The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815 (Penguin History of Europe) [Paperback]

Tim Blanning (Author), David Cannadine (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Penguin History of Europe | Publication Date: May 27, 2008

In 1648, Europe was essentially a medieval society. By 1815, it was the powerhouse of the modern world. In exuberant prose, Tim Blanning investigates ?the very hinge of European history? (The New York Times) between the end of the Thirty Y ears? War and the Battle of Waterloo that witnessed five of the modern world?s great revolutions: scientific, industrial, American, French, and romantic. Blanning renders this vast subject digestible and absorbing by making fresh connections between the most mundane details of life and the major cultural, political, and technological transformations that birthed the modern age.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This new volume in the Penguin History of Europe series is a wonderful achievement, particularly so considering the mammoth amount of specialist material that required synthesizing into digestible portions for general consumption. Blanning, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, has performed the miracle of balancing and blending traditional political and diplomatic accounts with the newer fields of social, economic and intellectual history. A prime example of this is the author's treatment of the impact of the new "public sphere." As people discoursed through coffeehouses, Masonic organizations or periodicals, "a new source of authority emerged to challenge the opinion-makers of the old regime: public opinion." Countries where this public sphere was left free, as in Britain or the Dutch Republic, tended to be more politically stable than, say, France, where suppression ended in bloody revolution. Blanning narrates the story of Europe from the end of the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars, when secularization and the primacy of state sovereignty were recognized as the key attributes of the coming era. What the Europeans would eventually get was the secular, martial religion of nationalism. But this is the subject for a subsequent volume—which will be hard-pressed to match this splendid one. (June 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end. Although the Europeans didn’t know it, of course, this devastating conflict would prove to be the last of the Wars of Religion that had been tearing the continent apart since the start of the Reformation in 1517. Europe was entering a new age.

Despite the Renaissance, it was still a largely medieval world in its outlook, infrastructure and government in 1648. Europe was less wealthy and, in many ways, less economically advanced than other parts of the world, like Mughal India and China. By 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo, Europe was recognizably modern. It was also far in advance of the rest of the world economically, scientifically, technologically, politically and militarily.

So the period between these two dates is the very hinge of European history. It is no small accomplishment to cover so vast a subject adequately in a single volume. But Tim Blanning, a professor of modern history at Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy, not only does so, he also triumphs at it. “The Pursuit of Glory,” at 708 pages, is not a short read, but it is so well written that for those who love history, it is a page turner.

Mr. Blanning accomplishes his task not by taking a strictly chronological approach but by dealing with various aspects of a rapidly changing Europe one by one. Consider communications. In 1648 the main roads in Europe were mostly the ones that the Romans had built 1,500 years earlier and that had been neglected ever since.

The pace of travel, therefore, was seldom more than the speed a man could make on his own two feet, which, indeed, is how most people traveled. What coaches there were were wretched and slow. In 1708 an envoy from Louis XIV to Madrid reported from Bayonne, in southwestern France, that he had been nine days on the road and expected that he would need another two weeks to reach the Spanish capital.

But by the end of the period, roads had much improved in Western Europe and with it the speed of travel. In France travel times were cut in half and the comfort of riding in coaches much improved by the better roads. In Britain matters were even better. The trip from Bath to London took 50 hours in 1700. By 1800 it took 16. These greatly improved roads allowed other improvements, like much more efficient and much less costly postal service.

This sort of history can be deadly dull, an endless recitation of facts and statistics. In Mr. Blanning’s hands it is not, because he has a keen eye for the exactly apposite contemporary quotation. The people who lived through this transportation revolution regarded it with the same wonder that we regard, say, the global positioning systems that now keep us from getting lost. In 1754 a newspaper advertisement proclaimed, “However incredible it may appear, this coach will actually arrive in London four days after leaving Manchester.”

Mr. Blanning is also the master of the unexpected connection. The greatly improved roads, and thus greatly increased traffic, had an entirely unanticipated consequence: highwaymen. The reason that the 18th century saw these “gentlemen of the road” turn into figures of romance and legend is simply that the improved roads provided them with so many more people of whom they could demand that they “stand and deliver.”

