← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining Europe's L'Ancien Regime
02:20:14
Loading summary
Transcript180 lines
- [00:03]
A
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator what if Alt hists Rudyard lynch and I dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
- [00:18]
B
Hi, everybody. This episode of History102 is on 18th century Europe, also known as the Lion Regiment. I am Rudyard lynch with our recurring co host, Austin Padgett.
- [00:31]
C
Hello, I'm Austin Padgett and I just did a really fun interview with Benjamin Boyce yesterday. So that should be out today around the same day, so you can go to his channel and check it out. Get to cover a lot of different political topics and get in depth, although there's plenty more to elaborate on.
- [00:49]
B
We both been on Timcast in the last week.
- [00:53]
C
Yes, that one as well. Yeah.
- [00:58]
B
So 18th century Europe is a sort of historic plateau. And when I say the 18th century, I really mean 1648 to 1789. People talk of the long 20th century, which is the long 20th century is 1914, or, sorry, the short 20th century is 1914 to 1989, and then the sort of like 19th century is 1815 to 1914. So you'll see sort of in the same way that we might say the 1950s is really 1945 to 1964, you have these sort of historical conventions where a certain decade has a distinct cultural spirit that does not actually fit the numeric decade. And. And that's why I say the Lien regime rather than just the 18th century for the title of this video, because the Lieu regime was a sort of cultural frame that Europe inhabited for around 200 years, and it built modern Europe. And there's a series of cultural particularities about it that are very interesting. Where it's a highly aristocratic culture. It's a lot like the spring and autumn period in ancient Chinese history, which we'll talk about later. It's a highly cultivated, civilized, humane culture that ultimately birthed the Enlightenment. And you could make the argument that this was the high point of European civilization that ever existed. However, like all eras of history, it sowed the seeds of its own demise. However, the world of the 18th century brought about the 19th century, which was a European golden age that in some ways burned brighter than the 18th, and the 18th shone more broadly across the world. But the 18th century set up the 19th century, and then the 19th century set up the 20th century, and then the 20th century led to the 21st century. And so with each generation, although Europe may have become wealthier, the cultural heritage it passed on to the next century decreased.
- [03:25]
C
Yes, like A Midas touch. The illusion of momentum.
- [03:30]
B
Yeah. And that's how these things always are. There's always the growth curve. You go up and then you go down. And we tend to think of the lien regime, which I will continue to say, because I like French words, and I sometimes imagine the struggle for the person who's going to have to like edit this video or repost it will have to look up French spelling. But lien regime is. It's French for the old regime because it's a term that stems from the French Revolution. And that's sort of the frame that we see the lie through, where we see them in their older decayed form when they were destroyed by the French revolutionaries. And it was just decadence between Versailles and Mary Antoinette's apocryphal statement, let them eat cake. And so we see the sort of silly endpoint of this culture. And I've remarked before about how all of our cultural representations of the 18th century or the late 18th century, let alone the early 18th century, which had a lot of other stuff going on and practically nothing for the second half of the 17th century. And that's sort of strange because Europe was so historically important in that time period and so much of the stuff that we're completely reliant on for our modern civilization stems from that time period. But we sort of have a time warp. It's not that we have a time warp, it's just we don't care about pre modern history, where the French Revolution is the start of history, as a lot of modern historians are concerned. And so they have no interest in the thirty Years War, let alone the continuous after effects of the Thirty Years War.
- [05:15]
C
Right. Even though those are much more foundational to England and England didn't have a French Revolution and America as its own thing. But it's kind of like we saw the remains of a dilapidated wall get demolished by the French Revolution, not realizing that that was, you know, a pretty good structure to build off of.
- [05:34]
B
Yeah, that's a great point. We had a stone wall and now it's a cement wall.
- [05:38]
C
Why would we care about that old stone wall that got knocked down like. Well, could have been actually you could have made that nicer and put a gate in it.
- [05:46]
B
Yeah. I don't think Americans get how like good a lot of European haute couture is. Haute couture is French for high culture, where if you go to France or a lot of European countries, you can buy a lovely centuries old mansion for vastly cheaper than an additional beach McMansion in Florida. And it's one of the great paradoxes when you compare their society to ours, that we statistically are a vastly wealthier society, but we don't actually use the wealth for nice things. We have an aversion to nice things in our culture.
- [06:24]
C
In my house in France was a thousand years old.
- [06:27]
B
Nice.
- [06:28]
C
It was, yeah. The walls would crumble when you touched them. Yeah.
- [06:32]
B
I went to a bar in France that was 800 years old.
- [06:35]
C
Wow.
- [06:36]
B
It was just a medieval. It was a medieval cellar. It was an Irish pub. Wait, no. Was that the Irish pub or was that another place?
- [06:43]
C
We had a sword on the wall over the doorway that was so old that it had withered to a black toothpick.
- [06:49]
B
Yeah.
- [06:49]
C
And it wasn't a. It wasn't a fencing sword. It was like a broader sword originally.
- [06:55]
B
And European higher culture, which was cultivated in this time period predominantly in France, although also different areas of Europe, was part of the political and social fabric of that society, which we'll get to. But it was the attempt, for when your material needs are taken care of, to live a life of higher cultivation so that you don't just keep sputtering. So the goal of aristocratic living was to, through your very actions, through the way you walked, through the way you talked, through your leadership ability, your production of culture and art, or your governance of your feudal estate, you are demonstrating human sort of advancement and cultivation, where the aristocrats, they were trying to sort of make investments in human capital that this would operate on a multi generational basis. And most defenses of aristocracy philosophically stem from how the aristocrats create a multi generational institution towards higher social values and social stability. The aristocrats have had many vices over history, and not all aristocracies have lived up to that, but that was the philosophic justification for it. And so this was a society where its level of cultivation was just insane. Where you can go to Austria. I haven't been to Austria, but I've seen the art where they'll have libraries that the Habsburgs built that were just utterly stunning. I think people forget how the artistic highs of the Baroque period are comparable to, I would argue, potentially superior to the Renaissance. Everyone thinks of the Renaissance in 15th century Italy. This artistic masterpiece, and I respect the Renaissance was earlier, but I think the artistic highs of the Baroque period were better. And I think the Baroque period was able to attain something that was very sort of aesthetically elevating. And you can see this, you go to the Louvre or other European museums and it permeated the entire culture between the clothes people wore, where they would wear these ostentatious ridiculous wigs that they would shave their heads for with often capes and ruffles. And there's this image of Louis xiv, the capstone of baroque culture, wearing a huge cape and carrying a sword and having like sort of powerpuff anklets around his legs and long flowing hair like a lion's mane. And that would be seen as utterly ridiculous and effeminate now, but that was the cultural ideal of the society.
- [09:49]
C
It's called peacocking.
- [09:50]
B
Yeah, exactly, to use the red pill term. And you can see that manifest across the entire culture between the verbosity of Edward Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Most of modern cuisine stems from the French court in the late 17th century, where the three course meal, appetizer, main course in dinner stem from this. And the western concept in cooking of the concentration of taste stems from this era, which is opposed to other cooking philosophies and distinct cultures. And it annoys me. America has grown so wealthy and yet we have not leaned more on the European old cooking styles because they're really attaining what the ingredients in American food could attain if we cared. We could make really good bread. We could create sort of mixes of our traditional American ingredients where like I could just. If you have a beef Wellington, like I once made a beef Wellington, it was so hard, I got the crust wrong. I made this artisanal medieval feasting pie one time. I mixed sort of dried fruits and meats and spices, and it was from the 14th century. And with that tangent, the point I was trying to convey is that there is so much more culinary diversity we could reach with the level of ingredients, ingredients we normally have in American cuisine that we don't. And so we over rely on like 6 different foreign sub cuisines, which we don't actually innovate on.
- [11:37]
C
Yeah, and there's, there's a degree of kind of random American mishmash cooking, but the, the number one issue with bread is shelf life. And that has to do with the supply chain and the logistics. So if we had basically the legal structure to facilitate home baking or small bakeries that developed into larger operations, then you wouldn't have to use so many preservatives. And it's the same thing with farmer's markets.
- [12:04]
A
Right.
- [12:05]
C
Like if you ever see a bakery, it's super expensive, it's bougie. With a farmer's market, it's like $25 for a chicken salad. And in France, it's Not actually that expensive to get that stuff because their lower level agricultural market is fairly deregulated or actually just gray market.
- [12:23]
B
Yeah, the French, so they very much subsidized their farmers and that's a side effect of the French Revolution. They don't want the public to starve again. And so I had never, because I had never put together that when you go to France you'll see these patisseries around every small town and you don't have them in America and they're normally staffed by some old lady. And in France you'll see these farmers markets and all these like good locally sourced ingredients. And I like, I know in America that you need to use the USDA certified slaughterhouses. And so that's a sort of controlling bit for the kinds of meat we eat. Or in Pennsylvania we have 20 million deer and 13 million people. And the reason we can't just shoot the deer and sell them is from laws stemming from the 19th century that they don't want mass overshooting. It's.
- [13:18]
C
Right. So now it's mass over population.
- [13:20]
B
Yeah.
- [13:22]
C
But yeah, you get a, there's a, there's a sophistication of there's food culture. But this ties into the wall analogy really well because it's a little bit frozen in some senses. Like they still eat pastries for breakfast. They eat a lot of griefy leans. They eat more, they eat smaller amounts of meat than you possibly could. Right. It's not exactly tuned towards the American Chad diets that are very popular now with higher protein. And I saw in Asia, like the amount of meat versus rice people put on their plate was directly correlated with their economic status. Even at food bars that were company paid for, where you could get as much as you want. And so the French baguette sandwiches are a good example of this because they're delicious and really popular. But it's actually technically a remnant of its poor people food because it's a lot of bread, a little bit of meat with a lot of flavor meant to make it last. Go further, where in America we have kind of like barbecue brisket and all this stuff. So the French could innovate their cuisine and we could also add some sophistication to ours.
- [14:32]
B
I agree. I worry that in the, in the French attempt to innovate their cuisine, they're going to dilute it though you have to be really careful. You need a cultural moment like what existed in Louis XIV's court where at the end of the Thirty Years War, France pulled itself out of a really Bad period where they had a revolt called the Fronde, where the nobility allied with the parliament with I think some Protestant elements, although they weren't predominant, tried to knock out the teenage king of France, Louis xiv, and make France a parliamentary democracy like Britain. And I believe if that worked, perhaps France would have been an industrial colonial power like Britain. But instead, Louis xiv, guarded by his wily minister, the Cardinal de Richelieu, was able to beat the Fronde and unify France under a central authoritarian monarchy. And it's interesting that in the aftermath of the crisis of the 17th century that killed a third of Europe's population, you see cultures of partying emerge in both England and France for their political structures. Where in Louis XIV's court, the way he domesticated France's nobilities. And keep in mind that France was a society that had lots of hyper distinct subcultures that spoke their own dialects of French that were not mutually intelligible. And so France was hyper diverse and divided and had a very powerful nobility, that the king of France gradually sort of increased the water pressure so that he could unify France into a singular country. And part of that process was indirect. Where when Louis XIV got the French court at Versailles, which was his luxurious palace that just astounded all of Europe, he would have them spend a lot on luxuries, which became one of the predominant drivers of the French economy. Where around Paris, there was nearly an industrial grade luxury linen production to make up for the competitions in the French court between these different noble families who in another society would be out with their peasants or on their estates, waging war, discovering things, investing in manufacturing. In France, there were competing luxury battles for the king's favor because France had enough centralized power where France was actually the country in Europe that pioneered bureaucracy so that the king of France could run the country. And this created perverse incentives where the nobility stayed in Paris, their entire aim was to please the king. And so the French court descended into constant affairs and squabbling and like high school toxic feminine BS over these constant status games to get the king's favor so that the king would do various projects because France was capitalist, but it wasn't fully capitalist. And there are certain situations where, for example, local town management in France was run out of Paris. So if a town wanted to like clean out a swamp or kill an enormous wolf called the Beast of Gouvernant that was raging across central France, they had to appeal to the king directly, not their local authorities. So even very granular stuff became based around the central authority in Paris that people jockeyed around. And this firstly created a cultural renaissance as these French nobility competed against each other with the creation of the modern three court course meal. There was a nearly scientific creation of the French culinary tradition where these nobility would pay for chefs to discover dishes. You saw the creation of what evolved over the course of centuries into modern fashion, a lot of painting, theater and French culture spread across Europe where the L regime, as the name suggests, was France's golden age. And this came at the expense of France's sort of long term vitality as a nation. Because before Louis xiv, France was a hyper dynamic, intrepid country. And by the time of the French Revolution, the Longcion regime had hurt France's fundamentals in a variety of ways. Enough so that Britain, a country of 1/5 France's population or like a quarter, could surpass France on nearly every metric.
