A History of the World (55 page)

Like later generals, he discovered that conventional armies find it a struggle to defeat guerrillas, and the fight against the Marathas began to feel like a war without end. It was spreading a hatred of Islam, rather than affection for it. The conflict brought his empire close to financial collapse, and as taxes rose, revolts spread far beyond the south.

This is about as good an illustration as you could get of the dangers of absolutism. An empire driven by the obsession of a single man, religious in this case, relying on repression and territorial expansion, cannot last long. The parallels with Europe are strong: there too the wars were about succession and religious differences, and would go on almost as long; though, thanks to ocean-going fleets, they would spread much further, including to India itself. As to Aurangzeb, as he was dying he apparently told his son: ‘I came along and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.’

The Mughals would stagger on into the nineteenth century; but they were by now exhausted. When the first adventurers of the British East India Company began to build coastal forts and defeat local armies – along with their French rivals – they would find Mughal India had a rotten door, easy to kick down. Under a pushy upstart called Robert Clive, the British not only barged in with bayonets and cannon, but managed to slip themselves into the Mughal system as tax-collectors for the Agra court. This gave them an instant authority in a strange land, allowing them to steal the Mughal hegemony until they were able to shake them off altogether. Under the Mughal cloak, the East India Company grew into a substitute government. And hidden under the Company’s entrepreneurial activities – and almost equally surprised by the turn of events – was the British Crown.

The British Empire would need to start afresh; for on the other side of the world, its first empire, won in the forests of America, was about to fall apart. Nor would it be long before absolutism in Europe, too, began to disintegrate.

Zozo and Fred

On 20 June 1753 there was a hubbub in the streets of Frankfurt. A skeletal Frenchman, famous throughout the Europeanized world, was trying to escape Prussian agents. They had ransacked his luggage and had orders to shoot him if he should try to flee.

His was a bungled escape; his carriage got caught in a traffic jam of hay-carts. At the city gate he was recognized, stopped and taken back by soldiers to be searched. Strip-searching is rarely dignified. The nicotine-addicted François-Marie Arouet, known to his parents as Zozo but to the world by his pen-name Voltaire, pleaded that he could not
live without snuff, but his snuffbox was seized. He was escorted to a local inn, the Goat’s Horn, where his niece, who was also his lover, was nearly raped by a Prussian soldier, while his clothes, cash, silver buckles and gold scissors were stolen.

Voltaire had already been relieved of his prized Order of Merit and the gold key that was his badge of office as Court Chamberlain to Frederick the Great of Prussia. It was Frederick’s agents who had ambushed the philosopher: the king was desperate to get hold of a book of poems and other writings he himself had composed, and of which Voltaire had a rare copy. The writings were too compromising, too radical, for a military monarch. Eventually, the shaken and humiliated Voltaire was allowed to leave for exile in Switzerland. One of the great experiments in enlightened despotism – ideals of freedom and inquiry pursued under the protection of a philosopher-king – had not gone according to plan.

Voltaire had fallen out many times with the rulers of his native France. As a younger man, he had been imprisoned in the Bastille for his insolent compositions. But he had known Frederick for much of his writing life and had seen him as a beacon of hope. Eventually, lured to Berlin to work for Prussia’s ruler, Voltaire had become disillusioned, complaining that despite the good conversation and the parties and the music, ‘there are prodigious quantities of bayonets but very few books’.
¹⁰
Frederick had replied in kind, telling a courtier who complained about his generous treatment of Voltaire, ‘I shall have need of him for another year at most, no longer. One squeezes an orange and one throws away the peel.’
¹¹

Frederick became infuriated when Voltaire attacked in print his French minister for science, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, a mathematician with a drink problem who had once seduced one of Voltaire’s mistresses. Voltaire’s diatribe was brilliantly funny, clever and popular, ripping into Maupertuis as a fraud. When he turned on an enemy, Voltaire wielded one of the most lethal pens in Europe. Frederick, however, was also a master of gunnery, and all those bayonets. He ordered the satire to be seized, torn up and burned by the public executioner and told Voltaire he ought to be clapped in irons for his behaviour. Voltaire skedaddled.

