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“The foundation deed of the 19th century international order was the treaty of Vienna of 1815.”1
The treaty closed the era of the French wars and intended to prevent their repetition, as well as contain the influence of the French Revolution. This was done by insistence of the principle of legitimacy, which was the ideological standard of conservatives, and certain changes to territorial arrangements.
Prussia was given large acquisitions on the Rhine. Genoa was handed over to the kingdom of Sardinia. A new monarchy appeared under a Dutch king that was constitutional, had a large electorate; and was granted rulership over Belgium and the Netherlands. Austria recovered former Italian possessions, kept a contested Venice, and was allowed virtually free rein to keep the other Italian states in order.
For nearly forty years, the treaty provided a framework within which disputes were settled without war. The treaty’s success is owed in part to the era’s widespread fear of subversion held by Europe’s ruling classes. In all major continental states, the years after 1815 were a great period of political intrigue. Secret societies proliferated, undiscouraged by their countless failures. Austrian soldiers dealt with attempted coups at Piedmont and Naples. A French army restored the power of a reactionary Spanish king, who had been hampered by a liberal constitution. The Russian Empire survived a military conspiracy and a Polish revolt. The predominance of Austrian power in Germany was not threatened, but Austria was always paranoid that it was.
Russian and Austrian power, the first in reserve, the second the main force in Central Europe and Italy from 1815 to 1848, were the two rocks on which the Vienna system rested.
- A History of Europe, J.M. Roberts, pg. 348 ↩︎
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A Re-Skim of that Trendy Fourth Turning Book
This post is based on the predictions put forth in The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, written by William Strauss and Neil Howe in 1997. It’s a fun read, but it’s essentially pop-sociology. I read it around six years ago. When I finished, I put a hot pink sticker on the spine that read “2025”, the potential year when all things would become horrid before time turned and our world was renewed. And here we are.
I didn’t re-read the whole thing, just the prediction parts, the “prophecies” concerning the years of 2000ish to 2025ish.
For those unfamiliar with this pop decadeology hit of yore, the whole argument is that time is cyclical and each rotation of these cycles has quarters populated by four generational archetypes transitioning through their respective life stage out of four; childhood, young adulthood, midlife, elder years. A large chunk of this book is spent on presenting what the authors see as recurring patterns across generations, stretching back to the germination of the seeds of America: those first whiffs of “fuck this” in 15th century England. So basically it’s a book full of confident guesses based on the authors’ particular frame of reference. And no, there is not a satisfying accounting of ancient or Julian or any other calendar. But whatever, I am here to have fun.
Our, as in we early second millennium people, our time is supposed to be, or have been, the supposed fourth turning era (fourth quarter) of a cycle that began around 1946. Our quarter was guesstimated to start around 2005 and to be marked by crisis, upheaval, and renewal. 9/11 is early but seems pretty crisis. 2008 is kinda late but also a crisis.
…these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas were, during the Unraveling (1984 to 2005), America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action. Anger at ‘mistakes we made’ will translate into calls for action, regardless of the heightened public risk.
pg. 273
We seem to have plenty of problem areas. Family stuff, mental stuff, race stuff; some would say gun violence, others would talk about disappearing jobs or disappearing communities. Others more would bring up the multi-dimensional beast of social media and the myriad ways it ruins us all.
Soon after the catalyst, a national election will produce a sweeping political realignment, as one faction or coalition capitalizes on a new public demand for decisive action. Republicans, Democrats, or perhaps a new party will decisively win the long partisan tug-of-war, ending the era of split government that had lasted through four decades of Awakening and Unraveling. The winners will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned.
pg. 275
Certain bits of this could be nearly any of the last two decades’ elections, but it doesn’t seem to fully apply to any of them.
Obama got elected on a high mood of Hope and Change. Some people thought the Democrats were going to rule forever. Obama remains so popular that I’d bet at least half the Dem base would vote for him over the last three if they could. Then again, I’d bet a slight bit more of them might go for Bill Clinton. Nostalgia sells. There was definitely some realignment in this election, and the Dems got some stuff done that the base seemed to like, or at least not hate.
