Elizabeth I was succeeded by James I (the first Stuart), who was very different than she had been.  Elizabeth had had the effect of absolutism, but James insisted on the theory as well.  James was the son of the executed Mary, Queen of Scots, and was sick of the rebellious Scottish nobles he had had to deal with before coming to England.  The large debt Elizabeth had created to defend English interests was not prudently paid off, and instead James squandered money on lavish court's and personal favorites, especially his homosexual lovers.  When Parliament protested, he tore up their petition.
     The House of Commons James was dealing with, however, was very different from the one Henry VIII had terrorized into passing the Reformation a century earlier.  The members had grown rich on the sale of monasteries and were enjoying the new wealth of the commercial revolution.  James made enemies of these commercial classes by granting monopolies to his favorites.  With new agricultural technology, the land's yield improved, so even the landed aristocracy was better off and less likely to be pushed around.  In religion, the Stuarts were high church against the wishes of a growing umber of Puritans.  Moreover, Calvin's virtues of hard work, thrift and sobriety were being flaunted by James at every turn.  The Archbishop of Canterbury further infuriated Puritan sensibilities when he tried to impose the elaborate architecture and ritual of the Baroque style.  James, however, saw Puritans who would not agree with him as potential traitors. Finally, in foreign policy, James flirted with Catholics sovereigns, especially the Spanish, in opposition to the policy of containment practiced by the Tudors.
     When Charles I (1625-49) came to the throne, he, like all the Stuarts, believed in absolute royal power, but he lacked the two things necessary to carry out his desires.  One was a royal bureaucracy appointed by him and the other was a standing army to make his will felt.  As a result he immediately had difficulties with Parliament.
 In 1628, the king was obliged to sign the Petitions of Rights which denied the king the right to tax without Parliamentary consent, imprison a freeman without just cause or to quarter troops in private homes. No sooner had Charles signed this, however, than he dismissed Parliament to rule England without calling the Parliament for 11 years, from 1629-40.  During this time he raised money by illegal means, such as collecting obsolete feudal laws and fines, forcing loans from his subjects and even forcing the rich to apply for knighthoods and then charging them for the privilege.  Eventually, Charles had to call Parliament back to raise money for war in Scotland against the Scots who objected to having the Anglican Book of Common Prayer foisted on them.  This parliament was hostile to more taxes for the king and set about to limit his powers and royal authority.
     Charles objected and took to the field in 1642 where he was defeated in a civil war by Oliver Cromwell in 1646.  The supporters of the king were called the Cavaliers and those of Cromwell the Roundheads because of the soup-bowl haircut they sported.  The so-called Long Parliament sat from 1640-60 to run the country during the civil war.  A defeated Charles was accused of treason and executed in 1649--after Parliament had redefined treason to make his previous acts illegal.
     The new government was called the Commonwealth. It proceeded to abolish the monarchy and House of Lords.  When the Parliament tried to grow rich on the spoils of the defeated cavaliers, Cromwell took over as Lord Protector in 1653, especially when the Parliament tried to disband his army of fifty thousand experienced men he would need to stay in power.  Cromwell became Lord Protector, a sort of military dictator, but not a tyrant dictator in the modern sense.  After all,  he could not veto Parliamentary legislation.  But the threat of the army was enough to enforce his powers.
     Cromwell experienced many difficulties as Lord Protector.  As time went on he became intolerant, producing a backlash. Stiffbacked Puritan supporters angered the populace by closing the theaters and muzzling the press.  Foreign adventures inflated the budget to three times that of Charles.  Cromwell savagely crushed a rebellion in Ireland, leaving a legacy of hatred there and frightening the British with his brutality.  Cromwell found it impossible to reconcile the religious differences among Puritans themselves, with the levelers and the true puritans clashing openly.   In this chaos, trade and commerce declined, and when Cromwell died in 1658, the English decided they had had enough of military dictatorship, and so invited Charles II, the son of the executed king, to take the throne in what is called the Restoration.
