Revolutions and Romanticism

A passage in David A. Bell's The First Total War (Boston: Houghton Miffln, 2007) caught my eye. Reflecting on the growing cosmopolitanism of European society during the eighteenth century, Bell notes: "... commerce was binding the states of Europe more closely to one another. Commodities imported from the Americas and Asia — sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, textiles, spices, precious metals — clogged every port in Europe with heavily laden ships and drove the European economy into unprecedented expansion. Bordeaux alone saw its maritime trade increase sixfold between 1724 and 1789 (most of the cargo moved straight out again to other European destinations). ... The development of commerce was further aided by the slow rise of `cottage industry' — which had transformed half the farmsteads in some areas of France, Britain and the Netherlands into scattered elements of what amounted to a giant, primitive factory." (This is my emphasis).


This sentences sums up quite nicely the reality that factory-industry arises not in metropolitan areas, but on the countryside (as per previous entry). Bell does not directly mention Flanders, the Dutch-speaking Belgian province that was, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary/Napoleon wars in 1792, part of the Austrian empire, and after 1815, was temporarily made a part of the Netherlands (Belgium became an independent kingdom in 1830). However, the Dutch-speaking Flemish areas was where heavy-industry became predominant in the Belgian economy; as in Britain, industrialization took place in these outlying areas, instead of in or near Brussels, a city founded in the tenth century. Belgian Dutch — the Flemish — were also relatively disenfranchised compared to their French-speaking compatriots (the Walloons), who until recently controlled most political power in Belgium.


As Bell notes, the "cottage" manufactories were themselves a kind of loosely-organized factory system. In Britain, due to the abolition of feudal bonds and the apprentice system long before other European states, it was relatively easy to organize these "cottages" into a single factory existing under one roof. A web site devoted to European industrial history, suggests why it is, of all European states, it was Belgium that experienced industrial revolution first, after Britain: "In 1792 the country was conquered by Napoleon. His occupation had a positive effect on the economy: he abolished the old guilds and introduced freedom of trade. At the same time a large new market was opening up in France, not least for coal."


Of course, Belgium was not conquered by Napoleon Bounaparte, in 1792 or ever after. Napoleon was an officer with the Republican army during that time, but did not participate in battles in Austrian Netherlands; it was a Revolutionary army that took over the country that year, and did impose the liberal economic reforms as described in the passage, which led to the rapid industrialization of Belgian almost as soon as the Napoleonic wars concluded in 1815.


In December I referred to the paradox of the division of labour, in which high intellect contributes to the process wherein work itself becomes de-skilled and monotonous. This reduction of work to a dumb mechanical process is just a particular instance of the reality of scientific and Enlightened thought generally, which reveals a natural world denuded of romance and spirituality, in favour of dumb mechanical processes. This is, as I said, behind the inevitable division that exists in industrial societies between bourgeois and proletariat, or management and worker. To get a better sense of how intellectually-addled is factory work, I will refer to a book I read years ago, which quoted an academic who had worked his way through school as employee of a factory. Working on an assembly-line, he said, is comparable to a clerical employee typing out the same page of text, over and over again, for five days a week, for as long as twelve hours per day. The outlook of the proletarian, thus, is radically different from that of a bourgeois, regardless if the worker actually has an income as high or higher than the average white-collar worker. In essence, the worker can gain no inherent reward from his work. Thereby, he gains his identity and meaning from anything other than work. A bourgeois, on the other hand, does have the opportunity to gain intrinsic pleasure from her work. Thus, her identity is wrapped up closely with work.


Most books covering the Napoleonic wars begin with Bounaparte's coup d'etat on the 18th Brumaire, Year 8 of the Revolutionary calendar (November 8, 1799). Bell's work instead covers the years from the Revolution itself in 1789, to the coup ten years later, this to more fully pursue his thesis that the Revolutionary/Napoleonic conflicts were the "first total war." His argument is that, apart from the vast scale of the conflict itself (with battles themselves often numbering more than half a million combatants, when engagements of anywhere near 100,000 were rare before 1790), it was a change in mentality among the French revolutionaries which made the conflicts the Revolution itself engendered, into total war (Bell, FTW, p. 73). Prior to 1789, Bell says, the military was not considered a distinct realm apart from civilian life. The word "civilian" itself, referred in English only to an expert in Roman civil law (Bell, FTW, p. 7). Officers would usually pass seamlessly from military to civilian life, fighting wars (for various militaries) in between service as ministers of the state, being full participants in "society", as well as contributing successfully to arts and letters. The rank and file, meanwhile, were not actively segregated as they are today in "their own communities (military bases), complete with special forms of housing (barracks), a separate education system (military academies and other specialized schools), and even a separate legal system," just as eighteenth-century soldiers were not "conspicuously marked off from civilians by their uniforms" (Bell, FTW, p. 27).


