Coping with a continent

Has there ever been a better time to be alive than the 18th century, provided that one were rich, healthy, literate and European? One would not necessarily have to be a Duke of Newcastle or a Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, although either would be nice. Many of the things which make life agreeable for humbler mortals originate in their modern form in this fascinating period: passable roads, fire insurance, tea, novels, newspapers, street lighting and innoculation to suggest only some random examples. At a more elevated level, an age which began with Bach, Newton and Racine and ended with Mozart, Hume and Beaumarchais plainly has much to be said for it.

But there is of course another 18th century. It is the one which began with Louis XIV and ended with Napoleon, those great monsters of capricious self-aggrandisement before the time of Hitler. Theirs was the age of vast armies, maintained by taxes deliberately designed to weigh mainly on the poor. It was the age of pervasive bureaucratic monarchies and the continual warfare which supplied their raison d’être. It was without doubt an age of reason and enlightenment, but also an age of torpid and corrupt national churches, widespread popular superstition and powerful spiritual movements like Jansenism and Methodism which overtly rejected rationalism. Beneath the optimism of the period’s best-known voices lay a world in which one was statistically most unlikely to be rich, healthy or literate. Expectation of life was low. In most of Europe, the great majority of men and women lived at subsistence levels, confined by narrow physical and intellectual horizons. And of course one might not be European at all. The 18th century began the great age of overseas settlement which brought prosperity and exotic comforts to Europeans, but invasion, disease and genocidal violence to much of the rest of the world.