Modern Lessons From Medieval History 9
Created | Updated Dec 11, 2011
Part 9: THE MARRYING OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE
As Dr. Thomson observed the struggles between England and France did much to shape Europe in the modern age, and it was a France still intimately involved in the prosperous regions of the Northern Italian Peninsular that was able to aspire to the maintenance of something like a Roman Empire after a brief Spanish "Golden Age". Spanish power led to an understandable dream of what Dr. Thomson described as "world domination" through the newly powerful Holy Roman Empire of Charles V. But, like Charlemagne before him, Charles V decided that the task was too much for one ruler and divided his Empire into Spanish and Austrian sections, and Spain lacked the advantages of France both in its lands and rivers and its proximity to Italy. French ascendancy over Europe became the aspiration of the "Grand Design" of Louis XIV, and then of "Revolutionary" and Napoleonic France, and resistance to such continental "superpowers" shaped an England capable of defensive "dog-fighting" in order to protect its way of life.
FRANCE- THE HOME OF HIGH CULTURE AND GREAT CIVILIZATION
The French connection with Italy is reflected in the way that both Leonardo da Vinci and Catherine de Medici made their homes in France as France once again became a power in Lombardy, the military excursion into Northern Italy accounting also for the acquisition of masters of Italian "cuisine", which the French proceded to perfect into 'haute cuisine". And, if English merchants were happy to find new sources of commodities in the Americas and luxury goods in Asia, and British colonists were happy to plant new colonies just to live a hand-to-mouth existence in the wilderness, France did not lack for land and had been producing luxury goods from its land to export to the Mediterranean Civilizations since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, who had learned to appreciate the wine of Burgundy.
So the French understood more deeply the economic value of Civilization and need for a pursuit of excellence in order to compete in markets set amongst the "Glittering Prizes" of the Mediterranean which attracted merchandise from almost all over the world. In such a region in ancient times the Phoenicians had constructed a whole economic system from establishing purple as the 'special reserve' colour of Emperors and Kings, the very top-end of the luxury market served up with dyes from the murex shell-fish. And its purchasers were only too happy to pay the premium price that meant that mere pretenders would be excluded. Generally speaking, however, the natural unit of "The Ancient World" seems to have been the City State.
A City State was most commonly a port/city with a hinterland which served as a domestic market and as a supplier of food, commodities and raw materials, not only for consumption but also for export. To this end the various levels of their societies provided stratified markets with the luxury end, and the "temple building", or its equivalent justified a large investment in skills and products that could be sold, at home or abroad, for prices that represented a return on the investment. Thus the skills of a Michelangelo were very closely linked to the marble quarries in the hills that produced the raw materials of Renaissance building in both men and material. And over recent years the British public have become more accustomed to the products of Mediterranean lands that are stocked by "delicatessents", invaribly, like expensive wines, liquors etc produced on the basis of descriminating selection of ingredients, considerable skill and training and long years of experience, and sometimes years of stocking to "mature" correctly. The fact that so many of these city-states had immediate access to the great highway of the Mediterraean Sea complex probably served only to accentuate the fact that any sense of Professor Barker's "sticking together" was essentially local and both Ancient and Medieval History in these regions is marked by conflicts and rivalries between cities and difficulties in establishing clear and general legitimacy.
In so far as France aspired to be at least "Romanesque" this pronounced provincialism and tendency to fall into civil war, or conflicts like the Hundred Years War with England, in which foreign monarchs had high feudal rank and claim to the throne in France was a recurring problem, and one which King Louis XIV sought to resolve for good through two great building projects. The brilliant engineer Vauban was engaged in fortifying a France that Louis XIV tried to push out to its natural frontiers: and on a piece of swampy-marshy land to the South West of Paris Louis built the Palace of Versailles to act as a kind of secular temple-complex from which "The Sun King" could watch France revolving around him.
