In the midst of the peace-process negotiations with the Palestinians, the late Yitzhak Rabin – answering to a group radical national-religious Jews who were shouting that the West Bank was a Jewish land according to the Book and would be so forever – said that the Bible: ‘is a book of fate, history and values. It is not the land registry of the Middle East’. He was, of course, right. Unfortunately, historians everywhere, and notably in Europe today, accept fuelling nationalistic fantasies by rooting purported identities in a faraway past, by forging new sets of invented traditions, and by giving credence to the notion of what is truly ‘autochthonous’. Today, such an attitude is a robust obstacle against any writing of the history of Europe. The political tension that historians are subjected to can thus be summarized as: we must not forget the lessons of Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger and their team on the ‘invention of traditions’, but, at the same time, we must not lend a deaf ear to the demands of illusory identity expressed by the voters of populist movements.
Over several decades, researchers have addressed the humanities and social sciences, together with our political responsibilities as citizens, by mobilizing two series of intellectual resources. The first one was inherited from Marxism. It rooted the political shaping and the transformations of societies within the analysis of their socio-economic development. The second, inherited from Kant’s critical philosophy, and later from the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paid attention to the logical forms and legal procedures used to define the political regimes of the past, as well as to imagine and promote future ones. In neither case, the emancipation of mankind and the advent of democracy and its consolidation were to be tied to a specific culture or a particular identity. But what do we see today? Many voices from the far left declare that these two intellectual and political traditions have given birth to a colour-blind vision of current and past societies, whereas many, from the far right, accuse these same intellectual streams of turning their backs on real people by weakening their patriotic pride. The universalistic point of view is designated, from the left, as an ethnocentric (if not racist) attitude, and from the right, as a technocratic conception of politics. The current success of populism lies at the junction of these two equally hostile feelings against any universalistic conception of democracy. The commitment to democracy has not been consolidated beyond a national framework, i.e. out of particular cultural identities. Whether or not one believes in the relevance of the concept of identity, the fact is that politicians, opinion leaders, journalists and citizens who respond to surveys claim the importance of identity, no matter how it is defined. Similarly, people who enjoy no symbolic benefits from the union do not join the European ideal. These are our fellow citizens who never had a passport, because they do not travel, who do not have the opportunity to spend their euros away from home, whose children do not benefit from Erasmus programmes, etc.
Twenty years ago, the writing of a history of Europe was supposed to take the risk of going beyond the history and historiography of the various Nation-States that had hitherto been the main (and often unique) framework in the shaping of our profession. The desire to write the history of Europe, in other words a narrative that would be out of the national (and perhaps even nationalistic) straightjacket, appeared to be and was a liberating choice. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. What might have appeared, 20 years ago, as a show of intellectual audacity, today seems suspicious of being an ethnocentric programme. Nowadays, the history of Europe is considered the reservoir of all conservatisms. The collapse of interest in the history of Europe – except for British history – in American universities, is a striking symptom of such phenomenon. ‘Imperial history’, by which I mean the history of each particular empire, promotes intercontinental geographies and does not favour the aggregation of the histories of different empires, the home countries of which were European countries. Entangled histories, by observing social realities according to different scales, aim at highlighting connections and wide radius circulations, if possible where little is known about them. Such histories do not engage in the task of re-building a coherent narrative of the European past. Finally, the horizon of global history tends to minimize the importance of the history of Europe in the world. Too often, such reassessment of perspective seems to be a target in itself. Anyway, the data entry of ‘Europe-in-the-world’ is almost always done at the expense of Europe itself, in a movement that reportedly claims to correct the excess of attention hitherto given to the history of Europe.
To observe Europe in its position with regard to the rest of the world supposes two approaches. One is to compare Europe with other regions. The other is to incorporate within European history the entangled processes that link it to other parts of the world. There is no reason to choose between these two alternative approaches. To be sure, the most valuable scholarly work achieved in recent years partakes of both. From the available studies, we may conclude that Europe, with its colonies and dominions, shares a number of common features with other societies. Such is the case of the socio-political organization based upon a monotheistic religion, with a strong presence, in society, of theology and dogma. Such is the case of social group hierarchy and the hereditary nature of the positions of individuals within each group. Such is also the case of forced labour: of course, there are considerable differences between different types of constraints, from the most radical servitude to the more or less negotiated forms of un-free labour. In the end, historians note that many essential phenomena that seem to characterize the evolution of European societies are also present in other parts of the world.