Donald Trump even winning was weird, but act I Trump was a wild time to be young. You could build a profitable social media brand based on vitriol of any eleventy-billion flavors. You could take your pent-up rage over how mediocre this brave new world of adulthood was turning out and go fist fight your perceived ideological other in the street if you were in the right city at the right time. It was a time for playground logic and cheap funny money. Pink hats fought red hats, while others looked to the blockchain to save them from their drunken spending habits. Lots of political realignment and radicalization, but definitely no sense that the “long partisan tug-of-war” was doing anything besides escalating.
Biden didn’t have an exciting victory so much as a strong catalyst. His opponent will always be the first name in any history about Biden’s win. Spirits were pressurized or demoralized or radicalized, and no one was in a very charitable mood. This admin, however much Joe Biden was involved in it, provided a sampling of some of the policies that many thought the louder parts of the Left would push for. Though I can’t confidently say how much political realignment happened in these years. The most I heard was something like: “Trump was obnoxious but at least we had more money,” signaling anything from a broader turn to Trump or a sizable amount of people who planned on treating election day like any other Tuesday.
In foreign affairs, America’s initial Fourth Turning instinct will be to look away from other countries and focus total energy on the domestic birth of a new order. Later, provoked by real or imagined outside provocations, the society will turn newly martial. America will become more isolationist than today (1997) in its unwillingness to coordinate its affairs with other countries but less isolationist in its insistence that vital national interests not be compromised.
pg. 276
Maybe it’s the major keywords of the last couple months, but this quote is ringing like all of Christendom’s bells. It is applicably current, but it also seems constant.
There was a distinctive mood building before Obama’s election. Far away wars were tiresome and unpopular. There was apathy, there was annoyance, and most importantly there was a sliver of disappointment when Obama was done and the Great Idea of the American nation felt no better. Like we just had a president that talked slick for eight years and that’s it. Trump’s Super America shtick capitalized on that mood. That mood which for a moment may have united sizable portions of Right and Left on the gripe that this world police thing wasn’t paying out, morally or economically, and our house is getting run down.
Society seems to have gone “newly martial” a couple of times in the last five to ten years. China talk has picked up higher tempo very recently, plenty of people got their blood hot over Ukraine or Israel, and I’d say there was a kind of soft martializing that started with Covid. Never have I ever seen people behave in such a willfully callous manner on that large a scale. A hoard of boring Robespierres in every city and county. That sticks out to me as the worst, which is shameful because that inanity was spurred on by a highly contagious illness from a foreign land and alarm-belling the frailty of our supply chains, yet that seemed secondary. People screamed about masks, ratted out neighbor’s for parties and restaurants for doing restaurant things, and the federal government played chicken with the idea of coerced vaccinations at a time when much of the populace were the most mentally vulnerable they had ever been in their lives. If I could turn that era into a person, I would beat them into the bloodiest pulp my skinny arms could render. I know that my sentiments are not unique, and I don’t think they’re healthy to have.
Back to the quote, that isolationist thing is almost too obvious. We are most definitely more isolationist than in 1997. There were people crafting policies still operating in Cold War mindset in 1997. But look at us now. Kosovo, for example, has taken a few concerning bruises since 2005, but I’d legitimately be shocked to hear U.S. planes were bombing Belgrade again, even if it has only been twenty-four years. Russia stomped into Ukraine and the West fed them some supplies and said “good luck!”. Plenty of people would say the U.S. is less willing to coordinate affairs, and Trump’s act II so far has been a clear example of someone important insisting that vital American interests not be compromised. Not that we agree on what those interests even are.
