Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

by H. Morse Stephens

The Benevolent Despots.

The period which preceded the French Revolution and the era of war, from the troubles of which modern Europe was to be born, may be characterised as that of the benevolent despots. The State was everything; the nation nothing. The ruler was supreme, but his supremacy rested on the assumption that he ruled his subjects for their good. This conception of the Aufgeklärte Despotismus was developed to its highest degree by Frederick the Great of Prussia. ‘I am but the first servant of the nation,’ he wrote, a phrase which irresistibly recalls the definition of the position of Louis XVI. by the first leaders of the French Revolution. This attitude was defended by great thinkers like Diderot, and is the keynote to the internal policy of the monarchs of the latter half of the eighteenth century towards their people. The Empress Catherine of Russia, Gustavus III. of Sweden, Charles III. of Spain, the Archduke Leopold of Tuscany, and, above all, the Emperor Joseph II. defended their absolutism on the ground that they exercised their power for the good of their subjects. Never was more earnest zeal displayed in promoting the material well-being of all classes, never did monarchs labour so hard to justify their existence, or effect such important civil reforms, as on the eve of the French Revolution, which was to herald the overthrow of the doctrine of absolute monarchy. The intrinsic weakness of the position of the benevolent despots was that they could not ensure the permanence of their reforms, or vivify the rotten fabric of the administrative edifices, which had grown up in the feudal monarchies. Great ministers, such as Tanucci and Aranda, could do much to help their masters to carry out their benevolent ideas, but they could not form or nominate their successors, or create a perfect body of unselfish administrators. When Frederick the Great’s master hand was withdrawn, Prussia speedily exhibited a condition of administrative decay, and since this was the case in Prussia, which had been for more than forty years under the rule of the greatest and wisest of the benevolent despots, the falling-off was likely to be even more marked in other countries. The conception of benevolent despots ruling for their people’s good was eventually superseded, as was certain to be the case, owing to the impossibility of their ensuring its permanence, by the modern idea of the people ruling themselves.

The Condition of the Labouring Classes.

Serfdom.

And, in truth, while doing full justice to the sentiments and the endeavours of the benevolent despots, it cannot honestly be said that their efforts had done much to improve the condition of the labouring classes by the end of the eighteenth century. The great majority of the peasants of Europe were throughout that century absolute serfs. To take once more the example of Prussia, the only attempts to improve the condition of the peasants had been made in the royal domain, and they had only been very tentative. The dwellers on the estates of the Prussian nobility in Silesia and Brandenburg were treated no better than negro slaves in America and the West Indies. They were not allowed to leave their villages, or to marry without their lords’ consent; their children had to serve in the lords’ families for several years at a nominal wage, and they themselves had to labour at least three days, and often six days, a week on their lords’ estate. These corvées or forced labours occupied so much of the peasant’s time that he could only cultivate his own farm by moonlight. This state of absolute serfdom was general in Central and Eastern Europe, in the greater part of Germany, in Poland and in Russia, and where it existed the artisan class was equally depressed, for no man was allowed to learn a trade without his lord’s permission, and an escaped serf had no chance of admission into the trade-guilds of the cities. Towards the west a more advanced civilisation improved the condition of the labourers; the Italian peasant and the German peasant on the Rhine had obtained freedom to marry without his lord’s interference; but, nevertheless, it was a leading prince on the Rhine, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects to England to serve as mercenaries in the American War of Independence. In France the peasant was far better off. The only serfs left, who existed on the domain of the Abbey of Saint-Claude in the Jura, on whose behalf Voltaire wielded his powerful pen, were in a far happier condition than the German serfs; they could marry whom they pleased; they might emigrate without leave; their persons were free; all they were deprived of was the power of selling their property or devising it by will. The rest of the French peasants and the agricultural classes generally were extremely independent. Feudalism had left them some annoyances but few real grievances, and the inconveniences they suffered were due solely to the inequalities of the copyhold system of tenure and its infringements of their personal liberty. The French peasants and farmers were indignant at an occasional day’s corvée, or forced labour, which really represented the modern rent, and at the succession-duties they had to pay the descendants or representatives of their ancestors’ feudal lords. The German, Polish, and Hungarian peasant, on the contrary, crushed beneath the burden of his personal servitude, did not dream of pretending to own the plot of land, which his lord kindly allowed him to cultivate in his few spare moments.

The Middle Classes.

The mass of the population of Central and Eastern Europe was purely agricultural, and in its poverty expected naught but the bare necessaries of existence. Trade, commerce, and manufactures were therefore practically non-existent. This meant that the cities, and consequently the middle classes, formed but an insignificant factor in the population. In the West of Europe, on the Rhine, and more especially in France, where the agricultural classes were more independent, more wealthy, and more civilised, existence demanded more comforts, and a well-to-do and intelligent commercial and manufacturing urban element quickly developed to supply the demand created. Commerce, trade, and the concentrated employment of labour produced a prosperous and enlightened middle class, accustomed for generations to education and the possession of personal freedom. With wealth always goes civilisation and education, and as there was a larger middle class in France and Western Germany than in Central and Eastern Europe, the peasants in those parts were better educated and more intelligent.

The Upper Classes.

The condition of the upper classes followed the same geographical distribution. The highest aristocracy of all European countries was indeed, as it has always been, on much the same intellectual and social level. Paris was its centre, the capital of society, fashion, and luxury, where Russian, Austrian, Swedish, and English nobles met on an equality. But the bulk of the German and Eastern European aristocracy was in education and refinement inferior to the bulk of the French nobility. Yet they possessed an authority which the French nobility had lost. The Russian, Prussian, and Austrian nobleman and the Hungarian magnate was the owner of thousands of serfs, who cultivated his lands and rendered him implicit obedience. The French nobleman exacted only certain rents, either copyhold quit-rents or feudal services, from the tenants on his ancestral estates. His tenants were in no sense his serfs; they owed him no personal service, and resented the payment of the rent substituted for such service. The patriarchal feeling of loyalty to the lord had long disappeared, and the French peasant did not acknowledge any subjection to his landlord, while the Prussian and Russian serf recognised his bondage to his master.

Why France experienced the Revolution.