Group items tagged

a close look at the rich list supports the thesis made famous by Thomas Piketty in his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” — namely, that we’re on our way toward a society dominated by wealth, much of it inherited, rather than work.

these days a lot of top money managers’ income comes not from investing other people’s money but from returns on their own accumulated wealth

Over time, extreme inequality in income leads to extreme inequality of wealth; indeed, the wealth share of America’s top 0.1 percent is back at Gilded Age levels. This, in turn, means that high incomes increasingly come from investment income, not salaries. And it’s only a matter of time before inheritance becomes the biggest source of great wealth.

why does all of this matter? Basically, it’s about taxes.America has a long tradition of imposing high taxes on big incomes and large fortunes, designed to limit the concentration of economic power as well as raising revenue. These days, however, suggestions that we revive that tradition face angry claims that taxing the rich is destructive and immoral

Piketty’s analysis articulates what many people on the Democratic left feel intuitively, that a domestic tax, spending and regulatory agenda is ineffective in the face of the power of globalized capital to grind down wages and benefits.

Rogoff views evidence of growing inequality presented by Piketty and others as “persuasive” and he proposes a number of alternative, smaller-scale remedies to control disproportionate wealth accumulation. He suggests a shift to a “relatively flat consumption tax, with a large deductible for progressivity.”

“absent aggressive policy intervention, the Western world appears to be headed toward a plutocratic dystopia characterized by wealth inequality approaching that of ancien régime France.”

Baker wrote that “a big part of the appeal is that it allows people to say capitalism is awful but there is nothing that we can do about it.”

Piketty’s proposed global tax would set rates of 0.1 to 0.5 percent on fortunes of less than 1 million euros ($1.37 million); 1 percent on assets of 1 to 5 million euros ($1.37 million to $6.87 million); 2 percent on holdings of 5 to 10 million euros ($6.87 million to $13.7 million); and a sliding scale ultimately reaching 10 percent on fortunes of “several hundred million or several billion euros.”

Why, Rogoff asks, should we “try to move to an improbable global wealth tax when alternatives are available that are growth friendly, raise significant revenue, and can be made progressive through a very high exemption”?

Rogoff cites a series of suggestions developed by Jeffrey Frankel, a professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard. These include “the elimination of payroll taxes for low-income workers, a cut in deductions for high-income workers, and higher inheritance taxes.”

In other words, centrists like Rogoff and Crook – in addition to liberals determined to assault bastions of privilege — are beginning to take proposals to restrain the growing concentration of wealth seriously.

Both the shift of attention to wealth and the seriousness with which a proposal to constrain the accumulation of wealth is being taken represent a major change in the contemporary debate over inequality. Few Americans appear to begrudge the multimillion dollar annual compensation of entrepreneurial executives like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. But inherited and unearned wealth does not command the same legitimacy.

In fact, the emergence of what Piketty calls “patrimonial capitalism” — concentrated wealth and political power passed on from generation to generation in a class-based social order — runs directly counter to the longstanding American commitment to equality of opportunity. Piketty has laid the intellectual groundwork for a challenge to a social and political order based on socioeconomic ranking by wealth stratification.

The economy can’t be played like a piano — press a fiscal key here and the right job creation notes come out over there. Instead, economic management is more like parenting. If you instill good values and create a secure climate then, through some mysterious process you will never understand, things will probably end well.

The crucial issue is getting the fundamentals right. The Germans are doing better because during the past decade, they took care of their fundamentals and the Americans didn’t. The situation can be expressed this way: German policy makers inherited a certain consensus-based economic model. That model has advantages. It fosters gradual innovation (of the sort useful in metallurgy). It also has disadvantages. It sometimes leads to rigidity and high unemployment.

In the U.S., policy makers inherited a different economic model, one that also has certain advantages. It fosters disruptive innovation (of the sort useful in Silicon Valley). It also has certain disadvantages — a penchant for over-consumption and short term thinking.

Nations rise and fall on the intertwined strength of their cultures and governing institutions. Despite all the normal shortcomings, German governing institutions have functioned reasonably well, ushering in painful but necessary reforms. The U.S. has a phenomenally creative culture, but right now it’s an institutional weakling.

I am very cleareyed about the hurdles to finally closing Guantánamo: The politics of this are tough,” Mr. Obama said during a 17-minute address. “I don’t want to pass this problem on to the next president, whoever it is. And if, as a nation, we don’t deal with this now, when will we deal with it?”

He said the issue had cost him “countless hours” of consternation as he toiled to craft a workable solution to a problem that he inherited from his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and that forced him to apologize on the world stage for an approach to terrorism he never supported.

Reprising arguments he has made since he first campaigned for president, Mr. Obama said the prison had fueled the recruitment efforts of terrorists, harmed American alliances and been a drain on taxpayer dollars.

It was also a final bid to erase what has become a painful and persistent blot on his tenure: his inability to tackle an issue that animated his campaign in 2008 and in many ways encapsulates his approach to national security.

The White House refused on Tuesday, as Mr. Obama’s advisers have done consistently, to rule out the prospect that he would use his constitutional powers as commander in chief, if Congress refuses to act, to close the prison unilaterally before leaving office.

The nine-page plan was immediately rejected by Republican presidential candidates and members of Congress.

“Not only are we not going to close Guantánamo, when I am president, if we capture a terrorist alive, they are not getting a court hearing in Manhattan. They are not going to be sent to Nevada,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a presidential candidate, said at a campaign rally in Las Vegas before the state’s Republican caucus. “They are going to Guantánamo, and we are going to find out everything they know.”

Democrats, too, were skeptical of the strategy, which centers on bringing to a prison on domestic soil 30 to 60 detainees who are deemed too dangerous to release, while transferring the remaining detainees to other countries.