Although the writing of history should not be converted into a trial, if one were nevertheless to decide to judge Europe for its colonial action, it would first be necessary to identify what constitutes its specificity when compared with other imperial policies, and also compared with the internal policies within Europe itself. Neither territorial conquest nor the destruction of cities, nor the deportation of populations, nor the religious mission, nor the economics of plunder, nor large scale slavery, nor the institution of racial discrimination between descendants of the conquerors and descendants of the conquered seem specific to European colonial action. On the one hand, other empires, with no connection to European societies, have practised them all. Moreover, European societies have inflicted upon each other, throughout their history, most of these types of actions. Beyond such a general typology, it is important to identify what makes the historical singularity of European colonialism. In a long term period, which that would run from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, three phenomena seem not to find their exact equivalent in the experience of other societies. The first of these is the unparalleled dimension of the destruction of the Amerindian populations, due to the Iberian conquest, which extends far beyond other later genocides of a similar nature (in the United States and Argentina during the nineteenth century, or in Central America during the twentieth century). The second phenomenon is the transatlantic slave trade. Its intensity and brutality truly justify qualifying it retroactively as a crime against humanity. The third is the production of public law and an ideology-based national sovereignty, crystallized around the revolutions of 1848, reactivated through Wilsonian diplomacy at the end of the First World War, and the application of which was duly denied to colonized peoples.
Because we can no longer think of Europe without its colonial and imperial dimensions, a major problem arises. Indeed, one might be tempted to distinguish two kinds of regions: one that forged a land-based or maritime empire (Portugal, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Russia) and one that did not experience such a process, at least in early modern times. However, it does seem that common features are as important as significant differences. It is true that only the countries mentioned above experienced the management of populations very different from an ethnic homeland, the former being generally considered inferior in the moving scale of progress towards civilized behaviour. However, other European countries did experience what we could describe as ‘internal colonialism’, with processes of stigmatization, control, segregation or liquidation of populations, deemed to be as far from the dominant standard as the New World wilderness. The case of gypsies offers an eloquent example.
Moreover, the colonial conquest had no monopoly on the reorganization of the princely or supreme authority. A number of European regions that are nowadays sovereign Nation-States – Norway, Belgium, Bohemia and Moravia, for example – found themselves for lengthy periods of time deprived of all autonomy, their territory and population being governed and embodied by monarchs who lived far away. Several of these regions had at one point been independent kingdoms (Bohemia and Moravia, Hungary, Scotland, Kingdom of Naples, etc.). It is then quite probably true that a colonial experience abroad had the effect of pushing judges, officers, clergymen and merchants to prioritize social groups according to racial distinction in Europe itself. However it would be wrong to believe that this phenomenon spared countries that did not manage distant colonies. The Statutes of Kilkenny in Ireland, in the fourteenth century, owe nothing to an English Atlantic expansion that only took place two centuries later. The separation between German speaking and Slavic or Baltic peoples in the cities of north-eastern Europe is another example. The confinement of Jews in ghettos had no relation to any colonial experience. Finally, returning to a point mentioned above, if it is true that only some European countries were active in the great slave trade, it is nonetheless certain that free labour was everywhere uncommon, if not exceptional.
Does this mean that everything looks the same? No. European countries have shared the same experience of the vanishing of the universalistic horizons carried forth by the Roman Church and the ghost of the Roman Empire. They also experienced the repatriation of political legitimacy around dynastic principalities. This happened long before the birth of Nation-States, based, in theory, on the will and sovereignty of the people.
