A Century of Contrasts 385bandits were known as chauffeurs because they held their victims’ feet to
the fire to force them to reveal the hiding place of their valuables. Yet many
poor people considered some bandits as heroic Robin Hoods, who stole
from the rich to give to the poor.
A Century of Contrasts
The eighteenth century was a period of contrasts. Musical performances
at court and in chateaux and elegant townhouses took place while peasants
and rural day laborers struggled to survive, toiling in fields they rarely owned
or working as dock or market porters, chimney sweeps, or common labor
ers in town. The well-heeled financier, wholesale merchant, manufacturer,
or lawyer in Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, or Vienna lived in a vastly more
cosmopolitan world, increasingly shaped by consumerism, than did their
counterparts in the relatively few cities and towns in Prussia, Russia, and
the Balkans. In many ways a century still dominated politically by nobles,
the eighteenth century also was a dynamic period of economic and social
transformation, beginning with the Industrial Revolution in England.
Commerce and manufacturing increased on the continent, as well. Devel
oping trade across oceans changed patterns of consumption in Europe.
Trade remained the basis of the British Empire, which stretched across the
world. Rivals Spain and France, too, were colonial powers.
Economic and social changes brought remarkable political conse
quences during the 1760s and 1770s. English country gentlemen who invari
ably supported court policies and those who sometimes opposed them began
to look and act like political parties. And the domination of political life by
an oligarchy of landowners came under challenge from ordinary people
without the right to vote. In the North American colonies, the king’s sub
jects protested the fact that they were taxed without representation, and
they rebelled against British rule.
On the continent, denunciations of unwarranted privilege began to be
heard, including calls for reform of the French absolute monarchy. Public
opinion gradually began to see parlements as blocks against absolute rule
and defenders of the rights of the “nation,” a term that increasingly came
into use. Elsewhere on the continent, too, opposition to entrenched privi
lege became more insistent.