Volume 11 — FRANÇOIS GUIZOT

History of Civilisation in Europe

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, French historian and statesman, was born of Huguenot parents at Nimes on October 4, 1787. The liberal opinions of his family did not save his father from the guillotine in 1794, and the mother fled to Geneva, where Guizot was educated. He went to Paris in the later days of the Empire, and engaged himself at once in literature and politics. His lectures on the History of Civilisation delivered in 1828, 1829, and 1830, during his professorship at the University of Paris, revealed him as a historian with a rare capacity for mastering the broad essential truths of history, co-ordinating them, and expounding them with vigour and impressiveness. His first series of lectures was on "The History of Civilisation in Europe," a masterly abstract of a colossal subject; the second on "The History of Civilisation in France." From 1830 to 1848 Guizot occupied high offices of State, ultimately becoming prime minister; in 1848, like his master Louis Philippe, he had to fly the country. He died on September 12, 1874.

I.--The Nature of Civilisation

The subject I propose to consider is the civilisation of Europe--its origins, its progress, its aims, its character. The fact of civilisation belongs to what is called the philosophic portion of history; it is a vague, obscure, complex fact, very difficult, I admit, to explain and describe, but none the less requiring explanation and description. It is, indeed, the greatest historical fact, to which all others contribute; it is a kind of ocean which makes the wealth of a people, and in the bosom of which all the elements of the people's life, all the forces of its existence, are joined in unity.

What, then, is civilisation--this grave, far-reaching precious reality that seems the expression of the entire life of a people? It seems to me that the first and fundamental fact conveyed by the word civilisation is the fact of progress, of development. But what is this progress? What is this development? Here is the greatest difficulty of all.

The etymology of the word civilisation seems to provide an easy answer. It tells us that civilisation is the perfecting of civil life, the development of society properly so called, of the relations of men to men. But is this all? Have we exhausted the natural and usual sense of the word? France, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was acknowledged to be the most civilised country in Europe; yet in respect of purely civil progress France was then greatly inferior to some other European countries, Holland and England, for example. Another development, then, reveals itself--the development of individual life, of the man himself, of his faculties, sentiments, and ideas.

These two notions that are comprehended in the broad notion of civilisation--that of the development of social activity and that of the development of individual activity--are intimately related to each other. Their relationship is upheld by the instinctive conviction of men; it is proved by the course of the world's history--all the great moral and intellectual advances of man have profited society, all the great social advances have profited the individual mind.

So much for civilisation in general. It is now necessary to point out the essential difference between modern European and other civilisations. The characteristic of other civilisations has been unity; they seem to have emanated from a single fact, a single idea. In Egypt and India, for example, the theocratic principle was dominant; in the Greek and Phoenician republics, the democratic principle. The civilisation of modern Europe, on the contrary, is diverse, confused, stormy; all the forms and principles of social organisation theocratic, monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, co-exist in it; there are infinite gradations of liberty, wealth, influence. All the various forces are in a state of constant struggle; yet all of them have a certain family resemblance, as it were, that we cannot but recognise.

These diverse elements, for all their conflict, cannot any one of them extinguish any other; each has to dwell with the rest, make a compromise with the rest. The outcome, then, of this diversity and struggle is liberty; and here is the grand and true superiority of the European over the other civilisations. European civilisation, if I may say so, has entered into eternal truth; it advances in the ways of God.

II.--Feudalism

It would be an important confirmation of my assertion as to the diverse character of our civilisation if we should find in its very cradle the causes and the elements of that diversity. And indeed, at the fall of the Roman empire, we do so find it. Three forms of society, each entirely different from the other, are visible at this time of chaos. The municipalities survived, the last remnant of the Imperial system. The Christian Church survived. And in the third place there were the Barbarians, who brought with them a military organisation, and a hardy individual independence, that were wholly new to the peoples who had dwelt under the shelter of the empire. The Barbarian epoch was the chaos of all the elements, the infancy of all the systems, a universal hubbub in which even conflict itself had no definite or permanent effects.

Europe laboured to escape from this confusion; at some times, and in some places, it was temporarily checked--in particular by the great Charlemagne in his revival of the imperial power; but the confusion did not cease until its causes no longer acted. These causes were two--one material, one moral. The material cause was the irruption of fresh Barbarian hordes. The moral cause was the lack of any ideas in common among men as to the structure of society. The old imperial fabric had disappeared; Charlemagne's restoration of it depended wholly on his own personality, and did not survive him; men had no ideas of any new structure--their intellectual horizon was limited to their own affairs. By the beginning of the tenth century the Barbarian invasions ended, and as the populations settled down a new system appeared, based partly on the Barbarians' love of independence, partly on their plans of military gradation--the system of feudalism.