Perhaps Louis had in mind events like the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre that showed how difficult it was to keep Paris under control, and he might have considered the English experience of King Charles I, who felt finally obliged to flee from London towards Hull, to be refused entry into England's second city and to go inland to raise his standard calling loyal subjects to fight to re-establish his power. In the English Civil War that followed, as in France, there was evident provincial resentment over the wealth and power of the capital city and metropolis. When Louis XIV assumed the reigns of power France also was coming out of a period of Civil War, and perhaps Louis was not fully aware of the consequences of ignoring the economic forces which seem very evidently now to be the real foundations of any collective power.
In England the London-financed Parliamentarian forces won the Civil War. But it led to the execution of the monarch and a period not only of a republican Commonwealth, but also to the Rule of the Major Generals during which not only was London courtless, but also many other sources of wealth generation were stamped out. John Evelyn searched in vain for a Church where even a Christmas service would take place, let alone a Thames Frost Fair, or any of the other things that might attract people into London to make and spend money. The Restoration of the Royal Court in 1660 brought London back to life, and probably too precipitavely. It was a London bursting at the seams that suffered the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666. But Sir Christopher Wren's new St. Paul's Cathedral was a really confident and positive statement that London was back as the centre of State and of Church at least in the public eye. The photo of the dome of St. Paul's amidst the great fires of The London Blitz was one of the iconic images of British defiance and resolve during the Second World War
****************************************************************
But Medieval England had made the export of its raw wool crop a national "Staple" trade leaving the higher value work of making fine cloth to the Tuscans, and also to the growing Flanders textile industry situated at the northern end of the corridor across Europe from Italy that Charlemagne bequeathed to one of his sons. So it was a conventional truth observed by Matthew Arnold in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, who contrasted the conversation he could have with a French peasant with that possible with an English country labourer. The latter was grounded in his roots by centuries of English stability and evolution providing for ‘simple rights’ in a land with a tradition of liberty.
But the French man inherited a very different tradition, one in which the state was not based upon any pre-existing Society. It was the work of monarchical power that imposed a unified state on polyglot and varied societies and communities. And, though ‘Saint Louis’ had set the benchmark and standard for a monarchy that deserved to be obeyed, ‘Charles the Spider’ was a very different matter. The natural consequence was that French people and communities learned to be “a law unto them selves” often only complying with the State through its powers of coercion and compulsion.
Of course from at least the time of Voltaire’s “English Letters” some French people have wondered- to paraphrase Bernard Shaw’s Professor Higgins- why a French person can not be more like an English one. An Anglo-Saxon sense of a French inadequacy in terms of ‘sticking together’ pervades Henri Amouroux’s 1977 study of France under the German occupation as a new Europe was emerging heavily based on Anglo-Saxon, or just “Saxon”, models.
But, in spite of his own published remarks about the sad decline of the proud French martial tradition in the late twenties, Charles de Gaulle always resented the way that the British assumed some kind of superiority over the French because of the manner and the haste with which the French accepted the German victory. For, while both France and England, and world history, had been shaped by the conflict between these two nations, England had always had that precious advantage of being on a ‘sceptred isle’. It was something that the French could never achieve with their greater surface area and longer frontiers that could never be made inviolate, not even by the genius of Vauban and great works of fortification like Verdun and the Maginot Line. So De Gaulle always insisted that the British people would have behaved just like the French had the Germans actually managed to land their invasion force. It does seem quite possible, however, that the first serious invaders to land for nine hundred years might have been resisted harder than French. The French people had very good reason to be war-weary and some of these old issues came to the fore as Britain and the USA decided to take wage a military war against terrorism.
For 9/11 had been a blow to Britain too. In the age of globalisation and the ‘Big Bang’, the City of London had become once more one of the world’s major financial centres housing multi-national corporations with branches on both sides of the Atlantic, and 9/11 was the largest single loss of British life in peacetime. Consequently, in the aftermath, Britain and the USA became major partners in the war against terrorism, refusing to be checked from the military path when a French “Non” blocked a new UN resolution that would have sanctioned collective UN action. And, back in the days of the second Iraq War, fought in defiance of the French veto, and also during the messy aftermath, French people often pointed out to the writer that Britain had stood alone during the Second World War because Britain decided to withdraw its forces from France at Dunkirk leaving the French to fight on alone or come to terms with Hitler. It was a decision made on the basis of Winston Churchill’s assessment that the French would not fight in accordance with the old Anglo-Saxon tradition of “the last-ditch stand”, to which he expected to commit the British people. “We will never surrender.”
