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November 11 - November 16, 2020
Chosen archon, or chief magistrate, in the 6th century B.C., at a time of economic distress and social unrest, Solon was asked to save the state and compose its differences.
Having neither participated in the oppressions by the rich nor supported the cause of the poor, Solon enjoyed the unusual distinction of being acceptable to both; by the rich, according to Plutarch, because he was a man of wealth and substance, and by the poor because he was honest. In the body of laws he proclaimed, Solon’s concern was not partisanship, but justice, fair dealing between strong and weak, and stable government. He abolished enslavement for debt, freed the enslaved, extended suffrage to the plebeians, reformed the currency to encourage trade, regulated weights and measures,
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Strong and effective rulers, if lacking the complete qualities of Solon, rise from time to time in heroic size above the rest, visible towers down the centuries.
He fostered the arts of civilization no less than those of war and earned a prestige supreme in the Middle Ages, not equalled until four centuries later by Frederick II, called Stupor Mundi, or Wonder of the World. Frederick took a hand in everything: arts, sciences, laws, poetry, universities, crusades, parliaments, wars, politics and contention with the Papacy, which in the end, for all his remarkable talents, frustrated him.
The product of a new nation, George Washington, was a leader who shines among the best. While Jefferson was more learned, more cultivated, a more extraordinary mind, an unsurpassed intelligence, a truly universal man, Washington had a character of rock and a kind of nobility that exerted a natural dominion over others, together with the inner strength and perseverance that enabled him to prevail over a flood of obstacles.
Louis XIV is usually considered a master monarch, largely because people tend to accept a successfully dramatized self-estimation. In reality he exhausted France’s economic and human resources by his ceaseless wars and their cost in national debt, casualties, famine and disease, and he propelled France toward the collapse that could only result, as it did two reigns later, in the overturn of absolute monarchy, the Bourbon raison d’être.
Louis XIV is the prince of policy pursued contrary to ultimate self-interest.
By general agreement of historians, the most condemned act and worst error of Louis’ career was his Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, canceling his grandfather’s decree of toleration and reopening persecution of the Huguenots.
Like all follies, it was conditioned by the attitudes and beliefs and politics of the time, and like some, if not all, it was unnecessary, an activist policy when doing nothing would have served as well. The force of the old religious schism and of Calvinist doctrinal ferocity was fading; the Huguenots, who numbered fewer than two million or about one-tenth of the population, were loyal hard-working citizens, too hard-working for Catholic comfort. That was the rub. Since Huguenots kept only the Sabbath as against more than a hundred saints’ days and holy days kept by the Catholics, they were
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The demand was justified on the higher ground that religious dissidence was treason to the King and that abolition of freedom of conscience—“this deadly freedom”—would serve the nation as well as serve God.
The greater his autocracy, the more the existence of a dissident sect appeared to him an unacceptable rift in submission to the royal will. “One law, one King, one God” was his concept of the state, and after twenty-five years at its head, his political arteries had hardened and his capacity for tolerating differences atrophied.
In addition, he had political motives. Given the Catholic leanings of James II in England, Louis believed that the balance of Europe was swinging back to Catholic supremacy and that he could assist it by a dramatic gesture against the Protestants.
Persecution began in 1681 before the actual Revocation. Protestant services were banned, schools and churches closed, Catholic baptism enforced, children separated from their families at age seven to be brought up as Catholics, professions and occupations gradually restricted until prohibited, Huguenot officials ordered to resign, clerical conversion squads organized and monetary bounty offered to each convert.
Persecution engenders its own brutality, and resort to violent measures was soon adopted, of which the most atrocious—and effective—were the dragonnades, or billeting of dragoons on Huguenot families with encouragement to behave as viciously as they wished.
Notoriously rough and undisciplined, the enlisted troops of the dragoons spread carnage, beating and robbing the householders, raping the women, smashing and wrecking and leaving filth while the authorities offered exemption from the horror of billeting as inducement to convert.