Voltaire was undoubtedly one of the most important Europeans of the eighteenth century. His campaigns against Catholic intolerance set
the thinking continent alight, just as his tragedies and comedies delighted Paris. His
Lettres Philosophiques
, a combination of essays on the English and a savage attack on the Catholic thinker Pascal, have rightly been called the first bomb thrown at the
ancien régime
of absolute monarchs. From a wealthy Paris family of lawyers and court appointees, he became famous as a poet, a playwright, a philosopher, a polemicist, and as a scientist of sorts – forever dangerous, and always, from the viewpoint of those in power, twinklingly unreliable.

The Great Britain that had emerged from its Glorious Revolution was exceedingly important to him. He had fled there after being beaten up by toughs employed by a nobleman he had offended, then finding that his hopes of justice were blocked by the court and the nobility. Britain seemed different – as did Holland, another country of relative freedom and middle-class prosperity. Voltaire put this down, in part, to parliamentary politics, but also to habits of tolerance: ‘If there were only one religion in England, there might be a risk of despotism; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live together in peace and happiness.’

Voltaire was a student of Newton’s, and when he visited England he paid court to her poets, playwrights and politicians, and to the cream of Hanoverian society. There he met Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who had been Princess Anne’s girlish companion so long before; the current Queen Caroline, Swift (who had just written
Gulliver’s Travels
), Pope, whose
Essay on Man
he adored, and John Gay, of
The Beggar’s Opera
. He met Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had been to Turkey and brought back the idea of inoculation against smallpox.

Voltaire admired the freedom of English public life and the way the English honoured artists: Newton was buried in Westminster Abbey alongside monarchs, which would never have happened in France, while a famous English actress, Mrs Oldfield, was also buried with honours. Back in Paris, when she died young, the greatest actress of her day, Adrienne Lecouvreur, was denied a Christian burial – actors were ‘excommunicate’. She was thrown into a pauper’s grave in wasteland at the edges of the city, and sprinkled with quicklime. She too had been one of Voltaire’s lovers, and the contrast shook him.
¹²

For much of his life Voltaire managed to dodge around the restrictions placed on free thought by the French monarchy, darting into the
public spotlight with a brilliant new play or a briefly grovelling poem, while publishing his most provocative works anonymously or abroad. For long periods he retreated into internal exile, at a beautiful provincial château where he wrote, performed amateur dramatics and did Newtonian experiments with his almost equally brilliant lover, Émilie du Châtelet; later, he had to retreat further from the reach of the French court, to Switzerland. He could count on the support of the Parisian public, and had some powerful defenders. He was a shrewd investor to the point of sharpness, trading in military supplies and grain, and it is said that he may well have had to leave England early after forging banknotes. In quarrels he was fearless, but he never knew when to call it a day; and he was no saint.

His situation seems strikingly like that of the greatest composers and writers in Soviet Russia, popular with the public but playing a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with the regime. In Voltaire’s world, of course, the normal form of government was some kind of absolutism. Looking at the great continental powers, a betting man would have assumed the future would continue to revolve around courts and all-powerful rulers. An actual, political, revolution was unthinkable. So when Prince Frederick of Prussia had started to write Voltaire fan letters, the future monarch seemed to present some kind of answer. As Mme du Châtelet put it, ‘since it seems that we have to have princes, although no one knows quite why, then at least it would help if they were all like him’.

Frederick too had yearned for English freedom. As a young man he had suffered terribly at the hands of his tyrannical father, Frederick William, who had first established Prussia as a centralized absolutist state. The father believed in absolute duty, military-style discipline and an iron routine. The son, like so many boys and teenagers, was dozy, dreamy, romantic and bookish. He took refuge in music, becoming a virtuoso performer on the French flute, and an addict of French books. Outwardly, he obeyed his father, attended parades and meetings, and accepted the beatings and public humiliation visited on him; but he deployed a form of dumb insolence which further infuriated his father. Frederick was probably homosexual and he certainly showed no interest in women, including his later wife, whom he banished from his court.

