A Political and Social History of Modern Europe | Page 4

Defeat of Turkey and the Dismemberment of Poland

PART III
"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY"


CHAPTER XIII.
EUROPEAN SOCIETY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century Commerce and Industry in the
Eighteenth Century The Privileged Classes Religious and Ecclesiastical
Conditions in the Eighteenth Century Scientific and Intellectual
Developments in the Eighteenth Century


CHAPTER XIV.
EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The British Monarchy The Enlightened Despots The French Monarchy


CHAPTER XV.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Introductory The End of Absolutism in
France, 1789 The End of the Old Regime: the National Constituent
Assembly, 1789-1791 The Limited Monarchy in Operation: the
Legislative Assembly (1791-1792) and the Outbreak of Foreign War
Establishment of the First French Republic: the National Convention,
1792-1795 The Directory (1795-1799) and the Transformation of the
Republic into a Military Dictatorship Significance of the French
Revolution


CHAPTER XVI.

THE ERA OF NAPOLEON The French Republic under the Consulate,
1799-1804 The French Empire and its Territorial Expansion
Destruction of the French Empire Significance of the Era of Napoleon

INTRODUCTION
The story of modern times is but a small fraction of the long epic of
human history. If, as seems highly probable, the conservative estimates
of recent scientists that mankind has inhabited the earth more than fifty
thousand years [Footnote: Professor James Geikie, of the University of
Edinburgh, suggests, in his Antiquity of Man in Europe (1914), the
possible existence of human beings on the earth more than 500,000
years ago!], are accurate, then the bare five hundred years which these
volumes pass in review constitute, in time, less than a hundredth part of
man's past. Certainly, thousands of years before our day there were
empires and kingdoms and city-states, showing considerable
advancement in those intellectual pursuits which we call civilization or
culture,--that is, in religion, learning, literature, political organization,
and business; and such basic institutions as the family, the state, and
society go back even further, past our earliest records, until their origins
are shrouded in deepest mystery. Despite its brevity, modern history is
of supreme importance. Within its comparatively brief limits are set
greater changes in human life and action than are to be found in the
records of any earlier millennium. While the present is conditioned in
part by the deeds and thoughts of our distant forbears who lived
thousands of years ago, it has been influenced in a very special way by
historical events of the last five hundred years. Let us see how this is
true.
Suppose we ask ourselves in what important respects the year 1900
differed from the year 1400. In other words, what are the great
distinguishing achievements of modern times? At least six may be
noted:
(1) Exploration and knowledge of the whole globe. To our ancestors
from time out of mind the civilized world was but the lands adjacent to
the Mediterranean and, at most, vague stretches of Persia, India, and
China. Not much over four hundred years ago was America discovered
and the globe circumnavigated for the first time, and very recently has
the use of steamship, telegraph, and railway served to bind together the

uttermost parts of the world, thereby making it relatively smaller, less
mysterious, and in culture more unified.
(2) Higher standards of individual efficiency and comfort. The physical
welfare of the individual has been promoted to a greater degree, or at
all events preached more eloquently, within the last few generations
than ever before. This has doubtless been due to changes in the
commonplace everyday life of all the people. It must be remembered
that in the fifteenth century man did the ordinary things of life in much
the same manner as did early Romans or Greeks or Egyptians, and that
our present remarkable ways of living, of working, and of traveling are
the direct outcome of the Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth
century and of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth.
(3) _Intensification of political organization, with attendant public
guarantees of personal liberties_. The ideas of nationalism and of
democracy are essentially modern in their expression. The notion that
people who speak the same language and have a common culture
should be organized as an independent state with uniform laws and
customs was hardly held prior to the fifteenth century. The national
states of England, France, and Spain did not appear unmistakably with
their national boundaries, national consciousness, national literature,
until the opening of the sixteenth century; and it was long afterwards
that in Italy and Germany the national idea supplanted the older notions
of world empire or of city-state or of feudalism. The national state has
proved everywhere a far more powerful political organization than any
other: its functions have steadily increased, now at the expense of
feudalism, now at the expense of the church; and such increase has