# The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II
EUROPE BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
I
From what has already been said, it is clear that the grand tour, with all that it implies, forms an important chapter in the history of European culture, and that it must be studied from that point of view if it is to be more than a merely curious record of travel in foreign countries. Taken in the broadest sense, the grand tour includes everything that one might see or hear in the course of long-continued travel. But as such an extension of the meaning would lay upon us an impossible task, we must in the study before us impose some well-defined limitations.
It is obviously no part of our duty to review in detail the complicated history of Europe in the eighteenth century. We are concerned with the course of events on the Continent only in so far as they affected the tourist. But a clear understanding of a few fundamental facts is imperative. Most important is it to bear in mind that participation by the common people in the work of government was relatively slight in nearly every country of the Continent, and only to a moderate degree permitted in England. Minor offices might be filled by persons of no importance, and in some cases men of humble origin rose to positions of great influence, but the policy of the government, the final decision in every matter that might affect the welfare of the ruling class as well as of the uncounted multitude, was commonly reserved for the supreme ruler. It is true that despotism became less harsh with each succeeding generation, but in theory it was hampered by few restrictions. The ruler, with his broad vision of the needs of his people, was expected to govern as a wise father governs his family. ​Their interests were supposed to be his. If the ruler was both wise and good, the people prospered; but in any case they were expected to accept without murmuring the decisions of their betters.
As may be inferred, the mass of the population throughout Europe was made up of plain and simple folk. For the most part they were occupied with agriculture and lived a very humble life. Cities were relatively, as well as actually, far smaller than they are to-day. Manufacturing was attempted on a small scale, particularly after the Seven Years' War, but at best it was insignificant and in general not greatly encouraged. As a result, trade and commerce lacked incentive, and, moreover, suffered under the burden of numberless regulations due to narrow prejudice and imperfect knowledge of the laws governing national wealth. Widespread poverty characterized the greater part of Europe.
Particularly notable, too, as a result of the universal acceptance of the doctrine of the "Balance of Power," was the division of large portions of Europe among nations that had nothing to do with the organic historical development of the regions they appropriated. Such was especially the case in Italy.
Into the life of the eighteenth century came the fearful upheaval of the French Revolution, which marks a turning-point in the history of every country of western Europe. The minds of men were themselves transformed — that was the Revolution. A thousand conceptions, social and political, that had seemed established for ever were at length shattered under the long-continued assaults of philosophers and political theorists, and systems of government that under manifold differences in externals were alike in exalting the personal will of the ruler were sooner or later greatly modified. In some cases, as in France, the change in institutions was immediate and sweeping; in others, as in Germany and Italy, the transformation was more gradual; but in all, the old state of things was doomed.
The thirty years or so just preceding the Revolution are ​those that most concern us in this study, though we shall often have occasion to look back to the early eighteenth century — and sometimes to the seventeenth.
To realize the conditions under which men lived in the eighteenth century is not easy. There are, indeed, only three or four generations between us and the gay throngs that crowded the salons of Paris before the Revolution. But the eighteenth century, notwithstanding its nearness in time, and the immense mass of information that we have about it, appears strangely remote, separated from us as it is by the great gulf of the French Revolution. The century of which men still vigorous have known many living representatives impresses us as markedly different in temper and point of view from our own. In a thousand ways the difference forces itself upon even the most careless observer — in the forms of government, in the rigid structure of society, in the fashions of dress, in the popular amusements, in the lack of facilities for travel and communication — in short, in all those particulars which distinguish the old, unprogressive régime with its numberless feudal survivals from our own bustling, democratic age.
Looking at the matter from one point of view we may say that there is no side of eighteenth-century life that might not in some way affect the tourist, but for our purpose the problem is much simpler. We need to know something of the political systems of the countries visited on the grand tour, for to those systems were due many of the restrictions laid upon the tourist. We need to know the times when peace prevailed, for, obviously, while there is war the average man will not undertake a tour, but will remain safely at home. We need to know of the means of travel, of the state of the roads and where they ran, of the inns and how one fared in them, of fashionable society and how it impressed the tourist, as well as the impression the tourist made upon society: in short, in so far as is possible in a book that must touch many things lightly if at all, we must endeavor to follow the tourist from place to place and see with him some of the sights that most interested ​him. In this way we may be able in some degree to estimate the value of the grand tour as a means of culture.
Besides all this, it is worth while to note that the eighteenth century, particularly during the first half, was a time of depression in poetry and art and architecture, and that for a time it appeared to be at a standstill in all moral and religious progress. But there was, nevertheless, in almost every field of human activity a new spirit stirring which wrought an amazing change before the century came to an end.
In view of the immensity of the field, it is obvious that to trace in any considerable detail the differences between the old time and the new would involve a review of the social history of Europe from the time of Louis XIV to the present, and to do that here is, of course, out of the question. We can, however, glance at the three or four countries that most attracted the English tourist and form some conception of the general conditions under which one traveled in the eighteenth century.
