Prof: We talked about
different political outcomes. Over the long run,
Great Britain remains a constitutional monarchy;
even in the nineteenth century, when Victoria had great
prestige, she did not have great power.
The Netherlands also resisted
absolutism, and the Dutch Republic remained the Dutch
Republic; although, for reasons that
we'll see later, the Dutch Republic ceases to be
a great power in the eighteenth century.
Given the very different route
that Prussia, Austria, Russia,
Sweden, and France went with a
centralization of absolute rule, why did it work out so
differently for England/Britain and the Netherlands?
Again, this is the second and
last of these sort of holding pattern lectures.
This parallels exactly what you
are reading. Again, until we get our class
set and all that, then there will be a very
different kind of lecture starting next Monday.
But let's just think out loud
about what these places had in common,
and what this tells you about social structure and political
outcomes in early modern Europe. Of course, the consequences are
enormous for other kinds of outcomes.
Let me give you an example.
Germany is not unified until
1871. Ironically, unification
proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Château of
Versailles, which we'll visit for a few seconds later on.
The fact that German
unification was achieved by Prussia and that Prussia was
dominated by nobles, who were called Junkers,
you'll come to them later, and by an army which--the state
basically was an appendage of the army--had rather enormous
consequences for Europe in the late nineteenth and above all in
the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s people
paid a lot more attention to social structure and class
analysis. But when you look at the
experience of Britain and the Dutch Republic,
they do share things that, in a way, determine the kind of
political economy that they would have.
What are some of these things?
I've written them on the board.
Let's just start in that order
and think aloud. Then what I'm going to do for
the last twenty or twenty-five minutes is talk about the Dutch
Republic. You can skip that part in the
reading, which isn't very long,
and illustrate with some paintings,
for which you are not responsible,
but just to make the points I want to make about the nature of
the Dutch Republic, and in which you'll see ways in
which it was very similar to England/Great Britain and very
different in terms of France. First of all,
it's not a coincidence that in both England and in the Dutch
Republic you had, along with the city-states of
Northern Italy, you had the largest percentage
of middle-class population that you could find in Europe.
The middle class in Russia,
which I'll talk about on Monday, was just absolutely
miniscule. The middle class was extremely
small in Prussia. Prussia did not include the
Hanseatic League cities, such as Bremen and Hamburg and
the others. You have in the Netherlands and
in England an astonishingly large middle class.
Moreover, in the case of
England, there was tremendous fluidity between elites.
The percentage of the
population who was noble, who had noble titles,
was extremely small. Privilege came from wealth and
wealth stemmed from the land. Yet, because of the rapid and
dramatic expansion of the English role in the global
economy, you had lots of very wealthy
landlords, property owners investing in
commerce, whereas in Spain and in France,
and Prussia in particular, it was seen to be sort of
slumming for nobles to participate in commerce.
Marxist analysis has given us
this all too rigid picture of the nobility sort of letting
their nails grow long, "they are nobles because
they do nothing." That was part of it.
Certainly there were nobles in
France who bought up vineyards around Bordeaux.
There are nobles around
Toulouse who have invested in commercial agriculture.
But yet the fact remains that
it's really in England that you have this tremendous fluidity
within the elite, and that basically commercial
money talks as much as propertied money talks.
London, already by the late
sixteenth century, one-sixth of all the people,
I think this is E.A. Wrigley who pointed this out a long time
ago--one-sixth of all the people in England went to London
frequently, because London was absolutely
gigantic as a city. The only cities in Europe that
were comparable--and they were smaller--were Naples,
an extraordinarily poor city, and Constantinople, Istanbul,
and, of course, in Japan, Edo, which would become known
as Tokyo. The percentage of the English
population that would have considered themselves to be
middle class is extraordinarily large.
The same is even more true in
the Netherlands. There were, to be sure,
nobles in the Netherlands. They tended to live in the
eastern part in rural Netherlands and in the south.