The following pages will try to present the coherence of Europe in early modern times as a field for historical research, through the process of politicization that took place there. Politics in this case is not concerned about theory. It is concerned about the empirical exercise of government across large territories and populations. The question at stake is the efficiency of authority without which government stability would be permanently threatened. In doing this, I turn my back both on the history of formal institutions and on the history of political philosophy. Europe, in early modern times, refers to the period that begins when political systems – built upon both an aggregation of lordships and the persistence of a universalistic legitimacy (the Church, the Holy Roman Empire) – were in the twilight of their existence. And the period ends before the implementation of the liberal programmes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was the time of self-centred kingdoms and Republics, most of them seeking to become empires in their own right. But this was not yet the time of sovereign Nation-States. Nevertheless, important political processes did take place between the Middle-Ages and the period of Revolutions, and considering Europe as a territorial whole seems to be a better scale to describe them, far better at any rate than the usual national frameworks. The issues this article addresses will thus be the containment of barbarism and civil war; the management of populations; the judgement of society; the art of persuasion; and finally negotiation with dissenters.
The Containment of Barbarism and Civil War
In the first scene of the first part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, the king claims that the end of the war with the Welsh lords opens the opportunity to resume the crusade against Islam. Civil war and far away expeditions seem to be the two faces of the same royal duty. In the first part, King Henry proclaims the end of civil war. At the end of the second part, he dies in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey. These are the two symbols of a political authority above all others.
Civil war is very much present in the history of modern politics: it was pervasive in England and Spain during the fifteenth century, during the ‘Time of Troubles’ in Russia (1598–1613), the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-century France and German speaking territories, the revolts and revolutions throughout Europe in middle of the seventeenth century (France, Britain and Ireland, Portugal, Naples, the Netherlands, Denmark), the Glorious English Revolution of 1688, the War of the Spanish succession (1701–1714). All these episodes dramatically threatened the bases of each society concerned. During the eighteenth century, the stronger shocks came rather from revolts and revolutions taking place in colonies beyond the seas: Tupac Amaru in Peru (1780–1781), British Americans in the 13 colonies (1776–1783), African slaves in Saint-Domingue (1791). Civil war was not a theoretical hypothesis but a real and permanent danger, which erupted at fairly frequent intervals. So its memory remained vivid throughout the Europe of early modern times. The ability to contain civil war was thus the first and foremost foundation of the authority of royal princes (or their Republican equivalents).
Acting as warrior-king, the royal prince dealt a double blow. He showed his capacity to protect an inner territory against outside enemies, while also embodying the most precious values of the aristocratic milieu he belonged to: the warrior’s valour and the knight’s virtues. The ideological model of a war against external enemies was the Crusade. Indeed, the legitimacy of war between Christian princes was constantly at stake and questioned. Since the second half of the seventeenth century, the formalization of diplomatic congresses opened the path to the gradual implementation of Westphalian parameters. They made available a common ideology that might rationally justify war between Christian princes. The balance of power theory, far from turning Europe into a warless area, provided excuses to go to war, especially against powers that dreamed of universal monarchy: Spain, France or Russia. At the same time, the articulation of military action and diplomatic activity fuelled the feeling that external threats were a never-ending reality.
As a direct heritage from medieval Crusades, the expansion by sea or by land (Russia against the Tatars and in Siberia) of Europeans to Africa, America and Asia deeply transformed the foundations of the royal princes’ political legitimacy. The colonial endeavour made plausible the ambition of each kingdom to be (or become) an empire that acknowledged no superior authority. Without the distant colonial enterprise, the imperial autonomy of each country was de facto contradicted by the powers that shared borders with it. The successes the colonizers met were territorial control, maritime communications and subjugation of conquered peoples (especially in the Americas). These actions, between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, changed the world, replaced the Crusade as a political and spiritual horizon, and diverted part of the military violence outside of Europe. Princes and colonization entrepreneurs mutually supported each other in order to stabilize and strengthen their authority and their ability to command.
