Climax and Dénouement 793
down. Revolutionary excitement was over. In America republicanism faded off
into the general attitude of most people in the country. In Europe, where Bonaparte
for a time treated republicans and royalists pretty much alike, giving them jobs if
they could be useful, and imprisoning or even executing those who persisted in
conspiracy or subversion, the forces making for change were content for a while to
operate within an authoritarian framework which he provided. Men of practical
bent and modern outlook, freed both from popular demands and from old- noble
pretensions, relieved of the fear of both revolution and reaction, and protected by
armed force, until 1813, against the inroads of ever- reviving Coalitions, worked
together at a liquidation of the Old Regime in various countries, in an area much
like that of the New Republican Order of 1798. This area was the Continental
heartland of Western Civilization, comprising France and Italy, Switzerland and
what are now called the Benelux countries, to which was soon added Germany as
far as the Elbe—the sphere of Napoleon’s empire, and of the “Europe ” of 1960.
The very German philosopher Hegel, as he watched the Emperor of the French
ride through the streets of Jena in 1806, just before annihilating the Prussian army,
saw the movement of history, of humanity, and of true liberty embodied before his
eyes—“the World- Soul sitting on a horse.”^25
In the twentieth century both the World- Soul and the horse have become archaic,
and the dialectic of Hegel has become unconvincing. It is not as easy to generalize
about the grand sweep of human events as it once was. It is not easy to summarize
what happened in the world of Western Civilization in the forty years from 1760
to 1800, or to be certain of the meaning of these years for the subsequent history
of mankind. For the ideas set forth at the outset of the first part of this book a
thousand pages of evidence have now been offered. In history, for large ideas, there
is no such thing as proof; no view, however much demonstrated, can pretend to be
conclusive or final. It is hoped, however, that the reader can now see these events
of the eighteenth century as a single movement, revolutionary in character, for
which the word “democratic” is appropriate and enlightening; a movement which,
however different in different countries, was everywhere aimed against closed
élites, self- selecting power groups, hereditary castes, and forms of special advan-
tage or discrimination that no longer served any useful purpose. These were
summed up in such terms as feudalism, aristocracy, and privilege, against which
the idea of common citizenship in a more centralized state, or of common mem-
bership in a free political nation, was offered as a more satisfactory basis for the
human community.
What had happened by 1800, even in countries where it was temporarily sup-
pressed, was the assertion of “equality” as a prime social desideratum. It was an
equality that meant a wider diffusion of liberty. That the assurance of some liber-
ties meant the curtailment of others was well understood, so that, more on the
continent of Europe than elsewhere, the democratic movement brought a consoli-
dation of public authority, or of the state. It was not an equality that could long
25 J. Hoffmeister, ed., Briefe von und an Hegel, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1952), I, 120.