Mr. Blanning uses this technique over and over, always with good effect. Why did France develop economically so much more slowly than Britain in the 18th century, with huge political consequences? One important reason was that Britain had an internal common market, but France was still riddled with internal tariffs and local taxes, causing no end of economic discontinuities.

An English traveler reported in 1786 that “a nobleman of Berry told me that on one side of a rivulet which flows by his chateau, salt is sold at 40 sols a bushel, and on the other ... at 40 times as much. In consequence of this, no less than two thousand troops of horse and foot were stationed on its banks to check smugglers.”

While everyone likely to read this book has heard of the scientific revolution, brought about by people like Isaac Newton, and the industrial revolution that began toward the end of the period (both well covered here), the agricultural revolution occurring at the same time was equally important. In 1648 European agriculture had not changed much since medieval times. But enclosure, manuring, crop rotation, new crops like turnips and clover, and improved breeding brought forth a large increase in food production.

One result was a golden age for the landed gentry, whose rent rolls increased sharply, and their conspicuous consumption along with them. (Robert Walpole employed 50 people just to weed his gardens.) Another result was the freeing of manpower to work in the factories that were beginning to spring up in the English countryside. The industrial revolution came about because of turnips as well as steam engines.

Mr. Blanning thoroughly covers the politics and endless wars of the era. These power shifts were not unconnected with the two great political trends in Europe in this period: the development of representative government in Britain and the Dutch Republic and the growth of royal absolutism in much of the rest of Europe. Change thus came about in manageable increments in Britain, allowing it both to modernize efficiently and to accommodate a potent new political force — public opinion, made possible by coffee houses and newspapers — while change was bottled up until it exploded in France.

Even here, Mr. Blanning presents the historical nuggets that bring this book to such vibrant life. When Louis XVI learned that he was to die on the guillotine the next morning, he sent a servant to fetch a copy of David Hume’s “History of England” to learn how Charles I had faced his own execution.

The Pursuit of Glory is history writing at its glorious best.

—John Steele Gordon (author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power), The New York Times --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143113895
• ISBN-13: 978-0143113898
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #397,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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168 of 169 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lust for glory did not generally lead to wise policies, July 4, 2007

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Antonio (Bogotá, Colombia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (Penguin History of Europe) (Hardcover)

This is not the first volume to be published in the Penguin History of Europe. That honor belongs to William Jordan's "Europe in the High Middle Ages", a book not as praiseworthy as Mr. Blanning's, which reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic have regarded as one of the top history books of 2007.

"The Pursuit of Glory" is a very ambitious book. It covers, in a single volume, a period that took up 4 volumes in Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization. It begins during the minority of Louis XIV, and ends with Napoleon en route to Saint Helena. In between these two, Blanning tells the stories of the trial and execution of Charles I and of James II's dereliction of duties, of pathetic Charles II and his poisoned inheritance, of Charles XII's madness and Peter the Great's folly, of Elizabeth Farnese's ambition, of Louis XV's lack of foresight, of Maria Theresa's efforts to survive and thrive next to fearsome neighbours, such as Frederick the Great, of Joseph II's pigheadedness and Katherine the Great's acquisitiveness, of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, of Brissot and the Girondins, of the Abbe de Sieyes and Napoleon, of Talleyrand, Pitt and Metternich. All the usual suspects turn up, but this is not dynastic history as usual.

Blanning tells us why road locations were not chosen in the same way in Britain, Spain or France, and what that meant for those countries' future development. He shows us that hunting was a very important activity, central indeed to the kingly role, and highlights the popularity of cock fighting in Britain all the way to Queen Victoria's reign. He compares Mozart's with Beethoven's funeral and uses it to give evidence of the artist's role from the classical to the romantic period. He derides the popular perception of the XVIII century as an age of irreligion, and instead argues that it was an age of faith, with several important revivals still to come, although he acknowledges the decline in the papacy's role since the renaissance. Perhaps the only XVIII century pope worthy of remembrance was Clement XIV, because he suppressed the Jesuit order under pressure from the Bourbon kings of France and Spain. Not the papacy's greatest hour.

In this book Blanning concentrates on the great powers. That meant France, Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia, since Spain, the Dutch Republic, Poland and Sweden went into a steep decline around the middle of the XVII century. France was a superpower until the end of the XVII century. Then Austria prevailed, before ceding its position to Prussia. On the margins, both Britain and Russia only got stronger, until in 1815 they were able to define the future of Europe. Seen from this perspective, the Napoleonic era is just a grandiose coda to a faded greatness that would never return.