Many despair that values that were new in the 1960s are today so entwined with social dysfunction and cultural decay that they can no longer lead anywhere positive…
I can agree with this. I get the sense that people aren’t as bananas about Neoliberalism as they used to be. The culture spawned in the Sixties does feel like it’s gone rotten in a few ways. The free sex was meaningless beyond novelty, the drugs were dirty and killed us, and music was never going to save anyone. There is a palpable amount of animosity towards Boomers because of the lush opportunities they were presumed to have throughout their lives.
But in the crucible of crisis, that will change. As the old civic order gives way, Americans will have to craft a new one. This will require a values consensus and, to administer it, the empowerment of a strong new political regime.
pg. 7
Old civic order given way? Seems so. Values consensus? Absolutely not. We’ve got the MAGA thing, the Woke thing, and all the irritated people in between. Strong new regime? Sure as shit not Biden’s. But Trump’s? Strong? Empowered? His win was decent, but that talk of mandates rightfully dried up. And does this supposed “New Right” he energized have the chops to keep up the momentum after he’s gone? Is this our strong new regime? Silly as it seems, I don’t see any other serious contender on the field.
The authors claimed that around 2025 America is supposed to “pass through a great gate in history”. Could be too soon to tell, but can it be said that we are now? Or already have? The authors include the possibility of this time being marked by people “succumbing to authoritarian rule.” Covid shit, depending where you were, was pretty authoritarian and made people insane. Masses of people will not hesitate to tell you that either Trump or Biden or some other clown are authoritarians. Beyond that we’ve got a ton of people pissed off or freaked out about “AI” and in the last decade civic violence has inched its way into being something closer to commonplace. Maybe, likely, this theory is all hogwash, the product of two guys profiting off their pet project. We as a people and nation could just keep walking backwards into hell until some hideous war or erupting geyser breaks us. Or maybe these guys did some okay work recognizing patterns and we will soon see a new dawn.
If you’re in a predictiony mood, buy a copy here.
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House Usher
I spent the last week working casual surveillance at the Cremorne, and how do I describe it? It’s the jewel of Rook Island, an entry-level Highland town the new money types like to move to. If you’re a member of a House or at least have a close relation that is you’re treated like gold. If not, you’re treated with indifference, to say the least. I love their food and am treated well because of who I have been there with and because I go so often. The two Watchers are excellent at their work. For successful surveillance one must seem to belong at the site, but also must be unremarkable enough to avoid excessive attention. Unfortunately at the Cremorne, this means my Watchers are regarded as nobodies and quarantined to a single dining parlor.
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J.M. Roberts, 1996
This review may as well be the story of how I became better at any bar’s Trivia Night.
My former condition was likely a common one. I knew a chartered education’s worth of Western history and some saturated spots here and there when I was compelled to take odd college electives. I liked the idea of knowing history, I was, after all, an English major. It seemed like it would be helpful to know what kind of hell-brew might have been breaking the windows and ruining the newspapers with doom at the time something or other was written.
But I could never keep caring, and I blame Wikipedia for that entirely. I would have been more humble, and publicly disparaged myself even, before I read this book. Details of history and the impacts of man were just going to be another one of those things I was too birdbrained to get. Western history alone was too enormous, and what I knew was all bits and pieces. Every time I thought I knew who Louis in France was, who Henry in England was, who any Marie of anywhere was, I was always very wrong. The more I read about those once fabulous lunatics who used to own the world, the less I understood where it all came from. Kings and emperors, dukes and senators, courtiers and court conspirators.
I remember having similar questions as a child. Learning about emperors feeding people to lions, and kings forcing people to dance or give up their homes; these things instilled a lot of deep and irrational fears in smaller me concerning Europe and all this princess stuff I liked so much at the time. However disturbed I’d been, from here it hardened into a subconscious shrug. Never knowing better, I likely assumed that the people of the old world had overgrown family trees built of illiterate shit-shovelers who lived short lives. All this aristocracy was simply those who’d been able to learn reading and whose mothers hadn’t starved between a handful of potatoes during pregnancy. Probably something close to two decades later, I make the mistake of picking a really good Marie Antoinette book out of one of those cabinets people put up in their driveways and call something like “cutesy smutesy free little library”. And it all flooded back.
