Final Proof

INTRODUCTION

From Westphalia to

Enlightened Peace, 1648–1815

STELLA GHERVAS AND DAVID ARMITAGE

Beati paciﬁci. Cedant arma togae.

—William Penn, 1693

This quotation placed at the start of William Penn’s Essay towards the Present and Future

Peace of Europe (1693) fused two cultures: the ﬁrst part (“blessed are the peacemakers”)

belonged to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament (Matthew 5:9); the

second came from Cicero’s On Duties (“let arms yield to the toga”) and referred to the

custom of Roman generals removing their armor and wearing a toga before entering

the City. Penn amalgamated the sacred and the classical to make a metaphorical appeal for

European states to abandon their habit of settling disputes by the force of arms and to

replace it by justice, by which Penn meant embassies bringing pleas from the wronged

party. In other words, it advocated a negotiated settlement of differences. Penn’s statement

can, indeed, serve as an apt summary of what the cultural idea of peace would become

during the European Enlightenment.

It is a commonplace among scholars to take the two dates of 1648 and 1815 as

historical milestones, the markers of a “Classical period” of statehood, sovereignty and

international relations with global implications well beyond Europe. Though this

interpretation has largely lost its dogmatic value, it can still be used with some proﬁt. The

year 1648 stands for the Peace of Westphalia, the series of treaties closing the Thirty

Years’ War (1618–48) that had drenched the Holy Roman Empire in blood, over a rather

intricate question: the prerogatives of the Holy Roman Emperor versus the rights of the

German states, all set against a backdrop of religious wars between Catholics and

Protestants.

Similarly, 1815 marks the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna and other

treaties signed in that year, as the tail end of a time of troubles that had started with the

French Revolutionary Wars, and swiftly proceeded with the conquest of Europe by

Emperor Napoleon’s armies.

In between these two dates, we ﬁnd a movement known as

the Enlightenment, a ferment of intellectual activity that was so intense it came to shape

the culture of a time and, in due course, the social and political organization of the

European states. Such a chronology is, needless to say, purely schematic and, like all such

frames, somewhat artiﬁcial. It is grounded, however, in the self-understanding of the

period itself, for which peace became a supreme cultural value that informed the

Enlightenment, both as a process and as an intellectual movement. The waxing and

waning of peace can therefore be taken as a good index for this historical epoch, which is

bounded by two peace settlements with profound cultural repercussions in their own

times and long afterwards.

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2 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

WHY A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE?

What we understand here by a cultural history of peace is distinct from (but tied to) its

diplomatic or political history. For the latter, the focus has traditionally been on short-

term decisions and events, for example, negotiations and treaties; the main characters

have been those individuals or great powers that made or broke peace treaties. In this

volume, individuals—philosophers, jurists, theologians, political economists, poets, artists

and others—appear on their own, sometimes as original contributors to the intellectual

history of Europe; but rarely did they leave the political situation fundamentally changed

immediately after their work was published. Cultural inﬂuence often takes time to

manifest itself: the shared representations of peace (which are the central focus of our

cultural history of peace) tend to move slowly. A cultural history, then, studies how these

were born and how they permeated European educated societies, eventually to inﬂuence

them in new directions. It can also show how those originally European ideas went global

and hybridized with other traditions of peace, far beyond the Atlantic world of Europe

and the Americas that is delimited by the traditional deﬁnitions of Enlightenment (see

Conrad 2012).

By taking such a cultural approach, the volume diverges from one traditional approach

to international relations, which has sought to identify seemingly permanent, abstract

scientiﬁc objects that transcend time and culture. We will consider here peace as a human

product, an intellectual or cultural construct with all its connotations and representations,

not as some immortal object of political science ﬂoating across time like a mythical

Nicolas Flamel or Count Saint Germain. As scholars from Sir Henry Sumner Maine in the

nineteenth century to Sir Michael Howard at the end of the twentieth noted, peace was

not a discovery but an invention, and hence a human achievement (Maine 1888; Howard

2000). The ideal of peace evolved and aged with human communities, naturally inﬂuenced

by the course of events; and it frequently perished miserably in war, only to be reborn in

new forms. It is only the inbred and tenacious impulse of many human cultures toward a

sense of “brotherhood” among human beings (perceived, for example, as ubuntu among

the peoples of southern Africa), despite all the apparent reasons to believe in the supremacy

of brute force, which compels us to acknowledge that some natural law is at play in

humanity. Immanuel Kant famously wrote in 1795 that:

Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so

far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a law

of world citizenship is no high-ﬂown or exaggerated notion.

—Kant [1795] 2006: 84–85

Whereas there might seem to be a universal aspiration of humans toward peace, what

forms and procedures peace takes deﬁnitely owes much to the culture of a time and place.

Indeed, Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries evolved a very elaborate

protocol around the conclusion of peace after war: called l’art de la paix (the Art of

Peace), that was complete with embassies, congresses, and treaties (Bély 2007). And while

each new avatar of peace after war may have been recognizable as belonging to the same

species pax—it is deﬁnitely not the same individual. Peace, during that epoch, was part of

the great canvas of shared mental representations: not only as the counterpart to war but

also as the ideal condition of a state; and it generally invited a sense of ordering reason,

safety of rights and prosperity (see Spinoza [1677] 2000, ch. V). Peace among states was

thus not merely an intellectual construct: it was also a yearning, represented in visual arts

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INTRODUCTION 3

from architecture to painting, either as the portraits of peacemakers orderly assembled in

a fashion evoking concord, or as allegories such as Peace and Justice kissing each other,

often complete with a dove and olive branch

—as well as in music where it was traditionally

associated, as in G. F. Handel’s Te Deum and Jubilate for the peace of Utrecht (1713),

with the emotions of pomp, joy, and gratitude. Peace, in that cultural sense, was ﬁrst and

foremost a perpetual quest for a safer and quieter state of affairs for human society

(Milam in this volume).

