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The Middle East: The tragedy of the Arabs | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...and-only-locals-can-rebuild-it mideast arab crisis
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  • slam, or at least modern reinterpretations of it, is at the core of some of the Arabs’ deep troubles. The faith’s claim, promoted by many of its leading lights, to combine spiritual and earthly authority, with no separation of mosque and state, has stunted the development of independent political institutions.
  • But religious extremism is a conduit for misery, not its fundamental cause (see article). While Islamic democracies elsewhere (such as Indonesia—see article) are doing fine, in the Arab world the very fabric of the state is weak.
  • Economic stagnation bred dissatisfaction. Monarchs and presidents-for-life defended themselves with secret police and goons. The mosque became a source of public services and one of the few places where people could gather and hear speeches. Islam was radicalised and the angry men who loathed their rulers came to hate the Western states that backed them. Meanwhile a vast number of the young grew restless because of unemployment.
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  • The absence of a liberal state has been matched by the absence of a liberal economy. After independence, the prevailing orthodoxy was central planning, often Soviet-inspired. Anti-market, anti-trade, pro-subsidy and pro-regulation, Arab governments strangled their economies.
  • only the Arabs can reverse their civilisational decline, and right now there is little hope of that happening. The extremists offer none. The mantra of the monarchs and the military men is “stability”. In a time of chaos, its appeal is understandable, but repression and stagnation are not the solution.
  • ultimately fanatics devour themselves. Meanwhile, wherever possible, the moderate, secular Sunnis who comprise the majority of Arab Muslims need to make their voices heard. And when their moment comes, they need to cast their minds back to the values that once made the Arab world great. Education underpinned its primacy in medicine, mathematics, architecture and astronomy. Trade paid for its fabulous metropolises and their spices and silks. And, at its best, the Arab world was a cosmopolitan haven for Jews, Christians and Muslims of many sects, where tolerance fostered creativity and invention.
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General Franco and the Spanish Succession | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...-franco-and-spanish-succession 1957 Spanish Succession Alfonso Franco Juan Carlos
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  • The days of Bourbon rule in Spain seemed to be at an end when King Alfonso XIII left the country in 1931
  • abdicating in favour of his third son Don Juan, Count of Barcelona
  • The Civil War of 1936-39 left Spain a fascist dictatorship run by General Franco as El Caudillo (the Leader)
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  • he enjoyed being dictator and had no intention of giving way to any monarch
  • In the following year Spain was officially proclaimed a monarchy with Franco as head of state and the power to choose his successor
  • the monarchy would be restored on General Franco’s death or retirement, but without saying who the monarch would be
  • The destinies of Spain will be directed,’ the parliament was told, ‘by a monarchy which is neither liberal nor absolute, but traditional, popular and Catholic
  • You’ve got all three Bourbons in front of you,’ she told Franco. ‘Decide!’ The general made no reply, but early in the following year Juan Carlos made it clear that in his opinion, when the time came, the monarchy would be ‘installed’ rather than ‘restored’
  • When Franco died in Madrid in 1975 at the age of eighty-two, Juan Carlos was duly installed as King of Spain
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Catalonia, Spain's Biggest Problem | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...pain%E2%80%99s-biggest-problem Catalan Attempts to Independence
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  • After the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile – the ‘Catholic Monarchs’ – in 1469, Catalonia, as part of Aragon, became united in a royal union with the Kingdom of Castile in 1474
  • The relationship between Castile and Aragon was more like the Austro-Hungarian confederation than the English incorporation of Wales, or that of Brittany by France
  • did not create a culturally homogenous Spanish state
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  • After the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in 1648, conflict between France and Spain continued
  • Spain was in precipitous decline and France was Europe’s dominant military power under Louis XIV
  • For the next 200 years, Spain followed closely the French project of centralisation under an absolutist monarchy with the imposition of a centralised state model
  • in 1701, Spain’s weakness was starkly revealed by the War of the Spanish Succession, caused when the Spanish King Charles II died without an heir in 1700. Two of Europe’s leading monarchical powers, the House of Habsburg led by Austria, and the Bourbons led by France, fought to place their candidate on the Spanish throne, with the French candidate Philip V (the Duke of Anjou) crowned on 1 November 1700. The victory of the French Bourbon Dynasty represented a severe defeat for Catalonia, as well as the other territories of Aragon. It meant that Spain would henceforth follow the centralising French state tradition
  • No Spanish city experienced more political violence and the Spanish military and police stepped in to perform suppressive roles frequently between 1902 and 1923
  • In 1898 Spain suffered military defeats to the United States, losing its remaining overseas territories
  • The conflict over differing conceptions of Spain – and the role of national diversity within it – was brought to a head in 1936 with the outbreak of Civil War
  • the departure of Catalonia would be a disaster for Spain
  • after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in 1989, the association of the independence movement with the revolutionary left waned. In the 1990s, the concept of independence increasingly entered mainstream political discourse
  • Today, the struggle for Catalan independence can be considered a middle class revolt.
