Lisa Rosner - A Short History of Europe, 1600-1815

SHORT HISTORY

16001815

First published 2000 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge

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Copyright 2000 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosner, Lisa, 1958

A short histoiy of Europe, 16001815 : search for a reasonable world / Lisa Rosner and John Theibault.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7656-0327-6 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-7656-0328-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. EuropeHistory17th century. 2. EuropeHistory18th century.

3. EuropeHistory17891815. I. Theibault, John, 1957 II. Title.

ISBN 13: 9780765603289 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 9780765603272 (hbk)

PHOTOS

MAPS

This book is a general survey of European history from roughly 1600 to the end of the Napoleonic era in 1815. It is designed to fill a niche between the large, multi-authored, general textbooks created expressly for Western Civilization and World History courses and specialized thematic or chronological surveys usually presented only in upper division college courses. Our goal is to be engaging for students, by giving ample coverage of personalities and events, while integrating insights from the last generations research on social and cultural history, including womens history.

No such survey can lay claim to comprehensive coverage of all topics worthy of consideration, nor is it always easy to find a balance between being reader-friendly and methodologically up-to-date. We hope that our occasional extended discussions of some topics will prove more valuable for giving the flavor of the era than would the addition of three or four more facts or events within the same space. We have divided the overall content into four large chronological blocs and included a timeline at the end of each chapter to refresh the understanding of key concepts and relationships of the era. Each chapter ends with a profile of a person, event, or institution that is connected to the theme of the chapter, but which would not ordinarily be mentioned in a survey. Finally, we have included an extensive bibliography with each chapter, to provide students and instructors with both the sources of our arguments and the most recent interpretations of controversial issues.

This book would not have been written if it had not been for Jonathan Zophy. We first began thinking about the book when one of us used Zophys survey of the Renaissance and Reformation with great success in an undergraduate early modern European history class. We contacted Zophy to express our students enthusiasm for his book, and he encouraged us to write our own. Since then, he has been a constant source of support for the project. He has read almost all of the chapters and has been generous in criticism. We do not claim to have written the same kind of book that Zophy would have written had he attempted the period from 1600 to 1815, but we hope that our work serves as a worthy complement to his earlier work.

Other scholars have been equally generous in their support of our work. We want to acknowledge Bill Bowman, Magdalena Sanchez, Bill Bearden, and Eithne Bearden for reading some or all of the manuscript with meticulous attention.

SHORT HISTORY

16001815

On a frosty January afternoon in 1649, Charles I, King of England, mounted a scaffold in a small square near Whitehall palace in London. For the previous three weeks he had been subjected to a public trial under the authority of the English Parliament and had been found guilty of being a Tyrant, a Traitor, a Murderer, and a Public Enemy to the Commonwealth of England. The sentence for his crime was death, by the severing of his head from his body. A crowd of spectators filled the square, the adjoining streets, and the roofs of the surrounding buildings. The king gave a short speech, audible only to those onstage; then he prayed and signaled to the executioner when his prayers were finished. His last word was Remember!; his executioners last words to him, as he laid his head on the block, were an it please Your Majesty. At the signal, the executioners axe fell and severed the head from the body. The crowd let out such a groan, one observer reported, as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again.

Nearly a century and a half later, on a cold, gray morning in January 1793, another king, Louis XVI of France, mounted a scaffold on the newly renamed Place de la Revolution in France. Like Charles, Louis had been put on public trial, in his case by the National Convention, and had been found guilty of treason against the French nation. At the signal, the guillotine blade fell and severed the head from the body. At first, there was silence. Then some voices in the crowd took up the chant of Vive la Rpublique! Long Live the Republic.

These two stories of executed kings frame the chronological period covered in this survey of European history and highlight many of its themes. First, of course, they point out that monarchy, government by kings, was the normal form of government in the era, and that much of the political history of the era must be written in terms of the successes and failures of kings. But the fates of Charles I and Louis XVI were distinctive, even given that fact. Monarchs had been killed before and since, defeated in battle, deposed by rivals for the throne, assassinated by enemies and madmen. But these executions were not the ordinary products of the often bloody history of the European monarchy, inflicted by other princes who wished to claim for themselves the thrones of England or France. Instead, they were carried out by men who considered themselves to be the true representatives of the nation, justified in bringing their Sovereign lord to public trial for treason against his own country. These two casesthe only two such executions in European historydemonstrate the struggles over political authority that dominated the era. By what right, wrote one of Charless supporters on the eve of his trial, did Parliament presume to try the king? Under whose jurisdiction would he fall? Who would be his peers to pass judgment? Never was such damnable doctrine vented before in the world it being contrary to the law of Nature, the custom of Nations, and the sacred Scriptures. And Robespierre, pronouncing sentence in turn against Louis XVI, wrote, I do not recognize a humanity that massacres the people and pardons despots. How had such different, contradictory political principles evolved within each country? And could such opposing definitions of nation, and commonwealth, and body politic, of treason and tyranny, ever be reconciled?