It is a “European History” Assignment which has 13 Multiple Choice Questions, Attached with 2 articles. Read the 2 articles and answer the questions correctly. Only Knock me if you are a European History background and a history expert. You have long 10 days to submit this work, so please work very carefully, if I get more than 90% points in this assignment, I will give more for the whole semester.

Discussion of Metternich and his 1820 Letter to Czar Alexander I

Klemen von Metternich was arguably the most influential political figure in Europe between the defeat of France in 1814 and his own overthrow in the European Revolutions of 1848. The practices he put in place to manage European states’ affairs still define international diplomacy today.

Metternich was born into a rich aristocratic family from the western German-speaking regions, raised and educated in privileged circumstances, and built a career as a skilled diplomat as a young man. He was the Austrian Empire’s ambassador to France from 1806-9 when Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself Emperor of the French and when French domination over Europe was at its height. Napoleon’s army was defeated and decimated by his invasion of Russia in 1812, however, enabling Metternich – now Austria Foreign Minister – to organize the last and ultimately successful of the European wars that sought to break the 20-years of French military and political hegemony over the continent (called the War of the Sixth Coalition, the sixth of the wars between France and all the major states of Europe between 1791 and 1814). Metternich then set about arranging European affairs through developing the modern forms of diplomacy to see to it that France nor any other states could ever promote revolution again (in this he was decidedly unsuccessful). Techniques he develop for this included periodic meeting between heads of state; coordinated military action by the major states to put down revolutions where-ever they broke out, as in the Austrian invasion of Italy in 1820 when revolts broke out there; and in the German-speaking regions a network of censorship, control over teaching institutions, and police informers to identify and suppress the kinds of ideas, activities and individuals he believed led to the French Revolution of 1789. His 1820 letter discussed here was designed to win support from the Russian ruler for this coordinated action against revolution given that it was the Russian army (and winter) that finally defeated Napoleon and the French. This letter identifies rather indirectly what Metternich and other anti-revolutionaries thought were the underlying causes of 1789. Clarifying what he is referring to makes this document an interesting insight into conservative thinking of that era as well as insight into some of the cultural and ideological factors that contributed to the Revolution.

Bottom of p. 1 – Metternich speaks of the “dangers” of his era and how kings now must calculate their chances of survival in the current climate.

Middle p. 2 – He then goes on the speak of “the source of the evil” behind the current situation. Note the choice of word – evil. From there he provides his own theory of humanity and society.

Middle p. 2 continued – Metternich then declares his view of human nature before going on to explain the variety one finds in different societies: climate, geography, etc. The essential declaration, though is “man’s nature is immutable,” that is unchanging despite differences or diversity between societies. Why?

Metternich is pushing back against the European Enlightenment and its conception of humanity. The targets of the Enlightenment that he indirectly attacks would be known to the educated public of his day. They are discussed below.

1689, John Locke in The Essay Concerning Human Understanding claimed that human nature is in fact a “Tabla Rasa,” a blank slate. Human personality according to Locke was not fixed and unchanging but a product of up-bringing, circumstances and experiences early in life. Locke was perhaps the first modern thinking to develop what today is called “behaviorist psychology,” the idea that people are first and foremost a product of their socialization. This was a key concept of the Enlightenment that ran through the work of all that movement’s thinkers. If true, it means that people and their society can be improved indefinitely through education and through a better, more rational and more just society. This idea in turn can be used to justify radical social change to improve society and the people who live in it. But for Metternich it is an entirely false idea. For him, human nature is immutable. And the fundamental reality of that nature is Original Sin , the fundamentally sinful nature of humans from which there can be no escape in this world. To deny Original Sin is to deny a fundamental religious truth and to set the stage for the something like 1789 from Metternich point of view.

Middle p. 3 – After giving his own version of European history since the Dark Ages in which technological progress and new discoveries have been rapid, Metternich claims that the false views of the Enlightenment have promoted what he calls presumption – the idea that one can know anything and everything of import without the wisdom of the past or the guiding hand of established institutions. Metternich is here attacking:

Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?, 1784 in which Kant declares that Enlightenment is the courage to make one’s own judgments without the direction of another. Kant calls this the courage to know, to be an independent thinker. Kant is particularly hostile in this 1784 essay toward the subordinate position of women, whom he claims have been kept in systematic ignorance, and toward the established churches, that he thinks try to keep people from their right and ability to use their own intelligence and judgment in matters of religion. For Metternich this way of thinking destroys the respect and deference to which established institutions are entitled while the presumptuousness this promotes led directly to the view that these institutions need not be preserved now that society has become better off, better educated and supposedly enabling people to move beyond what was inherited from the past.