Remarkable to this reader was that "Blitzkrieg" (lightning war) was an invention of Frederick the Great. He understood that a small, (relatively) poor country with a first rate army could hope to prevail against bigger, richer neighbors only through short wars with maximum impact. This meant sharp, painful thrusts instead of long campaigns of attrition. It worked for him: he gambled recklessly and always won. Sometimes it was luck, but over a long reign it was really brilliance. Frederick wanted Prussia to be accepted as a great power. He achieved that. For Frederick, "glory" was a practical concern: survival in the middle of strong, bellicose neighbors, for a small contry lacking natural borders.

For the French leaders from Louis XIV to Napoleon "glory" meant acknowledgment of France as supreme in any and all matters: military, economical, political, philosophic, artistic, literary, religious, etc. It didn't work. Demography and economics were against it. France invaded countries (like the Netherlands in the 1690s) without a clear purpose other than showing it was powerful enough to do so. It spent its wealth promoting revolution in remote regions (in North America in the 1770s and 1780s) while it was unable to pay its debts and its political system crumbled. Eventually it was reduced to fighting alongside satraps against everyone else (under Napoleon), until it was well and truly beaten. It continued to be an important country (indeed, it remains so to this day) but it ceased to be a great power in 1815. The pursuit of glory, which means simply the need to be acknowledged as greater than others and thus entitled to impose one's views and preferences, sapped its strenght and demoted it to subaltern status. The same thing happened to Spain or to Sweden.

While drawing parallels between the France of 1648-1815 and today's USA is surely beyond the scope of this book, it is a mark of its excellence that it gives elements that could feed such a debate without ever allowing current concerns to intrude into analysis of past events.

An interesting conclusion was that Napoleon's aggression, which nearly resulted in the unification of Europe under his aegis and the end of dynastic politics, so terrified contemporary leaders that they agreed to establish a legal and moral framework that would make such aggression impossible in the future. The framework held out for roughly a century before it unraveled in the trenches of 1914-1918. Wilson tried to revive it with the League of Nations, but to no avail, and it broke down even more spectacularly in 1939-1945. Then it was reinstated (suitably amended) and it has done fairly well for over 60 years. The lesson would be that such frameworks are fragile, that powerful countries often try to bypass them, and that the result can be total war. It also means that we forget our lessons, and that sometimes they need to be retaught so they are not entirely forgotten.

This is a great book. Extremely well written, prodigiously learned, always interesting and endlessly intriguing. I'd say it would be too short even at twice the number of pages.

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Socio-Economic Origins of European Nation-States, September 6, 2007

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Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (Penguin History of Europe) (Hardcover)

In the halcyon days of the 1970's, as an undergraduate history major, I set myself the absurdly ambitious goal of mastering world history. I would do this by first reading Palmer and Colton's "History of the Modern World," and then I would tackle Will and Ariel Durant's "Story of Civilization." I made it through the "History of the Modern World" and became so overwhelmed with facts, figures, and dates, I abandoned the original goal. I later discovered that cultivating smaller patches is a more steady path to historical knowledge.

Like-minded undergraduates of today have much more and better information available, and the current volume, the second of Penguin's projected eight volume History of Europe is a good example. Much historical research has been done in the last 30 years, and Tim Blanning, professor of history at Cambridge, makes good use it. It's a big improvement on the Pelican Series of my undergraduate days.

Traditionally history was a record of important people such as popes and kings, and major events such as wars and revolutions. From there, historians would make a few passing comments about the lives of ordinary people. Blanning, on the other hand, after the current fashion, gives us a history of everyday life and then shows how it affects the larger events of the day.

Blanning covers a wide swath of European history: frome the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. He begins the book with the physical realities of the lives of ordinary people. He tells us, for example, how roads in 1648 were not much different those in Roman times. It took about 3 weeks to travel from London to Edinburgh or from Paris to Madrid. By 1815, it took only a week. He describes how an internal system of tariffs in France stunted its economic growth, and how the absence of those tariffs allowed England to excel economically during that period. He describes how the improvements in agriculture led to better diets, which in turn led to healthier people and longer lives. He traces the advancements in medicine that at the beginning of the period was basically quackery, but by the early nineteenth century was scientifically advanced.