The blueprint offered few specifics, refraining from mentioning any of the potential replacement facilities the Pentagon had visited in preparing it, including military prisons in Leavenworth, Kan., and Charleston, S.C., as well as several civilian prisons in Colorado.

At the start of his administration, Mr. Obama noted, Republicans — including his predecessor, George W. Bush, and his rival for the White House, Senator John McCain of Arizona — backed the idea of closing the prison. “This was not some radical, far-left view,” Mr. Obama said. But “the public was scared into thinking that, well, if we close it, somehow we’ll be less safe.”

The Pentagon argued in its proposal that replacing Guantánamo would cost less than keeping detainees at the naval base in Cuba. Upgrading an existing prison could cost as much as $475 million, but would save the government as much as $85 million annually in operational costs compared with Guantánamo, it found.

The president’s plan faces steep obstacles, however. Congress has enacted a law banning the military from transferring detainees from Guantánamo onto domestic soil, and lawmakers have shown little interest in lifting that restriction.

Human rights groups and lawyers for detainees were divided. Some oppose bringing detainees who are being detained indefinitely without trial onto domestic soil, saying that would simply relocate the problem without solving it.

The Bush administration opened the prison in January 2002 and sent detainees from the Afghanistan war there. It declared that the detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions and that courts had no authority to oversee what the government did to prisoners at the base. In the prison’s early years, interrogators frequently used coercive techniques on detainees.

In one of his first acts as president, Mr. Obama issued an executive order instructing the government to shut the prison down within a year. But that proved easier said than done, and as the administration studied how to go about achieving that goal, political support for it melted away.

Mr. Obama has refused to add any more detainees to the 242 he inherited, instead working to chip away at the population. Of the 91 who remain, 35 are recommended for transfer if security conditions can be met, 10 have been charged or convicted before the military commissions system, and 46 have neither been charged with a crime nor approved for transfer.

A parolelike periodic review board is slowly working its way through their numbers and moving some to the transfer list. It was meeting even on Tuesday, senior administration officials said, as Mr. Obama strode into the Roosevelt Room to say, “Let us go ahead and close this chapter.”

This idea seemed to be disproved in the 20th century, by the emergence of a prosperous, non-revolutionary working class. But Piketty argues that those developments were transitory, made possible mostly by the massive destruction of inherited capital during the long era of world war.

Absent another such disruption, he expects a world in which the returns to capital permanently outstrip  —  as they have recently  —  the returns to labor, and inequality rises far beyond even today’s levels

Combine this trend with slowing growth, and we face a future like the 19th-century past, in which vast inherited fortunes bestride the landscape while the middle class fractures, weakens, shrinks.

On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy’s vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.

The term properly refers to a specific kind of American elite, mostly from the Northeast, mostly high-church Protestants, concentrated in a few cities (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, plus some Midwestern and Californian outposts), generally associated with the Republican Party (with occasional defectors like F.D.R.), who dominated a particular set of fields (academia, finance, foreign policy) and shared the code of service and piety and manners that defined the elder Bush’s career.

Their importance rested, to borrow from a WASP acquaintance’s email this week, on being “primus inter pares” — first among equals, with a particular kind of power in a particular set of institutions, and an ability to set a tone for the American upper class that was adopted by other groups when they ascended.

And ascend they often did, because the older American system was both hierarchical and permeable, with room for actual merit even without a meritocratic organizing theory.

Those advancing groups included non-Anglo-Saxons, and eventually non-Protestants and non-whites.

their example suggested that an aristocratic spirit was transferable to a more diverse elite, that there could be Catholic and African-American and Jewish aristocrats — like, say, the family that has long stewarded this newspaper — who could adopt the WASP establishment’s upper-class virtues without the ethnic and religious chauvinism.

The way of the “best and the brightest” at the dawn of the technocratic era and the “smartest guys in the room” decades later, the way of the arsonists of late-2000s Wall Street and the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley.

This was meritocracy, the system that we now take for granted. And for several reasons it didn’t work as planned

then the WASPs themselves decided to dissolve their own aristocracy, and transform their once-Protestant universities into a secular mass-opportunity system — a more democratic way of education, in which anyone with enough talent could climb the ladder, and personal achievement and technical expertise would be prized above all else.

instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.

Second, the meritocratic elite inevitably tends back toward aristocracy, because any definition of “merit” you choose will be easier for the children of these self-segregated meritocrats to achieve.

But even as it restratifies society, the meritocratic order also insists that everything its high-achievers have is justly earned. “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple,”

This spirit discourages inherited responsibility and cultural stewardship; it brushes away the disciplines of duty; it makes the past seem irrelevant, because everyone is supposed to come from the same nowhere and rule based on technique alone

As a consequence, meritocrats are often educated to be bad leaders, and bad people, in a very specific way — a way of arrogant intelligence unmoored from historical experience, ambition untempered by self-sacrifice.

First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders

Diversity, despite what many liberals want to think, does not provide a solution to this problem

nothing about being a woman or a minority makes you immune to meritocracy’s ruthless solipsism. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes or the slipping-from-grace Sheryl Sandberg

I don’t want to bring back the WASPs; if I had the magic wand to conjure a different elite, it would be a multiracial, multilingual Catholic aristocracy ruling from Quebec to Chile. (Hey, you asked.

But I do want to raise the possibility that an aristocracy that knows itself to be one might be more clearsighted and effective than an aristocracy that doesn’t, and that the WASPs had at least one clear advantage over their presently-floundering successors: They knew who and what they were

do the founders of those new fortunes “ever wonder how it will all play out, 100 years hence?” Because somewhere another beneficiary will choke down his gilded spoon, and tell himself he likes it.

“Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.

Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him

Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide

The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.

When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.

In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”

In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”

Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.

In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers

The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.

In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:

The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.

Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that

Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”

President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.

Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.

On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.

A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants

When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.

Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”

t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”

Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”

What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,

“It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”

Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.

Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.

He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe

it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.

The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.

two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.

Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.

the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.

The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it

historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name

Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.

The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.

That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.

The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.

The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.

because it has no canon, liberalism perpetually redefines and renews itself

mankind is fallible; our saving grace is that our errors are “corrigible.” We acknowledge our fallibility by listening to those with whom we disagree, and testing our ideas against the strongest possible counter-argument

In our own world, after all, free speech abounds while the intellectual habits that make free speech actually matter degenerate.

How can the quintessentially rationalist faith of liberalism flourish in an age that systematically demeans rationality?

all early liberals would have accepted Adam Smith’s proposition that prosperity will be best served if men are given free rein to pursue their self-interest

In 1909, Herbert Croly published The Promise of American Life, an immensely influential book that argued that Jeffersonian individualism no longer offered a real guarantee of freedom. “The democratic principle requires an equal start in the race,” Croly wrote, but so long as private property was sacred, equal rights could not guarantee equal opportunity to citizens not born to privilege.

The trunk of liberalism now separated into two boughs. One revived the free-market tradition, arguing that political freedom could not flourish absent full economic freedom.

The other liberalism was buoyed up by FDR’s New Deal and then sustained as the bulwark against totalitarianism by mid-century thinkers like Popper, Isaiah Berlin and George Orwell. This was the moderately interventionist, secular, empirical, pragmatic doctrine that became something like a civic religion in the United States after World War II

The “vital center,” as Arthur Schlesinger called it, occupied a spot midway between the strict individualism of 19th-century England and the collectivist social democracy of post-war Europe.

by the 1960s it was not white middle-class American who needed state intervention, but minorities, above all African Americans, who had been left behind as American became a broadly prosperous nation. This moral commitment carried obvious political dangers, for liberals were now asking Americans to make sacrifices for others.

By the end of the decade, liberalism had begun to lose its hold on the white working-class, once the prime beneficiary of government programs. Liberalism has never regained its appeal for those voters

“Neoliberals” or advocates of a “Third Way” like Bill Clinton (or Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder in Europe) endorsed the conservative emphasis on economic growth but applied liberal principles of social justice to public investment and the distribution of wealth; they aspired to forge a liberalism of the middle class.

The right-liberal and left-liberal parties traded power; each appeared to have almost exactly half the country on its side. Then, in 2016, the seesaw stopped: Both parties were rejected in favor of a candidate who simultaneously attacked Wall Street and the welfare state

Liberals have a problem of a different order; they need to reconstruct their faith as they did in 1912 and 1964 and 1992, when they learned or relearned how to speak to the broad middle of the country.

rather, liberals need to decide whether that is their goal. Can they, should they, seek to address the deep sense of grievance that the election exposed?

In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla argues that the growing obsession with identity politics has stripped liberals of the civic language they long used to address the American people collectively.

One way of thinking about the choice liberals face is this: At a moment of intense polarization, they must either return to the old “we” or deploy their own version of “us and them.”

liberalism simply cannot survive the violent division that now afflicts our culture. Intellectual polarization follows, and reinforces, social polarization. It is in the interest of liberals to take seriously the dictum of Lincoln that a house divided cannot stand.

What would it mean to address the sense of grievance that cost Hillary Clinton the election? Doing so requires liberals to find ways of buffering the effects of the globalization of jobs and products and people, without surrendering to Trump’s xenophobia and isolationism.

And it requires addressing the issue of inequality

But the inequality that makes Trump voters seethe is not the same one that enrages voters on the left; not the “1 percent,” but liberals themselves

The meritocracy of professionals and academics and upper-white-collar workers has ossified in recent years into something that looks to people on the outside more like an oligarchy. In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce dubs this phenomenon “hereditary meritocracy.

about a quarter of American children from the top 1 percent of the income scale attend an elite university, while only 0.5 percent of those from the bottom fifth do

Patrick Deneen, the author of Why Liberalism Died, has a word for this class: the “liberalocracy.” While the aristocratic family perpetuated itself through the landed estate, Deneen writes, the liberalocratic family rests upon the legacy of liberal individualism “loose generational ties, portable credentials, the inheritance of fungible wealth, and the promise of mobility.”

, standing apart from his fellow man, his past and his place. Liberty, in this formulation, means freedom from coercion, freedom to do as you wish—“negative liberty,” as Isaiah Berlin called it

Deneen reminds us of an older tradition, reaching back to Plato, which argues that citizens must gain self-mastery in order to be capable of exercising self-government. Liberty of this sort presupposes an “education in virtue”

Deneen is a Catholic conservative who offers an alternative reading of history that will be appealing to other Catholic conservatives, though perhaps only very reactionary ones.

In The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly writes that in a free society, men of talent will naturally rise to the top. But that privileged position begins to corrode social bonds when it threatens to become permanent, whether through inheritance or through the exploitation of privilege. “The essential wholeness of the community,” he writes, “depends absolutely on the ceaseless creation of a political, economic, and social aristocracy and their equally incessant replacement.”

Croly hoped to preserve the “essential wholeness of the community” in part through a steeply progressive estate tax. Teddy Roosevelt, his great patron, agreed

There is, in fact, no sharper difference between left-liberalism and right-liberalism than the estate tax, with its implicit principle that privilege ought not be transmitted generationally

No less important, the willingness of the left, unlike the right, to gore its own ox might demonstrate to hard-pressed Americans that the liberal elite understands, as it once understood, the meaning of sacrifice.

