ABSTRACT
The time has long passed since it was fashionable to dismiss the eighteenth century as a decorative interval, suspended between the glooms and dooms of the Wars of Religion and the grinding industrialisation of the nineteenth century. Just as the works of Haydn and Mozart now make up part of ‘our’ music, so their contemporaries among the statesmen and soldiers addressed themselves to questions of major historical import. It still matters today that Russia secured the domination of eastern Europe, that Prussia became the most vital power in Germany, and that the Americans wrested control of their future from British hands.
