World Order (6 page)

The Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent generally opted for the rationalist rather than the organic view of political evolution. In the process, they contributed—unintentionally, indeed contrary to their intention—to an upheaval that rent Europe for decades and whose aftereffects reach to this day.

Revolutions are most unsettling when least expected. So it was with the French Revolution, which proclaimed a domestic and world order as different from the Westphalian system as it was possible to be. Abandoning the separation between domestic and foreign policy, it resurrected—and perhaps exceeded—the passions of the Thirty Years’ War, substituting a secular crusade for the religious impulse of the seventeenth century. It demonstrated how internal changes within societies are able to shake the international equilibrium more profoundly than aggression from abroad—a lesson that would be driven home by the upheavals of the twentieth century, many of which drew explicitly on the concepts first advanced by the French Revolution.

Revolutions erupt when a variety of often different resentments merge to assault an unsuspecting regime. The broader the revolutionary coalition, the greater its ability to destroy existing patterns of authority. But the more sweeping the change, the more violence is needed to reconstruct authority, without which society will disintegrate. Reigns of terror are not an accident; they are inherent in the scope of revolution.

The French Revolution occurred in the richest country of Europe, even though its government was temporarily bankrupt. Its original impetus is traceable to leaders—mostly aristocrats and upper bourgeoisie—who sought to bring the governance of their country into conformity with the principles of the Enlightenment. It gained a momentum not foreseen by those who made the Revolution and inconceivable to the prevailing ruling elite.

At its heart was a reordering on a scale that had not been seen in Europe since the end of the religious wars. For the revolutionaries, human order was the reflection of neither the divine plan of the medieval world, nor the intermeshing of grand dynastic interests of the eighteenth century. Like their progeny in the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, the philosophers of the French Revolution equated the mechanism of history with the unadulterated operation of the popular will, which by definition could accept no inherent or constitutional limitation—and which they reserved to themselves the monopoly to identify. The popular will, as conceived in that manner, was altogether distinct from the concept of majority rule prevalent in England or of checks and balances embedded in a written constitution as in the United States. The claims of the French revolutionaries far exceeded Richelieu’s concept of the authority of the state by vesting sovereignty in an abstraction—not individuals but entire peoples as indivisible entities requiring uniformity of thought and action—and then designating themselves the people’s spokesmen and indeed embodiment.

The Revolution’s intellectual godfather
, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, formulated this universal claim in a series of writings whose erudition and charm obscured their sweeping implications. Walking readers step by step through a “rational” dissection of human society, Rousseau condemned all existing institutions—property, religion, social classes, government authority, civil society—as illusory and fraudulent. Their replacement was to be a new “
rule of administration in the social order
.”
The populace was to submit totally to it—with an obedience that no ruler by divine right had ever imagined, except the Russian Czar, whose entire populace outside the nobility and the communities on the harsh frontiers beyond the Urals had the status of serfs. These theories prefigured the modern totalitarian regime, in which the popular will ratifies decisions that have already been announced by means of staged mass demonstrations.

In pursuit of this ideology, all monarchies were by definition treated as enemies; because they would not give up power without resisting, the Revolution, to prevail, had to turn itself into a crusading international movement to achieve world peace by imposing its principles. In order to propel the new dispensation across Europe, France’s entire adult male population was made subject to conscription. The Revolution based itself on a proposition similar to that made by Islam a millennium before, and Communism in the twentieth century: the impossibility of permanent coexistence between countries of different religious or political conceptions of truth, and the transformation of international affairs into a global contest of ideologies to be fought by any available means and by mobilizing all elements of society. In doing so, the Revolution again merged domestic and foreign policy, legitimacy and power, whose decoupling by the Westphalian settlement had limited the scope and intensity of Europe’s wars. The concept of an international order with prescribed limits of state action was overthrown in favor of a permanent revolution that knew only total victory or defeat.

In November 1792, the French National Assembly threw down the gauntlet to Europe with a pair of extraordinary decrees. The first expressed an open-ended commitment to extend French military support to popular revolution anywhere. France, it announced, having liberated itself, “
will accord fraternity and assistance
to all peoples who shall wish to recover their liberty.” The National Assembly gave added weight to this decree and obliged itself to give it force in the proviso
that the document be “translated and printed in all languages.” The National Assembly made the break with the eighteenth-century order irrevocable by guillotining France’s deposed King several weeks later. It also declared war on Austria and invaded the Netherlands.

In December 1792, an even more radical decree was issued with an even more universal application. Any revolutionary movement that thought the decree applied to it was invited to “fill in the blank” of a document reading, “The French People to the ____ People,” which applauded in advance the next fraternal revolution and pledged support to “the suppression of all the civil and military authorities which have governed you up to this day.” This process, whose scope was implicitly limitless, was also irreversible: “
The French nation declares
that it will treat as enemies the people who, refusing liberty and equality, or renouncing them, may wish to preserve, recall, or treat with the prince and the privileged castes.” Rousseau had written that “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be forced to do so by the whole body … [H]e will be forced to be free.” The Revolution undertook to expand this definition of legitimacy to all humanity.