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France, Burgundy and England | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...france-burgundy-and-england England France 16-18THC
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  • The treaty of marriage between Henry V of England and Catherine of France, daughter of Charles VI, sworn in the Cathedral of Troyes on May 21st, 1420, marks the darkest hours of the French monarchy in the fifteenth century. In thirty-one short articles, the treaty made Henry the son of Charles VI and heir, with Henry's own heirs, to the Crown of France. It also made Henry regent until the king's death and gave him the government of the kingdom of France. The 'so-called' dauphin, Charles, was thought to be definitively isolated, having already forfeited his rights after he had had John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, assassinated at Montereau on September 10th, 1419
  • On the borders of the territories where he strove to impose his authority as regent and heir to France, the Dukes of Brittany (John V) and of Burgundy (Philip the Good), contrived to safeguard their de facto independence
  • The unexpected death of Henry V on August 31st, 1422, and the long-awaited death of Charles VI (October 21st, 1422), the brutal regency of the Duke of Bedford, and the Amiens alliance of April 1423 between the three dukes (Bedford, Brittany, Burgundy), all contributed, to different extents, to aggravate the political conflict
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  • The recovery of Orleans and the coronation of Charles VII at Reims on July 17th, 1429 mark a turning point for the future also because, by that time, a real national feeling and the concept of patriotism had gained ground
  • Furthermore, the result of Henry V's and Bedford's policy of granting newly conquered land to the English soldiers, was that those who had nothing in England stayed in France to defend and increase their new possessions. For those who already had land in England, the time came when holding estates on both sides of the Channel became impossible and they had to make their choice.
  • Never did Henry VI acknowledge the Duke of Burgundy's claims on the French monarchy and, for his part, the Duke obstinately refused to meet Henry VI during the period the latter was in France from April 1430 to February 1432. Excluded from any participation in the control of the government of France, Philip the Good was able, at leisure and under cover of this alliance, to increase his possessions in the Low Countries
  • In an article published in England and her Neighbours 1066-1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais edited by M.C.E. Jones and M.G.A. Vale (Hambledon Press, 1989), Maurice Keen offers a stimulating explanation of the English disaster in the 1450s.
  • Armstrong has drawn attention to the close cultural links between England and Burgundy in the early fifteenth century and has shown that the real instigator of the treaty of Troyes was Philip the Good. For his part, Andre Legay (Poitiers colloquium) developed the idea that, if the Anglo-Burgundian alliance did last until the reconciliation of Charles VII and Philip the Good at the treaty of Arras (September 21st, 1435), it remained nevertheless fragile and limited
  • After Formigny (April 15th, 1450) and Castillon (July 17th, 1453), the inglorious truce agreed upon by Edward IV and Louis XI at Picquigny on August 29th, 1475, was yet another injury to England's pride. However, as Charles Ross in Edward IV (Methuen, 1974) points out, 'the days when England, even in alliance with Burgundy, could seriously challenge the most powerful and wealthy state in Europe were long since past
  • The very title of the colloquium, 'La France de la Fin du XV' siecle: Renouveau et Apogee' (published in 1985 by Editions du CNRS), shows to what extent the fundamental research carried out over the last twenty years has improved our understanding of the kingdom of Louis XI, Charles VIII and Louis XII, and has altered the old image of a France lacking any real identity and torn between the waning of the Dark Ages and the emergence of modernity
  • The incorporation of the ducal apanage of Burgundy was one of the major preoccupations of Louis XI
  • Therefore, Louis XI and Charles VIII had to battle against a real state, which had its own institutions and an efficient and organised army, and which was the mainstay of all the French and foreign oppositions (particularly English) to the progression of the French monarchy. It was only at the end of the 1487-91 war, and after the marriage of the Duchess Anne to Charles VIII (December 6th, 1491) and later to Louis XII (January 8th, 1499) that Brittany was united with France
  • The custom was first followed in France in the case of the funeral of Charles VI, a few weeks after the funeral of Henry V of England where this practice had been followed, and it is likely that the English presence in Paris influenced French custom in this respect
  • The failure of Richard II who, in the 1390s, instead of building up a retinue which reflected, and therefore drew strength from the realities of local politics, 'tried to establish local power-structures which reflected the image of his own court', is similar to the one Richard lII suffered in 1483-85
  • The monarchs were able to rely on a more numerous and permanent administration, loyal to the continuation of the State, and therefore they were less dependent upon their network of patronage. Peter Lewis (Tours colloquium, 1983) refutes the idea that Louis XI's pensioners could have formed a royal clientage: 'they did not represent a monarchical clan, but were para-administrators carrying out para-administrative tasks
  • a group of men, most of them closely related, who monopolised the most eminent functions and offices and who behaved as the masters of the realm (Recherches sur le personnel du Conseil du Roi sous Charles VIII et Louis XII, Librairie Honori Champion, 1980)
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Henry VIII's Early Foreign Policy, 1509-29 | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...s-early-foreign-policy-1509-29 Tudor Medieval England Political
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  • Firstly, that Henry VIII failed to achieve his primary goal, which was to recover the French empire which had been conquered by Henry V
  • his foreign policy was often incoherent, thus allowing more wily operators, such as King Ferdinand of Aragon and the Emperor Maximilian, to manipulate him
  • He only succeeded in capturing the towns of Therouanne and Tournai in northern France in 1513, and these were soft targets
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  • Further, Ferdinand and Maximilian signalled their gratitude to Henry by signing separate treaties with Franc
  • This pattern was repeated later in the 1523-25 campaign which saw Henry VIII allied with the Emperor Charles V against Francis I
  • The campaigns of 1511-14 were, according to Richard Hoyle, largely funded from the wealth which Henry VII bequeathed to his son
  • Wolsey hoped to use the enmity between Charles V and Francis I to secure the best diplomatic deal for England from one or other of them in return for English support
  • England could not compete with France, even with the support of Charles V
  • Henry VIII was indeed, unlike his father, a warlike monarch, seeking gloire and prestige and pursuing his dynastic rights, just like any other Renaissance prince
  • However, Wolsey’s diplomatic genius saw even greater opportunities and he was able to persuade the Emperor Maximilian, as well as Spain, Scotland, Venice and a host of others, including Leo X himself, to agree to a non-aggression pact under the aegis of Henry VIII. For a brief while, Henry VIII was the arbiter of Europe and London was its foremost capital
  • Charles V combined his power as Holy Roman Emperor with his rulership of Spain and Burgundy
  • the costs of Henry’s wars were indeed considerable: they drained his private resources and those of his subjects
  • Where Henry VII had been able to resort to economic warfare against Burgundy, this avenue was closed to Henry VIII, due to the fact that the profitability of English cloth was dependent on the rising economic strength of Flanders
  • Wolsey was playing a double game, but only ever with the intention of putting pressure on Charles V
  • Henry’s frustration over Charles V’s utter obduracy in this matter led him to turn his back on the Habsburg alliance. Instead, after 1526, Wolsey hoped to use French ambitions to destroy Habsburg power in Italy and either break Charles V’s power over the pope or, at the very least, to cajole the Emperor into negotiations
  • relations with France became more binding after the sack of Rome in 1527 by a mutinous Imperialist army which obliged Pope Clement VII ‘to live and die a Habsburg’.
