But the forces of change would inevitably impose this transformation of continental society. On populations now sensitive to a political construct of nation-state and to monarchial leadership. Whose divine rights depended no more on a monolithic, spiritual social construct that had lost its purity and whose Vicar was now contested on half the continent; but on the will of the people of each nation.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 would consecrate the end of the feudal age, of religious wars, and the official emergence of the nation-state in Europe. Cardinal Richelieu's masterpiece of diplomacy would posthumously start the century of French domination. After his demise, under the control of successor Mazarin, who would as an added measure destroy the feudal powers of French Aristocracy during the Fronde, making French royalty an absolutist construct. Without a system of checks and balances as practiced by the rival English nation, all too aware of Norman king's power on their lands since Magna Carta days. It would seal the dissension of Franco-British rivalry in the following centuries.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 would consecrate the end of the feudal age, of religious wars, and the official emergence of the nation-state in Europe. Cardinal Richelieu's masterpiece of diplomacy would posthumously start the century of French domination. After his demise, under the control of successor Mazarin, who would as an added measure destroy the feudal powers of French Aristocracy during the Fronde, making French royalty an absolutist construct. Without a system of checks and balances as practiced by the rival English nation, all too aware of Norman king's power on their lands since Magna Carta days. It would seal the dissension of Franco-British rivalry in the following centuries.
Joan of Arc, initiator of this national sentiment during the Hundred year War in France, would now bear valiant sons in all nation-states. Over the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the power of imperial hold would flow from Catholic and regressive Spain, all hidebound by its Inquisitorial and Conquistador orders, to reformist France under Henry IV, most populous European nation; promulgating his conciliatory Edit of Nantes, new blueprint for the coming age, that would put an end to religious wars on French soil. It would liberate the nation's energies to achieve an intense period of nation building over fifty years that would make France the paramount cultural and political beacon of Europe and of the world, under Cardinal Richelieu and then King Louis XIV; the sun king.
His reign would be one of imperial consolidation evolving later on, under the spell of absolutist illusion, into a destructive cycle of paranoid delusion resulting in undoing what had previously been achieved with such painstaking effort against the will of the Feudal Order, now decimated and cowered into a coterie of fawning courtiers. Louis XIV would revoke the Edit of Nantes, thus oblige France's most talented entrepreneurs of Huguenot protestant bend to flee their native land. He would wage war on all his neighbours in a costly campaign that would ruin the economy of France and curtail its cultural influence, as his military defeats in front of the Augsburg League and during the war of the Spanish succession would allow English pre-eminence to neutralise French influence in political matters, notably in the Low countries and Rhineland regions.
His reign would be one of imperial consolidation evolving later on, under the spell of absolutist illusion, into a destructive cycle of paranoid delusion resulting in undoing what had previously been achieved with such painstaking effort against the will of the Feudal Order, now decimated and cowered into a coterie of fawning courtiers. Louis XIV would revoke the Edit of Nantes, thus oblige France's most talented entrepreneurs of Huguenot protestant bend to flee their native land. He would wage war on all his neighbours in a costly campaign that would ruin the economy of France and curtail its cultural influence, as his military defeats in front of the Augsburg League and during the war of the Spanish succession would allow English pre-eminence to neutralise French influence in political matters, notably in the Low countries and Rhineland regions.
Having ruined the economy of France, his successors, after his inordinately long reign, would find it difficult to match English mastery of the seas and implantation of colonies both in the New World as in India. The age of British colonisation of the world would begin, as French influence abroad would be limited by the Seven years war; where their presence both in Canada, in India as in the Indian Ocean would be severely restricted. Along with Spain and Portugal, France would be eliminated as a naval power and its colonial ambitions to capture land and procure slave labour would be curtailed for more than a century.
The cultural legacy of national awareness amongst the European people would express itself by renewing Greece's ancient passion for the arts, literature and philosophy. After Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch of the Renaissance Age, the new masters of literature would be a never ending list of luminaries : Shakespeare and Marlowe in England; Montaigne, Molière, Corneille, and Racine in France, Cervantes in Spain; for Philosophy : Spinoza, Descartes; for Science : Galileo and Newton.
Now that the Europeans had languages, culture and artifacts of war, they were fueled by the discoveries of science to heights unknown. Their ambitions for world domination expressed itself as each nation rivaled with the other for world hegemony. It would lead to intercontinental wars notably between France and England, now become United Kingdom of its small island.