- [19:20]
C
Right? And it's hard to balance narratively because we can talk about English as following more of one side of the Enlightenment and industrializing, but France, like you said, was a very mixed system, especially after the Napoleonic wars and revolution. And then they did have a lot of interesting, significant inventions, especially around electricity and filmography, cameras and they, they were early on cars as well, and elements of them. This is my beginning a little beyond the pale.
- [19:57]
A
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [20:01]
D
Being an entrepreneur, I can say from personal experience can be an intimidating and at times lonely experience. There are so many jobs to be done and often nobody to turn to when things go wrong. That's just one of many reasons that founders absolutely must choose their technology platforms carefully. Pick the right one and the technology can play important roles for you. Pick the wrong one and you might find yourself fighting fires alone in the ecommerce space. Of course, there's never been a better platform than Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started with hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style, just as if you had your own design studio. With helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. It's like you have your own content team and with the ability to easily create email and social media campaigns, you can reach your customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling, just as if you had a full marketing department behind you. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping, to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Cha Ching. With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com cognitive visit shopify.com cognitive once more. That's shopify.com cognitive.
- [21:57]
B
This is sort of pre Enlightenment where it's hard to articulate because the late 17th century built up a lot of trends that culminated in the 18th century, but they didn't know that at the time. As an example, one of the first harbingers of the Enlightenment was the collapse in belief in witches. The first thing that went out was belief in witches. And then after that came the rational, mechanistic explanation for the world because there was a degree of clarity after the silliness of a lot of the witch trials that made people realize that this wasn't what they wanted. And that was the general sort of social construct of the European elites at the time, where it started out as a sort of cynical desire for peace. And then over time that evolved into a mental framework where as an example, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, you saw the European Europe's borders divided into what would evolve to be its modern nation states. And this is one of the most famous years for diplomats and political thinkers because people say it's the foundation of the European order of nation states. I wouldn't use the word nation state yet, but it fits for enough of them, like Spain, England, France, Sweden, where the borders of Europe mostly defaulted back to what they were before the start of the Thirty Years War, which ravaged across Central Europe, taking in most of the countries in Europe. But at the same time, they codified them under political national frameworks, not religious frameworks. Sweden took Pomerania. The Dutch finally got legal independence from the Spanish. The French took a handful of places by the Rhineland, where Will Durant, who's one of my favorite authors, he kept on talking about how much the French were excited to take Franche Comte, which was a Spanish possession in alsace during Louis XIV's reign, where Louis XIV did all of these wars against the Rhineland and they mostly failed. Where he had like, he had like six of them, maybe more. And he took an area the size of like Delaware and New Jersey combined. And the French were so excited about this. But at the same time, the English were sending hundreds of thousands of people to the New World, which ultimately became a much bigger thread but to pull back to the Treaty of Westphalia, you see the establishment of these nations and there was a general agreement that we have been fighting over religion for 150 years for very little gain. And you saw the formation of sort of cynical decisions for we don't want war. And then these later evolved into Enlightenment rationalizations. So the French Enlightenment was based upon the King of France building a secular, rational toolkit for power to control the French nation. And keep in mind that France partly pioneered secularism because the French state was so powerful and they would frequently not listen to what the Pope said. And so when you look at the French Enlightenment's ideals of sort of rationalization, building complex logic chains, disattachment from cultural forces, it stemmed from the French government funding an entire class of thinkers whose purpose was to figure out logics of power to hurt the French organic culture so that the King of France could dominate the country. Because keep in mind France's unification. Unlike a country like America, where America was against very lightly populated natives, where we just were repopulated the land in France, the French monarchy had to actively crush or co opt the nobility, the church, a lot of the guild organizations, the towns, and there were so many interest groups. And this was a largely haphazard and corrupt process. Where 18th century France has a lot of similarities to Latin America, nothing Francis Fukuyama talks about, or America today. Their economic system is very closely paralleled to ours where they had all of these hyper specific regulations that stemmed from the King of France trying to gradually get as much power as possible. And they would have a lot of weird laws. Like there was a tariff barrier between north and South France or Brittany and the rest of North France. France was legally a bunch of different countries. There were hundreds of distinct legal identities for different types of Frenchmen, where the nobility didn't have to pay taxes if you were a free farmer. And by the end, most of France was owned by peasant farmers who didn't serve under a lord. You paid three times as much taxes as a peasant who was under a lord. The church didn't have to pay taxes, but they were super wealthy. And France had freedom of speech and an independent judiciary, but it was also a Catholic absolutist theocracy. And so the French elites were also inconsistent in how they applied their own rules. And so you can see the French rationalistic trend as a sort of like moralistic sense of no, we're going to clean up all of this trash, make France work as a singular country. But in the process they killed France.
- [27:35]
C
They kicked down Chesterton's fence and started questioning everything without the post part of the analogy, as they say. It's funny that the country was infused with the king's desire to not be bound by the cultural limitations and then the king or the government ruining things to the point where the people were actually willing to pull the trigger on that and revolt according to those desires ended in the king being taken out himself, because turns out, even though he didn't like the institutions, he was one of the institutions. Yeah, I don't know if you thought about that.
- [28:12]
B
Well, I have. It's a point I've brought up several times because there's a de Tocqueville quote that is one of my favorite ever. And de Tocqueville said that the year there was a bureaucratic assembly in France that had power parallel to the king, the French Revolution happened second. The bureaucracy had the. Second the bureaucracy could fulfill the role of the king, it said, psych, we're going to kill the king now. And the French Revolution was powered by basically France's bureaucratic elites who the king had used to push against the nobility, the merchant classes in the church. And they had highly uniform attitudes and worldviews and sort of concepts of life. So their ideal was that they, as a social unit, could rule France in communion because they could trust their other bureaucratic, educated friends to be vetted, and they would force everyone in France to be like them through socialization. That was the French Revolutionary beehive.
- [29:14]
C
Right. It's the classic dynamic where if something's. Someone's holding something up that you don't want to fall, and then they have you kind of hostage because you can't take them out. But if you get under it and hold the weight, then you can knee them out, and it's no problem. So it's all about having the ability to fulfill the function that the person you want to get rid of is the first step towards doing that. And that works the same way with systems as, you know, an individual in a company or something. So once the bureaucracy could fulfill the role of the king, boom. Change happens before the change kind of thing.
- [29:53]
B
Yeah, exactly. That's a. That's a very deep point. And once you understand it, you start to realize that the world is the world makes a lot more sense because a society's philosophy will be what their political structure will be a century later. Sometimes the lag is shorter, but sort of changes are made in the collective unconscious of a society first, and then the political consequences ripple out from that sort of core of that society's unconscious. In different societies, collective unconsciouss are at war with one another, and they evolve certain tricks to play on one another. So when you're seeing the example of the Japanese attack on Pearl harbor, you're seeing the Japanese project their own collective unconscious on the Americans. In Japanese society, if someone does overwhelming force, then that gives the person who's been attacked a moral justification to submit, because it would not insult their honor to submit to that level of force. That's why the Japanese fought hard until we bombed them with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then in their culture, a threshold for force had been reached that they could negate. They could surrender without a loss to their honor. In Western American culture, it's the exact opposite, because it's stemming from a sort of Germanic Celtic root where you're supposed to fight to the end at Ragnarok. And so the more someone pushes on you, the more you're morally obligated to fight back. And so this is an example of two collective unconscious. One projecting its ideas on the other and getting it staggeringly wrong.
- [31:33]
C
Right. Like you don't know who you're messing with kind of thing.
- [31:38]
B
Yeah.
- [31:38]
C
You didn't expect that they would react that way because you would have capitulated or whatever. You can finish on that topic.
- [31:48]
B
One of. I'm going to get back to the 18th century soon. No, I'm going to say this. One of the lessons I've learned from gaining sort of more wisdom and understanding of psychology is people are more different from you than you think. If you actually understand how the other sex thinks, you'll be shocked at how different they are. If you understand how children think, you'll be shocked. If you understand how people in different regions of the country think from you. Different social classes, different ethnicities, different eras of history. If you had to live in someone else's head for a day, you would be utterly shocked at what you'd have to see. And it's a wonder that we have a cohesive society with people who are so psychologically different. And it only works because you have shared rules and, like, rule of law.
- [32:41]
C
Yeah. And people have a tendency to try to imagine, especially young people, they want to know what other people are thinking about them. And they constantly try to guess and figure out what people are thinking about them, and then they act based off of those assumptions. And that's a terrible idea because you're never gonna figure it out. You're not gonna be in someone's head. It's much better to focus on your actions and Then look up every once in a while to make sure you're not having a total frame clash.
- [33:10]
B
The thing that people need to hear but they don't want to is people think about you a lot less than you think. And that is both liberating because you realize I can be a little weirder off and they're not gonna notice or care. But at the same time, it's horrifying for a lot of people because their identity is built off being perceived by others. So they'd rather hyper obsess over how others perceive them than realize the truth that others don't perceive them.
- [33:43]
C
Right. Even if you're getting social media attention or something like on Instagram, they're only going to be perceiving you in the moment that they're even looking at your content, and then it's gone. You just have to make more and more and more. Yeah, yeah. But it's not like they're thinking about you and they're off time. Unless, of course, you're a philosopher that got them thinking about all sorts of ideas. Everyone's thinking about you. Rudyard. Yeah, if you. I had something to say back on the topic, so whenever you segue back into that, I wanted to ask you a question about something.