  • In January 1528 a reluctant Henry found himself at war with Charles V with the only accessible Habsburg target being England’s trading partner, Burgundy
  • no contemporary monarch weighted up military gains against an artificial measure of financial expenditure, as the dismal legacy of incipient financial crises which Francis I, Henry II, Charles V and Philip II variously bequeathed underlines
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Good Friends and Brothers? Francis I and Henry VIII | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...thers-francis-i-and-henry-viii Tudor France England Henry VIII Francis I Political
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  • One was of Henry VIII of England and the other was of Francis I of France. Their symbolic presence at the beginning of an ambitious project designed to link England and France was especially appropriate. Henry VIII is often called a 'Renaissance prince' and is popularly remembered for his ebullience and the extraordinariness of his reign
  • influenced by his relationship with that other 'Renaissance prince', Francis I
  • France and England been so drawn together by some higher ideal or imperative
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  • The Angouleme family was a cadet branch of the royal house of Valois. Francis' father, Charles, died on January 1st, 1496, and in 1498, the boy became heir presumptive to the reigning monarch, Louis XII
  • Louis XII died leaving no surviving son and Francis succeeded him as king on January 1st, 1515. Francis's accession was greeted favourably by the French nobility
  • His mother, Louise of Savoy
  • He was determined to avenge the defeats which Louis XII had suffered there and to capture the duchy of Milan which he regarded as his inheritance
  • On September l4th, 1515, at the Battle of Marignano, Francis defeated a large Swiss army allied to the duke of Milan and so regained the duchy. He secured his prize by a concordat with Leo X and, later, by treaties with the Swiss, with Charles of Spain and with the Holy Roman Emperor, Maxmillian
  • In 1533, Francis concluded a marriage alliance with Clement VII which he hoped would detach the pope from his allegiance to Charles V and thus help both him and Henry VIII
  • The young Tudor's great role-model was Henry V and he regarded northern France as his inheritance, rather in the way Francis saw Milan
  • In 1513, Henry had invaded France in alliance with the pope, the emperor and the king of Spain
  • Nevertheless, these victories and the subsequent peace treaty with Louis XII, allowed Henry to feel that controlling France was a great way of demonstrating his own impressive royal power
  • In England, Francis found an ally in the person of Anne Boleyn who virtually replaced Wolsey as the lynch-pin in Anglo-French contacts
  • Like Wolsey before her, Anne encouraged continued exchanges between the two monarchs and she also patronised English scholars in France
  • Henry VIII's accession in 1509 had generated the same kind of excitement as witnessed in France in 1515. The two kings did indeed have many personal similarities and rivalry between them was almost inevitable
  • Henry then allowed himself to believe, incorrectly, that Francis approved of these claims
  • Against this background and despite the difficulties, Anglo-French contacts were maintained and Francis constantly sought Henry's financial and military support against Charles V
  • Francis spent increasing amounts of time in Paris and at Fontainebleau where his steadily expanding artistic collections and library were shown to all important visitors
  • During the 1540s, Henry VIII also insisted, more than ever, that his was an imperial kingship
  • Much of this augmentation work was undertaken by the same John Leland who had witnessed Bude's work for Francis in the 1520s
  • Francis discussed Henry's building ideas with his ambassador, Sir John Wallop, to whom he also gave a guided tour of his private gallery and baths at Fontainebleau.