Where did kings start? How did people agree to live like this? I tried going to Gibbons’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I wasn’t ready for it. I stumbled out mumbling, “Is it warlords then? Warlord grow strong? Warlord take land?” Ignorant of how murky my understanding still remained, I assumed the itch scratched and moved on to the next temporary manic interest.
Pass some years. Move to another city, again. Get a streaming service for the first time, because this city has free high-speed internet. The streaming service sucks, but it does have a lot of one thing I like; smutty pop history where the liberties taken are only slightly more abundant than the sudden sex reenactment theater. When the fun wore off a few days later I was once again bothered by my old question. Where did this all come from?
Fucking around in a used book store, I spot a title, A History of Europe. Really? All of it? Seemed so, I hurt my wrist pulling it up from the floor shelf. At nearly 600 pages it is certified Big, guaranteed to impress the other scrubs waiting around the bus mall. The consumer’s lust took me with a force like destiny. I flung my quarters at the register in the righteous belief that I had just bought the key to the world for four dollars.
It was more like I bought a really good outline of mostly western world history. A descriptive syllabus of all Europe, but I can’t immediately think of a single volume that is as ambitious as this. The entirety of Europe, and all its known secrets, from seed to twilight. I think I cried a little in a few places, not sure why, but there is something nauseating about the idea that a single person can ruin or destroy thousands of living people, without them even being aware of what’s happening, and never so much as face a bad dream about it. Such thoughts are the type that can stir the rational to violence. I hate almost every major republican figure of the French Revolution, but it’s this part of me that can understand why they got so heinous about it.
But about the book. Having now read and read again in most places, there’s more value than I can poetically express in this book for anyone like me who is under-educated, yet interested, in matters of history. The informative value is well beyond Western Europe. Central and eastern are given equal attention, and well more than most high schools in America would ever give them outside of their most scandalous eras. Closely tracked history naturally leads from Europe east across the Urals, south of the Mediterranean, past Anatolia, and of course, west over the Atlantic. So again, for those like me, it’s a particularly comprehensive text that will introduce you to a litany of stranger than fiction snapshots. And if you’re like me, you’ll stay up late into the harsh hours chasing the tail of a dragon promised by a passing snippet about the intercontinental opium trade or why Marie Therese got to be such a chad in the long era of very quiet women.
Reading this book I learned to think better of my abilities. Almost everything that had made me stupid about dusty old Europe was the result of never having learned about the Dark Ages beyond some elementary school spooky hours about the bubonic plague or the manic false facts of witch burnings. The first lesson squared here was that agriculture is the precursor of civilization, just not how I thought. I’d been told that, and I could understand how not having to go scrape up tubers and berries when you were hungry inevitably leads to societies advancing. What I’d never considered was what it does for the mass mental state. It may not guarantee full safety, but it is clearly a big deal to not have to worry about a real and proven threat of starving for even just a single person, let alone a mass of thousands concentrated in one general area.
Next lesson; no one could have made those big megalithic structures (Stone Henge et al.) without large-scale organization. Even today if someone decided to cut another face across Mt. Rushmore it would cost barrels, and there’s a chance at least one person would get maimed or die. There’s no answer for the ugly question here, which is how do you get one or several people to drag a larger-than-life rock up a hill, stack it nicely, and then go back down and do it again? Another small lesson, one I would have resisted if I learned it badly, representative value is a wonder of humanity. Yes, people do shit things for money and always have. However, what can now be bought on consensual terms for currencies hard or theoretical, was once only gotten by haranguing people with a sense of duty or breaking their will in slavery.