But then France had had to live with a very different reality over the millennia, one in which overwhelming force either natural of human could wreak havoc and destroy any system or order that the French people had tried to establish. For what makes a Civilization is not the power to create some great fortress-state, excluding the unwanted and setting the oppressed to work to maintain it. A Civilization is something that has a capacity to withstand devastation and perhaps total destruction without being forced to abandon those very foundations in the hearts, spirits and minds of the people, which mean that it can rise again like a Phoenix from the ashes. It was in this spirit that Albert Camus encouraged the French people to embrace Hellenism after the Second World War.
Of course France has not always kept faith with Civilization. Jean Jacques Rousseau first came to prominence by writing a prize-winning essay that argued that Civilization, as put to the service of Europe’s ‘Old Regime’ of absolute monarchs, had a detrimental rather than positive impact. The common people would be better off living as ‘Noble Savages’ rather than as the working oppressed. But the French Revolution descended into barbarity, massacre and mass-slaughter. And even when some kind of reaction set-in and people tried to restore the great Civilization of Ancient Rome, as T.B. Macaulay wrote in a piece on History for ‘The Edinburgh Review’, revolutionaries played out scenes as if from Roman histories, full of invention, make-believe and pretension. How much better, Macaulay, pointed out was the existence of an established and living tradition of English constitutionalism with the Westminster Parliament serving as a working model to the world. Macaulay came back to this theme almost 25 years later when he congratulated Great Britain on having come through the European Year of Revolution, 1848, a few years before without the streets running with blood, as they had done on so many of the capitals of Europe.
By then London had staged the Great Exhibition of 1851 and revealed Britain’s status as ‘The workshop of the world’. Yet in a very real way Britain now faced the same problem as Ancient Greece when, after the sailors from Athens had found their way to all the ports of the world, all the sailors of the ports of the world found their way to Athens. For, in fact, what was it that Britain had created? In many cases Britain had merely invented machines and methods that made it possible to produce cheaper and/or better substitute goods and services than pre-existing ones. Hence the great cotton industry was built on an existing market for Indian textiles, which Britain could now produce better than India. The great Wedgwood pottery revolution mass produced ‘chinaware’ like the famous willow pattern and other pottery like the Wedgwood Blue, based upon classical Etruscan forms. The iron industry expanded because the Darby’s found a way to use coal as a substitute for charcoal. And the common name for the railway-“the iron horse”, and indeed the whole terminology of ‘horse-power’- clearly shows the roots of the railway system. Moreover, by common consent, though it was the gallery of Britain’s industrial machines that ‘stole the show’ in 1851, subsequently Britain exported large quantities of these machines to countries that wished to set up their own industries. Then, having exported its industrial revolution, Britain faced the challenge of coming up with a new one, which was problematic because countries like France and the emerging Germany were much better equipped than Britain to embrace revolutionary change and the potential of the modern world.
For once Europe had recovered from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era British people once more had taken up the traditional Grand Tour of Europe at ‘High Culture’, and they experienced the shock of the old and the great and the magnificent. Things that were just not within the experience and range of the British Isles, not even England’s green and pleasant land. W.E. Gladstone felt an earthquake tremor in his soul when he visited a Renaissance Church in Italy. Ruskin was smitten for life by so much creativity in Venice. And Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale found so much to see that they had time to name two daughters after the places of their birth, Florence and Parthenon. In fact even the Great Exhibition was in many ways a continental vision transported to Kensington Gardens. It was the brainchild of the German Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, who not only thought of the project but drove it through to completion. Moreover the input in committee of Isambard Kingdom Brunel was almost certainly crucial.