     Charles was restored in 1660, and immediately won approval for stepping up the challenge to the Dutch who had been England's foremost trading rival.  London became the commercial and business center of the world, and Holland's defeat ended abruptly her Golden Age which had seen the emergence of Rembrandt.   In these wars, Charles was kept afloat financially from money slipped to him under the table by Louis XIV of France, who thought Charles would soon convert to Catholicism and return England to the Catholic fold.  Because Charles had money from abroad, he had little trouble with Parliament, because he did not demand new taxes.
     Charles was secretly pro-Catholic and so he preferred toleration, but the Anglicans who dominated Parliament thought otherwise, passing laws that said that you could not vote, hold public office, teach or preach unless you received the Anglican sacraments.
     When Charles returned, the powers of the king were further restricted.  There was now the implicit understanding that the king should rule through Parliament, a position very different from the continent's tradition of absolutism, where the king was responsible to God alone.  The English king could veto laws and command the militia, but Parliament controlled the finances and the king was obliged to live on a fixed income, financed by a tax on beer.
     Charles did secretly convert to Catholicism on his deathbed, and this brought his brother James II to the throne.  People were unhappy that James was a Catholic, fearing he would follow Louis XIV's example of revoking the Edict of Nantes and thus ending religious toleration in England as Louis had done already in France in 1685.  When Parliament tried to exclude Catholics from office, James adjourned it, and in violation of the Test Act, began appointing Catholics to important positions in government.  The English were content to wait him out, but to everyone's surprise, James' second wife gave birth to a son under suspicious circumstances, meaning the Catholic line would continue.  Parliament thus invited William of Orange, husband of Mary, James' daughter by his first, Protestant wife, to be king.  William had been the champion of the Protestant cause in Europe.  Although his army was only one half the size of James', James still fled, leaving William to use England against Louis XIV with whom William had been at war for years.
     William however had to accept the Bill of Rights.  This provided that judges were to stay in office during their tenure of good behavior and could not be removed by the king for delivering decisions he did not agree with.  There was to be no standing army in time of peaceóno more Cromwellsóand Parliament must be called every three years.  Freedom of religion was granted to all Protestant dissenters except Unitarians.
     The impact of this so-called Glorious Revolution was profound.  Parliament had deposed  a line of kings and laid down conditions under which future kings could rule.  Divine right of kings was therefore discredited.  In foreign policy, it meant a switch from the pro-French foreign policy of the Stuarts to checking the designs of Louis XIV.  This Glorious Revolution would later be justified by John Locke, whose reasons would even later by used by Jefferson to justify the American revolution.  The role of the English gentry was vastly increased in government as well.   Unlike in the rest of Europe, these gentry could actually determine national policy through membership in Parliament, and came to see themselves as an independent force in politics.
     The Glorious Revolution saw England reach the heights of her prosperity.  The navy which had been built up and reorganized under the late Stuarts became the premier force of the sea.  New colonies, especially in New Jersey and the Carolinas, were settled mainly by the English aristocracy.  The Bank of England grew to become the world's foremost financial institution, cementing London's position as the commercial capital of the world.  The crippling inflation of the last century was stopped so even the average worker could make a better living.  Thus the ordinary Englishman was better off than anyone else in Europe with the possible exception of the Dutch.  He enjoyed better roads, lower taxes, a more impartial judicial system, and more freedom from government interference than almost anyone else.  Moreover, he self-consciously thought of himself as English and was willing to fight for his liberties against Britain's main rival, the other giant of Europe, the France of Louis XIV, thus precipitating the struggle for the control of Europe which would consume most of the eighteenth century.

Struggle for the Control of Europe

     From 1688 on, Europe saw a struggle for control between Britain and France.  These not only represented two different systems of government, with Britain being a constitutional monarchy and France an absolutist state.  There were differences in terms of religious freedom, the role of the gentry and nobility, and the role of the army and navy.  Moreover, France faced a constant threat from the Hapsburg countries around her: Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, Milan in northern Italy, Luxembourg and the Austrian empire.  These foreign threats kept France busy until the war of Spanish Succession made Spain an ally, and finally broke the Hapsburg encirclement, leaving France free to try to dominate the continentóand spurring on Great Britain to stop her at any cost.
     Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643 as a young boy, firmly believing in the divine right of kings.  "L'état ç'est moi," he claimed (I am the state). As a result he continued the advancement of the French monarchy which had begun in earnest under Francis I. To do this, he needed to domesticate the French nobility which had long squabbled with the French kings for dominance. He did this by building his palace at Versailles and obliging the nobility to come to him, instead of himself traveling around France to preserve order with his very presence.  The palace cost him one-half year's royal revenue to build.   As many of 20,000 people were working on it on any given day.  Here the nobility was crammed into tiny rooms, with little sanitationóeven the drinking water froze at night in winter.  But all social and political advancement was at Versailles, and so they came.   Versailles is an example of the secular Baroque, designed to overawe people with the monarch's strength and wealth, as the Catholic church had desired to overawe when it created the Catholic Baroque a century before.  The palace also served as a showcase for French goods like mirrors. Here at Versailles, the nobility wasted its time playing cards, engaging in dances, and spending money lavishly on fripperies.  Louis' idea was so successful in taming or defanging the French nobility, that the palace idea was adopted by other monarchs in Europe interested in creating a true absolutist state, from Peter the Great of Russia to the Hapsburgs in Vienna.
     To pay for all this, Louis employed Colbert, his chief minister, who vigorously pursued a policy of mercantilism to increase the wealth and power of the state.  Although Colbert did not invent the theory, he used it to provide Louis with the robust economy his plans demanded.   In mercantilism, profit was secondary to increasing the sovereign's wealth and power.  The wealth of a nation according to the 18th century was based on the nation's gold supply, and to acquire more gold, a country would need a favorable balance of trade (selling more overseas than it bought), making the country more self sufficient.  High tariffs were used to keep out foreign competition (money raised from the tariffs was of almost secondary concern), colonies were sought to produce what France could not, internal tolls in France were reduced (the Rhone river alone had 40 toll stations), and a powerful merchant marine was constructed to ferry goods back and forth across the seas.  All this, however, presented a direct threat to Great Britain, who had already staked out the position as premier force of the sea and who, since the Navigation Acts, had employed mercantilism to produce the thriving British economy.
     Colbert's success was undone by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which stripped religious toleration from French Protestants, known as Huguenots.  These Protestants had been the victims of government harassment throughout the 17th century, but even more so after 1679 when Louis decreed there would be but one law and one religionóhis, Catholicism. As a result of this Edict, 300,000 Frenchmen left, carrying with them their skills, their money, and their hatred of Louis XIV and absolutism, feeding into the ears of British Anglicans the thought that Catholics once in power, like James II, could not be trusted to preserve religious toleration.  The exodus devastated French industry: Lyons lost 9,000 or its 12,000 silk workers.
     To dominate the continent, Louis improved his army.   Now the army would be employed directly by the king, not the nobles whom he distrusted, and the officers would be French even though many of the men would be mercenaries. He found a way to feed the army rather than have it live off the land, so the French armies rarely plundered the countryside, although to avoid doing so they sacrificed valuable speed as they dragged their supply wagons behind them.  Louis even built a hospital for the injured soldiers, called Invalides, in Paris, on the premise that soldiers who knew they would be cared for would fight more energetically.   But the area of most advance was artillery and engineers where one actually had to know what one was doing, and it is here that the sons of the middle class and lowest of the low nobility rose rapidly, the most famous example being Napoleon in the next century.  But the army was huge, never falling below  200,000 and at full fighting strength it was 400,000, all of whom would have to be paid as mercenaries, fed and housed, creating a huge drain on French tax receipts.