Fascinating as all the details are, historian must keep the narrative moving and Banning does this remarkably well. He takes the details of everday life and shows how they relate to the big picture. He does this for most of the book. In the final section, he goes into relations between states, the history with which most of us are familier.

Blannings account of Louis XIV's wars in pursuit of glory are probably his best, hence the title of the book. This period marks the beginning of European nation-states and phenomenon known as nationalism. The Peace of Westphalia is an important event for international relations theory, for politics in Europe from that point on becomes an equilibrium of power among the Great Powers. The equilibrium changed constantly and the map of Europe with it. Leaders of Britain, France, Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg were always positioning for more power and territory.

Towards the end of the book, Blanning expounds on another of his favorite subjects: the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. He excoriates the French for what began as the liberation of a people but ended up as a series of wars and conquests for the Bonaparte family. (Another good book on this subject isThe First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David A. Bell.) Blanning sees the seeds of 20th century totalitarianism and genocide in these events as did David Bell in his book.

I highly recommend this book and look forward to the next volumes in this series.

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine Survey: 4.5 Stars, August 19, 2007

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R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (Penguin History of Europe) (Hardcover)

This is a very ambitious survey. Blanning covers not only the 18th century proper but also the second half of the 17th century and the period of the French Revolution/Napoleonic wars. Similar books often start later and end with the beginning of the French Revolution, so Blanning has really undertaken an enormous task. Surveys like this one force authors into attempts to balance chronological narrative with thematic exposition of major trends. In this fine book, Blanning emphasizes thematic exposition over narrative. The Pursuit of Glory is divided into 4 major sections; Life and Death, Power, Religion and Culture, and War and Peace. The first three, comprising the great majority of the book, are thematic. The War and Peace section is a more traditional narrative overview of European politics and diplomacy. This structure is a little unusual but effective.

The Life and Death section is devoted to demography, transportation, economic history, and agricultural history. Power covers the basic political structures of the differing European societies, the impact of attempted reforms, the complex social history of European elites, and provides a broad brush outline of major political and diplomatic trends. The Religion and Culture section is the most diverse, covering intellectual history such as the Enlightenment, religious history and some efforts to look at religious enthusiasms, aristocratic culture, and the beginnings of the Romantic movement.

All sections, including the War and Peace narrative section, are very well done. Blanning is a fluent, sometimes witty, writer. He has to grapple with some controversial historiographic issues, such as the nature of the Enlightenment and the nascent Industrial Revolution, and does so in a generally sensible way. Some themes that emerge are the increasing population and economic vigor of Europe, particularly Western Europe, the parallel growths of the power of the state and the public sphere, and an increasing emphasis on individualism and human capacities. In terms of traditional political and diplomatic history, the themes are the decline of France, the emergence of the great peripheral powers, Russia and Britain, the emergence of Prussia, and the surprising resilience of the Austrian Hapsburgs.

As with all surveys, some things get neglected. Blanning's thematic approach to social, economic, and intellectual history generally works well. On the other hand, it is sometimes hard to get a sense of historical evolution of changes in these different areas from his thematic expositions. Most of the topics discussed are both crucial and very interesting but there are at least a couple of major omissions. There is little discussion of science or math in this book. This is the period of Descartes, Huygens, Newton, Boyle, Linneaus, Morgagni, Laviosier, Hutton, and many others. Similarly, there is little discussion of the history of technology, another major omission. In contrast, Blanning has a whole chapter on the history of palaces and gardens, and almost a whole chapter on the social history of hunting. These are both interesting topics but could easily have been dealt with more concisely and some other important topics discussed. It would have been worthwhile to discuss the extra-European impacts of the 18th century states. This is the period is which the European economies, particularly Britain, begin to dominate the world but there is no description of the expansion of world trade and domination. While Blanning does a good job of emphasizing the reality of the 18th century as a century of faith, particularly popular religious movements like Pietism, I think he neglects the important relationship between the early Enlightenment and moderate Protestant theology.

It is unfortunate that this book has been published with no footnotes, an obstacle to pursuing the many interesting questions raised in the text. The bibliography is decent but not annotated, which should be required for survey volumes.