by Will Durant
The chief obstacle to interpreting history as progress is the fact that civilizations can die, or entirely disappear. But Hegel was not the man to let such incidents disrupt his dialectic. He divided man’s past (as aforesaid) into three periods, the Oriental, the Greco-Roman, and the Christian, and saw some progress in their succession: the Orient gave freedom to one man as absolute ruler; classical antiquity gave freedom to a caste using slaves; the Christian world, giving each person a soul, sought to free all. It encountered resistance in the traffic in slaves, but this conflict was resolved in the French Revolution. At this point (about 1822) Hegel broke out into a surprising paean to that upheaval, or to its first two years.
The political condition of France [had] presented nothing but a confused mass of privileges, altogether contravening Thought and Reason, with the greatest corruption of morals and spirit. The change was necessarily violent, because the work of transformation was not undertaken by the government [was opposed by the court, the clergy, and the nobility]…. The idea of Right asserted its authority, and the old framework of injustice could offer no resistance to its onslaught. It was a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation. A spiritual enthusiasm filled the world.67
Mob violence darkened that dawn, but after the blood was washed away substantial progress remained; and Hegel was still cosmopolitan enough to recognize that the French Revolution had brought substantial benefits to much of Germany—the Code Napoléon, the abolition of feudal privileges, the enlargement of freedom, the spread of property ownership…,68 All in all, Hegel’s analysis of the French Revolution, in the final pages of The Philosophy of History, proves that the frightened conservative had not quite repudiated the ideals of his youth.
He considered it a main fault of the Revolution that it had made an enemy of religion. “Religion is Reason’s highest and most rational work. It is absurd to maintain that priests have thought up religion for the people as a fraud for their own benefit.”69 Consequently it is “folly to pretend to invent and carry out political constitutions independently of religion.”70 “Religion is the sphere in which the nation gives itself the definition of that which it regards as the True…. The concept of God, therefore, constitutes the general basis of a people’s character.”71
Conversely, “the shape which the perfect embodiment of Spirit assumes [is] the state.”72 Fully developed, the state becomes “the basis and center of the other concrete elements of the life of a people—of Art, Law, Morals, Religion, Science.”73 Supported and justified by religion, the state becomes divine.
Aspiring to produce a system of philosophy unified by one basic formula of explanation, Hegel applied his dialectic to one field after another. To his philosophy of history his students, after his death, added his History of Philosophy. The famous ancient systems of universal analysis, in this view, followed a sequence basically corresponding to the evolution of the categories in the Logik. Parmenides stressed Being and stability; Heracleitus stressed Becoming, development, change. Democritus saw objective matter, Plato saw subjective idea; Aristotle provided the synthesis. Each system, like each category and each generation, enclosed—and added to—its predecessors, so that a full understanding of the last system would comprehend them all. “What each generation has brought forward as knowledge and spiritual creation, the next generation inherits. This inheritance constitutes its soul, its spiritual substance.”74 Since Hegel’s philosophy was the latest in the great chain of philosophical imaginations, it included (in its author’s view) all the basic ideas and values of all major preceding systems, and was their historical and theoretical culmination.75
6. Death and Return
His time, for a time, almost took him at his own estimate. His classes grew despite his dour temper and abstruse style; prominent men—Cousin and Michelet from France, Heiberg from Denmark—came from afar to see him balance the universe on his categories. He was honored in Paris in 1827, and by old Goethe on the way home. In 1830 his certainties were shaken by the spread of radical movements and revolutionary agitation; he denounced them, and in 1831 he issued across the waters an appeal for the defeat of the Reform Bill that marked the rise of democracy in England. He rephrased his philosophy more and more in terms acceptable to Protestant divines.
