Chapter 6

Age of Revolutions to World War I: c. 1815–c. 1914

RESTORATION AND REVOLUTION

Following the final fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France, the rulers of Europe were faced with a daunting task—restoring stability to the relationships between the nations of Europe while also ensuring that the specter of revolution did not reappear within their domains. To aid in this task, one aspect of Napoleon’s reign was widely copied throughout Europe—France’s efficiency in controlling its population. In the period following the Napoleonic wars, states created larger and more efficient bureaucracies, secret police forces, and more efficient censorship offices. In an undeveloped nation such as Russia, these oppressive institutions were the only well-functioning part of the state.

States used another strategy to try to turn back the clock—attacking the legacy of the Enlightenment. No institution had suffered as much from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as the Church. The German Romantic poet Novalis wrote in 1799, “Catholicism is almost played out. The old papacy is laid in the tomb, and Rome for the second time has become a ruin.” Despite this prediction, the churches of Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, witnessed a remarkable recovery in the Restoration period (1815–1830). States viewed religion as a useful tool to aid in repression. In England, the Anglican clergy worked in the House of Lords to block parliamentary measures such as the bill in favor of Catholic emancipation and the Great Reform Bill. In Russia, the Orthodox clergy remained a bulwark of the reactionary policies of the state. The same was true in Catholic lands such as Spain, where the Inquisition was once again allowed to operate following its disappearance during the Napoleonic domination of Spain.

AN AGE OF COMPETING IDEOLOGIES

The Restoration period was a highly ideological period in which ideas inspired either from support or approbation of the French Revolution played a role in whether one was committed to the restored order that emerged after 1815 or wanted to see its demise.

Conservatism

Modern conservatism is rooted in the writings of Edmund Burke whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was widely read throughout Europe. Two components of Burke’s work were extremely popular in the Restoration period: his attack on the principle of the rights of man and natural law as fundamentally dangerous to the social order, and his emphasis on the role of tradition as the basic underpinning for the rights of those in positions of authority. Burke, a member of the English House of Commons, proposed a conservatism that was not reactionary in nature. He believed in the possibility of slow political change over the passage of time.

On the continent, however, a more extreme form of reactionary conservatism appeared in the writings of such men as Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), an émigré during the French Revolution. The Church, argued de Maistre, should stand as the very foundation of society because all political authority stemmed from God. De Maistre advocated that monarchs should be extremely stern with those who advocated even the slightest degree of political reform and that the “first servant of the crown should be the executioner.”

Nationalism

Nationalism is based on the idea that all peoples’ identities are defined by their connection with a nation and that it is to this nation that they owe their primary loyalty as opposed to their king or local lord. The roots of nationalism date back to the early modern period; however, nationalism emerged as an important ideology during the French Revolution. At this time, developments like national conscription, the calling of all young men for military service, helped create the idea of a citizen whose primary loyalty lies not to a village or province but to the nation instead.

Nationalism became important in other parts of Europe in reaction to the expansion in France. In the German and Italian states, the desire to rid their lands of French soldiers created a unifying purpose that helped establish a national identity. This growing national identity also had a literary component. Writers such as the Grimm brothers recorded old German folk tales to reveal a traditional German national spirit that was part of a common past, whether one lived in Bavaria, Saxony, or any of the other German states. Early 19th-century nationalism was often, though not exclusively, tied to liberalism because many nationalists, like the liberals, wanted political equality and human freedom to serve as the bedrock for the new state.

Liberalism

The foundations for 19th-century liberalism can be found in the writings of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, with their emphasis on the individual’s natural rights and support for limits on political authorities through the writing of constitutions and the formation of parliamentary bodies. Liberalism was also connected to the events of the early stages of the French Revolution with the establishment of the constitutional monarchy and with Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man serving as a basic foundational document. Liberals hoped to protect the rights of individuals by limiting the power of the state and by emphasizing the individual’s right to enjoy religious freedom, freedom of the press, and equality under the law.

Besides being a political theory, liberalism was also a school of economic thought. The most important of the early liberal economists—individuals who collectively formed what became known as the classical school—was Adam Smith (1723–1790), who published his most important work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in 1776. Mercantilism held that nations’ wealth could be measured only in gold reserves and that foreign trade would necessarily hurt one side or the other. However, Smith realized a nation’s true wealth was the goods produced by the labor of its citizens. Smith introduced two revolutionary ideas. First, specialists (whether individuals or countries) have natural skills and can produce their specialties better and faster than others. Trade could thus enrich everyone: France and Scotland would both be richer if they traded wine and coal, rather than the French mining in the vineyards and the Scots growing grapes in the highlands. Second, government price-fixing was unnecessary and counterproductive. Instead, governments should follow a laissez-faire policy and let individual businesses set their own prices and production levels. He argued that individual decisions, as though guided by an “invisible hand,” would provide a balance between supply and demand, while also providing businesses an incentive to find cheaper ways to produce more goods, lower prices, and increase sales.

Smith’s Laissez-Faire

The concept of laissez-faire, originated by Adam Smith, is the basis of free-market capitalism.

Economics is sometimes referred to as “the dismal science,” because the classical economists—men such as Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and David Ricardo (1772–1823)—reached conclusions that can only be viewed as deeply depressing. Malthus, a country parson, argued in his Essay on Population that the population was growing at a rate that would eventually outstrip the food supply. Factory owners were pleased to read in Malthus a justification for the payment of miserable wages to their workers because according to Malthus, if they were better compensated, they would be more likely to produce more children, ultimately leading to only more misery as increasing numbers of workers competed for fewer jobs and less food. According to Ricardo, the only way factory owners could find an advantage over their competitors was by offering lower wages, resulting in a steady downward spiral in their earnings. This “Iron Law of Wages” must also have pleased factory owners because, once again, their parsimony could be presented as if it were actually essential for the public good. Ironically, Malthus and Ricardo were both writing at a time when the dramatic expansion of production brought on by the Industrial Revolution was making their negative predictions obsolete.

Some writers, although we still apply to them the label of “liberal,” began to question certain classical, liberal orthodoxies on the workings of the economy as well as the role of the state. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) began as a disciple of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who had provided a justification for an expanded role for government by suggesting that governments should seek to provide “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Bentham’s views, which are given the label of utilitarianism, were taken further by Mill, who wrote in his Principles of Political Economy that it may be necessary for the state to intervene and help workers achieve economic justice.

In some of Mill’s later works, he began to move into a direction that brought him ever closer to socialism, with his questioning of the absolute right to hold private property while also suggesting that there needed to be a more equitable way for societies to distribute their wealth. Mill’s most famous work, On Liberty, was a clarion call for personal freedom. Although in the past the struggle for liberty involved placing constraints on monarchs, in Mill’s day the danger was that in democratic governments, the majority could deny liberty to the minority, thus squashing the personal liberty that Mill cherished in the name of majority rule.

Unlike other male liberals who saw political liberty solely as a male domain, Mill was greatly influenced by the feminist thought of his wife, Harriet Taylor (1807–1856). Inspired by her, he wrote On the Subjugation of Women, arguing in favor of granting full equality to women.

Socialism

Socialism, like the other ideologies discussed above, was also partly rooted in the French Revolution. A number of radical Jacobins took the idea of political equality for all and moved it to the next step: economic equality for all through the common ownership of all property. The early socialist writers are sometimes given the label “Utopian Socialists,” a phrase coined by Karl Marx, who viewed these early writers with contempt because he felt they offered non-scientific, unrealistic solutions to the problems of modern society. Utopian Socialists believed that expansive possibilities were available to mankind and that poor environments corrupted human nature. The Utopians also believed that capitalism over-emphasized production, under-emphasized distribution, and possessed other serious flaws such as unemployment and the suffering brought about by low wages.

Early Socialists

These early Socialists provided no single answer to society’s problems. Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) argued that society needed to be organized on a scientific basis. He argued for the creation of a hierarchical society led by an intellectual class that improved society and, most important, the lot of those on the bottom of the social ladder. Contemporary events in Europe are currently heading in a direction that Saint-Simon imagined: He hoped to witness the rise of a community of European nations that would have a common currency, transportation, and a parliament, among other things.

Another Utopian Socialist was Charles Fourier (1772–1837), who created a blueprint for a cooperative community. The blueprint consisted of a self-contained group of precisely 1,620 people living on 5,000 acres of land. Fourier hoped to make the workday more satisfying by rotating tasks so that everyone would do the boring tasks but not exclusively—Fourier thought that because children liked to play with dirt, they should take care of the community’s garbage.

Another individual who designed a planned community—and unlike Fourier he actually built it—was Robert Owen (1771–1858), a self-made manufacturer. Like Fourier, he blamed environment for man’s corruption and in response built New Lanark, a mill town in Scotland, where workers were housed decently and children received an education. These early Socialists had relatively little impact in comparison with Karl Marx’s proletarian socialism which came later.

POLITICAL RESTORATION AND REFORM

France

The term restoration literally refers to the events in France where the Bourbons were restored to the throne following the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The throne that Louis XVIII returned to was different from the one his older brother had enjoyed up until 1789. The Charter of 1814—a hastily written constitution—contained many of the freedoms from the revolutionary period, such as freedom of religion, even though it was presented to the French people by the king and contained no notion of popular sovereignty. The charter angered many royalists by confirming land purchases made from nationalized Church property. Politically, it allowed for a constitutional monarchy with a chamber of peers and a chamber of deputies made up of a very restricted franchise. The king held the firm reins of power, however, because only he could introduce legislation, and ministers were responsible to him instead of to the assembly.

In 1820, the son of the younger brother of Louis, Duke de Berry, was assassinated. The ultra-royalists, individuals who wanted to see the revival of absolute monarchy, used the assassination to pressure the king to clamp down on the press and to give more rights to the aristocracy, including compensation for nobles who had lost land during the Revolution.

Political repression increased after the death of Louis XVIII in 1824. At that time, Louis’s younger brother Charles X came to the throne. Charles felt more bitter about the Revolution than his brother Louis had. A year after taking the throne, he introduced a Law of Sacrilege, which ruled death as the penalty for any attack on the Church. In 1829, Charles appointed the Prince of Polignac as his chief minister, a man disliked throughout the country for being a leading ultra-royalist. In the following year, Polignac issued what became known as the July Ordinances, which dissolved the newly elected assembly, took away the right to vote from the upper bourgeoisie, and imposed rigid censorship.

That same month, revolution broke out in Paris. Leading liberals were afraid of the Parisian mob and wanted to avoid the creation of a republic because they associated republics with the violence of the first French republic dating back to 1792. Instead, they turned to Louis Phillipe, the Duke of Orleans, a liberal who had stayed in France during the Revolution. The July Revolution of 1830, which sparked revolutions throughout Europe, ended with the crowning of Louis Phillipe and the creation of what became known as the bourgeois, or July monarchy.

Revolutionary Movements

By the third decade of the century, people across Europe showed signs that it would be impossible to stem their desire for change.

Spain

In Spain, King Ferdinand VII had been restored to the throne following the collapse of French control in 1814. Ferdinand was restored on the condition that he honor the liberal constitution of 1812 drawn up by the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, which had met in Cadiz (in Andalucia, the southwestern coast of Spain)—the one part of Spain that was not conquered by Napoleon. Once restored to his throne, Ferdinand dissolved the Cortes and persecuted those liberals who had drawn up the constitution.

In 1820, a rebellion began among army divisions that were about to be sent to South America to put down the rebellions against the Spanish empire. The small Spanish middle class soon joined the army divisions in the rebellion. Although the king agreed to rule under the laws of the constitution to end the rebellion, Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia wanted to intervene to stem the tide of the revolt. The British, however, refused to directly intervene; they did not want the five great powers of Europe to be involved in putting down internal rebellions in other nations. Two years later, a French army acted unilaterally—although with the tacit support of Russia, Prussia, and Austria—and restored Ferdinand to absolute power.

