty. Feudalism left the impress of its graduation of rights and duties marked deeply on the constitutions of the European States. The sovereignty of the people implies political liberty of action; feudalism denied the propriety and advantages of social and economical freedom. Theoretically, freedom of individual thought and action was acknowledged to be a good thing by all wise philosophers and rulers. Practically, the poorer classes were kept in bondage either as agricultural serfs by their lords or as journeymen workmen by the trade-guilds. Where personal and individual liberty had been attained, political liberty became an object of ambition, and political liberty led to the idea of the sovereignty of the people. The last vestiges of feudalism were swept away during this era of transition. The doctrines of the French Revolution did more than the victories of Napoleon to destroy the political system of the eighteenth century. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 might return to the former notions of government and the State, but it did not attempt to restore the old restrictions on individual liberty. With personal freedom acknowledged, the reactionary tendency of the Congress of Vienna was left of no effect. Liberty of thought and action led to the resurrection of the conceptions of nationality and of the sovereignty of the people, which were but for the moment extinguished by the defeat of France in the person of Napoleon by the armies of united Europe.

The period which preceded the French Revolution and the era of war, from the troubles of which modern Europe was to be born, may be characterised as that of the benevolent despots. The State was everything; the nation nothing. The ruler was supreme, but his supremacy rested on the assumption that he ruled his subjects for their good. This conception of the AufgeklÄrte Despotismus was developed to its highest degree by Frederick the Great of Prussia. ‘I am but the first servant of the nation,’ he wrote, a phrase which irresistibly recalls the definition of the position of Louis XVI. by the first leaders of the French Revolution. This attitude was defended by great thinkers like Diderot, and is the keynote to the internal policy of the monarchs of the latter half of the eighteenth century towards their people. The Empress Catherine of Russia, Gustavus III. of Sweden, Charles III. of Spain, the Archduke Leopold of Tuscany, and, above all, the Emperor Joseph II. defended their absolutism on the ground that they exercised their power for the good of their subjects. Never was more earnest zeal displayed in promoting the material well-being of all classes, never did monarchs labour so hard to justify their existence, or effect such important civil reforms, as on the eve of the French Revolution, which was to herald the overthrow of the doctrine of absolute monarchy. The intrinsic weakness of the position of the benevolent despots was that they could not ensure the permanence of their reforms, or vivify the rotten fabric of the administrative edifices, which had grown up in the feudal monarchies. Great ministers, such as Tanucci and Aranda, could do much to help their masters to carry out their benevolent ideas, but they could not form or nominate their successors, or create a perfect body of unselfish administrators. When Frederick the Great’s master hand was withdrawn, Prussia speedily exhibited a condition of administrative decay, and since this was the case in Prussia, which had been for more than forty years under the rule of the greatest and wisest of the benevolent despots, the falling-off was likely to be even more marked in other countries. The conception of benevolent despots ruling for their people’s good was eventually superseded, as was certain to be the case, owing to the impossibility of their ensuring its permanence, by the modern idea of the people ruling themselves.