The Brunels had come to England from France and had brought with them a different level of scientific knowledge and technical expertise than was common in England, where Scotsmen like James Watt and William Murdock had stood out. With Isambard Kingdom Brunel engineering reached new heights of what developed into “futurism”. For many of I.K.Brunel’s great projects were based upon original analysis from first principles with a view to anticipating future and not present needs. Like other great French leaps forward some of them failed. But as evolutionary scientists came to understand, while gradual change suits long periods of time and conditions are relatively constant, there are times when the pace of change becomes accelerated and then those capable of successful revolutionary adaptation will thrive. And only when you have pushed the potential of the age right to the limit, as Brunel did in many of his great projects, can you find out where those limits really are. It is the exception that proves the rule.
By 1851 the full implications of the Renaissance as a world event were apparent within the Crystal Palace for it brought together examples of the best that the whole known world had to offer and presented them as the works of all the nations of the Earth. Great Britain had opened a new era, but it was soon obvious to many that the future would be made by the countries that took up the challenge of Civilization, that is of trying to match in the present the masterly and brilliant achievements of the best of the Past. And what Matthew Arnold called the “Anglo-Saxon contagion”, the cult of the “common man” and the threat of Americanization within countries that could be contented and complacent within the mere average in their “splendid isolation” made it very likely that Britain would lose its place in the world and that the USA would only hold its while the momentum of its temporary advantages lasted.
A hundred and fifty years later it could be argued that the world has reason to the thankful for the Anglo-Saxon stability in a world that might so easily have been dominated by countries more capable of taking up the French revolutionary tradition- Germany, Japan, Russia, and China amongst the main ones- for all of them have tended to follow the line taken by Eric Hobsbawm that a revolution that cost a few tens of thousands of human lives, or even tens of millions could still be justified in the interests of progress.
But the challenge of peaceful progress towards a more Civilized world has still not been grasped if “Western Civilization” really is based only upon merely finding ways to satisfy the demands of the “common people” for their “simple rights”. For underlying 9/11 and some popular reaction to it was a conviction, encouraged by the street demonstrations by young people in places like Seattle and the depravity of scenes like the Woodstock memorial concert, that the “West” has lost its way as a Civilization. That the hopes, dreams and aspirations of the Sixties generation had not been fulfilled. And in 2011 after ten years of war against terrorism, as Britain and the USA are beginning to be able to withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan, it is some time since it could be claimed that the war effort was a “crusade” or in any way warranted the adjectives “Christian” and “Civilized”, though the destructive capacity of Western military capability around the world is still very much in evidence. But, perhaps significantly, France has become a major partner in NATO effort to the rebels in Libya: and, after a period during which President Sarkozy moved the country closer to “the Anglo-Saxon way”, is finding a new confidence and belief in ‘the French way’, that has come not least through a re-evaluation of France’s recent history.
Just after the war, French historiography focused on the heroes of the struggle, both of the French Resistance and the ‘Free French’, highlighting the individuals, who rose above the chaos and disaster. Then in an age of partnership with a West Germany that was also anxious to come to terms with its own sense of guilt and shame, detailed research in German archives provided chapter and verse on the often willing cooperation that the German occupiers received from the French. So Henri Amouroux’s volume “quarante millions de petainistes”[Forty Millian Petainsts] gives a full account of the events of 1940 within France as it, to all appearances, fell apart, and settled down to work through the occupation, contributing vastly to the German effort through the terms of the Armistice in which France paid Germany the wages of the occupying troops.
But more recently historians have been working on a third phase exploring just what happened in France at the level of the “common people” during an age of heroes and villains. The French press in the thirties contained anti-Semitic material, as in most countries, and during the German occupation the Vichy Government and French authorities in the Occupied Zone cooperated with the Nazi’s “Final Solution”. But it perhaps fell naturally to a French population historically well-accustomed to making a show of complying with the laws of oppressive authority, while living by “system D”, to use their expertise in order to confound and defeat the program to exterminate the Jews of Europe, at least where France was concerned. This appears to have been just an autonomous reaction amongst individuals, friends, families, communes- in other words the “common people”- that such things could not be allowed to happen in a country that prided itself on its level of culture and civilization. And as a result something like two-thirds of all of France’s Jews survived the war. Common people can be heroic and achieve great things, but it took half a century for this reality to emerge- for this had been supposed to be an age of revolution and scientific organization, an age when considerations of Humanity had to be placed second.