  • Henry's personal Psalter, in which he is depicted as King David, his second great role-model after Henry V, was produced by Jean Mallard who had been Francis I's court poet in the 1550s
  • In July 1544 thirty-one years after his first invasion, Henry once again crossed the Channel to set about the conquest of France. He managed to capture Boulogne
  • Francis I died on March 51st, 1547, barely two months after Henry VIII's death in January
  • that of the king as the warrior-leader whose greatness lay in military success and the distribution of largesse to his elite companions
  • Henry VIII's concept of his kingship was centred on the same ideal and his efforts to make his monarchy conform to it, partly through competition with France, pre-dated the start of Francis I's reign
  • This sophistication was particularly evident in Francis's artistic and intellectual patronage and it is here that his 'Renaissance' influence on Henry VIII is most apparent
  • On May 6th, 1994, after opening the Channel Tunnel jointly with President Mitterand, the Queen observed that Britain and France, 'for all their ages-long rivalry, complement each other well, perhaps better than we realise'
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Return of the King: The Bourbon Restoration | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...eturn-king-bourbon-restoration France Monarch Restoration Europe Napoleon Louis XVIII
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  • On June 18th, the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end Napoleon's attempted comeback in the Hundred Days
  • At this point, two centuries ago, the victorious Allies – Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia – would determine the fate of France
  • The Austrian chancellor, Metternich, came from Vienna, Tsar Alexander from St Petersburg and, from Berlin, the 72-year-old Prussian Marshal Blücher
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  • Since both the republican and imperial models were discredited and unacceptable to the victorious Allies, a royal restoration was inevitable; Wellington warned that there would be no peace in Europe unless the Bourbons mounted the throne again. The Congress of Vienna, held to define European frontiers after two decades of war, reversed Napoleon's conquests but was otherwise generous to France
  • The new monarch, Louis XVIII, had made a poor fist of it on his first return from exile in Britain in May 1814. He surrounded himself with appointees who had been out of government business for more than two decades and the first restoration was brought to an abrupt end by the Hundred Days. Louis fled once more, to return three weeks after Waterloo
  • Louis Stanislas Xavier Bourbon, grandson of Louis XV and brother of Louis XVI, became heir to the throne when Louis' son died in prison in 1795
  • If France is still France, it is thanks to the Russians
  • Ignoring the king's desire for national unity, royalists in various parts of the country exacted their revenge for events since the Revolution of 1789
  • The Allies imposed financial indemnities on an economy that had been weakened by the demands of Napoleon's constant war-making and the effects of the British naval blockade
  • At the end of November 1815 a white-faced Richelieu signed the definitive peace agreement dictated by the Allies, lamenting that 'all is finished (by) this fatal treaty'
  • Russia, Prussia and Austria proclaimed their Holy Alliance and Britain joined them in the Quadruple Alliance
  • Then came 15 years wandering around Europe, including two in remote Courland in the Baltic, after which he came to rest for seven years in England
  • France was on its way to being re-integrated into the European system. This reflected the country's continental importance; Europe could not function without it. The path to national recovery was faster than might have been expected in the summer of 1815
  • the Hexagon between the Alps and the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Channel could no longer aspire to dominate Europe as it had sought to do under Louis XIV and Bonaparte
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Charles XII | king of Sweden | Britannica.com - 1 views

www.britannica.com/...Charles-XII Decline of Swedish Power
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  • Charles XII, (born June 17, 1682, Stockholm—died Nov. 30, 1718, Fredrikshald, Nor.), king of Sweden (1697–1718), an absolute monarch who defended his country for 18 years during the Great Northern War and promoted significant domestic reforms. He launched a disastrous invasion of Russia (1707–09), resulting in the complete collapse of the Swedish armies and the loss of Sweden’s status as a great power. He was, however, also a ruler of the early Enlightenment era, promoting domestic reforms of significance.
  • Prince Charles was the second child and eldest (and only surviving) son of Charles XI of Sweden and Ulrika Eleonora of Denmark.
  • Charles XI had stipulated a regency, but the regents proved anxious to obtain the new king’s concurrence in all decisions, and the Riksdag called in November 1697 declared him of age.
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  • By the time this program had been brought to success and Stanisław Leszczyński elected king of Poland—Augustus being forced to accept the settlement by a Swedish invasion of Saxony in September 1706—Charles XII had matured both as a general and as a statesman.
  • Most significant of these personal decisions was that to fight Augustus II in Poland and to transform Poland from a divided country, where Augustus had both partisans and opponents, into an ally and a base for the final campaign against Russia.
  • After negotiations for Charles’s marriage to a Danish cousin, the daughter of Christian V, were begun on Denmark’s initiative, Charles’s advisers held back until the outcome of Danish negotiations with other powers was known. These negotiations led in fact to a coalition between Denmark, Saxony, and Russia that, by attacking Sweden in the spring of 1700, began the Great Northern War. The speedy success hoped for by the three allied powers did not materialize, and rumours of rebellion by the Swedish nobility against the absolutist monarchy, in case of war, proved false.
  • His first necessity in 1706, however, was to secure Sweden’s position in relation to Russia, which, under Peter I the Great, had from 1703 onward made good use of Charles XII’s campaigns in Poland to train its army and undertake a piecemeal conquest of the Swedish east Baltic provinces.
  • He became the object of Turkish intrigues and in February 1713 had to fight a regular battle, the kalabalik of Bender (modern Bendery, Moldova), to avoid a plot to deliver him into the hands of Augustus of Saxony, now restored in Poland. The closing of the Turko-Habsburg frontier due to the plague, and the determination of the anti-French alliance in the War of the Spanish Succession to prevent Sweden from using its bases in Germany to attack its enemies further circumscribed Charles XII’s freedom of action in these years. The Swedish council, virtually in charge of affairs at home during his absence, was preoccupied with threats to Sweden from Denmark.