As will be readily seen in each of the various contributions to this book, the time frame

of a cultural narrative is thus necessarily larger than a political one—it spans decades,

even centuries. While the Peace of Westphalia could be said to have heralded the collapse

of cultural foundations that had framed Latin Christianity—notably the ideal of an

imperial unity, both political and religious—it is during the Enlightenment that we witness

the birth of innovative reﬂections that would shape the cultural representations of peace

in following eras. Political events formed, of course, the background and the counterpoint

of this evolution, and they provide us helpful signposts to understand the context; but

what matters here is the slow percolation of conceptions of peace and of the European

“order,” from the educated elites of the continent to political leaders, to societies at large

and even to other continents. In fact, we might venture to say that it is during the

Enlightenment that peace ﬁrst became deﬁnitively and irreversibly a cultural force in

FIGURE 0.1: Johann Gottlieb Becker, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Schiller-Nationalmuseum,

Marbach am Neckar, Germany. Bridgeman Images.

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4 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

itself: that is, a central value with its own representations, institutions and norms, and

with a constructed history as well as a constructive future. This slow movement of

transformation between Westphalia and Vienna, which identiﬁed a whole culture with

peace and rendered peace a cultural goal in its own right, led to forms of peace and peace-

making that are recognizable up to our own time (Ghervas 2014b).

BEYOND PRECONCEPTIONS: TOWARD

A NEW HISTORY OF PEACE

And yet the reader should be warned that our attempt to rediscover past cultural

conceptions of the political order of Europe, particularly of “peace,” also needs to be a

process of “unlearning”: it might require us to relinquish some of our own cultural

conceptions, at least momentarily. This difﬁculty manifests itself in two ways. The ﬁrst is

that approaching the written sources of the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is

doubly treacherous, even compared to earlier ones. First, the European languages had

already developed to be deceptively close to those of our times, but they are deﬁnitely not

identical. It is too easy for us to fool ourselves by misinterpreting the terms used by

authors; texts of the eighteenth century are strewn with many “false friends” that can

cause us to trip by unwittingly projecting our deﬁnitions and thereby missing their point.

Even sources written in Latin—such as the treaties of Westphalia—do not save us from

that hazard, since most of us rely on translations into modern languages. We will thus

have to forget, for a moment, the canonical terms of political science that we all learnt at

school (“state,” “sovereignty,” etc.) to dive instead into a bygone era of absolute

monarchies, aristocratic republics and a Holy Roman Empire. And where we use modern

FIGURE 0.2: Theodor van Thulden, Allegory of Peace and Justice after the Thirty Years’ War.

Deutsches Historiches Museum, Berlin, Germany (DHM). Bridgeman Images.

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INTRODUCTION 5

terminology, we should at least make sure that it will not interfere with our understanding

of the primary sources.

The second issue is that even if vocabulary was crystal clear, our own cultural (pre-)

conceptions of the early twenty-ﬁrst century could still get in the way. Anglophone

societies, among others, are still somewhat inﬂuenced by popular narratives relying on a

“historical teleology,” i.e. the belief that the succession of events of human history is

going toward some “manifest destiny.” This is understandable, as it is a side-effect of the

meteoric rise of European states during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution,

which led historians to view Western culture as somehow exceptional or superior to

others. We have all been exposed to various beliefs, such as the “triumph of science,” the

“unstoppable machine of progress,” not to mention the nineteenth century’s “civilizing

mission to the world,” Marx’s “struggle of the classes,” all the way to Francis Fukuyama’s

premature “end of history” as the victory of American liberal democracy (Fukuyama

1992); and perhaps even Steven Pinker’s over-optimistic account of the triumph of the

“better angels of our nature” (Pinker 2011). By contrast, many recent historians would

dismiss these hypothetical grand designs (which they consider as the reﬂection of long

cherished but now obsolete societal conceptions) as self-centered fallacies. By the same

token, no self-respecting historian would today endorse the idea that the history of the

European great powers of the seventeenth century represents the totality of human

history; European history telling is thus “provincializing” itself in its own estimation

(Hobson 2009). As a result, we would encourage the reader not to read any cosmic

signiﬁcance into this broadened “Enlightenment era of peace” framed by the dates of

1648 and 1815. It was merely a practical way of dividing eras of the history of Europe,

among other possible ones, within the constraints of a multi-volume collection covering

the cultural history of peace over more than two millennia.

Our warning about the hazards of teleology applies in particular to the Peace of

Westphalia. After the Second World War, its importance grew so much in Western culture,

to the point that it was reinvented as the origin point of all states in existence today—the

“Westphalian states,” with sovereignty supposedly the ne plus ultra of political evolution

and the ultimate impulse inherent to any modern state. That “sovereignty” is, however, a

modern character, whose birth can even be traced to a precise year: 1948 on the third

centenary of the Peace of Westphalia, in the context of the military and ideological contest

of the US against Stalin’s USSR during the Cold War. This event takes place in the ﬁrst

years of the United Nations (in reality, a club of states, not nations) and the promulgation

of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Gross 1948). By contrast, the real historical

character of 1648, the Latin superioritas, was not a gift from the Platonic realm of ideas;

it was rather a catchall phrase that synthesized the particular claims of a myriad of German

states toward the Holy Roman Empire. In their capacity of members of that political

formation, those states were obviously not “sovereign” as we would understand that

notion today.