Italy

A more serious revolt broke out in Naples, a revolt that the Austrian statesman Metternich labeled as the “greatest crisis” of his career. Similar to the situation in Spain, King Ferdinand of Naples had made promises while in exile to rule as a constitutional monarch, although once restored to the throne, he refused to give up any of his absolute powers. Neapolitan army officers, perhaps inspired by French ideas, joined with members of the bourgeoisie and began, with the assistance of secret nationalistic societies such as the Carbonari, to oppose the monarch. The revolt led to nationalistic stirrings throughout Italy and to another revolt in the Kingdom of Sardinia, which ultimately came to nothing.

Portuguese Power Play

A similar revolt took place in Portugal, where a group of army officers wanted to draw up a constitutional monarchy under John VI, who had fled to Brazil during the Napoleonic Wars.

Metternich wanted to put down the revolt in Naples, but once again, the British refused to participate in a joint attack. Metternich wanted the support of the other great powers, so he called the rulers of Austria, Prussia, and Russia to the Austrian town of Troppau to create what became the Troppau Protocol, which stated that the great European powers had the right to intervene in revolutionary situations. The following year, the rebellion in Naples was put down with the help of Austrian troops.

Greece

With the forces of repression everywhere triumphant, Western European liberals looked to the Greek revolt of 1821 to free the “birthplace of democracy” from “Eastern despotism”—though this was also part of a thousand-year prejudice that claimed Turkish citizens lived and died at the whims of a tyrannical Emperor (an especially ironic claim in a time of resurgent absolutism in France, Prussia, Italy, and elsewhere). Some leading liberals even went to Greece to aid the rebels; the British Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788–1824), for instance, sent his own money to refit the Greek fleet and died amidst the struggle in Greece (not on the battlefield, but from a fever). By 1827, Britain, France, and Russia organized a combined naval force to intervene on the side of the Greek revolutionaries, and in the following year, the Russians attacked the Ottomans on land. By 1832, Greece declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire—and became a monarchy with an imported Bavarian prince.

The Greek revolt was also tied to what became known as the “Eastern Question”—what should be done about the increasingly weak Ottoman Empire, appropriately nicknamed “the Sick Man of Europe.” Like other multi-ethnic empires, the Ottoman Empire was breaking down after a series of rulers who could not keep the groups united. Europeans were also uncomfortably reminded of the threat the Ottomans had posed—the Ottoman Empire had most recently besieged Vienna less than 150 years earlier. As the Greeks were breaking away from the Ottoman Empire, so were the Serbians, who had established effective independence by 1830. The new Serbia was a small kingdom about the size of South Carolina, located north of Greece on the southern border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ironically, this tiny kingdom would be a much greater threat to Austrian, and thus European, stability than the mighty Ottoman Empire ever was: The independent Serbian state strongly promoted nationalism in the Balkan regions of Austria, which ultimately led to the ethnic conflicts and revolutionary movements that started World War I.

Russia

Russia had emerged as a great European power as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, although in many ways, Russia was a much more backward nation than the other European countries. Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) had ruled Russia and at various times had toyed with the idea of political reform, although in the latter part of his reign he grew increasingly reactionary.

Alexander’s death in 1825 produced confusion as to the succession; Constantine, the older of his two surviving brothers, turned down the throne, so Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855) stepped up. In the confusion, a small group of military officers decided to stage a revolt in support of Constantine, who they wrongly thought was in favor of a constitutional monarchy and had been unfairly removed from the succession. This “Decembrist” revolt was put down rapidly and with great brutality. In the following years, Nicholas ruled with an iron fist, making sure to stamp out any additional movements for reform within his vast empire.

Great Britain

The French Revolution and the wars against Napoleon had created a backlash against the idea of political reform in Great Britain. The governing elite were also wary of possible social unrest owing to the economic downturn that occurred following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Such fears were realized in a catastrophe in 1819 when a large crowd of 60,000 people gathered in St. Peter’s field in Manchester to demand fundamental political changes, including universal male suffrage and annual parliaments. Although those who attended the meeting were for the most part peaceful, the soldiers on hand shot eleven members of the crowd. This became known as the Peterloo Massacre, an obvious play on the Battle of Waterloo. Soon after this disgraceful event, Parliament passed the repressive Six Acts, which banned demonstrations and imposed censorship.

The mood in Great Britain became more conducive to reform beginning in 1824 with the repeal of the Combination Acts, which had banned union activity. In 1829, restrictions dating back to the 17th century on the rights of Catholics to hold political office and government posts were lifted. In 1832, the Great Reform Bill was passed. The bill was hardly radical. Although it expanded the electorate to include those who had become wealthy as a result of industrialization, only one in five males in Great Britain could vote. It reduced, but did not completely eliminate, the number of so-called rotten boroughs, which were sparsely populated electoral districts. The bill succeeded in showing that political reform was possible in Great Britain without having to resort to the barricades as in continental Europe.

The new electorate created out of the Great Reform Bill undertook additional reforms. Although inspired by the middle-class Members of Parliament, they showed a new harshness toward the poor. The Poor Law of 1834 forced the destitute to enter into workhouses where conditions were purposefully miserable to discourage people from seeking assistance.

On a more humanitarian level, in 1833 slavery was banned in the British Empire, and the Factory Act of 1833 reduced the number of hours that children could work in factories and established government inspectors to ensure adequate working conditions. One sign that the new political order in Great Britain was now dominated by manufacturing interests as opposed to the old landed class was the 1846 elimination of the Corn Laws, which had imposed high tariffs on imported grain to support domestic growers. Manufacturers had long supported the end of the Corn Laws, believing that lower food prices would allow them to pay lower wages to their factory workers.

THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848

On January 12, 1848, there was a rebellion in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies against King Ferdinand II. This rebellion was to be the first of approximately fifty revolts that convulsed Europe in the first four months of that year. The rebellions were disjointed with very little cooperation or coordination between nations. However, there were a few key themes that ran through most of these contemporaneous upheavals. Primarily, widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership and an upsurge in nationalism motivated citizen demands for democratic government as well other liberal reforms. Following the revolutions of 1848, the Austrian Empire, now under the rule of Emperor Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916), relied heavily on military force to subdue all forms of liberalism and nationalism. Magyars, Slavs, Italians, and Germans would have to wait to see nationalist reforms realized. The 1840s were a terrible decade for agriculture and have accordingly been labeled the “hungry forties.” The Irish experienced the most terrible conditions, with the Irish potato famine of 1846 leading to the death of one million individuals and the emigration of an additional million out of Ireland.

France

There is an old saying that when France coughs, the rest of Europe catches a cold. In 1848, a rebellion in France created the spark for revolution throughout Europe. In France, the revolution of 1830 brought about only slight changes. The wealthy bourgeoisie dominated the July Monarchy, while the workers who had played such a pivotal role in the revolution of 1830 felt that they had received little for their efforts. Louis Phillipe’s chief minister, Francoise Guizot (1787–1874), believed that France had evolved politically as far as it should and that everyone who resented their lack of political rights should simply “get rich.” With the rise of censorship and the banning of openly political meetings, opponents of the regime turned to the practice of holding banquets that were thinly disguised political meetings. Over the winter, there had been more than seventy of these banquets with the largest one scheduled for February 22, 1848, to honor George Washington, a great hero to continental liberals. On the day of the banquet, Guizot issued an order banning it, which resulted in four days of revolution in the streets of Paris. After the first day, Louis Phillipe forced the resignation of Guizot, which may have been enough to placate the liberals; however, the workers on the barricades were not satisfied until they forced Louis Philippe to flee to England.

Political disagreements between the liberals and the radicals plagued this revolution in France from the start, with the liberals focusing on political issues such as an expansion of suffrage. The radicals, led by socialist journalist Louis Blanc (1811–1882), spoke of the need for fundamental social and economic change. Blanc’s supporters successfully pressured the provisional government to set up national workshops to provide jobs for the unemployed.

Outside of Paris, however, the nation was more conservative, as seen by the national assembly election held on April 23, which elected an assembly made up primarily of moderate republicans. The election, which had employed universal male suffrage, created a government run by a five-man executive committee comprised of moderates. In May, anger over the election results led to a workers’ revolt in Paris that was quickly put down. In the following month, the government believed itself in a strong enough position to do away with the national workshops, which they had felt pressured to support.

June Days and the French Second Republic

The termination of the workshops led to what became known as the “June Days,” essentially a violent class struggle in the streets of Paris in which 10,000 people died. The June Days further strengthened the hands of the moderate republicans, and in November, they felt confident enough to create the French Second Republic, headed by a president who would be elected by a universal adult-male body of voters and who would not be responsible to the legislature.

The surprising outcome of this year of revolution came in December when the first election for president was held and the victor was Louis Napoleon (1808–1873), a nephew of the Emperor. Louis Napoleon was able to capitalize on the appeal of his name and made vague promises to aid the embittered workers.

After being elected, he created a rather conservative government, and by 1851, during a constitutional crisis, he assumed dictatorial powers. In 1852, seeking to emulate his famous relative, he made himself Emperor Napoleon III.

The German States

Events in France had huge repercussions in the German states. In Prussia, Frederick William IV (r. 1840–1861) had promised to promote moderate reform for many years, but he never implemented any changes. In March 1848, disturbances erupted in the streets of Berlin. Frighteningly, two shots rang out and struck two people. Horrified by the bloodshed, Frederick ordered his army to leave the city, which left him with no defense. The king then allowed for an election for a constituent assembly, which would have the task of drawing up a new constitution for Prussia. Several months later, the king was confident enough to call back the troops, and the constituent assembly was dissolved. Nevertheless, in December 1848, the king did draw up his own constitution, which was rather close to what the assembly had planned. It allowed for personal rights such as freedom of the press and created a two-house legislature with adult-male universal suffrage for the lower house, although in the end, this provision was watered down by giving weighted votes to those who paid more taxes.

In Austria, news of the revolution in France inspired assorted nationalists to break free from the control of the Austrian monarchy. In Hungary, Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894) demanded a constitution that would provide for responsible government for Hungary. In Prague, a similar revolt called for the creation of a semi-autonomous Czech homeland. From May to October, Vienna was under the control of students and workers who demanded freedom of the press, an end to censorship, and also the removal from office of the hated Metternich. As in Prussia, at first the emperor did not want bloodshed and called off his troops. By June, however, the revolt in Prague was put down by military force, and in November, the emperor was firmly in control in Vienna. However, he needed Russian help to put down the Hungarian rebellion.

A paralyzing dispute also emerged over the question of where to draw the borders of the new Germany. Those who favored the Grossedeutsch plan wanted to see all German lands, including German sections of Austria and Bohemia, united under German rule. Kleindeutsch supporters felt that the more realistic solution would be to include only Prussia and the smaller German states. Eventually, the delegates settled on the Kleindeutsch, and they offered the German Imperial throne to William IV, the King of Prussia. He responded that he did not want a “crown picked up from the gutter” and declined the offer.

The Frankfurt Parliament

Another notable event in 1848 was a concerted effort to establish a unified German state. On May 18, elected representatives from all the German states gathered in Frankfurt to participate in what they thought was going to be the birth of a nation. From the start, the Frankfurt Parliament was hampered by the political inexperience of its participants and by conflicting aims; while all wanted to see a unified German nation, major disagreements arose over whether it should be a monarchy or a republic.

This was a lost opportunity to build a German nation under a liberal parliament rather than by a militaristic Prussian state, as would be the case in 1871. Perhaps the future course of German history would have been very different had Germany united under a liberal parliament. The German liberals at Frankfurt, however, had proven to be quite militaristic when they helped put down a revolt in some of Prussia’s Polish territories and had also been completely unconcerned with the rights of those Czechs who had no desire to see their lands included in the new Germany.