Of all these countries we must in some measure reshape our modern notions if we are to understand what the grand tour a hundred and fifty years ago really meant. Obviously, each country presented some features not exactly paralleled elsewhere, and the most characteristic of these we must try to realize. But we must remember that, owing to the complexity and variety of the facts and the frequent changes in details of administration, a general statement must ignore many minor details, and in some cases must be taken as a mere approximation to the truth.
II
As a preliminary to our later study we may well glance for a moment at eighteenth-century England, and then at the countries commonly visited on the grand tour. Until the last decade or two England has been a synonym for conservatism. But how different in a thousand ways is the England of our time from that of a century and a half ​ago! In comparison with the England that we know, eighteenth-century England was markedly provincial and insular. Until far beyond the middle of the century, Englishmen, though always ambitious and aggressive, had not enlarged their conceptions to the point of making England the center of a world-power. But they felt with reason that their country was the most favored land in Europe, and everywhere they went they instinctively claimed preëminence.
One inestimable advantage they had enjoyed for nearly three centuries. Although since the close of the Middle Ages almost every part of the Continent had been a battlefield, England, with the exception of the Puritan uprising and the futile attempts to restore the line of the Stuarts, had been free from war upon her own soil. And by her fortunate insular situation she was practically secure against attack from the Continent. The period since the Revolution of 1688 had been marked by increasing material prosperity, which had diffused habits of expensive living and stimulated the desire to see life in other lands. Not everything was perfect in eighteenth-century England. Great inequalities prevailed. Parliament was unreformed. Social conditions among the lower classes were pitiful. But while there were vice and brutality and misery in eighteenth-century England, as everywhere else, nowhere in Europe was a man freer to live his own life and to express his own views on society, politics, or religion.
Another fact worthy of note is that the country was not overpopulated. In 1750, England and Wales counted 6,400,000 inhabitants, and not until the end of the century did the population rise to 9,000,000. London in the middle of the eighteenth century had something like 600,000 inhabitants, — no insignificant number, it is true, but not so large as to preclude a man in society from the possibility of knowing almost everybody of importance. Naturally, then, society was more a unit than it is to-day. Men of the upper social class had about the same education — not too thorough, but including a tolerable acquaintance ​with Latin and some knowledge of Greek. Every one who wished to shine in society spent a part of his time in London, usually gamed a little at one of the fashionable clubs, and from the men of his own class took in the opinions generally accepted on politics, morals, and religion. A man in such a circle who had not seen Paris, to say nothing of The Hague, the Rhine, and, above all, Venice and Florence and Rome, could not aspire to be a leader of fashionable society. Something provincial, some lack of savoir-faire, would inevitably betray him. Sooner or later the spell of Italy or France would be upon him, and would lead him to the places that he must himself see if he would be in a real sense a man of the world and in keeping with the society in which he moved.
III
Nearest to England in point of distance was France, the leader of the fashions of Europe and the greatest rival of England in every part of the world. English commercial and colonial expansion more than once brought the two nations into conflict in the course of the century. Eighteenth-century France, just before the Revolution, occupied a slightly larger territory than the present Republic. She had not yet gained Savoy and Nice, but she had not yet lost Alsace and she had acquired Lorraine in 1766.
Of the condition of France before the Revolution there is so much that might be said that any brief generalization is hazardous, for there had come down from the Middle Ages multitudes of anomalous special privileges reserved for the upper classes, and in this rapid summary we can touch only on matters that are most typical and characteristic. But a rapid glance at the main features is imperative.
France presented a striking contrast to England in government, in religion, in the structure of society, in habits of living, in manners, in dress, — in short, in a thousand details that make up the greater part of everyday existence. Moreover, France, taken by herself, was full of contradictory ​elements. Standing as she did in the forefront of civilization, boasting the most brilliant philosophers and men of letters in Europe, her life was throttled by a system of government that was daily becoming more inadequate to the demands of the time.
Notable, indeed, were the differences between the government of France and that of England. The centralizing policy of Louis XIV had gradually brought France under a system of administration that deprived the provinces of political power and made the king's will supreme. A powerful minister might relieve the king of the burden of multiplied administrative detail, and even usurp authority, but in effect the king was responsible. Yet, though nominally absolute, he was in practice restrained by a host of precedents and usages, surviving from the days of feudalism.
This centralized authority was in many particulars sadly inefficient and could not be bettered without a radical reform from top to bottom. The regulation of the finances was subject to continual alteration, but the sporadic change resulted chiefly in making administration more difficult. No head of government, however honest his intentions, could bring harmony and justice out of the tangled confusion of laws that had accumulated in France. Bureaucratic and cumbrous in its machinery, the government was at the same time lavish and niggardly. It poured out money like water at Versailles and often begrudged the most necessary expenditures in the provinces. Between 1763 and 1789 the national debt enormously increased. Dishonesty in handling public money was common. Too often, not merit but favor brought advancement.