As Metternich says near the bottom of p. 3, “ Presumption makes every man the guide of his own belief, the arbiter of laws according to which he is pleased to govern himself, or to allow some one else to govern him and his neighbors; it makes him, in short, the sole judge of his own faith, his own actions, and the principles according to which he guides them.” He clearly views this as outrageous and absurd.

Middle p. 4, Metternich adds, “France had the misfortune to produce the greatest number of these men. It is in her midst that religion and all that she holds sacred, that morality and authority, and all connected with them, have been attacked with a steady and systematic animosity, and it is there that the weapon of ridicule has been used with the most ease and success.” This certainly referring to Voltaire, who in his novella Candide, 1759, heaped scorn and ridicule on characters representative of the power-structure and values of pre-Revolutionary Europe: the aristocracy, portrayed as remarkably stupid; the clergy, presented as hypocrites given over to lust while preaching chastity for others; intellectuals who promote silly ideas disguised as brilliant insights; and kings, who wage wars for their personal glory that end up in misery for their people. Two Enlightenment thinkers, however, need special mention.

David Hume’s An Inquiry Concerning the Principals of Morals, 1751, claimed that human morality is based on “sympathy,” what today we would call empathy. This is the ability to see over-selves in another’s place when we witness their suffering. We thus share in some small part in that suffering and wish to alleviate it. Hume believes that this is the foundations of all morality and moral codes. What Hume ignores is religion, which plays no role and is entirely omitted in this view of morality. For a deeply religious man like Metternich, this is the ultimate evil and I believe why he uses that word so often in this letter.

The man Metternich hates most, however, is referenced on p. 4 in the following, “Drag through the mud the name of God and the powers instituted by His divine decrees, and the revolution will be prepared! Speak of a social contract, and the revolution is accomplished!” This is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, 1762. For Rousseau, society and its institutions are a agreement or contract between its members to provide good institutions, laws and social conventions that enable people to live collectively with security, order, liberty and cooperation. These institutions and practice therefore have to be rational and command the consent and support of the members of a society who live under them. The vehement opposition of Metternich to such a view should be clear if we keep in mind what were the foundations of all societies before 1789: religious authority. Religious authority is why Louis XVI was by Grace of God King of France; Selim III was entitled to respect and obedience so long as he ruled justly according to Islamic principals; why Qianlong ruled according to the Mandate of Heaven, etc. And as Metternich says (or believes anyway), human institutions are instituted by God’s divine decrees. People in this view have neither the wisdom nor the right to create, or destroy, these institutions according to their own judgments as to what is or is not appropriate to a well-organized, just and functional society. To claim and act otherwise is to defy the will of God in Metternich’s view.

The remainder of Metternich’s Letter of 1820 gives his views about details of the French Revolution, then moves on to advise Czar Alexander that the rulers of Europe must act together to make sure that this never happens again. This for Metternich involves good government – keeping taxes reasonable, securing peace as much as possible for their subjects – and of taking a firm hand in putting down subversive ideas and the individuals who promote them in their kingdoms.

The most interesting feature of this letter in my view is that Metternich understood at a very early date that before there was the political revolution of 1789 to 1799 there was the cultural revolution of the European Enlightenment. From Locke’s 1689 analysis of human nature to Kant’s 1784 declaration urging people to think for themselves in all matters of importance, the leading intellectuals of Europe promoted what was in effect the world’s first sustained and sustainable secular culture across virtually all aspects of humanity and society. Metternich understood quite clearly that this eroded the foundations of the society and values he believed in and set the stage for the rebellions that ultimately destroyed them. The pen indeed proved mightier than the sword.

Lastly, note who Metternich blames most for picking up and acting upon these ideas he loathed so much on

p. 6 fourth paragraph down:

“It is principally the middle classes of society which this moral gangrene has affected, and it is only among them that the real heads of the party are found. For the great mass of the people it has no attraction and can have none.” While not a fan of Metternich I think he was right on this point. The laborious efforts by some more recent commentators on the French Revolution in the 200 years since Metternich wrote this to prove that that Revolution was not essentially a revolution of the middle classes are often interesting by ultimately not very convincing in my view, as well as the view of those who lived through it.

18th Century French Defeats and Decline of the Monarchy

Maps 00, 01 Eighteenth Century Europe and its Trading Networks. The American historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has written a four-volume study of what he called “the modern world system” and which the general public now calls “globalization.” The second of these, The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600-1750 (2nd Edition 2011) examines how west European states created and dominated a new global trading system that eventually dwarfed that of the Old World. The exponential expansion of wealth this afforded was an important factor contributing to the emergence of money and education over birth and inherited status that was consolidated by the social upheaval that erupted in 1789. By the 18th century, military/political struggles between the British and French over control of this global system, called by some historian “the eighteenth-century world wars,” resulted in a series of French defeats that helped under-mined popular respect and support for the monarchy, contributing to its collapse by 1791. The the maps and text below illustrates this process by which the French monarchy came to be seen as increasingly ineffectual in some quarters of French society.