- [34:16]
B
Yeah. I knew a lot of Instagram influencers, another period of my life, and that's true the thing. So 18th century France with the French Revolution. You have to remember that the French Revolution was a reaction to the Lien regime, where this desire for unity and simplicity stemmed from the bureaucratic aristocratic clusterfuck that France was. And the great irony is that the end of the Lyncian regime was a net negative for France. If you discount Napoleon, they needed a chad Italian to save them. But if you remove him, then. If you remove Napoleon, and I do, I think history creates opportunities for figures like Napoleon to arise. But their arisal. I'm not going to use the other declension of that word. Their arisal requires their sort of individual initiative. But you look at the lcien regime, where France had uneven economic and social growth over the 18th century. Some periods were really good, others were slowed down. And I was reading de Tocqueville, who's an author I love. And then you compare them where de Tocqueville, as an example, writing in the early 19th century, said that it was widely known that the 1750s were a terrible economic period due to the loss of the French and Indian war. Then the 1760s and 1780s were a good economic period, but it came with the rise of Enormous inequality. That meant that by the 1780s and 1790s, the average person was starving, which caused the French Revolution. However, that economic boom of the mid to the late 18th century had brought a lot of people out of poverty into middle class status with that increasing inequality, where the top third did better, the bottom two thirds did worse, a lot like modern America. But then when they slid back into poverty due to France's debt crisis, which was France could not pay off its debts because it was too busy paying off the different special interests inside its own society, which France had enormous economic obligations to various sort of shareholders in the government. Whereas an example, France would sell government offices or military positions to fund the government, which became disastrous over time. And France would also, you could buy off your ability to never pay taxes. So the wealthiest people in France paid no taxes because they bought off their ability to pay taxes. And so when you're looking at this time period, you have to see this immense level of complexity. Or Most of Louis XIV's reign was a golden age for France, but the early 18th century, when he was waging the War of Spanish Succession was a disaster and France had an economic recession. So when you're looking at the 18th century, we want to see it as a single thing, but there's as much complexity as France in the 20th century. In fact, I'd argue that 18th century France was a more complex and dynamic society than 20th century France.
- [37:34]
C
That makes sense because it was kind of homogenized to a large degree since then. And that brings me back to the question I actually wanted to ask earlier, because when you mentioned it was the period of state formation, I thought of, okay, that's kind of like similar to the period of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire. Right, but you mentioned it was, it was formed under a national but religious basis. So could you see those as parallels with one being the earlier period being religious based, large state formation and the other being national, or would you not quite compare them? Because the earlier period didn't quite lock in as hard.
- [38:11]
B
So the religious unification was way earlier, that was with the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages. And France is an ethnic identity formed long before France as a political identity did, where the first mention we have of French as a distinct language or ethnicity, distinct from either the Franks, a German people, or the sort of local Latin peoples of Gaul, was Charlemagne. And then by the time you get to the early the First Crusade, the Pope spoke to the French nation because France was a failed state, but they still had a concept of a shared French ethnicity. And so by the time of the Hundred Years War, France had formed an ethnic identity as a nation state to fight off the English. And so the king of France was the sort of spiritual and cultural head of the French nation. But that did not mean you had to pay the King of France taxes or he had total control of things. Where as an example in the French wars of religion in the 16th century, an English force of hundreds of people just landed in France and then rode across France and then attacked the king of France outside Paris because they had no border controls. It's like, that's crazy. Yeah.
- [39:36]
C
It'S in that period before total warfare, right. Where it was just kind of roaming groups of people. And if it takes a week to send out the messages to get your guys in town, then a little cavalry force can cause a lot of trouble.
- [39:52]
B
This is a good transition that one of the big shifts that occurred with the L regime moving out of the sort of like early modern period. These terms are sort of arbitrary. Some people say the early modern period ends with 30 years war, others say with the French Revolution. And when people get into these sort of autistic nerd battles over definitions, I find it really silly because the top historians in this, in these whatever field largely don't care. They see terms as useful things for the historic topic. It's the midwits who will say, like I thought the early modern period ended in 1815, not 1648.
- [40:34]
C
Everybody needs an objective semantic construction which.
- [40:37]
B
Is just contradictory, which allows them to not actually deal with the argument or have to. A huge shift was that the militaries of early modern Europe leading up to the Thirty Years War were largely mercenaries. And this was so the kings of said countries did not have to rely on their own populations, so their own populations couldn't mutiny and rebel against them. And one of the things Geoffrey Parker in his book on the 17th century talks about is this transition from governments actually having to care about their own people, which is. It's a weird thing to think about today because parts of the 17th century were really bad. And so the first government oriented famine relief systems were in 17th century Europe. The king of France and I think the king of Sweden and a handful of other countries maintained granaries and then gave it to the population. And over the course of the Thirty Years War and the crisis of the 17th century in general, mercenary bans were so bad that European authorities made the realization we should be nicer to our people so that our people actually fight for us and so we don't have to rely on Mercenaries. Because the second we don't pay the mercenaries, you get things like the Rape of Antwerp, where the Spanish mercenary army destroyed one of the wealthiest cities in Europe because they hadn't been paid for a while. The French were the first major European power to pioneer that. France had a majority ethnically French army by the end of the 17th century. Sweden did it earlier, England did it under Oliver Cromwell. But having these organized militaries that were drilled and regimented was an enormous change in the European man's relationship to basically the world. Because the invention of drill was a huge sort of military watermark. And I'm getting my concept for the lyncian regime from McNeil, who uses the same sort of time frames I do. And he connects the popularization of drill very closely with the Lien regime. He says it's actually the causal variable because drill was. This is really fascinating. It was discovered in 16th century Netherlands by Maurice, by William of Orange, sorry, Maurice of Nassau, who was a Dutch prince and he was reading Roman documents. The Romans had drilled and he reincorporated from the ancient Roman teachings to fight against the Spanish. And this was a big reason that the Dutch were able to fight an 80 year war against the Spanish, the greatest military power on earth, and win. Well, the Dutch were just a handful of city states in the North Netherlands. And the way drill works is you have your men walk together and they do exercises where they can move as a single unison form, where when you see men marching in drill, their feet hit the ground at the same time, they can turn at the same time. And drill has insane military effects. An army that is drilled will almost always beat an army that's not drilled unless there's some extenuating circumstance like they're fighting in the jungle. And so the invention of drill being a huge turning point in European history, and it became correlated with the rise of these national militaries. Because you take the poor dregs of your society, and in some cases the middle classes, shove them into the army, or they choose to join the army, or I think France had conscription and that was targeted purely at the lower classes. And almost no other countries in Europe had conscription in the Lien regime. And you take these not very skilled people, drill them for a few months, and you have a crack military force where what drill did was take not very good quality men, make them fight very bravely, make them adequate musketeers, and then that way you could sort of domesticate and fight with your own population because the drill gave them a shared cohesion. And so this was also the time of the sort of rise of military professionalism, although it didn't kick in until after the French Revolution due to the predominance of the nobility in European militaries. And so stuff from the thirty Years War where a group of mercenaries would go into a town, just steal the food of the peasants, steal a few girls to take with them, live in the town for actually no quartering soldiers kept going into the 18th century, that was a real tragedy. But just the rank absence of professionalism that killed a third of Germany. There was a moral revulsion against it towards making professional structured militaries. And by the time of the French Revolution, most militaries in Europe, to be an officer you had to be a nobleman. In Britain it was de facto true, it was based by money. In France it was literally true. To be an officer you had to be a nobleman. And the nobility were not professional, but they were graceful. And those militaries did work where a nobleman would sort of hang out at the palace and then he'd go to the battlefield for a little bit and then he'd get tired and then come and then go back to his manor. And with the French Revolution, you saw the removal of the nobility from their traditional privilege as being the officers with the replacement by soldiers who were raised in soldiers who built their careers out of military cadet schools. And what you saw there was an increase of the professionalization of the military, but also the rise of the government to total dominance of the society. Because once you've removed the nobility and the government becomes the sole vehicle of force, the government, the ultimate overriding principle.
- [47:02]
C
That's fascinating because I, like I've said before, I just watched this show Sharp, and this is a dynamic in the show where all the British officers are very look down on someone who rose up from the ranks. It's, it's terrible. And they are constantly incompetent and overestimating themselves. Or they bought the, they bought their commission, bought their position and they're incompetent and they're treating the non aristocratic soldiers very poorly. And then you get to the French army and the language is completely reversed where this captain, this, this guy kind of sloppily eating and this noble Frenchman comes down in with his head in. And the captain's like, well, you're pretty competent for a nobleman. Which is the exact reverse of what they say to Sharp about being pretty competent for someone who came from the ranks.
- [47:50]
B
So it's a complex dynamic where a huge factor in the Americans beating The British in our revolution was we had a meritocratic military and the British didn't. And so American leaders like Washington or like, who's the guy from New England who fought a camp? Nathaniel Greene or the mad Anthony Wayne and Benedict Arnold. They were fairly good generals, and they could consistently beat the British in a military sense. And that's a huge reason why the French conquered Europe, because they had a meritocratic military. But in a lot of ways, the noble system did work. You can see it operate best in Prussia, where they ran the nobles through this insane military training gauntlet for their entire youth. And then you'll see in the Napoleonic wars, the British did fight quite well, because the British had put a lot of effort into sort of cultivating their nobility as a leadership class, which is a good transfer for Britain versus France, where there's an interesting anthropological tipping point I spotted where. So American accents are closest to the British. The English accent of, like, 400 years ago, medieval English sounds like its own thing, but it's closer to American English than it is to modern English. And that stemmed from the loss of the rhotic sound, which is the hard R. There's a Scottish band called the Proclaimers, which is a song called Throw the R Away. And it's about how if you're a Scottish guy trying to assimilate in England, stop pronouncing the hard R. No, you're not allowed to have jokes here.
- [49:36]
C
I'm really trying to.
- [49:38]
B
Yeah. My last name is lynch, so we can. So it's. I don't want to make things worse here.
- [49:44]
C
Right.
- [49:46]
B
But it's. It's also just bad form to say the hard R. But the history repeats. So the upper class English stopped pronouncing the hard R, and then it gradually dribbled through the population. And this stemmed from a shift where it used to be in the period when England populated America, that England's elites were local and focused around regional subcultures. And you brought that to America, where elites tend to be localized, where America doesn't have a unified class system, where we do, but it's sort of particular to certain contexts. But in Britain after the English Civil War and through just a gauntlet of political crises, you saw the formation of a unified English aristocracy. And this occurred through boarding schools, where the English elite, starting in the late 17th or maybe early 18th centuries, they would send their young men out to boarding schools where they'd engage in physical activities, they'd socialize, they were forced to take cold showers when they had cold Showers, they read the classics, they would periodically engage in homosexuality, which we have records for. The English aristocracy formed around these unified experiences, which meant that England had a coherent upper class which they could use to keep the rest of the population down and also form the empire. And the aristocracy was the engine of the British Empire, where even when they worked with commoners, they would use these aristocratic norms and institutions to create a sort of leadership system where they could dominate India or create a global spanning empire. And this isolated Britain from America, because this process didn't really take place in America. It did in a few places, like the attempt to create a sort of Franklin Delano Roosevelt northeastern WASP transatlantic elite. But that didn't really set into America. And when you look at the British Enlightenment, it stems from a sort of reasonable doubting due to the constant wars largely between different subsets of Protestants inside Britain. Like the, I mean, the English Calvinists fought the Scottish Calvinists, everyone fought the Anglicans, everyone hated the Catholics, but the Anglicans and the Catholics were pretty similar. The Anglicans were originally theologically Presbyterians and they evolved to be more Catholic. You had dissenters like the Baptists and the Quakers, and that's just half of the things going on. And so you had all of these sects of Protestantism warring over Britain. And there was a general realization over the 17th century that like, in the grand scheme of things, this was not worthwhile for Britain. And they initially directed their hatred towards the Catholics. And the King of England was, was a closeted Catholic after the Restoration. And they were fine with him being a closeted Catholic. This is James ii until his. He baptized his son as Catholic. Then there was a coup by the Dutch who knocked out James ii. And this was called the Glorious Revolution, which, you know, it's called that when you win.
- [53:21]
C
And.