  • Charles XII was not the simple and uneducated soldier-king he has often been made out to be. His intellectual pursuits were many and varied. He became increasingly occupied with new ideas in administration, and many of his administrative reforms were far ahead of their time. He demanded considerable sacrifices of those classes in Sweden who were lukewarm about the war effort once the years of bad fortune set in after 1709.
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Henry VIII | Biography, Wives, & Facts | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Henry-VIII-king-of-England England Foreign Policy Henry VII Tudor
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  • Henry was the second son of Henry VII, first of the Tudor line, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, first king of the short-lived line of York. When his elder brother, Arthur, died in 1502, Henry became the heir to the throne; of all the Tudor monarchs, he alone spent his childhood in calm expectation of the crown, which helped give an assurance of majesty and righteousness to his willful, ebullient character.
  • More serious was Henry’s determination to engage in military adventure. Europe was being kept on the boil by rivalries between the French and Spanish kingdoms, mostly over Italian claims; and, against the advice of his older councillors, Henry in 1512 joined his father-in-law, Ferdinand II of Aragon, against France and ostensibly in support of a threatened pope, to whom the devout king for a long time paid almost slavish respect.
  • The cardinal had some occasional ambition for the papal tiara, and this Henry supported; Wolsey at Rome would have been a powerful card in English hands. In fact, there was never any chance of this happening, any more than there was of Henry’s election to the imperial crown, briefly mooted in 1519 when the emperor Maximilian I died, to be succeeded by his grandson Charles V.
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  • In Charles, the crowns of Spain, Burgundy (with the Netherlands), and Austria were united in an overwhelming complex of power that reduced all the dynasties of Europe, with the exception of France, to an inferior position.
  • at Pavia (1525), for the moment, destroyed the rival power of France.
  • It provoked a serious reaction in England, and Henry concluded that Wolsey’s usefulness might be coming to an end.
  • Since Henry knew how to work with parliaments, the immediate effect was to make him appear more dominant than ever and to give to his reign a spurious air of autocracy—spurious because in fact the rule of law remained to control the sovereign’s mere will.
  • Between 1538 and 1541 the families of Pole and Courtenay were destroyed by the axe for treasons linked with efforts abroad to reverse the course of events in England but mainly because they could claim royal blood and represented a dynastic danger to the unprolific Tudor line.
  • from Cromwell’s fall (which he regretted too late), the only maker of policy. Policy in the hands of a sick, unhappy, violent man was not likely to be either sensible or prosperous, and so it proved. Left to himself, Henry concentrated on keeping the realm united, despite the growing strife between the religious factions, and on keeping before the world his own image as the glorious monarch of the age. The first resulted in frequent explosions against the ingratitude of his subjects and against his councillors. The second brought him back to his first love—war and conquest, the sport of kings.
  • In 1542 the emperor and the king of France resumed hostilities. After a pretense of independence, Henry again joined the former; the Scots promptly joined the French.
  • But the Scottish dream quickly collapsed as Henry’s crude handling of that nation gave control to a pro-French party, determined to resist even an alliance with England; physical conquest was beyond the king’s means.
  • As king of England from 1509 to 1547, Henry VIII presided over the beginnings of the English Reformation, which was unleashed by his own matrimonial involvements, even though he never abandoned the fundamentals of the Roman Catholic faith.
  • Henry VIII has always seemed the very embodiment of true monarchy. Even his evil deeds, never forgotten, have been somehow amalgamated into a memory of greatness.
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The Personality Traits that Led to Napoleon Bonaparte's Epic Downfall - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...all-reasons-personality-traits history
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  • Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise and fall are one of the most spectacular in recorded history. The French general and statesman turned self-appointed emperor revolutionized the nation’s military, legal and educational institutions. But after some of his most audacious expansionist campaigns failed, he was forced to abdicate and was ultimately exiled in disgrace.
  • A close look behind the heroic portraits and beneath the gorgeous uniforms reveals some surprising things about the great little man. (He was small.) Perhaps most striking? The number of complexes he suffered from, including class inferiority, money insecurity, intellectual envy, sexual anxiety, social awkwardness and, not surprisingly, a persistent hypersensitivity to criticism. Taken in whole, these traits drove his stark ambition, undermined his grandiose endeavors—and ultimately crippled his historic legacy.
  • He became brutally aware of social barriers when, at the age of nine, he left home and entered the military academy at Brienne in northern France. His foreign origins, atrocious French (he had grown up speaking a Corsican Italian patois) and dubious noble status laid him open to the taunts of his schoolmates.
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  • He welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, when he was a month short of his 20th birthday—not just because he was a republican, but also because by removing class barriers it opened up new prospects politically and personally. But when he found himself in revolutionary Paris five years later, 26-year-old general Napoleon faced an alarming world governed by two things he had never had much experience of: money and sex.
  • The lure of making money briefly eclipsed his military ambitions as he speculated on buying and selling the properties of émigré or guillotined nobles, and importing often-smuggled luxuries such as coffee, sugar and silk stockings. Although his dislike of what he called “men of business” never left him, neither did his determination never to be short of ready cash. When he came to power he always had with him a cassette of gold coins. He also saw money as the key to achieving the goals he set himself, creating new institutions and building public works.
  • While he was on the retreat from Moscow, a group of generals tried to seize power by announcing he had been killed in battle. The plot failed, but it revealed to Napoleon that his whole edifice of imperial glory had feet of clay. On hearing of his death, nobody reacted as they would have had he been a real monarch—by saying ‘the Emperor is dead, long live the Emperor’ and proclaiming his son’s accession to the throne.
