The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization, Volume XI

by Will Durant

History is a circle, or an enlarged repetition of the same circle, with frills that make the old seem new; the same good and the same evil survive in men despite such mighty overturns. There is no real progress; knowledge grows, but merely to serve instincts that do not change.

Intellectual and political turmoil will undermine European civilization, and return it to the barbarism from which it emerged; peoples now savage will rise to civilization, go through successive grandeurs and revolutions, and sink into barbarism in their turn.

The French excelled in pure science, and made France the most intellectual and skeptical of nations; the English encouraged applied science, and developed the industry, commerce, and wealth that made them the protagonists of world history during the nineteenth century.

French government by impairing the credibility and moral standing of the Church, and by calling for an “enlightened despotism” to mitigate the evils of ignorance, incompetence, corruption, oppression, poverty, and war.

By 1800 there were 15 million souls in Britain, and 19 million sheep; the sheep, said a wit, are devouring the men.

Corn” then meant any grain; in England it usually denoted wheat; in Scotland, oats.)

In the Britain of 1750 there had been two cities with fifty thousand inhabitants; in 1801 there were eight; in 1851 there would be twenty-nine.

Between deliveries women were preferred to men as factory workers, and children were preferred to women, as requiring less pay. In 1816, of 10,000 employees in forty-one Scottish mills, 3,146 were men, 6,854 were women, 4,581 were under eighteen.

Thomas Malthus, in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), explained that it is useless to raise wages, for this would lead to larger families, increasing the pressure of population upon the food supply, and would soon restore the poverty that must forever result from the natural inequality of men.

The basic struggle was of the capitalist to replace the aristocrat at the helm of state; in France it took a generation; in England it took centuries.

till 1832, the nobility was supreme, and smiled at its challengers. In its strictest sense it consisted, in 1801, of 287 “temporal” peers or peeresses, and twenty-six Anglican bishops, who, as “spiritual lords,” were entitled to sit in the House of Lords.

The temporal peers were ranked, in descending order, as princes of the (royal) blood, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons. To all of these except princes and dukes the appellation “lord” could be properly applied; and their titl...

Below these lords temporal and spiritual England ranked 540 baronets and their wives, entitled to prefix “Sir” or “Lady” to their Christian names, and to transmit these titles in their families.

Next were 350 knights and their wives, entitled to the same prefixes, but not to transmit them.

Below these came some six thousand squires or “gentry”—landowners born in old and accepted families, and authorized to bear a coat of arms. All these groups below the “lords” constituted the lesser nobility, but they were...

All government is by a minority or by a despot, and the ruling minority is either an aristocracy of birth or a plutocracy of wealth. Democracy, of course, is the latter, for only wealth can finance campaigns, or pay the cost of persuading the people to vote for the moneyed minority’s candidate.

Men democratically chosen are rarely equipped, by birth and training, to deal successfully with the problems of government, much less with international relations.

The Constitution of England is the whole body of unrepealed enactments of Parliament and unrevoked decisions of the courts. By such precedents the full authority of the government resided in the Crown (king or queen) and the Parliament acting in concert; usually, since 1688, the monarch accepted what Parliament legislated.

The House of Commons numbered 558 members: two each from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, one from Trinity College, Dublin, forty-five from Scotland; the rest chosen by forty counties (“shires”) and twenty boroughs (townships) by electors holding limited franchises

Excluded from the electorate were women, paupers, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Jews, agnostics, and, in general, anyone who could not swear allegiance to the authority and doctrines of the Church of England. All in all, there were 245,000 eligible voters in England’s nine million souls.

some boroughs with a mere handful of voters returned one or more members, while London, with six thousand voters, was allowed only four.

in local affairs many towns and villages retained considerable self-rule; so the city of London, through a property-limited suffrage, chose its own government, and maintained a proud independence of Parliament.

The chosen members were loosely divided between two parties—Tories and Whigs. These had largely forgotten the issues that had once divided them; their leaders were in both cases members of old aristocratic families; but the Whigs were more inclined than the Tories to listen to the upcoming and affluent lords of commerce and industry,

The law was heavy with relics of its feudal origins and its Christian emendations: accused lords still demanded to be tried by lords, and “benefit of clergy” still (till 1827) exempted Anglican ministers from secular courts.