Moreover, the administration of government was meddlesome in the extreme and constantly interfering in the smallest matters. This officiousness was the more exasperating because apparently irrational and, in any case, not applied to all classes alike. Under the old régime France was doubtless in many respects a paradise, but only for the chosen few.
​Next to the king stood at the head of the social order the clergy and the nobility. They formed the privileged classes and were in the main exempt from public burdens, though they owned two fifths of all the land in France. In fact, if we exclude the public domain from the estimate, their possessions amounted to "one half of the Kingdom." The clergy and the nobles numbered but a thirtieth part of the twenty-six millions in France, but they enjoyed an enormous proportion of the income of the nation. Not only did the clergy hold vast estates, but they also exacted tithes, as was their right, and received, moreover, a considerable annual income from voluntary offerings and bequests. Without question, the Church of France in the eighteenth century was, all in all, an institution of incalculable beneficence as well as of great splendor. But luxury had deadened the zeal of earlier days, and too often the Church served as a convenient means of providing well-paid sinecures for the younger sons of noble families.
In many parts of France the Church had estranged its natural adherents and even embittered its own servants. Although it possessed vast estates and enabled the great dignitaries to live like princes, the minor clergy were sadly underpaid, and in many cases lived little better than the impoverished and starving people that they served. In eighteenth-century England there was, before the great religious awakening of the middle of the century, a prevailing indifference to spiritual things. But there was no such popular hostility to the clergy as was common in France; for, particularly after the great religious revival, the English clergy took a genuine interest in the welfare of the poor; whereas in France the higher clergy appeared chiefly concerned to exact their tithes and to turn over their routine duties to ill-paid curates.
As for the French nobility, they had long since lost most of the political power they once possessed as a natural right in their own districts; and unless kept at home by poverty, they had, with few exceptions, given up living upon their estates for the greater part of the year and ​yielded to the attraction that drew all France to Paris and the court of the king at Versailles. In their absence their estates were managed by agents, who too often were unscrupulous and merciless.
But although as a class they had lost political power, the nobility enjoyed many special privileges and had vast influence at court and on the administration of government. Theirs was an unquestioned social position. They secured in the army and in the fleet the choicest places, which gave them large revenues and little to do. Some of the higher nobles had vast incomes from their estates and lived in extravagant luxury. But the nobility almost wholly escaped taxation. They were free from the burden of the corvées, of compulsory military service, and of having soldiers quartered upon them. They had the privilege of selling their wine in the market thirty or forty days before the peasant; they could pasture their cattle in the meadows of the peasant; they could keep a host of pigeons that devoured the peasant's grain while he dared not kill or take them; they could claim a certain proportion of the peasant's grain or wine or fruit; and they could compel him to use the seignorial oven for baking his bread. These survivals in the eighteenth century appeared increasingly irrational, since what had given rise to the privileges was no longer in existence. In short, as De Tocqueville remarks: "France was the only country in which the feudal system had preserved its injurious and irritating characteristics, whUe it had lost all those which were beneficial or useful."
Moreover, admission to the ranks and privileges of the nobility could be secured by men of wealth who had no ancestral claims. This upstart aristocracy was despised by the ancient noblesse and doubly hated by the toiling masses. In England the aristocracy was one of the strongest bulwarks of the constitution and of the social order: in France it was a constant source of irritation and dislike and an invitation to revolution.
Below the privileged classes was the great third estate, ​comprising the merchants, the members of the learned professions, multitudes of men of letters, and, of course, all the peasantry, as well as all the working-classes in the towns. The members of the third estate were in many cases as wealthy, as learned, as polished in manners, as the members of the favored classes, but they were not permitted to share in the privileges and exemptions reserved by law for the clergy and the nobility. And as for the peasants and artisans, they were, in the main, simply ignored, even by multitudes of those who themselves were counted as belonging to the third estate.
Upon the poorer classes of France the burdens of existence pressed heavily. Throughout the country the lot of the peasantry was pitiful, even though the serfdom of central and eastern Europe was practically unknown. Upon them fell the duty of keeping themselves and their families alive, while at the same time they carried the load of taxation from which the privileged upper classes were mainly exempt. With no opportunity for self-improvement they became sodden and hopeless. It is true that many French peasants, by thrift and incessant toil, had accumulated considerable wealth, particularly in land, but they were none the less subjected to trivial yet exasperating annoyances that reminded them of their lack of legal equality with their titled neighbors, who were sometimes poorer than themselves. The country districts were shamefully neglected by the government, which drained them of money and of men and gave little or nothing in return.
Many of the towns, we may note, were relatively prosperous, particularly in the generation just preceding the Revolution, but the small villages and rural hamlets were too often wretched collections of filthy hovels occupied by half-starved peasants, brutalized by want and by excessive toil.