Before the French Revolution, rank and file soldiers usually lived within in their own communities, or when on campaign, were (usually reluctantly) quartered within the civilian population (the obscure third amendment to the U.S. constitution expressly forbids the quartering of soldiers within "any house, without the consent of the owner").


This situation was paradoxical, however. Although there was no conceived opposition between "civilian" and "military" in ancien-regime France, and the rest of Europe, wars themselves rarely ever affected much of the non-combatant population. There were many instances of armies running amok upon civilian populations, of course: this was common in civil conflicts all through history, and it occurred frequently during the seventeenth-century wars of religion (which were often civil wars, as well). But, as Bell notes, during the eighteenth century, even as war itself became progressively more lethal for combatants, attacks on civilian populations actually decreased. As well, codes of honour among the nobles commanding the militaries usually prevented the wholesale slaughter of losing armies by the victors (after all, officers had often previously fought alongside officers they were now fighting against).


The American and French Revolutions firmly established that militaries were under the authority of civilian leadership (temporarily, as it turned out, in the case of France). This began the breach between "civilian" and "military". But this carried its own paradox. For although military personnel were thenceforth deliberately separated from civil society, armies themselves were (as with the Revolutionary levee en masse) vastly expanded to include, in potential, the whole of the adult and male population. Not only this, even those not conscripted to serve in Revolutionary or republican forces, were subjected to aggression and violence on the part of the mass armies. This is the meaning of "total war", according to Bell (a professor at Johns Hopkins university in Baltimore), and it is the reason why, at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, as many as five million Europeans had lost their lives, most of these being direct combatants, but including a far larger proportion of civilians than ever was the case previously.


Reading through Bell's review of the debates and controversies which gave rise, by 1792, to the doctrine of total war, I could not help but to be reminded of Peter Gay's assertion that the original Romanticists did not view themselves as rebels against the Enlightenment, as they are usually considered today. They instead wished to bring advance Reason from its traditional concerns with society and politics, to the realm of the arts, literature, and the psyche itself. In fact, Romanticism and the Enlightenment existed in a figure-and-ground relationship. Romanticism subsisted on the domination and enslavement of nature and natural processes, as occurred through the scientific and industrial revolutions. Enlightened philosophy, at least in its Gallic form, incorporated an ideal of the "natural goodness of man" that has, in fact, no rational basis. There is little to differentiate the chief philosopher of the Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the Swiss Protestant who lived from 1712 to 1778), from any member of the Romantic movement in the post-Revolutionary period, and into the nineteenth century. Rousseau exalted the Noble Savage, while derogating the civilized arts and sciences (including the printing press, the means by which Enlightened ideas were spread throughout Europe).


According to Bell, Rousseau's avid followers during the French revolution were frequently Romanticists, to the point of delusion. Bell writes, "Take, for example, the durable belief that freedom gave `citizen-soldiers' something close to supernatural abilities, despite their lack of experience," (p. 138) and cites Revolutionary deputies and journalists who claimed that, in face of royalist enemies, soldiers of the republic would be immune from gunfire and that would magically gain the power of ten men. Bell writes, "Then there was the curious matter of the pike. As a weapon, it had not featured seriously on western European battlefields for a century. When used to impale the horses of oncoming cavalry, it still had some utility, but for soldiers to rely on it when facing companies of well-trained musketeers was little more than suicide. Nonetheless, the Girondins [radical Revolutionary deputies to the National Convention that ruled France from 1791 to ‘93] had blithely promoted it as the true weapon of free citizens before the war, and its cult continued to flourish even as the Prussians had began their march. In September 1792, the department of the Marne, on the Prussians route to Paris, ordered smiths and locksmiths to abandon all their work in favor of pike making. The sober military engineer Lazare Carnot, a future member of the Committee of Public Safety [which instituted the Reign of Terror in 1793-94], argued for the distribution of pikes to the entire adult population. In a revealing exchange in the Legislative Assembly [which ruled from 1789-91], a deputy criticized Carnot for holding up the pike-bearing Macedonians and Romans as models. ... But another deputy immediately shot back, to huge applause: `If we have not been either Spartans, or Athenians, we should become them.' In 1793, a Revolutionary general would complain that the government had burdened him with no less than `sixty thousand [pikes] that are good for nothing.'" (pp. 138-139)


But, there was a change in intellectual life, which distinguished the Enlightenment philosophy from that of the Romanticists. It was simply due to he French Revolution itself. The plans and schemes proposed by Rousseau and the other philosophes were acknowledged (even by the philosophers themselves) as mere fantasia. It was believed that, perhaps, in a century or so, perhaps as long as two hundred years, humanity would be adequately prepared to live by Reason. As 1789 dawned, no one in France or anywhere else had any idea that, by the end of the year, royal absolutism would be replaced with a constitutional monarchy, let alone that a few years after that, a republic would be declared and Louis XVI and Queen Mary-Antoinette would be put to the guillotine. The fantasy republics envisioned by Rousseau, Montesquieu and Condorcet obviously couldn't measure up to the reality of Revolutionary republicanism.


