BEFORE AND AFTER i5θθ: CONTINUITY

22 This chapter deals with the period until about the middle of the eighteenth century. It therefore ignores traditional periodization and the conventional break - about 1500 - between the Middle Ages and modern times.' It is true that traditional periodization corres­ponds to important changes: the fracturing of the unity of the medieval church, the rise of absolutism, great discoveries.

' Many historians, dissatisfied with traditional periodization, argue that a break just as important as that around 1500 should be made around 1100, and consequently propose to distinguish between the early and late Middle Ages. Others go further and divide the history of Europe after Antiquity into three phases: archaic (until 1100), Old Europe (until the eighteenth century), and the industrial period. This periodization is followed especially in the Zeitschrift fi-^r historische Forschung. Halbjahrschrift zur Erforschung des SpdtmiUelalters und der friihen Neuzeit, launched in 1975, in which the second period is described as the �old- European period’. of these changes must not be misunderstood, yet it is all the more important to underline the continuity which existed between the Middle Ages and modern times. The rise of the national sovereign state clearly began during the last centuries of the Middle Ages and reached its apogee in modern times. Criticism of, and attacks against, absolute power became an important political consideration only in the eighteenth century (except in England where they began in the seventeenth century). Dogmatic Christianity also survived the Middle Ages: although the meaning of Christian dogmas was sometimes in dispute, it was not possible to place the dogmas themselves in doubt. Yet this prohibition lost all significance with the diffusion of the ideas of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

The fundamental transformations which occurred in these various areas profoundly changed the society of the ancien regime in the course of the eighteenth century. The Industrial Revolution brought about a vast increase in potential energy, and laid the foundations for mass production. It was this, together with scientific advances, which shaped the modern technical and industrial age, in comparison with which all earlier history may be called pre-industrial.

The Enlightenment (Aufkldrwng) signified a new mode of thought and a new conception of man and the universe: from now on the foundation was human reason and no longer revealed religion. This movement towards rational ideas and discoveries broke with a thousand years of European history and prepared the way for a new philosophy — and at the same time for a new society, since the old social structures were intimately bound up with religious concep­tions of the universe. Monarchy by divine right is an example. The exponents of new ideas attacked absolutist regimes precisely because they were steeped in dogmas which had now been declared to be obsolete and contrary to the freedom of the individual. None the less in Europe the old political system managed to survive until the end of the eighteenth century; the only exception is England, where absolutism received a decisive setback at the end of the seventeenth century. In some states the durability of the old political structures can be explained because sovereigns favourable to the ideas of the Enlightenment pursued policies of modernization. In other coun­tries, France above all, it was largely political inertia which kept the monarchy in power. Modernization struck late in France, with all the more force, and led to the destruction of the political system of the ancien regime, first in France and soon in other European countries too.