We can, furthermore, notice two additional logical issues with the “cultural” belief that

modern sovereignty was born in Westphalia. The ﬁrst is that the signatories of the treaties

had never hoped for or even conceived of such a glorious remote posterity, three full

centuries after the events. Indeed, the political and geographical scope of that peace

agreement was limited to the Holy Roman Empire (a geographical area spanning from the

North Sea to Northern Italy), and it was designed to put an end to political and institutional

disputes that were speciﬁc to a time and place: “Discords and Civil Divisions being stir’d

up in the Roman Empire, which increas’d to such a degree, that not only all Germany, but

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6 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

also the neighbouring Kingdoms, and France particularly, have been involv’d in the

Disorders of a long and cruel War” (“Treaty of Münster” 1648, Preamble and Art. 1).

One could perhaps be deceived by the stated aim of the agreement to establish a “Christian

and universal peace, and a perpetual, true and sincere amity,” but that was a standard

rhetorical device used in most treaties of the time (ibid.). But what historical sovereignty

may lose in mythical prestige, it gains in authenticity, detail, and interest.

The second issue is that the motivations for keeping alive the myth of the “Peace of

Westphalia” may no longer exist in the early twenty-ﬁrst century.

The doctrine of

“absolute sovereignty” (a core tenet of the post-war realist school of International

Relations associated in the post-War period with Hans Morgenthau and others) has been

put into question as a long-term survival strategy. Indeed, several of the largest and most

powerful political formations on Earth today are federations, notably the United States of

America; and most of the European powers of old seem to have gone this way since 1950,

and are now part of a European Union. It is, also, particularly ironic that “sovereignty,”

in the post-Second World War era, had been of such little succor to the German states that

had beneﬁted from the Peace of Westphalia: their number had already been whittled

down by Napoleon’s “mediatization” in 1812–14, then progressively reduced to only two

after warlike Prussia rose to prominence and a Second German Reich was formed in

1871; then summarily fused into one, when the Third German Reich militarily annexed

Austria with the Anschluss of 1939. After the Second World War, it was set to naught as

the occupied Third Reich ceased to exist as a sovereign state. If there had indeed been a

Grand Designer of a “principle of sovereignty,” it stands to reason that they would have

FIGURE 0.3: Gerard ter Borch, The Ratiﬁcation of the Treaty of Münster (1648). Reproduced

with the kind permission of the National Gallery, London, UK.

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INTRODUCTION 7

been kinder to the many German states that had been the ﬁrst to gather and follow it. In

that order of things, a Principality of Münster would have been sitting as a member of the

United Nations Assembly in 1948; instead, the constitution of Germany evolved once

again toward a federal state. We will thus ask the reader to bear with the authors and

consider the cultural manifestations of peace from 1648 to 1815, in themselves and as

themselves, not necessarily as the prelude to our modern political order.

With such historical myths and absolutes out of the way and with due regard to the

cultural context, there is something to be said about important peace treaties or territorial

settlements as temporal signposts in a longue durée history of peace: they brought a

formal end to the periods of violent organized ﬁghting between states, known as wars.

Such has long been, after all, a most basic and legal meaning of the term peace in European

culture: as a treaty, a document putting an end to the state of war, and the resulting

political state. “Peace,” in that restricted sense, was a condition beneﬁcial to commerce

and prosperity. It was alas transient, even though peace treaties were labeled as “perpetual”

or “eternal,” seemingly as a countercharm. In the period under consideration, peace

treaties thus appeared to the eyes of contemporaries as welcome pauses to disorders. For

today’s historians, they serve as useful milestones for a meaningful chronology of peace

(Arcidiacono 2011; Ghervas 2020a).

1648: THE END OF A CONVENTIONAL ORDER OF

LATIN CHRISTIANITY?

Let us now turn brieﬂy to this “historical” Peace of Westphalia: it came as the result of a

victory for German states in general and setbacks for the Austrian Habsburg dynasty in

particular. It also brought relative stability to Germany and, by extension, to the lands

west of it. The name of Westphalia derives from the name of the German state that hosted

the negotiations and is a generalization, because the “peace” is really a series of treaties

signed in 1648: Münster (30 January) between Spain and the Dutch Republics, and

more importantly, Münster (24 October) between the Holy Roman Empire and France

and allies, and Osnabrück (24 October) between the Holy Roman Empire and Sweden.

To capture its essence, we can turn to Voltaire a century later:

This Peace of Westphalia, ﬁnally signed in Münster and Osnabrück on 14 October

1648, was agreed, granted and received as a fundamental and perpetual law: these are

the very terms of the treaty. It must serve as the basis for imperial capitulations

[commitments made by a newly elected emperor]. It is also received law, as sacred until

now as the Golden Bull [of 1356], and far superior to it by the detail of all the diverse

interests that this treaty covers, by all the rights it ensures and by the changes introduced

into civil status and religion.

—Voltaire 1827: 319

By settling the relations of the German states with the Holy Roman Empire—as well

as Austria—and by severing the link of the Dutch Republic and Switzerland from it, the

peace of Westphalia created a regional order that was less monolithic, generally more

disposed to compromise and therefore to peace, and in consequence less susceptible to

attract foreign powers in search of territorial acquisitions.

