4.31 Europe: a.d. 1701 to 1800  (Page 15/28)

All royalists were eventually slaughtered and Robespierre ruled with blood, consumed by a passion for a new order of life. He attempted to equalize property and abolish profit. Divorce was made easy and illegitimacy was approved. A new calendar was made. But somewhere in all this Robespierre became insane and was finally killed by his own group. The terror came to an end after 4,000 people had been executed. A new constitution of 1795 provided that France should be ruled by a two-house legislature and five executives known as Directors. A rapid recovery of market-regulated economic activity took place.

After his Italian victories, Bonaparte took an army to the Mediterranean, invaded and initially conquered a part of Egypt. He did this by making the Directory believe that he was indirectly attacking England by breaking their lifeline, but it is probable that the real reason for that peculiar move was locked into Napoleon's own dream of empire. He took scholars and scientists with him and these men did start the science of Egyptology, initiate the breaking of the old hieroglyphics' code and made some striking reforms in Egyptian public health. A combination of some reinforcement Turkish armies and a British fleet under Lord Nelson cut off Napoleon's ships and forces, however, and only he managed to escape to France at the end of 1799. In spite of leaving his men behind, he still managed to arrive as a hero, took over the Directory and conferred the administrative power to three consuls.

The French Revolution brought down the European Old Regime. Neither the previously existing radical ideas nor new technical processes could have transformed European society so rapidly and so fundamentally. In the last decades of the old regime, Russia and eastern Europe were drawing abreast of the political organization of other European states and were on the verge of tipping the scales eastward. The revolution changed this drift. Of course it was costly. Approximately 600,000 French soldiers died between 1792 and 1799, the survivors remaining outside France, living on plunder.

At the end of the century several great scientists emerged in spite of the turmoil. Laennec developed the stethoscope, Pierre Simon Laplace was a great astronomer and statesman and Lavoisier worked out a new theory of combustion and conservation of matter in chemical reactions while repeating many of Priestley's oxygen experiments with a better understanding of their meaning. Theophile de Bordeu held that the stomach, heart and brain each secreted a material to the blood stream necessary for health and thus became known as a pioneer in endocrinology. Dentistry became a separate, true profession with the work of Pierre Fauchard. His publication The Surgeon Dentist became a standard text for generations. (Ref. 125 )

The netherlands and belgium

At the beginning of the century Holland built ships for all of Europe and we have seen how Peter the Great of Russia not only went there to personally learn shipbuilding but then transported a number of Hollanders to Russia to establish shipyards there. In 1717 with 600,000 people