The Management of Populations
Othello is described by its tragedy subtitle, as the Moor of Venice and not the Moor in Venice. This great captain is supposedly Venetian, but he is not really. Has he been a Muslim? Nothing suggests it. Is he black? It is likely, but not certain. His marriage with Desdemona was possible, and nevertheless shocking. Is he in or out? At any rate, what his personal tragedy shows is that a man responsible for large and widespread military expeditions loses his strength and confidence from the moment when, by the bond of marriage, he becomes a member of a Venetian family. What makes the plot possible is not Othello’s difference but his nearly complete integration into Venetian society, while still being a Moor. In a London where Elizabeth I had authorized the expulsion of all ‘Blackamoores’, the play thus reflects the importance of ‘population definition’, by means of their respective characteristics and inherent limitations.
To describe differentiation according to social qualities is the only way to understand differentiation of political functions within a given society. Neither the Gospel call to overthrow social hierarchies, nor the Pauline call for their abolition were implemented in medieval European societies. The end of social-condition differentiations being postponed until the Final Judgment Day, the exercise of the royal prince’s authority relied upon the hierarchical composition of those social bodies that made up the community of his subjects, at a time when the very concept of society was still unthinkable. The sustainability of this arrangement was not only based on the exercise of power by the powerful over the dominated. The success of a king also depended on his ability to maintain and impose a certain hierarchy within the community as something natural or as divine design. By guaranteeing the permanence of this order, the king would then meet the main attribute of political power and hold the pillar for its constitution.
Since the fourth Lateran Council (1215) at least, the ability to classify the members of a given community was invested in a function stressing stigmatization. Heresy, dissent or ‘accursed races’ highlighted suspicious individuals and groups. The regulations adopted by dioceses, cities and other bodies within European kingdoms sought to separate the pure from the impure, or unclean. This had essential implications for the organization of social relations. It developed the simple idea that sins and stains, as well as virtues and valour, were transmitted through heritage and lineage. It perpetuated its consequences, in terms of de facto segregation, by making it difficult if not impossible for a marriage to take place between pure and impure to-be spouses. In the Iberian Peninsula such political process was initiated from the late fourteenth century onwards, especially around the Jewish question. It can be interpreted as the matrix for most of the racial policies later implemented in Europe and in its colonial territories. Everywhere in Europe, the royal prince felt compelled to act as guarantor of the respect for the rules of separation. Such a domestic framework was a major source for the rules later enacted to manage populations living under an overseas colonial system.
The ability to report on the composition of populations, to produce the best possible territorial description, and to know the nature as well as the volume of trade is paramount to evaluating the competence of financial magistrates, the military as well as the police. Geographical descriptions, the development of population censuses, the collecting of land record information: by observing the progress of these methods, historians can provide the most interesting narrative for the political history of the West. These techniques were designed to improve the knowledge of the royal prince about such topics. The production of these large databases must be understood, first, as an instrument to foresee the effects of taxation decisions. But it also fed the sense of power attributed to the prince by his subjects, because it actually demonstrated his power to rule both his lands and his peoples. The ability to know about citizen-subjects and territories reached a new dimension when, in the eighteenth century, it was backed by the new – and intrusive – design of police administration.
The Judgement of Society
In The Merchant of Venice, the Doge of Venice is under obligation to apply the law, or, more precisely, the private agreement contract clauses designed by Shylock. Antonio declares:
‘The Duke cannot deny the course of law.’ (Act III, sc.3)
Also, in the Comedy of Errors, the Duke of Ephesus has no choice but to sentence to death the Syracusan merchant Egeon, because he arrived in this town, which is forbidden in principle to all Syracusans. In both cases, the law seems to prevail over the power and will of the prince. In both cases, it is not the absolute authority of the prince that bypasses the law. Only extraordinary circumstances, and the effectiveness of legal quibbling, open, in both plays, the possibility for a happy ending. The authority of the prince, the law and circumstances are thus the three main components of the political heart of a given society: that is to say the exercise of jurisdiction.