Their political ambitions forged the social construct of national societies. Built by the Tudors in England during the sixteenth century, the King severed his relationship to Latin church, nominally assuming leadership of the Reformist Anglican church, making England beacon of commercial innovation thanks to its Corsair sea captains; all covered with the glory of defeating the Spanish Armada. No foreign invasion would henceforth extinguish its national impetus. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the liberal traditions inherited from the Magna Carta pushed the English nation to first behead its king, then to impose a constitutional change through peaceful transition, from absolutist state to parliamentary democracy, with a symbolic king as head of state. The English revolution would be remarkable in its imagination for balancing power between the people and its ruling elites; but the onus would stay in the hands of the upper classes, who would create their wealth based on the colonial adventure, thanks to England's maritime pre-eminence, making the East India Company the successors to Venice and Genoa of the Medieval Age. Britannia ruled the waves and drained the produce of its newly discovered continents under its imperial colonial yoke to its under-resourced and cold isle.
For France, the other burgeoning rival nation state, the transition to people's government would be violent, as the ancient hold of both Royalty and the now subservient Clergy to the absolutist construct, relic of old Kaiseridée, would be total. It would take the bankruptcy of the nation resulting from the speculation of its monetary fiat system, conceived by the Scotsman Law, as well the profligate spending of Louis XV, it's despotic king, to bring down the monarchial system.
The French revolution in the wake of a century of war-making and spendthrift absolutist governance, where the people's third estate would be totally absent from all decision making, would mark the political scene by its violence, the initiation of open class warfare, a novelty to Modern times.
Danton's Republican construct would be a model for the new century as it relayed the values brought back to France by the Marquis de Lafayette, when he had fought as liberator of the American colony from the British yoke beside George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and its newly written Constitution of 1787 would inspire France's revolutionary transformation to republic. But the seeds of violence and statist regime change leading to the Terror would curtail its transformation of France into a stable and appeased democratic country. The ascension of a militarist dictatorship under Napoleon I, ambitious conqueror of Caesar's dimension, would leave a trail of blood across the European continent during his fifteen year reign. Man of incredible brilliance he would mark both the destiny of his country by his administrative skills as he would mark the destiny of his Continent by the sterile and vain brilliance of his military strategy and conquests. His Moscow moment would be the turning point of his career. From then on he would lose all; and France with it its continental supremacy forever onwards.
The British Empire, in coalition with Prussia would triumph at Waterloo, as it had done previously alone on the seas at Trafalgar to defeat Napoleon's hegemonial ambitions. The resulting new European order would be established at Vienna, under the diplomacy of Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, laying the stable foundations of peace and uneasy truce between burgeoning imperial ambitions amongst nation-states; a situation that would finally fester into European Armageddon a century later.
This awareness of people's individual rights would be the fruit of a new philosophy that had matured in Europe based on the progress of human spirit and knowledge; positivist belief in Man's own ability to think for himself without relying on revelatory, God given references and traditionally instilled superstition. The age of Enlightenment would free man's mind from centuries of ingrained prejudice inculcated both by the Clerical order as by the Feudal order. It would be the iconic moment of European political and social transformation as it influenced the advent of the secular and scientific age.
Its main harbingers would be Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Montesquieu in France; Kant in Germany, relayed by the flowering of the German language under Goethe and exalted by the music of Beethoven. Also on a similar footing by Locke, Adam Smith and Ricardo in England, authors of treatises that glorified individual initiative and freedom, notably in the economic domain. The basis for political freedom of the individual, exemplified in the Rights of Man, and economic freedom exemplified in the Wealth of Nations, would set the tone for human progress for the century to come. All devoted to the Industrial revolution, the most impressive transformation of human society ever undertaken thanks to capitalistic means of production, based on mechanization and technological innovation.
Peace of Westphalia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nine Years' War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
War of the Spanish Succession - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Georges Jacques Danton - Wikipédia
French Revolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The cultural legacy of national awareness amongst the European people would express itself by renewing Greece's ancient passion for the arts, literature and philosophy. After Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch of the Renaissance Age, the new masters of literature would be a never ending list of luminaries : Shakespeare and Marlowe in England; Montaigne, Molière, Corneille, and Racine in France, Cervantes in Spain; for Philosophy : Spinoza, Descartes; for Science : Galileo and Newton.