Still only sixty-one, and apparently in full vigor, he fell victim to a cholera epidemic, and died in Berlin, November 14, 1831. He was buried, as he had wished, beside the grave of Fichte. As if in testimony to his cautious obscurity, his students divided into antipodal groups: the “Hegelian Right,” led by Johann Erdmann, Kuno Fischer, and Karl Rosenkranz; and the “Hegelian Left”—Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Karl Marx. The “Right” excelled in scholarship, but declined as “Higher Criticism” of the Bible grew; the “Left” expanded in attacks upon religious and political orthodoxy. The “Left” interpreted Hegel’s identification of God and Reason to mean that nature, man, and history are subject to invariable and impersonal laws. Feuerbach quoted Hegel as saying, “Man knows about God only insofar as God knows about himself within man”;76 i.e., the Reason of the universe becomes conscious only in man; only man can think of cosmic laws. Marx, who knew Hegel chiefly through the master’s writings, transformed the dialectical movement of the categories into the economic interpretation of history, in which the class war superseded the Heroes as a main agent of progress; and socialism became the Marxian synthesis of capitalism and its internal contradictions.
Hegel’s reputation faded for a time as Schopenhauer’s sarcastic passions swept the philosophic board. Philosophers of history were lost in the advance of historical scholarship. Hegelianism seemed dead in Germany, but it had risen to new life in Great Britain with John and Edward Caird, T. H. Green, J. M. E. McTaggart, and Bernard Bosanquet. When it died in England it rose again in the United States. Perhaps the echoes of Hegel’s worship of the state helped to pave the way for Bismarck and Hitler. Meanwhile Sören Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre found in the Phänoinenologie des Geistes a virile note of human competition in a world apparently shorn of divine guidance, and Hegel became the godfather of Existentialism.
All in all, this age of Goethe, Beethoven, and Hegel was one of the high-water points in the history of Germany. It had reached or neared such peaks before, as in the Renaissance and the Reformation; but the Thirty Years’ War had shattered the economic and intellectual life of the people, and had darkened the soul of Germany almost to despair through a hundred years. Slowly the native vigor of her stock, the stoic patience of her women, the skill of her craftsmen, the enterprise of her merchants, and the power and depth of her music prepared her to receive and transform to her own taste and character such foreign influences as England’s Shakespeare and her Romantic poets, the Enlightenment and Revolution of France. She moderated Voltaire into Goethe and Wieland, Rousseau into Schiller and Richter; she answered Napoleon with a War of Liberation, and cleared the way for the manifold achievements of her people in the nineteenth century.
Civilization is a collaboration as well as a rivalry; therefore it is good that each nation has its own culture, government, economy, dress, and songs. It has taken many diverse forms of organization and expression to make the European spirit so subtle and diverse, and to make the Europe of today an endless fascination and an inexhaustible heritage.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Around the Heartland
1789–1812
I. SWITZERLAND
THIS blessed land felt the tremors of the French upheaval with all the intimacy of a neighbor. Swiss liberals welcomed the Revolution as an invitation to Freedom—Johannes von Müller (1752–1809), the most famous current historian, pronounced July 14, 1789, the best day in the history of Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. When the Jacobins took charge he wrote to a friend: “Doubtless you share my regret that in the National Assembly eloquence is more effective than good sense, and you may perhaps apprehend that owing to their wish to become
too free they will not become free at all. Yet there will always be something to show, for these ideas are lodged in every heart.”1
Frédéric-César de La Harpe, who had returned in 1796 to his native Switzerland after inoculating Czarevich Alexander with liberalism, joined with Peter Ochs and other Swiss rebels to form the Helvetic Club, which labored to overthrow the oligarchies that ruled the cantons. Napoleon, passing through after his first Italian campaign, noted these sparks, and advised the Directory that it would find many allies if it chose to act against the antirevolutionary activities of French émigrés who were being harbored and helped by the Swiss aristocracy. The Directory saw the strategic value of Switzerland in the conflict between France and the German princes; it sent an army into the cantons, annexed Geneva, deposed the oligarchs, and, with the enthusiastic support of native revolutionaries, set up the Helvetic Republic under a French protectorate (1798).