     Worse, the army did not distinguish itself in the War of Spanish Succession, 1701-13, which France lost.   As part of his drive to break out of his Hapsburg encirclement, Louis schemed to have a relative of his named to the Spanish throne when the insane and ailing Spanish king died.  This robbed Austria of a throne she believed belonged to the family and would have secured peace along the Pyrenees to give France one area she would not have to worry about Hapsburg attack. Thus, the war pitted France and Spain against Austria and Great Britain, who saw the opportunity to damage France by supporting Austrian claims.  England continually organized coalitions to keep first France (and later Germany in the 20th century) from dominating Europe, and here she fought with Austria, but in a few years she dropped Austria as an ally and embraced Prussia.  France lost the war because she was poorly financed and badly equipped, and she was also hurt by the terrible famine of 1709 that killed one out of ten Frenchmmen.  Government receipts gathered in only one fourth of expenses.  John Churchill led the armies of the English coalition to a resounding victory at Blenheim in 1704, whereupon a grateful nation built him Blenheim palace outside Oxford, and made him the Duke of Marlborough.
     The war ended with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which was less of a victory than Britain had won on the battlefield.  Philip, Louis' relative, became king of Spain on the condition that the Spanish and French crowns were never united.  But France was obliged to give up Newfoundland which Britain would then use as a staging area for the later war on Canada, and Spain gave up Gibraltar, the only entrance into or exit from the Mediterranean until the creation of the Suez canal in 1869.  The war was fought as were most 18th century wars, by professional armies, not the masses as would occur later in the French revolution, thus involving the people only indirectly. In fact, the history of European wars is that they end primarily because of exhaustion of manpower and money, rather than by a decisive clash of arms. Further, Most european wrs are fought for territorial changes nd end with a negotiated treaty like this one, rather than being fought for ideology and settled by a dictated treaty like the Treaty of Versailles which ended World War I.  As a result of the war, the long-standing rivalry between France and Spain was replaced by a strong Spanish-French alliance, and the two most powerful countries in Europe, France and Great Britain, struggled for the control of the continent.
     Louis XIV died in 1715.  He had unified France as she had never been before, but he left her demoralized and debilitated by costly wars which he lost.  He also sold many offices, thus exempting more people from taxation and raising the tax rates on those still left in the system, those who were least able to pay.  French agriculture remained hopelessly backward in relation to the rest of Europe, in spite of the natural fertility of the soil, since French farmers would not make improvements that the tax collector could see.  In the long run, Louis XIV may have discredited absolutism.  Indeed, the later Seven Years war displayed French weakness to the rest of the world, showing France would need more than mere political and administrative reform--and thus helped usher in the French revolution.
     England now moved to neutralize France.  To this end, she subsidized allies in Europe, first Austria and then Prussia, to keep France busy fighting in Europe while she concentrated on conquering colonies overseas and destroying French commerce.   Thus, Britain was able to put 40,000 troops in the New World when the French could not, and France divided her energies playing power politics in Europe while competing with the British overseas.
 France was primarily a land power while Britain relied on her navy.   By 1750, British ships of the line outnumbered the French by two to one.  In 1759, when French ships tried to leave port, they were decimated by the British.  Moreover, in trying to have it all, France further bankrupted herself, eventually bringing on the revolution.
     The Seven Years War (1756-63), known in our country as the French and Indian war, saw new alliances, with Britain and Prussia against France and Austria, showing again that alliances in Europe are almost always temporary and designed to achieve certain limited goals.  William Pitt the Elder gave Britain her new war strategy, funneling money to Prussia while Britain concentrated on preventing French men and supplies from reaching overseas possessions.  Well-equipped British armies thus could conquer isolated, poorly fed, and rarely paid French garrisons.
     As a result of this war, England won Canada and India, while France lost her possessions on mainland North America including the area east of the Mississippi, an area which would help to provoke the American revolution.  Moreover, England had beaten France decisively, and for the first time in a long time was able to devote herself to her American colonies, whom she discovered had been evading taxes and basically doing things on their own.  Thus the century of benign neglect came to an abrupt end and paved the way for the American revolution.

Enlightenment

     Two things would be needed for the French Revolution to occur. One was the bankruptcy of France as a result of the Seven Years War which we have already discussed.  The other was an atmosphere of critical thought from the Scientific Revolution and a commitment to rational discussion known as the Enlightenment.