  • As appalled as he was by Josephine’s promiscuity, Napoleon was entranced by her supposedly aristocratic background. He would be even more excited by that of his second wife, the Austrian archduchess Marie-Louise. As she was a great-niece of the late Marie-Antoinette, he would refer to his ‘uncle’ king Louis XVI and reveled in the fact that his father-in-law was the Emperor of Austria.
  • He continued to build on this image so successfully that he could turn a less-than-glorious episode in Egypt into the stuff of legend and persuade many in France that he was the predestined savior of the nation. This enabled him to seize power and begin rebuilding France from the ruins of the Revolution.
  • While he was destroying the might of Austria, Russia and Prussia by his spectacular victories at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, he received reports from Paris that people were longing for an end to the fighting so they could get on with their lives. By then, his extraordinary luck, leading from triumph to triumph, had begun to make him believe his own propaganda, that he was the darling of destiny. Yet the aura of glory could not mask an underlying frailty.
  • His sexual insecurity and distrust of women only deepened his unwillingness or inability to engage with others, hampering his diplomatic relations, which he saw as showdowns in which he had to be seen to win. He could never see that a judicious concession might win him greater advantages; had he prolonged the peace of Amiens by allowing Britain to keep Malta in 1803, for example, he could have used the respite to reinforce his position, rebuild France’s economy and his navy.
  • He went on fighting a battle that was long lost, desperate for a resounding victory he believed might redeem what, for all the bluster, was his irredeemably low self-esteem. Ironically, it was only after he had lost his throne and was even denied the courtesy of being addressed as a monarch by his British jailers on the island of Saint Helena, that he managed to recover this and project an image of grandeur in defeat that still fascinates people today.
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FC95: The Age of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715) - The Flow of History - 2 views

www.flowofhistory.com/...FC95 Louis XIV history france
shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
  • Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
  • Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
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  • Versailles Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass.  This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris.  Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy.  Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city.  Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
  • Religion was one aspect of Louis' reign that illustrated the absolute nature of his monarchy quite well.  Louis himself was quite a pious Catholic, learning that trait from his mother.  However, in the spirit of the day, he saw religion as a department of state subordinate to the will of the king.  By the same token, not adhering to the Catholic faith was seen as treason. As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598.  This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor.  Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
  • Results of Louis' reign The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons.  First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe.  Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow.  Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin.  Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever.  French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained.  All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction.  Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe.  However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt.  Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
  • Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.  This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English.  Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once.  For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations.  But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause.  His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies.  However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
  • Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler.  Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north.  Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion.  Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
  • Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history.  As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles."  Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
  • I am the state. — Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
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Anti-Monarchy Conference Coincides With Queen's Platinum Jubilee - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...anti-monarchy-queen.html
shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Instead, Mr. Smith will be hosting an international anti-monarchy conference, and explaining why he thinks Britain should get rid of its royals.
  • urging Britons to “make Elizabeth the last” monarch.
  • “I certainly don’t view her with any kind of admiration,” he said, drinking a coffee in the town of Reading, west of London, where he now lives. “There is no achievement in what she’s done.”
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  • She was given the job for life when she was 25, and she’s still alive 70 years later so she’s still got the job.”
  • In the midst of these changes, the royal family seems an unrepresentative symbol of modern Britain, raising questions about why the country’s next three heads of state are destined to be white men from the most privileged of backgrounds, Mr. Smith thinks.
  • But support for the royal family has declined in the past few decades and is weakest among young people. So Mr. Smith thinks time is on his side.
  • “The monarchy’s support is dropping on her watch,” Mr. Smith said. “If she’s not able to stop that happening, then Charles certainly won’t when he’s king.”Part of this, Mr. Smith thinks, is about changing social attitudes as exemplified by the legalization of same-sex marriage, the growing discussion over issues like mental health, and debates over the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter and the legacy of slavery.
  • She remains a symbol of national unity at a time when the United Kingdom is under growing threat of breaking up and there is no consensus on what sort of system could replace the monarchy — an institution that even most left-of-center politicians want to keep.
  • if you speak with a posh voice, you probably know what you’re doing, you seem to be the right fit for being in change.”
  • “I don’t see why there should be a royal family today — I don’t see the need for them,” said Mr. Jones, also a retiree, adding, “The current monarch is probably as good as you are going to get, but I’m not looking forward to the next one.”
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Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee Celebrates Her 70 years on the Throne - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...queen-elizabeth-jubilee.html queen elizabeth new york times
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • LONDON — With columns of Scots and Irish guards, throngs of Union Jack-clad admirers and waves of aircraft roaring overhead, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated 70 years on the throne Thursday, earning tributes from world leaders and ordinary people for one of history’s great acts of constancy.
  • “You are the golden thread that binds our two countries, the proof of the unwavering friendship between our nations,” said President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking in English in a videotaped greeting.
  • It was only the first of four days of festivities, known collectively as the queen’s Platinum Jubilee. But it was perhaps the grandest, featuring a military parade with 1,200 officers and soldiers from the Household Division, hundreds of Army musicians, 240 horses, a 41-gun salute and a 70-aircraft flyover.
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  • In the ensuing decades, the queen has become an irreplaceable figure in Britain, central to its self-identity.
  • That the queen made it to this Platinum Jubilee at all was far from given. She contracted the coronavirus in February and has talked about how the ordeal left her exhausted. She lost her husband, Prince Philip, last year, and her fragile health has forced her to cancel multiple public appearances, including two major events on the royal calendar: a remembrance service for the war dead and the state opening of Parliament.