Unwilling communicants were sometimes driven to Mass, among them resisters who spat and trampled on the Eucharist and were burned at the stake for profaning the sacrament.
Obdurate pastors who continued to hold services were broken on the wheel, creating martyrs and stimulating the resistance of their following.
At a Council held on the eve of the Revocation, the Dauphin, probably expressing concerns privately conveyed to him, cautioned that revoking the Edict might cause revolts and mass emigration harmful to French commerce, but he seems to have raised the only contrary voice, doubtless because he was safe from reprisal.
The ill effects were soon felt. Huguenot textile workers, paper makers and other artisans, whose techniques had been a monopoly of France, took their skills abroad to England and the German states; bankers and merchants took their capital; printers, bookmakers, shipbuilders, lawyers, doctors and many pastors escaped. Within four years, 8000–9000 men of the Navy, and 10,000–12,000 of the Army, plus 500–600 officers, made their way to the Netherlands to add their strength to the forces of Louis’ enemy William III, soon a double enemy when he became King of England three years later in place of
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The total number of émigrés is now estimated rather elastically at anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000. Whatever their number, their value to France’s opponents was immediately recognized by Protestant states. Holland granted them rights of citizenship at once and exemption from taxes for three years. Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg (the future Prussia), issued a decree within a week of the Revocation inviting the Huguenots into his territory where their industrial enterprise contributed greatly to the rise of Berlin.
The flood of anti-French pamphlets and satires issued by Huguenot printers and their friends in all the cities where they settled aroused antagonism to France to new heat. The Protestant coalition against France was strengthened when Brandenburg entered into alliance with Holland, and the smaller German principalities joined.
A prolonged revolt of the Camisard Huguenots in the Cévennes, a mountainous region of the south, brought on a cruel war of repression, weakening the state. Here and among other Huguenot communities which remained in France, a receptive base was created for the Revolution to come.
More profound was the discredit left upon the concept of absolute monarchy. By the dissenters’ rejection of the King’s right to impose religious unity, the divine right of royal authority everywhere was laid open to question and stimulus given to the constitutional challenge that the next century held in store.
The feasible alternative would have been to leave the Huguenots alone or at most satisfy the cry against them by civil decrees rather than by force and atrocity.
The peculiarity of the whole affair was its needlessness, and this underlines two characteristics of folly: it often does not spring from a great design, and its consequences are frequently a surprise. The folly lies in persisting thereafter.
His point is reinforced from an unexpected source in a perceptive comment by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, “In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.” This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect. They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do.
Shorn of his tremendous curled peruke, high heels and ermine, the Sun King was a man subject to misjudgment, error and impulse—like you and me.
recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counterrevolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.
When Charles X at age 67 ascended the throne in 1824, France had passed through 35 years of the most radical changes in history up to that point, from complete revolution to Napoleonic empire to Waterloo and restoration of the Bourbons.
Having seen the process at work during exile in England, Charles said he would sooner earn his living as a woodcutter than be King of England. Not surprisingly, he was the hope of the émigrés who had returned with the Bourbons and who wanted the old regime put back together again, complete with rank, titles and especially their confiscated property.
This had been accomplished by restricting the franchise to the wealthiest class by the interesting method of reducing the taxes of known opponents so they could not meet the tax qualification of 300 francs required for voters. Government office was similarly restricted. Ultras held all the ministerial posts, including a religious extremist as Minister of Justice whose political ideas, it was said, were formed by regular reading of the Apocalypse.
The beneficiaries of the Revolution and of Napoleon’s court were not prepared to make way for the émigrés and clergy of the old regime, and discontent was rising although still subdued. Surrounded by his Ultras, the King could probably have more or less comfortably completed his reign if he had not by aggravated unwisdom brought about its downfall. Charles was determined to rule and, while lightly endowed for the task intellectually, was rich in the Bourbon capacity to learn nothing and forget nothing.
