The pursuit of glory, p.38
The Pursuit of Glory, page 38
In the more medium term, military developments made a powerful contribution to the development of the state. As Otto Hintze observed: ‘War is the great fly-wheel of the whole political activity of the modern state.’ Perhaps due to the nature of their material, military historians are among the most bellicose of their profession, disputing every inch of territory with grim resolution. Yet one thing they seem to be able to agree on is that the cost of warfare grew throughout the early modern period. This was partly a result of the numbers involved. The King of France, Charles VIII, had taken an army only about 20,000-strong to Italy in 1494; by the time of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 each side could deploy between 50,000 and 60,000, not to mention naval forces. Those figures kept on rising. When France intervened directly in the Thirty Years War in 1635 it could muster about 125,000. Although the figures are much disputed and very inexact, not least because there was a wide gulf between official figures and the number of soldiers actually under arms, Louis XIV’s armies reached nearly 400,000 at their peak in the War of the Spanish Succession. Rather than bombard the reader with an enervating series of statistics relating to every other European country, Table 8 provides an instructive overview.
Table 8. European army numbers 1630–1786
Table 8. European army numbers 1630–1786 continued
The ‘Austrian’ army is very difficult to disentangle from that of the Holy Roman Empire until the 1740s. When the War of the Spanish Succession began, it was about 100,000-strong; that figure doubled by the beginning of the Seven Years War and rose to over 300,000 by the beginning of the war against the Turks in 1787. It is not quite a tautology to observe that the size of an army and statehood go hand-in-hand. However, it is significant that the middling German states which failed to emulate Brandenburg-Prussia in achieving full sovereignty also experienced a sharp reduction in military capability. It bears repeating that the chief victim of Prussia’s rise to great-power status was Saxony, whose army fell from a peak of around 30,000 during the reign of Augustus the Strong (1694–1733) to just 6,000 in 1792. In the same period Bavaria’s army was halved.
To these figures of course must be added the manpower required by the navies of the maritime powers. The best statistics are available for the Royal Navy, showing that during the Nine Years War at the end of the seventeenth century the highest total of seamen entered on the ships’ books was 48,514; during the War of the Spanish Succession 47,647; during the War of the Austrian Succession 59,596; during the Seven Years War 86,626; during the War of American Independence 105,443; and during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars 147,087. Figures for the French navy are much harder to come by. In 1686 the rolls listed 59,494, which was probably the highest figure recorded. The standard history of the French navy during the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars, by Martine Acerra and Jean Meyer, takes the view that the total manpower never exceeded 50,000. The Spanish navy’s complement was about 25,000 in the late 1730s, when the naval registry was first instituted, rising to 65,000 in the 1790s, although not all of those registered would have been actually available for service. If these figures seem modest when compared with the land forces, it should be borne in mind that the cost of building, equipping and maintaining a fleet was much greater than that of assembling an army. If a sailor packed more fire-power than a musketeer, he cost a great deal more to train and was much more difficult to find in the first place. As Acerra and Meyer point out, the Dutch navy never dropped much below the French total, because they had a larger pool of trained seamen on which to draw. Or in other words, the chief constraint on navy size was not financial.
Recruiting, financing and deploying these great hordes naturally led to a corresponding expansion in the powers of the state. We have already seen how the relationship between rulers and elites was influenced by the process. In a later chapter, the financial aspects will be considered. Here the ideological aspects will be examined. The example chosen is Brandenburg-Prussia, because the process there was rapid, relatively complete and found particularly clear expression. Could there be a more eloquent statement of traditional monarchy than Frederick William I’s political testament of 1722? Although no attempt has been made to reproduce the weird spelling in the translation that follows, the virtual absence of punctuation has been retained:
My dear successor should be very well aware that all happy rulers have God always in their mind and so do not take mistresses although whores would be a better name for them and live a God-fearing life God will pour on these rulers all the blessings of this world and the next so I implore my dear successor to lead a pure God-fearing life and behaviour and set a good example to his country and army do not drink or guzzle from which an obscene life comes, My dear successor must also not tolerate that in his territories and provinces plays operas ballets masquerades balls are put on but have a horror of such things because they are godless and devilish and greatly add to Satan’s temple and empire.
There is a lot more of this kind of thing, but that will suffice to catch the flavour of Frederick William I’s political thought. Although his son Frederick certainly never took a mistress, it may be doubted whether his abstinence was a result of either filial or Christian piety. On the contrary, in his own political testament he dismissed Christianity as ‘an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it’.