As Dr. Thomson observed the struggles between England and France did much to shape Europe in the modern age, and it was a France still intimately involved in the prosperous regions of the Northern Italian Peninsular that was able to aspire to the maintenance of something like a Roman Empire after a brief Spanish "Golden Age". Spanish power led to an understandable dream of what Dr. Thomson described as "world domination" through the newly powerful Holy Roman Empire of Charles V. But, like Charlemagne before him, Charles V decided that the task was too much for one ruler and divided his Empire into Spanish and Austrian sections, and Spain lacked the advantages of France both in its lands and rivers and its proximity to Italy. French ascendancy over Europe became the aspiration of the "Grand Design" of Louis XIV, and then of "Revolutionary" and Napoleonic France, and resistance to such continental "superpowers" shaped an England capable of defensive "dog-fighting" in order to protect its way of life.
FRANCE- THE HOME OF HIGH CULTURE AND GREAT CIVILIZATION
The French connection with Italy is reflected in the way that both Leonardo da Vinci and Catherine de Medici made their homes in France as France once again became a power in Lombardy, the military excursion into Northern Italy accounting also for the acquisition of masters of Italian "cuisine", which the French proceded to perfect into 'haute cuisine". And, if English merchants were happy to find new sources of commodities in the Americas and luxury goods in Asia, and British colonists were happy to plant new colonies just to live a hand-to-mouth existence in the wilderness, France did not lack for land and had been producing luxury goods from its land to export to the Mediterranean Civilizations since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, who had learned to appreciate the wine of Burgundy.
So the French understood more deeply the economic value of Civilization and need for a pursuit of excellence in order to compete in markets set amongst the "Glittering Prizes" of the Mediterranean which attracted merchandise from almost all over the world. In such a region in ancient times the Phoenicians had constructed a whole economic system from establishing purple as the 'special reserve' colour of Emperors and Kings, the very top-end of the luxury market served up with dyes from the murex shell-fish. And its purchasers were only too happy to pay the premium price that meant that mere pretenders would be excluded. Generally speaking, however, the natural unit of "The Ancient World" seems to have been the City State.
A City State was most commonly a port/city with a hinterland which served as a domestic market and as a supplier of food, commodities and raw materials, not only for consumption but also for export. To this end the various levels of their societies provided stratified markets with the luxury end, and the "temple building", or its equivalent justified a large investment in skills and products that could be sold, at home or abroad, for prices that represented a return on the investment. Thus the skills of a Michelangelo were very closely linked to the marble quarries in the hills that produced the raw materials of Renaissance building in both men and material. And over recent years the British public have become more accustomed to the products of Mediterranean lands that are stocked by "delicatessents", invaribly, like expensive wines, liquors etc produced on the basis of descriminating selection of ingredients, considerable skill and training and long years of experience, and sometimes years of stocking to "mature" correctly. The fact that so many of these city-states had immediate access to the great highway of the Mediterraean Sea complex probably served only to accentuate the fact that any sense of Professor Barker's "sticking together" was essentially local and both Ancient and Medieval History in these regions is marked by conflicts and rivalries between cities and difficulties in establishing clear and general legitimacy.
In so far as France aspired to be at least "Romanesque" this pronounced provincialism and tendency to fall into civil war, or conflicts like the Hundred Years War with England, in which foreign monarchs had high feudal rank and claim to the throne in France was a recurring problem, and one which King Louis XIV sought to resolve for good through two great building projects. The brilliant engineer Vauban was engaged in fortifying a France that Louis XIV tried to push out to its natural frontiers: and on a piece of swampy-marshy land to the South West of Paris Louis built the Palace of Versailles to act as a kind of secular temple-complex from which "The Sun King" could watch France revolving around him.
Perhaps Louis had in mind events like the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre that showed how difficult it was to keep Paris under control, and he might have considered the English experience of King Charles I, who felt finally obliged to flee from London towards Hull, to be refused entry into England's second city and to go inland to raise his standard calling loyal subjects to fight to re-establish his power. In the English Civil War that followed, as in France, there was evident provincial resentment over the wealth and power of the capital city and metropolis. When Louis XIV assumed the reigns of power France also was coming out of a period of Civil War, and perhaps Louis was not fully aware of the consequences of ignoring the economic forces which seem very evidently now to be the real foundations of any collective power.