Instead, the royalists lost by almost two to one. Refusing to acquiesce in the result like some helpless King of England, Charles decreed another dissolution and under a new and narrower franchise and sterner censorship, another election.
While the King went hunting, not expecting overt conflict and having summoned no military support, the people of Paris, as so many times before and since, put up barricades and enthusiastically engaged in three days of street fighting known to the French as les trois glorieuses. Opposition deputies organized a provisional government. Charles abdicated and fled to the despised haven of limited monarchy across the Channel.
Two of the most eventful, however, both involving war with the United States, represent policy decisions at the government level. They were the German decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in 1916 and the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. In both cases, contrary voices warned against the course taken, urgently and despairingly in Germany, discreetly but with profound doubt in Japan, unsuccessfully in both.
Sternly protested by the United States on the dearly held principle of the neutral’s right to freedom of the seas, the practice had been halted in 1915 after the frenzy over the Lusitania, less because of American outrage and threat to break relations, and the antagonizing of other neutrals, than because Germany did not have enough U-boats on hand to give assurance of decisive effect if she forced the issue.
Political action to gain a separate peace with Russia was required, but this failed as did numerous other feelers and overtures made to or by Germany with regard to Belgium, France and even Britain during the next two years. All failed for the same reason—that Germany’s terms in each case were punitive, as if by a victor, providing for the other party to leave the war while yielding annexations and indemnities.
To resume unrestricted sinkings, the civilians insisted, would, in the words of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, “inevitably cause America to join our enemies.” The High Command did not deny but discounted this possibility. Because it was plain that Germany could not win the war on land alone, their object had become to defeat Britain, already staggering under shortages, by cutting off her supplies by sea before the United States could mobilize, train and transport troops to Europe in any number sufficient to affect the outcome.
Two leading bankers returned from a mission to the United States to warn against underestimating the potential energies of the American people, who, they said, if aroused and convinced of a good cause, could mobilize forces and resources on an unimagined scale.
The war party clamoring for the U-boats included the Junkers and court circle, the expansionist war-aims associations, the right-wing parties and a majority of the public, which had been taught to pin its faith on the submarine as the means to break England’s food blockade of Germany and vanquish the enemy.
Wilson’s offer of December 1916 to bring together the belligerents for negotiation of a “peace without victory” was rejected by both sides.
Germany was not fighting for the status quo but for German hegemony of Europe and a greater empire overseas. She wanted not a mediated but a dictated peace and had no wish, as the Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, wrote to Bernstorff, “to risk being cheated of what we hope to gain from the war” by a neutral mediator. Any settlement requiring renunciations and indemnities by Germany—the only settlement the Allies would accept—would mean the end of the Hohenzollerns and the governing class.
An official who found him later slumped in his chair, looking stricken, asked in alarm if there had been bad news from the front. “No,” answered Bethmann, “but finis Germaniae.”
Although the sinkings took a terrible toll of Allied shipping before the convoy system took effect, the British, upheld by the American declaration of war, did not capitulate. Despite von Holtzendorff’s guarantee, two million American troops eventually reached Europe and within eight months of the first major American offensive, the surrender that came was Germany’s.
a better outcome could have been won by accepting Wilson’s proposal, knowing it would be a dead end, thus preventing or certainly postponing the addition of American strength to the enemy. Without America, the Allies could not have held out for victory, and as victory was probably beyond Germany’s power too, both sides would have slogged to an exhausted but more or less equal peace.
Japan’s appetite was in inverse proportion to her size, though not to her will. To move the forces necessary for this enterprise, access was essential to iron, oil, rubber, rice and other raw materials far beyond her own possession.
Atrocities in China, attack on the United States gunboat Panay and other provocations were factors in American opinion. In 1940 Japan concluded the Tripartite Treaty making herself a partner of the Axis powers and moved into French Indochina when France succumbed in Europe. The United States, in response, froze Japanese assets and embargoed the sale of scrap iron, oil and aviation gasoline.