But, far from ushering in a new age of liberty, the Revolution introduced the Terror (the Marquis du Condorcet lost his life to it in 1794) and total war (which eventually gave rise to Bounaparte). In response, many of the Enlightened turned away from politics entirely, or even embraced reaction — like William Wordsworth, the English poet and radical Whig who embraced the French-Revolutionary cause, only turn away from it during the Reign of Terror, and who, by the time of his death in 1850, was a firm Tory. But, as Peter Gay points out, most Romanticists were not like Wordsworth; to the extent that they did react against the Enlightenment, it was more so out of a recognition that Reason, while necessary, wasn't in itself sufficient to living a full life.


In any case, Romanticism and Utility formed into a Victorian dialectic: as industry and rationality proceeded during the nineteenth century, so too did Western culture become more and more enamoured with romantic concepts — to the point of cliche, by the mid-century. Certainly, Romanticism powerfully informed the radical political movements of the time. The socialist philosophy espoused by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, had as its meta-purpose the expulsion of Romanticist concepts from socialism. Marx and his followers sought to revive the dormant spirit of the Jacobins, the ultra-rationalist Terrorists of what Marx called the "Great French Revolution." It is, on the other hand, not surprising that Marx and Engels — like their erstwhile mentor, Georg Hegel — would promulgate a philosophy of history. The systematic and scientific treatment of the past was another area pioneered by the Enlightenment — in particular by German academics. History, long the only real social-science (in spite of its treatment as an "arts" subject in the English-language curriculum), had brought clarity to the past as never before, or at least since ancient times.


It established the time-line of history as being much older than was previously assumed, just as geology was beginning to prove that the earth simply had to be millions of years old. Before history was developed as a science, the past was a pastiche of legend and fact. Early-modern philosophers neglected history because they recognized how unreliable were accounts of the past. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, along with most others, instead ignored the past and proposed a hypothetical man "in the state of nature", as the starting point of their theories. Otherwise, early-moderns looked to the ancient past, accounts of which in Thucydides and Herodotus were assumed to be accurate.


The narrative of the past proposed by these early scientific historians — that the classical world marked the height of human achievement, the Middle Ages were represented the apex of darkness and superstition, and history ran on a progressive course — have become the common-sense of the educated today. These and other notions of the past have been superseded, or upended entirely, by professional historians. Marx and Engels, as much as Hegel, looked to a philosophy of history as a way to lend meaning to past events, thereby lifting humanity from the realm of dumb mechanical processes.

The Importance of Karl Marx

Karl Marx, the Lutheran whose family had converted from Judaism, was key to the “secularization” and deracinating of the age-old contempt and suspicion held toward money and merchantry.


Marx did not succeed completely in his mission: before him, and into the present day, class division has taken on distinctly ethnic overtones, simply because the merchants are usually from minority nationalities. Throughout Europe, it was the Ashkenazim, from which Marx himself descended, who were disproportionately involved in trade. In the Near East, it was the Christian Armenians that dominated money and markets, while descendants of Arab-Muslim conquerors were predominate in trade in the Far East. The “overseas” Chinese, based out of Pacific Asia, have been disproportionately numerous in business in that region, and latterly in the western coasts of Canada and the United States, which also hosts a business class where Muslims from the Middle East, Jews from Europe and Armenians from Africa and the Near East (as well as those from the Subcontinent) are again found in trade more frequently than the strict proportions of these minorities in the general population.


The apparent universality of “stranger” or minority populations involved disproportionately in trade, stems from several causes. For one, minorities may be forbidden outright from standard occupations, such as farming or handicrafts, as well as the law, medicine and so on. Trade has always been considered, by the high and low, as so disreputable that only despised minorities were left to it. However, simple discrimination in this fashion is not sufficient for a minority population to survive in business. There are many minorities who remain penniless, but for their possession of religious beliefs of a lesser or greater ascetic import, which is shared in common with all or most of the minority-trading populations cited above. It is true of the Ashkenazi Jews, as of the Armenian Christians; the Muslims of the Far-East and modern-day Europe and North America, as well as the Hindu and Islamic Subcontinentals who live in the Occident today. The Overseas Chinese are adherents of Confucianism, which alike with Buddhism, expresses the ascetic aspect of Asiatic religiosity. This is of course paradoxical. Why is trade, supposedly based on greed and chicanery, so associated with the ascetic faiths of inconvenience? It is precisely the self-discipline and energy of the ethical and ascetic, which makes them so right for business.