- [53:24]
B
England, since the glorious revolution in 1688, has not had a single regime change, which is the longest time a government has not had a regime change in human history. And it's why Britain ruled the world.
- [53:37]
C
Oh, wow. Interesting. Are they still on that run?
- [53:40]
B
Technically they are. They won't be within a few years, but yeah, they're still on a run. They can still rack up their score.
- [53:49]
C
I'm still waiting for the King of France to show up with the stolen crown. Be like it was part of the whole operation. That, that boarding school thing is interesting because it sounds like boarding school was their attempt to adapt to the Prussian model, which then parallels with like all the other Prussian school comparisons later.
- [54:12]
B
Russia wasn't really a country yet. They were, they were Brandenburg. And they were just utterly raped by the thirty years War. They were one of the areas of Germany that lost two thirds of their population because they were where the Swedes but up against everyone else. And so Prussia had this sort of like trauma reaction against losing two thirds of their people where they had two kings in a row who were kind of obsessive autists at the military, where they were just widely known as eccentric for putting a majority of their government funds into the military until they conquered central Europe. But they were widely seen as a joke. But to backtrack on the English a little. But you are correct that it's the sort of standardizing model implicit in modern Prussian schooling. Do you have anything else in that moment?
- [55:11]
C
If just. They also referenced the Prussian model and sharp with the wimpy, wimpiest British officers who were still in England larping as really tough guys who turn men into warriors and bragging about how, yes, I use the Prussian mess method. What about you, Wesley? You know, and it was, it was kind of funny because they clearly themselves hadn't been brought up in a hardcore military training like the Russians.
- [55:35]
B
Yeah. The modern standardization of the industrial revolution hadn't occurred by this point because Europe was not an industrial society, with a few exceptions like England. But England's only became industrialized at the end of this time period. So it's not like a broader thematic element to 18th century Europe. And they had. So their upper reaches of their intellect was vastly higher than ours. But outside Protestant areas, the vast majority of Europeans were illiterate. And you had most Europeans living in grinding poverty in the 18th century who were part of a cultural current that we don't think about. And I talk about this in the Enlightenment video. The Enlightenment was segmented among a fairly small bubble of educated Europeans who often developed sort of atheist cultural norms while the general population was going through religious revivals like the Great Awakening or German pietism or the strength of the Catholic Church for most of the 18th century, which ruled Latin Europe theocratically. And when you compare America to Europe, America took the sort of general population of Europe, which is why America was such a religious society, with the Second Great Awakening arguably being the most important. Sorry, the First Great Awakening in the mid 18th century arguably being the most important cultural event in colonial America. Well, in Europe you saw the gradual growth of secularism and this stemmed from an aristocratic culture which aimed at sort of cultivating the top 20% of the population. And it didn't even consider the rest of the population where the 18th century was pretty relentlessly classist in a kind of horrifying way. And it got worse the further east you got into Europe. But in France you'll hear stories of the elites casually saying they didn't see the lower classes as huge, human, or like saying, I don't think the lower classes can actually hear or think. And the French Revolution was a reaction to all that built up resentment because the lower classes did in fact know they were people. And no one at the time of the French Revolution thought it would happen. They were just utterly decadent. And the King of France and everyone involved was horrified when it did occur. Because de Tocqueville covers this really well. They just keep on piling up these weights on the average working French person until they snapped. Because the third estate, or the common people who were not the nobility of the church, realized they did drive the French nation. But then the aristocracy and the church and the bureaucratic interests took the common people for granted, so they snapped. And this was a trend you saw across Europe, where it just happened to occur in France first. Where all of the historians I respect the most who have written on this time period, such as Norman Davies, er, MacNeill or De Tocqueville, said that the French Revolution was a pan European problem of Europe's evolution past the medieval feudal institutions that built these European nations. It's just that for a handful of reasons, France was the place the bomb went off. But once it did, the ripples of the French Revolution spread across Europe, where the historians have said that if it didn't happen in France, it would have happened in Austria or Italy or Germany. Even Russia had a lot of instability at the time with the Cossack revolts that nearly crippled Russia. And there was something in the air. And the French Revolution happened to be that thing.
- [59:26]
C
What did the average people read at the time?
- [59:29]
B
So they didn't read, but they. There was. France was made up of a series of sort of elite interests who had political opinions. And it was a widely known point in the 18th century that the lower classes didn't have political opinions. They called them.
- [59:48]
C
They didn't even have the Bible like Protestant areas. So they could read that.
- [59:52]
B
No, they couldn't read the bible.
- [59:54]
C
Okay, okay, 20%.
- [59:55]
B
France was literate in the 18th century. In England it was 60%. And the Protestants invested very heavily in education because it was a moral duty to read the Bible yourself. In Catholic Europe, the priest interpreted, interpreted the word for you. And among these European peasants, their predominant identity was Christianity. You can't overstate that. And it's why the singular most controversial decision of the French Revolution was to go up against the Catholic Church, because the vast majority of Frenchmen were still ardent Catholics. It's just the bureaucratic interests in Paris that controlled the levers of power were atheist.
- [60:39]
C
The rural areas really just got drastically out organized because they shouldn't have been able to be so easily controlled.
- [60:47]
B
This is one of the things that historians talk about where historians of Europe tend to say it's a consistent historic pattern that the cities win. And in different areas of the world they say the countryside wins. Where a weird thing at the science of history is if you look at early modern Europe, which is almost the only data set people who look at the science of history study early modern Europe is a series of weird quirks which will sort of throw you off as an example. And Azar Gott speaks to this. The nation in Europe forms from these sort of ethnic amalgams that a central king gradually enforces his will upon and on the rest of the earth. It's a barbarian people moves in forms an identity that stems back thousands of years. And so when Europe threw this extra layer of complexity or Europe sort of unlocks the insane technological abilities. Europe also doesn't go through these sort of cyclical patterns of rise, decay, barbarian invasion, repeat. And so the early modern period was the cities controlling and gradually assimilating the countryside. And the defeat of the nobility was the causal principle here, or the integration of the Nobel nobility. Because the nobility were the people who protected the local interests because they had been in a specific place for centuries. And with the loss of the nobility's power, you saw the folding in of European populations into their sort of broader metropolitan nation. And in Britain and the Netherlands this occurred through the free market. In most of Europe it occurred through conscription and through schooling aimed at conscription. And what you do is when, when your predominant social socializing force is military conscription or the draft, you're going to develop a population that worships the state. Because the socially unifying principle of a society is very important, is it's how people interact with one another.
- [62:54]
C
And that's why England was so far ahead in the 19th century century.
- [62:58]
B
Yeah.
- [62:58]
C
Because sometimes we compare liberalism to more fascist forms of organization through the English and, and the Germans around World War II. But the Germans failed and they were competing against the like embers of the English culture.
- [63:17]
B
Yeah.
- [63:18]
C
So it's, it's in that context, it's.
- [63:20]
B
Interesting to split Europe into four. You have the British and the Dutch in the neighboring North Sea areas who became liberal capitalist. Where leaving the 17th century, England and the Netherlands were republics and they were actually pushing against the European trend because over the course of the 18th century and the 17th, earlier the centralization of absolutist autocratic power that was pushed by the king, that that was considered the current of history, that was the cool thing. In the 17th century, being a theocratic authorite was the cool thing. And anyone who was pushing against it was seen as an insane reactionary. So both the Dutch and the English parliamentary traditions that won out did so by appealing to their medieval constitutions as a free nation where freedom was seen as a medieval concept and the growth of the autocratic bureaucratic state under the king and God was seen as the cool new trend. Sort of like in the 20th century, socialism was. And so the big philosophers of this era were largely aristocratic monarchists like Hobbes or Voltaire or Rousseau wasn't a monarchist, but he also supported the state, where you can draw a handful of Enlightenment thinkers where freedom with their dominant axis like Locke or Montesquieu, but most of them that was not the case and were sort of projecting American values onto the Enlightenment. And so you have the northwest of Europe, which was liberal capitalist. And they were the people who clicked the switch of all of these hyper dynamic forces that made the modern world, like science and capitalism and technological advance and demographic revolutions. Where in England and the Netherlands, after the end of the crisis of the 17th century, their quality of life doubled. And that was strange across Europe. Where in France, due to the deaths of the wars of religion and the plagues and the famines, quality of Life went up 1/3 for the average Frenchman. And then it slid back to utter poverty by the time of the French Revolution. Because in France the government controlled the farming sector. So you couldn't just figure out your own farming as a peasant. And it discouraged the nobility from living on their own land and doing the agricultural revolution like they did in Britain or the Netherlands, where quality of life doubled. This doubling of quality of life caused a natural migration to the cities and helped cause the industrial revolution because you had strong property rights in Latin Europe. You saw the gradual rise in Spain, Italy and France of these bureaucratic absolutist states claiming will from the Catholic from the Catholic divine right. And these were sort of amalgams of the nobility, the church, bourgeoisie interests, the bureaucracy, the king. And this became a highly cultivated and pleasant society that was still stultifying. And so you saw Latin Europe's decay where northwest Europe far out competed them over this time period, which was only a trend that became obvious in the 19th century once France lost the Napoleonic wars, but it still already happened. And then in Eastern Europe, you saw serfdom. And serfdom is sort of. It's in some ways more true to the spirit of the 18th century than freedom was, because the 18th century was a highly aristocratic society. Denmark had serfed them until the French Revolution. Sweden didn't, which is part of the reason why Sweden consistently beat Denmark. Because their peasants were free, they could basically arm them. But Denmark had serfdom, Prussia had serfdom, most of Austria had serfdom, and then the Russian and Polish empires had horrifying serfdom. And serfdom in Eastern Europe was closer to how bad as black slavery was in America than high medieval West European serfdom. And it was a gradual introduction into Eastern Europe, where in the Middle Ages, the Eastern European peasants were free. But in Poland or Russia, serfs were sort of borderline slaves, where they couldn't leave their master's lands. They had no real rights. Their master could work them whenever he wanted. He could do whatever he wanted with them. He could sell them off his property, split up their families. And so you're seeing these disparate sort of tendencies inside Europe that got ossified into Europe's colonies, where the Northwest European trajectory became the Anglosphere, like North America and Australia. The Latin European trajectory became Latin America's dysfunction. And then Eastern Europeans, serfdom and absolutism eventually led to the Soviet Union. And then the final quadrant of Europe were the Ottoman Turks, who had a surprisingly large empire that went into decay. And they, by the 1780s, they still had Crimea, the bottom of Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, the vast majority of the Balkans, including Greece. And the Turks had been declining against the rest of Europe, where By the late 17th century, they could still threaten Vienna and be a terror of Europe. But by the time we get to the 18th century, the Turks were constantly fighting a defensive campaign against Europe. They were declining, utterly stagnant. And there was a point where the Ottoman Turks only survived because they were on life support by the European powers, and the British and the French would help them against the Russians, and they were called the sick man of Europe. But the Turks also did shut off intellectual or economic or cultural progress in the Balkans. And so that's part of the reason why the area is so stagnant and decayed today. And another thing I want to emphasize is that the dominant elite culture in central and Eastern Europe was French. Russian nobility would speak French before They spoke Russian, they would have French chefs cook their food.
- [70:05]
C
It's still like that in Turkey?
- [70:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. In, in Prussia they, the Frederick the Great said, I speak French to philosophers, I speak Italian to lovers, and I read Greek and Latin and I speak German to my horse.