But their lives and interests
were far, far away from that economic large machine,
which was Amsterdam. Amsterdam is dominated by the
middle classes. Now, the middle class want
political rights. They want prerogatives.
They want their privileges for
themselves. It is fair to argue that
non-titled people in England were at the forefront of the
victorious role in the civil war that parliament played.
In the city-states of Venice,
which was a major trading city already on the decline,
and in Florence, and in Milan, and in Turin,
and in places like that you find something very comparable,
but Italy is not united until the 1860s.
Northern Italy has a large
percentage of the population who are middle class.
But in talking about the
political outcomes of states, that doesn't really fit into
our analysis here. Part of that is that along with
Northern Italy, the Netherlands and
England/Great Britain have, by far, the most urbanized
population in Europe. If you go into what now is
Serbia, there basically was Belgrade, which was a small
place. Poland had very lively,
important cities, Warsaw and Krakow,
and Gdańsk as well. You can't just say,
"In Eastern Europe there weren't cities,"
but there isn't any place, including France,
that had a remotely as high a percentage of the population
living in cities as England and the Netherlands.
One of the great shifts in
English/British history that you will become aware of is the
shift of economic dynamism in England away from the south to
the north. In the time we're starting this
course in the seventeenth century, besides London,
which is this gigantic place, the biggest cities in England
were Norwich and Exeter, and York in the north.
Of course, with large-scale
industrialization, which begins in the middle of
the eighteenth century, you'll see this dramatic shift
up to the north. Manchester, which was a small
town, becomes this enormous city, and Liverpool becomes ever
more important. Cities are where the middle
class lives. Bourgeois and burghers,
as I said last time, are urban residents who are
losing their privileges on the continent to big-time absolute
states. They will defend,
quite vociferously, their privileges as townspeople
against absolutist pretensions of nobles,
in the case of the Netherlands and also, to an extent,
in England as well. They share those things in
common, which is not to say that a country like France wasn't
urbanized. Paris is already enormous.
There are about 500,000 people
at the time of the French Revolution.
There are so many people you
can't count, because they own nothing.
Also, we don't have accurate
censuses until the nineteenth century.
The first accurate census,
I think, is in Copenhagen at the end of the eighteenth
century. Most censuses were taken,
by the way, as a way of counting heads,
the number of people who had to be fed at the time of a siege.
We're kind of guessing on these
population figures. The fact remains that the
Netherlands and England/Britain share this.
This is important in terms of
political outcomes, and also important in the case
of England/Britain in what we've come to call the Industrial
Revolution, which I will talk about at
another time. Secondly, as I tried to suggest
the other day, these places resist absolutism.
The English Civil War,
it's kind of a generalization to underline that too much,
but nonetheless, people living in England in the
1640s saw that there was a real threat to the idea of the
freeborn Englishman that was coming from the trampling of
long-assumed rights, since at least the thirteenth
century, at least in the imagination of
people by kings who wanted to dispense with the rights of
parliament and run things as they wanted to.
In the case of the Netherlands,
it's the same thing. There isn't anything as
dramatic as the English Civil War,
but the important outcome is that in the end this
decentralized federalist structure,
which I describe in the book and we'll talk a little bit
about in a while, is victorious over the
pretensions of a potential dynastic ruling house,
that is the Orange House, the House of Orange,
who wanted to make the chief Dutch official,
who was called the Stadtholder-- you can read that
in the book--and wanted to turn that person into kind of a
thundering, semi-absolutist monarch.
That doesn't work as well.
When you think of the origins
of the Netherlands, it comes from a civil war,
or a war of independence against the Spanish absolutist
state, that begins in 1572 and goes on
and off all the time until Dutch independence is recognized--it
was a fait accompli for a long time,
but until the Dutch independence was recognized in
1648 at the Treaty of Westphalia.
For the Dutch when they imagine
scary things, a scary thing is an army sent
by the king of Spain to extract more taxes from the wealthiest
of all the Spanish provinces--that is,
the Netherlands--rich because of commerce and,
as we'll see in a minute, to try to force people to
remain Catholics at a time when the vast majority of the Dutch
population had converted to Calvinism.
