ANY ONE who seeks to understand the stirring period in which we are now living becomes quickly aware that he must first know the history of the French Revolution, a movement that inaugurated a new era, not only for France but for the world. The years from 1789 to 1815, the years of the Revolution and of Napoleon, effected one of the greatest and most difficult transitions of which history bears record, and to gain any proper sense of its significance one must have some glimpse of the background, some conception of what Europe was like in 1789. That background can only be sketched here in a few broad strokes, far from adequate to a satisfactory appreciation, but at least indicating the point of departure.
What was Europe in 1789? One thing, at least, it was not: it was not a unity. There were states of every size and shape and with every form of government. The States of the Church were theocratic; capricious and cruel despotism prevailed in Turkey; absolute monarchy in Russia, Austria, France, Prussia; constitutional monarchy in England; while there were various kinds of so-called republics – federal republics in Holland and Switzerland, a republic whose head was an elective king in Poland, aristocratic republics in Venice and Genoa and in the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire.
Of these states the one that was to be the most persistent enemy of France and of French ideas throughout the period we are about to describe was England, a commercial and colonial empire of the first importance. This empire, of long, slow growth, had passed through many highly significant experiences during the eighteenth century. Indeed, that century is one of the most momentous in English history, rendered forever memorable by three great series of events which in important respects transformed her national life and her international relations, giving them the character and tendency which have been theirs ever since. These three streams of tendency or lines of evolution out of which the modern power of Britain has emerged were: the acquisition of what are still the most valuable parts of her colonial empire, Canada and India; the establishment of the parliamentary system of government, that is, government of the nation by its representatives, not by its royal house, the undoubted supremacy of Parliament over the Crown; and the beginnings of what is called the Industrial Revolution, that is, of the modern factory system of production on a vast scale which during the course of the nineteenth century made England easily the chief industrial nation of the world…