- [70:27]
C
Well, what if his lover is not Italian and his horse is English? Did he ever think about that? It seems like he's orienting the language he uses more around what he wants than what language other people speak. Speak. Anyways, when you're, I guess that's when.
- [70:41]
B
You'Re King of Prussia, you get what you want, right?
- [70:44]
C
Good point. But nobody understands him. Doesn't matter. Sounds nice. Fits the vibe. You can kind of picture this like a three story house, right? Where the Turks are outside. The Eastern Europeans are on the first floor. The French get rid of serfdom, so they're on the second floor, but they're still controlling trade, where the English free up trade. So they're on like the third floor. And when you run out of floors to move up the poverty concentrates and then you have like this artificial Malthusian trap French Revolution condition. And a big, a big reason why the French had to give food welfare so early is because they controlled the production of food and tax people a lot for the war. So they're like, oh crap, it's the same. They have the same realization that modern billionaires make, right? Like when Warren Buffett says, oh, I care a lot about the poor, I want to give more taxes to the poor. Because they're very happy to have a 10% tax increase to pay for their version of appeasement as long as it enables them to keep their control of industry that maintains 80% of their market share or whatever.
- [71:58]
B
Exactly. One of the points sort of lib right authors have made is that most of the foundations for socialism stem from these authoritarian divine right monarchies of the 18th century. And they would use the same mechanisms. So the English and the Dutch escaped the lien regime trap. The Swedes did this as well. But we don't think about the Swedes as much as by creating meritocratic systems of competition and removing legal distinctions while having aristocratic republic voting systems. And so as an issue across the rest of Europe, the legal differences between people caused profound resentment because the 18th century was a period of enormous demographic, economic and technological growth across Europe. And so the middle classes gained a cultural predominance across a lot of Europe. And they felt profound resentment at the continued dominance of an aristocracy who they generally knew they were more talented and Clever than in England. So across Europe, there were different methods that the new arising middle classes could or could not integrate with the nobility. In Germany they couldn't, where the nobility were culturally French and then the German identity formed through these middle class professors or merchants, where they would form their own identities. Because Germany was in a lot of ways a caste society where different social castes wouldn't even associate socially or look at each other or this stuff. In France, there was the bureaucracy and the buying of titles, marriage, so that you could integrate with the nobility if you were an enterprising commoner. And there was a term called the nobility of the sword and the nobility of the letter. The nobility of the letter, as you have a title of nobility from being a bureaucrat for the king. The nobility of the sword is you're an old noble line that would wage war. In England, you saw the removal of the legal designation, the title of nobility, where everyone was taken equal under the law, but the nobility as a social class made the decision to step up as social leadership. So they kept on sort of guiding the society where the nobility would intermarry with the merchant class, they would invest in new technologies, they'd serve in the colonies. They were the predominant people in the parliamentary government, where the Netherlands and England and Scotland had parliamentary democracies, where a handful like 1 to 3% of the population could vote. And that was a way for filtering for basically the highest quality control for the general population. Because the way these ancient people or these earlier studies viewed it is we don't know people as individuals, but we can make sort of statistical bets for quality control. You can choose to disagree with it, but that was the sort of logic they were operating under In England and the Netherlands. They established a meritocracy and then the old ruling class made the decision that they would try to continue to win in the new meritocracy and then import the successful people from the commoners into their aristocracy to maintain its power. And this became a very strong combination.
- [75:40]
C
That's pretty impressive because it's not often in history where you're able to make a productive synthesis that's like a wall reconstruction moment. Most of the time it just fades.
- [75:53]
B
And that's what de Tocqueville said happened where, why those countries did not. I mean, the Netherlands faced the social instability of the French Revolution, but that was non consensual. Their neighbor that's 10 times as large forced it on them. But I want to focus on England a little bit because they were very sort of clever setting this up. Because out of the English Civil War, which we had a video on, Cromwell rose to power as a puritan military dictator. He ran England as a theocracy, seized Jamaica, genocided over a third of Ireland. But upon Cromwell's death, one of his lieutenants named Monk seized power and then reinstated the King and the parliament. And I frequently think of Monk as one of those unsung heroes. The guy basically set the Anglosphere's predominance for centuries by avoiding at this critical juncture, the English speaking world falling into these low trust strategies. And he gets very little credit. We should have statues of Monk in major cities. And he's like a noble man who did the right thing. And if he made himself dictator, he would be more respected by history because humans are twisted. And so he brought back the parliament and then the King returned because the English realized they didn't want to have a Lord Protector in charge forever. Where Cromwell was like a uniquely charismatic figure who could pull this off. And I wouldn't say Cromwell's charismatic, he's, he's hard. Cromwell is the iron rod where he just rose from a middle class guy to leading the cavalry and then installing himself as dictator.
- [77:38]
C
He's very Napoleon like he is.
- [77:39]
B
And Napoleon was obsessed with Cromwell and he read his autobiography on repeat, especially before he launched the Brumairco. And so King Charles II was back. And this is why I say the 17th century culture of partying. Because Charles II was actually a quite capable leader and he managed England very well. But the English people were scared of having a king. So he did everything behind closed doors to manipulate England while he pretended to be a degenerate, to sort of get people to like him. Well, he was actually a very cunning king and he founded Pennsylvania by giving William Pen, the son of Cromwell's admiral, who seized Jamaica, Pennsylvania to pay off their debts to the family, to the Penn family. And it's funny that the King of England could just right away an area the size of England casually, it really shows how empty North America was. And after Charles ii, the Stuart line, who were initially Scottish, ruled for a little bit. James II's Catholicism was not tolerable. And then you saw the rise of the Dutch under William of Orange, who was his wife, was English. And they established the new sort of English line, which was later replaced by the Hanoverians, where Hanover is the part of Germany the Anglo Saxons were from. And through a distant relation, the Hanoverian monarch became the King of England. And so the English had this sort of extenuating province in Germany which was a liability from time to time. And the Hanoverians did so well that they tried to forget they were German. And European royalty has become a sort of distinct ethnic group. I memorize the ethnicities of celebrities as a hobby. And for European royalty, they'll have 40% European royal ancestry because they've mixed so much, they've distilled into a separate genetic pool distinct from local subpopulations. And that pool is predominantly German ancestry. Because in this time period, Germany was a complete mess. It was hundreds of distinct states unified by the Holy Roman Empire, which the Emperor of Austria tentatively held, while the King of Austria's possessions were actually in Hungary and modern Romania and Ukraine. And it's a strange. It's an awfully strange situation. So whenever European royals needed to marry another royal and not be dependent on marrying a duke inside their own, a duchess inside their own country, that would tie them to local liabilities, they'd pick a German. So due to this bug of Germany being disunited, the European royalty of the 18th through 20th centuries was vastly, disproportionately German. Where Catherine the Great was Empress of Russia, she was German. She'd import the Germans. The English monarchy were Germans. At the time of the French Revolution, there was a sort of racialist sentiment, and this is partly due to the Frankish invasion earlier, about the local French saying the nobility are actually Germans. Ethnically Galois. We do not want to be governed by Germans.
- [81:03]
C
Yeah. And that was a problem in England. I think Queen Victoria's husband was German and kind of more obviously so. Because as you got closer into the modern era, I think the national characters were more distinct than when it was just kind of a noble network.
- [81:20]
B
Yeah.
- [81:21]
C
So it became more of a tension.
- [81:24]
B
I. I'm going to need to mention the unification of Britain. It doesn't fit in the rest of my narrative. But if I don't mention it would be a sin where in 1703, England and Scotland fused. And this was partly the Scottish nobility backstabbing their country. And it also wasn't where Scotland was ravaged by Cromwell. They had their own Calvinist theocracy called the Covenant. And then Cromwell's other Calvinist theology, Theocracy didn't like that. And Scotland got really sort of humiliated. And Northern Europe, where Scotland and Finland lost a third of their population in the 1693 famine, where Europe was the coldest in the 1690s out of any period in the mini Ice Age, which was a period when the weather was a lot colder than today. And people like to think that sort of the crisis of the 17th century ended in the mid 17th century. But you had issues through the late 17th century and it was a sort of gradual piecing things together. But the Scottish nobility had an economic crisis greater than the Great Depression due to them investing all of their capital into a failed colony in Panama, which the English refused to trade with and which they all died of disease, which was how the Caribbean worked. The English offered to pay out the Scottish nobility if they joined England for their losses in Panama and also integrate Scotland into the English shared market and remove all the tariffs. The Scottish nobility agreed, thus unifying two countries that had been distinct for nearly a thousand years and had hated each other for a while. And the English tried to conquer Scotland so many times only to peacefully integrate. And it's part of a process where the kings of England beforehand were Scottish or the Stuarts, but upon going to England in the early 17th century, the Stuarts never went back to Scotland. So when Charles I fled to Scotland in the 1640s, the Scottish did not consider him to be one of theirs and they captured him and threw him in jail. And to round out this picture, Ireland was an area that did not succumb to the English without the English having to kill at least a third of the population and kill off the native Irish nobility and turn the entire population of Ireland into legal serf who could not own property, vote, obtain an education. And Ireland experienced exponential population growth in this time period under horrifying English colonialism due to the introduction of the potato, where Ireland's population in the year I believe 1700 was half a million. By the time 1840 rolled along, it was 8 million. Ireland had more people nearly 200 years ago than today. And then potato famine. Go burr.
- [84:38]
C
Yeah, they got a technological benefit without any political improvement. In fact the worst political situation. So it just created this crazy Malthusian trap, which is a real danger for a lot of the developing world because this, this technology, if just a potato could change everything while being in total serfdom to the English, then imagine what electricity can do. So that's an interesting one. And then this. It's seems like the Scottish James, monarch James in the 1500s being named as the sole leader of England. I think that might have kind of set the stage and helped Scotland have less of an identity crisis and eventually joining England. Not that that was a good idea, but I also found it was poetic that the entrepreneurial Appalachians home country was lost by a failed startup.
- [85:38]
B
Yeah.
- [85:40]
C
In Panama.
- [85:41]
B
It's funny, Thomas Sowell talks of The Scottish immigrants to America, where the 18th century generation were poor and uneducated, and they settled in Appalachia to become the poorest large group of white Americans. And then the 19th century immigrants from Scotland migrated to the north, and they were above average wealth, highly educated, highly technical. And the reason for that is that over the course of the 18th century, Scotland went through an incredibly rapid economic, technological and cultural revolution that's basically without parallel in history, where the Scots who migrated to Kentucky in 1770 were completely different from the Scots who migrated to Buffalo, New York in 1850 or even 1820.
- [86:25]
C
Because I hadn't thought much about that immigration wave.
- [86:27]
B
Was it big, the ones in the northern cities?
- [86:30]
C
Yeah, in the 1850s.
- [86:31]
B
Scottish yeah, it was. It was big. This is one of the things that's been written out of genealogies that the number either two or three country America took immigrants from in the 19th century was Britain. We like to think that after the Revolution, English Americans stopped coming over from Europe. And in reality, England and Scotland were some of the biggest drivers of 19th century American immigration. It's just they assimilated into the colonial stock Americans so quickly that we never thought about it. As an example, James Burnham, one of the big conservative authors, his father was an immigrant from England who. But you see the last name Burnham, you think this guy's ancestors came over in 1640.
- [87:17]
C
Interesting.
