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Reviews
| The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815, by Tim Blanning. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007. 736 pages. $39.95, cloth.
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| This survey, the sixth volume of The Penguin History of Europe, is a valuable synthesis of recent scholarly work on the 167 years from the end of the Thirty Years War through the Napoleonic Wars. Its thirteen chapters range over all regions of Europe and are organized into four topical areas: Life and Death; Power; Religion and Culture; and War and Peace. There are four substantial chapters on social and economic history in Part One: Communications; People; Trade and Manufacturing; and Agriculture and the Rural World. These capture realities of everyday life and precede the political history treated in Part Two. Historians familiar with Blanning's books on French Revolutionary wars and on the French Revolution's impact on German states will not be surprised that his discussions of the Old Regime often point toward 1789–1815 or that he emphasizes wars as agents of change. |
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The development of state power and absolute monarchy, as epitomized by Louis XIV's reign in France, are among the familiar staples of historical narrative that Blanning reviews. Like most recent historians, he notes that limited communications and transportation meant that absolute monarchies wielded far less control over populations than in more recent states, including democracies. Furthermore, ruling families like the French Bourbons often pursued dynastic interests as well as the interests of the state. Yet Blanning disagrees with scholars who contend that absolutism was simply a "myth" purveyed by artful publicists and reinforced by impressive building projects like Louis XIV's Versailles, the Habsburgs' Schönbrunn Palace, or Tsar Peter I's St. Petersburg. Although the term "absolutism" was evidently not coined before the 1830s, seventeenth-century contemporaries spoke of a state's "absolute authority." The buildup of government power by Louis XIV, by Frederick the Great and his Hohenzollern predecessors, or by Catherine the Great was real. Extending the power of the state also concerned the Austrian Habsburgs, whose leadership in their own lands and in the Holy Roman Empire Blanning judges more favorably than have many previous historians. Admittedly, Joseph II exacerbated divisions within the multinational Habsburg empire when, in the 1780s, he ruled alone after Maria Theresa died, but the Holy Roman Empire survived until Napoleon pronounced it extinct. |
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Economic resources were vital in the buildup of a state's power. France's agricultural prosperity and overseas trade long gave it advantages, but from the War of the Spanish Succession onward, England was on the rise economically due to international trade, its overseas empire, early industrialization, and sound public fiscal policies. Blanning also detects in eighteenth-century England, as in some other countries, the appearance of nationalist attitudes. Like most recent historians, he rejects the notion of an industrial "revolution," as opposed to an "evolution," in late eighteenth-century England, but nonetheless emphasizes England's lead in certain inventions and aspects of industrial production, elements familiar in narratives of European economic history. It was in the 1830s that some French writers began referring to an industrial revolution paralleling political revolutions. |
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The chapters in Part Three on religion and culture are rich in insights. Reviewing the range of books published before 1800, Blanning notes that for most contemporaries, the eighteenth century could be called an age of religious faith rather than an age of reason. Yet he also argues for retaining the concept of an Enlightenment to organize the history of ideas before 1800, observing that contemporary references to reason replacing superstition, or light replacing the darkness of ignorance, were legion. Some Germans, after all, termed the later eighteenth century an Aufklarung, the French spoke of a siècle Des lumières, and Italians of I lumi. Enlightenment authors produced many texts that figured in discussions characteristic of an increasingly important "public sphere," and there were new references to the influence of "public opinion." As Jürgen Habermas memorably defined it, that public sphere was located in between the state and the larger society and was the forum for debating many political issues. Such discussion also reflected some supposed limits on absolutist rule, as did periodic popular riots by rural or urban populations. |
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In explaining the origins of the French Revolution, Blanning, like most recent historians, rejects purely Marxist or materialist explanations and stresses the importance of the political and fiscal crises facing the Bourbon monarchy. Dealing with the government's near bankruptcy led Louis XVI's regime to take the steps leading to the 1789 upheaval. France's economic woes were tied to the costs incurred during the War of the Austrian Succession, Seven Years/French and Indian Wars, and in aiding the American Revolution. As he details the role of major and lesser European states in these and other conflicts, Blanning often refers to a Second Hundred Years War between France and England, dating from 1688 to 1815. Although the French Revolution ushered in a new era of mass participation in politics, it was not without great resistance, resistance exacerbated by France's march to war. |
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Blanning's concluding balance sheet weighs the positive and negative features of each period surveyed, and wisely concludes that European leaders and their subjects recognized elements of both. Because he often assumes that readers have some familiarity with standard chronological narratives, however, his review of recent scholarly findings will be more useful for teachers than for many beginning students. |
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| Millersville University of Pennsylvania |
Linda L. Clark |
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