From an intellectual or cultural perspective, the stipulations appear however less as a

beginning than an end: they mark a break from the top-down dogma of the alliance of the

throne and the altar (namely the Emperor and the Pope) that had dominated Western

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8 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Europe, the land of Latin Christianity, during the late Middle Ages. After the fall of the

Western Roman Empire at the end of the Fifth Century, Western Europe had been an

anarchy of states. This fact had, paradoxically, allowed the Patriarchate of Rome to

emerge as a unifying factor, both religiously and politically. When, in the year 799, Pope

Leo III crowned the Frankish King Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans mostly to

create a counterweight to the Roman Empire of Constantinople, a particular politico-

religious conﬁguration was inaugurated in Western Europe whereby the Pope became the

spiritual suzerain of all monarchs. The cultural paradigm was that a benevolent Augustus

would impose peace and unity once again for the beneﬁt of humankind, as in the Ancient

Roman Empire, but this time he would do so with the caution and blessing of the highest

religious ﬁgure of Christianity.

There was a wide stretch, of course, from the ideal to practice. For the Holy Roman

Empire (which was—in the famous words of Voltaire—neither holy, Roman nor an

empire), the alleged “alliance of the altar and the throne” was actually a contrived and

gloriﬁed confederation, where coexistence was not straightforward and was even a cause

of occasional wars. Furthermore, kingdoms such as France, Spain, England, and Poland

were not part of it and did not recognize its supremacy. Yet, for all its awkward mismatch

with reality, the Holy Roman Empire provided a solid mental and legal framework that

held together the lands between Germany and Northern Italy for eight centuries

(Stollberg-Rilinger 2013). The ﬁgure of the Pope even rose during the Middle Ages to

become the arbiter of the affairs of Europe. The inextricable interconnection between the

spiritual and the secular, with the spiritual constantly seeking to gain or maintain the

upper hand, was undoubtedly a dominant trait of Latin Christianity.

This balance changed at the the turn of the sixteenth century, when European powers

started to inﬂuence Africa, Asia and the Americas, in what came to be known (at least in

Europe), as the “Great Discoveries.” On the continent itself, a powerful German–Spanish

Empire rose in Western Europe under Charles V. At the very moment when it seemed that

Latin Christianity would be ﬁnally united politically in an explosion of grandeur, its

structure started to crack apart because of the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath.

With its rejection of the clerical intermediation with God and its distrust of Church

hierarchies, Protestantism had also strong implications for the social and political order:

by rejecting the divine right of monarchs and by ultimately supporting the prerogatives of

parliaments, Protestantism led to the birth of a new form of secular state, quite different

from the top-down paradigm of Catholic inspiration. It is not coincidental that seminal

philosophers of European political thought, such as the English Thomas Hobbes (1588–

1679) (on whom see Christov in this volume) and the Dutch Hugo Grotius (1583–1645),

hailed from countries that had adopted the Protestant strain of Reformation. They would

be later canonized as “theorists of sovereignty” alongside the Frenchman Jean Bodin

(1530–1596), a ﬁgure from the other side of the confessional divide, but who shared their

critique of papal power.

Change tends, however, to break the peace if it is resisted too hard against, or fought too

fervently for. The “Religious Wars” of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Europe were

less about theology than about two radically opposed conceptions of society and the role of

the individual in it. The incumbent Catholic powers, Spain and Austria, considered the

reformed states of the Holy Roman Empire (ﬁrst of which were the Dutch Republic and

Prussia), as existential threats to their way of life, and assigned themselves a mission to

restore what they considered as the natural order. Conversely, Protestant states were willing

to defend, to the last breath, both their existence and their own conception of a natural

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INTRODUCTION 9

society where individuals would have a direct relationship with God and their political

rulers. This opposition of two sides which both considered that far more was at stake than

interests of power, money, or inﬂuence, were conducive to a conﬂict of the worst kind: a war

of mutual annihilation (which is the proper meaning of internecine war) (Armitage 2017:

93–120). The shocking cruelty and the human cost of the wars of religion in Germany—

some ﬁve million deaths in the name of the love of Christ—can only be explained as the

instinctive reaction of two mutually incompatible factions that both contemplated oblivion.

The political war between states thus doubled as a civil war among the states of Latin

Christianity, not to mention the frequent occurrence of acts of civil war (in a proper sense)

between communities of the two confessions, outside of any public control (Armitage 2017).

Barbarism was thus the consequence of the states’ angst of an impending collapse of their

social order, or the result of the actual collapse of said social order. The literature of the

time, seeking signs of God’s anger in natural phenomena, turned as a precedent to Jeremiah’s

lamentations for the destruction of Jerusalem by the Persians in the sixth century

BCE

(Theibault 1994). Those prophecies of doom were, alas, self-fulﬁlling.

“Peace” in 1648, after the Thirty Years’ War, was thus not a mere termination of “war,”

which Grotius might have described as a public duel between states: it was ﬁrst and

foremost the relinquishment of deep-rooted hatreds, a lesson in mutual tolerance, the

mending of political and societal rifts that had threatened to rip the fabric of Western

FIGURE 0.4: Delff, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Dutch Jurist and Politician. Interfoto. Alamy

Stock Photo.