Where Frederick William’s thinking was prescriptive, particularist and pious, Frederick’s was rational, universal and secular. To legitimate his authority, he postulated a social contract, by which the inhabitants of a state of nature delegated to a sovereign sufficient authority to maintain external security and internal order. By the middle of the eighteenth century, such a concept was hardly original, but its advocacy by a ruler of a backward and hitherto minor state certainly was. Frederick’s clearest exposition was given in the course of a discussion of religious toleration in his Essay on the forms of government and the duties of sovereigns of 1777:
One can compel by force some poor wretch to utter a certain form of words, yet he will deny to it his inner consent; thus the persecutor has gained nothing. But if one goes back to the origins of society, it is completely clear that the sovereign has no right to dictate the way in which the citizens will think. Would not one have to be demented to suppose that men said to one of their number: we are raising you above us because we like being slaves, and so we are giving you the power to direct our thoughts as you like? On the contrary, what they said was: we need you to maintain the laws which we wish to obey, to govern us wisely, to defend us; for the rest, we require that you respect our liberty. Once this agreement had been made, it could not be altered.
This is, of course, an authoritarian interpretation of the social contract–the grant of sovereignty is irrevocable and unconditional, the subjects have no right of resistance–but it does impose on the ruler the obligation to serve the interests of the whole. Frederick made that explicit in a passage following that just quoted:
Here we have, in general, the duties which a prince should carry out. So that he never neglects them, he should often recall to mind that he is a man just like the least of his subjects; if he is the first judge, the first general, the first minister of society, it is not so that he can indulge himself, but so that he can fulfil the duties involved. He is only the first servant of the state, obliged to act with honesty, wisdom and with a complete lack of self-interest, as if at every moment he might be called upon to render an account of his stewardship to his fellow citizens.
‘The first servant of the state’ was a phrase repeated by Frederick time and again: it became the leitmotiv of his political system. In a letter to Voltaire written the year before he came to the throne, he used a striking simile to identify the role of the ruler: he was like a heart in the human body, receiving blood from all members and then pumping it out again to the furthest extremities of the body politic; in return for receiving loyalty and obedience, he sent out security, prosperity and everything else that could further the welfare of the community. It was this sense of responsibility to the whole that rescued Frederick from any charges of despotism. The essence of despotic power was held to be its arbitrary, capricious character, its dependence on the whim of its wielder. That was what led contemporaries to castigate the Russian and Ottoman Empires as ‘oriental despotisms’. In Prussia, on the other hand, the absolute power of the king was limited by the obligations imposed by the social contract, especially by the rule of law. Although Frederick did indeed abuse his absolute power on occasions–did act despotically, in other words–he was loyal to his enlightened political thought with sufficient consistency to prompt Prussians to reject with indignation the charge that they lived in a despotism.
The were encouraged in this belief by the reforms Frederick introduced during the course of his long reign. Particularly his expansion of the religious toleration for which Prussia had long been famous, his relaxation of censorship and reform of the civil and criminal law provided evidence that this was indeed ‘the age of enlightenment, the century of Frederick’, as Kant proclaimed in his essay What is Enlightenment? of 1784. From around the middle of the eighteenth century, similar reforms could be found in other parts of Europe–Spain, Portugal, Tuscany, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, the Habsburg Monarchy and many of the states of the Holy Roman Empire. Whether collectively they justify the description ‘enlightened absolutism’ has been much contested. For some historians, especially those of a Marxist persuasion, there is a fundamental contradiction between the two components that make up the concept, for the Enlightenment they regard as essentially bourgeois ideology, whereas ‘absolutism’ was a feudal relic. For others, it was only the absolutism that was real, any enlightened characteristics being dismissed as coincidence or window-dressing.
The view that the Enlightenment was bourgeois can be despatched without further ado. It flies in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, especially that relating to the social origins of both the writers and their audience, that it can be sustained only as an article of faith. The relationship between power and ideology, however, is more problematic, for the tricky question of human motivation is involved. When Catherine the Great plundered Montesquieu and Beccaria to compile her Nakaz, did she really intend to make their enlightened precepts the basis of future legislation? Or was she just looking forward to receiving the plaudits of the fawning philosophers? Or was it both those things, and, if so, in what proportion: 50/50, 60/40, or what? Although not an entirely pointless exercise, it can best be left to individual judgement. One important consideration that should be borne in mind, although often overlooked by those who deny reality to the concept, is that not even rulers as autocratic as Catherine, Frederick or Joseph were working alone. They all relied on their ministers to a greater or lesser extent, and not only in the implementation of their policies.
Once one expands one’s field of vision to embrace this wider constituency of policy-makers, however, the influence of the Enlightenment is next to impossible to deny. The achievement of the Marquês de Pombal (1699–1782) in Portugal as first minister to Joseph I (1750–77) provides an excellent example. He was both a member of the Academia dos Ilustrados at home and a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, where he was ambassador from 1739–44. From there he moved to Vienna, where he became a member of the enlightened group led by Baron Gerhard van Swieten, who was not only personal physician to the Empress Maria Theresa but her adviser on a wide range of political and cultural matters as well. Returning to Portugal, Pombal then presided over a radical secularization of perhaps the most clericalist country in all Europe (as we shall see when the great palace-monastery of Mafra is discussed in a later chapter), including the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759. This intimate relationship between enlightened intellectual and practical politician was especially common in the Holy Roman Empire, where bureaucrats were often university professors and vice versa. Typical was Joseph von Sonnenfels (1733–1817), professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna, author of many enlightened treatises, notably The Man without Prejudice (1773) and On the Abolition of Torture (1775), senior civil servant in the Court Chancellery, member of the censorship commission, President of the Academy of the Visual Arts, freemason and member of the Order of the Illuminati. He was also another good example of the social mobility that talented intellectuals enjoyed, for his grandfather had been a rabbi in rural Brandenburg. These two examples from either end of Europe could be multiplied at will.
