Well, this morning I finished Volume VIII of The Story of Civilization: The Age of Louis XIV. Whooo-hooo!
Many thoughts on this volume, but I’ll just look at a few here
Many thoughts on this volume, but I’ll just look at a few here
First, Will and Ariel Durant—her name appears with his beginning with Volume VII—devoted four of the eleven volumes of their history to a period of history spanning less than two hundred years. The three remaining volumes for me to read cover just a little over a hundred years. Perhaps this weighted approach to history, this bias for modernity, comes from what Durant wrote at the end of The Age of Louis XIV (I’m paraphrasing since I can’t find the quote): that this period of history offered the most productive thinking in science and philosophy.
Another thought: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Near the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, for example, Charles Castel, Abbe of Saint-Pierre, proposed a plan of European confederation, with a senate for arbitrating differences, a code of international law, and the establishment of uniform currency and measures throughout Europe. Today, after over two hundred years of European wars, we have the European Union and a chance to see whether such an arrangement will ultimately work.
Toward the close of this same war, in reference to the highly regulated economy of France, Pierre Le Pesant recommended, in Durant’s words, that “The wisest way is to let men produce, sell, and buy freely within the state. Let the natural ambition and acquisitiveness of men operate with a minimum of legal restraint; so freed, they will multiply the fertility of land, the products of industry, and the range and activity of commerce; and the resultant increase of wealth will provide new revenue for the state.”
Sounds familiar, eh? And we’re still battling for and against these ideas.
Then there are the historical figures of this era: Cromwell, Swift and Milton, the many scientists, the multi-talented men and women who could speak five and six languages, play several musical instruments, wrote letters and books, dipped into theology and mathematics, the philosophers, especially Leibnitz, because I knew so little about him. (I still have no idea what he meant by monads, and I am not sure he did either.)
My favorite of all these figures was Madame de Maintenon, Louis’s lover and later his morganatic wife, meaning he had married a woman of much lower social status. Her long life of adventures, rising as she did from an impoverished childhood to the court of Versailles and her love for the king, were all new to me. She was a woman of faith, and though wrong at times in her political advice to her husband, often showed compassion to others.
So onward now to The Age of Voltaire.
Another thought: plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Near the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, for example, Charles Castel, Abbe of Saint-Pierre, proposed a plan of European confederation, with a senate for arbitrating differences, a code of international law, and the establishment of uniform currency and measures throughout Europe. Today, after over two hundred years of European wars, we have the European Union and a chance to see whether such an arrangement will ultimately work.
Toward the close of this same war, in reference to the highly regulated economy of France, Pierre Le Pesant recommended, in Durant’s words, that “The wisest way is to let men produce, sell, and buy freely within the state. Let the natural ambition and acquisitiveness of men operate with a minimum of legal restraint; so freed, they will multiply the fertility of land, the products of industry, and the range and activity of commerce; and the resultant increase of wealth will provide new revenue for the state.”
Sounds familiar, eh? And we’re still battling for and against these ideas.
Then there are the historical figures of this era: Cromwell, Swift and Milton, the many scientists, the multi-talented men and women who could speak five and six languages, play several musical instruments, wrote letters and books, dipped into theology and mathematics, the philosophers, especially Leibnitz, because I knew so little about him. (I still have no idea what he meant by monads, and I am not sure he did either.)
My favorite of all these figures was Madame de Maintenon, Louis’s lover and later his morganatic wife, meaning he had married a woman of much lower social status. Her long life of adventures, rising as she did from an impoverished childhood to the court of Versailles and her love for the king, were all new to me. She was a woman of faith, and though wrong at times in her political advice to her husband, often showed compassion to others.
So onward now to The Age of Voltaire.