And, in truth, while doing full justice to the sentiments and the endeavours of the benevolent despots, it cannot honestly be said that their efforts had done much to improve the condition of the labouring classes by the end of the eighteenth century. The great majority of the peasants of Europe were throughout that century absolute serfs. To take once more the example of Prussia, the only attempts to improve the condition of the peasants had been made in the royal domain, and they had only been very tentative. The dwellers on the estates of the Prussian nobility in Silesia and Brandenburg were treated no better than negro slaves in America and the West Indies. They were not allowed to leave their villages, or to marry without their lords’ consent; their children had to serve in the lords’ families for several years at a nominal wage, and they themselves had to labour at least three days, and often six days, a week on their lords’ estate. These corvÉes or forced labours occupied so much of the peasant’s time that he could only cultivate his own farm by moonlight. This state of absolute serfdom was general in Central and Eastern Europe, in the greater part of Germany, in Poland and in Russia, and where it existed the artisan class was equally depressed, for no man was allowed to learn a trade without his lord’s permission, and an escaped serf had no chance of admission into the trade-guilds of the cities. Towards the west a more advanced civilisation improved the condition of the labourers; the Italian peasant and the German peasant on the Rhine had obtained freedom to marry without his lord’s interference; but, nevertheless, it was a leading prince on the Rhine, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects to England to serve as mercenaries in the American War of Independence. In France the peasant was far better off. The only serfs left, who existed on the domain of the Abbey of Saint-Claude in the Jura, on whose behalf Voltaire wielded his powerful pen, were in a far happier condition than the German serfs; they could marry whom they pleased; they might emigrate without leave; their persons were free; all they were deprived of was the power of selling their property or devising it by will. The rest of the French peasants and the agricultural classes generally were extremely independent. Feudalism had left them some annoyances but few real grievances, and the inconveniences they suffered were due solely to the inequalities of the copyhold system of tenure and its infringements of their personal liberty. The French peasants and farmers were indignant at an occasional day’s corvÉe, or forced labour, which really represented the modern rent, and at the succession-duties they had to pay the descendants or representatives of their ancestors’ feudal lords. The German, Polish, and Hungarian peasant, on the contrary, crushed beneath the burden of his personal servitude, did not dream of pretending to own the plot of land, which his lord kindly allowed him to cultivate in his few spare moments.

The mass of the population of Central and Eastern Europe was purely agricultural, and in its poverty expected naught but the bare necessaries of existence. Trade, commerce, and manufactures were therefore practically non-existent. This meant that the cities, and consequently the middle classes, formed but an insignificant factor in the population. In the West of Europe, on the Rhine, and more especially in France, where the agricultural classes were more independent, more wealthy, and more civilised, existence demanded more comforts, and a well-to-do and intelligent commercial and manufacturing urban element quickly developed to supply the demand created. Commerce, trade, and the concentrated employment of labour produced a prosperous and enlightened middle class, accustomed for generations to education and the possession of personal freedom. With wealth always goes civilisation and education, and as there was a larger middle class in France and Western Germany than in Central and Eastern Europe, the peasants in those parts were better educated and more intelligent.

The condition of the upper classes followed the same geographical distribution. The highest aristocracy of all European countries was indeed, as it has always been, on much the same intellectual and social level. Paris was its centre, the capital of society, fashion, and luxury, where Russian, Austrian, Swedish, and English nobles met on an equality. But the bulk of the German and Eastern European aristocracy was in education and refinement inferior to the bulk of the French nobility. Yet they possessed an authority which the French nobility had lost. The Russian, Prussian, and Austrian nobleman and the Hungarian magnate was the owner of thousands of serfs, who cultivated his lands and rendered him implicit obedience. The French nobleman exacted only certain rents, either copyhold quit-rents or feudal services, from the tenants on his ancestral estates. His tenants were in no sense his serfs; they owed him no personal service, and resented the payment of the rent substituted for such service. The patriarchal feeling of loyalty to the lord had long disappeared, and the French peasant did not acknowledge any subjection to his landlord, while the Prussian and Russian serf recognised his bondage to his master.