Moreover, critics of enlightened absolutism might well be barking up the wrong tree when they concentrate on policies. It was not the post-modern era that discovered that politics is more about style than substance. Whatever reservations have to be made about individual rulers’ enlightenment, or lack of it, the obstinate fact remains that most educated people in most countries believed that Kant was right, and that they were indeed living in an age of enlightenment. The following anonymous testimony is taken from a document included in a ‘time-capsule’, placed in the steeple-ball of St Margaret’s Church at Gotha in 1784 and discovered there in 1856:
The days we spent on this earth constituted the happiest period of the eighteenth century. Emperor, kings and princes are philanthropically stepping down from their intimidating heights, disdain pomp and display and become the fathers, friends and companions of their people. Religion sheds its clerical vestments and emerges in pure godliness. Enlightenment marches forward with giant steps; thousands of our brothers and sisters who lived in sacred idleness now contribute to the community. Sectarian hatred and religious persecution diminish; philanthropy and freedom of thought win the upper hand. Arts and sciences flourish, and we are gaining deep insights into the workings of nature. Craftsmen approach artists in their level of skill; useful knowledge spreads through all classes. Here you have a true portrayal of our age. Do not look down on us with arrogance, if you stand higher and see further than we did; rather appreciate from the picture we have given you just how much we elevated and supported your fatherland. Do the same for your posterity and be happy.
The master of what has come to be called ‘gesture politics’ was Frederick the Great. No sooner did he come to the throne in 1740 than he demonstratively recalled from exile Christian Wolff, hardly a household name today but then regarded as the great philosopher of the Enlightenment. Thus he proclaimed to the intelligentsia of Europe a sea-change in the cultural identity of his state, and, moreover, in a way they could appreciate–a job. Earlier that year Frederick had written to thank Wolff for a copy of his latest work on natural law, praising it to the skies and delivering the following perfect encapsulation of enlightened absolutism: ‘philosophers should be the teachers of the world and the teachers of princes. They must think logically and we must act logically. They must teach the world by their powers of judgement, we must teach the world by our example. They must discover, and we must translate their discoveries into practice.’
Joseph II has often been berated for his obstinacy, arrogance and insensitivity by armchair rulers, but one thing he did understand was how to catch a public mood. Shortly after he gained sole control of his dominions on the death of his mother in 1780, he issued a new censorship regulation: ‘Criticisms, if they are not slanderous, are not to be prohibited, no matter who their targets might be, whether the humblest or the highest, including the sovereign, especially if the author appends his name as a guarantee of validity, for every lover of truth must rejoice to be told the truth, even if it is conveyed to him via the uncomfortable route of criticism.’ It soon turned out that in Joseph’s liberty-hall some rooms were still locked–the one marked ‘pornography’, for example–but so different was his attitude from anything that had gone before in the Habsburg Monarchy (or to be found elsewhere in Europe) that his gesture caused a sensation, not least because of his apparent indifference to personal attacks: ‘if the slanders derive from arrogance, the author deserves contempt; if they derive from mental deficiency, he deserves pity; and if simple ill-will is the cause–then we forgive the idiot’.
If this kind of gesture endeared Joseph to the intelligentsia of the Habsburg Monarchy, his ostentatious radicalism had just the opposite impact on the privileged orders. There was nothing inevitable about the systemic clash that brought the Monarchy to the verge of collapse by the late 1780s, especially not the confrontation between Church and state. The reform movement that became known as Josephism did not begin as an attack on the former by the latter. On the contrary, it began as a movement inside the Church and by the Church to reform itself. Beginning long before Joseph was born, it aimed at the replacement of ‘baroque piety’ by a form of Catholicism characterized by simplicity instead of display, rigour instead of opulence, austerity instead of indulgence, denial instead of sensuality. As this summary suggests, it was strongly influenced by Jansenism, especially as mediated by the influential Modenese reformer Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), whose most important work, Della regolata devozione dei cristiani (1723), went through twenty different editions in German translation, eight of them published in Vienna. The reformers’ concern to shift power within the Church away from the Pope, Jesuits and regular orders towards the bishops and parish priests was shared by the Empress Maria Theresa. The personal link between the reforms of the bishops and the reforms of the state was provided by Count Christoph Anton von Migazzi, a devotee of Muratori who became archbishop of Vienna in 1757.