A sound proof that in the tenth century the feudal system was necessary, and the only social state possible, lies in the universality of its establishment. Everywhere society was dismembered; everywhere there was formed a multitude of small, obscure, isolated societies, consisting of the chief, his family, his retainers, and the wretched serfs over whom he ruled without restraint, and who had no appeal against his whim. The power he exercised was the power of individual over individual, the domination of personal will and caprice; and this is perhaps the only kind of tyranny that man, to his eternal honour, is never willing to endure. Hence the prodigious and invincible hatred that the people have at all times entertained for feudal rule, for the memories of it, for its very name.

The narrow concentrated life of the feudal lord lent, undoubtedly, a great preponderance to domesticity in his affairs. The lord had his wife and children for his permanent society; they continually shared his interests, his destiny. It was in the bosom of the feudal family that woman gained her importance in civilisation. The system excited development of private character and passion that were, all things considered, noble. Chivalry was the daughter of feudalism.

But from the social point of view feudalism failed to provide either legal order or political security. It contained elaborate obligations between the higher and the lower orders of the feudal hierarchy, duties of protection on the one side and of service on the other. But these obligations could never be established as institutions. There was no superior force to which all had to submit; there was public opinion to make itself respected. Hence the feudal system was without political guarantee to sustain it. Might alone was right. Feudalism was as much opposed to the establishment of general order as to the extension of general liberty. It was indispensable for the reconstruction of European society, but politically it was in itself a radically bad system.

III.--The Church

Meanwhile the Church, adhering to its own principles, had steadily advanced along the route that it had marked out for itself in the early days of its organisation. It was during the feudal epoch the only power that made for civilised development. All education was ecclesiastical; all the arts were in the service of the Church. It had, during the Dark Ages, won the Barbarians to its fold by the gorgeous solemnity of its ritual; and, to protect itself against secular interference, it had declared the spiritual power to be independent of the temporal--the first great assertion, in the history of European civilisation, of the liberty of thought.

In one set of respects the Church during the feudal epoch satisfied the conditions of good government; in another, it did not. Its power was uniformly distributed, it drew its recruits from all classes, and entrusted the rule to the most capable. It was in close touch with every grade of mankind; every colony of serfs, even, had its priest. It was the most popular and most accessible society of the time, the most open to all talents and all noble ambitions. But, on the other hand, it failed in that all-important requisite of good government, respect for liberty. It denied the rights of individual reason in spiritual matters, and it claimed the right to compel belief--a claim that placed it in some dependence upon the temporal powers, since as a purely spiritual body, governing by influence and not by force, it could not persecute without the aid of the secular arm.

To sum up, the Church exerted an immense and on the whole a beneficent influence on ideas, sentiments, and conduct; but from the political point of view the Church was nearly always the interpreter and defender of the theocratic system and the Roman Imperial system--that is, of religious and civil despotism.

IV.--The Towns

Like the Church, the municipalities survived the downfall of the Roman empire. Their history varied greatly in different parts of Europe, but none the less some observations can be made that are broadly accurate with respect to most of them.

From the fifth to the tenth century, the state of the towns was a state neither of servitude nor of liberty. They suffered all the woes that are the fate of the weak; they were the prey of continual violence and depredation; yet, in spite of the fearful disorders of the time, they preserved a certain importance. When feudalism was established, the towns lost such independence as they had possessed; they found themselves under the heel of feudal chiefs. But feudalism did bring about a sort of peace, a sort of order; and with the slightest gleam of peace and order a man's hope revives, and on the revival of hope he takes to work. So it was with the towns. New wants were created; commerce and industry arose to satisfy them; wealth and population slowly returned.

But industry and commerce were absolutely without security; the townsmen were exposed to merciless extortion and plundering at the hands of their feudal overlords. Nothing irritates a man more than to be harassed in his toil, thus deprived of its promised fruits. The only way in which the towns could defend themselves from the violence of their masters was by using violence themselves. So in the eleventh century we find town after town rising in revolt against its despot, and winning from him a charter of liberty.

Although the insurrection was in a sense general, it was in no way concerted--it was not a rising of the combined citizens against the combined feudal aristocracy. All the towns found themselves exposed to much the same evils, and rescued themselves in much the same manner. But each town acted for itself--did not go to the help of any other town. Hence these detached communities had no ambitions, no aspirations to national importance; their outlook was limited to themselves. But at the same time the emancipation of the towns created a new class, a class of citizens engaged in the same pursuits, with the same interests and the same modes of life; a class that would in time unite and assert itself, and prevent the domination of a single order of society that has been the curse of Asia.

Although it may be broadly asserted that the emancipation did not alter the relations of the citizens with the general government, that assertion must be modified in one respect. A link was established between the citizens and the king. Sometimes they appealed for his aid against their lord, sometimes the lord invoked him as judge; in one way or another a relation was established between the king and the towns, and the citizens thus came into touch with the centre of the State.