Those people who believed in
the Dutch Republic, which was the vast majority of
the people, just as the majority of the
population of England held to the rights of parliament,
they have this scary scenario of their rights being violated,
trampled upon, destroyed, eliminated,
eradicated by big-time absolute rulers.
The other scary thing for the
Dutch is, of course, the big guy down south.
Louis XIV would love to control
all of the Netherlands. His invasions at one time are
turned back when they literally open the dykes and flood the
French armies back. In the mental construction of
the Dutch and the English both involves one thing they don't
want to be. That is to lose their
prerogatives, their rights to an absolute
state. In both cases,
this becomes part of their self-identity.
That's an essential part,
as my good friend, Linda Colley,
who used to teach here and sadly is not here anymore.
She's at Princeton.
She made an argument in her
very successful book called Britons,
the construction of British identity.
I will argue later in the
course, in 1848 it has to get
reinvented again by imagining an other,
who is perceived as sneaky and dangerous,
and of course in that case it's the French,
but also the point of view of the British, the Irish,
who are conceived of as being capable because of their quest
for--"I don't want to be trampled by the English,
especially by English Protestants"-- of hooking
up with France, which they tried to do in 1798,
or in World War I with Germany, because there were some
attempts by the Germans to stoke up Irish independence movements.
Again, the only point here is
that they see themselves as anti-absolutists.
This helps them create this
sense of identity, which helps determine their
political origins. You'll find nothing comparable
in Russia, obviously which I'll come back and talk about,
or in Prussia, or in France.
You can talk about the origins
of French nationalism in the middle of the eighteenth
century, but it's very closely tied to
this dynasty, at least until they lop off the
guy's head in 1793. So, that's that point.
Third is decentralization.
Both of these states are
decentralized states. The British don't have a police
force until 1827 or 1829, I can't remember which,
when Robert Peale creates a London police force which they
call the Bobbies, after, like,
Robert, Bob, Bobbies.
People didn't want that.
They didn't want a large
standing army. What have they identified large
standing armies with? They always had to have a large
standing navy for obvious reasons.
But they identified large
standing armies with France or with the Spain of Phillip II or
with Prussia or with Russia. So, it didn't mean that the
English state wasn't efficient in collecting taxes,
because they were more efficient than the French were
in collecting taxes. But it does mean that this
decentralization is an essential part of who they thought they
were. The local sheriff will call out
the guys and restore order when there's trouble.
There is this real fear that
large standing armies could ultimately compromise the rights
of freeborn Englishmen. That's in a way that they would
have put it. In the case of the Netherlands,
which I'll come back to in a while,
you have these provinces that--although Holland,
which is the province of Amsterdam,
is by far the most important and most prosperous of the Dutch
provinces, such as that we often miscall
the Netherlands Holland, in fact Holland is just one of
the provinces, as if you called the United
States New York or California, because those are the two most
powerful states in the United States.
But this decentralized
federalist structure is part of who they thought they were and
who they continue to think they are.
This is very different than
these absolute kings who can send out their armies,
can run by their minions to squish whomever they want like
grapes whenever there's trouble. We can exaggerate the power of
Peter the Great in this vast empire that's expanding south
and already expanding toward Siberia and such distant places.
It took a long time to get the
guys there. But when they got there,
there was hell to pay. Very, very different than this
federalist decentralized structure of both of these
countries. The political outcome is
different. You can also make that
argument, this isn't the course to do
that, but you can make that argument
about the United States and the evolution of the United States,
because of the prestige of local leaders and the
decentralized nature of the colonies already at the time of
the War of Independence--which is going to have a strong role
in the political outcome, for better or for worse--in
this country where you have this sort of wacko political system
that still exists because of people screaming,
"state's rights," and all that.
But that's another subject.
Fourth, anti-Catholicism in
both cases. Why?
