PART III
"LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY"
Our narrative of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus far has been full of intrigue, dynastic rivalry, and colonial competition. We have sat with red-robed cardinals in council to exalt the monarch of France; we have witnessed the worldwide wars by which Great Britain won and lost vast imperial domains; we have followed the thundering march of Frederick's armies through the Germanies, wasted with war; but we have been blind indeed if the glare of bright helmets and the glamour of courtly diplomacy have hidden from our eyes a phenomenon more momentous than even the growth of Russia or the conquest of New France. It is the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Driven on by insatiable ambition, not content to be lords of the world of business, with ships and warehouses for castles and with clerks for retainers, the bourgeoisie have placed their lawyers in the royal service, their learned men in the academies, their economists at the king's elbow, and with restless energy they push on to shape state and society to their own ends. In England they have already helped to dethrone kings and have secured some hold on Parliament, but on the Continent their power and place is less advanced.
For the eighteenth century is still the grand age of monarchs, who take Louis XIV as the pattern of princely power and pomp. "Benevolent despots" they are, these monarchs meaning well to govern their people with fatherly kindness. But their plans go wrong and their reforms fall flat, while the bourgeoisie become self-conscious and self-reliant, and rise up against the throne of the sixteenth Louis in France. It is the bourgeoisie that start the revolutionary cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," and it is this cry in the throats of the masses which sends terror to the hearts of nobles and kings. Desperately the old order—the old régime—defends itself. First France, then all Europe, is affected. Revolutionary wars convulse the Continent. Never had the world witnessed wars so disastrous, so bloody.
Yet the triumph of the bourgeoisie is not assured. The Revolution has been but one battle in the long war between the rival aristocracies of birth and of business—a war in which peasants and artisans now give their lives for illusory dreams of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," now fight their feudal lords, and now turn on their pretended liberators, the bourgeoisie. For already it begins to dawn on the dull masses that "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" are chiefly for their masters.
The old regime, its decay, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the disappointment of the common people,—these are the bold landmarks on which the student must fix his attention, while in the following chapters we sketch the condition of Europe in the eighteenth century, and trace the course of the French Revolution, the career of Napoleon, and the restoration of "law and order" under Metternich.