- [87:19]
B
Yeah. There was a big Scottish migration to the northern cities in the 19th century. Andrew Carnegie was a part of it. And I feel bad for not covering sort of the concert of European diplomacy in this time period earlier, because that's sort of the central facet of this time period. The Enlightenment's a different video, but for Lunchien Regime Europe, the central variable people look at when they study it is the constant internecine warfare between nations. And when I was in high school and I was drinking, I'd have a game that if I couldn't remember every war France fought between the Thirty Years War and the French Revolution, I was too drunk and wasted. I should stop. But I never passed that threshold, so I could always hold the information in my head. And so it was a bad metric. And let me do this again. It's been a while. So you have nine years war in the late 70th century. You have the Franco Dutch War, you have the War of Spanish Succession, you have the War of Austrian Succession, the French and Indian War, the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars. Then you have the wars of the many Coalitions and the Napoleonic Wars. I probably Forgot one there. But Europe was constantly embroiled in these intractable wars where as the European nations formed, they turned their energy at one another. And in Western Europe these would form into nation states like France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark. And in Eastern Europe you had these huge sprawling empires that often had a shared singular ethnicity, but in most cases were multi ethnic. Austria is sort of quintessential example where after the Thirty Years War, when Austria realized they couldn't take Germany for themselves because all of the rest of Europe would intervene, they turned instead of the Turks who were declining. And the Austrians carved out an empire in the former Turkish Empire, taking Transylvania and Hungary. And they used sort of Germany's higher civilization to control these areas. And the Austrian Empire was sort of boring and calm, which is not the worst thing in that region of the world. The Austrians mostly grew their empire through marriages and long term diplomacy. And their grand strategy was sort of holding things together. And if you go to Poland, it's interesting that the South Poles look back fondly on Austrian governance because Poland was split up in the late 18th century, which was a tragedy. And Russia took part, Prussia took another, Austria took the other. Of those three. The only one of them looks back on their ex favorably is South Poland with Austria, because the Austrians had enough sort of humanity. But the Hungarian regions of the empire which they gave autonomy in the mid 19th century, they hate the Hungarians, but the Austrian regions still like the Austrians. And the reason Austria survived so long, although it often feels as if the only stakeholders in the Austrian Empire were the actual Austrian ruling family, where in the Austrian military, part of the military training was memorizing the genealogy of the Emperor of Austria. To become a rifleman, you had to know all of his five ancestors. And that was a sort of cultural thing where they made these bureaucratic stories, structures to be a nobleman. And in the last 200 years, if you had a single non noble ancestor, you were not a nobleman.
- [91:14]
C
That's funny.
- [91:15]
B
Yeah.
- [91:15]
C
And so it's like making a test about the constitution or something. Like a civics test.
- [91:19]
A
Yeah.
- [91:19]
C
The guy's family, you got one of.
- [91:22]
B
Your ancestors 160 years ago was an enterprising merchant. No, it's like the one, it's like the one drop rule for blacks in America, but for classism. And the reason Austria survived so long was because they were a stabilizer in a place that's not stable. The death of the Austrian Empire, the death of the Austro Hungarian Empire was not good. And you could argue both Hitler and Stalin are sort of Offshoots of the fall of the Austrian Empire.
- [91:53]
C
How so?
- [91:54]
B
So Hitler was an Austrian. He went to Germany when Austria failed, although he did serve in the German military in World War I. And then Stalin is a more tenuous connection, but he did stuff in Austria. And there's this map of, I think it's Aust Vienna in like 1920 and it shows Sigmund Freud, then Hitler, Stalin, maybe Carl Jung and a handful of maybe Einstein. They were all in Vienna at the same time. So Vienna was a world city for centuries based around this unified Austrian Empire, which created a scaffolding over a dozen different sub ethnicities. And for the communists, I won't really defend my claim that Stalin, Stalin as a direct outcome of the fall of the Austrian Empire, but they were part of the sort of intermeshed web where the reason that Lenin seized power in Germany was, sorry, Lenin seized power in Russia was due to the Germans trying to destabilize the Russians. And so the death of the Austrian Empire created this ripple effect across Central Europe where all of these Balkan states gained independence. But what the death of Austria and these old empires like Poland, Lithuania did was set up Russia and Germany to be hyper powered nations that would murder each other over Central Europe and unleash.
- [93:30]
C
The Austrian philosophy scene onto those countries. Basically at the same time they had to have ideas for how to fight.
- [93:40]
B
Yeah, it's a, it's a. One of the things Paul Johnson said is that two German Jews, Sigmund Freud and Einstein, brought about the 20th century world because they introduced moral relativity into a Victorian worldview where the world was rational and honorable and an upward ascent. And so you had the Austrians and their most famous empress was Maria Teresa. And you had the Russians who had a huge sprawling empire. And they were seen as a medieval society that sort of butted itself into the European order. And Russia was a real wild card where Kissinger said that Russia was the first big disturbance to the Westphalian order because Russia was not really a Western power. It was an Asian nation with clan societies without individual freedom, where most people lived as borderline slaves that had a Western philic elite. So the Russian elite, starting with Peter the Great, started importing these Western experts who gained enormous power in Russia, where Germans and Dutch and French would lead militaries, invent new technologies, introduce culture. And the Russian imperial government was heavily manned by their Baltic German populations, the descendants of the Teutonic Knights. And Russia showed up on the scene with defeating Sweden, a great power that emerged out of the 30 years war that had a Sort of dominion over the Baltic. And in the Great Northern War, war, which I'm not going to cover here because we talk about it in the 17th century Eastern Europe video, Sweden made a play to conquer all of eastern central Europe under their genius boy king, Charles xii. And starting with Sweden and a handful of neighboring territories, he knocked out Denmark, which had Norway. He knocked out Poland, Lithuania, and then launched an invasion of Russia that made it out to Kiev, where he allied with the Cossacks and the Turks. And so Charles XII was frequently seen as like a reincarnation of Alexander the Great as this boy genius. But he ultimately lost because the man he was facing was potentially Russia's greatest leader ever, Peter the Great, who saw all of these trends in action and then tried to modernize Russia. And earlier in his reign, he failed against the Swedes at the Battle of Narva on the Baltic. But after a few years of innovation, Russia had modernized enough that he could wipe out the Swedish army at Poltava. And out of this war, Russia gained dominance over Eastern Europe. And they propped up Poland, Lithuania, which was a large state that had Ukraine and a lot of the Baltics and Belarus in Poland, because Poland, Lithuania was weak, where they had a dysfunctional constitution, a dysfunctional society. And so Russia propped up Poland, Lithuania as a puppet state for like a century. But there were Russian armies as far west as Prussia, and Russian armies marched into Warsaw and Krakow. And once Poland, Lithuania tried to wake up and gain sort of cognizance. Russia, Austria and Prussia teamed up to smother it because they could accept a weak Poland, but not a strong Poland.
- [97:19]
C
Because they basically saw what happened with Russia and were like, we don't want Poland to become a new Russia.
- [97:26]
B
Yeah. And the, the, the, the polls did a pretty good job. They, in the late 18th century, they put up a good fight. And Adam Zamoyski's history of Poland covers this. Where they abolished serfdom, they started bringing in manufacturing, they got conscription, they made Poland a liberal democracy. And so there was a sort of trajectory in the late 18th century where you could have imagined Poland becoming a sort of European America because Eastern Europe was actually being settled over the course of the 18th century. And McNeill covers this where lots of places in Hungary or the Balkans or Ukraine, they were uninhabited grassland at the start of the 18th century. But then the Austrians, the Poles and the Russians went through this active process of peopling and colonizing Eastern Europe, where as late as the American Revolution, Crimea in the bottom of Ukraine was controlled by a Mongol remnant state of the continent of Crimea that the Russians only took in 1788. And so when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1806, Ukraine was populated by ethnic Slavs, but they were the first generation of ethnic Slavs in the south Ukrainian steppe grassland.
- [98:47]
C
Right. People underestimate how much development and the population explosion can change the equation because there were so few people back then that just through settlement and the growth of those communities and what was often frontier Western Europe could have ended up populating a huge portion of Eastern Europe.
- [99:05]
B
Yeah, that was, that was a cause of Hitler's resentment because he looked at the open spaces of Eastern Europe and thought, imagine if Germany was unified in the 17th century, we could have taken all of that. But they weren't.
- [99:17]
C
Ironically, he was the one who got their entire multi thousand year diaspora killed. Which is crazy to think about because there used to be a lot of Western Europeans in Eastern Europe. That's a funny thing to say.
- [99:30]
B
As I like to say, you must accept reality. And until you do, reality will keep punishing you. Reality is non consensual. You have to accept it.
- [99:39]
C
You can't base things off of wishes. You have to like take stock of the current situation.
- [99:45]
B
Yeah, facts. So when you look at sort of Eastern European Enlightenment equilibrium, it brings up these sort of uncomfortable notions about enlightened despotism, which I think was probably truer to the spirit of the Enlightenment than the American Revolution. Because the American Revolution was the embodiment of sort of the free northwest European capitalist enlightenment. You see in figures like Locke or Montesquieu, a little bit in Voltaire. And then you look at Eastern Europe where Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria were all highly enlightened. They all funded philosophers, they'd eat French cuisine, they were highly cultured. But all of them utterly, brutally oppressed the serfs. Because in Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment was an elite ideology that was used by these governance classes to modernize and better control their own populations. However, I will take enlightened despotism above other forms of despotism where when you look at the Enlightenment, you see that there was this genuine attempt in Eastern Europe to a lot of these countries radically decreased or even got rid of the use of the death penalty, they got rid of torture, they tried to introduce economic liberalization when they could. They tried to dampen the completely sort of like barbaric medieval practices they still had where there was this element. But at the same time, look at Catherine the Great's Russia where she technically did all of these things. To lessen the weight on the serfs, While in reality, life for the average Russian serf got dramatically worse over Catherine the Great's reign because she enabled all of these modernizing, sort of oppressive forces at the same time as population growth. And so Russia was on the verge of a revolution in the 1780s, where that was when the quality of life for the average Russian was worse. And there was a question, will the French Revolution happen in Russia or France? Because Russia had its own Cossack revolt in the south, where these free bandit peoples who the Russians had brought in as allies and partners on the contingency that they'd maintain their freedom, the Russian government turned them into serfs instead. And it's always a tragedy to see a free people shoved into slavery. But the pressure that Russia didn't have the French Revolution was the mass population of Ukraine and Siberia, where if you didn't like the system, you could leave to the frontier to get better conditions and the centralized government would only reach out to oppress you a few decades later.
- [102:46]
C
Right. That the space of Russia defused the Malthusian trap.
- [102:51]
B
Yeah.
- [102:52]
C
And enlightened despotism is a really interesting concept because it's like we're trying to deconstruct this as well as we can, but also we're kind of despotic and attached to it, so we're not moving fast enough. But luckily you have some extra grassland where you can survive.
- [103:11]
B
De Tocqueville likes to say that a lot of the Enlightenment was basically enabling power, and that was masked behind sort of rationalistic documents. And he also said that when the elites put out these ideas, they never thought they would trickle to the population because they were that elitist. And when it eventually did, and you saw revolutions across Europe, the elite were shocked. That happened, especially so in France. Also, this speaks to a point Foucault made where he talks. He uses the Panopticon as a symbol for modernity, where Jeremy Bentham, who was the big utilitarian of 19th century Britain, he invented the colonial concept of the Panopticon, which is a prison where any given time the prisoner can look in at, sorry, the warden can look at the prisoners, but the prisoners never know when the warden is looking at them, and uses this as a symbol for modernity. And I think that's valid because we live in the Panopticon, we can always be spied on by whatever authority can hack into our phone, and we're okay with that for some reason.