Jurisdictio: This is the conceptual and legal matrix on which all regulations ensuring the stability for the exercise of power were built since the late Middle-Ages. An administration was authoritative in so far as it possessed and preserved the ability to arbitrate disputes between parts by tapping into the huge reservoir of legal techniques, in particular the modern commentary on both Roman law and Canon law, and an in-depth experience of jurisprudence. Under the Ancien Régime, European communities of citizens were primarily societies of litigants. The ordinary way to make decisions concerning family or social body interests was that of controversial debate, litigation, leading at the end of the process to the final sentence issued by the custodian of the iurisdictio. The formalization of conflict was a major instrument used both to drive and reduce it. In this sense, its contribution was essential when it came to keep away the danger of civil war. Magistrates, well trained in the science of cases and regulations, acted as a third court body in dual conflicts. They could deliver sentences on behalf of the royal prince. Nevertheless, they also embodied a dimension of legitimacy that purported to be prior to (and therefore better than) any particular political regime, including monarchy itself.
The ‘warrior king’ was also the supreme judge of the citizens on whose community he exerted his authority and his power of command. In most European countries, the advice that helped the royal prince to reach his decisions included information and requests that magistrates, cities and lords, holders of local authority, presented to his majesty. It was the counsellors who made the legal classification of cases and defined opinions that might guide the decision, or rather the sentence, of the king about any matter submitted to his judgement. This was actually a two-way operation, because the advice provided gave legal shape to the decisions (already) taken by the king. In every kingdom, magistrates served justice by delegation of the king’s own authority. However, rulers did not have control on the training process of the judges to-be. The universities, where law schools operated, escaped their authority almost completely. Moreover, kings could not make or break careers as they pleased. The more-or-less open and legal systems of selling positions of office reinforced the patrimonial nature of judicial offices as a private heritage among and within individual families. In addition, the judicial courts pyramid-like regulation was largely self-managed.
The royal prince, as ‘king of justice’, would then have to negotiate with the dynasties of magistrates, within a system of mutual support and assistance. The authority of the supreme command holder was not so great that it could enjoy a complete monopoly for the production of legal rules. In almost all European countries in early modern times, such a feature was shared with judges and legal specialists, but also with theologians. On the one hand, this sharing might appear to present-day eyes as a show of weakness. On the other hand, the slow consolidation of a mechanism to formalize the rules of political action helped to distinguish a given order, even if it was an unfair one, from disorder. Because laws formally governed them, institutional actions eventually became cumulative. Occasional jolts could at times seem to cancel, for a while, the establishment of political stability, particularly during episodes of political turmoil. However, in the long run, the formalization of political decisions and the science of situation qualifications that arose within the communities themselves proved to be key factors that ensured the permanence of government systems and consolidated the rulers’ authority. The ‘empire of papers’ that Philip II of Spain managed from his study, spreading his royal will throughout his gigantic monarchy, provided the example to be followed in early modern times by kings all over Europe.
The Art of Persuasion
To denounce the false pretence of power, the court deceit and the comedy of princely virtue, young Hamlet uses a troupe of actors who perform before the king and queen a play that purportedly will tell the truth in an environment full of lies. The truth is on stage, whereas lies pervade the whole royal palace. The play within the play acts as a magnifier for the reality of the big royal theatre. It suggests that the legitimacy and authority of the king entirely depend on the show of royal Majesty. The crown and regalia, the ceremonies, the court etiquette, the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude, and so on: all these objects, exhibitions and performances strengthen the actual power of ‘rotten Denmark’s’ king. Authority requires not only obedience, but also the acceptance and recognition that the power involved is legitimate. Vassals must share the same spiritual horizon, they must be touched by the staging of power.
From the start, the community of the king’s subjects, considered as a whole, or as the aggregation of different groups of people interacting in everyday life, was referred to as a ‘community of believers’. The fact that communities of believers pertaining to other faiths were resident in European kingdoms, notably Jews and Muslims, did not change the fact that the constitution of the political community was of an ecclesiastical nature. The capacity to frame the people and the power of conviction, which churches proved capable of achieving in early modern times, clearly show that this dimension of social life, essential during the medieval times, was not abolished after the Renaissance. Many astrologers had noted that Martin Luther and Hernán Cortés were born the same year, in 1483. They concluded that the former announced the ageing of Christianity in Europe, while the latter made possible its regeneration in the Americas. This type of image played a major part throughout the early modern era in legitimizing and delegitimizing political authorities. Depending on the circumstances, it also happened many times that the altar did defy the throne, in Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox societies. But overall, the clerical ideology proved to be a very efficient companion to the propaganda that legitimized the royal princes’ authority. The sacral presence (unction, thaumaturgies, clerical entourages) played an important role in the staging of kings as providential men, or divine beings. However, during major religious crises (Lutheran and Calvinist reforms, the Russian Old Believers schism) churches could also play a part in delegitimizing and destabilizing royal authority.