V.--The Crusades

From the fifth to the twelfth century, society, as we have seen, contained kings, a lay aristocracy, a clergy, citizens, peasantry, the germs, in fact, of all that goes to make a nation and a government; yet--no government, no nation. We have come across a multitude of particular forces, of local institutions, but nothing general, nothing public, nothing properly speaking political.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the contrary, all the classes and the particular forces have taken a secondary place, are shadowy and almost effaced; the stage of the world is occupied by two great figures, government and people.

Here, if I am not mistaken, is the essential distinction between primitive Europe and modern Europe. Here is the change that was accomplished in the period extending from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Viewed by itself, that period seems a characterless one of confusion without cause, of movement without direction, of agitation without result. Yet, in relation to the period that followed, this period had a tendency and a progress of its own; it slowly accomplished a vast work. It was the second period of European civilisation--the period of attempt and experiment, succeeding that of origins and formation, and preparing the way for that of development properly so called.

The first great event of this period was the Crusades--a universal movement of all classes and all countries in moral unity--the truly heroic event of Europe. Besides the religious impulse that led to the Crusades, there was another impulse. They gave to me an opportunity of widening their horizons, of indulging the taste for movement and adventure. The opportunity, thus freely taken, changed the face of society. Men's minds were opened, their ideas were extended, by contact with other races; European society was dragged out of the groove along which it had been travelling. Religious ideas remained unchanged, but religious beliefs were no longer the only sphere in which the human intellect exercised itself. The moral state of Europe was profoundly modified.

The social state underwent a similar change. Many of the smaller feudal lords sold their fiefs, or impoverished themselves by crusading, or lost much of their power during their absence. Property and power came into fewer hands; society was more centralised, no longer dispersed as it formerly was. The citizens, on their part, were no longer content with local industry and trade; they entered upon commerce on a grander scale with countries oversea. Petty influence yielded place to larger influences; the small existences grouped themselves round the great. By the end of the Crusades, the march of society towards centralisation was in steady progress.

VI.--The Age of Centralisation

Already, in the twelfth century, a new idea of kingship had begun, very faintly, to make its appearance. In most European countries the king, under the feudal system, had been a head who could not enforce his headship. But there was, all the while, such a thing as kingship, and somebody bore the title of king; and society, striving to escape from feudal violence and to get hold of real order and unity, had recourse to the king in an experimental way, to see, as one might say, what he could do. Gradually there developed the idea of the king as the protector of public order and justice and of the common interest as the paramount magistrate--the idea that changed Europe society from a series of classes into a group of centralised States.

But the old order did not perish without efforts to perpetuate itself. These efforts were of two kinds; a particular class sought predominance, or it was proposed that the classes should agree to act in concert. To the first kind belonged the design of the Church to gain mastery over Europe that culminated with Pope Gregory VII. It failed for three reasons--because Christianity is a purely moral force and not a temporal administrative force; because the ambitions of the Church were opposed by the feudal aristocracy; and because the celibacy of the clergy prevented the formation of a caste capable of theocratic organisation. Attempts at democracy were made, for a time with apparent means, by the Italian civic republics; but they were a prey to internal disorder, their government tended to become oligarchical, and their incapacity for uniting among themselves made them the victims of foreign invaders. The Swiss Republican organisation was more successful, but became aristocratic and immobile. The House Towns and the towns of Flanders and the Rhine organised for pure defence; they preserved their privileges, but remained confined within their walls.

The effort at concerted action by the classes was manifested in the States General of France, Spain, and Portugal, the Diet in Germany, and the Parliament in England. All these, except the Parliament, were ineffective and as it were accidental in their action; all they did was to preserve in a manner the notion of liberty. The circumstances of England were exceptional. The Parliament did not govern; but it became a mode of government adopted in principle, and often indispensable in practice.

Nothing, however, could arrest the march of centralisation. In France the war of independence against England brought a sense of national unity and purpose, and feudalism was finally overthrown, and the central power made dominant, by the policy of Louis XI. Similar effects were brought about in Spain by the war against the Moors and the rule of Ferdinand. In England feudalism was destroyed by the Wars of the Roses, and was succeeded by the Tudor despotism. In Germany, the House of Austria began its long ascendancy. Thus in the fifteenth century the new principles prevailed; the old forms, the old liberties were swept aside to make way for centralised government under absolute rulers.

At the same time another new fact entered into European history. The kings began to enter into relations with each other, to form alliances; diplomacy was created. Since it is in the nature of diplomacy to be conducted more or less secretly by a few persons, and since the peoples did not and would not greatly concern themselves in it, this development was favourable to the strengthening of royalty.