     Sometimes called the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment was predicated on the Scientific Revolution which helped create a faith in reason and facts, as opposed to mere authority.  Secular in orientation, the Enlightenment was concerned with this world and how it works, rather than ultimate salvation or damnation.  It showed an optimistic faith in progress and accepted that happiness was attainable in this world.  It further demanded control over unrestrained emotion, preferring what Kenneth Clark, the great art historian, called the "smile of reason," rather than the grimace or the grin of Romanticism.   Enlightenment thinkers believed in man's improvability.  In religion, this became known as Deism, a rational faith that subjected the Bible to scholarly criticism and dismissed much of it as myth, which deemphasized the miracles and denied predestination as unreasonable.   Deism emphasized Christian ethics, regardless of religion.
     The Scientific Revolution prepared the way for the Enlightenment.  It was made possible by strong nation states which insured domestic political order and stability, so that time could be spent for science instead of civil war.  Monarchs greatly increased their prestige by financing scientific writers.  Wealth from commerce allowed even independent merchant princes to dabble in science, collecting specimens and building labs.  Moreover, new geographical discoveries gave new information to explain.  Most important was the lack of fear of the supernatural.  The witch craze had died out by the mid-17th century, reflecting the fact that the European population was now increasingly living in cities where they were less reliant on good weather and the lack of the soil's fertility, and thus no longer searched for scapegoats in the population.
     Inventions made the Scientific Revolution possible.  New purity in glass making allowed better telescopes and microscopes.  New developments in math, like decimals and logarithms, as well as the slide rule, allowed calculation to proceed more quickly, and calculus was now able to describe algebra in motion.  Scientific societies, such as the Royal Society of England founded in 1662, helped spread that information.   Newton is probably the symbol of the age.  Building on the work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, he unified the new discoveries of the age into one unifying principleógravitationówhich showed that celestial and terrestrial motion were governed by a single theory which could be expressed in a mathematical formula.
     Most important, the new developments of the Scientific Revolution impacted political thought.  If the universe could be understood by men, so must governments be.  If the universe is like a machine governed by laws, so must governments be.  Not surprisingly, this is the age of constitution writing, as men tried to discover the laws governing political arrangements and set them down, as Newton had done for gravity.  There was a contract between the people and their God, who did not make apples fall up.  If God bound Himself by laws, so must kings, for to do otherwise would be to set themselves above God.
     Voltaire is an example of an Enlightenment thinker.  He believed in reasonable behavior and that happiness was possible in this world.  He attacked the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, sickened by its intolerance, but he didn't realize that with the Church and State so closely connected, an attack on one became in effect an attack on the other.  For this reason he was imprisoned in the Bastille. In politics, he believed in a benevolent despot, but he had no real systematic philosophy of politics.  That is why he got on so well with Catherine the Great of Russia, who saw herself as an Enlightened Despot.  While Voltaire was no revolutionary, his beliefs certainly had revolutionary implications which would be fleshed out in the French Revolution.
     It is important to note that the culture of which Voltaire was a part was truly cosmopolitan in nature, spreading over national boundaries and social classes.  This was partly due to improved ability for travel. It was also made possible by the development of salons where people exchanged ideas.  Commoners like Voltaire would attend these salons, although they were usually run by the wives and mistresses of the nobility.  Now a new architectural style grew up to contain these salons.  The rococo emphasized smaller rooms, wooden paneling for better acoustics and a generally lighter style of decoration.  Here men learned to speak clearly to make their ideas understood by laymen, not just specialists.  This was especially important as literacy was increasing.   In 1600, only one male in 6 was barely literate in Scotland, but by 1800 almost 90% were.  Two-thirds of French males and more than half of English males were literate by 1800.  Ideas not only spread more quickly, but spread into social classes heretofore isolated from such revolutionary concepts, as newspapers catered to the urban population.  After all, Danton, the great French revolutionary, was first and foremost a publisher of a newspaper called Le Cordelier.

Social Life in the Enlightenment

     As the year 1700 dawned, people were marrying late in life, well into adulthood.  Men usually married for the first time at age 27 or older, while women were 25.  That meant that between 40 to 60% of women of childbearing age (15-44) were unmarried at any given time.  People delayed marriage because they could not support themselves, peasants having to wait, for example, for the father's death so that they could inherit the land.  This pattern of late marriage is very different from modern non-western societies where early marriage, especially for women, is the norm, and also helps to explain the relatively low rate of population growth in Europe as opposed to modern non-western societies.  Even at its height in the 19th century, the European population rose at a little less than one-half of one percent per year.  Modern Bangladesh's rate of population growth in 3 and one half percent per year, seven times faster.