Great prose, epic poetry, treatises on princely virtues, sacred oratory, religious ceremonies, triumphal entries, live performances and ephemeral architecture, painting, sculptures, medals, music, ballet, architecture, artistic gardens: there were so many resources available to royal princes in order to persuade their subjects about the irrevocable evidence of their majestic authority. Thus, most modes of artistic expression have actually been political tools. In early modern times, the social type of the individual and autonomous creator, footloose to any patronage and control systems, is an exception. This is why, in spite of the reverence that major works of thought and of great aesthetic achievements deserve, we should not hesitate to include a large part of this production under the category of propaganda. At the same time, there is an open question: what are the treatises on political authority sources of? Do they help historians understand the origins of government institutions and practices, or do they merely show ideological and rhetorical programmes to legitimize power?
The previous question is central since most of the early modern European regimes were unable to open the path to the modern freedoms of opinion, reunion and publishing. The printing and engraving techniques, which actually accompanied the formation of modern politics, aroused fears and questions. Very early on, the magistrates were anxious about the possibility of mechanically reproducing pages considered dangerous for the stability of political order, or simply inept, faulty or poor in quality. The Indexes elaborated by the Holy See and the Inquisition courts offer full-scale examples of how authorities in charge of the supervision of people’s minds and beliefs scrutinized the production of printing companies. This censorship regime was not able, however, to scrutinize the entire traffic of written pieces in societies where printed materials had never entirely removed the manuscript form and in areas where counterfeiting and smuggling books were massive activities. In countries where censorship was locking the exchange of ideas too harshly, its bypassing reduced the legitimacy of the kings’ authority, all the more considering that the Indexes could ban works that were neither about politics nor about religious dogma.
To Negotiate with Dependents, Dissenters and Rebels
In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the eponymous character refuses the social contract upon which the Roman republic is based. That is to say, he rejects a sort of compromise with the people, a compromise that truly represents a fall into demagogy, at least for this knight who defends aristocratic values. Coherently, he refuses the leadership that the people are ready to give him, on condition that he must first require it from them. By rejecting the common rules, he achieves his own misfortune. But another Shakespearean tragic figure goes even further. King Lear decides to be king no longer. His refusal causes a general disruption of the entire society. The ingratitude of two of his daughters and the terrible avalanche of murder and desolation that follows show that we cannot undo legitimate command with impunity. Both Lear and Coriolanus clearly show that, for the Globe theatre audiences, the resignation of characters who must exercise power was a source of great anxiety.
Royal princes never wished to undo the aristocratic matrix from which they sprang, even though they occasionally had to face rivals within that environment during periods of royal authority weakness (minorities, regency periods, civil revolts). The circles of the first nobility (direct relatives of the prince, legitimized bastards, dukes and peers, grandees, boyars, etc.) would have to acknowledge the legitimacy of the royal prince otherwise the conditions of civil peace would not be met. Clients and sub-clients could then be directed toward this first circle of obedience. The acceptance of the existing political order was based on a set of dependency relations and contractual relationships, backed in turn by trade flows of material and symbolic goods. The community of subjects was not made up of a society of individual citizens, holders of political rights. The inclusion of individuals in society was achieved through family ties and alliances, positions of dependency and patronage capabilities, as well as by forms of cross allegiances. This organic web was also a global communications system. It opened the path to the in-depth embracing and credibility of royal ideology into the entire social body.