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10 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Europe (Lesaffer 2002; Asch 2004). This explains the painstaking detail (the second

treaty of Münster has 128 articles) with which the peace stipulations sought to settle each

jurisdictional and territorial dispute from the North Sea to the Adriatic, without referring

to dogmatic notions. It was a diplomatic triumph, not of lofty principles but of the

common sense of negotiators seeking to address each and every particular situation in

itself and by itself. Of course, posterity can discern a few general principles that implicitly

emerged from this catalogue: notably the afﬁrmation of the superioritas of each state of

the Holy Empire, with its prerogatives and duties; and, most importantly, the exclusion

of religious beliefs as a legitimate motive for waging war (Te Brake 2017: 44–90). The

fundamental association between religious toleration—the mutual accommodation of

confessional difference—with peace both internal (concordia) and external (pax) would

deﬁne the self-image of Enlightenment. There is thus a case to be made, at least in the

cultural sphere, for tracing one basic strain of Enlightenment back to 1648—to the

beginnings of what might even perhaps be called a “Westphalian Enlightenment.”

Let us note, however, that those stipulations aimed at leveling the playing ﬁeld, by

enforcing negative rights for the German states: in other words, they made peace possible

by prohibiting encroachments from the Holy Roman Empire and foreign powers. That

was undoubtedly removing a thorny issue, but they did not set either positive principles

or any rules for how European states should treat each other in the future, in order to

maintain the peace. Nor did they provide guidelines for how monarchs should deal with

religious dissent within their own borders. The Peace of Westphalia, “the last Christian

peace” as it has been called, signaled the end of a feudal epoch based on imperial-religious

suzerainty (Croxton 2013). It was however “Christian” only in an abstract, ecumenical

sense. Signiﬁcantly, Pope Innocent X’s bull “Zelo Domus Dei” (1650), condemned those

articles of the 1648 peace treaties detrimental to the Catholic religion, but this fell on deaf

ears and he had to accept the new German order as a fait accompli. The Papacy’s role in

the Holy Roman Empire would henceforth be theoretical—and in practice minimal, since

episcopal states did not answer to the Pope for their internal affairs; and furthermore, the

last papal coronation of an emperor had been that of Charles V in 1530.

For all this, it was not yet the start of a putatively “modern” world: states were still a

highly patrimonial affair, with territories shifting from one dynasty to another according

to marriages, inheritances, purchases, or barter. This time-honored tradition, descended

from the Middle Ages, had long been a guarantee of safe and orderly transition of political

power in Europe, but it was now becoming unsustainable because it was an ever-increasing

source of territorial contentions: dynastic wars periodically broke the peace in the Three

Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland and on the European Continent. There had to be better

ways to ensure both orderly succession and a peaceful coexistence of states. The effort to

ﬁnd such means would consume much intellectual and institutional energy over the

following two centuries.

THE “ENGLISH TURN” TO THE BALANCE OF POWER

For European states in the latter half of the seventeenth century, learning new ways of

dealing with other states—preferably without recourse to military force—would thus be

a next big challenge. It was especially true with a Western power dangerously on the rise:

a resurgent France under Louis XIV le Roi Soleil (the Sun King). Louis XIV’s House of

Bourbon had been the historical enemy of the House of Habsburg; but this was of little

relief to the states of the Holy Roman Empire on the west bank of the Rhine, as well as

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INTRODUCTION 11

to the Dutch Republic, which were now the next targets for his appetite for self-

aggrandizement. It was, in fact, fortunate that Spain was ﬁrmly holding on to its Flanders

dominions (roughly today’s Belgium), and thus served as a bulwark against the French

threat of invasion. Indeed, the Protestant Dutch Republic and Catholic Spain were forced

into a rapprochement during the Dutch Wars (1672–78). This war saw enemies of

yesteryear now united against Louis XIV, who nevertheless won the day.

Upon this European war fought for territorial reasons, a second, colonial one was

superposed, which opposed England and the Netherlands for control over the seas.

Protestant England and Catholic France thus became allied in a war of opportunity. Yet

another war was being fought on the East, between a Danish–German coalition and the

Kingdom of Sweden on the defensive. All in all, the intricate game of political interests

and diplomacy had it so that the complex pattern of European states was drifting into a

conﬁguration of two coalitions: France, Sweden, and England on one hand, and Spain,

Austria, and the rest of Europe on the other. Or, to simplify it further, the French House

of Bourbon and the Spanish/Austrian House of Habsburg became the main components

of two opposed military blocs. At this stage, the fates of armies and navies in battle, not

diplomats, were still the arbiters of Europe.

The ﬁnal great upheaval of the old feudal order of Europe occurred when the last

Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II, died in 1700 without an heir, bequeathing his kingdom

to a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, who happened to be none other than the grandson

of Louis XIV. While the prospect of a reunion of the French and Spanish colonial empires

was frightening enough for the English, the bulwark of Spanish Flanders, now in French

hands, was suddenly turned into a rear guard for military offensives into the heart of

Germany: this spelled disaster for the Dutch Republic as well as the minor states on the

western bank of the Rhine.

It is, paradoxically, in that very moment that European powers took a turn toward

recognizably “modern” cultural conceptions of peace. The impulse came from the one

state that was not looking for territorial aggrandizement on the continent but exclusively

at the development of her commerce and the conquest of overseas dominions: England.

The Stuart King Charles II, while a Catholic at heart, had restored peace in his kingdoms

around a sound tolerance policy that acknowledged the country’s preference for

Anglicanism, and he gained much popular appreciation for it. When his openly Catholic

heir James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), sheer necessity

demanded that the government set aside both religious disputes and strict adherence to

dynastic principles, to follow a sensible course of action.