Because these are major
countries in the Reformation. The English Reformation,
which begins with Henry VIII wanting to divorce and kill his
various wives along the way, still had an awful lot to do
with the resistance to the power of Rome and the power of the
Catholic Church as an institution.
In the case of the Netherlands,
anti-Catholicism is endemic. Why?
Because it's identified with
the Spanish empire, with Spain,
which not only wanted to extract taxes and other revenue
from its most prosperous province,
but wanted to force people to remain Catholic.
When they send this guy called
the Duke of Alba up to the Netherlands, he burns people to
the stake and all this kind of stuff.
The association of Catholicism
as the dominant religion in both of the enemy countries,
France and Spain, is extremely important.
This is not to say that the
Dutch don't fight the English, too, because they do.
There are various wars over
control of the seas. But nonetheless,
in the imagination, in the imaginaire,
in the mental construction of these two countries,
what we are not, that is Catholic,
helps define their identity. Of course, the particular
problem of Ireland, the challenge of Ireland as I
suggested earlier, has an awful lot to do with
that. And the reinvention in the
nineteenth century of British identity will also have a lot to
do with fear of the Irish, "the enemy within,"
as they were perceived. But more about that.
I'll talk about that a lot and
try to explain there was no revolution in England in 1848.
In the course of Britain,
it's even clearer. The French are "the sneaky
French." From the French point of view,
it's the perfidious Albion already there.
You can go all the way up to
the origins of World War I to see.
When the British get into World
War I, it's because of the violation
of Belgian neutrality by the Germans,
because the idea of having another enemy…we've
already got the French across the channel and it's not that
big a channel. You can swim across it.
I couldn't and you couldn't
either but lots of people have. They do it all the time.
But if you've got the Germans
in Ostende eating moules frites,
eating mussels with French fries,
and you've already got the French there,
this is unthinkable. So, they go to war.
I don't want to exaggerate this
too much, but the largest riots in Britain in the eighteenth
century are not the riots for political reform at all.
They are the anti-Catholic
riots called the Gordon Riots, which take place in London.
Anti-Catholicism is very much
strongly entrenched in the British sense of who they were.
Anti-French--there we go.
Those two are already linked,
along with anti-absolutism and anti-Catholicism.
Last, and all these things are
linked. You could do one of these
little boxes they do in sociology or political science,
and have these arrows running all over the place.
You could make it there.
Who are the biggest trading
powers in Europe? We forget about the enormous
trading vitality of Asia, even sea vitality and land
vitality at the same time, but they are without any
question by this point--with the decline of the Spanish empire,
which begins before this course--the Dutch and the
English. What this does is it increases
the role of this commercial middle class.
It increases the role of
cities, particularly port cities, which Amsterdam is.
And it increases the role of
these economic elites or their concern with maintaining their
privileges against threats to their privileges and to their
prosperity no matter where they come from.
Just to amuse yourself,
not for any kind of punitive think-about-the-exam exercise,
but it would be fun to take these categories and think about
these other countries, particularly those who were
absolute states, other large important states in
Europe and see to what extent you have these factors there.
Prussia, I already said,
you've got your big nobles. You've got all these guys with
dueling scars, and for them to be indulging in
commerce is just crass, and not terribly manly,
and all this business. You've got your flute-playing
king, Frederick the Great, who could be awful.
He could lash out.
Voltaire went and hung out with
Frederick the Great, and after a while he said,
"Let me out of here." But you've got Berlin,
which was a very important town,
but it's a very important city because it's got this huge
garrison and it's got factories turning out military uniforms.
It's got Potsdam Palace and all
of this. It's not at all the same thing
as Amsterdam, or London, or any of the other
trading cities around. In the case of Russia,
it's even easier. You've got a practically
nonexistent middle class. You've got all sorts of nobles.
They are involved in commerce,
some of them, but mostly what they do is they
serve the state. They're called service nobility.
They're not serving the cities.
They're not serving commerce.