The new government divided into Jacobin “Patriots,” Moderates, and Federalists. They quarreled and plotted rival coups d’état until, fearing chaos and war, they asked Napoleon (then consul) to give them a new constitution. In 1801 he sent them the “Constitution of Malmaison,” which, “in spite of its imperfections, was the best that the country could hope for at the time,”2 though it kept Switzerland under French tutelage. After more internal quarreling the Federalists overthrew the republican government, organized a new army, and proposed to renew the oligarchy. Napoleon intervened, and sent an army of thirty thousand men to reestablish French control of Switzerland. The warring parties again asked Napoleon to mediate. He formulated an “Act of Mediation,” which all major factions accepted. It ended the Helvetic Republic, and initiated the Swiss Confederation essentially as it exists today, except for a continuing obligation to contribute an annual quota of men to the French Army. Despite this burden it was a good constitution,3 and the cantons gave Napoleon the title of Restorer of Liberty.
Switzerland, however magnificent its scenery, gave only a small theater and audience to genius, and several of her authors, artists, and scientists sought the range and stimulus of larger lands. Johann Füssli went to England to paint; Augustin de Candolle (1778–1841) went to France and advanced the description and classification of plants. Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1827) remained, and caught European attention for his experiments in education. In 1805 he founded at Yverdun a boarding school that operated on the principle that, at least for the young, ideas have meaning only when connected with concrete objects, and that the education of children works best through group activities and recitations. The school drew visiting teachers from a dozen countries, and influenced primary education in Europe and the United States. Fichte made it an element in his plan for national rejuvenation.
Johannes von Müller spent twenty-two years (1786–1808) on his voluminous Geschichten Schweitzerischer Eidgenossenschaft, and, even so, brought this History of the Swiss Confederation only to 1489; but it remains a classic in both substance and style. Its excellence earned him the title of the Swiss Tacitus; its idealization of the medieval cantons shared with martial victories in building up the national pride; and its story of the legendary William Tell gave Schiller the outline of a famous play. In 1810, at the age of fifty-eight, Müller began a general history, Vier und zwanzig Bücher allgemeiner Geschichten. Drawn to Germany by his readers, he served the Catholic Elector of Mainz, moved to the Imperial Chancellery in Austria, and ended as the director of education in Jérôme Bonaparte’s Westphalia. When he died Mme. de Staël wrote of him: “We cannot conceive how the head of one man could contain such a world of facts and dates. … It seems as if more than one man were taken from us.”4
Only next to him in historiographic industry was one of Madame’s cavalieri serventi, Jean-Charles-Léonard de Sismondi (1773–1842). Born in Geneva, he fled to England to escape revolutionary violence, then to Italy, then back to a recalmed Geneva. He met Germaine in 1803, accompanied her to Italy, and later frequented her salon at nearby Coppet. Meanwhile he wrote prodigiously, yet with conscientious scholarship. His sixteen-volume Histoire des républiques italiennes au moyen âge (1809–18) shared in inspiring Manzoni, Mazzini, Cavour, and other leaders of the Risorgimento. For twenty-three years he labored on his thirty-one-volume Histoire des français (1821–44), which for a time rivaled Michelet in acclaim.
He visited England again in 1818, and was moved by the mercilessness of its economy to write and publish (1819) a remarkably prophetic book, Nouveaux Principes d’économie politique. The basic cause of the English depression, he argued, was the lag of public purchasing power behind production that was rapidly rising with invention; and this lag, he argued, was due chiefly to underpayment of the workers. Similar crises of under-consumption would recur as long as the economic system remained unchanged.