How all this affected the tourist is obvious. He found little to attract him to the country districts, where the miserable condition of the peasantry made comfort difficult ​to secure, and he moved from town to town with as little delay as possible along the route. And whether in town or country he could not help realizing that something was out of joint. Keen observers, like Chesterfield, already foresaw revolution.
Yet the thirty or forty years before 1789 — the very years that most concern us — were far more prosperous than the first half of the century, and had there been a more efficient administration of government and a more equitable distribution of the burdens of public life, it is possible that France would have escaped the horrors of the Revolution, as England herself did.
But the average English tourist was no prophet nor a very competent judge of the significance of what he saw. With the less attractive sides of French life and official administration he inevitably came more or less in contact as he journeyed across country, but, unless he was a trained observer like Arthur Young, he noted only incidental defects, and those mainly as they affected his personal comfort. Of the deep discontent that smouldered in every part of France he hardly suspected the existence, and he regarded the schemes for social reform, so popular in the salons, chiefly as entertaining speculations that must not be taken too seriously. The glitter and the gayety of French society blinded his eyes. But most of the world was blind in those days, and he was but a passing stranger.
IV
Of all the countries visited on the grand tour, the condition of Italy was, from many points of view, the least enviable. Her decline was the favorite topic of eighteenth-century tourists and poets. There had, indeed, been a sad falling-off since her days of ancient greatness. In the time of the Roman Empire Italy had been the recognized leader of the world, but when the barbarian invasions overwhelmed the Empire the country became the successive prey of the strongest. The brilliant period of the ​Renaissance made Italy for a time the chief center of European culture and art. But war from without and dissension from within had long before the eighteenth century impoverished the land and left it weak and divided. Says the historian of Piedmont: "What Italy really attained during the latter end of the eighteenth century was not happiness, but cessation from suffering; there was not actual progress in Italy, but only a stay in her decline." Spain and France and Austria for generations regarded Italy as a mere pawn upon the chessboard — a mere make-weight to aid in adjusting the "Balance of Power."
After the middle of the sixteenth century, France in her own name figured little in Italian affairs in comparison with Spain, but the so-called Spanish Bourbons, who ruled a large part of Italy in the eighteenth century, were of course really French; and French ideas and French fashions never ceased to exert a marked influence in the peninsula. Throughout the seventeenth century the greatest power in Italy was Spain, which, indeed, maintained peace, but hampered industry and individual initiative by narrow-minded and absurd interference. Early in the eighteenth century, as a result of the war of the Spanish Succession, Austria forged to the front in Italy and assumed the leading political rôle.
It is needless to remark that as yet Italian unity was hardly a dream, and that Italy as such had no voice in the councils that parceled out her territory among foreign rulers. This very fact makes difficult a clear understanding of political conditions below the surface in Italy in the eighteenth century, since the changes in boundaries and in masters were made without reference to the desires of the people and the interests of the country, and hence without reference to the organic development of the national life. Whereas in French or English history the sequence of events can be traced in something like logical order, the thread of Italian history is so tangled that one has difficulty in following any line for a great distance. Where unity is lacking, there can be no strict sequence.
​Into the details of history we cannot here enter, but we must glance for a moment at the most important territorial readjustments that were made in the course of the first half of the eighteenth century, though we must remember that it is not easy to make a compact statement covering all the details.
The one fact of greatest moment is that the Italian peninsula, with its population of fourteen millions, had no central dominating government, but was split up among many different sovereignties. Between 1700 and 1750 four treaties were made which transferred large portions of Italian territory from one European power to another. The first treaty was that of Utrecht in 1713, at the close of the War of the Spanish Succession. This transferred the Kingdom of Naples, which had been Spanish since 1504, from Spain to Austria; Sardinia from Spain to Austria; Sicily from Spain to Savoy; and the Duchy of Milan from Spain to Austria. In 1720 a partial readjustment was made by an agreement between Savoy and Austria to exchange Sicily and Sardinia. This had for Austria the advantage of giving her sovereignty over the adjacent regions of Naples and Sicily. In 1738 the Peace of Vienna brought about extensive changes. Austria relinquished the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily and other bits of Italian territory to the Spanish Bourbons and in her turn received Parma and Piacenza, whose last Farnese duke had died in 1731. At the same time, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was confirmed to Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine. He had married Maria Theresa of Austria in 1736; and hence Tuscany became to all intents an Austrian possession. But in 1765 their son Peter Leopold was made Grand Duke of Tuscany, and he ruled here with practical independency of Austria until his election as Emperor in 1790. As a minor matter we may add that early in the eighteenth century the Duchy of Mantua became a dependency of Austria and was made a part of Austrian Lombardy. Lastly, we note that, in 1748, at the close of the War of the Austrian Succession, Parma and Piacenza were given to a Bourbon ​prince, and some portions of the Duchy of Milan were ceded to the Kingdom of Sardinia.
