The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815 (Penguin History of Europe)

Tim Blanning may not be personally in pursuit of glory, but judging by the back page blurb he has achieved a good deal of it. The man at the Sunday Telegraph read it with his "jaw permanently dropped in admiration" - at the Sunday Times it was "let the nations rejoice . . . a truly glorious book" - "Sparkling" intoned the Guardian. Appetite whetted with all this praise I plunged into the book. Alas, between the hype and reality there is a gulf.

"The Pursuit of Glory" starts off reasonably well. Part one covers what might be labelled the Socio-Economic sphere, though without enough discussion of the economic side of it for my taste. The section that contemplates whether an industrial revolution happened in Britain or not, never seemed to get its teeth into the subject, and I felt that Blannings judgement was pre-ordained; he doesn't seem a great fan of revolutions, whether they're Industrial, English (1640's and 50's) or French (1790's).

The second part "Power" is a tolerable discussion of "Rulers and their Elites" and "Reform and Revolution" especially if you are up to coping with a regular bombardment of names from the various Royals and their noble (or otherwise) flunkies. This brings us to the third part, "Religion and Culture" and I presume this is where the claim that the book is "provocative" is rooted. I certainly felt seriously provoked while reading a thirty-page chapter on hunting including statistics of the kills of various notables of the era. The book ends with a hundred and fifty pages of warfare.

One thing that I found surprising is that Blanning only incidentally mentions Europes over-seas Empires. Why on earth have thirty-pages on hunting (followed by forty-pages on elite architecture) and not deal with the Imperial issue in anything like a systematic manner? Given that this is a crucial factor in the period's history at the European and Global level, this has to be marked down as a serious omission. Another source of irritation was the register Blanning writes in: essentially conservative, complacent and well pleased with itself.

"The Pursuit of Power" is a book that left me under whelmed and without any feeling that I had gained any great knowledge or insight into the age. Not the nicest of feelings after slogging through 677 pages in search of an understanding of European history during an important era. Not one that I'd recommend.

This book is perhaps the best book out there on life in the 18th century. Blanning goes into almost every detail one wants to see about the time period mentioned. He covers everything from transportation, to disease, food supply, warfare, and even sexual practices and morality. He makes these references in the sense that the 18th century was one of transition. The destruction of the Thirty Years War based on religion ended with the destruction of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars as a national struggle. The modern world was ripe for the picking thanks to the improvements made during the 18th century. If you want to know anything about this time period: war, government reform, economics, family life, morality, medicinal practices etc. this book is the best. Another nice aspect about it is that the book is divided into subsections within subsections so finding the information you want to know about is quite easy.

The title, the blurbs on the back, and the cover all give you the idea that this book is going to be about "revolutions" in Europe during the period quoted (1648-1815). Weirdly this has little to do with what's in the book, however. This occasionally happens when a publisher (that's my guess anyway) imagines that if he tells you what the book actually is, no one will buy it. In this case, the book is a pretty comprehensive overview of every aspect of life in Europe during the period in question. Chapter 1 literally starts out with a discussion of the state of roads in Europe during the period, and proceeds from there, talking about other methods of transportation and then moving on to essentially every aspect of society, from everyday life for peasants to the proliferation of pornography, hunting as a royal passtime, gardens, sculpture, and art in various political arenas, and so forth. The author peppers the discussion of each subject with anecdotes from the era which serve to illustrate his points.

This book is long, involved, and it's also arranged topically. The only narrative involved is the ending part of the book, about 150 pages where the author discusses the course of politics during the era. This mainly winds up being a very brief account of all the wars France fought in during the era, since France fought in basically every war that was fought between those two dates. Because of space limitations, I assume, the narrative part of the book is very cursory.

As an illustration of the strangeness of the subtitle of the book, which says it's about five revolutions that changed Europe, when you look at the back of the book and read the list, you discover that one of the "revolutions" involved is the Industrial Revolution. This of course took place after Napoleon went into exile, so its inclusion here is rather problematic. A second is the scientific revolution, the inclusion of which makes some sense, but the book never really addresses the issue per se. The French Revolution is a large part of the narrative, and is given a lot of attention, but the American Revolution (once I sorted out a snafu in the index) gets less than have a dozen mentions, and is recounted in the narrative section in a paragraph (which incorrectly puts Lafayette in command of the French army at Yorktown). Lastly, I'm not even sure what a "romantic revolution" is, and I saw no mention of one in the book itself.

Given this specious description of the book, the text itself is quite interesting and easy to read, at least in my opinion. The author makes some interesting points (that artists were subsidized during the era of Louis XIV so thoroughly that they all sang his praises, because doing so guaranteed more work, as an example) and has a clear, easy writing style. The book is long, but the information therein is worth the effort.