In England the London-financed Parliamentarian forces won the Civil War. But it led to the execution of the monarch and a period not only of a republican Commonwealth, but also to the Rule of the Major Generals during which not only was London courtless, but also many other sources of wealth generation were stamped out. John Evelyn searched in vain for a Church where even a Christmas service would take place, let alone a Thames Frost Fair, or any of the other things that might attract people into London to make and spend money. The Restoration of the Royal Court in 1660 brought London back to life, and probably too precipitavely. It was a London bursting at the seams that suffered the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666. But Sir Christopher Wren's new St. Paul's Cathedral was a really confident and positive statement that London was back as the centre of State and of Church at least in the public eye. The photo of the dome of St. Paul's amidst the great fires of The London Blitz was one of the iconic images of British defiance and resolve during the Second World War
****************************************************************
But Medieval England had made the export of its raw wool crop a national "Staple" trade leaving the higher value work of making fine cloth to the Tuscans, and also to the growing Flanders textile industry situated at the northern end of the corridor across Europe from Italy that Charlemagne bequeathed to one of his sons. So it was a conventional truth observed by Matthew Arnold in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, who contrasted the conversation he could have with a French peasant with that possible with an English country labourer. The latter was grounded in his roots by centuries of English stability and evolution providing for ‘simple rights’ in a land with a tradition of liberty.
But the French man inherited a very different tradition, one in which the state was not based upon any pre-existing Society. It was the work of monarchical power that imposed a unified state on polyglot and varied societies and communities. And, though ‘Saint Louis’ had set the benchmark and standard for a monarchy that deserved to be obeyed, ‘Charles the Spider’ was a very different matter. The natural consequence was that French people and communities learned to be “a law unto them selves” often only complying with the State through its powers of coercion and compulsion.
Of course from at least the time of Voltaire’s “English Letters” some French people have wondered- to paraphrase Bernard Shaw’s Professor Higgins- why a French person can not be more like an English one. An Anglo-Saxon sense of a French inadequacy in terms of ‘sticking together’ pervades Henri Amouroux’s 1977 study of France under the German occupation as a new Europe was emerging heavily based on Anglo-Saxon, or just “Saxon”, models.
But, in spite of his own published remarks about the sad decline of the proud French martial tradition in the late twenties, Charles de Gaulle always resented the way that the British assumed some kind of superiority over the French because of the manner and the haste with which the French accepted the German victory. For, while both France and England, and world history, had been shaped by the conflict between these two nations, England had always had that precious advantage of being on a ‘sceptred isle’. It was something that the French could never achieve with their greater surface area and longer frontiers that could never be made inviolate, not even by the genius of Vauban and great works of fortification like Verdun and the Maginot Line. So De Gaulle always insisted that the British people would have behaved just like the French had the Germans actually managed to land their invasion force. It does seem quite possible, however, that the first serious invaders to land for nine hundred years might have been resisted harder than French. The French people had very good reason to be war-weary and some of these old issues came to the fore as Britain and the USA decided to take wage a military war against terrorism.
For 9/11 had been a blow to Britain too. In the age of globalisation and the ‘Big Bang’, the City of London had become once more one of the world’s major financial centres housing multi-national corporations with branches on both sides of the Atlantic, and 9/11 was the largest single loss of British life in peacetime. Consequently, in the aftermath, Britain and the USA became major partners in the war against terrorism, refusing to be checked from the military path when a French “Non” blocked a new UN resolution that would have sanctioned collective UN action. And, back in the days of the second Iraq War, fought in defiance of the French veto, and also during the messy aftermath, French people often pointed out to the writer that Britain had stood alone during the Second World War because Britain decided to withdraw its forces from France at Dunkirk leaving the French to fight on alone or come to terms with Hitler. It was a decision made on the basis of Winston Churchill’s assessment that the French would not fight in accordance with the old Anglo-Saxon tradition of “the last-ditch stand”, to which he expected to commit the British people. “We will never surrender.”