Now the big question; specter of my childhood, plague of my fleeting youth. The answer was so obvious it was disappointing. Like I had a whole dress laid out in front of me and all that was missing was the stitches. These troublesome bastards were no more than the ascendent tribal leaders whose lifetimes fell in the right place at the right time, that is, the collapsing years of the western Roman Empire. But that’s what my whole a-ha consisted of after the Gibbons book, so I wasn’t about to settle again. Where did all the silly stuff come from? Those later lace-puffed royals whose appetites impoverished whole countries. The Dark Age hammerheads, whatever they called themselves, came off more like personnel manager-generals. Less the all-father, more anointed decision maker.
The question “Where do kings come from?” was the wrong way to walk in. If I’d known better it would have been “How do tribal war bands work?” This is easier to answer because it’s pretty much the same as any street gang anywhere works. To start, you’re a charismatic guy who’s gotten a few memorable kills, be they human or animal. People like you, or you’re strong enough that they pretend to. They want to stay near you, and they’ll fight with you while their wives stay home and cook food for all. The charming young warlord has already staked out a pretty cabbage patch with his own muscle, now it widens with the addition of other, loyal, muscles. Everyone gets fat and happier, but what happens when the charming leader dies? What if his son is a coward who prefers candlelit baths over bleeding the horizons? Apparently, it’s all in the loot. As king, you take the best share of the shinies, and when you die your son can sit on a mountain of shining things. Life is not difficult for the guy whose friendship gets you in front of more jewels, booze, and broads than anyone else you know. Claiming authority over an area or set of people that has rarely seen anything bright or clean isn’t too hard when you have the monopoly on good drag.
But the silly stuff, the glittering capes, and the coquettish posturing, that can all be blamed on the Roman power vacuum. Better yet, it can all be blamed on the Catholics, if we’re being so simple. Take the ambitious warlord from the previous paragraph. Say he’s been successful and spread beyond the backyard. His domain is no longer the one piddly village, it’s grown to four and each has a set of satellite outposts for agriculture and defense. Then some discontented assholes whose parents moved out to the boonies forty years ago show up and start ripping up the roses. The warlord rides out and tells them in no uncertain terms to cut it out. They say “Why should we?” Warlord says “Because I’m the king damnit”. They say “So what?”
Meanwhile, elsewhere easterly, Rome is little more than a city and a word. A large church worries that this is the end, maybe they even feel the shadow of the first Orthodox father who will claim their shiny white buildings for his own. A Vatican without the empire is something like a disease without a host. Then you hear that suddenly there are a couple of new names distinguishing themselves out in the ghetto borderlands. Some are called Franks, some are called Visigoths, and one of them just sang his heart out in a battlefield conversion uncannily similar in description to that of sacred Constantine. So the bishops fly and the Vatican lives to shoot another day while the kings get to say “Me and This army” while playing Weekend at Bernies with whatever monsters the primitives conjured up from Rome. Then it all tumbles down from there.
Borders were surveyed, and the right to violence was consolidated. The peacock feathers and sparkling jewels were just to cheer egos and strike awe. There’s a mountain more to this book. For instance, have you ever heard of the 1980s? I couldn’t believe it. In this review, I listed the questions I rode in with. What I didn’t list is how many questions and queries I carried out in a stuffed-to-bursting bag. I could realistically say that I might die still thinking about the curiosities I’ve filled my foggy head with. I draft on those yellow legal pads, those ones without a cover that you rip from the top, fifty thin pages in all. I filled the entirety of one with my moth thoughts. “What is that? Why was it like this? Who picked that name out? Why’s everyone so angry?”
It’s a good thing. As I’ve said countless times in my prestigious, masterful, award-breaking book series: I’m a very serious writer and I’d like to know everything.Buy a copy here.
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What was the South Sea Bubble? What was “Law’s Swindle on the French”?