As a rule, too, minority-trader populations are “homeless”, possessing no proper place of origin, being neither from here or from there. This is literally the case with the Jews of Europe, as well as the Armenians, who each lost their homelands thousands or hundreds of years ago. The Muslim descendants of the Arab conquerors were, by the time of the collapse of the power of the Caliphate, so integrated into the societies of those whom they had conquered, that the Arab language itself was lost or had evolved completely into a new tongue, and the Muslims themselves had become Asiatic in appearance. This holds true, to a lesser extent, with the Overseas Chinese, especially in the Pacific Asia home-base. However, for racial, ethnic or religious reasons, the minority populations are not considered a part of the host society. They instead sought a base of power outside what was acceptable to most — in trade. And, for this reason, virtually all the trader-minority populations mentioned, have been subjected to varying degrees of assault and despisal, especially when times were bad.


Karl Marx, the convert who was so darkly-complected that his nickname was “The Moor”, and who moreover came from a milieu familiar with money and markets (his father was a lawyer, but his uncle founded in Holland what became Phillips Electronics, and of course his partner was Freddy Engels, the Manchester factory-owner), sought to channel the natural hostility of the masses toward the merchant class, entirely away from ethnic and racial conceptions. His dialectical philosophy taught that all human beings were defined essentially not by race, religion, ethnicity or sex, but by class: either bourgeois or proletarian. These groups formed, as it were, separate and antagonistic “nations” that were (or would become) global in reach.


It is obvious that this is not the case, that members of bourgeoisie and of the proletariat define themselves foremost by nationality, ethnicity, gender, and so on, before they see themselves as middle- or working-class (this is dismissed by Marxists as an aspect of “false consciousness”). However, it is true more generally that participation in trade and (especially) industry in modern times has been characterized less so by ethnic or religious minority-status. In virtually all industrialized countries, the nationality, ethnicity and religion of the bourgeoisie was broadly the same as the proletariat. But this general statement disguises the fact that, very often, religious or national minorities were more predominant in capitalist trade given their share of the total population.


During the industrial revolution in Britain, for example, Dissenters from the Church of England were far over-represented among the nascent capitalist class, compared to their overall population. Dissenters were Protestants, but belonged to other than the official denomination, which meant their full participation in civic life was curtailed or forbidden (no holding of elective office, for example). In Scotland, industrialization was carried out mainly by those of Anglo-Saxon heritage, as compared to the proletarian descendants of the Celtic Highlanders (including the minority Scots Catholic population). Calvinist Anglo-Scots have in turn, been predominant in modern business throughout England itself, and in Ulster, Canada and the United States. In Germany, Max Weber famously observed that “Protestants eat well, while Catholics sleep well,” indicating the predominance of the former in business and the professions, the latter among the working-classes. In Germany, too, secular or convert Jews were again over-represented in trade and merchantry, notoriously to fall victim to Nazism because of it.


The reality of the prevalence, or outright dominance, of ethnic and religious minorities in the ranks of the merchantry, is confounding to the respective views of human nature held by Marxists, on the one hand, and by monetarists, on the other. Far from being, by definition, rational benefit-maximisers, as argued by classical liberals, people only take to trade as a primary way of life, under extraordinary social circumstances. It is the ascetic value placed on “saving for another day”, which paradoxically makes capital accumulation possible. But this is upsetting, in turn, to the Marxian assumption that, in the first place, capital accumulation is not dependent upon ethno-cultural particularities, and that it is impossible for the dispossessed to get ahead by saving and risk-taking.


All the religious and ethnic minorities that were, ultimately, noted for their shrewdness in business, were originally in wretched straits. It was precisely their denial of full participation in the feudal-tributary economy, which forced the minorities into trade, and thus, subsequent wealth. Under capitalism, it is possible to get ahead; but success and sagacity in business requires a particular socio-cultural conditioning, and is not otherwise intuitive. In reality, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century occurred against a particular social and cultural background. Ascetic religion, the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, thrived especially in nordic Europe (essentially, Britain, the Dutch- and German-speaking lands, as well as Scandinavia) during the early-modern centuries. Protestantism was successfully transplanted from there to northern America, as well as other outports throughout the world (southern Africa as well as Australia and New Zealand). True asceticism was the province of but a minority of the pious, but the values of hard work and sobriety in conduct and manners, were broadly held throughout English-speaking and other nordic-European societies.


Anglophone society as well, had a tradition of free labour, extant since long before the advent of factory-employment. This together allowed Britain to pioneer a factory-based economy, a process repeated on a far more grandiose scale in the United States. In Britain and the United States, industrialization was hardly trouble-free, but not marked by the sort of social and class division that characterized the factory revolutions in France and elsewhere in Europe. Although even in the English-speaking world, trade and commerce was dominated by those of ascetic denominations and ethnicities, the general embrace of Protestantism allowed those of lower station to make something of themselves, as long as they were ready to adopt monastic habits themselves.