But do liberals understand sacrifice? Liberalism did grave damage to its reputation in the 1960s by demanding real sacrifices from ordinary people and very little from elites, whose children were not the ones being bused to inner-city schools, nor drafted and sent off to fight in Vietnam. Has anything changed today?

So many of the things liberals favor—globalization, a generous immigration policy, an increase in the minimum wage, affirmative action—do them real good and little harm, while impinging, or at least seeming to impinge, on Americans a few steps down the ladder.

What do liberals favor that’s good for America broadly but not good for them?

liberals fancy themselves idealists. They need to prove it by pulling themselves off their perch. What about mandatory national service?

National service and even the estate tax are essentially emblems; perhaps sacrifice itself is a kind of emblem. But it is a language that Americans understand, and appreciate. If liberals are to find a way to speak to Americans who have been trained to regard them as the spawn of Satan, it will not be enough, as Hillary Clinton amply demonstrated, to have the best policies.

The first traces of the Nubian kingdom called Kush date to roughly 2,000 B.C. Egyptians conquered parts of the Kushite Kingdom for a few hundred years, and around 1,000 B.C., the Egyptians appear to have died, left, or mixed thoroughly with the local population. At 800 B.C., Kushite kings, also known as the black pharaohs, took over Egypt for a century—two cobras decorating the pharaohs’ crowns signified the unification of kingdoms. And somewhere around 300 A.D., the Kushite empire began to fade away.

A woman’s skull half coated with termite-riddled dirt rests on a wooden table. Smith beams and locates an amulet the size of his fist that he found beside this skeleton. The amulet is shaped like a scarab beetle, a common symbol of rebirth in Egypt, but the insect bears a man’s head. “This is very unusual,” Smith says. He laughs as he paraphrases hieroglyphics etched into the scarab’s underside: “On the day of judgment, let my heart not testify against me.”

“This period has been burdened by racist colonial interpretations assuming that Nubians were backwater and inferior and now we can tell the story of this remarkable civilization,” he adds

When ancient Egyptians conquered the region, they identified Jebel Barkal as the residence of the god Amun, who was believed to help renew life each year when the Nile flooded. They carved a temple into its base, and illustrated the walls with gods and goddesses. And when ancient Nubians regained control, they converted the holy mountain into a place for royal coronations, and constructed pyramids for royalty beside it.

“Civilisation had opened my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about.”

Beard is one of three “presenters” (or hosts) of the series, joining the historians Simon Schama and David Olusoga for a round-the-world, millennia-spanning tour of human hustle and bustle. The series has its faults of pacing and plotting, but it offers plenty of opportunities for Beard-like tingles

The new program is best understood as a kind of delayed rebuttal, sometimes quite explicit, to Clark and his view of history

The association is all to the good, and to Clark’s benefit, if it leads audiences back to civilization, and Civilisation, all 13 episodes of which are playing 24/7 at your neighborhood YouTube.

He wasn’t a natural TV star, but he was an accomplished lecturer, a brilliant stylist, and an unrivaled historian of art. When, in 1966, the BBC decided to produce a series on the history of European culture, Clark was the unanimous choice for presenter.

The job fell to the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough to introduce color to the BBC audience. He got the idea to film a survey of the greatest artworks of Europe, as a way of bringing color into British living rooms as tastefully and vividly (and cheaply) as possible.

It is hard to imagine, at this remove and with the conventions of documentary TV so well established, how strange Civilisation must have seemed 50 years ago. Color was just the first of the technological innovations, and the range of subjects and locales was unheard of

No one had seen a single presenter so dominate a nonfiction program of such length as Clark did. Unprecedented too were the long stretches in which Clark disappeared, leaving the camera to move tenderly over the surface of something beautiful.

The narration, full of anecdote and grand pronouncements, was pitched at the highest level, without condescension or pedantry

About that word civilization, the mere utterance of which set Clark off on his great televised adventure. He confronts it in the first episode’s opening moments, as he stands on the banks of the Seine with Notre-Dame Cathedral rising up behind him. “What is civilization?” he asks us. Then, amazingly—this is, after all, the title of his TV show—he shrugs! “I don’t know,” he says. It is a shrug at once amused, modest, and perhaps genuinely baffled. “I can’t define it in abstract terms. But I think I can recognize it when I see it.” He turns to look over his shoulder at the cathedral. “And I’m looking at it now.”

a sense of civilization’s meaning, by his lights, forms soon enough. Throughout the programs certain words come up over and over: enlarge, deepen, extend, broaden, expand, and above all, life-enhancing. An act or piece of art that is life-enhancing—that allows us to have life, and to have it more abundantly—is civilized; one that isn’t isn’t.

In the first episode Clark compares the ornamental prow of a Viking ship, showing a fearsome animal head, with the head of a once-celebrated sculpture from antiquity known as the Apollo Belvedere. The prow is “a powerful work of art,” he acknowledges, and “more moving to most of us” than the Apollo.

Each expresses a cultural ideal. The prow emerged from “an image of fear and darkness” while the Apollo, the product of “a higher stage of civilization,” emerged from an ideal of harmony and perfection, justice and reason and beauty held in equilibrium. This is the civilizing ideal that Western Europe inherited from Greece and Rome

As Beard says, his “great man” theory of history was even then at odds with the prevailing academic view, which saw (and sees) history as a process swept along by technology, economics, and shifts in the balance of brute power.