The best feature of English law was the right of the accused to trial by jury. Apparently this institution of the Carolingian Franks had come to England in primitive form with the Norman Conquest.

In trials the jurors heard the evidence, the speeches of contending counsel, and the judge’s summing up; after this they retired to an adjoining room, where, “in order to avoid intemperance and causeless delay,” they were kept without meat, drink, fire, or candle (unless by permission of the judge) “till they were unanimously agreed.”

In the Cabinet, as well as in the government as a whole, the power of the purse was the chief instrument of discipline and rule.

The deistic attack upon the orthodox creed had subsided as the skeptics came to realize that they had nothing to put in its place as an aid to individual morality and public peace.

in 1810 Alexander Murray, philologist, calculated that three fourths of the agricultural laborers were illiterate; in 1819 official statistics reported 674,883 children attending schools in England and Wales—a fifteenth of the population.

Oxford was Tory, Cambridge was Whig.

Until 1929 the legal age of marriage was fourteen for the male, twelve for the female.

England was now leading in this traffic. In 1790 British vessels transported 38,000 slaves to America, French ships 20,000, Portuguese 10,000, Dutch 4,000, Danish 2,000; each nation contributed according to its ability in what was probably the most criminal action in history.

The waltz had come in from Germany, and had been named from walzen, to revolve. Moralists helped to make it popular by branding it as sinful intimacy.

He was a good great man and one of those redeeming men and women who must be weighed in the balance against our ignorance and sins.

Vaccination was applied to other ailments, and the new science of immunology shared with other medical advances, and with public sanitation, in giving modern communities as much health as is allowed by the harassments of poverty, the fertility of ignorance, the recklessness of appetite, and the patient inventiveness of disease.

Paine rejected it as a tale fit for nurseries, and for adults too busy with bread and butter, sickness and mortality, to question the promissory notes sold to them by the theologians.

Godwin did not like governments. Whatever their form or theory, they were, in practice, the domination of a majority by a minority. He repudiated the conservative contention that the masses were congenitally inferior and always potentially murderous, and therefore had to be ruled by fable, terror, or force.

The Industrial Revolution transformed children from the economic assets they had been on the farm to the economic handicaps they became in cities as child labor slowly diminished, as education became expensive, as urban crowding rose.

Even war now demanded technical inventiveness for competition in material destruction rather than masses of young men deployed in competitive homicide.

Bentham took it for granted that all organisms seek pleasure and shun pain. Pleasure he defined as any satisfaction, pain as any dissatisfaction, of body or mind. Utility is the quality of producing pleasure or avoiding pain; happiness is the continuity and consistency of pleasures.

society should encourage voluntary associations, whose members would surrender part of their liberties to united effort for a common cause. From the same principles Bentham argued that representative government, with all its faults and multiple corruption, is best.

it warned against revolutions as feeding on revolutionists.

The ideal poet, or painter, or sculptor is a philosopher clothing wisdom in art, revealing significance through form.

the Papacy entered into a slow decay as the advances of science and the inroads of philosophy left the Church with a dangerously reduced support in the influential classes of Western Europe;

The last of the five, Opus 135, states a motto for its final movement: Muss es sein? (Must it be?), and gives the answer: Es muss sein.

Germany in 1800 was a loose concatenation of some 250 “states,” each with its own laws and taxes, many with their own army, coinage, religion, customs, and dress, and some speaking a dialect unintelligible to half the German world. However, their written language was the same, and gave their writers a third of the Continent for their potential audience.

Nationalism, large or small, grew as religion declined, for some creed-political or social—must hold a society together against the centrifugal egoism of its constituent souls.

had helped Schiller to realize that human nature has changed too little in history to make political revolutions profitable for the poor.

He died in 1825, leaving unfinished an essay on the immortality of the soul; his time had come to explore the matter at first hand.

If nothing exists but individual entities, what is the state, the army, the Church, the university, but conspiracies of privileged individuals to frighten and control, to form and deform, to rule and tax, to herd to slaughter the indoctrinated rest?