These questions were inspired by a passage in J.M. Roberts, The History of Europe, page 214
So began the rise of paper as a substitute for coin, in domestic as well as in international commerce. In the eighteenth century came the first European paper currencies and the invention of the cheque. Joint stock companies generated another form of negotiable security, their own shares. They were long traded in London coffee-houses before the London Stock Exchange acquired a name and location in 1773. By 1800 similar institutions existed in many countries. New schemes for the mobilization of capital and its deployment proliferated in London, Paris and Amsterdam. Lotteries and (at one time) tontines enjoyed a vogue; so did some spectacularly disastrous investment projects, such as the notorious English South Sea ‘Bubble’, or Law’s swindle on the French. But all the time the world was growing more commercial, more used to the idea of employing money to make money, and was supplying itself with the apparatus of modern capitalism.
The South Sea Bubble
A speculation mania that ruined reckless British investors in 1720.
The bubble, or hoax, centered on the fortunes of the South Sea Company, founded in 1711 to trade (mainly in slaves) with Spanish America, on the assumption that the War of the Spanish Succession, then drawing to a close, would end with a treaty permitting such trade.
The company’s stock, with a guaranteed interest of 6 percent, sold well, but the relevant peace treaty, (Utrecht) made with Spain in 1713, was less juicy than had been hoped. It had an annual tax on imported slaves and allowed the company to send only one ship each year for general trade.
The success of the first voyage in 1717 was only moderate, but King George I of Great Britain became governor of the company in 1718, creating confidence in the enterprise, which was soon paying 100 percent interest. In 1720 there was an incredible boom in South Sea stock, as a result of the company’s proposal, accepted by Parliament, to take over the national debt. The company expected to recoup itself from expanding trade, but chiefly from the foreseen rise in the value of its shares. These did, indeed, rise dramatically. Those unable to buy South Sea stock were sweet-talked by overly optimistic company promoters or actual swindlers into bad investments.By September the market had collapsed, and by December South Sea shares had crashed, dragging the government down with them. Many investors were ruined, and the House of Commons ordered an inquiry, which showed that at least three ministers had accepted bribes and speculated. Many of the company’s directors were disgraced. The South Sea Company itself survived until 1853, having sold most of its rights to the Spanish government in 1750.
The Mississippi Bubble
A financial scheme in 18th-century France that triggered a speculative frenzy and ended in financial collapse. The scheme was engineered by John Law, a Scottish adventurer and economic mystic who was a friend of the regent, the Duke d’Orléans.
In 1716 Law established the Banque Générale, a bank with the authority to issue notes. A year later he established the Compagnie d’Occident and obtained exclusive privileges to develop the French territories in the Mississippi River valley of North America. Law’s company monopolized the French tobacco and African slave trades, and by 1719 it held a complete monopoly of France’s colonial trade. Law also took over the collection of French taxes and the minting of money.
Public demand for shares in Law’s company increased sharply, sending the price for a share from 500 to 18,000 livres. Law hoped to retire the vast public debt accumulated during the later years of Louis XIV’s reign by selling his company’s shares to the public in exchange for state-issued public securities, which shot up in value shortly after, kicking off a speculative mania that spread a general stock-market boom across Europe.
The French government took advantage of this situation by printing increased amounts of paper money, which was readily accepted by the state’s creditors because it could be used to buy more shares from Law’s company. This carried on until the glut of paper money led to runaway inflation, and both the paper money and the public securities began to lose their value.
Profits from the company’s colonial adventures were slow to materialize, and the tangle of the company’s stock with the state’s finances ended violently imploded in 1720, when the value of the shares plummeted and set off a wider stock market crash in France and abroad. The crash was not directly attributable to Law, but he was the obvious scapegoat. He fled the country in December 1720. The enormous debts of his company and bank were consolidated under the state, which raised taxes to clean up the mess.
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What turned the transfer of a crown that had passed through so many into a struggle the ended on a pile of bodies, an outrageously burst economic bubble, and a Spanish flavor of the house of bourbon?
“Sometimes a nation’s luck runs out. Spain had had a good run, but centuries of Hapsburg inbreeding had finally produced a king barely able to function as an adult – King Charles II of Spain.”