England turned toward an unorthodox candidate, but a not unsurprising one in view

of the rise of France: a scion of the one family that had given many leaders to the Dutch

Republic, the house of Orange. For the English political class, commercial competition

from Dutch maritime power had long been a serious but manageable nuisance, even

better if an accommodation could be found. By contrast, the prospect of England facing

alone the French Sun King commandeering the three combined ﬂeets of France, Spain

and the Netherlands would have been inﬁnitely worse. It logically followed that once

Spain had switched sides over to the Bourbon faction in 1700, England had to turn

around and join forces with the Netherlands to defend their existence as Protestant,

trade nations; and that both had to ally without remorse with the Catholic Habsburg of

Austria.

From these quite particular circumstances, higher interpretations had to emerge. In

England, this was the rise of the balance of power as a governing principle of foreign

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12 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

policy: it stipulated that in order to preserve its freedom and peace, the kingdom should

side militarily, in any situation, with the less powerful European alliance so as to re-

establish an equilibrium. In this sense, “balance” was to be understood literally, as the

scales used to weigh merchandise at the market (Ghervas 2017: 407–08). The assumption

here was that the European states would always divide into two opposed military alliances;

and as long as those alliances would be matched in strength, the continent would not fall

prey to a universal monarchy—or a pan-continental empire, in modern terms (Bosbach

1988). And, indeed, France under Louis XIV was edging dangerously close to such a

universal monarchy, as contemporary British observers noted with alarm. In this vein,

Charles Davenant, a writer and member of Parliament classically wrote in 1701 that “the

post of England is to hold the balance of power” (Davenant [1701] 1771: 302–05). This

is, after all, exactly what it did in the following year, by declaring war on both France and

Spain and starting the War of Spanish Succession. By 1710, the Balance of Power had

become a household concept in the political parlance of London and it would have a long

and inﬂuential afterlife (see Ghervas 2017).

PEACE IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT: BOLD THEORIES,

STABLE PRACTICES

After over a decade of indecisive conﬂict without winners or losers, the European powers

decided to come to an agreement, with the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). What England

“proposed and insisted upon” on that occasion, quite unsurprisingly, was a solemn

relinquishing by the Bourbon Kings of France and Spain of any future claims on each

other’s throne. The novelty lay in the motivation of “securing for ever the universal good

and quiet of Europe, by an equal weight of power, so that many being united in one, the

balance of the equality desired, might not turn to the advantage of one, and the danger

and hazard of the rest” (Treaty of Utrecht 1713, Art. II). On the continent, the construct

of the Balance of Power started to seep into political vocabulary: witness the fact French

and German writers later used it quite conﬁdently, while acknowledging the role of

England in its development (Sheehan 1996: 97–120; Dhondt 2015). They understood it

as a prescription for how to maintain the peace by the preservation of the status quo ante:

according to which, the patrimonial rights of the ruling families had to give way to the

collective interest of a continental community of states. The political conﬁguration of

Europe was indeed a bipolar one: two perpetually opposed military alliances, organized

around the Austrian House of Habsburg on one hand and the French House of Bourbon

on the other (Ahn and Whatmore in this volume). While peace was a desirable object,

wars would still be frequent, because preserving the balance of power was more important

as a safeguard against universal monarchy.

While Latin Christianity was falling into the background as the dominant cultural

reference for peace, a secular “European Republic of States” was emerging, complete

with its own Law of Nations and a cultural identity increasingly deﬁned by enlightened

values of internal and external peace: indeed, this has been called with justice by J. G. A.

Pocock the “Utrecht Enlightenment” (Pocock 1999: 7–9). By mid-century, the Law of

Nations was formalized by authors such as the hugely inﬂuential Swiss jurist Emer de

Vattel (1714–1767), who understood it as a way to better integrate this republic of states

according to the prescriptions of natural law and human reason (Vattel 2008). The

conclusion of peace, with its armistices or capitulations, as well as its treaties, obeys

rituals that may be seem self-evident today, but they are the product of a long evolution,

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INTRODUCTION 13

as well as codiﬁcation. Conversely, it may seem counter-intuitive that war, by nature a

chaotic activity where nothing is certain beyond the fact that it has been declared, would

become such a ritualized duel between states. War and peace, under the inspiration of

philosophers and lawyers, thus became legal constructs with their modus operandi,

regulations and norms, which were generally respected by belligerents (Koskenniemi in

this volume). In the end, the only purpose of the law of nations was to bring more order

in the interrelations of states on the continent and, as such, it was a factor contributing to

peace on the continent—or at least to attempt to make wars less cruel.

To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, “the age of Enlightenment was not an enlightened

age,” and that applies also to political history (Kant [1784] 2006).

While established

churches did their best to contain and channel the torrent of new ideas—especially those

ideas that could call the social order into question—the eighteenth century had its

plentiful supply of conﬂicts. Military deterrence, with Europe divided into two alliances,

continued to be the foundation of the European “system.” When mixed with dynastic

rights and the legal cavils of succession, the logic of the balance of power actually made

for new conﬂagrations, such as the War of Polish Succession (1733–38) and the War of

Austrian Succession (1740–48). Nonetheless, the periods of peace were occasions for

considerable development of commerce by sea (with the increase of colonial shipping)

and by land (with the generalized improvement of roads on the continent).

FIGURE 0.5: Delff , The Signing of the Treaty of Utrecht on 11th April 1713. Private

Collection. Bridgeman Images.