He was a confessed “hero worshipper.” “I believe in genius,” he said. When an excellent biography of Clark was published a year ago—Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and ‘Civilisation’ by James Stourton—nearly all reviewers mentioned this hoary defect. Clark’s approach was “scandalous,” “outrageous,” and of course it was stuffed with dead white males

it’s hard to see how any survey of European high culture up to the First World War could include large numbers of nonwhite non-males, since it was produced almost exclusively by persons who had the temporary advantage of being white and male

Clark was too sophisticated, too honest to be a cheerleader. Alongside the glories he shows examples of what happens when civilization goes wrong.

Clark was acutely aware of his program’s shortcomings and omissions. He regretted not dwelling more on philosophy and law, but he “could not think of any way of making them visually interesting.”

Critics too often forget the subtitle of Civilisation: A Personal View. “Obviously,” Clark wrote, “I could not include the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome, because to have done so would have meant another ten programmes, at least.” Ditto India, China, and “the world of Islam.

He reckoned that any misunderstanding was worth the risk. “I didn’t suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East.

Yet the charge against Clark hasn’t been that he was forgetting non-Western cultures but that he was willfully dismissing them, committing an act of denigration.

relativism—a term that Beard and her costars would reject as right-wing cliché—is the motive force behind the series. A variety of academics, plus a narrator, are brought in to reinforce the presenters in their judgment that it is wrong to make judgments.

The story Clark wanted to tell was relatively straightforward—one critic cleverly compared Civilisation to a relay race, with one great man passing the baton to another. Civilisations, by contrast, does a great deal of jumping about, forward and backward and sideways, not merely in geography and chronology but in the sequence of ideas

question-and-answer combo recurs throughout Civilisations. It has a dual purpose: It’s meant first to rattle our confidence in our objective judgment—hey, that figurine is pretty!—and then to turn our attention back on ourselves to discover the cultural conditioning that has manipulated us into the illusion that our judgments are objective—that we have good reason to think the figurine is pretty. “Different eyes behold different things,” we are told.

To the extent Civilisations treats particular pieces of art, it dwells on their function—to what purposes were they put? Mostly, it turns out, art was about projecting and protecting the power of an elite

If you are uncomfortable with this approach—seeing the glories of human creativity reduced to tools for class warfare—too bad

“I love the history of art,” he tells the camera. “I love looking at these beautiful images. But I also recognize that there’s something quite sinister about their past.

“Sinister” sounds judgmental, doesn’t it? So judgmental indeed that I don’t think even Clark used it at all in his Civilisation. But it nicely summarizes the attitude toward the West that viewers of the new Civilisations will find unavoidable, even if they’re confident enough to find it unpersuasive

Next to life-enhancing, the most important word in Clark’s account of civilization was confidence. Several things came together to make a civilization, Clark said: a measure of material prosperity, a sense of history, a range of vision, and a feeling of permanence, of being situated in a particular moment between past and future, that makes it worthwhile to construct things meant to last

“But far more,” he said, “it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, confidence in one’s own mental powers.” His program was an effort to persuade his audience that confidence in their inherited civilization was well-earned.

the centre of a genealogical network which covered half Europe

Through his mother he would inherit Spain and the bloodstained kingdom of Naples as well

through his father he would become one of the great magnates of France as Duke of Burgundy

Clement personally crowned Charles, the last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by a pope

Irony often attended Charles

February 24th, 1500

dividing it between his brother Ferdinand and his son, Philip II of Spain

abdicate in 1556

Charles died in the monastery in 1558

The city had a close relationship with England

it became part of Burgundy

Burgundy itself was as much an idea as a place; sometimes expanding as far south as Italy, sometimes pushing north, swallowing the towns of Flanders and northern France

the last truly effective emperor in Europe

It might fairly be asked why the Emperor Charles V did not dispose of the Valois challenge more quickly.

In 1519 he was elected Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of Germany

Francis, in turn, harboured a deep-seated resentment against Charles

The kingdom had recently been consolidated by the incorporation of great provinces like Burgundy and Brittany

This explains why the history of the Habsburg-Valois rivalry is one where intensive periods of bloody fighting were followed so often by stalemate and financial exhaustion

The two kings [Henry II and Philip II] realised that if they attempted to mount another campaign in 1559, they might stretch their finances and the loyalty of their subjects to breaking point

In waging war he could only really rely on the financial support of the Netherlands and Castile, and as the Habsburg-Valois wars persisted he, and his successor Philip II, found himself plundering both territories to their absolute limits

In the mind of the young Charles V, no family ambition loomed larger than that of recovering his ancestral lands of Burgundy from the French

Much of the Habsburg-Valois rivalry revolved around rival ambitions in Italy

Habsburg-Valois conflict to an end was that the conflict was essentially a dynastic one; the rivalry was between two proud ruling families who were determined to protect the achievements of their forbears and to enhance the reputation and power of their family, or dynasty

This helps to explain why the House of Habsburg and the House of Valois persisted for so long in their conflict with such a disregard for the damaging consequences to their lands and peoples

Francis's successor, Henry II, had spent three years as a hostage of the Habsburgs in Spain, after the Treaty of Madrid, and as King of France from 1547 he exhibited an animosity to the Habsburgs that perhaps exceeded even that of his father

The continuation of the Habsburg-Valois conflict was also a tremendous boon to the Ottoman Sultan. He aimed to extend Muslim Ottoman power into Europe. The major obstacle to expansion were, firstly, the Austrian Habsburg lands in central Europe, ruled by Charles V's brother Ferdinand, and, secondly, the military and naval presence of the Habsburgs in the Mediterranean

The impression is often given that Charles abandoned his claim to Burgundy in the Peace of Cambrai in 1529

Thus for Charles V his personal rivalry with Francis I was overlaid by a sense of injustice at what he perceived to be the theft of his family's Burgundian inheritance by the Valois kings

It was also here that the deeply felt dynastic rivalry between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois was at its most acute. Throughout the long conflict the French chafed at Habsburg control of the kingdom of Naples

Charles V consequently acquired Naples when he inherited the kingdom of Aragon in1516

Francis and his successor Henry II continued to press French claims to Naples

The House of Valois did periodically renounce its claim when peace with the Habsburgs was expedient or unavoidable

Francis I's successor, Henry II, continued to uphold the Valois claim and in 1557 launched a final and unavailing assault on the kingdom.