The Italian States

In the Italian states, the revolt that first broke out in Sicily led Ferdinand II to grant a liberal constitution. Eventually, similar revolts broke out and terrified monarchs granted charters in Tuscany and Sardinia. Even the pope granted a liberal constitution: The Papal States, at the time still a substantial territory in central Italy under papal rule, also saw revolts. After the revolt, the territory was governed by a short-lived Roman Republic. In the north of Italy, revolts broke out in the Austrian-dominated provinces of Lombardy and Venetia. This led to a call by Italian liberals for a war of unification. Charles Albert, the ruler of the Kingdom of Sardinia, reluctantly took up the banner of Italian nationalists and attacked Lombardy, only to be easily defeated by the Austrians.

For Italy, the lesson for the future was that unification would not take place under the auspices of the papacy, as some Italian liberals prior to 1848 had assumed. On the other hand, the possibility of the Kingdom of Sardinia serving as the foundation for a unified state improved, because in the group of Italian states that were granted constitutions in 1848, only Sardinia governed via the constitutional monarchical course in the following years. A final important lesson that had future ramifications: The Italians could not eject Austria from its possessions within Italy without the aid of another European power.

Russia and Great Britain

Two nations avoided the turmoil of revolution in 1848: Russia and Great Britain. Repression in Russia was so complete under the reign of Nicholas I that the nation passed the year with hardly a yawn. In Great Britain, the story was quite different, because 1848 marked the peak year for a movement known as Chartism, which dated back to the previous decade. Chartism centered on the belief that the problems of the working class could be corrected by changes in the political organization of the country. The People’s Charter of 1838, from which the movement received its name, contained six points.

In many ways, working-class dissatisfaction with the House of Commons after the passage of the Great Reform Bill was a motivating factor behind the Chartist movement, because working-class citizens believed (correctly) that the reformed Parliament was completely unresponsive to their demands.

In April 1848, a mass meeting was scheduled in London for the presentation of the Charter to the House of Commons. If the petition were once again rejected by Parliament, the Chartist Convention planned to transform itself into a National Assembly that would take over the government of the country. The mood in the capital was apprehensive. One middle-class man wrote to his wife:

London is in a state of panic from the contemplated meeting of the Chartists, 200,000 strong on Monday; for myself, nothing that happened would in the least surprise me: I expect a revolution within two years: there may be one within three days. The Times is alarmed beyond all measure. I have it from good authority that the Chartists are determined to have their wishes granted.

In London, there were preparations for a violent conflict, and Queen Victoria was sent out of London for safety. On April 10, the day of the mass meeting, the situation was tense as 200,000 individuals gathered to sign the petition. The petition was presented to the House of Commons, and basically, everyone went home peacefully. The House of Commons, however, refused to even debate the clauses contained in the petition. At this point, Great Britain appeared to be on the verge of revolution, but the country emerged far more fortunate than its continental counterparts. Reform did eventually come about in incremental stages; by the early 20th century, five of the six acts of the Charter (the annual parliaments didn’t pass) were established parts of the British Constitution.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (1750–1850)

Historians had formerly placed the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at 1760, when a group of new inventors appeared from nowhere and began to develop factories, bringing an end to the domestic system of production that had guided manufacturing since the early modern period. Experts have modified this belief over the last several decades; some historians even avoid the term “Industrial Revolution,” which they claim implies far too dramatic a change. We now know that technological progress did not begin in 1760; it had been occurring for centuries. This much is true: The second half of the 18th century saw a quickening of an age-old evolutionary process rather than a fresh break from the past. By the middle of the 19th century, particularly with the advent of the railroad, industrialization was beginning to reshape the European landscape and to dramatically alter the way in which people lived.

Great Britain’s Industrial Lead

Great Britain was the first European nation to begin the process of industrialization. What motivated England to change so dramatically? Although numerous books and articles have dealt with this question, conclusive or definitive answers for queries of this sort are rare. Several possible factors may have contributed to England’s role as the leader of the industrialization of Europe:

The first 18th-century technological advances occurred in cotton manufacturing. In 1733, John Kay (1704–1764) invented the flying shuttle, which greatly increased the speed at which weavers could make cloth. Kay’s invention created a problem: Cloth could be made so rapidly that it outstripped the supply of thread. By 1765, James Hargreaves (d. 1778) solved this problem by inventing the spinning jenny, a machine that initially spun sixteen spindles of thread at one time, and by the end of the century, improvements allowed it to spin as many as 120 spindles at once. Kay’s and Hargreaves’s machines were small enough that they could still be used in the traditional location of cloth manufacturing—the home. Note that these labor-saving devices, including Arkwright’s water frame (see inset), were in the field of cloth production. Labor-saving was useful because British cloth manufacturing was constrained by labor supply: thanks to cotton imports (from colonization of India and trade with the American South) and increased wool supply (due to enclosure and the agricultural revolution), labor savings actually resulted in more cloth to sell, giving factory cloth producers a strong price advantage over their competition. However, the cotton industry came at a cost: The cotton imports which fueled the Industrial Revolution were available only because of colonization and slavery.

Arkwright’s Water Frame

If what was truly revolutionary about the Industrial Revolution was the displacement of domestic manufacturing by the factory system, then it was Richard Arkwright’s invention of the water frame that marked the beginning of this development. The water frame was a huge apparatus that combined spindles and rollers to create a spinning machine to spin cloth. By 1770, Arkwright employed 200 individuals under one roof in what is known to be the first modern factory, and in so doing, made a half-million-pound fortune for himself.

The first factories were originally located along streams and rivers so that water could provide the energy needed to work the machinery. The invention of the steam engine made it possible to build factories in other locations. The ancestor of the steam engine was the steam pump, which was used to remove water from mines. James Watt (1736–1819) studied the steam pump and adapted it for use in industry. His invention was the first true steam engine, as opposed to a steam pump, because it worked by pushing steam into each end of a closed cylinder, resulting in the upward and downward movement of the pistons. A decade later, Watt invented an engine that turned a wheel. This made factories independent of waterpower and dramatically increased the pace of industrial change.

Another factor that increased the pace of industrialization was the greater ability to smelt iron. Traditionally, iron was smelted in extremely hot ovens fueled by charcoal, but by the 18th century, England was devoid of forests, and the resulting lack of charcoal seriously limited the production of iron. Abraham Darby (1677–1717) discovered a means of smelting iron using coal. Like the inventions discussed earlier, the economy experienced a multiplying factor as a result of Darby’s invention, as more productive machines made of iron replaced those previously made from wood.

Iron and steam were the combination behind perhaps the most important invention of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution—the railroad. The first passenger railroad traveled between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, and by the middle of the century, Britain was crisscrossed with railroad tracks that carried passengers and goods throughout the land. The railroads had an immense impact on the economy. Engines, tracks, stations, tunnels, and hotels for travelers were just some of the machines and structures that were connected with the railroads. It is estimated that by 1880, one in ten jobs in Great Britain was in some way connected either directly with the railroads or with services tied to rail transportation.

The British took the lead in manufacturing, but it wasn’t long before methods pioneered by the British appeared on the continent. Belgium was the first to industrialize, possibly because, like Great Britain, it had a plentiful supply of coal and iron. Other nations industrialized with varying degrees of rapidity. The German states were hampered by numerous tolls and tariffs, making the transportation of goods extremely expensive. To aid in the spread of trade and manufacturing, Prussia in 1834 took the lead by creating the Zollverein, a customs union that abolished tariffs between the German states.

As certain German states, most notably Prussia, achieved significant industrial growth by the middle of the century, France lagged behind by comparison. Historians often make telling comparisons between Great Britain and France. Unlike Great Britain, France was wracked by political instability in the first half of the 19th century. France also lacked the centralized banking structure enjoyed by British entrepreneurs. Additionally, French population growth was only half that of the other European nations during this period. French peasants remained relatively content to stay on the land, unlike their British counterparts who had little choice but to go to the cities in search of low-paying factory jobs.

French Contributions to Industrialization

In certain industries, however, such as in the manufacturing of luxury goods, the French took the lead, and while their economic growth was not quite as dramatic as the British and Prussian models, it remained constant throughout most of the 19th century.

The Impact of Industrialization

Industrialization dramatically changed life in Europe. Because the location of factories tended to be concentrated in certain areas, cities began to grow and develop rapidly. Industrialization, and the urban movement it spawned, replaced the putting-out (or domestic) system, in which raw materials were delivered to the homes of peasants and then the finished products were collected and sold by merchants. The change from rural manufacturing to bringing workers to a location significantly affected life in Britain.

By the middle of the century, Great Britain became the first nation to have more people living in the cities than in the countryside, one of the most dramatic transformations in the history of humankind. Unfortunately, the cities that grew from the ground up as a result of industrialization tended to be awful places for the working poor. Poor ventilation and sanitation led to conditions in which the mortality rates were significantly higher for urban dwellers than for those who resided in the countryside. Because people had to use a water supply that came into direct contact with animal and human feces, cholera became part of the early 19th-century urban landscape, killing tens of thousands of individuals.

Industrialization greatly affected the family structure. The fact that the entire family was working was not new; the earlier domestic system had relied on the family as a cohesive working unit. What was different was that the family no longer worked together under one roof, with women and children now often working under conditions even more deplorable than the men, because factory owners thought they were less likely to complain. Great Britain’s Sadler Committee exposed that children were being beaten in the factories. As a result, the House of Commons passed the Factory Act (1833), which mandated that children younger than nine could not work in textile mills, that children younger than twelve could work no more than nine hours per day, and that children younger than eighteen couldn’t work more than twelve hours each day. But the act provided for only seven inspectors to ensure compliance.

Working-Class Responses to Industrialization

At first, workers were befuddled as to how to grapple with the economic and social problems caused by industrialization. For some individuals, such as handloom weavers, complete economic dislocation ensued, and their traditional way of life was threatened by machinery. Some laborers tried to destroy the machines, which they blamed for their problems. Their fictional leader was Ned Lud, and the term Luddite has stayed in the modern vocabulary in reference to those who refuse to embrace new technologies. Machinery also caused hardship for many laborers on the farms. They created an imaginary character known as Captain Swing, who righted the wrongs imposed on hardworking individuals by the advent of technology. After these rather primitive means of dealing with industrialization proved to be ineffective, workers sought to create cooperative societies, small associations within a given trade that provided funeral benefits and other services for their members.

Despite government disapproval, workers in Great Britain in the late 18th century organized what first were known as “friendly societies,” and these eventually evolved into full-blown unions once the ban on such activities was lifted in 1824. On the continent, it was not until the 1860s that unions were allowed to freely operate in France and in Prussia. Great Britain also took the lead in establishing the first unions that represented more than a single industry. In 1834, Robert Owen helped form the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which several decades later evolved into the Trade Union Congress, pulling together workers from disparate industries. Skilled laborers formed the first unions; by the end of the 19th century, however, unions were being formed by dockworkers and other non-skilled workers. Unions were a critical reason for the steady improvement in wages and factory conditions that took place in the second half of the 19th century.

Socialism and Karl Marx

Some workers—particularly on the continent—found that although the unions’ emphasis on gradual improvements in wages and hours worked, it was at best only a partial solution to the problems caused by industrialization. Many turned to socialism, believing that it offered a complete overhaul to an oppressive society. Socialism had early roots in the writings of such individuals as Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier; the most significant strand in socialist thought, however, was the so-called scientific socialism offered by Karl Marx (1818–1883).

Marx was born in the German city of Trier and eventually received a university education at Jena. As a young man, he became the editor of a Cologne newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, but he soon found that his political views were considered too radical by the authorities, who banned the newspaper, leading Marx to seek the freer intellectual climate of Paris. The French, however, quickly grew tired of Marx, so he left Paris for London where he spent the remainder of his life.

Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) organized a Communist League to link the far-flung German Socialists, many of whom, like Marx, were living in exile. In 1848, they teamed up to write a pamphlet that was to serve as a basic statement of principles for the organization. This document was The Communist Manifesto, one of the most influential political tracts in history. The very first line contains Marx and Engels’s view that all history from the beginnings of time consists of the struggle between social classes, an idea that was labeled as historical materialism, or the material dialectic. The origin of this idea can be found in the writings of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose dialectic differed from Marx’s in that it saw economic conditions emanating from ideas rather than the reverse. Hegel’s thinking influenced Marx and many others, as it seemed to suggest a means toward analyzing historical events.

Class Warfare

According to Marx and Engels, all of history has been dominated by the struggle between social classes.

Marx posited that the feudal age was supplanted by the triumph of the bourgeois class in the 19th century. The development of capitalism led to the creation of a new class, the proletariat (the working class), who would one day arise and supplant those capitalists who had exploited them. In the beginning of this supplantation, the state would dominate in what Marx admitted would be a violent, though triumphant, struggle by the workers; eventually, the state would wither away when it was no longer needed as a result of the elimination of all other classes besides the proletariat. Marx is also known for Das Kapital, an enormous treatise on capitalism that explains the mechanics by which capitalists extract profit from labor.

Industrialization and Child Labor

Interestingly, many workers were against placing constraints on child labor. It was not that they were monstrous parents; it was simply that wages were so low that children were providing funds that were an essential part of the family budget. There has been a long-standing—and perhaps tired—historical debate about the wages earned by industrial workers and the type of life such wages provided. The “optimist” school on this standard-of-living debate argues that in the first half of the 19th century, wages did rise somewhat for workers while prices remained steady or in fact declined, thus allowing for improved living conditions. The “pessimists,” on the other hand, claim that horrible working conditions and miserably low wages provided for an increasingly bleak existence for the working poor.

Marx brought a revolutionary dynamism to the class struggle, because he believed that the working class had to constantly prepare itself by organizing socialist parties. In 1864, he organized the First International, which Marx said was created to “afford a central medium of communication and cooperation” for those organizations whose aim was the “protection, advancement, and complete emancipation of the working classes.” This First International was not a completely Marxist organization—Trade Unionists, Mazzini Republicans, Marxists, and Anarchists were all members. Internal conflicts eventually led the First International to dissolve in 1876. After Marx’s death, Engels helped organize the Second International, a loose federation of the world’s socialist parties heavily influenced by Marxism that met for the first time on July 14, 1889. It was, of course, no accident that this meeting took place on the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille—Marxists were consciously referencing the beginning of the French Revolution and calling for one of their own.

THE AGE OF NATIONAL UNIFICATION (1854–1871)

Metternich once remarked that Italy was “a mere geographical expression.” He could have said the same for Germany, because up until the second half of the 19th century, both lands consisted of a number of independent territories, a disunity that dated back to the Middle Ages. In the late Middle Ages (c. 1100–1500) and the early modern period (c. 1500–1789), the rulers of France, Spain, and Great Britain successfully expanded their authority. In France, this expansion resulted in the monarchy destroying the independence of the rulers of Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine and incorporating them into the domains of the French king. This process was not predestined: We could just as easily imagine a Europe where modern Spain is divided between a large nation of Portugal and a small Aragon; and as it happened, the process of consolidation did not take place in either the northern German territories or on the Italian peninsula. However, by the early 19th century, individuals in both the German and Italian states sought to create a nation-state that would unite all Italians or all Germans under one political banner because they shared either a common culture, or language, or a fear of foreign domination. This process of national unification would have a tremendous impact on the future course of European history.

The Crimean War (1854–1856)

The Crimean War was critical to the formation of centralized states in both Italy and Germany, though initially it was impossible to foresee such a result when the war began in 1854. Several factors led to the outbreak of hostilities, including a controversy over which nation would control access to the religious sites sacred to Christians in Jerusalem. The main issue, however, was the fear among British and French statesmen that Ottoman weakness was encouraging Russian adventurism in the Balkans and the possibility that the Russians might gain access to the Mediterranean by occupying the port city of Istanbul.

War in Poetry

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” captures just one instance of battlefield stupidity during the Crimean War.

Following a naval defeat by the Ottomans, who had declared war on the Russians in 1853 with British encouragement, France and Great Britain declared war on the Russians. Most of the fighting took place in the Crimean region and was notable for the incredible incompetence of all participants. Most of the half-million casualties did not die in battle but perished due to disease in filthy field hospitals, something that inspired Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) to revolutionize the nursing profession.

The war came to an ignominious end after the fall of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol, Russia’s chief port in the northern Black Sea and nearest access to the Mediterranean. Though reluctant to quit, the Russians were forced to reconsider when the Austrians threatened to enter the war on the side of the British and the French unless Russia accepted the offered peace terms. Russia was forced to cede some territories on the Danube River and to accept a ban on warships in the Black Sea region. This was a major blow to Russian ambitions of involvement in European politics. Since the time of Peter the Great, Russia had sought a warm-water port in the south which could provide access to the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosporus and the Aegean. Without power in the Black Sea or along the Danube, the Russian navy was trapped in ports along the Baltic, subject to Swedish and Danish tolls.

The real cost of the war, however, was that the Concert of Europe, the idea that the great powers (France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Great Britain) should work together—a concept that emerged from the Congress of Vienna—was finally shattered. This conflict was the first European war since the Napoleonic era. Previously, Russia and Austria had worked together to resist the trend toward nation-building. After all, both were large, multi-ethnic empires with much to fear from nationalist movements among ethnic minorities. During the Crimean War, the Germans and other Europeans had no sense of unity on such questions. Additionally, the British public was horrified by the course of events in the Crimean region; as a result, Great Britain became more isolationist regarding European affairs. This meant that when Austria stood in opposition to the building of states in Germany and Italy, it received no support from an embittered Russia, and when France found itself confronting Prussia in 1870, it would find little sympathy across the English Channel.

Breakdown of European Unity

Following the Crimean War, European efforts toward cooperation broke down, and Great Britain became more isolationist.

The Unification of Italy

The Unification of Italy

In 1848, Italian liberals made an aborted attempt to create an Italian state. Although the attempt failed, the dream for a state never disappeared. Following the collapse of the short-lived Roman Republic, Pope Pius IX—when his authority in Rome was restored—inspired increasingly reactionary policies. Liberals no longer saw any potential for the realization of a federation of Italian states headed by the pope. Although some liberals wanted nothing less than the creation of an Italian republic, an increasing number looked with hope to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, the one Italian state that had preserved its liberal constitution since the year of revolutions.

The true architect of Italian unification, or what is referred to in Italian as the Risorgimento, was not the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel (r. 1849–1878), but Count Camillo di Cavour (1810–1861), his chief minister. Cavour was quite different from earlier Italian nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), who saw state-building in romanticized terms. Cavour was a far more practical individual who primarily sought ways to enhance the power of the Sardinian state.

Cavour realized that creating an Italian state would require the expulsion of Austria from the Italian peninsula. Events in 1848 foreshadowed the impossibility of succeeding in this expulsion without the aid of some other European state, so Cavour entered into a secret alliance with France. Cavour had set the groundwork for this relationship by cleverly entering the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the Crimean War on the side of France and Great Britain, and although its participation was minimal, it earned Napoleon III’s gratitude. Napoleon III was additionally interested in aiding the Sardinians because Austria was a traditional enemy of the French state. Napoleon III also periodically looked for foreign military adventures so that he could live up to his famous namesake, something that would eventually lead to his downfall.

What’s the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia?

This kingdom consisted of the island of Sardinia and Piedmont, a northern Italian territory that borders France and Switzerland. In some history textbooks you may see this kingdom labeled as the Kingdom of Sardinia, or sometimes simply as Piedmont, though all these labels refer to the same state.

The war began in April 1859. The combined French and Sardinian forces won a series of battles against the Austrians, but Napoleon decided to bring the conflict to a close before expelling the Austrians from all Italian lands. He was horrified by the high number of casualties from the conflict (something that never seemed to bother his uncle) and was threatened by Prussia who was massing troops on the Rhine to come to the aid of the Austrians. Cavour was so angered over Napoleon’s abortion of the war and his betrayal of the treaty with Sardinia that he resigned as prime minister, though a year later he resumed the office.

Both Cavour and Napoleon sought to create a state that would unite northern Italy. Napoleon did not want to see the entire Italian peninsula unified for fear that a large Italian state could be a threat to France. But to Cavour’s and Napoleon’s surprise, and to the latter’s great displeasure, the war against Austria helped inspire popular rebellions throughout the Italian peninsula. In the Austrian-dominated regions of Tuscany, Parma, and Modena, revolts led plebiscites to join with Sardinia.

Meanwhile, in the south of Italy, emerged one of the most intriguing characters in Italian history, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882). Garibaldi was a link to the old romantic tradition of Italian nationalism; he had at one time been a member of Mazzini’s Young Italy movement. Horrified by the terms of the treaty between Sardinia and France, which required Italy to hand over Savoy and Nice to the French, Garibaldi at first threatened to attack France over the loss of what he considered to be Italian territories. Cavour instead encouraged Garibaldi to invade the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, thinking that it would be a suicide mission. To everyone’s surprise, Garibaldi led his famous army of 1,000 “red shirts” and conquered this southern Italian kingdom, which had been ruled with great incompetence by the Bourbons. Garibaldi wanted to march on Rome and make it the new capital of a unified Italy, but this threat to papal control of the city would have greatly antagonized Napoleon III, who found it useful for his popularity among the French to portray himself as a defender of the Church.

Cavour was horrified by the idea that the vastly popular Garibaldi might seek to unify Italy under his own charismatic leadership rather than under Piedmont’s control. To curtail this possibility, Cavour rushed troops to Naples to block Garibaldi from his march. Cavour was interested in the papal lands, however, and he shrewdly waited for a popular revolt in the papal states to commence, and only then, under the pretext of restoring order, moved Sardinian troops into all of the lands controlled by the pope except for the city of Rome. This was followed by the declaration of Victor Emmanuel as the first king of Italy on March 17, 1861. After the successful invasion of papal lands, only Venetia and Rome were not under the unified Italian flag. In 1866, after Prussia’s victory over Austria, the Italians used the opportunity of Austria’s vulnerability to seize Venetia. Rome was added to Italy in 1870 and named as its new capital following the withdrawal of French troops from the city as a result of the Franco-Prussian War.

The new Italian nation was beset with problems and plagued by corruption and bribery. For more romantically oriented nationalists like Garibaldi, the new Italy was a cold bureaucratic state led by petty officials from Sardinia, inspiring little of the passion that they had felt for the cause of statehood. To this day, there is an economic divide between the north of Italy, which is highly industrialized, and the far more economically backward south. A major problem for the new state was the continuing hostility of the Catholic Church, which banned Catholics from participating in national elections, even though Catholics widely ignored this order. In fact, the Church would not fully reconcile with the Italian state until 1929 when Mussolini agreed to restore the sovereignty of Vatican City to the papacy.

German Unification

Although Italian unification had important implications for the rest of Europe, the rise of a unified German state in 1871 totally altered the balance of power in Europe, owing to the great military and economic strength of this new state. The story of German unification is rooted in the Napoleonic era. Napoleon’s domination of large parts of Germany not only increased the demand among German patriots for the creation of a unified nation but also reduced the sheer number of independent German states, which eventually aided in the actual process of unification.

Following the fall of Napoleon, Austria and Prussia were the two dominant states within the German Confederation. In 1848, it appeared as if German unification would be achieved when the Frankfurt Parliament offered the crown to the Prussian king, but Frederick William’s refusal delayed the process until it was achieved through means that the Prussians found more conducive to their interests.

Although it was not a foregone conclusion that it was to be Prussia rather than Austria that would take the lead in creating a unified Germany, Prussia did enjoy a number of significant advantages. Prussia, through its creation of the Zollverein, had achieved an economic preeminence over the other member states, while Austria was specifically excluded by Prussia for membership in the Zollverein customs union. By mid-century, Prussia had achieved a significant measure of industrialization, while Austria remained a primarily agricultural state. In addition, the Austrian Empire was a polyglot state made up of numerous nationalities, while Prussia was primarily a German state. Perhaps most important to its dominance, Prussia enjoyed the services of one of the most remarkable statesmen of the 19th century, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898).

