The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815 - 1914

Richard J. Evans “The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815 - 1914,” Viking, 2016 Paperback, 716 pgs. (Notes after pg. 38 from hard cover edition)

Here’s the book that I believe Johnny Carson had in mind when he waved a book at the TV camera and said it, “contained all you needed to know—and more!!”  Evan’s book places emphasis on the ‘more,’ containing a 100-year survey of European history that moves by transnational themes emphasizing “power”—over industrialization, class, selfhood, wages, and nature.  This book considers incremental continental developments from 1815 up to the outbreak of WWI in 1914.  A very hard read from which I needed many breaks by reading other books.

British historian Evans emphasizes on how the Republican ideals ignited by the French Revolution never died following the 1815 Congress of Vienna. While the European powers were reorganizing after the Congress of Vienna, the revolutionary genie was already out of the bottle, as evidenced by the subsequent uprising in Russia, the Polish officers’ insurrection, the movement for Greek independence, among others, all creating the climate that would explode by 1848.

My Notes:

Pg. xviii:  Two of the main lines of development for the years 1648 to 1815 are the ‘relentless march of the state to hegemony’ and ‘the emergence of a new kind of cultural space—the public sphere.  This development achieved an expansion and a dominance by the nineteenth century that was unthinkable in the eighteenth century.  The state structures of Europe that emerged in 1815 would in some respects still have been familiar to the continent’s inhabitants of thirty years before, even though appearances in many ways were deceptive.  The power and intrusiveness of the state were still relatively limited.  Popular participation in politics was still minimal, despite the recent, vivid example of the events of the French Revolution.  The public sphere was still confined mostly to a small stratum of the educated and the literate and their institutions, from the periodical publication to the coffee house or the reading club.  But by 1914 the state had been transformed.  On the one hand there was universal male suffrage, and direct popular participation in the shaping of national, regional, and local policy.  On the other hand there was a vast expansion in the control that the state could exercise over its citizens, in areas ranging from education to health, military service to social work.

The linked processed of the improvement of communications and the growth of the economy accelerated faster in the nineteenth century than anyone in the eighteenth century could have imagined.  In 1815 the railway, the telegraph, the steamship and the photograph were barely visible over the historical horizon.  By 1914 Europe was entering the age of the telephone, the motorcar, radio and cinema.  In 1815 we were still in the age of the Newtonian understanding of the universe, of representational art and classical music.  By 1914 Einstein had propounded his Theory of Relativity, Picasso had painted his Cubist works, and Schoenberg had composed his first atonal pieces.  Europe was also in an even more immediate sense entering the age of the machine gun, the tank, the submarine and the fighter plane.  We were learning that progress was not always linearly getting better.

Pg. 3:  It used to be thought that the damage inflicted by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was relatively light compared to the devastation wrought by later twentieth century conflicts.  Yet altogether, in the twenty-three years of more or less continuous warfare that had swept across Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, an estimated five million people had died; compared to Europe’s population as a whole, this was proportionately as many as those who died during WWI. 

Pg. 27:  After 1815 the European states placed less emphasis on the traditional Balance of Power doctrine, the doctrine according to which no single state should be allowed to become so strong that it dominated all the rest, and replaced it by a network of collaborative institutions, summed up in the idea of the ‘Concert of Europe’, whose main purpose was the maintenance of peace.  Leading members of European states now became used to meeting on a frequent basis to thrash out their differences, and managed to take common action on a number of occasions, despite their opposing interests, because of their common fear of revolution and upheaval that the French Revolution had generated.  So when the Great Powers collaborated from the 1820s to the 1840s, it was as often as not in order to put down liberal revolutions. 

Pg. 28:  After 1815 insistence of monarchs on their Divine Right to rule as the basis of sovereignty had shifted perceptibly from individuals and families to nations and states.  Before 1815, all international treaties were considered to have been rendered invalid on the death of a sovereign.  After 1815, this rule no longer applied.  Treaties were concluded between states, not between individual monarchs, and retained their validity unless and until one or the other party deliberately abrogated them.  Similarly, armies now owe their allegiance to states rather than to individual sovereigns; the old eighteenth-century system of mercenary armies and soldiers selling themselves to the highest bidder had gone forever. 

Pg. 38:  Pope Pius VII (1742-1823) got rid of street lighting and vaccination against smallpox as objectionable modern innovations. 

Pg. 291:  The aristocracy’s decline in the nineteenth century broadly mirrored the decline of land as a source of wealth and the rise of banking, trade and industry until they outstripped it.  The titled aristocracy, increasingly uncoupled from landed wealth, became ever more exclusively a status group, retaining its social prestige but losing its economic identity and merging into the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie. 

Pg. 397:  Death rates from tuberculosis fell almost everywhere in the second half of the nineteenth century.  The decline in tuberculosis mortality accounted for around half the overall decline in mortality between 1850 and 1900.  The most important factor in the decline is likely to have been improved diet.  Direct medical intervention had little effect. 

The greatest success of medical science had been scored in the fight against smallpox, which in the late eighteenth century had killed as many as 200,000 victims a year in Europe. 

Pg. 463:  In 1864 Pope Pius IX issued a Syllabus of Errors.  The Syllabus proclaimed that it was an error to believe that human reason contradicted Christian faith, or to hold that Protestantism was merely another form of Christianity, or to claim that the Catholic religion should not be the sole religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.  Article 80 proclaimed that it was an error to believe that the Pope can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and civilization as lately introduced.  Civil marriages were to be regarded as null and void, and matrimonial causes should only be dealt with by the Church.  Education had to be carried out by the Church not the state.  Pius then strengthened his position by summoning a Council, which met in 1870 and issued a Declaration of Papal Infallibility. 

In 1893, after Pius IX, Leo XIII Papal Encyclical Providentissimus Deus reaffirmed the literal truth of the Old and New Testaments. 

Perhaps the most famous reaction to all this came from the historian and sometime editor of a liberal Catholic periodical, Lord Acton, who declared, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

Pg. 491:  In Russia the social exclusivity of the school system was underlined by a notorious decree issued under the reactionary Tsar Alexander III (1881-1894) requiring academic secondary schools to be freed from the attendance of children of drivers, footmen, cooks, laundry-men, small traders and other persons similarly situated, whose children, with the exception perhaps of exceptionally gifted ones, should not be encouraged to abandon the social environment to which they belong.

Pg. 512:  In Russia alcohol revenues began to increase almost exponentially, from 250 million rubles a year to nearly a billion by the eve of WWI.  Taxes on vodka supplied nearly a third of government revenues for much of the century.

Pg. 635:  From the 1870s it was official British policy to ensure that its own naval strength should be greater than that of any other two navies combined.  With such massive naval predominance the British were the only power in a position to acquire and maintain a really large-scale empire.  More than 80 percent of the world’s goods were carried in British ships. 

Pg. 649:  The Chinese Empire from 1850 to 1864 had been convulsed by the Taiping Rebellion, which caused the deaths of up to 20 million people, the largest armed conflict anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century.

Pg. 715:  The outbreak of WWI brought to an end a century of European hegemony over the rest of the world.  However, even before WWI, America had been starting to outstrip Britain and Germany in economic terms.  Also, in India the first stirrings were visible of the movements for freedom and independence that would reach fruition within a few decades.  Europe’s slow and uneven march towards democracy was reversed with the War.  New political movements, notably Communism, Nazism and Fascism, came onto the scene.