There is a great contrast between the first half of the seventeenth century and the second.  In the years before 1660, to pick a fairly arbitrary date, we have international war, revolution, bloody religious conflict, disorder of all sorts.  After 1660, is a period of comparative calm.  Even conflict seems more orderly after 1660.

All over Europe, in some places more and faster than others, conflict subsided and prosperity replaced destruction.  A period of apocalyptic fear gave way to one of limited and then growing optimism.  Even the fear of witches, and the hunt for witches, diminished and then disappeared.

 The contrast is so marked that for the past generation, European historians have been talking about a "General Crisis of the 17th Century,"  which somehow was overcome after 1650 or 60.  What made it possible for Europe to pull out of the cycle of war and revolution, fear and hatred, that had caused the great wars of the 16th and early 17th centuries?

  For a long period following the Reformation, Europe was dominated by men who aggressively pursued ambitious, indeed absolute goals.  Whether their goals were expressed in religious or political terms -- and the language was usually religious, they added up to a reordering, a disciplining of the whole world.  Satan and all his stooges had to be driven out, massacred if necessary, so that godliness and god-sanctioned government could be restored.  These men, who might be considered idealistic, found plenty of less idealistic, pragmatic men, who were willing to follow them, doing whatever killing or torturing was necessary to attain those goals, as long as it paid.

If that was the character of the century and a half between 1500 and 1660, then it is no surprise that immense destruction was the result.
 

 Eventually, Europe was left exhausted and frightened.  Even those with military and religious power became frightened, or incapable of further effort, or came to disbelieve in absolute goals.  When that happened, the era of immense ideological ambition gave way to one dominated by different attitudes and different phenomena.  I have broken these up into five
classifications.

1.  First, the new period was characterized above all with a vast longing for safety, order and normality.

2. This was accompanied by a willingness to submit and conform to traditional authority.  Whether that authority was actually traditional or or not, any institution that seemed to promise safety and order, or seized effective power at the right, strategic was able to claim submission and acceptance from a weary population.

3..  At the same time there was a rejection of fanaticism.  The search for absolute righteousness had led to bloody war, and more important, civil conflicts that had ripped apart every institution and community in western and central Europe.  Almost everyone now recognized how undesirable and counterproductive this was.

4.    These first three attitudes had two major results.  The first is this.  Those powers that had survived the previous period, or gained power during it, became established powers.  In other words, they settled in and became strong, stronger and less precarious than any institution had been in the previous period.

5..  The second major result of the three attitudes is that reason and control became the watchwords of the new culture.

 
     Let us go through these five points, illustrating my generalities with examples and drawing out implications that are not necessarily obvious at first glance.
 
1.  The desire for safety, order and normality should be perfectly understandable.

Consider the situation of England.  The Civil War resulted from a revolt of those who felt threatened by a would-be absolute king promoting an imperious church.  When it came to battle, some were willing to sacrifice all to reform the church, throw off the Norman Yoke, or to defeat Satan -- or all three at once.  Others were not so sure, and they retreated into neutrality.  But victory brought even the zealots up short.  Chaos threatened.  Many who had sacrificed to attain justice and godliness saw all the old abuses back in a different form.   A
few people grasped at a vision of equality and freedom of conscience that seemed threatening to their old comrades-in-arms.  The threatened ones grasped instead at an image of safety and normality, knowing that the neutrals and even many of their own foes would support them.

2.   The search for normality and safety usually inspired a return to traditional values and institutions.  Anything that promised stability at the right psychological moment could present itself as such.  In both England and France, kingship returned from ineffectiveness to become the keystone of the social order -- even though both kingship and the social order were much changed.

A more interesting example is the Church of England.  The tolerance of the civil war and commonwealth period in England enjoyed a great deal of support.  Charles II, when he was maneouvering to return from exile, felt compelled to support the principle of toleration.  Yet during the Restoration Parliament, the Church of England regained its supremacy and its property
in a last-minute coup coup.  It was not exactly what most people wanted, but it was not worth fighting over.
 
If we look at France, and absolutism, we see a similar situation.  Most of Louis XIV's subjects did not want absolutism.  There had been many revolts of all classes against it.  But the simultaneous collapse of all royal enemies, domestic and foreign, gave Louis great power.  Perhaps reluctantly, absolutism was accepted as the best practical alternative.

And in either case, where was there room for complaint?  Was not the Church of England the traditional church of England?  Was not the King of France the traditional ruler of France?