On taking the throne of Prussia, William I (r. 1861–1888) made the most important decision of his reign when he selected Bismarck as his prime minister. William was engaged at the time in a fight with his parliament over military reforms that he wanted in order to challenge Austrian supremacy in the German Confederation. To break the impasse, William turned to Bismarck, a Junker (Prussian noble), who was known for his arch-conservative views. Standing before the parliamentary budget commission, Bismarck delivered his “Blood and Iron” speech in which he said, “Germany is not looking to Prussia’s liberalism but to her power…it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time will be decided—that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.” Despite the colorful speech, the parliament still refused to vote in favor of the military budget. Never one to bother with constitutional niceties, Bismarck simply ignored parliament and proceeded to collect the taxes and implement the reforms. To their great discredit, the Prussian liberals did nothing to oppose this blatant disregard for their authority.

The key to his plan to create a unified German state was to modernize the Prussian army by giving it the latest weapons. The first stage in this plan took place in 1864 and involved an alliance with Austria against Denmark over the disputed territories of Schleswig and Holstein. After easily defeating the Danes (the Danish War, also known as the German-Danish War or Danish-Prussian War), Schleswig came under Prussian control while Holstein was run by the Austrians. Bismarck cunningly set up this system because he wanted the Danish dispute to help achieve his next goal—war with Austria.

By 1866, Prussia prepared for war by securing an alliance with Italy (which wanted to see the final removal of Austria from Italian lands) and securing a promise of non-participation from the French. Then Prussia under Bismarck’s orders, declared war on Austria, citing the petty dispute over the governance of Holstein as the reason for the attack. The modernization program undertaken by the Prussian army proved to be astonishingly successful, as Prussian forces brought about the defeat of Austria in a matter of seven weeks (the Seven Weeks War, or Austro-Prussian War). Ignoring the advice of both his king and the generals who wanted to stage a victory parade through the streets of Vienna and to annex large pieces of the Austrian Empire, Bismarck wisely treated Austria with courtesy to keep her out of the next stage of his plan—a war with France.

After the defeat of the Austrians, Bismarck annexed those small German states in the north that had supported Austria in the conflict. Other northern German states were convinced to join Prussia in the creation of what became known as the North German Confederation. The states of southern Germany, while remaining independent, concluded a military alliance with Prussia in case of French aggression.

In 1870, the final stage of Bismarck’s plan was set in motion when he provoked a war with the French (the Franco-Prussian War). Bismarck, with great cunning, made France the outward aggressor in a conflict that began when a prince, who was a kinsman of the Prussian King (a Hohenzollern), was invited to take the vacant throne of Spain. To Napoleon III, the thought of Hohenzollern rulers on two fronts was too much to contemplate. Napoleon III initially won a diplomatic victory when William I agreed to withdraw his cousin’s name. However, Bismarck, who desperately wanted war, rewrote the so-called “Ems dispatch,” a telegram sent by the Prussian king to Bismarck informing him of what had transpired in the conversation between the king and the French ambassador, to make it appear as though the king had insulted France. Bowing to the demands of an outraged French public, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia. Following the decisive battle of Sedan, France, which many believed had the finest army in the world, was soundly defeated by Prussia. Using Prussia’s newfound prestige earned by achieving this victory, Bismarck was able to either convince or bribe the rulers of the other German states to accept the creation of a Germany under Prussian leadership. On January 18, 1871, William I was proclaimed in the palace of Versailles as German emperor.

The creation of a German Empire completely changed the direction of European history. The following are some examples:

This new Germany was also not necessarily a very stable entity. Created by military might, its military commanders had a great influence over the nation at large, particularly following the forced retirement of Bismarck in 1890. Prior to being put out to pasture, Bismarck had worried about the internal dangers facing the new nation and therefore attacked two groups he deemed to be a threat to the internal cohesion of the Reich—the Catholics and the Socialists.

Fearful that Catholics owed an allegiance to a church that extended beyond nationalism to Germany, Bismarck responded with an attack on the Catholic Church in a conflict known as the “Kulturkampf,” in which he insisted on controlling all church appointments and on gaining complete supervision over Catholic education. Eventually, because of Catholic resentment toward such policies, Bismarck backed away from this struggle.

He turned to another perceived enemy—the Socialists—and in 1878, Bismarck called for the passage in the Reichstag of a ban on Socialists’ right to assemble and to publish materials. Bismarck also attempted to limit the political appeal of the Socialists by establishing old-age pensions and other social benefits for all Germans. However, as in the case of the Catholics, Bismarck found that oppressing the German Social Democratic Party merely increased its appeal.

Despite his seemingly hostile nature, Bismarck was seen as having helped establish the glory of Germany and its peoples. His efforts to co-opt the appeal of socialism increased his prestige in his later years. However, he ultimately rose to power (and remained in power for over twenty-five years) thanks to his careful manipulation of the press and the monarchs of Germany. Prussia (and later, Germany) was a conservative, aristocratic state. Bismarck ruled at the pleasure of the king, not the people; and his poor relations with Wilhelm II led to less able statesmen taking his place, jeopardizing his fragile peace with Russia, and ultimately sacrificing German stability for the sake of German glory.

France

France seemed to have a tortured existence throughout the 19th century as it continued to grapple with the legacy of the French Revolution. A measure of stability finally emerged with the rise of the Third French Republic (1870–1940), though it too had to deal with a past that still divided segments of the French public.

Following his victory in the December 1848 election, Louis Napoleon became the first and only president of the short-lived Second Republic. He used a tool developed by his uncle, Napoleon. Following a constitutional dispute with the legislature, he staged a plebiscite in 1851 that polled the people about whether to grant him dictatorial powers for a ten-year period. After winning this vote, Napoleon moved on in the following year to stage another plebiscite, this time on the question of whether to create a second French empire. Although there were numerous electoral irregularities, apparently large numbers of Frenchmen were perfectly content to see the revival of the empire in the hope of once again seeing France take the dominant position in Europe.

France prospered greatly during the first ten years of the reign of Napoleon III. Cheap credit provided by the government allowed for a significant economic expansion during this period. The city of Paris underwent a remarkable transformation from a medieval city to a modern one under the guidance of Georges Haussmann (1809–1891), who cleared many of the slums of the city and in their place built the wide avenues that have become a hallmark of Paris. Besides making the city more attractive visually, this new Paris was a much cleaner place, with aqueducts to bring fresh water into the city and sewers to remove waste, resulting in the elimination of one of the great scourges of the earlier part of the century—cholera.

Despite the economic improvements during the first decade of his reign, politically Napoleon III led an authoritarian regime. Beginning in 1860, Napoleon began to make a number of concessions, such as the easing of censorship, in part because of the unpopularity of his wars in the Crimean region and the Italian states. However, this liberalization had the opposite effect of what he intended; it led the people to openly display their disenchantment with his reign. Napoleon was, nevertheless, an effective politician, and he took a bold gamble in 1859 when he declared the creation of a “liberal empire,” making his state a constitutional monarchy. This intriguing experiment never had the opportunity to succeed. Napoleon blundered into the Franco-Prussian War and was captured in battle. Eventually, he was sent into exile in Britain, where he soon died.

The New Paris

It’s said that one British visitor told the emperor with a bit of sarcasm, “May it be said of you that you found Paris stinking and left it sweet.”

Following the collapse of the Second Empire, France created what became known as the Third Republic. Right away, the Republic had to deal with the daunting task of putting down a revolt in Paris, which resulted in the rise of the Paris Commune, a radical government created out of the anarchy brought about by the Franco-Prussian War. The republican government restored order in Paris only after winning an armed struggle that resulted in the massacre of 25,000 Parisians. By 1875, the republic was firmly established and consisted of a two-house parliamentary body, with a chamber of deputies, or lower house, elected by a universal male pool of voters and a senate chosen by indirect elections. The president, or head of government, was a relatively weak office, directly responsible to the chamber of deputies. The Third Republic would face its greatest challenge in 1889, when a coup d’état looked probable. What became known as the Boulanger Affair severely weakened the monarchist movement. Although it was marked by significant problems, such as tensions between the state and the Catholic Church and significant anti-Semitism, the Third Republic proved to be the most durable of all the French republics.

Great Britain

In contrast to France, Great Britain enjoyed remarkable stability and prosperity in the second half of the 19th century. A general sense of self-satisfaction pervaded in Victorian England. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which boasted more than 13,000 exhibitors displaying the variety of British goods that were now available as a result of industrialization. To accommodate the exhibits and the millions of visitors, the architect John Paxton constructed a building with the greatest area of glass to date, which became known as the Crystal Palace. One contemporary wrote that because buildings represent the society that builds them, the Crystal Palace revealed “the aesthetic bloom of its practical character, and of the practical tendency of the English nation.”

Politically, the nation was slowly evolving in the direction of increased democracy. The Great Reform Bill of 1832 was only the first in a number of steps that were taken to expand the franchise. In 1867, under the direction of prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), one of the most remarkable men to ever hold that post, the Second Reform Bill passed, which extended the vote to urban heads of households. In 1884, during the Prime Ministership of Disraeli’s great rival, William Gladstone (1809–1898), the vote was further extended to heads of households in the countryside. The rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone was emblematic of another important aspect of Victorian politics—the evolution of a political system dominated by two political parties, in this case, Disraeli’s Tory or Conservative party and Gladstone’s Liberal party. The long reign of Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901) saw a continuing deterioration in the political power of the monarchy, resulting in the crown’s inability to play a significant role in the selection of a prime minister, which meant that at times Victoria had to live with Gladstone as her chief minister, even though she detested him and adored Disraeli, who knew how to flatter her vanity.

Russia

The stresses of war can show a nation at its best or they can reveal significant problems. For Russia, the poor showing in the Crimean War, fought in its own backyard, revealed the backwardness of its society in comparison to the nations of western Europe. Although Nicholas I was far too reactionary to contemplate reform, his successor, Alexander II (r. 1855–1881), recognized that the greatest problem facing Russia was serfdom. In 1861, he issued a proclamation freeing the serfs, though the former serfs had to buy their freedom with payments that were to extend over fifty years (a practice that was stopped following the Russian Revolution of 1905). The peasants were also generally given the poorest lands by their former owners, which meant that life remained harsh for many agricultural laborers.

Administratively, to cope with a Russia that faced a burgeoning population throughout its far-flung empire, Alexander introduced zemstvos, or district assemblies, that had mandates to deal with local issues such as education and social services. The zemstvos were dominated by the local gentry and were hardly bastions of democracy, though some Russian reformers saw their existence as the potential for greater political freedoms. Alexander enacted further reforms, such as a revision of the legal system, although at heart he remained an autocrat and saw no need to implement fundamental changes like the introduction of a written constitution and parliamentary bodies. His intransigence on these points led to a rise in revolutionary organizations such as the People’s Will, which assassinated Alexander in 1881. The succession to the throne of his reactionary son Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) brought about a new round of repression and an attempt to weaken even the tentative reforms of Alexander II.

Austria

The 19th century was not kind to the Austrian Empire, a multinational empire in an age of growing nationalist sentiment. By 1866, the Habsburgs had lost all their territories in Italy, and their shattering defeat by the Prussians at the Battle of Sadowa made Austria no longer a factor in German affairs. In 1867, the government in Vienna found it necessary to sign an agreement with the Magyars in Hungary, creating a dual Austrian-Hungarian empire. Each state was to be independent but united under the mutual leadership of Francis Joseph, who became Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Magyars, having achieved a measure of independence, turned around and did their best to ensure that the Croats, Serbs, Romanians, and other nationalities located within Hungary were denied any form of self-rule. As a result of a lessening influence in western Europe, Austria-Hungary attempted to become more influential in the Balkan region, ultimately with disastrous consequences.

