History 301 introduces students to the history of Europe from the end of the Thirty Years' War (1648), through the age of absolutism and Enlightenment, to the French Revolution and its extension throughout Europe by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. The period begins with a pan-European diplomatic treaty—the Peace of Westphalia—the first in a chain of such international settlements that continues down to the present. These years also witnessed the first, full efflorescence of the modern sovereign state—whether it took the shape of royal “absolutism,” as in France and several of the German states, or was charaterized by the ascendance of representative institutions, as in the case of Britain, the Netherlands, and (in the eigtheenth century) Sweden. And of course virtually every aspect of modern culture and intellectual life was shaped, to one degree or another, by the European Enlightenment. The period ends with the French Revolution, that complex series of events without which no modern political movement—liberalism, conservatism, socialism, even fascism—can be fully comprehended. But to us “Old Regime” Europe is also a strange time and a foreign place, in which kings cured scrofula by the touch of their hand, a time when pigs that injured humans could be tried in court and put to death, an era in which married life was punctuated more often by death than divorce, and in which whole populations might still face exile on the grounds of heresy.

A common theme underlies these disparate topics. It concerns a transformation in the relationship between what was thought of as “public” and what was considered “private.” This distinction seems so clear and obvious to us—and yet it, like everything else in human affairs, is the product of specific historical processes. In its modern form, the distinction did not exist prior to the period examined in this course. Most people, for example, held little or no property that we would consider “private”—which is not to say they owned nothing. It is, rather, to suggest that the ownership of things was many-layered in ways it is no longer. This system of layered and divided ownership defined a whole host of social and economic relationships; abolishing its last vestiges was central to the agenda of revolution in France in 1789. Another example: those who exercised “public” authority were thought to embody that power is some fundamental way. The king of France did not simply rule over his kingdom; rather, he was France. To put it another way: his private and his public person were one and the same. Similarly, when the delegates of a kingdom or a province assembled in one place, they did not simply function as delegated representatives of their electors; rather, the delegates assembled together as a collectivity embodied the realm. In this sense they did not “represent” the realm; they were the realm itself. This concept of representation, too, the French Revolution sought to abolish.