J.M. Roberts, A History of Europe
The sole surviving son of a marriage between an uncle and a niece, King Charles was dysfunctional.
He was unable to speak until he was four, and unable to walk until he was eight. The only adult activity he performed enthusiastically was shooting. Because of a massive, deformed jaw he was barely able to speak coherently or chew. Because of uncontrollable premature ejaculation, he produced no children.
They called him “Charles the Hexed”.
Charles’s arch-nemesis was also his brother-in-law, King Louis XIV of France, who had married Charles’s half-sister, the oldest daughter of the previous king of Spain. As the “Sun King,” Louis set Europe’s standards of magnificence with his new palace at Versailles. By 1700, he had already fought four wars against the rest of Europe, trying to take the Spanish territories in Flanders and Burgundy along the eastern border of France. To keep him from gaining too much power, Austria, Britain, and Holland had established the ongoing Grand Alliance against him.
Charles the Hexed had always seemed doomed to a short life; so with the extinction of the Spanish Hapsburgs appearing imminent, the rest of Europe haggled at several conferences over who should get the inheritance. It was decided that the Hapsburgs in Spain would be revived using another Charles, the brother of Emperor Joseph of Austria, while France would be placated with stray Hapsburg lands scattered around the continent. Charles grew annoyed at the way the other great powers talked about him like he were already dead and their plans to carve up Spain. Out of spite, in 1700 on his deathbed, Charles altered his will to prevent the partition of his vast empire; he gave the whole thing to the French claimant, his half-sister’s grandson, who was also the grandson of King Louis XIV. This would link the two primary powers in Europe, leaving everyone else a distant second, so the rest of the world decided the union had to be stopped.
Austria invaded Italy to take the Spanish territories of Milan and Naples. The English held the French in the Low Countries. The war climaxed in 1704. England and Austria met up with a combined army around a hundred thousand. At the time, France was rampaging through Germany with infamously unbridled enthusiasm. The Anglos and Austrians snuck through the night like rats and France awoke already compromised. Artillery isolated their infantry while the cavalry was chased off. It was the first time someone had fucked up the French in more than fifty years.
Yet France still fell ass backward into victory. In 1711, the Emperor of Austria died childless. His brother, the claimant to the Spanish throne, became the new emperor. The Dutch and English got spooked because they didn’t really like the idea of Austria + Spain any more than France + Spain. So they drew up a treaty that split the inheritance of the mutant Charles between Spain + their overseas colonies (France) and everything Spanish in Europe but Spain (Austria).
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The man who made France the most magnificent of kingdoms.
“The role of defender of the traditional constitution was taken up by special interests, notably the parliament of Paris, the corporations of lawyers who sat in and could plead before the first law court of the kingdom.”
J.M Roberts, A History of Europe
At the time of the insurrection of 1648, France was being ruled under regency. The first Fronde occurred in Paris and was followed by an uneasy compromise. The second Fronde was supported by provincial rebels and was the more dangerous. The parliament failed to maintain a united front against the grandees and provincial nobles involved. During these troubles, the Sun King was only a small and frightened child.
In 1660 the regency was over, and Louis XIV assumed his full powers; France would not be ungovernable again until the 1780s. Louis would become the model for monarchs by embodying a new vision of absolute monarchy and for presiding over the golden age of French cultural ascendancy.
The King’s ambitions combined personal, dynastic, and national standing as one and the same. Politics under Louis XIV was reduced to courtiership, administration, and enforcement. His royal councils, as well as provincial royal agents, attendants, and military commanders, took account of the nobility and local immunities, but wreaked havoc on real independence. Louis tamed his aristocrats by offering the greatest among them a home at the most glamorous court in Europe; he gifted them pensions and honors, but he never forgot the Frondes. He excluded his family from the royal council and chose non-nobles to be his ministers. Local representative bodies were curbed; the provincial “estates” were managed by royal officials and parliaments were restricted by their judicial role.