The Ottoman Empire

Another multinational empire at the crossroads was the Ottoman Empire. Commonly referred to as “the sick old man of Europe,” the Ottoman state attempted in the second half of the 19th century to implement a process of modernization. This reform program, which began during the reign of Sultan Abdul Mejid (r. 1839–1861) and was known as the Tanzimat, was an attempt to adopt Western methods of waging wars, to bring about a much needed overhaul of the Ottoman economy, and to introduce such notions as equality before the law and freedom of religion.

The introduction of Western education played a significant role in forming a group of liberal intellectuals known as the “Young Turks.” The Young Turks were eventually able to push reform further than the government had ever planned and in 1876 helped establish the Ottoman state as a constitutional monarchy. However, when the brutal Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) came to the throne, the constitution was scrapped as part of his attempt to subjugate the non-Muslim peoples within his empire. His policies led to the deaths of thousands of Armenians (though they were only a precursor to the full-fledged Armenian Genocide that would take place under the Young Turks during the years following 1915) and general repression throughout the state, although by the end of his reign, the Young Turks once again restored a measure of constitutional rule.

Ottoman weakness, however, continued to plague the empire up until it sided with the Central Powers in the First World War. The Ottomans could do little but sit idly by when, at the Congress of Berlin (1878), after another humiliating defeat at the hands of the Russians (the Russo-Turkish War), the other European powers recognized the independence of Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and Bulgaria—all former Ottoman territories in the same Balkan region where the Austro-Hungarian Empire would soon have so much trouble.

THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

By the middle of the 19th century, Europe had undergone a dramatic process of economic expansion. These economic changes—sometimes referred to as the Second Industrial Revolution—and their impact on human lives may have been even greater than what occurred during the initial stages of industrialization.

Steel

The label “Age of Steel” is an apt one for the second half of the century. Previously, steel production was expensive. In 1856, the Englishman Henry Bessemer (1813–1898) introduced a method that became known as the Bessemer Process that produced steel in far greater quantities without increasing costs. A few years later, William Siemens (1823–1883), a German, introduced an even better method of making steel that produced a higher quality product at significantly reduced costs. Because of its strength and durability, steel became the metal of choice for buildings and ships, resulting in a revolution in architecture and shipbuilding.

Electricity

Few developments have affected the way people live their lives as significantly as the invention of the means to harness electrical power. In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lamp. Two years later, the first electrical power station was built in Great Britain. Soon after that, European cities began to be lit after dark, and populations moved through the streets of the city more effectively with the introduction of electric tramways. Electric lights made cities far safer and even led to the expansion of nighttime activities in London and Paris, where the late 19th century saw a tremendous growth in the number of public opera houses and theaters.

Transportation

The second half of the 19th century witnessed many significant developments in all forms of transportation.

Communication and Education Advances

Other Scientific Developments

Science began to play an increasingly important role in industrial expansion. In particular, the second half of the 19th century produced a series of major developments. While this trend was to continue into the first decades of the 20th century, in many ways, the optimism that one could sense in the 1880s concerning the world of science was not to be found some forty years later. Even before the First World War delivered a terrible blow to the belief in rational progress, scientists were revealing that nature was incredibly complex and that many questions would remain unanswered while at least some of the basic assumptions concerning the workings of the universe were under attack.

Increasingly, the 19th and early-20th centuries witnessed greater specialization in the sciences, as scientists provided some of the key foundational work in areas such as physics and chemistry. Some of these developments include the following:

Philosophy

Just as scientific inquiry was revealing ideas and principles that appeared to be less than rational, philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, for a time a professor of classical languages at the University of Basel, began to question and even to reject the ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment. In Nietzsche’s most influential work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he argued that it was necessary to break free from traditional morality, which is why he famously proclaimed that “God is dead.” It was necessary, according to Nietzsche, to “kill” God, because religion was at the center of a Western model of civilization that he despised. Nietzsche hated the Germany created by Bismarck and instead yearned for the emergence of the artist-warrior superman. Unfortunately, after his death in 1900, his pro-Nazi sister was in charge of his literary estate, and she edited his writings to make them supportive of Hitler’s extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism, two modern chauvinisms that he, in fact, despised.

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, took the methods of modern science and proposed to find a way to treat mental disorders by delving into the human subconscious, using what he referred to as the “talking cure.” As he spelled out in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud believed that dreams revealed the inner workings of a subconscious world and devised a list of Freudian symbols—items or events that appear in dreams that actually represent other items or events stored in the unconscious. In Civilization and Its Discontents, a book written in his more pessimistic later years, Freud questioned the very premise of continuous progress for the human race and instead posited that despite attempts to suppress it, violence lies at the very core of our being.

Advances in Medicine

The beginnings of modern Western medicine took root in the 19th century, marking the first time in history that going to the doctor was not such a bad idea.

Darwin

Few individuals had a greater impact on the intellectual world of the 19th century than Charles Darwin (1809–1882), an English naturalist who traveled on the H.M.S. Beagle to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of South America. Prior to Darwin, there were some, including his grandfather, who had challenged the biblical account of creation found in Genesis, which states that creation was a one-time event and that species therefore never undergo a process of change (evolution), because God created the world in six days and then stopped. In addition, geologists, like Charles Lyell (1797–1875), claimed that geological evidence proved that the Earth was much older than the biblical age of approximately 6,000 years.

Darwin’s Followers and “Survival of the Fittest”

Darwin did attract a number of followers. Although Darwin was always calculating in his own speculative thought, many of his followers pursued his ideas with wild abandon. It was Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) who first used the phrase “survival of the fittest,” a phrase never in fact uttered by Darwin. For Spencer, such an idea provided justification for governments to abandon the poor; he believed that giving aid on their behalf would upset the natural order of survival. Such ideas, which received the label “Social Darwinism,” were used to justify the idea that Europeans were superior to Africans and Asians and therefore should dominate them. Across Europe, ardent nationalists used the concept of survival of the fittest to explain the constant state of tensions between nations and why some states thrived while others didn’t. Social Darwinism also played a role in the heightened anti-Semitism found across Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century, as some argued that Jews were a lesser race and could never be integrated within the larger fabric of society.

Although Darwin was not operating in an intellectual vacuum, he was the first to offer an explanation for the process of change. Darwin argued that certain members of a species inherit traits that over time may make them more successful in the struggle for survival. These traits are then passed down, while those members of the species who lack such characteristics ultimately do not reproduce. Darwin labeled this process “natural selection” in his epochal book The Origin of Species (1859). It was not until more than a decade after the publication of his first book that Darwin, a cautious man, would take his idea to its natural conclusion. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin argued that humans were not exempt from this process of evolutionary change and that human beings have therefore evolved from simpler forms of life. The opposition to Darwin was swift and vehement, particularly from religious groups, who saw such ideas as a direct threat to the very basis of their beliefs.

Social Class and the Second Industrial Revolution

Such far-reaching industrial developments played a significant role in changing the social dynamic in western Europe. One group in decline was the traditional aristocracy. The French Revolution created the concept of a meritocracy, thereby eliminating any special privileges based on birth. In Great Britain, the development of refrigerated railcars meant that less expensive agricultural products could be imported from the United States, Argentina, and Australia, which resulted in the propitious decline in the wealth of many of the great noble families, whose wealth was primarily based on land. The implementation of competitive examinations for civil service and military positions served to reduce the aristocracy’s role in two of their traditional endeavors: government administration and command of the military.

The second half of the 19th century has sometimes been called the “Age of the Middle Class.” Middle classes were not new: During the Renaissance, a different “middle class” was largely responsible for the changes that radically transformed society. That middle class consisted of wealthy, city-dwelling merchants, who lay somewhere between the three traditional classes, or “estates,” of medieval society—the peasants, the priesthood, and the nobility. The money of these merchants, and their secular interests, contributed to the intellectual progress of the Renaissance.

In the late 19th century, however, the middle class was growing in size and importance. The merchants were joined by members of newly created professions (such as industrialists and engineers) and of newly wealthy ones (lawyers, journalists, doctors, and teachers). These people were “middle class” in the sense that they fell outside the earlier class system. On the whole they were not middle-income; they were instead quite wealthy. The late 1800s were significant not because the middle class was new, but because it was larger than ever before.

As a group, the middle class enjoyed new luxuries such as fresh running water and central heating. All families that were considered middle class had at least one servant, while wealthier families had large staffs to attend to their every need. Department stores began to cater to the increasing taste for consumer goods that became a hallmark of middle-class existence. Travel in the 18th century had been the preserve of the extremely wealthy, when it was considered an essential part of a young gentleman’s education to go on a “Grand Tour” of the capitals of Europe. However, this too changed. Thomas Cook (1808–1892) popularized travel among the middle class when he organized day trips to the Great Exhibition in London, thus giving rise to the tourist trade. For those seeking less vigorous relaxation than seeing ten countries in as many days, spas and resorts became common vacation destinations.

A “Victorian” Morality

Another sign that the middle class enjoyed preeminence at this time was that its standards of behavior became the societal norms. In some instances, this trend produced positive results; for example, certain barbaric forms of popular entertainment, such as animal fights, ceased. Unfortunately, the middle class often obeyed a rather priggish, or what we today refer to as “Victorian,” morality. This sense of propriety also greatly affected middle-class women: Victorian sensibilities seemed to preclude them from living fulfilled lives. Women were excluded from the professions and from enrollment in institutions of higher education. The late Victorian period did witness the development in Great Britain, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, France and Germany, of a women’s rights movement that sought to dramatically change the status of women.

For workers, the Second Industrial Revolution brought about some improvements in their standard of living. One example of this is the development of popular entertainment such as dance halls and professional sports leagues, a sign that the working-class income was not entirely consumed by survival necessities, such as food and housing. Yet, for many workers across western Europe, the improvements were slight at best. Many still saw socialism as the best means to change their dreary existence. Socialism itself underwent some significant developments in the latter part of the 19th century. Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), a German intellectual, challenged some of Marx’s basic ideas in Evolutionary Socialism (1898). He and his followers, who were labeled “revisionists,” argued that capitalism was not, as Marx claimed, about to collapse.

The Beginnings of Anarchism

Another political ideology that began to attract some workers by the end of the century was anarchism. Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), a self-educated typesetter, is often considered to be the father of anarchism. In 1840, he wrote What Is Property?, and his answer to that question was simply that “property is theft.” Proudhon, who was the first to use the term “anarchist,” believed that the true laws of society had little to do with authority and came from the nature of society itself. Anarchism touted the idea that bringing these laws to the surface should be the ultimate goal of any society. Anarchists like Proudhon wanted workers to organize small groups of independent producers that would govern themselves without interference from the state, an institution that anarchists wanted to see abolished. Anarchism never gained the support of as many workers as socialism, but in certain regions, such as in the Spanish province of Andalusia, the movement had a significant following.

Because capitalism was firmly rooted in society, it was necessary for socialists to work toward the progressive improvement of working-class conditions within a capitalist framework rather than focus on revolutionary upheaval. Their more radical views had been mollified in part due to the development of parliamentary democracy and universal male suffrage in parts of western Europe, which led them to believe that socialism could be achieved through the ballot box.

Radicals, such as the German Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), held firm to the validity of Marx’s “laws” and were harsh toward the revisionists, whom they considered heretics, although Kautsky himself in fact altered some of Marx’s ideas. Unlike Marx, he claimed that the proletarian revolution would not be a bloody affair but a civilized process. A socialist movement could be a passive evolution because it was inevitable. Such views were in turn declared heretical by more extreme socialists such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemberg.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTS

Religion

Religious beliefs and institutions made a significant recovery in the period after 1815, particularly considering the extent of the challenges posed to organized religion by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic era. Secular rulers saw religion as an important bulwark for the existing social order, with the revolutions of 1848 further spurring this trend toward state support of religion.