These considerations help to show why the Revolution, which was after twenty-six years to inaugurate modern Europe, broke out in France. It was because the French peasant was more independent, more wealthy, and better educated than the German serf, that he resented the political and social privileges of his landlord and the payment of rent, more than the serf objected to his bondage. It was because France possessed an enlightened middle class that the peasants and workmen found leaders. It was because Frenchmen had been in the possession of a great measure of personal freedom that they were ready to strike a blow for political liberty, and eventually promulgated the idea of social equality. The ideas of the sovereignty of the people, of nationality and of personal liberty, did not originate in France. They are as old as civilisation. But they had been clouded in the Middle Ages by feudalism, and, after the Reformation, had been succeeded by different political conceptions, which had crystallised in the eighteenth century into the doctrines of the supremacy of the State, of the arbitrary rule of benevolent or enlightened despots. England and Holland had developed separately from the rest of the Western World. For reasons lying deep in their internal history and their geographical position, they had rid themselves alike of feudalism and absolute monarchy; they had developed a sense of their independent nationality, and had recognised the importance of personal freedom. In England especially, the abolition of the relics of feudalism in the seventeenth century had placed the English farmers and peasants in a different economical position from their fellows on the Continent. There existed in England none of the invidious distinctions between nobleman and roturier in the matter of bearing national burdens, which had survived in France, and, though owing to the curiosities of the franchise the larger proportion of Englishmen had but a very small share in electing the representatives of the people, the government carried on as it was by a small oligarchy of great families possessed an appearance of political liberty, and of a wisely-balanced machine for administrative purposes.

Nor must the influence of intellectual ideas, as bearing on problems which the French Revolution was to force on the attention of the more backward and more oppressed nations of Europe, be underrated. The great French writers of the eighteenth century—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau—had been deeply impregnated with the ideas of Locke and the English political thinkers of his school. In their different lines they insisted that government existed for the good of the governed, and investigated the origins of government and the relations of man in the social state. It was their speculations which altered the character of absolute monarchy and based its retention on its benevolent purposes; they, too, insisted upon the rights of man to preserve his personal freedom, as long as it did not clash with the maintenance and security of civil society. The great French writers of the eighteenth century exercised by their works a smaller influence on the outbreak and actual course of the French Revolution than has been generally supposed. The causes of the movement were chiefly economical and political, not philosophical or social: its rapid development was due to historical circumstances, and mainly to the attitude of the rest of Europe. But the text-books of its leaders were the works of the French thinkers of the eighteenth century, and if their doctrines had little actual influence in bringing about the Revolution, they influenced its development and the extension of its principles throughout Europe. It is curious to contrast the opinions of the great French writers of the middle of the eighteenth century, whose arguments mainly affected the general conceptions of man living in society, that is, of government, with the views advocated by the great German writers of the end of the century, who concentrated their attention upon man in his individual capacity for culture and self-improvement. Schiller, Goethe, Kant, and Herder were, further, more cosmopolitan than German. The problems of man and his intellectual and artistic development proved more attractive to the great German thinkers than the difficulties presented by the economical, social, and political diversities of different classes of society. Goethe, for instance, understood the signification of the French Revolution, and was much interested in its effects on the human race, but he cared very little about its impression on Germany.

Finally, the low state of morality in the eighteenth century had sapped the earnestness in the cause of humanity of men of all classes in all countries. Disbelief in the Christian religion was general in both the Protestant and Catholic countries of the Continent. The immorality of most of the prelates in Catholic countries was notorious, and was equalled by their avowed contempt for the doctrines of the religion they professed to teach. The Protestant pastors of Germany were quite as open in their infidelity. In the famous case of Schulz, the pastor of Gielsdorf, who openly denied Christianity, and taught simply that morality was necessary, the High Consistory of Berlin held that he was, nevertheless, still fitted to hold his office as the Lutheran pastor of his village. Christianity in both Catholic and Protestant countries was replaced by the vague sentiments of morality, which are best presented in Rousseau’s Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard. In reaction to this vague and dogmaless morality, there existed many secret societies and coteries of mystics, such as the Rosati and the Illuminati, who replaced religion by ornate and symbolical ceremonies.

Such was the political, economical, intellectual and moral state of Europe in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution. The whole continent was to pass through twenty-six years of almost unceasing war, at the end of which it was to emerge with new conceptions and new ideals of both political and social life. The new ideas seemed indeed to be checked, if not destroyed, in 1815, but once inspired into men’s minds they could not be forgotten, and their subsequent development forms the history of modern Europe in the nineteenth century.