- [104:20]
C
So that was an allegory or so.
- [104:22]
B
Foucault was using the Panopticon as an allegory for the direction of modernity.
- [104:29]
C
I was thinking about this earlier with houses and institutions and how basically like a town used to have such control over their local enforcement that the outside enforcement would talk to their representative before going in. And so much of that has to do with the way space, even though it's all the same space, space was just so much more larger. It shrunk between things by virtue of technology to the point where like you're not in as isolated of spheres, so it complicates things.
- [105:02]
B
Yeah. This is also what I tell people, that within any given room is a thousand different worlds. You just need to know where to look, where if you have enough wisdom and perception, you can look at a sort of intractable situation, zoom out, realizing the thing you're seeing is only one aspect of it, pick a different aspect and then roll with that.
- [105:24]
C
You're supposed to lock onto one aspect and say, that explains everything and obsess about it.
- [105:29]
B
Welcome to high school English class. And so I'm going to finish with the sort of different wars of Enlightenment Europe. I wanted to front load with this, but I guess it'll make more sense if after you know the context of this aside, to go through the historic chronology where the first wave was Spain's decline with France's rise, where Spain was the great power of the 17th century, they had a huge colonial empire, waged near constant wars over Europe to make themselves basically Catholic emperors of Europe to destroy Protestantism. But by the start of the 18th century, Spain had totally worn itself out and lost a third of its population. France had been growing though, and France reached its high point under Louis xiv. And then after him they saw a gradual decline where Louis XIV himself said, apres moi, destination deluge. After me the flood. Because he knew that he was the one holding things together where he ruled for like 60 years. And Louis XIV, his professional smart guy was Vauban. And Vauban was a mathematician. He made France's star forts, where early modern Europe had the most advanced fort construction ever in human history. And Vauban built these forts to maximize the firing range and the difficulty of taking them around France. I've seen a few of his forts up by the English Channel, and I've seen comparable star forts in Luxembourg, which is called the Gibraltar of the north. And they're really impressive. And Vauban, he told the king of France that If he sent 10,000 people a year to Quebec, which was less than what the English were sending to their colonies, New France would have 200 million people by the year 2000. And he also said that if the French took in English agriculture and incorporated the agricultural revolution alongside changing the tax code and deregulating France, that Vauban would. That France would become the world power. And I love this because it's a guy getting something so staggeringly right and no one listens. Another thing, Vauba predicted the French Revolution. He said, we can't maintain this debt and tax structure, so if we don't renovate this, France is going to collapse. And Louis XIV said, I think you're a genius, but I'm not going to do that.
- [108:09]
C
Wow. So Vauban was his name.
- [108:12]
B
Yeah.
- [108:13]
C
This guy needs to be talked about more.
- [108:15]
B
Yeah.
- [108:15]
C
Because that's half my points revolve around how that would happen in the French Revolution. It'd be great to point to one of them knowing it as well. And if we. Can we. If we're going to talk about learning from history, can we. Can we take this into account?
- [108:30]
B
Yeah, it's a. So France had a philosophic school called the Physiocrats. And a lot of libertarian thought is based at the Physiocrats because they believed in sort of emergent free market cooperation. And Adam Smith was very much influenced by them. And France is a very diverse country. Americans don't understand that a place the size of Texas can have dozens of different subcultures in very different currents. And Europe was the most educated in this time period it would ever be. I mean, you'll hear about people making. People making totally casual references to very obscure pieces of classical mythology in this time period. And you look at Baroque art, you see the manifestation of these highly deep archetypes of both the Greco Roman tradition and the Bible. And so they had a very sort of rich cultural density. And elite European culture developed its own sort of subculture we've forgotten about that was pulling very heavily from classical roots and had its own philosophic assumptions that guided Europe's global dominance. But then with the rise of mass democracy, we forgot how the sort of character of these European nobility built the modern world, because in a numeric sense, there weren't that many. There were like 1 to 2% of most countries in Europe, but they had the power.
- [109:59]
C
It's also interesting because it's another example of the King Louis understanding that abandoning his oligarchy or whatever would work. Just like King George understood it and various other people understood it. They mock it as theoretical in their propaganda. And then. But the real Elite understands free market words, which is kind of a funny contradiction because most of the elite are globalist communists, but they understand what free markets better than most libertarians. They actually know the threat. And if we're worried about population all the time and civilizational collapse, like be fruitful and multiply, it's more meaningful than. It's not just like a materialist goal. It's like how we thrive as humans.
- [110:49]
B
That's a good point. And it makes me think of how the elites on paper are modern materialists. They don't think there's a God, there's a soul. But then you look at their actions and a lot of the elites actually have a pretty good comprehension of the occult where, see sort of weird symbolism they do, or like various sort of like weird occult things. And I'm like, I can see what you're doing. It's totally evil. But I thought you were a modern materialist. Like. Like what?
- [111:17]
C
Well, I guess Satan is the. Like you eat from the apple or whatever, right? Satan has a lot of knowledge. Satan knows what will work and what won't, but he makes his decision anyways.
- [111:28]
B
Yeah, I get the Soviet Union and the demoralization research came to believe that religion was the central thread that tied society together. And I'm like, but you guys are still atheist and yet you'll. You'll carry this out to hurt other countries. And so you had a series of wars where France was sort of buckling against its boundaries, and they took Franche Comte and Alsace the wonder, which I still won't get past it. It's weird. And they were consistently blocked off by the European balance of power, because the way the balance of power worked is that if any country got too big, everyone else in Europe would team up against them. When Spain and Austria under the Habsburgs threatened Europe in the 17th century, the French, the Swedish, the English, the Dutch and the Turks all allied against them, so they couldn't win. And so when the French went up against Europe, all of Europe went up against the French. They hit this immunological response they couldn't break through. Where even though France had the best military on earth, they were very well organized, they were wealthy, they were technologically advanced. They couldn't break past the European balance of power. And they exhausted themselves on these constant wars. And the French have a genre called spectacle, which is sort of their operas, and there's one called Le Roi de Soleil, and it's talking about Louis XIV's affairs with his mistresses, of which he had many. And the Constant war. And they don't portray the wars very well because it's French spectacular drama. But that was Louis XIV's France. Those were the things they cared about. The French went up against the Dutch and the Spanish because the Dutch somehow held Belgium until the War of Spanish Succession and then it went over to the Austrians. And so Belgium was potentially one of the wealthiest places on earth. And so the Spanish really held onto it. And they put more fight into the Netherlands than they probably should have, because the Netherlands was totally split off from every other Spanish possession, where they had to sail to Italy, march over the mountains, go down the Rhine to reach the Netherlands, because England was blocking off the English Channel. But the French pushed up against the Spanish in Belgium and against the Dutch. And the French nearly took the Netherlands in the Franco Dutch War. But then the Dutch flooded their country by opening up the dikes, thus killing the French army, which is. I see that as a pretty like based move. I've always respected the Dutch for doing that.
- [114:25]
C
It's very cool. And just the geoengineering of it is fascinating. And that also related to their technological development because they were able to produce entirely new armies. They had different kind of spears that stopped cavalry with delicate, like ballpoints. So their innovation helped them survive the French attack to go on to do more glorious things later. And then you mentioned how they were going after Belgium. Alsace Lorraine was a huge source of division between Spain and Germany. And it's funny, a lot of this is in the context of Burgundia falling, because they're essentially like fighting over the corpse of Burgundia, creating all these unnecessary conflicts, distracting them from bigger opportunities in the New World or domestic reforms or whatever. And they just went mad over Burgundia.
- [115:15]
B
You're right, that's hilarious. It all does stem back from the fall of Burgundy. Just centuries of European conflict.
- [115:24]
C
And there's this cultural sphere that almost deserves its own categorization, like South Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and in North Italy, I think of that as a country. And then I think of the rest of Italy as a country. I think of the rest of Germany as a country. Like they're almost more culturally similar to each other.
- [115:42]
B
Yeah, I'd agree with that. You can sort of see that in the genetic maps that the Alps is a sort of singular cultural unit. And South Germany spoke High German and North Germany spoke Low German, which were not mutually intelligible. And so after the difficult wars of the late 17th century, which were burning Europe out, Europe only barely survived the 17th century because they were Pressing up against, oh, my God, they could barely afford the 3% of income the government made up of the total economy. And they would fight wars over the 0.1% increase in taxes on the nobility. That lasted years. But then the War of Spanish Succession is a really important war that's fairly interesting that no one remembers. And it stems from early 18th century, where the king of Spain was retarded, where he had a series of deformities, where he could barely walk. He had a huge hunchback. He could not sort of have descendants because he could not control his ejaculation. He was considered to be hideously ugly. He was mentally retarded. He could not function as an adult. And I'm sure that wasn't his fault line. It's the constant mixing of the Habsburg lines. And he was sort of a joke at the time. And even before his death, the European powers were dividing up the once great and now decayed Spanish Empire, where the Austrians and the French, before he died, divided up his empire. And the king of Spain was so resentful about this, he just gave it all to France on a whim. And this was huge issue. I mean, I wouldn't like dividing up my empire too, because he couldn't have heirs for reasons outside his control. And so the issue was that Spain had this huge empire, including a lot of Italy and Belgium and the New World, and you unified it with France. That was the great European power. For a litany of reasons. It was just widely assumed that France would conquer all of Western Europe. And the French had enough of stuff going on that if they conquered Western Europe, they could probably hold it. And so with the addition of Belgium, the French pushing up against the Netherlands and Germany, where the English, the Dutch and the Austrians allied against the French. And Eastern Europe was embroiled in the Great Northern War, where both sides of Europe had their own huge climactic wars at the start of the 18th century. And so the French strategy was to punch across South Germany to take out Austria, who was fighting their own rebels in Transylvania and Hungary. And the English had an unusually good commander named John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, direct ancestor of Winston Churchill. And Churchill made this decision to take his English army with the Dutch, because the English had normally sort of defended the area around the Netherlands, because that's where the ports are, to attack England, it's closest to England. He just took that army and made a decision out of his own right to march it down to the bottom of Germany to intercept the French army to keep them from taking Austria. And he defeated the French army at Blenheim, which changed the course of European history because it stopped France from taking over Europe. And this is a war that no one remembers or respects. But the house that Winston Churchill was born in was Blenheim palace, one of the most ostentatious in England. Because the English nation was so grateful for him winning this victory over the French, they let him build one of the most ridiculously ostentatious palaces in England.
- [119:59]
C
So that would have really set up his mentality around defeating great powers in Europe, right. Like as his literal ancestral pattern of duty. And it's interesting, Waterloo happened around the Netherlands, right, because that was kind of like the focal point of England's retreat and attack and area and foothold.
- [120:24]
B
The consistent area the English have fought on the continent the most is Belgium, because Belgium has all a lot of ports you could use to attack England. So the English are always very careful about Belgium and the region. Belgium exists at all as a unification of the Flemish Dutch speakers and the French Walloon is because England did not want any larger country to own those ports.
- [120:49]
C
That's why they tried to invade through Dunkirk right in the beginning, which was in the. I think they went to the Netherlands for that. And it took the. I guess it took the Americans to teach him, like, hey guys, there's a huge west coast on Normandy. You know, you can land there too.