The House of Valois felt strongly that they had the strongest dynastic claim to the Duchy of Milan

When Charles V had acquired his extensive empire by 1519 he regarded Milan not only as a satellite of the Empire

The Habsburg-Valois wars were, then, to a very significant extent, an unremitting struggle for mastery over Milan

The conflict between the Habsburgs and the Valois appeared at times to escalate into something approaching a general European war. The German Protestants, the lesser powers of Europe and even the superpower of the Ottoman empire were all drawn into the fray at various times

Henry VIII of England took a distinctly opportunistic view of the conflict. When he was anxious to undermine Habsburg predominance in Europe he sided with the French

Charles believed that he had triumphantly achieved his great dynastic dream in 1526, when the defeated and captive Francis I agreed to surrender the territory in the Treaty of Madrid

the Sultan was brought into an anti- Habsburg alliance by the French firstly in 1536 and, later, in 1542

the Two Sicilies were happier under Charles than they had been for many a long century

he reversed his predecessor’s policy of neutrality and involved Spain in two expensive wars against Britain, for which she was ill-prepared; and he committed the country’s pride and strength to a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to recover Gibraltar

Born in Madrid in 1716, the son of Spain’s first Bourbon King, Philip V, and of his second wife, Isabella Farnese, he enjoyed in some respects a happy and normal childhood

to bend the foreign policy of Spain solely for the purpose of providing kingdoms for her offspring

I would like to deserve to be called Charles the Wise

Philip V inherited the melancholy, the longing for seclusion that at times overcame all reason

the King had become so deranged that he had to abdicate in favour of Louis

In October 1731 he set off for Italy to take over the Duchies of Parma and Piacenza, and to garrison Tuscany, an inheritance arranged for him by Isabella

the Austrians had to withdraw and Naples was ensured a separate existence under the Bourbons. Charles returned to his regime of hunting, building and reform.

Taking advantage of Austria’s preoccupations elsewhere in the war of the Polish Succession, Isabella decided to attack in Italy. The aim was to recover for Spain the provinces of the Two Sicilies which had been Spanish for two centuries until 1713 when they had been handed over to Austria under the Treaty of Utrecht. Spain declared war on Austria in December 1733, and Charles was made titular commander-in-chief of the 30,000 Spanish troops that landed at Leghorn

Austria withdrew without a fight and in 1734 Charles became King of the Two Sicilies, a territory now independent for the first time. But as part of the general settlement he had to give up his rights in the Duchies; and a commitment was made, which for him cast a shadow before, that the crowns of Spain and of the Two Sicilies would never be united

As in Spain later, Charles challenged and reduced the powers and privileges of the aristocracy and clergy. He reformed the archaic legal and economic systems. His aim was ‘to sweep away feudalism’,

Naples before him had been without industry or trade

Naples rose and flourished, a European capital of the arts

he astounded the aristocracy of Madrid by the purity of his life

His mother was once again meddling in Italian affairs, trying this time to exploit Vienna’s preoccupation with the war of the Austrian Succession to recover the central Italian duchies for Philip, her second surviving son. Charles was forced to send troops north to support his brother’s Spaniards who had landed under the Duke of Montemar

he nourished a grievance against Britain

he helped to defeat the Austrian troops at Velletri. He showed courage and leadership in the battle, having survived an attempt at capture

identify government not only with order and tradition, but with reform, and thereby helped to avert revolution.

This routine was shattered in 1759 by the death of his childless half-brother Ferdinand VI who had been King of Spain since 1746; a King who, true to family tradition, had gone mad

For months the kingdom of Spain languished under this rule

From the moment of his arrival in Madrid in December 1759, Charles showed that he was not prepared to follow in Ferdinand’s easy-going footsteps. Government was a serious business, and would be conducted by himself in the interests of the people

Italian influence came in with him like a tidal wave, sweeping over muph of Spanish life

But it was in administrative reform that the sharpest note of change was stock. The economy of the country was sagging, yet Charles badly needed more money—among other things to pay off his father’s debts, and to strengthen the almost non-existent defences of Spain and the Indies. A flow of decrees poured forth regulating commerce and providing for the collection of revenue.

cleaning as was done was carried out by private enterprise, by troops of sweepers

Charles set about a radical clean-up

Since reaching Madrid, Charles had been under pressure from both sides to join in the war between Britain and Prussia on the one hand, and France and Austria on the other, which had broken out in 1756

Ferdinand VI had managed to stay neutral and Maria Amalia had been a strong influence for peace, but after her death, Charles changed his policy

life-long grudge against the British for having taken Gibraltar from his father—a feeling compounded by Commodore Martin’s insult

if he joined the French alliance, might help him to recover Minorca and Gibraltar. So in August 1761 he agreed to the Family Compact with Louis XV which brought him into war against Britain

Spain was heavily defeated by the British fleet which captured Havana and Manila

British power had greatly increased, partly at the expense of Spain

The country was exhausted, and there was much resentment against the French. Charles personally would have liked to have shaken himself out of the family straight-jacket

But Louis XV dismissed Choiseul and wrote to Charles in his own hand: ‘My minister would have war, but I will not