     While marriage was delayed, sex was not.  Premarital sex was common, but the rate of illegitimacy was low, because such premarital arrangements were usually limited to those contemplating marriage, and if pregnancy resulted, village pressure was usually enough to secure a marriage before the birth of the child, technically making it legitimate.  Couples used contraception to avoid pregnancy, especially early withdrawal and the rhythm method.  Condoms, however, were unreliable and were used mostly against disease, especially until the invention of vulcanized rubber in the 19th century.  Women had many children to insure the continuation of the family, but since childbirth was the single most frequent cause of death for women, once the desired number of children had been obtained, the sex continued but the pregnancies did not.
     As the 18th century progressed, however, people began to marry earlier. Cottage industry permitted couples to provide for themselves, since all that was required was a cottage and a loom.  But as the 19th century wore on, there was an explosion of illegitimacy.  For example, in Frankfort, in 1700 2% of births were illegitimate, 5% in 1760, 10% by 1800 and 25% by 1850.  In 1840 Bordeaux, one third of all births were illegitimate.  Partly this surge of illegitimacy was a result of the laws passed during the Napoleonic period which limited the class one could marry into, and partly it resulted from the fact that people living in cities, where village culture did not exist, could not be forced to the altar if pregnancy occurred.
     Many children died in infancy. At least 20% of all children died, as much as 33% in poorer areas.  Twenty-five percent of children did not reach age one and 50% would be dead by age 20. While by modern standards these figures are horrifying, such death rates also permitted those youngsters who survived to rise socially, since there were fewer older people alive to block their advancement.  Lower class women breast fed their babies, partly to postpone ovulation and thus control pregnancy, and partly because breast fed babies were more likely to survive.   Upper class women by contrast tended to use wet nurses.
     Infanticide, the killing of unwanted children, which had been legal in the ancient period, was declared illegal by the Catholic church only in the Middle Ages, but it was still practiced secretly.  There were many suspicious "accidents," such as parents rolling over on infants and suffocating them by "mistake."  The tale of Hansel and Gretal speaks as well to another method of infanticide, namely abandonment.  So many children were abandoned that foundling homes were built, becoming the favorite charity of the rich.  But many regarded them as merely legalized infanticide, since 50% or more of the children died of illness and neglect.  In 1770, one third of all babies born in Paris were immediately abandoned and of those, one third were the children of married couples who could no longer afford to keep them.
     Medicine played almost no role in prolonging human life in this period.  Mostly, physicians prescribed complex prescriptions in which the only useful ingredients were laxatives for the stopped up bowels of the rich.   Operations were rare because there was no anesthesia, and so limbs were hacked off to the accompanying screams of the patient, many of whom died of shock.  There were no antiseptics either, since the very concept of germ was not invented until Pasteur's work in the late 19th century.  Instead, doctors used bloodletting as an almost universal cure-all.   As late as 1825, 25,000 leeches were used in St. Bartholomew's hospital in London.
     The most important medical advance may have been inoculation against small pox.  With the decline of the Bubonic plague brought on by stricter quarantine procedures, small pox became the most lethal disease, with 80-95% of the population stricken, and one out of seven dying from it. George Washington had his army inoculated in 1776, as did Napoleon several years later.  Edward Jenner took the process further when he used cow pox as a vaccination.  Unlike inoculation which tries to use either dead germs or a limited dose of live ones to provide the patient with immunity, vaccination uses a different, non-lethal disease, in this case cow pox, to give immunity to the more dangerous and deadly small pox.  Jenner's book appeared in 1798 and knowledge of vaccination quickly spread as an alternative to actual inoculation, which, if not practiced exactly right, could cause the deadly disease itself.