- [121:07]
B
So after the. I think the I for. I think the War of Spanish Succession devolved into wars in Spain itself, where I think this might be the War of Austrian Succession. But the English took Majorca and Gibraltar, sealing their control of the Mediterranean for the entire 18th century. Which I said before, really weirds me out that Britain controlled the Mediterranean in a time period when France was the great European power. Who has a Mediterranean coast and England doesn't? And Spain was a transcontinental empire. The War of Spanish Succession went on way longer than anyone wanted it to. It was partly, at least. This is Churchill's answer and he was biased as a descendant of a Whig at the time, or the English two party system descended from the late 17th century of the Whigs and the Tories. Or were you more sympathetic to the parliamentarians or the royalists? In the last cycle, the Whigs were more parliamentarian, the Tories were more royalists, but they had chilled things out where it wasn't sort of. It was polite disagreement, it was open out fighting. And Churchill says that the Tories needed to have a public relations victory for the British people. So they kept on grinding France Down. And by the end of that war, France was on the verge of collapse. When I was in Montpellier, they had a huge building to honor crushing the peasant revolt of South France, where there had a lot of Protestants in the south of France who rebelled. And then Louis XIV hated Protestants. He just utterly crushed them. He betrayed the Protestants by revoking the Edict of Nantes that gave them tolerance. So the Huguenots fled across the Protestant world, enervating it, because the Huguenots were the wealthiest and most entrepreneurial demographic of the French. And so the War of Spanish Succession resulted in the French getting most of the Spanish empire except for the European possessions. And the Spanish Empire was so sort of morally degenerate and corrupt and decayed that the French got very little value out of this transcontinental empire. The French did send a generation of experts and Enlightenment thinkers to the Spanish New World, which started a trajectory that ended in the Spanish New World's independence. And Belgium went to Austria, Venice and Lombardy, and North Italy went to Austria. And South Italy became an independent country, not a Spanish possession. So you saw the Austrians pushed into central and western Europe. The Austrians really fought the French a lot over Belgium and northern Italy. They became natural rivals, where in the War of Spanish Succession, the second best commander after the Duke of Marlborough was Eugene of Savoy. And Savoy is partly modern southeast France, northeast Italy. And they were working with the Austrians where Savoy was an Austrian ally. And because Austria respected that, they let him be their top general or one of their top generals. And a point to get across is because European culture was highly aristocratic, these wars were genteel. And I compare it to the spring and autumn period of ancient China where you had these aristocratic armies who would follow these highly respectful doctrines. Where you'll hear stories from both the spring and Autumn period and 18th century Europe of one army letting their enemies fire first on the battlefield. Or in 18th century Europe, it was totally normal to go on vacation or trade with a country you're at war with because it's about the king, it's not the nations being at War. In 18th century warfare, it was not uncommon for officers of different armies to have dinner together before the battle. Or in The War of 1812, when America burned down the village that later became Toronto York. It was this huge public relations disaster in both Britain and America because they had burned down this relatively small frontier town, because war was that genteel and polite in the 18th century, because there was the shared aristocratic understanding, right?
- [125:29]
C
And they thought, hey, maybe we can get away with it on the frontier. But still on the continent, they took great moral affront to that because it's breaking down the traditions. Yeah, it sounds like it's like they're not even fighting. Right. If you say it's the kings are fighting and we're just doing our job. Oh, what king do you work for? What king do you work for? Like competing companies or something. And I guess if they value, especially the higher up people involved in the process, value their life or even the soldiers as, as it relates to an opportunity to move up through a hierarchy in society, they want, they appreciate that job. So they are not going to take it personally because they can't look down on the guy on the other side doing the same thing because they're, they want to be doing what they're doing. So it's like a good game.
- [126:18]
B
That was the general attitude. And because everyone was an aristocratic, an aristocrat, no one wanted to die. So if another aristocrat captured you, you had these notions of chivalry, that life is sort of an impersonal thing. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Or like Clausewitz, a Prussian officer, he left Prussia and fought for the Russians when he disliked how much Prussia was cooperating with the French. The Polish architect, both. The Polish architect was named after the K. It's like Kosciuski or something. And then Lafayette fought for the Americans and then went back to their home country. The Germans produced a lot of mercenaries that fought across Europe because if you're from. In the American Revolution, the Hessians fought for the British because Hesse was a small enough state in Germany that its main export was mercenary. And that's how the Prince of Hesse paid his bills. And it was part of the culture.
- [127:17]
C
It almost. Go ahead. It feels like, because you see this line fighting all the time, right? And you're like, I know there's benefits to this strategically from military perspective, but at some point it seems so inflexible that there are opportunities for efficiency being missed. Like are you never going to hide behind any object? Are you going to maybe create a barrier like the civil war for your line of musketeers to stand behind or so. And. Or are you going to allow a more kind of open front guerrilla thing? And a lot of the reasons I feel like they didn't do that is because that's. The officers would have lost control of the armies if they actually made it a full out fight between the people. Then all of a sudden you're not taking breaks, you're not doing rounds and it gets a lot more chaotic. Right. In the same sense that it's hard to control an army that completes a siege from destroying the population. I wonder how much of that was an element of its artificial constraints rather than all just tactical necessity.
- [128:26]
B
Tolstoy has like a multi hundred page rant about the thing you said he has at the Battle of Borodino. Is Napoleon actually in control of the battle and the so must the rank and file. Musket warfare makes sense with the logic provided by muskets where they don't have very good aim and you're trying to maximize firepower in the ratio of how much you fire at what range, because the muskets aren't very good. It becomes a game of statistics. And the line formations were incredibly successful under most contexts. They could slaughter almost any other type of military. With the destruction of the Highlands charge at Culloden, fighting against the Jacobite Scottish, that being an easy example where these Celtic Scottish warriors could consistently beat other militaries before the musket rank and file, which is how Scotland and Ireland maintained independence. But they couldn't beat that. You see the rank and file break down once rifles show up, because rifles are very exact and so you can just look at something, do your scope, fire. And so the rank and file formation, you started to see it break down in the American Revolution due to the terrain. It really broke down by the US Civil War. Start of the Civil War, you have the rank and file musket lines. By the end of the Civil War, that was considered suicide. And you saw the rise of trench warfare like World War I and in the Napoleonic wars you saw a gradual shift where one of Napoleon's big innovations was having highly fluid lines of muskets in command. Because he was an artillery officer and he spotted how artillery would become the dominant tool of the battlefield. Where a majority of deaths in war in the 20th century happen from artillery. Less than 10% is from guns.
- [130:25]
C
Oh, yeah, yeah. It's all modern warfare is artillery now. Right.
- [130:29]
B
You need infantry to hold terrain, which matters as much as killing people.
- [130:34]
C
It's like political more than the warfare element.
- [130:37]
B
Yeah, it's political and it's not. It's artillery is killing people and infantry is at holding terrain and holding position. And tanks is creating breakthroughs that can be exploited by infantry. And so War of Spanish Succession. The next one's the War of Austrian Succession, which I believe this was Frederick the Great going after Silesia, where Maria Theresa, a woman, received inheritance of the Austrian throne. And Frederick II of Prussia, who was part of sort of insane Prussian militaristic state that developed as a reaction to the constant chessboard that was a disunited Germany where Germany later on became a great power. But during this time period it was constantly fought over by larger nations that were unified which was deeply humiliating for the Germans because the Germans knew they had a sort of higher civilization although they were disunited. And so Frederick the Great realized that because there was a technicality that you didn't have to respect a woman empress. He could take the wealthy province of Silesia from Austria. And Silesia I think may have had more people in GDP than Brandenburg and the rest of Prussia combined. And it's in modern Poland. It's one of the areas that Stalin ethnically replaced that was majority German. So Frederick II in a daring move seized control of Silesia. And then I believe the French and the Austrians attacked him over that maybe the Russians. And then the British declared war on the French to sort of fight over the colonies a lot. The War of Austrian succession was important in the seizure of areas of Canada or in certain parts of India. But the War of Austrian succession is largely an anticlimactic war. I think it's better known for a lot of humiliations that occurred in Spain. I could be confusing that with the War of Spanish Succession where there was a point when an Austrian army landed in the east of Spain and practically incited a Spanish civil War. But the outcome of the War of Austrian Succession was that Prussia held on to Silesia. Then you have the Seven Years War which was furthermore fought over Silesia where the Austrians, the Russians and the French teamed up against Prussia while the British were working with Prussia. And the British used the Seven Years War to seize control of British North America and India. Made the British Empire the anomalous and they funded Prussia. Prussia fought an even more impressive war, were massively outnumbered. Frederick the Great, who got his name from this war was able to beat a three sided front against those nations. And there were points where the Russians were about to take Berlin. And then Catherine the Great died. And then the successor on the Russian front on the Russian throne was a huge admirer of Frederick ii. So he pulled out of the war. That was the miracle of I believe Potsdam. And there were several battles like Rossbach and Leuthen where Frederick the Great was able to sort of beat off these significantly better armies. And it really cemented Prussia as a power of respect because the ruler of Prussia declared himself king. And that wasn't really respected. But if Prussia could hold its own against these much greater powers, it meant that Prussia was a serious contender for The European balance of power alongside Russia disturbing the unified system.
- [134:50]
C
And it'll be interesting to get into Austria more next week. And the specific areas that we refer to as Prussia, because Prussia is such a weird. It's kind of like. It's like half between Germany and Austria, but not really. And it's funny how it was Prussia and Russia before Germany and Russia. So it'd be interesting to find out how that shifted.
- [135:14]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's complex. Eastern Europe's complex. I forgot something. So the war between the British and the French in the War of Austrian Succession was called the War of Jenkins Ear because it was based around. The Spanish had their own preferential monopoly trading network network in their empire where only certain Spanish monopolies could trade with their colonies. And the English wanted to break into this because they were economically superior and they would just flood the Spanish market with their goods. And there was this English naval officer called Jenkin who had his ear cut off by the Spanish when he was trying to trade in the New World. And then he wandered around the English parliament for decades carrying the pickled jar of his ear year to say, this is what the Spanish did to us. And he finally got the English to fight the Spanish over having free trade due to this. And eventually it caused the legal allowance that the English were allowed to trade slaves and goods from Africa to the Spanish Empire.
- [136:13]
C
Other things as well, or was that the compromise? Just slaves?
- [136:17]
B
There was other stuff there. I forget all of it. I mean, they did open up Spanish America somewhat, but not far fully to English trade.
- [136:25]
C
That's funny. He's like, look at the ear. Look at it, look at it.
- [136:29]
B
Exactly. Yeah.
- [136:30]
C
So persistence, the value of persistence and a good props and storytelling.
- [136:38]
B
Exactly.
- [136:39]
C
Those are the lessons.
- [136:40]
B
So here we are with the American Revolution and its news rippling across Europe, the foundation of a new republic and the French Revolution awaits. The old order of the Lien regime is creaking, but no one knows it yet. Their world is about to end. And here we are in 1789.
- [137:05]
C
And we could take some modern parallels from that, maybe stew it over and figure out what we can do.
- [137:13]
B
Facts. So do you want to do Romantic era Europe next or 19th century Europe, or do you want to do the creation of modern Britain?
- [137:26]
C
We can stay romantic. Seems like on. On theme. If we bounce to modern Britain, it'll be hard to bounce back to this period. Right. I mean, founding of Britain.
- [137:39]
B
I was going to do romantic in a straight way. I was gonna do the Romantic period anyway. So that works for me.
- [137:47]
C
Perfect.
- [137:48]
A
Okay.
- [137:48]
C
All right.
- [137:49]
B
Bye bye.
- [137:50]
C
Peace.
- [137:54]
A
History102 by Rudyard lynch and Eric Thornberg is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a Friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening. History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Eric Thornberg is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a Friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.