Classical economics postulates that every individual wishes to maximize his/her gains. Political history exclusively observes the future of ambitious individuals. Some get their way, others fail, but all are deemed to have sought to increase their ability to command. However, in early modern times, the holders of bits of authority and persons trained to hold offices, sometimes refused to take the plunge. Jansenist lawyers in Richelieu’s time offer a good example. The resignation of Queen Christina of Sweden is another fascinating example. Many people who were expected to seek important positions in the chain of political command didn’t do so. The reasons for their withdrawal could be spiritual, financial, medical, psychological, and also political. A history of early modern politics must take into account this blind spot in the way we look at the past. This dimension of the issue can draw a prehistory of pluralism that is not limited to the contrasting couple: obedience/disobedience. Dissent and denial are two positions that defy the authority of the royal prince, but without necessarily engaging in battle against him. They were amongst the most important sources of political tensions throughout Europe in the early modern age. These kinds of phenomena proved to be of particular concern for royal princes in their distant overseas dominions and colonies, where new Euro-creole societies developed, albeit at a very slow pace, their specific local foundations.
Dissent can take many forms. For example, the English Puritans of the first half of the seventeenth century, and later the Quakers, whose rejection of monarchical order resulted in prominent colonial activity and in the preparation for rebuilding a Christian society on improved moral grounds. The conditional nature of obedience, despite the royal propaganda trying to deny it, could be reactivated in times and circumstances of tensions or crises. This duty of obedience could then collapse among entire communities. The impulse towards dissent was not one-way, or exclusively top-down or bottom-up. One cannot, in fact, reduce the temptation of rebellion either to the narrow circle of quarrel protagonists in the palace, or to the expectations of a miserable population to improve its condition. The causes for the denial of obedience could also be fairly strong among oligarchic municipalities, corporations, or jurisdictions, such as high courts and parliaments. The decision to burst into revolt faced the prohibition of treason against the king and reactivated the fear of civil war. Therefore, the threat of uprising could carry even more weight than its actual achievement, either in local politics or even in the entire community of the royal prince’s subjects. In this sense, if it is true that the containment of civil war could be viewed as the entry threshold into modern politics, the memory of the risk of falling back into troubled times continued to act in the background, as the reminiscence of a danger that was never fully exorcised.
The containment of barbarism and civil war; the management of populations; the judgement of society; the art of persuasion; and finally negotiation with dissenters: all these processes were launched in European countries between the late Middle-Ages and the explosion of liberal Revolutions, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. These processes managed to frame between countries, with strong shades of difference but also with strong similarities, a general mechanism of political authority stabilization in the absence of the new public law that these Revolutions created. These five pillars did support, to a greater or lesser extent, the political organization of all European countries. These experiences proved to be highly familiar, or at least recognizable, from area to area, in Europe. The question now, therefore, is not whether one can write a history of Europe, that is to say, a historical narrative that reflects the mutual intelligibility of the political process between European societies. The actual question would be: are these processes, described in order to understand the European socio-political systems, exclusively European? Are they specifically European? To answer these questions, we must first ensure that other societies have produced, and especially preserved, the archives of their own past, in proportions that may enable a comparison between Europe and these other areas. When these archives exist, it is of course possible to make comparisons. The result, one imagines, may be ambivalent: some phenomena have been present in Europe and elsewhere; other phenomena have been present only in Europe. Therefore, the formula for Europe, in a mathematical sense, probably has no exact equivalent elsewhere. This can be explained calmly, without the risk of indulging in ethnocentrism. The heads of European political systems in the early modern era were always aware of the relative fragility of their power, and even of their authority, including when they imagined that God had granted it to them. Such mixture of pride and worry also characterized the attitude of Europeans away from home. Those conquerors, missionaries, settlers, merchants from Europe, established all around the world, carried abroad this mixture of pride and concern. During the last five centuries, a permanent and pervasive ambivalence about strength and weakness, dogma and doubts, spirit of conquest and fear of degeneracy, has truly contributed to shaping Europe as an area with a specific political and cultural system.
Amélia Polónia is professor at the University of Porto. She holds the chair of Portuguese Overseas Expansion. Among her latest publications are, as co-editor, Beyond Empires. Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Seaports in the First Global Age. Portuguese Agents, Networks and Interactions (Porto: Editorial UPorto, 2016) and Mechanisms of Global Empire Building (Porto: CITCEM/Afrontamento, 2017).