  • “I like democracies, but I have a fascination with monarchical displays of power,” said Nichola Persic, an Italian exchange student who left his college in Canterbury, England, at dawn to stake out a position along the parade route. “And it’s nice to be a part of something people will remember.”
  • Strictly speaking, Elizabeth has not yet set the longevity record for any monarch.
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Bones Under Parking Lot Belonged to Richard III - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...richard-the-third-bones.html history methods UK
shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • researchers showed photographs of the skeleton as they found it, stuffed into a grave without a coffin, clearly displaying curvature of the spine as chronicled in contemporary accounts of Richard III’s appearance.
  • DNA samples from the remains had been compared with the DNA of two descendants of the monarch’s family. One of them, Michael Ibsen, is the son of a 16th-generation niece of King Richard’s. The second descendant wished to remain anonymous, the researchers said. The researchers said that the body displayed 10 wounds, 8 of them in the skull and some likely to have caused death, possibly by a blow from a halberd, a kind medieval weapon with an ex-like head on a long pole. Other wounds seem to have been inflicted after his death to humiliate the monarch after his armor was stripped and he was paraded naked over the back of a horse, the researchers said.
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Europe and the Age of Exploration | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Met... - 0 views

www.metmuseum.org/...hd_expl.htm history education exploration
shared by fischerry on 30 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The great period of discovery from the latter half of the fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries is generally referred to as the Age of Exploration. It is exemplified by the Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus Essay Gold of the Indies (1451–1506), who undertook a voyage to the New World under the auspices of the Spanish monarchs, Isabella I of Castile (1451–1504) and Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516).
  • fischerry on 30 Oct 16
     
    This article from TheMet talks about the Age of Exploration.
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Thailand's thoughtcrime arrests are getting dangerously bizarre - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...85163714 Thailand Arrests Crime Rights
shared by maddieireland334 on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • Thailand is now entering its third year under military dictatorship, a reign established when generals seized power from an elected government on May 22, 2014.
  • The army has vowed to use its sweeping powers to heal a nation torn by class resentment.
  • When the army seized power two years ago, it justified its takeover by promising a wave of grand reforms. Thailand, the generals said, would become a nation purged of corruption and of the recurring, sometimes bloody street protests that have convulsed the political order for nearly a decade
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  • Indeed, Thailand has endured 13 successful coups since 1932, the last year in which the nation (then called Siam) was directly ruled by monarchs.
  • This can involve several days of interrogation and re-education at an army camp. Failure to attend is a crime. “The United States has the Patriot Act to deal with the situation after 9/11,” Gen. Werachon said. “This is the same.”
  • Even less fortunate are those accused of Thailand’s most serious speech-related crime: disrespecting the royal family
  • But disrespect toward the king, who is now 88 and in ailing health, is hardly common. He is widely revered and his image is ubiquitous — on banknotes, gilded street portraits and glowing portrayals on television.
  • Though corruption persists and the economy is struggling, few are eager to risk confronting a military with near-absolute power.
  • A poll released six months ago by Thailand’s statistics office, which is beholden to the military government, dubiously suggests that 99% of Thais are happy under the junta.
  • “They made it clear from day one that they would not tolerate even the slightest dissent,” Sunai said. “Now these measures send a very clear signal that Thailand is falling deeper and deeper into military dictatorship.”
  • The public will vote on the junta’s favored constitution in August. But ahead of the referendum, debate is stifled. The penalty for those found guilty of “influencing a voter”? Up to 10 years in prison.
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Thai prime minister struggles to stay in power - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...4634901
shared by Julia Blumberg on 18 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • From inside her "war room" in a temporary office at the Defense Ministry, Thailand's beleaguered Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra is watching television feeds of flag-waving protesters trying to bring down her government.
    • Julia Blumberg
      Julia Blumberg on 18 Jan 14
       
      Prime Minister - struggling to stay in power
  • Yingluck can't order a police crackdown for fear of triggering a military coup. And she is now facing a serious legal threat: The country's anti-corruption commission has announced that it will probe her handling of a controversial rice policy, an investigation that could force her from office if she is found guilty.
  • The power struggle has taken place against what analysts also see as a battle for control over a crucial transition period when the country's 86-year-old monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, passes from the scene. But for much of it, Yingluck had stayed out of the spotlight.
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  • Just three years ago, she was largely unknown
  • Today, she is in the political fight of her life
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3 Gulf Countries Pull Ambassadors From Qatar Over Its Support of Islamists - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ll-ambassadors-from-qatar.html history politics gulf countries pull qatar support
shared by julia rhodes on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Tensions between Qatar and neighboring Persian Gulf monarchies broke out Wednesday when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from the country over its support of the Muslim Brotherhood and allied Islamists around the region.
  • The concerted effort to isolate Qatar, a tiny, petroleum-rich peninsula, was an extraordinary rebuke of its strategy of aligning with moderate Islamists in the hope of extending its influence amid the Arab Spring revolts.But in recent months Islamists’ gains have been rolled back, with the military takeover in Egypt, the governing party shaken in Turkey, chaos in Libya and military gains by the government in Syria.