02, 02b – The Franco-British struggle in North America culminating in the French loss of Canada in 1763 is one example of how the French monarchy appeared incapable of defending the country’s interest to some of its critics.

03, The Decline of the Spanish Empire after 1600 touched off a series of European wars for control of the small but very rich slave-based plantation economies of the Caribbean, dramatically expanding the Atlantic slave trade in the process. The British and French were by 1700 the chief actors in these conflicts which produced another series of French defeats, the last of which was the Haitian Revolution beginning in 1791 that dove-tailed with the French Revolution itself.

05-08, The Spectacular Decline of the Mughal Empire after 1707 brought decades of warfare across South Asia characterized by bitter communal violence between supporters of the Muslim Mughal court vs. coalitions of Hindu princes. European trading companies fearful of loosing commercial rights granted by the Mughal shahs during the hey-day of their empire responded by providing military and financial support to competing sides in these wars. This made South Asia another site of the Anglo-French world wars in which again, French influence and trade was pushed out by the British. After 1757 French interests were reduced to four southern enclaves that remained in French hands until they were annexed by independent India in 1954.

Samir Amin’s book Eurocentrism already touched on offers a dialectical analysis as to why modern bourgeois society consolidated by the French Revolution emerged first in Europe. While dissecting and dismissing old claims of European exceptionalism, i.e. European superiority, he does point to a certain type of exceptionalism to explain that development. Take a good look at map #09 of the old Silk Road commercial network, parts of which pre-date China’s Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) and stretched from the archipelagos east of the Chinese coast to the city-states of northern Italy during the Renaissance. At the geographical and cultural center of these networks were the old civilizations that defined civilization itself for most of human history, with the Fertile Crescent and the North China plain being the twin cores of that system. Examples: all surviving written languages today use alphabets derived from either the Sumerian cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) or from early Chinese pictographs. Likewise, the most widely followed ethical systems today derive either from religions that emerged in the Eastern Mediterranean (Judaism-Christianity-Islam) or Chinese Confucianism. So how to explain the fact that in the modern period (after say 1500) the ancient centers of civilization get overtaken and eventually dominated by an historically marginal region; how to explain a Europe-centered world – Eurocentrism?

As argued in the discussion about “1788,” the under-laying structures of large-scale societies were remarkably similar for most of human history despite the unique characteristics of any and all of them. But the versions of those structures that evolved in Europe were weaker, less developed forms of those structures. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire there were no long-lasting continental-sized European empires inside that region like that of Imperial China, the various South Asian empires, or that of the Ottoman Turks and their predecessors in the Mediterranean despite efforts to create them; Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire lasted barely a generation. That of other conquerors from Charles V of Spain (early 16th century), Louis XIV and Napoleon in France (mid-17th to early 19th centuries), to Hitler in Germany (a mere dozen years in the 20th) come even remotely close to that of the old civilizations. Another example is pre-industrial European economies that were a fraction of the size and wealth of the old centers of civilization. Amin also points out that the legitimating ideology of traditional society in Europe, namely European Christianity, incorporated logical inconsistencies into its basic doctrines from its very inception – the fully human and fully divine conception of its central figure or the idea of three distinct beings rolled into one (the Trinity), these contradictions explained away as “mysteries.” Technological know-how regressed dramatically after the fading away of Western Roman society in which everything from monumental building with concrete to maintaining the Roman aqueducts disappeared for centuries and had to be re-learned.

But …. a dialectical analysis led Amin to conclude that it was Europe’s relative backwardness that explains the early collapse of traditional social forms there, and their displacement by those of bourgeois society.:

· The division of European society into small to mid-sized nation-states meant that when one of this faulted or declined , as with Portugal and Spain by 1600 European global expansion continued under others, France and Britain.

· The mysteries built into European Christianity, ie. Its logical inconsistencies, allowed for rapid and radical interpretations that could service as legitimating ideologies supporting profound social changes without requiring the complete abandonment of a belief -system. Thus Protestants’ abandonment of the much of Catholicism’s theology and practice was presented as a return to core doctrines rather than their overthrow thereby adapting the older belief to the needs of new social groups and realities.