The French Church’s independence from the authority of Rome was asserted to bring the church more securely under the authority of the Most Christian King (one of Louis’s other titles). He did not exile Huguenots, but was paranoid of them at times and determined not to be a ruler of heretics. He pressured them harshly and brutally to convert.
His reign was called the Grande Siecle; he ruled a hierarchical, corporate, theocratic society that was new and revolutionary, but also looked to the past for its goals, and for its sanctions. The glitter owed much to Louis himself. He carried French prestige to a peak at which it was long to remain, partly because of the model of monarchy he presented; he was the perfect “absolute” monarch. He was a legalistic man, preferring to have an existing legal claim good enough to give respectability to what he was doing. His personal foreign and domestic aims were closely entwined with one another, ideology and the royal temperament. Versailles was not only the gratification of personal tastes, but an exercise in a prestige essential to diplomacy. For example, in order to fill its gardens, Louis may buy millions of tulip bulbs a year from the Dutch in spite of hating everything about them.
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As a buyer of clothes and enjoyer of moderate debauchery, I’ve long been familiar with the term “bohemian” and its indication of loose-fitting floral prints and collections of expressive people sharing a single living space.
But as a relatively newish reader of history books, I kept getting mildly confused every time I read about Bohemia. Whenever mention of the region came and went in whatever book, the question would flare up all over again. That is, what do trust-funded neo-hippy lifestyles have to do with a particular region of Central Europe?
The answer is unsatisfying.
Bohemia is a province of the
Holy Roman Empire,Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic. In ancient days as a subordinate of Moravia it shook off the weight of its chains with the Premyslid dynasty. Eventually the region would sleepwalk itself under the widening wings of the Luxembourg-led HRE and until it was consolidated with the rest of the holdings by the Habsburg duke, Ferdinand I. Culturally, Bohemia had the pretty standard Central European scenes of Protestant revolts and nationalism (Czech flavored). In the 20th century it became the industrial heartland of the sub-region. After the great, big wars of the same century, it fell back under subordination again (Commie flavored).No sign of artsy freaks, proto-hippies, cocaine or promiscuity.
Boho, or bohemian, fashion was apparently born out of marketing and simple ignorance. Cuts and patterns were supposedly inspired by gypsies, who enough people at the time believed came from Czechoslovakia, rather than India-ish. Boho fashion has nothing to do with Bohemia.
Bohemianism, the unconventional lifestyle and/or subculture whose followers prioritize community living and artsy shit while rejecting such social constraints as money and polite manners, evidently built up steam in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 19th century.
And so it is nothing more than a fluke of false attribution that became a marketing term for the churning industry of over-priced clothes.
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While reading about copper mining out in the wild west, I came across this term, “company towns”. I was hot off of reading a Jane Jacobs collection, so I was curious if this was another one of those types of planned communities that Jacobs always bitched about.
Essentially, it’s a crappy little two-horse town where pretty much all the stores and homes are owned by the one company that also employs everybody. Some were packed with oodles of amenities like churches, schools, and parks. Others were slapped and stapled together, particularly those linked to mining operations. They usually bloomed in places where extractive industries (coal, metal, lumber, etc.) had established monopolies. Though they also could show up around other enterprises, large dam building projects; the garrison societies of peak war manufacturing; the Soviets even had “atomgrads” to stow away their nuclear scientists. And sometimes they happened organically and unplanned in towns that already existed but had a business that moved in and over time became the majority’s employer.
Company towns tended to be substantially exploitative of both whatever resource they were harvesting and their labor force. However, there were some idealists in the mix, and this is seen in the late-19th century trend of “model towns”. These were built by high-minded industrialists appalled at the congested conditions most laborers were living in. They believed that by building a healthier environment for employees, they would make for a more productive company. Well-intended at times, but nonetheless a demonstration of the kind of power a company’s owner had over the lives of those they employed. This ability to socially engineer the lifestyle of the laborer to the benefit of the company’s bottom line is the nightmare fuel of union reps.
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