Such are, if I mistake not, the principal characteristics and general results both of the enfranchisement of the boroughs and of their internal government. I have already stated that they were not so uniform and universal as I have represented them. There is, on the contrary, a great diversity in the history of European boroughs. For example, in Italy and in the south of France, the Roman municipal system prevailed; the population was not so much divided or so unequal as in the north. The borough organisation was also much better, either on account of the lingering Roman traditions, or on account of the superior state of the population. In the north, it was the feudal system which influenced the borough existence. There, all was made subordinate to a successful struggle against the lords. The southern boroughs were much more occupied with their internal organisation, with improvements, and with the means of advancement. They were paving the way for their becoming independent republics. The destiny of the northern boroughs, of the French especially, assumed a more rude and incomplete aspect; a destiny of far inferior development. If we survey the boroughs of Germany, Spain, and England, we shall find in them differences of other kinds. It is not my purpose to enter into these details; we shall have occasion to remark some of them as we advance in the history of civilisation. At their original formation, all things were confounded in pretty nearly one likeness, and it was only by successive developments that the variety occurred. By subsequent developments, societies have been urged to that grand and concurrent unity which is the glorious goal of the efforts and hopes of the human race.
Lecture VIII.
The Twelfth And Thirteenth Centuries.
The Crusades.
I have not hitherto stated the entire plan of my inquiry. I commenced by indicating its object, and then I proceeded, without considering European civilisation as a whole, or without marking out at one and the same time the point of departure, the course, and the port; that is, the commencement, the middle, and the end. We are now, however, arrived at an era in which this survey of the whole, this general sketch of the region we are traversing, becomes necessary. The periods that we have investigated so far, are illustrated in some sort by themselves, or by immediate and distinct results. Those upon which we are about to enter would not be understood, and would indeed fail in exciting any lively interest, if they were not connected with their most indirect and remote consequences. In so extensive an investigation, moments occur in which the mind seeks for elucidation as to the ultimate object, and feels reluctant to proceed with mists and darkness before it; not only whence we come, and where we are, does it seek to know, but also whither we go. This is what we feel at present. The epoch upon which we now open is intelligible, and its importance can be appreciated only by the relations which link it to modern times. Its true tendency has only been revealed at a very late period.
We are now in possession of almost all the essential elements of European civilisation. I say almost, because I have not yet entered upon royalty. The era of the decisive development of royalty did not take place until the twelfth or even the thirteenth century; it was not till then that the institution was truly established, and began to assume its definitive station in modern society. For this reason I have not treated of it earlier, but it will form the subject of my next lecture. With this exception, however, we grasp all the great elements of European civilisation: the feudal aristocracy, the church, and the boroughs, have all been traced to their origin; the institutions corresponding to each of these matters have been laid open, and not only the institutions, but also the principles and ideas which they were calculated to excite in the minds of men. Thus, when treating of feudalism, we have gone to the cradle of the modern household, to the sanctuary of domestic life; and we have fully understood the prevailing sentiment of individual independence in all its energy, and the influence it was destined to exercise upon our civilisation. On the question of the church, we have witnessed the rising of the purely religious society, its relations with civil society, the theocratic principle, the separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, the first objects of persecution, and the first cries of liberty of conscience. The consideration of the infant boroughs has shown an association founded upon very opposite principles to those of feudalism or the church, the diversity of the social classes, their contests, the first and deep-rooted characteristics of modern burgher manners, timidity of spirit by the side of firm determination, and mob licentiousness accompanied by principles of legality, In a word, all the elements which have concurred in the constitution of European society, and all that that society has been, have now been fully searched into.
Now let us transport ourselves into the midst of modern Europe; I do not mean the present Europe, after the astonishing change we have witnessed, but that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Do we recognise the society we have just beheld in the twelfth? How prodigious the difference! I have already dilated upon this difference when on the subject of the boroughs; I then endeavoured to show how little the third estate of the eighteenth century resembled that of the twelfth? Scrutinising feudalism and the church in the same manner, we are struck by a similar metamorphosis. There was no more resemblance between the nobility of Louis XIV.'s court and the feudal aristocracy, or between the church of Cardinal de Bernis and that of the Abbot Suger, than between the third estate of the eighteenth century and the burghers of the twelfth. In the interval between these two epochs, society (although in possession of all its elements) was completely transformed.
I shall attempt a clear explication of the general and essential character of this transformation.
From the fifth to the twelfth century, society contained all that I have described—kings, a lay aristocracy, a clergy, burghers, serfs, religious and civil powers, the germs, in fact, of all that constitutes a nation and a government, and yet there was no government or nation. As to a people, properly so called, or a veritable government, in the sense with which those words are now applied, there was nothing of the sort in the whole period mentioned. We have encountered a multitude of particular forces, of special facts and of local institutions, but nothing general or public, no political system, in the strict sense of the word; in fine, no real nationality.
Let us look, on the contrary, to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We behold in every quarter two great forms appear on the stage of the world, the government and the nation. Society is formed by, and history is occupied in the relation of, the action of a general power upon a whole country, and the influence of that country upon the power which governs it; the mutual ties of these two great forces, their alliance and their strife, are the especial objects of history. The nobles, the clergy, the burghers, all those particular classes and powers, have no longer a prominent appearance, but are merged in and effaced by these two great bodies, the government and the nation.
This is, if I mistake not, the essential feature which distinguishes modern from primitive Europe, and the metamorphosis was accomplished between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.