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14 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

By contrast, the new economic demands made it desirable for wars to be as short as

possible, as well as less destructive, so as to cause minimal disruption to the ﬂows of

colonial imports and manufactured goods. This led the rise of the intellectual construct

that Montesquieu called doux commerce (“sweet commerce”), as an alternative to war

between states (Montesquieu 1989: IV, XX, 1 and 2; Terjanian 2013; Kapossy,

Nakhimovsky, and Whatmore, eds. 2017). Replacing military conﬂicts by trade

competition was certainly an improvement—yet attaching the adjective “sweet” to

commerce may sound, from our horizon of experience, as an oxymoron for a period

marked by brutal colonial conquests, the slave trade, and commerce-raiding under letters

of marque. At least, the absence of religious fanaticism reduced European wars of the Age

of Enlightenment to public duels for settling disputes between monarchies. Conﬂicts

became less cruel to the point of being called la guerre en dentelles (“lace wars” or “soft

war”) at the time of the French Revolutionary Wars (Bély 2007: 581–602).

This catchy

metaphor is misleading, however, since only ofﬁcers—that is a fraction of the combatants—

could afford to wear lace; and, furthermore, this adornment might have provided relief

to aristocratic egos, never to the wounds caused by bullets, cannon shot, or bayonets.

It would be incorrect, however, to assume that Christianity disappeared from

intellectual reﬂections or from the cultural representations of peace. The relative

reconciliation between the Catholic and Protestant factions allowed the perception to re-

emerge of a community of civilization founded on a common heritage of Europe (Idris in

this volume). With the entry of Russia in the European political arena from the reign of

Peter the Great, Eastern Christianity and the heritage of Constantinople also had to be

taken into consideration. While organized peace movements are really a feature of the

nineteenth century, and the word “paciﬁsm” is only attached to the early twentieth, grass-

roots movements aimed at preventing or banning war did exist in the period we are

considering, with dissenting Protestant denominations at the forefront of criticism against

war. Quakers left a particularly strong imprint on the European peace tradition; among

them was William Penn who, with his Essay toward Present and Future Peace of Europe

(1693), was possibly the ﬁrst to have conceived a Grand Design for uniting the states of

the continent under a single banner (Conway in this volume).

Most importantly, the Enlightenment was a moment when new conceptions of

European uniﬁcation saw the light, starting with the Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle

en Europe (“Plan for making peace perpetual in Europe”) by the French Abbé de Saint-

Pierre ([1713] 1986), which may indeed have drawn upon Penn. This idea was later

republished and re-proposed as an Extrait (“Excerpt”) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761)

and ﬁnally conceptualized and transcended by Immanuel Kant in Toward Perpetual Peace

(1795) (Pagden in this volume; Rousseau 2008a). Whereas Saint-Pierre proposed an

ecumenical European Union, which initially included the Ottoman Empire as well,

Rousseau held that Christianity was the civilizational bond of Europe, and argued that

the common cultural heritage would be a key asset for reaching peace (Spector 2008:

230–32; Ghervas 2014a: 55–57).

Nevertheless, philosophers of the eighteenth century (among them Rousseau himself)

were always skeptical of those plans for European uniﬁcation, for the simple reason that

there was no incentive for monarchs to adopt them: whereas the political system of

enlightened Europe born at Utrecht was failing at making peace perpetual, it was at least

sufﬁciently dynamic to take its own changes in stride. In particular, England’s policy of

counteracting the movements of the balance of power by switching sides did have a

dampening effect in practice; and other powers took the cue from England. Indeed, the

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INTRODUCTION 15

spectacular reversal of alliances of the War of Austrian Succession (where the French

Bourbons and Austrian Habsburg houses allied for the ﬁrst time) as well as the rise of

Prussia as major power in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) introduced changes to the

European balance of power, though neither fundamentally put its validity into question.

With economies on the rise, and sciences in full development, there is little doubt the

future must have seemed bright for the European cultured elites, for a common civilization

on the path to Enlightenment and therefore to peace.

It should not be forgotten, however, that war and peace were mostly made by men and

that most philosophers we have quoted (foremost among them Rousseau and Kant) held

rather disparaging views on the ability of women to assume political roles (Tomaselli in

this volume). Conversely, women like the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–

1797) did express their views on an increased role of women in society. They were the

exception in political ofﬁces, yet in the period we are considering, female rulers

paradoxically became a staple of European monarchies. It was, however, only the

accidental product of the logic of succession, which preferred women to hold the power

than relinquishing it out of the family. In England, Mary II (reigned 1688–1694) and

Anne (1702–1714), and in Austria the Empress Maria Theresa (1740–1780) successfully

wrestled her throne in the War of Austrian Succession; for Russia, Catherine I (1724–

1727), Anna Ivanovna (1730–1740), Elizabeth (1741–1762) and ﬁnally Catherine II

FIGURE 0.6: Allan Ramsay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Chateau de Coppet, Paris,

France. Bridgeman Images.

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16 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

(1762–1796) are still remembered as among the most prestigious rulers in Russian history.

Royalty was, however, a circle apart from the rest of society, where another set of

conventions and morals applied. Nevertheless, the fact that a few of these female rulers

actually shined in their political role may have started to introduce some rebuttal to the

European cultural prejudice against women in public life.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE COLLAPSE OF

SHARED BELIEFS ON PEACE

Unfortunately, the well-oiled political balance of Europe started to creak and jam with the

French Revolution. This major political experiment had two faces: a positive and peaceful

one, applauded by most enlightened elites of Europe, as a welcome liberalization of the

kingdom of France and generally a modernization of its institutions. Indeed, the country

turned momentarily its back to colonial wars, and the Constituent Assembly passed, on

22 May 1790, a “Decree of Peace Declaration to the World,” which was really an attempt

to prevent France from entering wars by subjecting declarations of war to parliament, in

a context of colonial disputes between Spain and Britain.