Catholicism

Spain, in 1851, declared Catholicism the only religion of the Spanish people, while in Austria, the reforms that Joseph II had imposed on the Catholic Church in the late 18th century over areas such as the training of priests were repealed.

Nowhere were the events of 1848 felt more than in Rome, where a revolution forced Pius IX to flee his city. Restored to power with the help of French troops, he issued the encyclical Syllabus of Errors, which listed liberalism as one of the errors of modern life. In 1870, Pius put forward the doctrine of “papal infallibility,” which posits that when making an official statement on matters of faith, the pope could not be in error, a controversial doctrine that alarmed moderate Catholics.

Perhaps inevitably, there was a backlash against religious institutions where they appeared to be standing in the way of change. Such criticism could be clearly expected from liberal circles, but even conservative politicians could be antagonistic toward religious bodies. In the newly unified Germany, Bismarck saw Catholicism as a force that could rip the nation apart, because Catholics were tied to a supranational institution that would be the object of their primary loyalties. To deal with this purported threat, Bismarck, with the support of German liberals, attacked Catholic institutions in what was known as the Kulturkampf (cultural war), taking control over Catholic schools and the appointment of bishops. After seeing that this was having little effect, Bismarck stopped this harassment in 1878.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, there was a growing sentiment among both Catholic and Protestant clergy that religion needed to address the social issues of the day. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) issued Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), and although the encyclical reaffirmed the right of private property and bashed socialism, it said that Christians in general and the Church specifically had a responsibility toward the poor. In primarily Catholic countries such as France and Italy, this message led to the establishment of the Catholic Social Movement, while in Protestant lands, churches expanded their efforts on behalf of the poor.

The Bible as History

In the German states in the early 19th century, a group of theologians began to study the Bible as history in search of the “historical” Jesus. A critical step in this effort was the publication in 1835 of The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874). For Strauss, the Bible consisted of a series of myths formulated by the early Christians, ultimately providing for a scripture that contained, in his famous phrase, a “Christ of faith, rather than the Jesus of history.” The work of these German theologians was brought to England by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as well as by George Eliot, who translated Strauss’s Life as well as Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1804–1872) Essence of Christianity, which argued that God was a man-made device that reflected our own inner sense of the divine.

Religion for the Working Class and Peasants

In Great Britain, a religious census taken in 1851 revealed that attendance at church (it assumed everyone was Christian) was much lower than expected and that the working class in particular had very little connection with organized religion. On the other hand, the 19th century was not without some interesting examples of the continuing strength of popular religious sentiment. One well-known incident dates back to 1858, when a young French peasant girl named Bernadette saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, an event that was repeated eighteen more times. The waters from the grotto at Lourdes where she saw the vision became an important religious shrine.

The Lourdes Shrine

To this day, the grotto at Lourdes remains a place where those who are ill drink or bathe in the waters in the hope of being cured.

Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism

For Jews, the 19th century presented new opportunities as well as new pressures. The legal status of Jews improved throughout the century. In 1858, Jews were allowed to enter the House of Commons in Great Britain, and in the following decade, Jews received full political rights in Austria-Hungary and Germany. Despite their newly enhanced legal status, social discrimination remained endemic. Those Jews who wanted to rise in certain professions or in government often found the path blocked to them unless they converted.

The last quarter of the 19th century was a period of increasing hardships for Jews. For many, Jews were seen as responsible for new and troubling trends in modern economic life, such as the creation of the department store, which put small shopkeepers out of business. The economic depression of 1873, which lasted for most of the remainder of the decade, led to an increase in prejudice. Economic resentment was combined with a new form of anti-Semitism (the word was first used in 1879) based on Social Darwinist notions of Jews as being part of a distinct and foreign race and not just members of a religious denomination.

Hitler’s early years in Vienna were spent in a city governed by Karl Lueger (1844–1928), who was elected mayor of the city on an openly anti-Semitic platform. Anti-Semitic political parties formed in Germany, while in France, the Dreyfus Affair helped give rise to Action Française, a monarchist group that was also virulently anti-Semitic.

In Russia, the monarchy used attacks on Jews, or pogroms, as a tool for redirecting popular anger, which might otherwise have been directed toward the throne. Several million Jews left Russia at the turn of the century to escape the persecution that grew worse after the 1905 Revolution.

For many Jews, the optimism they felt at the middle of the century that the future would bring ever greater social acceptance was by the end of the century being destroyed by a wave of hatred. For some, this would lead to the conclusion that the only hope to live in peace would be through the establishment of a Jewish homeland. The leading advocate for Zionism, as this idea was called, was Theodore Herzl (1860–1904), an Austrian journalist who was horrified over the anti-Semitism that bubbled over the surface as a result of the Dreyfus Affair. In The Jewish State, he argued that Jews must have a state of their own and began to form a worldwide organization to achieve this goal, with the First Zionist Congress meeting in Switzerland in 1897.

The Rights and Role of Women

The role of the family changed in the 19th century, with one of the most significant developments being that families, which at one time operated as a cohesive economic unit, no longer functioned in such a manner. Increasingly, there were now separate spheres for both male and female endeavors, with the male going off to earn the money that provided for the family’s support. In the late 19th century, the rise of a sizable, wealthy middle class created new gender standards. Middle-class city-dwellers had the money and the energy to record their social views and set standards of taste for their nations. And, among those families who had the money, the new standard was for a man’s place to be in the workforce and a woman’s to be in the home, which was increasingly seen as a haven in an ever-changing world.

This idealization of the household and the female’s place within it led in the Victorian period to the rise of what is known as the “cult of domesticity.” Among the well-off, women were expected to exhibit certain traits that were to make the home a blissful paradise. Submissiveness was one of the traits that women were expected to exhibit, along with sexual purity and religious piety, because women were expected to be responsible for the religious life of the family. Books were written to provide women with tips on running their households and raising their children. Standards were quite different for the poorer majority of the country. Working-class women worked just as hard as working-class men, whether in factories, or in forms of domestic labor (such as taking in laundry), or as servants. Many worked multiple jobs, and had little time or energy left to raise children, let alone read books on the subject. The working class would, nevertheless, sometimes receive visits from well-meaning but patronizing middle-class women offering to instruct them in the new ways of home economics.

Who Is Mary Mayson Beeton?

She wrote the most famous advice book for women during this period. Her Book of Household Management was second in sales in Great Britain only to the Bible.

Limits to Women’s Education and Work

Keeping women in the home was in part ensured by outside institutions that limited the opportunities that were available to females. Higher education was generally reserved for men, although cracks began to appear, with women being allowed to attend the University of Zurich by 1865 and the University of London in 1878. With the development of professional societies in areas such as medicine and law, women found an additional barrier, as the bylaws of these societies generally excluded women. For those middle-class women who did work outside the home, certain professions such as primary school teacher, nurse, secretary, and librarian became almost completely female, which also ensured that they were poorly paid jobs in comparison to those held by men.

Some women were able to move beyond the bounds of convention. Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) was one of the first women to make a living as a journalist and later became an active campaigner against medical vivisection, and Josephine Butler (1828–1906) challenged a basic Victorian prohibition simply by talking about sex publicly. Butler helped found the Ladies National Association in 1869, an all-female organization that fought against the Contagious Diseases Act, which allowed for women who were deemed to possibly be infected by sexually transmitted diseases to be dragged off the street for examination while males went unaccosted.

Women’s Struggles for Increased Rights

As the century continued, a growing number of women began to criticize the civil disabilities under which they lived, such as the lack of right to divorce or to possess property rights. These women, who adopted the French word “feminist” to describe themselves, began to organize organizations to help bring about change. Even in unexpected places, such as in a conservative society like Greece, a feminist newspaper existed that advocated for both professional and civil rights and survived for more than twenty years with a circulation of 20,000.

Cross-national cooperation existed among the various feminist groups, and there were also transatlantic links with feminists in the United States. Although there was a general desire for cooperation, these first-generation feminists tended to split over the issue of whether the primary struggle should be for the vote or for the improvement of social conditions.

Some progressive women scorned feminism altogether, as was the case with the German Marxist Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), who saw socialism as offering women the only possibility for ending their oppression. In Great Britain, there was a split among those women who were working to achieve the vote. Suffragists, women who worked peacefully for the vote, were at times overshadowed in the public consciousness by the individuals who joined the Women’s Social and Political Union formed by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928). With her daughter Christabel (1880–1958) at her side, Emmeline and her followers (called Suffragettes) pursued a militant campaign of heckling political speakers, breaking church windows, and committing arson. These were serious crimes, and there was no sense of mercy on account of their gender or their wealthy backgrounds (Poorer women did not usually have the luxury of being involved in politics.). On the contrary, suffragettes were punished severely for the significant threat they posed to the established social order: They were arrested for their actions and frequently beaten. They went on hunger strike in prison, only to be force-fed.

In 1918 women in Great Britain finally achieved the right to vote. There is ongoing historical debate regarding whether it was the suffragettes or the suffragists who ultimately deserve the credit for this momentous achievement. However, there is an additional factor that allowed women across Europe to achieve the vote in the early 20th century: the significant contribution that women made to the war effort during the First World War.

Cultural Changes

Meanwhile, there were cultural changes taking place that provided the foundations for the emergence of the so-called “new woman.” Maria Montessori (1870–1952) exemplifies this new woman in Europe at the turn of the century. An Italian, Montessori became a famous educator and physician who was renowned for her teaching strategies. Factors such as the increased availability of birth control and greater educational and professional opportunities offered new horizons for women. For some men, this new woman was unsettling, with the British novelist D. H. Lawrence noting in an essay that women, who used to “see themselves as a softly flowing stream of attraction,” were now “pointed and they want everything.”

Emergence of the Social Sciences

History

In the 19th century, there was a new impetus to take the methodology established in the sciences and apply it to the workings of society. One result of this was the emergence of history as a modern academic discipline. One of the pioneers in the new historical methods was Barthold Niebuhr (1776–1831), who introduced the close examination of primary source documents into the writing of classical history. His Roman History influenced Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and led von Ranke to challenge the traditional way of looking at history as revealing some grand design, whether that design was the revealed work of God or led to a more secular purpose. Ranke felt that the historical texts of his day were unreliable and instead felt that it was necessary, like Niebuhr, to go to original sources.

Anthropology

Another social science, anthropology, was born out of the sudden expansion of European dominance over large parts of the globe as a result of the new imperialism. Across Europe, national anthropological societies were established, although unfortunately, due to the endemic “scientific” racism of the age, such societies often spent their time exploring the “inferiority” of non-Europeans.

Sociology

Sociology, the study of human social behavior, was in part inspired by the growing tendency of governments to keep statistics on the conditions of their citizenry. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) held the first chair in sociology at the University of Bordeaux, an appointment that was met with skepticism by the more traditional faculty.

Archaeology

Scientific principles were also used in the field of archaeology, which in the 19th century still remained the preserve of dedicated amateurs such as Heinrich Schlieman, a German businessman who searched for the ruins of ancient Troy, and the Englishman Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941), who excavated the Minoan culture of Crete.

The Arts

Romanticism began in the second half of the 18th century as a rejection of what was viewed as the cold rationalism of 18th-century Neoclassicism and instead placed a much higher value on the primacy of emotions and feeling.

Romanticism in Literature

Part of the inspiration for Romanticism came from the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his novel Émile proposed an educational program for a young man in which the education was derived from nature and not from rote memorization of facts.

Artists who worked in the Romantic tradition extolled both the beauty and mystery of nature. They also exhibited a great deal of interest in the supernatural, as for example in Goethe’s Faust, which deals with a man who sells his soul to the devil in order to achieve worldly success.

Romantics explored folklore and traditional peasant life because country people were idealized as living closer to nature. Romantics also found it necessary to break with the traditional styles of the past. In their jointly written Lyrical Ballads, the English poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) completely ignored the rules of punctuation, revealing their rejection of classical poetic forms.