· Recall that Queen Isabella of Aragon/Spain had to put up her jewels as collateral to raise enough money to outfit Columbus with three ship and a couple-hundred men in 1492. Meanwhile, decades earlier China’s Yongle Emperor had financed dozens of ship with thousands of sailor in seven expeditions under Admiral Zheng He as far west as the East African coast before these were suppressed by his successor, the Hongxi Emperor. The relative poverty of the former state forced its rulers into dramatic and risky innovations while the great wealth and power of China convinced its ruling classes that there was little of interest or value in “barbarian” lands. Similarly, Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Hungarian-born convert to Islam, was the first to develop a printing press with moveable type in Arabic in 1729 in Istanbul, nearly 300-years after Guggenberg had developed his system just across the Ottoman border in the German-speakng lands of Europe. Those who ruled the great and powerful lands that had long defined higher civilization saw no need to pursue change or even know much about those they understood to be backward, poor, and uncouth, which they largely were compared to themselves.

Europe was for a very long time a lesser-developed, poorer and weaker version of a traditional society; this turned out to be to its advantage, for it was there that the radical breaks that created “modernity” first consolidated into bougeois society for that reason. Conversely, it was the long-term resilience of the old centers of civilization based on traditionalist social forms that accounts for their ability to withstand great shocks over time, until the radically new forms of power that emerged from bourgeois society in Europe over-whelmed them in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is the “exceptionalism” at the heart of how western Europe came to dominate the globe according to Samir Amin’s dialectical reading of modern world history. I believe he was quite right in this.

Modern Europe

Fall 2020

Quiz 1 — Bourgeois Society

This assignment is due on Blackboard by Each question is worth 8 points

Question 1-9 are based on Klemens von Metternich’s “Letter to Czar Alexander I” of 1820 posted on Blackboard

1. Metternich describes human nature as:

a) Determined by the specific culture and identity into which people are born

b) Determined by each individual’s personal experiences

c) Fundamentally unchanging despite differences in culture, identify or individual

circumstances

2. The two forces that shape all human institutions according to Metternich are:

d) Morality and locality

e) Identify and family

f) Economic class and technology

3. Metternich claims that three forces have shaped modern history:

g) Printing, gunpowder and the discovery of the New World

h) Capitalism, modern science and the New World

i) Liberal ideas, religion and printing

4. Identify Metternich’s claim about the effects of modern science and philosophy:

j) Conservative backlashes against rapid social changes

k) Presumptuousness among people who believe they no longer need be guided by the past

l) Optimism about how the human condition can be improved with new knowledge and insights

5. Which best expresses Metternich’s attitude toward the individualism of modern people and society:

a) Individual judgment opens up new perspectives and positive innovations

b) Individual judgment tends to undermine established wisdom, values and truths

c) Individual judgment is generally compatible with established wisdom, values and truths

6. Which best describes Metternich’s view of 18th century ideas (the ideas of the Enlightenment):

d) Excessive in their criticism despite some useful insights

e) Useful in so far as they encouraged scientific innovations but dangerous in their political views

f) Destructive of social, religious, and political truths and institutions

7. Metternich apparently sees the relation between 18th century ideas and the French Revolution as:

g) Negative causes producing negative effects

h) Little real relationship at all

i) Progressive ideas that took a wrong turn leading toward revolution

8. What social groups does Metternich identity as most responsible for the French Revolution?

j) Over-taxed and exploited poor people misled by ambitious aristocrats

k) Aristocrats eager to restore their ancient privileges over the peasants

h) The middle classes supported by ambitious elements of the aristocracy

9. Identify Metternich’s advice for preventing a recurrence of revolution in Europe:

i) Firm state action against subversive groups and ideas

j) Constitutional government giving a voice to the common people

k) Playing off different discontented groups against each other to keep them divided and weak

Questions 10 and 11 are based on chapter 4 of Berenson’s Europe in the Modern World

10. Identify the “Physiocrats” of 18th century France:

x) The most radical faction within the French Revolution of 1789

y) Supporters of King Louis XVI’s authority against revolutionaries

z) Thinkers who favored de-regulation of agriculture

11. Identify which contributed to the French fiscal crisis of the 18th century:

p) The cost of expansion into German-speaking regions under Louis XVI in the 1770s

q) The cost of several wars against the British during the century

r) Inflation caused by an influx of gold from trade with India

12. What according to the author of the 1840 “The Defense of Laissez-faire” should be the goal of economic legislation and regulation? (the “Defense” is at this link: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1840laissezfaire.asp )

a) Reducing income inequality and creating a fairer society

b) Providing better health and safety conditions in workplaces

c) Eliminating as many rules and restrictions on business as possible

13. Identify which of the solutions to the issue of child labor was advocated by the author of “The Defense of Laissez-faire” in 1840

a) Establishing a minimum wage for child labor

b) Shorting hours of work for minor in factories

c) Parents using their judgment to determine whether and how long their children should work