Aged eighteen, he plotted to run away from Prussia with a twenty-six-year-old
Guards officer called Hans Hermann von Katte, his closest friend, who was said to carry on with the prince ‘like a lover with his mistress’.
¹³
Two years after Voltaire left London, the duo had decided to make for that beacon of relative freedom. But the king had probably been tipped off, and the absconding pair went about their planned flight in a rather lackadaisical way, so that when Frederick sneaked out of the military camp he was quickly captured and brought back. His father ordered him to be imprisoned in a grim military fortress where he was dressed as a convict and cross-questioned with great menace. He was told that he might well be executed on his father’s orders. Von Katte, meanwhile, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military tribunal. Frederick William decided this was not adequate punishment, and suggested the young man have his limbs torn off with hot pincers before being hanged. He graciously commuted this to death by decapitation, but insisted the sentence be carried out in front of his son’s eyes.

On 6 November 1730 von Katte was taken from a cell in the same prison where Frederick was being held, to a pile of sand in the courtyard. The prince’s face was held up to the bars of his cell by two warders, to force him to watch. In an account written by the preacher afterwards, Katte looked around and saw Frederick at his window, saying goodbye to him with ‘some courteous and friendly words spoken in French’. He then removed his wig, jacket and scarf, kneeled on the sand, called upon Christ, and had his head removed with a single sword blow. Frederick, however, missed the last moment: he had fainted.

As he read his way through the works of Voltaire and other radical French writers, Frederick began to imagine a different way of ruling. One could see this as the traumatized reaction to his father’s cruelty, combined with the radical idealism of youth, but Frederick was serious in his desire to be an enlightened monarch. He himself was a copious writer and, like Voltaire, a compulsive historian of his own times. He regarded German as a barbaric language and always preferred French, just as he liked French music; he even called his pleasure-palace at Potsdam, outside Berlin, Sans-Souci (‘Without a Care’). When he became king, he built on the Prussian tradition of good schools and universities, assembling a court of thinkers and scientists, and began to renovate his cities.

Frederick the Great’s Prussia was not simply the militaristic warrior-state of legend, with its bone-headed Junker landowners flogging their peasants and its young men all in uniform. It saw forward-looking experiments in agriculture, early industrial projects (particularly in the iron and steel industries), reading societies, bookshops, newspapers, philosophical clubs and the growth of a relatively sophisticated civic society. Frederick remained interested all his life in promoting advances in farming, road-building, drainage, the building of factories and the education of the young, just as enlightened autocrats were supposed to. He practised religious toleration. Asked whether this extended to Roman Catholics, he replied that he would build mosques and temples if Turks and heathens wanted to come to Prussia. He banned torture. Visitors to Berlin were struck by the relative freedom of speech enjoyed in cafés and bookshops there.

The problem was that this was only one half of Frederick’s personality. He might have recoiled from his father’s Germanic simplicities, but he idolized the army his father had bequeathed him. His resentment at being forced to marry a woman he did not love was directed not only at his father, but also at the overweening power in the Germanic world that had lobbied for that marriage – the Austrian Habsburg empire. And so when he became king ten years after the traumatic decapitation of his officer friend, Frederick’s first act had been to march his armies into neighbouring Austrian-controlled Silesia, a huge territory with considerable manufacturing wealth, and seize it. Frederick’s armies almost brushed aside the Austrians rather than merely defeating them, but in doing so he upset the balance of European power-politics and triggered further wars.

In his second act upon becoming king, he again took on the role of aggressor, seizing Saxony. As a result, in his third and biggest conflict, part of the global Seven Years War, Frederick faced a daunting coalition comprising France, Austria, Russia and Sweden, encircling him and threatening to carve up Prussia for ever. He had a small British–Hanoverian force on his side, but he faced overwhelming odds. At this point the philosopher-king was seriously considering a suicidal ‘soldier’s death’ on the battlefield. But Frederick became ‘the Great’ not because he had cultivated Enlightenment thinkers or because he played the flute well, but because he proved to be a brilliant soldier.
Expert at dividing and confusing his enemies, he won most of his battles, often against great odds.