Besides the states under foreign domination there were others that maintained their independence. The States of the Church stretched from the Republic of Venice to the Kingdom of Naples and recognized no master but the Holy Father. The Duchy of Modena had little power, but it was undisturbed by outside aggression. In the midst of the Papal domain the tiny medieval Republic of San Marino preserved its liberty in its mountain nest. The little oligarchy of Lucca kept its autonomy as it had long done. The two republics of Genoa and Venice had sadly declined, but in their decrepitude they still cherished their great past and continued to drag out a sluggish existence. In the extreme northwest, Savoy and Piedmont had succeeded for centuries in making headway against the powers that had taken possession of much of the peninsula. When Sardinia was exchanged for Sicily in 1720, the Kingdom of Sardinia was founded, and included the island of Sardinia, the Duchy of Savoy, and the Principality of Piedmont. Later additions of territory slightly increased the strength of the kingdom, which was destined in the course of time to become the dominant power in the Kingdom of Italy and to bring about the union of all the scattered sovereignties in the Italian peninsula. The French Revolution, followed by Bonaparte's invasion in 1796, brought an end to many of the complicated arrangements here outlined, but with the later history we cannot now deal.
In the forty years before the French Revolution Italy was in the main free from commotions, though neighboring states had "an aversion for each other … often increased to a marked hatred and contempt. The Genoese, Florentines, Neapolitans, and Romans," we read, "foster so great an odium against each other as was never manifested between the English and French." The rulers of the separate states were despotic, as was the case all over the Continent, but some of them made considerable effort to improve agriculture and industry, particularly in the ​northern half of the peninsula, and to put the public finances upon a sounder basis. Notably in Milan and in Tuscany the incoming of Austrian rule brought a far greater prosperity than had been known for generations. But, as a result of the excessive subdivision of the territory of Italy, we can easily see that foreign trade and international intercourse of every sort would be greatly hampered by the ordinary and inevitable eighteenth-century formalities at the frontiers and at city gates. Moreover, it is obvious that a country so divided could have no collective national life or spirit. Throughout the greater part of Italy, participation in political life was for most men, of whatever rank, an impossibility. Practically all that was left was to take up with some occupation of an obviously harmless type.
Under the conditions existing everywhere in Italy no man could take pride in the name of Italian. He might be a member of an ancient and wealthy family, but, shut out as he was from an active career and disdaining any useful occupation, he was likely to become an amateur in art or music — to spend his days and his nights in dancing attendance upon some woman who could never be his wife, and to fritter away his energy in inane social follies. Civilization in some parts of Italy, particularly in the southern half, seems to have been a thin veneer over ill-concealed barbarism, due to causes of remote origin. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, "in Romagna and the Marches … the blood-feud was custom of the country, greatly enhanced by long years of Papal misrule."
Still, in spite of all drawbacks, portions of the northern half of Italy, particularly Tuscany and Lombardy, were measurably prosperous. In comparison with these regions the southern half of the peninsula presented a marked contrast. Speaking broadly, poverty increased in proportion as one proceeded down through the States of the Church into the regions of the extreme South. A sober investigator like Tivaroni says that in the Roman territory there were no manufactures and no agriculturists. The ​poor of Rome lived upon the fragments that fell from the tables of fifteen or twenty thousand rich foreigners who spent the winter there, — upon the cardinals, the Papal court and the Roman princes. Says an English traveler in 1741: "Viterbo, Montefiascone, Ronciglione, and the rest of the towns we passed through are all in the same miserable condition, tho' in a pleasant and fruitful country: We saw ruinous houses and poor people, with fine churches, rich clergy, and fat convents." Of Rome itself the same writer says: "This City, which was once the mistress of all the riches of the then known world, is now so poor, that, to change a pistole in a shop, you must buy half the value in goods, and take the rest in several bank notes, each of the value of half a crown sterling." He adds, with some extravagance, "It is very probable that in a few years both the town itself and all the neighborhood may be perfectly void of inhabitants, and, like the former Babylon, only a haunt of monsters and beasts of prey."
In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the great minister Tanucci had brought about notable reforms, but the social conditions throughout the country districts were substantially those of feudal times. The peasantry were not only desperately poor, but they were illiterate, superstitious, hopeless, and such they continued to be throughout the eighteenth century, and even long after. More than one fourth of the population were ecclesiastics, who had gathered up a large proportion of the wealth of the country into their own hands.
Even in the middle of the nineteenth century a brilliant historian points out in enumerating the reforms that were urgently needed: "In no country of Europe was this triple revolution more lamentably overdue than in Naples, where the tyranny, uncontrolled through long centuries, of priest, of noble, and latterly of king, had left marks of devastation not only on the welfare of a few passing generations, but deep in the national character itself. …" Referring to "the hill towns of southern Italy," he continues, "In those miserable abodes of fear, poverty, and ​superstition, the Dark Ages were prolonged down to the end of the eighteenth century, and it was there that the character of the Neapolitan people was moulded."
Other features of Italian life will receive attention in the proper place, but this rapid sketch is sufficient to make clear the general condition of the country that the tourist had to traverse.