3.  Fanaticism, religious certainty pursued regardless of the cost, had finally acquired a bad name.  The cost of absolute purity had been seen time and again.  Let us have another English example.  The Church of England got its supremacy in the Restoration Parliament, kept its property and its episcopal structure, but it did not get either the power or the
mandate to enforce absolute righteousness or conformity.  Religious laws were enforced by laymen, the local justices of the peace.  Thus the church of England had to abide by the local consensus, which, in the Restoration was against
Puritanism.  If the people of London wanted the theaters opened up, if they wanted sex comedies on stage, they would get their theaters and sex comedies.

Another example:  witch hunting.  Witch-hunting also fell out of favor.  It eventually seemed counterproductive, because it was destructive of the social peace that everyone wanted.   Reaction to the disorder of the hunts themselves, part of
a less zealous search for stability in the late 17th century, made the authorities unwilling to search for the accomplices of accused witches, and even begin to reject the evidence against those actually brought against them.

To point 4:  Whatever powers had survived the earlier catastrophes grew stronger.  In some places, this meant an absolute
monarch came much closer to absolutism than ever before.  In England and in Spain, the landholding class enjoyed a more secure independence from royal interference.

The initial success of the newly established powers gained them greater public acceptance; this in turn meant that powers could be less wild, less arbitrary in exerting their prerogatives.  It no longer took a witchhunt, for instance, or a visit from
the dragoons to subdue a village.  Violent resistance seemed less likely to succeed, and was less often resorted to.  And thus the new powers, with their claims to traditional sanction and their partial success in delivering what people wanted, became sanctified, and the only reasonable sources of authority.

5.  All powers that survived and thrived after the crisis justified themselves by an appeal to reason, reason which was the antithesis of both fanaticism and uncontrolled violence.  This does not mean that the appeal to religion was abandoned.  Far from it.  The good churchgoer was constantly told that God approved of his rulers.  But this was not an apocalyptic God, raining down punishment on his sinful people, a God on the verge of returning to judge all humankind on a final day of ashes.  No.  It was a God who approved of commonsense, of pragmatic methods that achieved practical results instead of ultimate justice.  It was a God who approved of social order, which reflected heavenly order.  It was a God who was
reasonable.

The pursuit of reason, of rational control of society and nature is an important aspect of European culture after 1660.  It deserves some further discussion.

I will take two examples, one practical and political, the other ideological and philosophical.  First, we will look at the methods in which rulers controlled armies after 1660, and the spirit in which they did so.   Then we will go on to look at the emergence of a confident, even optimistic scientific ideology.

First, armies.  The armies of Thirty Years' War were scary, even to those who had brought them into existence.  Surviving  rulers came to realize that contracting out everything in a carefree manner was counterproductive and might be fatal.  They would have to run their own war machine, and control all important aspects of it directly.

A pioneer in this direction was Louis XIV of France, the chief beneficiary of the 30 Years' War.

Louis' method was to build a bureaucratic system that monitored all aspects of recruiting, supply, and mobilization of his armies.  He was a war king, with the biggest European military establishment since the time  of the Roman empire -- 400,000 regulars in 1690, not including militia -- but he was never a warrior king.  He did not fight (unlike the Swedish King Gustavus
Adolphus, who died in battle during the 30YW), and he never wore military dress.  Instead he stayed in Paris or Versailles and checked the accounts, or inspected bricks to be used in fortifications.  His ideal was not bloodshed, but the power to command in the abstract.  He wanted an army that was precisely formed to do the job he set it to do.
 

The army itself was no longer an entrepreneurial enterprise.  It was the king's army, and all the soldiers were servants of
the king. Louis required all of his captains to ransom prisoners of war as quickly as possible; later in his reign he made arrangements to regularize exchanges between hostile armies.  Neither captain nor soldier had the freedom of a true
contractor any more.

The seventeenth century was the era where drill was invented as a method to keep individual soldiers under control.
Drill had a straightforward practical goal -- to make deadly volleys of musketfire possible by training every soldier to
load and fire in precisely the same way -- but it also turned armed mobs into stable companies, with identities and morale all their own.  The process of doing things in unison created that valuable military commodity,
esprit de corps .  The possibility of real discipline existed.

Along with this, there was a change in attitude.  Rulers after 1660 or so were not the mad gamblers that Charles V or Gustavus
Adolphus of Sweden had been.  If they went to war, it was a matter of cold calculation.  They were not willing to risk vast
destruction that might undermine their power.  Thus we see what is often called a growing humanitarianism -- the wounded were better cared for, prisoners were exchanged in a systematic manner, some weapons were banned by mutual consent. The basic motivation was the desire of Louis XIV and his rivals to control everything.   They wanted war not to be bloodless,
but to be a rational exercise in gaining policy goals.  The elimination of random, senseless destruction paralleled efforts to supply troops with uniform clothing, uniform weapons, and reliable provisions and medical care.  Armies were to be disciplined tools; thus drill was increased, and soldiers were housed in barracks, where they could be watched and regulated.
 
