65 pages • 2 hours read
E.H. GombrichA Little History of the World
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 33-35Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 33 Summary: “A Truly New Age”
As an introduction to the Enlightenment, Gombrich remarks, from a modern perspective, how strangely a 17th-century person would appear and think. Peasants were not to complain, beggars should be whipped, and slaves were a perfectly reasonable source of labor. At this point in history, Gombrich says, these kinds of views began to change. After so many years of religious conflict, the principle of toleration became very important to people. The principles of the Greeks and Romans were given new life. Reason could solve all questions of science and humanity. God had bestowed all humans with the gift of reason, and thus, all humans must be equal. Humans had rights to dignity that could not be taken by another man. These ideas were debated in England and France, and their spread became known as the Enlightenment. Gombrich acknowledges that many of the ideas of the Enlightenment may seem obvious today, but it was a remarkable achievement—not just because of the innumerable scientific discoveries that were made as a result, but also because the Enlightenment’s principles of tolerance, reason, and humanity have become integral to our society.
After years of slowly seizing territory from Sweden, the prince of Prussia declared himself king in 1701. Frederick II, or Frederick the Great, was Prussia’s third king, and he was very interested in the Enlightenment ideas being discussed by his French correspondents. He abolished torture and believed that all of his subjects should receive equal justice. He also wanted to increase Prussia’s power and sought to do this by defeating Austria. After seven years of conflict, Frederick captured Silesia, but nothing else. The rulers of Austria, too, were passionate about the Enlightenment and eliminated the death penalty, serfdom, and the laws barring Protestant worship.
At this same time, the British colonies in America were refusing to be subjects to the empire. Under the leadership of people like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, the rebels formed a confederation and fought the British soldiers away. In 1776, they declared their independence on the principle of inalienable rights and the equality of all men, but their slaves were not included in their newfound independence.
Chapter 34 Summary: “A Very Violent Revolution”
While most European monarchs were openly discussing and implementing ideas from the Enlightenment, the kings of France had no interest in them. The nobility spent exorbitantly while the rest of the country starved. By 1789, during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, all the money had dried up. The king held a meeting of the nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie to discuss how to improve his finances. When he didn’t like any solutions offered, he dismissed the assembly. The enraged people of Paris then stormed the Bastille, the state prison, freeing everyone inside and parading them through the streets. The assembled representatives decided to implement the ideas of the Enlightenment in France. They announced that all people would be given the same human rights and the country would now be ruled by the people. Many interpreted this doctrine as a call for revolution, and a mob marched on the palace of Versailles, taking the king and queen as prisoners. The National Assembly confiscated the assets of the Catholic church and announced that the people would elect a group of new representatives to vote on laws.
Meanwhile, the rest of Europe could no longer stand by and watch a fellow monarch be removed by the people. Prussia and Austria sent troops to protect the king and queen, which provoked the people of France to label all nobility in favor of the king as traitors. The Jacobins, the most outspoken group of revolutionaries, believed that their enemies were not just aristocrats, but anyone who disagreed with them. A Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced traitors to death by guillotine in the streets of Paris. This period of rampant executions is called the Reign of Terror. Even Louis and Marie Antoinette were publicly executed.
The nobility had been stamped out of France, the peasants had been liberated, and the Catholic Church’s wealth had been redistributed. The principles and actions of the Revolution had spread across Europe, and neighboring countries Belgium and Switzerland formed their own republics. Gombrich ends this chapter by alluding to a young French officer, Napoleon, who would “one day prove stronger than the whole Revolution” (226)
Chapter 35 Summary: “The Last Conqueror”
Gombrich reiterates that what he loves most about history is that it is true and that this story he is about to tell takes place during the life of his grandfather. In 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica. He became a second lieutenant in the French army at age 17, and his good advice and military instinct soon earned him the rank of general. He led a small army to Italy to spread the French Revolution, and soon, they had conquered all of Northern Italy. Adored by the French, in 1799 he used his military might to overthrow the elected representatives and declared himself consul, and, eventually, he also declared himself Emperor of France and King of Italy. International alliances were formed to try to curb Napoleon’s power, but he defeated their troops and became sovereign of almost all of Europe. Even the German emperor surrendered his title in 1806, signaling the end of the empire of the German Nation. Napoleon’s empire was “now considerably larger than that of Charlemagne” (232). However, Napoleon continued to risk his immense victories by seeking more. When Russia defied his embargo on Britain, he advanced into Moscow with an army of over 600,000 men. The Russians set fire to the city, and he was left with no choice but to retreat into the brutal Russian wilderness, which proved deadly.
Napoleon abandoned his troops and fled to Paris. Weakened, with new rebellions cropping up everywhere, he managed to raise another army of young men to subdue rebels in Germany. He was defeated and retreated to Paris, where he was deposed. He was given the island of Elba, but in 1815, he returned in an attempt to restore his power. The princes of Europe declared Napoleon to be the enemy of humanity, and an army made up of English and German soldiers defeated him at Waterloo. He fled to an uninhabited island as a prisoner of war, and the rest of Europe determined how to divide up his empire. They believed that the Enlightenment had caused nothing but trouble and sought to restore sovereign rule.
Chapters 33-35 Analysis
Chapter 33, “A Truly New Age,” is titled in direct reference to Chapter 26, “A New Age.” By alluding to this previous chapter, Gombrich compares the two eras of immense social change. While Chapter 26 describes the effects that the Italian Renaissance had on our understanding of human nature, Chapter 33 describes the effects of the Age of Enlightenment. Despite his great admiration for the philosophy and art of antiquity that was revived during the Renaissance, Gombrich clearly sees the Enlightenment as a more impactful shift, as he seems to divide history by its development: “Only after 1700 did things gradually change” (214). Though he typically vividly describes a hypothetical figure of the past in order to point out how much people throughout history have in common, in this chapter, he uses such a description to highlight just how much has changed because of the Enlightenment. He offers some of the appalling views that a man before this time may have held:
A peasant’s lot is to toil and not complain. Beggars and tramps should be whipped […] And finally, a Mr So-and-so—an English friend—has an excellent and well-established business selling negroes from Africa to America as slaves: a brainwave of that most worthy gentleman since, as we all know, American Indian convicts don’t take well to manual labour (214).
New ideas of equality and tolerance, according to Gombrich, set off the American and French revolutions that he summarizes in these chapters. While Gombrich does not express admiration for the leaders of the French Revolution, he does view their actions as a direct consequence of the tyranny they suffered under and expresses admiration for all pioneers of Enlightenment principles:
All this we owe to the brave citizens and writers who dared stand up for these ideas. And it was daring. They may have lacked understanding and behaved unjustly in their struggle with ancient and long-held traditions, but they fought a long and hard battle to win tolerance, reason and humanity (215).
Chapter 35 begins with a new perspective from the author, as he says that the story he is about to tell took place during the life of his own grandfather, and, “It begins like this” (227). This wording recalls his explanation of history as a collection of “Once upon a times” in Chapter 1.