     Diet and nutrition, rather than medicine, were far more important in helping people live longer.  Indeed, most extensions of longevity have been, until late in the 20th century, the result of preventative measures like better sanitation and diet.   Before 1600, Europeans had been meat-eaters, since, with the land only half populated following the Black Death, wild animals moved in, meaning even peasants could eat meat.  But by 1700, the staple of the diet had become bread washed down with beer.  Baked once a month, this bread sometimes required an ax to cut it. Bread, however, cost eleven times less than meat and 65 times less than fish.  Milk and eggs were rare as well by the 1700s.  Vegetables were considered a poor people's food and the rich ate mostly meatóthus requiring the laxatives doctors prescribed.  Drunkenness was common, especially as gin swept the continent in the 18th century.  If poorly made, this gin could cause blindness.
     By way of dietary evaluation, we can note that bread was made from whole grain including the bran so it was higher in protein that most bread today.  People ate little sugar so had few cavities. Vitamin C deficiency made scurvy a constant threat. Ironically, the diet of the rich was deficient in most vitamins because they ate so much meat and so little of anything else.  By 1800, however, the nutritional value of bread declined when, following the social upheaval of the Napoleonic period, everyone, including the poor, wanted white bread which was less nutritious than the dark bread they had eaten for centuries.
     Agriculture was made more productive by the developing industrial revolution.  This is especially important when we remember that so many lives depended on cereal production.   Machines were invented to chop fodder to form feed cakes which were easier to use and store than hay and which allowed the farmer to winter over a large herd.  Jethro Tull's seed planter eliminated wasteful broadcasting of seed.  Increased supplies of cheaper yet stronger iron led to mass production of iron farm machinery which was both more reliable and cheaper.  Note that, rather than a huge investment in expensive and sophisticated technology, simple, inexpensive technological improvements and increases in labor productivity were really responsible for allowing more food to be grown and sold at lower cost, allowing more people to eat a more varied diet and eliminating the famines which had heretofore struck every 8-9 years.
     With better and more plentiful food, the population of Europe exploded as the 18th century progressed, reaching a crescendo in the 19th century.  Made possible by scientific agriculture which produced more food, this population increase, like most in history, was nonetheless due to a decreased mortality, not an increase in births.  Major killer diseases like small pox and plague were controlled, if not completely eliminated.  (When plague broke through quarantine in Marseilles in 1720, in a few weeks it had killed 40,000 out of a population of 90,000. )  Improved transportation eliminated problems of local food shortages as well.
     Perhaps most important was the use of the New World miracle crops like corn and the potato which were much more productive than European wheat had been.   Corn produced 80 kernels or more for each sown, while a good crop of wheat saw five seeds for every one sown.  The population explosion these new crops made possible led eventually to a vast emigration of Europeans back to the New World.  Most important for us, the increasing population provided the manpower for cottage industry and ultimately the industrial revolution.

Assault on Absolutism

     The assault on absolutism was fed by middle class discontent, and took the form of an economic attack launched by the physiocrats and a political one launched by the philosophes.  The middle class objected to the state controlled economy of mercantilism, especially laws which controlled prices and limited access to raw materials.  They wanted free enterprise instead.  Likewise, the middle class objected to their lack of political power, since they had no influence at court and could not vote. They were further hurt by high taxation, since it was easier to tax their sales than the property of aristocrats.  Finally, a full-fledged economic philosophy emerged, developed by the physiocrats, to which the middle class gave their support.
     The physiocrats represent an economic basis to the challenge to absolutism.  By changing to a more democratic economic theory, they were in effect challenging absolute government.  When the state and economy were closely tied together as they were under mercantilism, where the economy served only to enrich the state, by challenging mercantilism as they did, the physiocrats in effect had challenged absolute government.  Physiocrats believed money should circulate freely as blood does in the human body, a concept they learned from the scientific revolution.   Physiocrats further argued that the laws of supply and demand should regulate the economy without government interference.  Sometimes called laissez faire, this idea that government should keep hands off the economy was a rebuke to the prevailing ideas of mercantilism associated with absolutist states.   In foreign policy, physiocrats argued against destroying the trade of neighboring countries and amassing bullion as the mercantilists wished, noting that trade works to benefit all nations, and that countries were interrelated by economic forces just as the universe was interrelated by gravity as Newton had proved.   Just as the earth could not prosper or perhaps survive without the moon, so one country could not prosper or perhaps even survive without neighboring ones.