But then France had had to live with a very different reality over the millennia, one in which overwhelming force either natural of human could wreak havoc and destroy any system or order that the French people had tried to establish. For what makes a Civilization is not the power to create some great fortress-state, excluding the unwanted and setting the oppressed to work to maintain it. A Civilization is something that has a capacity to withstand devastation and perhaps total destruction without being forced to abandon those very foundations in the hearts, spirits and minds of the people, which mean that it can rise again like a Phoenix from the ashes. It was in this spirit that Albert Camus encouraged the French people to embrace Hellenism after the Second World War.
Of course France has not always kept faith with Civilization. Jean Jacques Rousseau first came to prominence by writing a prize-winning essay that argued that Civilization, as put to the service of Europe’s ‘Old Regime’ of absolute monarchs, had a detrimental rather than positive impact. The common people would be better off living as ‘Noble Savages’ rather than as the working oppressed. But the French Revolution descended into barbarity, massacre and mass-slaughter. And even when some kind of reaction set-in and people tried to restore the great Civilization of Ancient Rome, as T.B. Macaulay wrote in a piece on History for ‘The Edinburgh Review’, revolutionaries played out scenes as if from Roman histories, full of invention, make-believe and pretension. How much better, Macaulay, pointed out was the existence of an established and living tradition of English constitutionalism with the Westminster Parliament serving as a working model to the world. Macaulay came back to this theme almost 25 years later when he congratulated Great Britain on having come through the European Year of Revolution, 1848, a few years before without the streets running with blood, as they had done on so many of the capitals of Europe.
By then London had staged the Great Exhibition of 1851 and revealed Britain’s status as ‘The workshop of the world’. Yet in a very real way Britain now faced the same problem as Ancient Greece when, after the sailors from Athens had found their way to all the ports of the world, all the sailors of the ports of the world found their way to Athens. For, in fact, what was it that Britain had created? In many cases Britain had merely invented machines and methods that made it possible to produce cheaper and/or better substitute goods and services than pre-existing ones. Hence the great cotton industry was built on an existing market for Indian textiles, which Britain could now produce better than India. The great Wedgwood pottery revolution mass produced ‘chinaware’ like the famous willow pattern and other pottery like the Wedgwood Blue, based upon classical Etruscan forms. The iron industry expanded because the Darby’s found a way to use coal as a substitute for charcoal. And the common name for the railway-“the iron horse”, and indeed the whole terminology of ‘horse-power’- clearly shows the roots of the railway system. Moreover, by common consent, though it was the gallery of Britain’s industrial machines that ‘stole the show’ in 1851, subsequently Britain exported large quantities of these machines to countries that wished to set up their own industries. Then, having exported its industrial revolution, Britain faced the challenge of coming up with a new one, which was problematic because countries like France and the emerging Germany were much better equipped than Britain to embrace revolutionary change and the potential of the modern world.
For once Europe had recovered from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era British people once more had taken up the traditional Grand Tour of Europe at ‘High Culture’, and they experienced the shock of the old and the great and the magnificent. Things that were just not within the experience and range of the British Isles, not even England’s green and pleasant land. W.E. Gladstone felt an earthquake tremor in his soul when he visited a Renaissance Church in Italy. Ruskin was smitten for life by so much creativity in Venice. And Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale found so much to see that they had time to name two daughters after the places of their birth, Florence and Parthenon. In fact even the Great Exhibition was in many ways a continental vision transported to Kensington Gardens. It was the brainchild of the German Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, who not only thought of the project but drove it through to completion. Moreover the input in committee of Isambard Kingdom Brunel was almost certainly crucial.