Charles had no alternative but to capitulate to the British

the Madrid mutiny of 1766

The favour he had shown early on towards the bourgeoisie, his concern for the poor, and the reforming zeal of his Ministers had all helped to generate distrust amongst the nobility and clergy

the discontent did not stop with the rich

There was widespread public unrest caused by the effects of the war, prolonged drought and high prices. Far from assuaging this, Charles had aggravated it, particularly in Madrid

public indignation

Squillace was the main target of public wrath

Within a week the King capitulated and agreed to everything

the Jesuits the scapegoat for the mutiny. In 1767 they were expelled from Spain with ruthless efficiency

He was the “most Christian King” who entered into an alliance with the enemy of Christendom. He was the destroyer of the integrity and tradition of the Gallican Church. He was the voluptuary who allowed his court to be divided into factions

His father, Charles of Angouleme, resembled his namesake and uncle, the graceful lyric poet, Charles of Orleans

The group accepted the easy guardianship at Amboise of Louis, Duke of Orléans, who two years later became King as Louis XII.

The adulation of his mother and sister shielded him from the hatred of Anne of Brittany. The Queen had borne Louise XII an only child, the Princess Claude, who was heiress of Brittany in her mother’s right

Francis was heir-presumptive to the French Crown. A marriage between Francis and Claude seemed a natural arrangement, which would prevent the alienation of the Duchy of Brittany from the French royal house. But the Queen was firmly opposed to it, and the marriage took place only after her death in 1514

the future of the heir-presumptive remained in doubt. In October 1514, Louis XII

married Mary of England, the sister of Henry VIII. Francis was less distressed than his mother

Bonnivet was made Admiral of France, and the long-vacant title of Constable was bestowed upon his cousin, Charles of Bourbon

The election of Charles V marked the beginning of a two-hundred-year conflict between the French monarchy and the Hapsburgs

In February 1516, the grandson of the Emperor, Charles of Austria, inherited the thrones of Aragon and Castile. Six months later, he recognized the French conquest of Milan. At this time there was no hostility between him and Francis I.

Political responsibilities were not neglected in the flush of military success.

opposed to a rival whose encircling dominions included Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and southern Italy, and whose strength was augmented by the wealth of the New World

The contrast between the ebullient King of the Renaissance and the melancholic Emperor has always attracted the attention of historians

The one reliving the ancient myths of the universal monarchy and the crusade against the infidel: the other replacing the symbolic attitudes of the past with the realistic values of the nation state

The two Kings were too much alike in age and temperament to allow common interests to still the spirit of mutual competition

Henry VIII, reading through the terms of a declaration, obligingly omitted his title of King of France

When hostilities began in the following year, the Tudor King, after making some show of mediation, aligned himself with the Emperor. The war went badly

For a year Francis I remained the captive of the Emperor in Madrid, while Louise of Savoy rallied national sentiment for the continuation of the war

The great-grandfather of the Emperor was Charles the Bold of Burgundy. It was as a Burgundian that Charles V claimed the lands that had been seized by Louis XI. The release of the King was not secured until a pledge had been given for the cession of Burgundy

The subsequent death of Catherine of Aragon removed the cause of English disagreement with the Emperor. In the last two wars of the reign Henry VIII reverted to the imperial alliance

In the course of the war, Bourbon was killed during the ferocious assault of his mutinous forces on Rome in May 1527

In the sack of Rome Henry VIII saw an opportunity to win the favour of Clement VII and obtain the annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. For several years he remained the ally of France

Even after the revelation of the marriage with Anne Boleyn, Francis pleaded the English case during his meeting with the Pope at Marseilles in October 1533

The King had never intended to observe the terms of the Treaty of Madrid. Fresh allies were found in Italy, notably Pope Clement VII

Turkish armies were threatening the eastern imperial marches. In his league with the Sultan Sulaiman he inaugurated one of the most enduring of French policies

a vast Turkish army had erupted into Hungary and overwhelmed the Emperor’s Hungarian allies

The infidel was regarded with mingled curiosity and horror

The Ottoman alliance appalled the conscience of Europe; but the King found it difficult to resist the temptation offered by the expeditions of Charles V to North Africa and the campaigns of his brother, Ferdinand, upon the Bohemian border

Although the King’s diplomacy with the Papacy, the Turk, England and the Princes of the Empire, contained many failures and much duplicity, it was pursued with a realism and a flexibility that offset his lack of strategic ability in war

By June 1538, when Paul III personally negotiated the truce of Nice, it appeared possible to achieve a genuine reconciliation

The significant campaigns of the future were not to be fought in Italy, but on the frontiers of France

The altered texture of French society in the first half of the sixteenth century was, in part, a response to the demands of the monarchy

Francis I never summoned a full Estates-General

In July 1527, in the presence of the King, the Parlement heard from the lips of secretary Robertet a statement so imperious and unequivocal that it represented an unprecedented declaration of monarchical absolutism. The King, like Louis XII before him, was called the father of his people; but, whereas Louis earned his patriarchal status through his benevolence, Francis claimed it as his right

His sister, Marguerite, now Queen of Navarre, was scarcely less influential

Factions long concealed within the court became more apparent after the death of the Dauphin in 1536

The plain and modest Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles V, whom the King had married five years after the death of Claude in 1525, became the centre of the pro-Hapsburg party at the court

He held the office once occupied by de Boisy and, finally, that which the traitor Bourbon had forfeited

the King’s death in 1547

In the last years of the reign the glories of the new monarchy seemed tarnished and outworn

bowed to the zealots of the Sorbonne and aped the gallant ways of his youth

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 then allowed himself to believe, incorrectly, that Francis approved of these claims

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

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'

the power of the first consul was so well established that there was no hope of intervening in France. Instead, the house of Orléans became reconciled with the elder branch of the Bourbon family. Even so, Louis-Philippe never took up arms to fight with émigré forces for the royalist cause against other Frenchmen

On November 25 he married Marie-Amélie, a daughter of King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Maria Carolina of Austria. About this time there was some suggestion that Louis-Philippe should join the English forces in the Peninsular War. Maria Carolina—who held the real power in Naples and whose sister Marie-Antoinette had been executed by the French Revolutionary government—had long backed the campaign against the Revolutionary armies and Napoleon. She certainly would have supported such a move by her son-in-law, but nothing came of it, probably because Louis XVIII again feared any activity that might further the Orleanist cause.