Sismondi’s recommendations were alarmingly radical. The well-being of the population should be the chief object of government. The laws against labor unions should be repealed. The workers must be cushioned against unemployment, and be protected against exploitation. The interests of the nation or of humanity should not be sacrificed “to the simultaneous action of all cupidities;… the rich must be protected against their own greed.” Despite this pre-Marxian Marxism, Sismondi rejected socialism (which was then called communism); it would put both economic and political power into the same hands, and would sacrifice individual liberty to an omnipotent state.5
II. SWEDEN
Sweden could welcome the French Revolution, at least in its early stages, for throughout the “Swedish Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century Swedish thought had been in tune with the French, and the King himself, Gustavus III (r. 1771–92), was a son of the French Illuminati and an admirer of Voltaire. But Gustavus made no obeisance to democracy; he considered a strong monarchy, then and there, the only alternative to rule by a landed aristocracy jealous of its traditional privileges. He looked upon the French States-General (May, 1789) as a kindred assemblage of estate owners, and in the developing conflict of this body with Louis XVI he felt a basic threat to all kings. So the liberal and enlightened Gustavus offered himself as the leader of the First Coalition against the Revolution. While he busied himself with plans for saving Louis XVI, some Swedish nobles plotted his assassination. On March 16, 1792, he was shot; on March 26 he died, and Sweden entered a period of political disorder that continued till 1810.
The reign of Gustavus IV (1792–1809) was unfortunate. He joined the Third Coalition against France (1805), which gave Napoleon an excuse for seizing Pomerania and Stralsund—Sweden’s last possessions on the mainland. In 1808 a Russian army crossed the Gulf of Bothnia on the ice and threatened Stockholm; Sweden was compelled to cede Finland as the price of peace. The Riksdag deposed Gustavus IV, restored the power of the aristocracy, and chose the King’s uncle, then sixty-one, as a manageable Charles XIII (r. 1809–18). As Charles was childless, an heir to the throne had to be chosen. The Riksdag asked Napoleon to let one of his ablest marshals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, accept election as crown prince. Napoleon consented, probably in the hope that Bernadotte’s wife—who had once been Napoleon’s fiancée, and was sister-in-law to Joseph Bonaparte—would be a pro-French influence in Sweden. So Bernadotte, in 1810, became Charles John, crown prince.
Within this frame of government the Swedish mind continued to keep pace with the march of education, science, literature, and art. The Universities of Uppsala, Åbo and Lund were among the best in Europe. Jöns Jakob Berzelius (1779–1848) was one of the founders of modern chemistry. By the careful examination of some two thousand compounds he arrived at a table of atomic weights far more accurate than Dalton’s, and differing only minutely from the table internationally established in 1917.6 He isolated many chemical elements for the first time. He revised Lavoisier’s system of chemical nomenclature. He made classical studies in the chemical action of electricity, and developed the dualistic system which studied elements as electrically positive or negative in chemical combinations. The textbook wh
ich he published in 1808, and the Jahresbericht (Annual Report) which he began to issue in 1810, became the gospel of chemists for a generation.
There were so many poets that they divided into two rival schools: the “Phosphorists,” who took their name from their magazine Phosphorus, and imported the more mystical elements of German Romanticism; and the “Gothics,” who strummed their lyres to heroic themes.
Esaias Tegnér began his literary career as a Gothic, but as he developed he so enlarged his scope that he seemed to sum up all the schools of Swedish poetry. Born in 1782, he was only seven years old when the greatest phosphorist of all—the French Revolution—spread its light and heat through Europe; and he was still but thirty-three when Napoleon left for St. Helena. Tegnér lived another thirty-one years, but he had already achieved eminence when, in 1811, the Swedish Royal Academy awarded him a prize for his poem Svea, which scolded his contemporaries for their failure to maintain the customs of their ancestors. He joined the “Gothic Union,” and ridiculed the Phosphorists as Romantic weaklings. At the age of thirty he became professor of Greek at the University of Lund; at forty-two he was made bishop of Växjö; and at forty-three (1825) he published the most celebrated poem in Swedish literature.