What they're doing is they're
doing is they're serving the state.
They're serving this huge,
lumbering, strange guy, Peter the Great.
Then you could take other
places, like Italy and smaller cities.
But you don't yet have these
big state structures. So, if you're looking back,
say, from the end of the nineteenth century,
it's not easy to see, but you can see these--don't
ever think that history runs on railroad tracks,
and all you need is the timetable to show when
modernization shows up. That's a most ludicrous word,
really, in contemporary social science
or orthodox Marxist, where you just had to say,
"Well, eventually the proletariat will rise up,
because the bourgeoisie did this before."
But yet when you look back from
the nineteenth century, these factors do count in
explaining how countries turn out to be the way they are.
When you try and look at the
origins of World War I, it mattered that Germany is run
by this kind of madcap dufus, Wilhelm II,
who was intellectually lazy and liked to break bottles of
Riesling over bright, shiny battleships and didn't
concentrate on things very long, and sends off provocative
telegrams here and there to make everybody mad.
That has a long-run outcome,
which cost the lives of millions of people.
Anyway, here we go.
It's just kind of fun to think
about that, so that's what we are doing.
We're thinking about that.
Now, let's dim the lights.
Here we go.
How do we dim the lights?
I can't remember.
Is that good?
We've got to get further down
than that. So, the lecture…
Okay, now paralleling what you've been reading,
let's look a little bit at the Dutch Republic,
because people talk about England and Britain all the
time, so let me talk about the Dutch
Republic. This will kind of bring some of
these factors together, along with the idea of what
people thought they were. What is their identity?
Here again, we'll look at some
paintings. You're not responsible for
these paintings, but we'll illustrate ways in
which the Dutch Republic, and their social structure,
and what they emphasized, and who they thought they were
was very different than, for example,
la belle France. So, here we have Amsterdam.
It grows dramatically because
of this global trade in the seventeenth century.
That was 1613.
I made this.
It's all a bunch of jumble.
But this is 1640,
or something like that--later. But what you have are these
canals. Many of you,
or some of you have had the good fortune to go to one of
Europe's most wonderful cities. The canals were used to
transport goods. Thus, the city structure
itself, the way the city was built with houses along the
canals reflects the economic primacy of global trade.
At this time the Dutch are
sending herrings, these long flat boats,
herring ships are going all the way to Newfoundland in the
seventeenth century, and Iceland,
freezing off the coast of Iceland.
They control and dominate the
Baltic trade, and herring is an important
part of that, because herring will keep once
it's salted and all that. The city of Amsterdam grows up
not only as part of this victorious struggle against the
Spanish armies. There's a wonderful book by my
former colleague, Geoffrey Parker,
called The Spanish Road, which talked about how
difficult it was for the Spanish to get troops all the way to the
Netherlands. They had to go from Italy,
because much of Italy was controlled by Spain,
through the Alps all the way up along the Rhine and finally get
into the Dutch Republic. It was a losing battle.
But Amsterdam reflects this
kind of primacy of the global economy,
because it's such an important trading power,
but also this federalist decentralized aspect that I've
tried to describe. This is the shipyard behind.
In fact, this building behind
is still there. I go to Amsterdam--not
frequently, but I've been there ten or twelve times,
or something. I did a Yale trip there.
I remember we took all these
alumni around to look at all this stuff.
That was mildly fun.
What the Dutch did--the
Netherlands is an extraordinarily small country,
and it's the most populated country in Europe,
then, per square kilometer,
and is now--once. What they have to do in order
to feed the population, you have to have more land.
How are you going to get more
land? One of the incredible things if
you're driving, say,
from Groningen, and you're going to go all the
way down to Amsterdam, when you drive along the coast,
you're driving along this sort of road that's out in the sea.
All the land between the water
on the left side and a long, long way has been reclaimed
from the sea. This is the seventeenth century.
This isn't scuba diving now off
the Great Barrier Reef, or something like that.