V
Very different from France, and yet in all ranks of polite society the persistent imitator of everything French, was Germany. The well-informed man of to-day naturally thinks of Germany as the greatest military power in the world, as the home of the most advanced scholarship, and as the formidable commercial rival of England. Far lower in the eighteenth century was the international reputation of Germany. All through the period we are examining, Germany was not a compact nation, but a bewildering congeries of disunited kingdoms and electorates and principalities and free cities, with one portion — the Electorate of Brandenburg — gradually rising to preëminence as the new Kingdom of Prussia.
There is, indeed, no more confused and complicated history when taken in detail than that of Germany, for where there is no unity there can be no clearly defined policy and no general continuity of growth. With the historical development of Germany we cannot here deal. We have rather to endeavor to form some conception of what was connoted by the term "Germany" in the eighteenth century and to indicate the type of civilization it presented.
In the Middle Ages, Germany held a commanding position among the nations of Europe, with wealthy cities like Lübeck and Hamburg and Cologne and Nuremberg and Augsburg and Frankfort and Mainz and Strassburg and Breslau. But Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century had long been declining. The Reformation and the animosities it engendered rent the Empire in twain ​and left a heritage of strife that made Germany a battlefield for a generation. Since the Middle Ages no greater calamity fell upon any European nation than came to Germany with the Thirty Years' War. The ruin of great and flourishing cities, the destruction of ancient festivals and quaint customs, the brutalizing of the rural population throughout a generation of strife, all this left its mark upon the Germany that travelers visited in the eighteenth century.
Following the Thirty Years' War came the ravaging of the Palatinate in 1688, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Seven Years' War. In these wars much of the earlier brutality continued. Prosperous and beautiful German cities were laid in ashes and countless villages made uninhabitable.
Already in the seventeenth century progress was sadly arrested. Public spirit and public opinion almost died out. Bureaucrats and pedants held full sway. It was the day of small men and small things. Great centers of present-day industry, like Solingen, Essen, Krefeld, Elberfeld. Barmen, were in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries too insignificant to deserve mention.
Even late in the eighteenth century a semi-medieval character pervaded the atmosphere of Germany. The nobles, particularly in the Rhine districts, were too poor to keep up their ancient splendor, but they cherished all their surviving privileges and looked with contempt upon the peasantry. Throughout the Empire the laboring classes were in a far worse condition than in France. "The dwellers on the estates of the Prussian nobility in Silesia and Brandenburg were treated no better than negro slaves in America and the West Indies. They were not allowed to leave their villages, or to marry without their lords' consent; their children had to serve in the lords' families for several years at a nominal wage, and they themselves had to labour at least three days, and often six days, a week on their lords' estate. These corvées or forced labours occupied so much of the peasant's time that he could only ​cultivate his own farm by moonlight. This state of absolute serfdom was general in Central and Eastern Europe, in the greater part of Germany, in Poland and in Russia, and where it existed the artisan class was equally depressed, for no man was allowed to learn a trade without his lord's permission, and an escaped serf had no chance of admission into the trade-guilds of the cities. Towards the west a more advanced civilization improved the condition of the labourers; the Italian peasant and the German peasant on the Rhine had obtained freedom to marry without his lord's interference; but, nevertheless, it was a prince of western Germany, the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who sold his subjects to England to serve as mercenaries in the American War of Independence. In France the peasant was far better off."
Besides all this, there was everywhere prevalent in Germany a narrow spirit of particularism, an inability to see the world from any other point of view than that of one's own limited district. Taken as a whole, Germany was inert and unprogressive, feudal in spirit and practice, and everywhere divided against itself. Even where neighboring states lived peaceably side by side, as for the most part they did, there was marked lack of interest in one another's welfare, and a lack of concerted effort toward a common end.
And this contracted, illiberal spirit is precisely what might have been expected from the rulers and the subjects of the petty states that constituted the moribund German Empire. Already, before the dawn of the eighteenth century, the Empire, with its ten circles, — including some three hundred separate states, of which fifty-one were free cities, — was little more than a name. "Properly, indeed, it was no longer an Empire at all, but a Confederation, and that of the lowest sort. For it had no common treasury, inefficient common tribunals, no means of coercing a refractory member; its states were of different religions, were governed according to different forms, were administered judicially and financially without any regard to each other."
​Since the Thirty Years' War the Empire had so lost all directive power that it left the rulers of diminutive states to govern unchecked by imperial restraint. These minor despots were in some cases well disposed and capable, but too often they were destitute of German spirit and were chiefly bent upon making their courts tawdry copies of the splendors of Versailles.