By the beginning of the 18th c. armies were much different than they had been a century earlier.  They were still made of the scum of the earth, but now armies showed what could be done with the scum of the earth.  Brutal but consistent discipline, a routine existence under the scrutiny of inspectors and accountants made not only armies into rational implements,
but also men.  In Berlin in 1764, James Boswell, the friend and biographer of Dr. Johnson, saw Prussian troops being drilled and noted that they seemed to be in terror:  "For the least fault," he said, "they were beat like dogs."  But he thought perhaps such fellows would make the best soldiers.  In his words, "Machines are surer instruments than men." Quoted from Anderson,
169-70).

Boswell's mention of the machine as an instrument of perfection, of the image of rational control, leads me to my second point:  the growth of scientific ideology.  It, too, was a major feature of the 17th century, and a major formative force for the future.  Where did it come from?

Faith in science to some extent preceded scientific advancement.  Faith in science, in reason, in the possibilities of discovery was a part of the European intellectual heritage, and the 17th century gave it the opportunity to spread and prove itself.

There was an important strand of late medieval and Renaissance thought that believed in the possibility of discovering new knowledge.  If we were to talk to one of those proto-scientists of the 14th, 15th, or 16th century, we might be surprised.  That scientist would spout an amazing mixture of perfectly sensible ideas (sensible from our point of view) and sheer mumbo-
jumbo.

During the Renaissance, and even later, it is very difficult if not impossible to separate what seems like nonsense from real scientific thought.  Even the most talented scientists often had their minds so open that their brains fell out.

But this Natural philosophy offered Europe something it desperately needed -- the idea that there are many roads to truth, and that people can find those roads if they looked.

This is the significance of a figure like Francis Bacon, an English politician under James I who spoke constantly of the
possibility of new knowledge, acquired through exploration and experiment, which would make human life more productive, pleasant, and safe.  Francis Bacon is often presented as an early scientist, and if looked at in that way it his significance is hard to understand.  He did a few piddling experiments, like stuffing a dead chicken with snow to see how long cold would preserve it.  Bacon  was not so much a scientist as a  prophet  of science, a man who said that many old ideas were worthless, and that systematic investigation could uncover and formulate better ones.  He contributed nothing to his scientific successors -- except inspiration.

Natural philosophy was suspect during the period of the great crisis, of course.  It was equated with sorcery. But when fanaticism failed, there was natural philosophy to provide an alternative -- and hope.

Of course it did not hurt at all that natural philosophy delivered answers.  The most famous example is the 17th century development of the earlier insights of Copernicus.  Copernicus back in the 15th century had said that the earth was not at the center of the universe, the sun was.  In the seventeenth century, the telescope helped Galileo prove that Copernicus
was right.  This meant that, in this very profound matter, Aristotle and all his medieval Christian followers, not to mention the Bible, had been wrong.  Authority was wrong.  Human reason and observation had proved it.

And it offered an alternative interpretation, not just of astronomy but of physics, the scientce of movement.  For Galileo's greatest work was providing an alternative to the standard physics of Aristotle.  Which led to Newton's laws of gravity and motion, the most astonishing intellectual achievement of the 17th century, and one of the most astonishing of all time.  Newton showed men a reasonable world designed by a reasonable, mathematical God.  A clockwork world.

Clockwork brings us back to the image of machines more reliable than man, and perhaps far more reliable than religion.  The ideology of science is often discussed entirely in relation to ideas, the ideas of physics and astronomy and gravity.  But let us not forget the work of mechanics, who from the Middle Ages on had been tinkering with gears and escapements and springs.  Town clocks were not rare in the 15th century.  Watches were commonplace among the rich in the 17th.  And there is of course the telescope and the microscope, which opened up new worlds even to the less than brilliant.

The rise of science is a fascinating long term phenomenon.  Its interest for our course is the way it finally began to pay off just at a time when fanaticism failed, and people were looking for a new way to reorder the universe.  Science was one more route to the order that everyone wanted.

By the later 17th century, we are, for a wide variety of reasons, entering a world with an entirely different mental atmosphere.  Order was being recovered, and with it a degree of prosperity, and finally, civility.  Eventually this would lead to a self-confidence in human powers that had not been seen in a long time.  We are on the road to the Enlightenment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

     Anderson, M. S.  War and society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618-1789

     Easlea, Brian.   Witch hunting, magic and the new philosophy : an introduction to debates of the scientific revolution 1450-1750.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.