The Invention of Civilisation

Even as civil society triumphed it was already coming under attack from critics, who saw it as a threat to martial virtues. Rousseau idealised the noble savage and scorned the decadence of civilisation.

Violence is a contested category: it requires legitimation in order to have the force of legality. This explains the changing meaning of civility around 1600. Long before the word ‘civilisation' was coined in the 1750s thinkers were using the word ‘civility' to mean civilisation. The English took the idea from Louis Le Roy, whose De la vicissitude (1576) adapted the classical model of flourishing, decay and rebirth, but avoided the idea that history is cyclical, repetitious and a constant return of primeval events. Historical change is his concern and the development that this implies. The key to this is ‘civility', a meaning which in Le Roy is synonymous with ‘civilisation', denoting a level of technical, cultural and material progress. Le Roy com­pared various civilisations and was certain of the superiority of our own, as advances in technology made clear. His ideas had most immediate impact in England, where his influence is discerned in Spenser and Bacon, who, on his attack on the duel employed the newly minted verb: ‘all that is rude ought not to be civilised with death'. And the English continued to be creative. When Walter Montague translated the French conduct book, L'Honneste femme in 1655, he invented a word that was not present in the original: ‘civilisation', which he used to mean a process of conscious individual self-improvement.

Italian and Spanish dictionaries of the seventeenth century do not have equivalent terms. The reason why the French, who were the trendsetters in manners, avoided the verb ‘to civilise' was because, for them, it had another meaning: civilisation meant turning a criminal suit into a civil action. In relation to the history of violence and civil society, this anachronistic render­ing is of some significance. The revolution in our understanding of the early modern judicial system which has taken place over the last generation has shown that throughout Europe the law promoted arbitration and reconcilia­tion at every stage of the process and how the expansion of access to justice prevented quarrels from escalating. Perpetrators of violence, in contrast to thieves, were rarely subject to corporal punishment if they could compensate the victim's family. Most complaints never got to a definitive judgement and the public advertisement of one's grievance followed by a handshake was usually sufficient to repair honour. In Holland each neighbourhood had its own buurtmeester, whose job it was ‘to maintain, peace, amity and concord'. In French-speaking parts of the Low Countries these were called faiseurs de paix. The Calvinist Consistory performed a similar role, one that the faithful welcomed more than its surveillance of morals. The practice of binding people over to keep the peace was ubiquitous. The principle of reconciliation was a particular feature of German and Swiss courts. Even the Paris police (established in 1667), which became the model for absolutist state control, spent a great deal of time reconciling neighbourly disputes, which meant that they had multiple roles as policemen, social workers, youth custody officers and family counsellors. The law was not simply an arm of the state but an essential component of civil society, and contributed greatly to the pacifica­tion that eighteenth-century thinkers recognised when they reinvented the term civilisation.