A ruling bureaucracy cannot function efficiently without its proper complement, a docile population resigned to being ruled. This docile German population was also a product of the Thirty Years’ War. The Peasants’ War had ended in a victory for the landowners; but in spite of this, the later sixteenth century had witnessed a certain relaxation in the old feudal restraints. During and immediately after the Thirty Years’ War, those peasants who survived the massacres and the famines found themselves, owing to the extreme shortage of labour, in a position to demand better social and economic conditions.
It looked for a moment as though the catastrophe might have at least one good result, the liberation of the German peasantry. Actually, it had a precisely contrary effect. The Peace of Westphalia strengthened the independent princes and their nobility-strengthened them so much that they were able to reverse the trend towards the modernization of German society and to reimpose the old feudal servitudes with a strictness and effectiveness unknown for generations. So far as the agricultural population of Germany was concerned, the most important consequence of French foreign policy was the creation of a new, monstrous kind of artificial Middle Age. When the time came for the rise of a new German power, the Prussians found an elaborate bureaucracy and a cowed and regimented population all ripe and ready to their hands.
Within Germany itself, the political consequences of the Thirty Years’ War were almost entirely bad. Modelling themselves on Louis XIV, the post-Westphalian princes either stultified or abolished outright the local diets by means of which their fathers’ tyranny had to some extent been mitigated. Autocracy became the tradition of the country. Meanwhile, Austrian power had been finally and for ever excluded from western and northern Germany. The states which still nominally formed part of the Empire were in fact independent of the Hapsburgs -independent enough to be, as Richelieu and Father Joseph had intended them to be, under the influence of the Bourbons. So far as France was concerned, this was an admirable arrangement; but it was an arrangement that could persist only on two conditions: first, that French monarchy should remain stable, neither unduly declining nor unduly expanding its power, and second, that the Germans themselves should not be reunited, either voluntarily or under compulsion. By the beginning of the nineteenth century both these conditions had ceased to be fulfilled.
The French monarchy had declined and collapsed, to be replaced by an aggressive military dictatorship that scared all Europe into opposition; and the Prussian monarchy had arisen and was in a position to create a new unified German state. By breaking the power of Austria, Richelieu and Father Joseph had made sure that, when Germany came to be united, it should not be united as a federated, non-national and not wholly German empire, but as a highly centralized, purely Teutonic nation. The final blow to the federal idea -the only political philosophy with any chance of working, under modern conditions, in central and eastern Europe was delivered in 1919 when, instead of reforming and strengthening the Hapsburg empire, the allied politicians broke it up into half a dozen independent, but entirely non-viable, national states.
Richelieu’s policy had been directed to the weakening of Spain and Austria, the disintegration of Germany and the substitution of Bourbon for Hapsburg predominance in Europe. That policy was successful -so successful, indeed, that when Louis XIV carried it to its insanely logical conclusion, perpetual aggressive warfare against everybody, all Europe united against the Bourbons, just as on earlier occasions all Europe, including France, had united against the Hapsburgs. By the end of the long reign France was bankrupt, her trade and industry almost ruined, her oppressed peasantry in a state of latent rebellion, and large stretches of her territory almost depopulated. In the economic field, private enterprise had been discouraged; in the religious and political, freedom of worship and all the traditional autonomies and checks on tyranny had been abolished.
The ground had been prepared for the Revolution; and out of the Revolution was to come, along with the ‘progress through catastrophe’ of which political optimists are fond of speaking, Napoleonic imperialism and, by reaction, German nationalism, the Prussian empire and the disasters of the twentieth century. About politics one can make only one completely unquestionable generalization, which is that it is quite impossible for statesmen to foresee, for more than a very short time, the results of any course of large-scale political action. Many of them, it is true, justify their actions by pretending to themselves and others that they can see a long way ahead; but the fact remains that they can’t. If they were completely honest they would say, with Father Joseph,
“J’ignore où mon dessein, qui surpasse ma vue,
Si vite me conduit;
Mais comme un astre ardent qui brille dans la nue,
II me guide en la nuit.”23
If hell is paved with good intentions, it is, among other reasons, because of the impossibility of calculating consequences. Bishop Stubbs therefore condemns those historians who amuse themselves by fixing on individuals or groups of men responsibility for the remoter consequences of their actions. ‘It strikes me,’ he writes, ‘as not merely unjust, but as showing an ignorance of the plainest aphorisms of common sense, … to make an historical character responsible for evils and crimes, which have resulted from his actions by processes which he could not foresee.’ This is sound so far as it goes; but it does not go very far. Besides being a moralist, the historian is one who attempts to formulate generalizations about human events. It is only by tracing the relations between acts and their consequences that such generalizations can be made.
When they have been made, they are available to politicians, when framing plans of action. In this way past records of the relation between acts and consequences enter the field of ethics as relevant factors in a situation of choice. And here it may be pointed out that, though it is impossible to foresee the remoter consequences of any given course of action, it is by no means impossible to foresee, in the light of past historical experience, the sort of consequences that are likely, in a general way, to follow certain sorts of acts.
Thus, from the records of past experience, it seems sufficiently clear that the consequences attendant on a course of action involving such things as large-scale war, violent revolution, unrestrained tyranny and persecution are likely to be bad. Consequently, any politician who embarks on such courses of action cannot plead ignorance as an excuse. Father Joseph, for example, had read enough history to know that policies like that which Richelieu and he were pursuing are seldom, even when nominally successful, productive of lasting good to the parties by whom they were framed. But his passionate ambition for the Bourbons made him cling to a voluntary ignorance, which he proceeded to justify by speculations about the will of God.
Here it seems worth while to comment briefly on the curious time sense of those who think in political terms. Courses of action are recommended on the ground that, if carried out, they cannot fail to result in a solution to all outstanding problems a solution either definitive and everlasting, like that which Marx foresaw as the result of the setting up of a classless society, or else of very long duration, like the thousand-year futures foretold for their regimes by Mussolini and Hitler, or like the more modest five-hundred-year Pax Americana of which Miss Dorothy Thompson has spoken.
Richelieu’s admirers envisaged a Bourbon golden age longer than the hypothetical Nazi or Fascist era, but shorter (since it had a limit) than the final, classless stage of Communism. In a contemporary defence of the Cardinal’s policy against the Huguenots, Voiture justifies the great expenditures involved by saying that ‘the capture of La Rochelle alone has economized millions; for La Rochelle would have raised rebellion at every royal minority, every revolt of the nobles during the next two thousand years.’ Such are the illusions cherished by the politically minded when they reflect on the consequences of a policy immediately before or immediately after it has been put in action. But when the policy has begun to show its fruits, their time sense undergoes a radical change.
Gone are the calculations in terms of centuries or millennia. A single victory is now held to justify a Te Deum, and if the policy yields apparently successful results for only a few years, the statesman feels satisfied and his sycophants are lavish in their praise of his genius. Even sober historians writing long after the event tend to express themselves in the same vein. Thus, Richelieu is praised by modern writers as a very great and far-sighted statesman, even though it is perfectly clear that the actions he undertook for the aggrandisement of the Bourbon dynasty created the social and economic and political conditions, which led to the downfall of that dynasty, the rise of Prussia and the catastrophes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His policy is praised as if it had been eminently successful, and those who objected to it are blamed for their shortsighted views.
Here, for example, is what Gustave Fagniez has to say of the French peasants and burgesses who opposed the Cardinal’s war policy -a policy