Out of this crowd of feeble little states, long overshadowed by the great House of Hapsburg, Prussia emerged in the eighteenth century, and from being merely the Electorate of Brandenburg became the powerful Kingdom of Prussia. But although the genius of Frederick the Great had won for Prussia a foremost place in Europe, Germany as a whole counted for little beside France and England. The greatest rival of Prussia was Austria. For generations the House of Hapsburg, while ruling Austria, had at the same time stood at the head of the German Empire. For a brief interval (1742–45) the Elector of Bavaria had held the dignity of Emperor, but at his death it was immediately given to Francis I, the husband of Maria Theresa, and after him to Joseph II. With the enfeebled German Empire, however, we need not longer concern ourselves, for its days of usefulness were past and its end was near. But the Austrian monarchy had a vigorous though troubled life, and ranked as one of the greatest powers of the eighteenth century. In the course of the eighteenth century Austria lost and gained territory, but she gained more than she lost. In 1772, Austria shared with Russia and Prussia in the dismemberment of Poland. In Italy Austria held the Duchies of Milan and Mantua and the Principality of Castiglione; and a member of the Lorraine branch of the House of Austria was the ruler of Tuscany. In the Low Countries the Catholic provinces — substantially the modern Belgium, — were under Austrian sovereignty.
Beyond question these were great and important possessions. But the most marked characteristic of Austria as contrasted with France was that it was not a compact and homogeneous country inhabited by a people speaking the ​same language. France, indeed, harbored in Brittany a picturesque race that cherished its ancient speech and traditions, but the Bretons were among the most loyal supporters of the throne. Austria, on the other hand, consisted of a group of provinces with little in common except dependence upon the ruling Hapsburg monarch. The dominant German element cherished ideals very different from those of the Magyars, the Slavonians, the Rumanians, the Italians, who were continually struggling to advance their own interests. Various languages, various political institutions, various customs, various religions, made real unity impossible and engendered constant jealousies and sometimes open strife. So slight was the bond uniting the Austrian provinces that, as is still the case, the personal qualities of the ruler were of great importance in holding together the disparate elements.
It is to be noted, too, that far more than in France and the Rhine region of Germany had the spirit of medievalism survived in Austria. The aristocracy still enjoyed many odious class privileges and raised their heads high above the miserable common people. The peasants were bound to the soil and forced to labor for the aristocratic landowners as a compensation for the privilege of being allowed to exist. They were not even free to marry without the approval of their masters. In Hungary, in Bohemia, in Silesia, in Moravia there was, throughout the eighteenth century, a growing discontent and a more insistent longing for a diminution of the heavy feudal burdens.
Maria Theresa, and far more in his turn the restless Joseph II, had to some extent succeeded in carrying through the most pressing social reforms, such, for example, as the abolition of serfdom, and the imposition of taxes upon the nobles. The zeal of Joseph II would have forced a host of sweeping changes upon his people, but he could not overcome the inertia of centuries, and at length, prematurely worn out and bitterly disappointed by his many failures, he died in 1790.
​Everything considered, Austria in the eighteenth century was in a very backward state. Education was sadly neglected. Illiteracy was general among the lower classes. Manners were brutal. Immorality was rife in all ranks of society. Free-thinking was popular in the upper classes and superstition pervaded the untutored peasantry. For the tourist there was in Austria little that was attractive outside the cities. These were united by an extensive system of roads, which, on the great lines of travel, were maintained by the centralized government in condition far better than was the case in the petty states of what we now call Germany.
VI
Upon the other portions of Europe we need not long delay. Switzerland, securely placed in the center of the Continent, took no recognized part in the affairs of Europe, and was permitted to work out its destiny undisturbed. Great wealth was unknown, and simplicity of living was the rule. Some of the mountain districts afforded a very scanty subsistence, but the country as a whole was reasonably well-to-do and contented, and some cities, such as Basel and Geneva, enjoyed remarkable prosperity.
In the northwest comer of the Continent were situated the Low Countries — the seven Dutch provinces that we collectively call Holland, from the name of the most important, and the Austrian Netherlands. The story of the rise of the Dutch Republic is one of the marvels of the history of Europe. Throughout the seventeenth century the little republic was extraordinarily prosperous, and her merchant vessels brought her untold wealth from every part of the world. Despite her diminutive size she stood up against the aggressive policy of France, for a moment humiliated England, and took an active part in the War of the Spanish Succession. The long strain of this and previous wars was, however, too severe, and except for the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the brief but unfortunate naval war with England just at the close ​of the American Revolution, the Dutch Republic as a political power played throughout the eighteenth century little or no part in shaping the destiny of Europe. But her merchants and her bankers, her florists, and her seamen made her everywhere respected for her wealth and her trade. Dutch comfort and Dutch cleanliness were proverbial. Dutch freedom was the envy of the downtrodden in every part of Europe.
Between Holland and France were the Catholic Low Countries, which we know as Belgium. These provinces had long been under Spanish rule, but at the close of the War of the Spanish Succession they had fallen to Austria. They were governed by an Austrian viceroy and, particularly during the reign of Maria Theresa, enjoyed a measure of prosperity. But the grasping policy of Holland and of England blocked the navigation of the Scheldt and prevented commercial expansion. From the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht to the French Revolution Holland overshadowed the Austrian Netherlands and prevented them from seriously rivaling her commercial supremacy.