What they're doing is they're
reclaiming the land from the sea.
What this has to do with global
economy is that you have to be able to feed the population.
They have, along with the
English--and these two facts are related--an agricultural
revolution. They have an agricultural
revolution, investment in commercialized agriculture,
and increase in the production in rural areas.
In the case of the Netherlands,
it's because of this. I'll talk about why it happened
in Britain another time. It's because they reclaimed
land. How much land do they reclaim
from the sea? Well, 36,000 acres just between
1590 and 1615. That's a phenomenal amount,
and they keep going over and over again.
The population of the Dutch
Republic increases between 1550 and 1650 to almost two million
people. This is in a pretty small--it's
bigger than Belgium, but this is a pretty small
territory. Amsterdam, by mid-seventeenth
century, by 1650, increases to 150,000 people.
They build these three large
canals and this expands the area of the city by four times.
What this means is that boats
can dock outside these kind of big warehouses and can unload
or, depending on the case, load goods.
You have 500 miles of canals
dug just in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.
It becomes this economic dynamo
because of that, and thus traders are to be
found everywhere. In the 1630s there are 2,500
trading ships. They become the principal
supplier of grain and fish in Europe.
The Dutch dominate the Baltic
trade. Cities like Gdansk,
which we tend to forget about, unfortunately,
which is a very important port then and still now.
It's where Solidarity began,
too, as many of you know, in 1980.
It's an important port in all
of this. They reach the East Indies in
the 1620s and the 1630s. They bring back cinnamon,
nutmeg, and all sorts of valuables.
It's this kind of wealth that
allow them to fight this long, hard war of independence,
which they finally win. Now, why is this in here?
This is Rembrandt,
as most of you know. This is called The Night
Watch. The importance of this painting
is who is being painted and, more than that,
who is getting Rembrandt to paint this.
If you go down into France,
if you go to la belle France,
the painting is dominated by nobles who want pictures of
themselves, or the tiresome Sun King and
all his sort of miserable hangers-on,
very rich, miserable hangers-on. What the Dutch painters painted
reflects in the same way that Renaissance art reflected what
was important to Renaissance Italy.
Who did the commissioning of
painting? I care because my mother was a
painter, she was a portrait painter.
That's how we survived in
Portland, Oregon. Who commissioned these
paintings and what they painted tell you who these people
thought they were. That's pretty interesting.
Who are these?
This is The Night Watch.
These are the guys who run
Amsterdam. This is essentially the town
hall of Amsterdam. In fact, that building itself,
of which I don't have a slide, is extremely modest.
It looks so terribly different
than anything like the Spanish palace outside of Madrid or
anything that ever had anything to do with the Prussian kings
and all that. Well, that's pretty obvious.
This is the weighing house.
Here, this is very classic.
I'm not a professor of
architecture, but it's obvious this is
northern European architecture that you can see in northern
France, cities like Arras and other
places, or Charleville-Mezieres in the
Ardennes. It's one of the most fabulous
plazas anywhere. Or in the Place des Vosges,
which is by far the most beautiful plaza in Paris,
you have this kind of architecture.
But this is the weighing house
there. Here's another one.
The buildings are the most
important. Buildings in the cities are not
huge, over-the-top Baroque churches, such as the
Gésu in Rome, for example.
They are weighing houses.
The town hall was in very
modest proportions because it's Calvinist.
Calvinists weren't exactly what
the French call rigolo, weren't exactly wild,
fun-loving types. Even the churches are
completely denuded of the kinds of Baroque,
swooning cherubs and clutter that you found in--;beautiful,
I'm not knocking the Baroque--but beautiful
churches--;or, in Vienna it's a good example
of that, or anywhere is a good example
of that. Here's another weighing house.
This is in Gouda,
as in the cheese, but the town of Gouda.
Amsterdam wasn't alone.
Now, here, these are houses
that are built along the canals. You've got these warehouses
along the canals and here's where the bankers--the Dutch had
the most, along with the English,
sophisticated banking system in the world.