  • The Saudi monarchs, in particular, have grumbled for years as tiny Qatar has swaggered around like a heavyweight. It used its huge wealth and Al Jazeera, which it owns, as instruments of regional power. It negotiated a peace deal in Lebanon, supported Palestinian militants in Gaza, shipped weapons to rebels in Libya and Syria, and gave refuge to exiled leaders of Egypt’s Brotherhood — all while certain its own security was assured by the presence of a major American military base.
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  • All four gulf countries actively back the Syrian rebels against President Bashar al-Assad, and all see Shiite Iran as a regional rival. But now the split with Qatar makes it harder for the West to work with them as a group on common concerns like Iran or Syria.
  • . The internal tensions make it harder for Washington to reassure the nervous governments in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia that American negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program will not undermine gulf security.
  • In its own statement, Qatar expressed “surprise and regret” and denied that the rift had anything to do with “security and stability.”
  • “The whole issue is really about Sisi,” he said. “These countries are supporting a coup d’état” and “they want Qatar to support such a policy” but “we will never support another regime that kills its own people.”
  • Qatar, on the other hand, was Egypt’s most important donor when the Brotherhood was in power. Doha, along with London and Istanbul, has become a hub for Brotherhood leaders in exile.
  • The United Arab Emirates state news media reported last month that its government had summoned Qatar’s ambassador to express “extreme resentment” at a declaration on Al Jazeera by Sheik Qaradawi that the Emirates “has always been opposed to Islamic rule.”
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If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...franz-ferdinand-had-lived.html origins WWI austria empire balkan history crisis
shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • There were many possibilities before 1914. One ingenious proposal was for a United States of Austria, which would have carved the empire into a series of federal language-based states, including small urban enclaves to protect (but also isolate) German speakers. This could have been achieved only by the destruction of Magyar imperialism, but Franz Ferdinand at different points seems to have seen this as worth risking. The archduke also toyed with universal suffrage, knowing that the threat alone might keep the Magyar and German minorities in line.
  • these are ghosts that have haunted Europe ever since — possibilities whose disappearance unleashed evils inconceivable in the stuffy, hypocritical, but relatively decent and orderly world of the Hapsburg empire.
  • The Hapsburg rulers might have been shortsighted, cynical and incompetent, but they ruled over a paradise compared to the horrors that followed. The successor states were desperately weak, and almost all contained fractions of those minorities that had caused the Hapsburgs such problems.
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  • There were many reasons Franz Ferdinand was the perfect target for the Serbian-sponsored terrorists of 1914. They knew that his plans for reform within the empire were a profound threat to them.
  • The fates of the countries of the former empire, as they fell into the hands first of Hitler and then of Stalin, represented nightmarish “solutions” to the challenge of multinational rule, solutions based on genocide, class war and mass expulsions of kinds unimaginable in 1914.
  • Franz Ferdinand was probably the most senior antiwar figure in Central Europe, a man acutely aware of Hapsburg weakness, scathing about the delusions of his generals and a close friend of the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. The recklessness and stupidity of the Hapsburg response to the assassination — the ultimatum of humiliating demands served on Serbia, a response so crucial to the outbreak of the World War I — would not have occurred in the face of some other provocative outrage that had left Franz Ferdinand alive.
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Hirohito: String Puller, Not Puppet - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-string-puller-not-puppet.html Japan hirohito wwII
shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • As I and other scholars have tried to show, Hirohito, from the start of his rule in 1926, was a dynamic, activist and conflicted monarch who operated within a complex system of irresponsibility inherited from his grandfather, the Meiji emperor, who oversaw the start of Japan’s epochal modernization.
  • Hirohito (known in Japan as Showa, the name of his reign) represented an ideology and an institution — a system constructed to allow the emperor to interject his will into the decision-making process, before prime ministers brought cabinet decisions to him for his approval. Because he operated behind the scenes, the system allowed his advisers to later insist that he had acted only in accordance with their advice.
  • In fact, Hirohito was never a puppet. He failed to prevent his army from invading Manchuria in 1931, which caused Japan to withdraw from the League of Nations, but he sanctioned the full-scale invasion of China in 1937, which moved Japan into a state of total war. He exercised close control over the use of chemical weapons in China and sanctioned the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even after the war, when a new, American-modeled Constitution deprived him of sovereignty, he continued to meddle in politics.
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  • Hirohito was a timid opportunist, eager above all to preserve the monarchy he had been brought up to defend. War was not essential to his nature, as it was for Hitler and Europe’s fascists. The new history details his concern over the harsh punishments enacted in 1928 to crush leftist and other opposition to Japan’s rising militarism and ultranationalism. It elaborates on his role in countering a coup attempt in 1936 by young Army officers who wanted to install an even more right-wing, militaristic government. It notes that he cried for only the second time in his life when his armed forces were dissolved.
  • The official history confirms Hirohito’s bullheadedness in delaying surrender when it was clear that defeat was inevitable. He hoped desperately to enlist Stalin’s Soviet Union to obtain more favorable peace terms. Had Japan surrendered sooner, the firebombing of its cities, and the two atomic bombings, might have been avoided.
  • Japan’s government has never engaged in a full-scale reckoning of its wartime conduct. This is partly because of the anti-imperialist dimension of the war it fought against Western powers, and partly because of America’s support for European colonialism in the early Cold War. But it is also a result of a deliberate choice — abetted by the education system and the mass media, with notable exceptions — to overlook or distort issues of accountability.
  • The new history comes at a politically opportune time. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party government is waging a campaign to pump up nationalist pride.
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