VII.--The Spiritual Revolt

Although the Church until the sixteenth century had successfully suppressed all attempts at spiritual independence, yet the broadening of men's minds that began with the Crusades, and received a vigorous impetus from the Renaissance, made its mark even in the fifteenth century upon ecclesiastical affairs. Three main facts of the moral order are presented during this period: the ineffectual attempts of the councils of Constance and Bale to reform the Church from within; the most notable of which was that of Huss in Bohemia; and the intellectual revolution that accompanied the Renaissance. The way was thus prepared for the event that was inaugurated when Luther burnt the Pope's Bull at Wittenberg in 1520.

The Reformation was not, as its opponents contend, the result of accident or intrigue; nor was it, as its upholders contend, the outcome of a simple desire for the reform of abuses. It was, in reality, a revolt of the human spirit against absolute power in spiritual affairs. The minds of men were during the sixteenth century in energetic movement, consumed by desire for progress; the Church had become inert and stationary, yet it maintained all its pretensions and external importance. The Church, indeed, was less tyrannical than it had formerly been, and not more corrupt. But it had not advanced; it had lost touch with human thought.

The Reformation, in all the lands that it reached, in all the lands where it played a great part, whether as conqueror, or as conquered, resulted in general, constant, and immense progress in liberty and activity of thought, and tended towards the emancipation of the human spirit. It accomplished more than it knew; more, perhaps, than it would have desired. It did not attack temporal absolutism; but the collision between temporal absolutism and spiritual freedom was bound to come, and did come.

Spiritual movement in European history has always been ahead of temporal movement. The Church began as a very loose society, without a properly-constituted government. Then it placed itself under an aristocratic control of bishops and councils. Then it came under the monarchical rule of the Popes; and finally a revolution broke out against absolutism in spiritual affairs. The ecclesiastical and civil societies have undergone the same vicissitudes; but the ecclesiastical society has always been the first to be changed.

We are now in possession of one of the great facts of modern society, the liberty of the human spirit. At the same time we see political centralisation prevailing nearly everywhere. In the seventeenth century the two principles were for the first time to be opposed.

VIII.--The Political Revolt

Their first shock was in England, for England was a country of exceptional conditions both civil and religious. The Reformation there had in part been the work of the kings themselves, and was incomplete; the Reformers remained militant, and denounced the bishops as they had formerly denounced the Pope. Moreover, the aspirations after civil liberty that were stirred up by the emancipation of thought had means of action in the old institution of the country--the charter, the Parliament, the laws, the precedents. Similar aspirations in Continental countries had no such means of action, and led to nothing.

Two national desires coincided in England at this epoch--the desire for religious revolution and liberty, and the desire for political liberty and the overthrow of despotism. The two sets of reformers joined forces. For the political party, civil freedom was the end; for the religious party, it was only a means; but throughout the conflict the political party took the lead, and the others followed. It was not until 1688 that the reformers finally attained their aim in the abolition of absolute power spiritual and temporal; and the accession of William of Orange in that year brought England into the great struggle that was raging on the Continent between the principle of despotism and the principle of freedom.

England differed from other European countries in that the essential diversity of European civilisation was more pronounced there than anywhere else. Elsewhere, one element prevailed over the others until it was overthrown; in England, even if one element was dominant, the others were strong and important. Elizabeth had to be far more wary with her nobles and commons than Louis XIV. with his. For this reason, Europe lagged behind England in civil freedom. But there was another reason--the influence of France.

During the seventeenth century, the French Government was the strongest in Europe, and it was a despotic government. During the eighteenth century, French thought was the most active and potent in Europe, and it was unboundedly free thought. Louis XIV. did not, as is sometimes supposed, adopt as his principles the propagation of absolutism; his aim was the strength and greatness of France, and to this end he fought and planned--just as William of Orange fought and planned, not against despotism, but against France. France presented herself at that age as the most redoubtable, skilful, and imposing Power in Europe.

Yet, after the death of Louis XIV., the government immediately degenerated. This was inevitable. No system of government can be maintained without institutions, and a despot dislikes institutions. The rule of Louis XIV. was great, powerful, and brilliant, but it had no roots. The decrepit remains of it were in the eighteenth century brought face to face with a society in which free examination and free speculation had been carried to lengths never imagined before. Freedom of thought once came to grips with absolute power.

Of the stupendous consequence of that collision it is not for me to speak here; I have reached the end. But let me, before concluding, dwell upon the gravest and most instructive part that is revealed to us by this grand spectacle of civilisation. It is the danger, the insurmountable evil of absolute power in any form--whether in a form of a despot like Louis XIV. or in that of the untrammelled human spirit that prevailed at the Revolution. Each human power has in itself a natural vice, a principle of weakness, to which there has to be assigned a limit. It is only by general liberty of all rights, interests and opinions that each power can be restrained within its legitimate bounds, and intellectual freedom enabled to exist genuinely and to the advantage of the whole community.