Lloyds of London,
which now does things like insure quarterbacks' knees and
things--but it begins in the eighteenth century when people
go into the docks. Because a lot of these ships go
blub on the way back, or are taken by pirates and
stuff like that, they say, "We want to
insure this ship. Will you sign up for ten
percent of the value of this insurance?"
That's how Lloyds of London
starts. But you had the equivalent in
Amsterdam as well. You have access to capital by
those guys, these guys who are no longer there.
The middle class guys behind
the screen who are going to invest in these long treks.
You send off a ship to
Newfoundland, or to Iceland,
or even to the Mediterranean. They start getting into the
Mediterranean and that scares the hell out of their commercial
rivals. So, you also build these houses
for people to live in. Because there's not a lot of
room between the canals, that's why they're so steep
when you walk up these things. It's almost like that.
It's an incline.
They seem to be reaching toward
the sky there, but not reaching toward the sky
as in the cupola of a Baroque church where you're supposed to
see God at the top. Here, they look up and they see
money at the top, or whatever.
They were religious as well,
but it was a different kind of religion.
Here, this is a more modern
example with a little hash café next to it or
something. This is Rembrandt's house.
He had to live somewhere,
and that's where he lived because he paints these people.
Rembrandt did have one time
where he started painting kind of Catholic themes,
but basically he's like these other guys.
They're painting--I'll tell you
in a minute. But they're painting
middle-class life in the Netherlands.
They don't do big battle scenes.
You have to go to the southern
Netherlands or Belgium for that, or into France.
That's what they do and that's
what they look like. That's pretty obvious.
This is an orphanage.
They had, without question,
the most sophisticated charitable institutions
anywhere. In fact, we know what they ate.
It was the most prosperous
country for ordinary people anywhere.
The diet here,
we know what they ate in their meals.
They ate much better than poor
people did almost anywhere else. Indeed, some ordinary workers
bought paintings by Steen and all sorts of these other people.
Here is a workhouse.
This is a prison, basically.
They were organized for that,
too. It was the place of toleration.
There's no doubt about that.
During the Enlightenment,
the works of the philosophes that could
not be published in France were published in Switzerland,
more about that another time, and in the Netherlands.
But they could lash out.
They lashed out at gays
sometimes. They lashed out at Catholics
sometimes. There was an edge to them,
as if the whole thing could collapse on their heads.
Simon Schama is not the only
person who made that point. Others have as well,
perhaps because of the big floods.
If the dyke goes--here's the
image of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke.
If the dyke goes,
you are drowned. There's this whole sense that
the thing is precarious and you'd better kind of mind your
Ps and Qs, or whatever the expression is,
and be a good person or this whole thing could kind of be
literally flooded away. How different that is than this
modest estate of Versailles. I worked in the archives in
Versailles in the small stables. This is one of my least
favorite palaces. The way the Dutch thought about
themselves is a little different than the way the French nobility
or the Spanish nobles, at least at the higher ranks,
thought about themselves as well.
I show these.
These are obvious,
but just to put them in comparison with what you'll see
in the middle. A little modest bedroom there
in Versailles. This is the war room,
it's called, the salon de guerre.
I don't like Versailles. What the hell.
This is Vaux-le-Vicomte,
which is much more interesting. I just put this in because I
like it. It shows you there were
chateaus in the Netherlands, but they were mostly in the
east. They were nobles that had the
chateaux, and they didn't dominate;
they didn't rule. Vaux le Vicomte was fabulous.
Louis XIV was invited by his
treasurer, a man called Fouquet, to go and eat there.
He was insanely jealous.
They served him on gold plates
with gold silverware, and he had huge ponds stocked
with not only freshwater fish but saltwater fish.
He was so jealous that he threw
him in the slammer, threw him in jail and
confiscated it. But the image is just that this
is very different. The paintings you found were
very different. Here's Rembrandt himself.
That was Rembrandt.
That was quick.