The second, uglier face of the

Revolution progressively came to light in the second half of 1791, after the emperor of

the Holy Roman Empire and the King of Prussia jointly declared that they considered the

internal affairs of France as a matter of their own concern: this encroachment on

sovereignty (“The Declaration of Pillnitz” 1791) prodigiously angered the parliament of

that country and put the French royal family under suspicion of being traitors to the

nation. The darker side then came into full view when France declared war against Austria

in April 1792, paving the way to the fall of the monarchy and the decapitation of King

Louis XVI; and the invention of the systematic repression policy known as Terror, led by

merciless men such as Jean-Paul Marat or Maximilien de Robespierre (Kolla 2017).

Warfare—at least on the French side—was set back to the Wars of Religion, as the

republican armies fought with desperate energy for the survival of their societal

conceptions. With ideology, fear and hatred added into the equation, the same causes led

to the same effects, with the increase of wanton violence and casualties. This deleterious

effect was compounded by demographic increase, which made for armies much larger

than a few decades earlier. It seemed that peace between the two mutually incompatible

conceptions of the social order in Europe would be impossible once again, unless one side

won militarily over the others. Surprisingly, the ragtag columns of the French Republic

started not only winning defensive battles against the monarchies, but they proceeded to

bring war over into the lands of Prussia and Austria. After Napoleon Bonaparte, crowned

Emperor in 1802, gave discipline, ﬁrst-rate equipment and brilliant generalship to the

French popular army, it became the instrument of a new conquering Empire; it soon

forced most states of continental Europe into subjection, including the old Habsburg

imperial dynasty of Austria; and arguably it inaugurated the earliest instance of “total

war” (Bell 2007).

The balance of power, completely jammed, had failed this time to prevent the rise of a

universal monarchy; this terrifying fact shook the societal certainties of the European

aristocratic classes, even more than the decapitation of Louis XVI. By contrast, the sudden

but enforced uniﬁcation of the continent later gave birth to the myth of a Pax Napoleonica,

in a Europe coalesced under a single regime and the cancellation of custom barriers

(Ghervas 2015, 2019: 99–102). Unfortunately, the United Kingdom and Russia refused

to be part of it and the British Navy kept a painful blockade; and with Napoleon’s

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INTRODUCTION 17

unquenched lust for conquest, peace was at best a lure. A whole generation, from 1792

onwards, was raised in conditions of perpetual war: treaties signed by the French Empire

such as Amiens with Britain (1802) or Tilsit with Russia (1807) were only armed truces.

At worst, for the occupied populations of Germany and Spain, this imperial peace was a

sham that motivated insurrection and the rise of a national identity.

CONCLUSION: ENLIGHTENED PEACE AT LAST?

It is thus that Europe went full circle, from the Peace of Westphalia that closed the

religious wars to the Napoleonic wars, from one set of brutal wars to another; and from

the Habsburg imperial threat to state “sovereignty” to the Napoleonic one. The Peace of

Westphalia (1648) had brought—in practice though not in theory—an end to the political

supremacy of the elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who also happened often

to be a Habsburg. The prohibitions it created for the Holy Roman Empire (and the

corresponding negative rights for the German states) generally leveled the playing ﬁeld in

Europe; but it did not provide yet any positive prescriptions on how the European states

should deal with each other. It would take another half a century before the doctrine of

the balance of power emerged in England, and then it was reinterpreted and adopted on

the continent with the peace of Utrecht (1713) as a device for preventing the establishment

of universal monarchy. It was arguably a limited and imperfect system and not a “system

of peace” but a “system of war,” as Abbé de Saint-Pierre almost immediately argued; yet

it worked sufﬁciently well for the needs of the time (Ghervas 2017: 411–12). After the

FIGURE 0.7: The Congress of Vienna (1815). PRISMA ARCHIVO. Alamy Stock Photo.

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18 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PEACE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Revolutionary Wars, the crushing supremacy of the French Empire was the last blow that

jammed the balance of power, discrediting it as the cure-all that would preserve peace.

Between Utrecht (1713) and the start of the Revolutionary Wars (1792), the parenthesis

of Enlightenment thus stands not as a period of peace, but as one of dynamic equilibrium

where wars were contained within acceptable limits.

How European peace had to be completely reinvented at the Congress of Vienna after

the Napoleonic Empire met with disaster in the Russian campaign of 1812, and the

defeats of 1813–14 is another story (Ghervas 2020b: 24–25). Obviously, the next iteration

of peace would heavily draw from the argumentation and proposals generated by the

critics of the now disesteemed balance of power. Indeed, both the Russian tsar Alexander

I and the Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich came to the negotiation table

having read the argumentation of writers on perpetual peace. Furthermore, the four

victorious powers—namely Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia—decided to meet regularly

to discuss important matters of Europe, inaugurating the “Congress System” (1815–

1823), the ancestor of our modern system of international conferences. While this was

deﬁnitely not the European federation imagined by Saint-Pierre, it did aim at replacing

“the principle of equilibrium, or more accurately of counterweights formed by separate

alliances which . . . had too often troubled and bloodied Europe [by] a principle of general

union” (Gentz [1818] 1876: 354–55). And it did so to the accompaniment of a profusion

of celebratory cultural forms, from balls and ﬁreworks to paintings and works by

composers from Beethoven to Rossini (Cavazzocca Mazzanti 1923; Fuchs 2002; Even

and Nathan 2015). The Vienna order saw the culmination of idiomatically Enlightened

debates on peace, as well as their fusion with artistic expressions of peace as both ideal

and practice. It is here that we really ﬁnd the cultural origins of the modern conceptions

of peace.

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