We have now completed our survey of the portions of Europe that particularly concern us. With Denmark and Norway and Sweden and Russia and Poland and Turkey and Greece the majority of tourists had little to do, and our plan does not permit us to follow the steps of the occasional travelers. To Spain we must, however, give a word. In the eighteenth century Spain was in full decadence. An intolerant religious policy had rooted out and banished the most prosperous elements in the population of Spain. Vast wealth was in the hands of the Church, but poverty and superstition pervaded the country. Travel was attended with great discomfort. Roads were few and in bad repair. Inns throughout the country were of the most primitive character. Spanish misgovernment, moreover, had left its mark on more than one part of Europe. Spanish princes still held portions of Italy, and Spanish possessions were scattered all over the world; but the energy ​that had marked Spanish administration in the sixteenth century had given place to pretentious weakness; and to the increase of the power of Spain in any part of the world England in the eighteenth century was sternly opposed, as she had been in the days of the Invincible Armada.
With Portugal, on the other hand, the relations of England were intimate and amicable. A good part of the country was dominated by English capital, and the commerce of her greatest ports was wholly in the hands of the English. The very food and clothing of the people came in large measure from England and in English bottoms; on the other hand, the wine imported from Lisbon and Oporto into England, on the easy terms of the Methuen Treaty, and freely consumed in every well-to-do English household, made gout a disease almost inevitable to an Englishman of recognized social position.
In a country like Portugal, where English interests were paramount, there were naturally a good many representatives of English families not actively engaged in trade, but attracted by the genial climate and the beauty of the country. The lack of roads and accommodations for tourists compelled strangers for the most part, however, to sojourn in one of the coast towns, such as Oporto, Lisbon, Cintra, since touring in the interior for mere pleasure was hardly practicable. At all events, a voyage to Portugal was not counted as an essential part of the conventional grand tour, but rather as an interesting excursion for one who sought a change of scene and air.
* ↑ See Chapters X-XIV for details.
* ↑ In the middle of the century, Nugent, Grand Tour, iv, 8, estimates the population of France at 20,000,000. For 1789, Levasseur estimates the population at 26,000,000. The census of 1801 makes it 26,930,756.
* ↑ "L'ancienne France était si hérissée d'exceptions, de privilèges, de contrastes, que les assertions absolues … appellent à chaque instant des explications, des atténuations ou des correctifs, suivant les circonstances de temps et de lieux." Cardinal Mathieu, L'Ancien Régime en Lorraine et Barrois, p. xiii.
* ↑ The place that the king held in the everyday thought of the people is well illustrated in the following contemporary comment: "The most inconsiderable circumstance which relates to the monarch is of importance: Whether he eat much or little at dinner; the coat he wears, the horse on which he rides, all afford matter of conversation in the various societies of Paris, and are the most agreeable subjects of epistolary correspondence with their friends in the provinces." Moore, View of Society and Manners in France, etc., p. 20.
* ↑ "Everything in this kingdom is arranged for the accommodation of the rich and the powerful … little or no regard is paid to the comfort of citizens of an inferior station." Moore, View of Society and Manners in France, etc., p. 16.
* ↑ Taine, The Ancient Regime, I, 17.
* ↑ Ibid., I, 14.
* ↑ "It is the taste in France, for all that can possibly afford it (and of course for many that cannot) to live in the capital. This is a most devoted friend to luxury, which necessarily begets poverty — and then dependence — it is therefore encouraged by the court." Letters concerning the Present State of the French Nation (1769), p. 145.
* ↑ They were not subject to the taille, and although they paid the capitation tax, this was comparatively unimportant, and very unequally imposed.
* ↑ Cf. Taine, The Ancient Régime, I, 25.
* ↑ The Old Régime, p. 246.
* ↑ Cf. De Tocqueville, The Old Régime, p. 155.
* ↑ Gallenga, History of Piedmont, I, 208.
* ↑ Baretti, Manners and Customs of Italy, II, 156. The population of Italy (1750–89), according to other estimates, ranged somewhere between this figure and seventeen and a half millions.
* ↑ Wyndham, Travels through Europe, I, 35.
* ↑ Trevelyan, Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, p. 103.
* ↑ Yet even after Leopold's many reforms, parts of Tuscany were in a wretched state, with squalid villages and impassable roads. Cf. Tivaroni, Storia Critica del Risorgimento Italiano, I, 267.
* ↑ Ibid., I, 298.
* ↑ "A debased aristocracy, a people of beggars, behold the result of the ecclesiastical government." Ibid., I, 295.
* ↑ A Short Account of a Late Journey to Tuscany, Rome, etc., p. 16.
* ↑ Ibid., p. iii.
* ↑ Ibid., p. iv.
* ↑ Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand, p. 38.
* ↑ Morse Stephens, Europe, 1789–1815, pp. 5, 6.
* ↑ Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, p. 339.