Narcissism--he did something
like seventy self-portraits. He was his own favorite subject.
Anyway, my mother tried to
paint me, but I'd never hold still long enough.
There's only sort of two
half-finished portraits of me. Anyway, what did people paint?
Ruysdael, don't write this down.
Well, you can if you want.
Go to the great museum in
Amsterdam and see it at the Rijksmuseum.
Ruysdael painted ordinary
people living and at work. These are windmills, obviously.
Here are windmills with people.
This is different.
Generally, you wouldn't find
these kinds of paintings in other places.
This is a painter called Frans
Hals, H-A-L-S. It's a family scene.
These are middle-class people
commissioning paintings of themselves.
It's the equivalent of fancy
patricians in Florence having paintings of themselves.
But they're from a very
different social class, the patricians of Florence or
Venice. This is to set the theme.
I love still life,
especially if they have food and wine.
There's some wine up there.
This is Pieter Claesz,
C-L-A-E-S-Z, probably mispronounced.
This is still life.
They paint food.
They paint food,
and people eating, and people having fun,
not people at war, not the eighteenth-century
inevitable paintings of the British nobles or land big
gentry looking over all of the villages they've had knocked
down so they could expand their hunting terrain,
or fondling the nose of their killer hunting dogs,
or something like that. It's just a very different way
of imagining oneself. It's very attractive.
I must admit it's very
attractive. This is the village school.
They had the highest literacy
rate in the world, point,
period, the Dutch did. They were very,
very ordinary people. There were poor people in the
Netherlands. Nonetheless,
they were very ordinary literate poor people.
There's something to be said
for that. I like cats a lot.
I hate dogs,
but anyway, this is children playing with a cat.
My cat yesterday actually undid
my Yale password last night. I saw the thing that said
password. The next I knew,
she had literally typed my password.
I had to put a new one.
This has nothing to do with
anyone, so you should take this out.
Anyway, cats.
There we go--boules.
This is what we do in the South
of France with a little chardonnay on the side.
We play boules.
It's not quite the same thing.
That's like bocce.
We have this sort of metal ball.
That's for another lecture,
ça n'a rien à voir avec…
These are ordinary people having fun.
Here they are.
Here they're having fun.
But they're having too much fun.
This is part of the point.
Part of this sort of this
inveterate Calvinism, and part of the fact that,
"what if the dams burst?"
Or what if the British begin to
outdo us in the world trade department?
Or what if the French come and
squish us like grapes? There's always this sense of
vulnerability. Behind the paintings of people
eating, the theme of people eating or
praying prayers at mealtime, and this sort of thing,
or playing boules, pétanque,
bocce, there is always this sense of
the ribald family. That's what this is called by
Jan Steen, S-T-E-E-N. If you have too much fun,
things will get away from you. These people are all drinking
and leaving these poor little children to their own devices.
They may be knocking down one
or two themselves there, because nobody's paying any
attention. You could go too far and then
you end up like this. How does it all end up in the
long run? How it ends up in the long run
for the Dutch is that the Dutch cease to be a great power.
But there's nothing wrong with
that. They have gone on to live
highly prosperous lives. They eventually end up with a
monarchy. They eventually lose Belgium in
1831. They basically didn't care.
The Dutch economy,
the equivalent would be the decline of the Venetian economic
power in the Mediterranean--and trade with the East diminishes.
The Netherlands ceases to be a
great power, whereas Britain in 1707 becomes the biggest of the
world powers. But let us still remember these
six or seven factors, or whatever I had up there,
and remember what these two places had in common.
It has a lot to do with the
global trade. It has a lot to do with social
structure. It has a lot to do with who
they thought they were, the paintings they bought,
the paintings they commissioned,
the way they viewed themselves. Part of this reconstructing of
national identity often has as much to do with who you're not,
not absolute, not Catholic, not French,
as it does with you who imagine yourself to be.
In the growth of national
awareness, that itself is an important theme.
Have a great weekend.
See you on Monday.