To achieve such vast and universal objectives, the leaders of the French Revolution strove to cleanse their country of all possibility of domestic opposition. “The Terror” killed thousands of the former ruling classes and all suspected domestic opponents, even those who supported the Revolution’s goals while questioning some of its methods. Two centuries later, comparable motivations underlay the Russian purges of the 1930s and the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

Eventually, order was restored, as it must be if a state is not to disintegrate. The model once again came from Rousseau’s “great legislator.” Louis XIV had appropriated the state in the service of royal power; the Revolution commandeered the people to underwrite its design. Napoleon, who proclaimed himself “First Consul for Life,”
later Emperor, represented a new type: the “Great Man” swaying the world by the force of his will, legitimized by charismatic magnetism and personal success in military command. The essence of the Great Man was his refusal to acknowledge traditional limits and his insistence on reordering the world by his own authority. At the climactic moment of his coronation as Emperor in 1804, Napoleon, unlike Charlemagne, refusing to be legitimized by a power other than his own, took the imperial crown from the Pope’s hands and crowned himself Emperor.

The Revolution no longer made the leader; the leader defined the Revolution. As he tamed the Revolution, Napoleon also made himself its guarantor. But he also saw himself—and not without reason—as the capstone of the Enlightenment. He rationalized France’s system of government, establishing the system of prefectures through which, even at this writing, the French system of administration operates. He created the Napoleonic Code, on which the laws that still prevail in France and other European countries are based. He was tolerant of religious diversity and encouraged rationalism in government, with the end of improving the lot of the French people.

It was as the simultaneous incarnation of the Revolution and expression of the Enlightenment that Napoleon set about to achieve the domination and unification of Europe. By 1809, under his brilliant military leadership, his armies crushed all opposition in Western and Central Europe, enabling him to redraw the map of the Continent as a geopolitical design. He annexed key territories to France and established satellite republics in others, many of them governed by relatives or French marshals. A uniform legal code was established throughout Europe. Thousands of instructions on matters economic and social were issued. Would Napoleon become the unifier of a continent divided since the fall of Rome?

Two obstacles remained: England and Russia. England, in
command of the seas after Nelson’s crushing victory at Trafalgar in 1805, was for the moment invulnerable but not strong enough to launch a significant invasion across the English Channel. As it would a century and a half later, England stood alone in Western Europe, aware that a peace with the conqueror would make it possible for a single power to organize the resources of the entire Continent and, sooner or later, overcome its rule of the oceans. England waited behind the channel for Napoleon (and a century and a half later, for Hitler) to make a mistake that would enable it to reappear on the Continent militarily as a defender of the balance of power. (In World War II, Britain was also waiting for the United States to enter the lists.)

Napoleon had grown up under the eighteenth-century dynastic system and, in a strange way, accepted its legitimacy. In it, as a Corsican of minor standing even in his hometown, he was illegitimate by definition, which meant that, at least in his own mind, the legitimacy of his rule depended on the permanence—and, indeed, the extent—of his conquests. Whenever there remained a ruler independent of his will, Napoleon felt obliged to pursue him. Incapable of restraint by concept, temperament, or experience, he launched his forces into Spain and Russia, neither of them essential to a geopolitical design. Napoleon could not live in an international order; his ambition required an empire over at least the length and breadth of Europe, and for that his power fell just barely too short.

With the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the age of total war—the mobilization of a nation’s entire resources—had arrived. The scale of bloodshed and devastation harked back to the Thirty Years’ War. Napoleon’s Grande Armée—now manned through conscription, including even in annexed territories—supplied and maintained itself on the assets of the conquered enemy and population, including gigantic financial “tributes.” The results were an enormous increase in the size of the army and the subjection of entire regions. Not until Napoleon succumbed to the temptation to enter territories
where local resources were insufficient for the support of a huge army—Spain and Russia—would he face defeat, first by overreaching himself, above all in Russia in 1812, and then as the rest of Europe united against him in a belated vindication of Westphalian principles. At the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig in 1813, the joint armies of the surviving European states inflicted Napoleon’s first major, and ultimately decisive, defeat in a battle. (The defeat in Russia was by attrition.) After the Battle of the Nations, Napoleon refused settlements that would have enabled him to keep some of his conquests. He feared that any formal acceptance of limits would destroy his only claim to legitimacy. In this way, he was overthrown as much by his own insecurity as by Westphalian principles. Europe’s strongest conqueror since Charlemagne was defeated not only by an international order that rose up against him, but by himself.

The Napoleonic period marked the apotheosis of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the examples of Greece and Rome, its thinkers had equated enlightenment with the power of reason, which implied a diffusion of authority from the Church to secular elites. Now these aspirations had been distilled further and concentrated on one leader as the expression of global power. An illustration of Napoleon’s impact occurred on October 13, 1806, one day before the Battle of Jena, where the Prussian army was decisively defeated. As he left to reconnoiter the battlefield with his general staff, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, then a university lecturer (he would later write
The Philosophy of History,
which inspired Marx’s doctrine), described the scene in panegyrical terms as he heard the clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobblestones:

I saw the Emperor—this world-soul
—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.

But in the end, this world spirit had drawn into Europe an immense new power—of Europe and yet with three-quarters of its vast territory in Asia: imperial Russia, whose armies pursued Napoleon’s decimated force back across the Continent and were occupying Paris at war’s end. Its strength raised fundamental issues for the balance of power in Europe, and its aspirations threatened to make impossible a return to the prerevolutionary equilibrium.