The Brunels had come to England from France and had brought with them a different level of scientific knowledge and technical expertise than was common in England, where Scotsmen like James Watt and William Murdock had stood out. With Isambard Kingdom Brunel engineering reached new heights of what developed into “futurism”. For many of I.K.Brunel’s great projects were based upon original analysis from first principles with a view to anticipating future and not present needs. Like other great French leaps forward some of them failed. But as evolutionary scientists came to understand, while gradual change suits long periods of time and conditions are relatively constant, there are times when the pace of change becomes accelerated and then those capable of successful revolutionary adaptation will thrive. And only when you have pushed the potential of the age right to the limit, as Brunel did in many of his great projects, can you find out where those limits really are. It is the exception that proves the rule.
By 1851 the full implications of the Renaissance as a world event were apparent within the Crystal Palace for it brought together examples of the best that the whole known world had to offer and presented them as the works of all the nations of the Earth. Great Britain had opened a new era, but it was soon obvious to many that the future would be made by the countries that took up the challenge of Civilization, that is of trying to match in the present the masterly and brilliant achievements of the best of the Past. And what Matthew Arnold called the “Anglo-Saxon contagion”, the cult of the “common man” and the threat of Americanization within countries that could be contented and complacent within the mere average in their “splendid isolation” made it very likely that Britain would lose its place in the world and that the USA would only hold its while the momentum of its temporary advantages lasted.
A hundred and fifty years later it could be argued that the world has reason to the thankful for the Anglo-Saxon stability in a world that might so easily have been dominated by countries more capable of taking up the French revolutionary tradition- Germany, Japan, Russia, and China amongst the main ones- for all of them have tended to follow the line taken by Eric Hobsbawm that a revolution that cost a few tens of thousands of human lives, or even tens of millions could still be justified in the interests of progress.
But the challenge of peaceful progress towards a more Civilized world has still not been grasped if “Western Civilization” really is based only upon merely finding ways to satisfy the demands of the “common people” for their “simple rights”. For underlying 9/11 and some popular reaction to it was a conviction, encouraged by the street demonstrations by young people in places like Seattle and the depravity of scenes like the Woodstock memorial concert, that the “West” has lost its way as a Civilization. That the hopes, dreams and aspirations of the Sixties generation had not been fulfilled. And in 2011 after ten years of war against terrorism, as Britain and the USA are beginning to be able to withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan, it is some time since it could be claimed that the war effort was a “crusade” or in any way warranted the adjectives “Christian” and “Civilized”, though the destructive capacity of Western military capability around the world is still very much in evidence. But, perhaps significantly, France has become a major partner in NATO effort to the rebels in Libya: and, after a period during which President Sarkozy moved the country closer to “the Anglo-Saxon way”, is finding a new confidence and belief in ‘the French way’, that has come not least through a re-evaluation of France’s recent history.
Just after the war, French historiography focused on the heroes of the struggle, both of the French Resistance and the ‘Free French’, highlighting the individuals, who rose above the chaos and disaster. Then in an age of partnership with a West Germany that was also anxious to come to terms with its own sense of guilt and shame, detailed research in German archives provided chapter and verse on the often willing cooperation that the German occupiers received from the French. So Henri Amouroux’s volume “quarante millions de petainistes”[Forty Millian Petainsts] gives a full account of the events of 1940 within France as it, to all appearances, fell apart, and settled down to work through the occupation, contributing vastly to the German effort through the terms of the Armistice in which France paid Germany the wages of the occupying troops.
But more recently historians have been working on a third phase exploring just what happened in France at the level of the “common people” during an age of heroes and villains. The French press in the thirties contained anti-Semitic material, as in most countries, and during the German occupation the Vichy Government and French authorities in the Occupied Zone cooperated with the Nazi’s “Final Solution”. But it perhaps fell naturally to a French population historically well-accustomed to making a show of complying with the laws of oppressive authority, while living by “system D”, to use their expertise in order to confound and defeat the program to exterminate the Jews of Europe, at least where France was concerned. This appears to have been just an autonomous reaction amongst individuals, friends, families, communes- in other words the “common people”- that such things could not be allowed to happen in a country that prided itself on its level of culture and civilization. And as a result something like two-thirds of all of France’s Jews survived the war. Common people can be heroic and achieve great things, but it took half a century for this reality to emerge- for this had been supposed to be an age of revolution and scientific organization, an age when considerations of Humanity had to be placed second.