Louis-Philippe returned to France at the First Restoration (1814). Although Louis XVIII refused to grant Louis-Philippe the style of royal highness (later allowed to him by Charles X), the king did grant Louis-Philippe the dignities traditionally held by the head of his family. More important perhaps, Louis-Philippe regained possession of the family estates and forests that had not been sold after his own emigration and his father’s execution. During the Hundred Days (1815) he returned to England instead of following the court to Ghent.

Under the second Restoration the duc d’Orléans was a steady and more or less open adherent of the liberal opposition

when Louis-Philippe had become king and his eldest son, Ferdinand-Louis-Philippe, was heir to the royal domain, he could reserve the Orléans inheritance for his other sons instead of merging it with the crown lands.

In 1830 Charles X’s attempt to enforce repressive ordinances touched off a rebellion (July 27–30) that gave Louis-Philippe his long-awaited opportunity to gain power.

The revolution that brought Louis-Philippe to power constituted a victory for the upper bourgeoisie over the aristocracy. The new ruler was titled Louis-Philippe, king of the French, instead of Philip VII, king of France. He consolidated his power by steering a middle course between the right-wing extreme monarchists (the Legitimists) on the one side and the socialists and other republicans (including the Bonapartists) on the other. The July Monarchy, with its “Citizen King,” could never command the support of all the factions, however. Its opponents resorted to political intrigue, insurrection, and even assassination plots. In July 1835 an attempt on the king’s life by Giuseppe Fieschi resulted in the deaths of 18 people and the wounding of many more, but the royal family escaped injury. Throughout Louis-Philippe’s reign, it was said that “for shooting kings there is no close[d] season.”

before abdicating in favour of his 10-year-old grandson, Henri Dieudonné d’Artois, comte de Chambord. On August 7 the provisional government of deputies and peers present in Paris declared the throne vacant. Following the terminology of the Constitution of 1791, Louis-Philippe was on August 9 proclaimed “king of the French by the grace of God and the will of the people.” A modified version of the Charter of 1814 was issued, which the new king was obliged to accept.

The death of the popular duc d’Orléans in a carriage accident in July 1842 not only grieved Louis-Philippe very deeply but also seriously weakened the dynasty. The new heir to the throne, the duke’s son Philippe d’Orléans, comte de Paris, was an infant for whom a regency had to be prearranged.

The marriage (August 1832) of his daughter Marie-Louise to Queen Victoria’s uncle Leopold I, king of the Belgians, established an excellent relationship between Paris and London, almost foreshadowing the Entente Cordiale.

The British were finally alienated by Louis-Philippe’s policy on the “Spanish marriages.” In an attempt to revive the traditional family alliance between the French and Spanish Bourbons, he had at first wanted his sons Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, and Antoine, duc de Montpensier, to marry Spanish Queen Isabella II and her sister and heiress presumptive, the infanta Luisa Fernanda, respectively. The British objected to this obvious threat of French predominance in Spain, and in 1843 Louis-Philippe agreed that Isabella should marry neither Henri nor the British nominee, Prince Albert’s cousin Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, but rather some Spanish Bourbon instead.

French opposition to the regime had become much more embittered. The industrial and agricultural depression of 1846 aroused widespread popular discontent, and Louis-Philippe’s constant refusal of any electoral reform meant that many members of the lower middle class—from whom he might still have drawn support—remained without the vote. Finally, his narrow-minded conservatism and his unwillingness to seek any solution for pressing political and social problems drove many divergent interests into union against him.

The July Monarchy was but one casualty of the great revolutionary movement that swept through Europe in 1848. In any case, a change had come to seem unavoidable in France.

The July Monarchy was really an anachronism. To the French people—for whom, whether or not they favoured the institution, monarchy meant the splendours and absolutism of the ancien régime

In power Louis-Philippe strove to implement his desire to rule as well as to reign. The political difficulties with which he was faced revealed in him the weaknesses of an obstinate man; increasingly, his only response to crises was words and theories, and ultimately inaction lost him his crown.

After mid-century, Peter I of Castile invaded the Crown of Aragon, prompting Peter IV to back Henry of Trastámara’s claims to the Castilian throne, but Henry subsequently refused to reward him with any territorial concessions. That disappointment was offset to some extent by the reincorporation of Sicily into the dominions of the Crown of Aragon in 1377. Peter IV remained neutral during the Great Schism, but his son John I (1387–95) acknowledged the pope of Avignon. Both John and his younger brother and successor, Martin (1395–1410), had to attend constantly to agitation and unrest in Sardinia and Sicily.

Alfonso V (the Magnanimous; 1416–58) opted to pursue ambitions in Italy and generally neglected his peninsular domains.

Louis XI of France seized the opportunity to occupy Roussillon and Cerdagne, thereby laying the foundation for future enmity between France and Spain. By 1472 John II had suppressed the Catalan revolt; subsequently he aided his daughter-in-law Isabella in acquiring the Castilian crown. His son Ferdinand succeeded him as king of Aragon and Sardinia, and his daughter Eleanor inherited Navarre.