Now that the Europeans had languages, culture and artifacts of war, they were fueled by the discoveries of science to heights unknown. Their ambitions for world domination expressed itself as each nation rivaled with the other for world hegemony. It would lead to intercontinental wars notably between France and England, now become United Kingdom of its small island.
Their political ambitions forged the social construct of national societies. Built by the Tudors in England during the sixteenth century, the King severed his relationship to Latin church, nominally assuming leadership of the Reformist Anglican church, making England beacon of commercial innovation thanks to its Corsair sea captains; all covered with the glory of defeating the Spanish Armada. No foreign invasion would henceforth extinguish its national impetus. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the liberal traditions inherited from the Magna Carta pushed the English nation to first behead its king, then to impose a constitutional change through peaceful transition, from absolutist state to parliamentary democracy, with a symbolic king as head of state. The English revolution would be remarkable in its imagination for balancing power between the people and its ruling elites; but the onus would stay in the hands of the upper classes, who would create their wealth based on the colonial adventure, thanks to England's maritime pre-eminence, making the East India Company the successors to Venice and Genoa of the Medieval Age. Britannia ruled the waves and drained the produce of its newly discovered continents under its imperial colonial yoke to its under-resourced and cold isle.
For France, the other burgeoning rival nation state, the transition to people's government would be violent, as the ancient hold of both Royalty and the now subservient Clergy to the absolutist construct, relic of old Kaiseridée, would be total. It would take the bankruptcy of the nation resulting from the speculation of its monetary fiat system, conceived by the Scotsman Law, as well the profligate spending of Louis XV, it's despotic king, to bring down the monarchial system.
The French revolution in the wake of a century of war-making and spendthrift absolutist governance, where the people's third estate would be totally absent from all decision making, would mark the political scene by its violence, the initiation of open class warfare, a novelty to Modern times.
Danton's Republican construct would be a model for the new century as it relayed the values brought back to France by the Marquis de Lafayette, when he had fought as liberator of the American colony from the British yoke beside George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and its newly written Constitution of 1787 would inspire France's revolutionary transformation to republic. But the seeds of violence and statist regime change leading to the Terror would curtail its transformation of France into a stable and appeased democratic country. The ascension of a militarist dictatorship under Napoleon I, ambitious conqueror of Caesar's dimension, would leave a trail of blood across the European continent during his fifteen year reign. Man of incredible brilliance he would mark both the destiny of his country by his administrative skills as he would mark the destiny of his Continent by the sterile and vain brilliance of his military strategy and conquests. His Moscow moment would be the turning point of his career. From then on he would lose all; and France with it its continental supremacy forever onwards.
The British Empire, in coalition with Prussia would triumph at Waterloo, as it had done previously alone on the seas at Trafalgar to defeat Napoleon's hegemonial ambitions. The resulting new European order would be established at Vienna, under the diplomacy of Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, laying the stable foundations of peace and uneasy truce between burgeoning imperial ambitions amongst nation-states; a situation that would finally fester into European Armageddon a century later.
This awareness of people's individual rights would be the fruit of a new philosophy that had matured in Europe based on the progress of human spirit and knowledge; positivist belief in Man's own ability to think for himself without relying on revelatory, God given references and traditionally instilled superstition. The age of Enlightenment would free man's mind from centuries of ingrained prejudice inculcated both by the Clerical order as by the Feudal order. It would be the iconic moment of European political and social transformation as it influenced the advent of the secular and scientific age.
Its main harbingers would be Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Montesquieu in France; Kant in Germany, relayed by the flowering of the German language under Goethe and exalted by the music of Beethoven. Also on a similar footing by Locke, Adam Smith and Ricardo in England, authors of treatises that glorified individual initiative and freedom, notably in the economic domain. The basis for political freedom of the individual, exemplified in the Rights of Man, and economic freedom exemplified in the Wealth of Nations, would set the tone for human progress for the century to come. All devoted to the Industrial revolution, the most impressive transformation of human society ever undertaken thanks to capitalistic means of production, based on mechanization and technological innovation.
Peace of Westphalia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nine Years' War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
War of the Spanish Succession - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Georges Jacques Danton - Wikipédia
French Revolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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