      The most influential physiocrat was Adam Smith, who argued that individuals motivated by self interest alone would drive the economy forward, not the mercantilist state.  He challenged the idea of scarce goods and resources which mercantilism was based on, substituting instead an idea of the boundless expanse of resources.  In short, one got a bigger pie by letting the pie grow, not by taking more pie from someone else.  Smith provided a comprehensive philosophy to challenge mercantilismówhich in effect meant an attack on absolutism itself.
     The philosophes challenged absolute government on political grounds.  They wanted a basic bill of human rights, including trial by jury, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly.  These ideas were later expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in the moderate first stage of the French Revolution. The freedoms here were part of natural law, as much as gravity was.  To try to change or combat these laws would be against the natural order of things, and as sel-defeating as trying to combat gravity.  Moreover to ignore these laws would be against God's will, for if God had created the universe, then He had created natural laws as well.  Only efficient national governments could make the necessary reforms, meaning it would not be enough to change a few underlings, but instead perhaps require replacing the king himself.  Philosophes were not interested in revolution, however; they only wanted reform, and then only from the top down.  They held a low opinion of the masses and believed the educated and well-to-doóthemóshould run the government.  But their ideas could and would be used by those interested in true revolution.
     The difference may have been the development of Romanticism, the beginnings of which one can trace to Rousseau.  He distrusted reason and science which as much fervor as the Enlightenment had admired them.  He believed the people were naturally good in the state of nature and that civilization only corrupted man; Enlightenment thinkers would have argued that people had at least a tendency toward evil and that civilization, as the term implied, actually civilized man. In the Social Contract of 1762, Rousseau tried to construct a theory of government based on the consent of the governed.  Sovereignty rested with the people, not the king. All governmentsóand all kingsóhad to submit to the general will of the people.  Of course despots sometimes used the idea of general will to stay in power, saying only they could rightly interpret it and that representative assemblies often got it wrong.  Rousseau went on to hail as the ideal the noble savage, uncorrupted by civilization, in contact with his emotions.  This desire to get back to nature could be taken to ludicrous extremes, as when Marie Antionette had a little hamlet built for herself on the grounds of Versailles where she could play at being a shepherdess, tying silken ribbons in the horns of her cows, totally unaware that most French peasants had barely enough to eat and certainly did not possess silk ribbons of any kind.
     The gun that set off the French Revolution was the American Revolution itself.  As a result of the Seven Years War, known in our country as the French and Indian war, the British had created a huge war debt.  Britain was finally at peace, and so could finally enforce laws and collect the taxes the American colonists had been ignoring for decades.  And finally, she had acquired a huge amount of land from France east of the Mississippi; this new territory had a long border which would be difficult to control.  When the British tried to restrict settlement in the area to avoid a costly war with the Indians, Daniel Boone and others ignored the law and moved into the territory anyway. When the inevitable war with the Indians ensured, a financially strapped Britain demanded Americans actually pay for the troops needed to fight it.  The colonists may have complained about no taxation without representation, but the colonies were very prosperous and were taxed lightly in comparison with Europe.  Moreover, according the British system of government, the colonies were already represented in Parliament and so were being taxed with representation.
     The real issue, of course, was that the Americans had a long tradition of self government brought on by the century of benign neglect in which Britain had been fighting for her survival against France.  We had already put into practice many of Locke's views on democracy.  And we had been influenced by the Glorious Revolution of Britain and the ideas of the philosophes.  We succeeded in forcing Britain to end the war, mostly because she had become diplomatically isolated, with almost all major European powers declaring war on her.  Britain therefore had to divide her energies between the colonies and a war with France on her doorstep.  The French aided the colonies a little to achieve our independence, but even this little bit of financial help was enough to plunge the corrupt and debt-ridden French state into bankruptcy, thus calling forth the French Revolution.