Wolfgang von Goethe

The most important of the early Romantic writers is arguably Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). In his Sorrows of Young Werther, an epistolary novel, young Werther kills himself when his love for a woman is not returned. The novel proved to be so popular that young men throughout Europe began to dress in clothes similar to Werther and, in some extreme cases, killed themselves. Goethe was the greatest figure of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) generation of German Romantic writers of the 1770s and 1780s. These writers were introduced to an interested French public by the author Madame de Staël (1766–1817), who was living in exile in Switzerland after angering Napoleon.

Many of the artists who worked in the Romantic tradition became fascinated with the Middle Ages. Although their glorification of the medieval past, an age of theocratic kingship, would have seemingly pointed them into a more conservative direction, many of the Romantics were political liberals. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) and Victor Hugo (1802–1885) in many ways invented the popular image of the Middle Ages in novels such as Ivanhoe and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Their influence can be felt when you look at almost any church in the United States from the second half of the 19th century; the odds are that it’s built in the Gothic style.

Many in the Romantic movement not only rejected traditional literary and artistic styles, but also rejected the traditional political order. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1827), an English Romantic poet, rebelled against the conservative values found in his country. In Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama, the mythical protagonist challenges the established order by stealing fire from the gods, and Mask of Anarchy was written as a political protest after the Peterloo massacre. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), challenged the political status quo and ended up dying in Greece fighting in the rebellion against the Ottoman Turks. Amandine-Aurore Dupin (1804–1892), who wrote under the intentionally male-sounding pen name George Sand, challenged the endemic oppression that weighed down women. Sand was involved in a famous affair with Frederic Chopin, who initially said about her to his family, “Something about her repels me.” In Indiana, we have the story of a woman who is desperate for love but finds herself abused by both her husband and a selfish lover. Sand broke with stereotypes not only with her pen name but by smoking cigars, dressing like a man, and engaging in affairs with married men.

Music

In addition to its impact on literature and art, Romanticism influenced the world of 19th-century music. Ludwig von Beethoven (1770–1827) began to write compositions that broke with earlier classical forms by adjusting their length and doing unheard-of things such as putting a vocal soloist toward the end of the last movement of a composition. Beethoven was able to break with tradition because he was the first composer to earn his living directly with proceeds from compositions and performances, earning enough to not have to rely on either aristocratic or religious patrons.

Other innovative composers include Franz Schubert (1797–1828), who invented the lied, or art song, which involves a solo voice performing a melody to piano accompaniment. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) wrote pieces in which for the first time there was an attempt to tell a story without the use of singers and a written text, such as when he set Goethe’s Faust to music. Some composers made use of traditional oral tales or folk songs: Frederic Chopin (1810–1849) was influenced by the music of the peasants of his native Poland, and Franz Liszt (1811–1886) wrote music based on traditional gypsy music. At the turn of the century, a self-styled avant-garde sought to break with convention, so that when Sergei Diaghilev presented his ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913, the odd costumes, peculiar dancing, and jarring music by Igor Stravinsky seemed to be an utter rejection of every element of classical ballet. The artists were often well ahead of their skeptical audiences, and the premiere performance of The Rite of Spring was famous for the mayhem that ensued among the proper bourgeois crowd.

Art

Romantic artists became fascinated with what they deemed to be “exotic,” and leading painters traveled to North Africa and to the Middle East in search of subjects. Also, like their literary counterparts, many artists rejected the political order in their works. For example, Eugène Delacroix’s (1798–1863) Liberty Leading the People, painted one year after the overthrow of Charles X, captures the stirring events of the revolution in the streets of Paris.

By the mid-century mark, photography was beginning to have a significant impact on painting while also serving as a new art form in its own right. One of the pioneers was Louis Daguerre (1789–1851), who in 1835, accidentally discovered that he could produce an image when he put an exposed plate in a chemical cupboard where mercury vapor was present. It still took him several years to find a way to fix the image, a process that received the name of daguerreotype. Photography would enter into the mainstream with the introduction of celluloid film, and in the 1880s, George Eastman introduced flexible film and the first box camera, which made photography into something far less expensive that could be enjoyed by the masses.

The development of photography made it increasingly clear to painters that there would be less demand for realistic landscapes and portraits. Some artists began to look to new subjects, such as those we refer to as the realists, who sought to paint the world around them without any illusions. In part inspired by the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) began to paint works like The Stone-Breakers that rejected the romantic traditions of the day and instead focused on showing the world of the peasants in all its grim reality. Jean-Francois Millet (1814–1875) is most famous for The Sowers, which shows hardscrabble peasants who seem, like the wheat, to be growing out of the earth. Millet was himself from the peasant class and refused to paint them in an idealistic manner, nor did he seek to show that hard labor brought happiness. The artist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) is best known for his cartoons that lifted the curtain on the corrupt politicians and legal system of the July Monarchy. In his later years, he turned to painting and sculpture, with one of his most famous works being The Third Class Carriage, focusing on a group of French peasants, their faces creased with the legacy of their difficult lives, sitting in the obviously uncomfortable setting of the railcar.

Realism in Literature

Realism was also an important movement in literature. Just as realist painters wanted to show the world the actual conditions of those on the bottom of the social order, so too did novelists like Charles Dickens (1812–1870), who used his brief experience in a blacking factory as the basis for his critique of industrialized society. In Hard Times, the noble workingman Stephen Blackpool struggles against forces over which he has no control. He can’t divorce his drunken wife and marry his beloved Rachael because divorce is available only to the wealthy. Meanwhile, he’s falsely accused of being a troublemaker at work and finds himself unable to make a living. Such works, although at times a shade maudlin, introduced many middle-class individuals in Great Britain to the hardships of working-class life.

Other realist authors focused on what they perceived to be the barrenness of middle-class domestic life and most notably the institution of marriage. One such writer was Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), who wrote under the name George Eliot. In Middlemarch, her most important work, Eliot deals with English provincial life on the eve of the Great Reform Bill. Her main character, Dorothea Brooke, despite her own beauty, marries an unattractive older cleric named Casaubon in the failed hope that his scholarly ways will broaden her world. Although her second marriage, to Casaubon’s young cousin, is a happy one, frustration still remains over her inability to realize her dream of improving the living conditions for their tenant farmers. Emma Bovary, the title character in Gustave Flaubert’s (1821–1880) Madame Bovary, marries a mediocre village doctor only to find that reality is far different from the romantic notions of marriage she received from books. In search of excitement, she engages in a series of affairs, but the emptiness continues, and finally disappointment in love and financial failure lead her to commit suicide by taking arsenic. In Leo Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) Anna Karenina, once again we have a beautiful but bored woman who engages in an affair that also meets with disastrous results.

History in Literature

Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace, takes the grand events of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia and reveals how ordinary people can get caught up in the swirl of events over which they have no control.

Tolstoy’s fellow Russian, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), was almost executed for his participation in an illegal political group, after which he was forced to spend ten years in Siberia. The experience transformed him, pushing in a conservative direction both his politics and his interest in the psychological and moral obligations of man, an interest that was revealed in his classic novels, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Back in France, Émile Zola (1840–1902) found himself applying the social sciences to the novel. Using this “naturalistic” technique, he wrote a series of novels dealing with a family over several generations, showing how environment and heredity were the critical factors in explaining their moral and physical degeneration. Zola also defended Alfred Dreyfus from charges of treason in his open letter entitled “J’accuse,” which appeared on the front page of the French daily, L’Aurore.

Post-Realist Art: The Impressionists and Expressionists

Although some painters, such as Édouard Manet (1832–1883), were inspired by the realists, they wished to push their techniques in new directions. Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass shows a rather peculiar picnic, with two fully clothed males and a nude female. The work was in part startling to contemporaries because nudes were acceptable only if they were figures from classical mythology and not the people who packed the ham sandwiches. But besides the perplexing subject matter, Manet was changing the way we look at art. Dating back to the Renaissance and the introduction of single-point perspective, paintings served to open the window into another world. Now, however, instead of looking through the painting, Manet has us stop at the surface of the canvas, something that was to be pivotal for the development of modern art.

Although Manet was a quiet man who was not looking to be controversial, he and other innovative artists of the day were to find themselves at the center of a controversy when they were not allowed to show their work at the official 1863 Salon, an annual public exhibition held in Paris. In response to the public outcry over the hanging committee’s refusal to show these paintings, Napoleon III decided that the public should be given an opportunity to see them and make their own judgments, which led to the establishment of the Salon des Refusés, or “exhibition of the rejected.”

Those artists who took the techniques of Manet are labeled impressionists, although the term was initially used as one of derision after a critic first used it in 1874 to blast a work by Claude Monet (1840–1926) entitled Impression: Sunrise. Instead of shying away from the label, painters embraced it, with the exception of Manet who refused to use it for his own work. Impressionists wanted to capture the shimmering effects of light, and to do this, they were the first to take their easels outdoors. They were aided in this desire to leave their studios by the invention of portable paint tubes. Monet would take the same theme, such as a haystack or the Cathedral of Rouen, and paint it at different times of day or different seasons to show how the impact of light would transform it. Although Monet is most famous for his landscapes, he didn’t shy away from scenes of modern life such as railroad stations. Other impressionists, like Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), captured everyday scenes such as couples flirting in a dance hall, or in the case of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), numerous works showing the behind-the-scenes world of the ballet.

By the end of the 1880s, impressionism, which had once seemed so revolutionary, had become widely accepted. Some artists, while acknowledging their debt to the impressionists, wanted to push things even further. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) challenged traditional perspective, composition, and the use of color. His work had a great influence on 20th-century artists; he is therefore often referred to as the “father of modern art.” Cézanne said that he wanted to make impressionism into “something solid and durable, like the art of the museums.” Taking the forms of geometry that he believed were most commonly found in nature—the cylinder, sphere, and cone—he took the somewhat abstract technique used in his landscapes and applied it to numerous still lifes of fruit.

If Cézanne became the inspiration for artists who would completely challenge the traditional three-dimensional picture frame, artists like Pablo Picasso, who said of Cézanne that he was his “one and only master,” then Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) would influence those 20th-century Expressionists who sought to put their deepest emotions on canvas. Van Gogh, a native of Holland, had a very brief ten-year career ended by his tragic suicide. Although his dark early paintings, such as The Potato Eaters, reveal his deep sensitivity to those who were economically struggling, his style changed following a trip to Paris where he met a number of leading artists through his brother Theo’s gallery. In Arles, in the south of France, he painted his most famous works, landscapes of sunflowers or cypress trees, using bright colors and broad brush strokes to provide them with a deep emotional intensity.

The Genius of Picasso

The most revolutionary artist of the 20th century was Pablo Picasso, who, with his nearly abstract Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), made an irreparable break with the single-point perspective that had been central to Western art since the time of the Italian Renaissance. Later on, Picasso became famous as the co-founder (with Georges Braque) of cubism.

Painters such as the Norwegian Edvard Munch (The Scream) also sought to reveal the emotions rather than portray the way things looked on the surface. In Vienna, one of the centers of the avant-garde movement, artists such as Gustav Klimt saw themselves as rejecting the values of mass society and proceeded to find ways to shock their viewers through the vibrant use of color or by showing classical images in strange, unfamiliar ways.

The New Imperialism: Colonization of Africa and Asia

In the 1880s, the nations of Europe began an expansion into Africa and Asia that was unprecedented both for its speed and its scale. This period of conquest and the establishment of colonies is referred to as the “new imperialism.” The term is used in part to separate the period from earlier periods of overseas conquest, such as the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, but also to denote the fundamental ways in which life was transformed in those regions that were now under the sway of Europeans.

The new imperialism was built on a foundation of technological advances:

Although technology was vital for the new imperialism, it would have made little difference without the various motivating factors that stirred Europeans to conquer foreign lands. One important factor was the search for profits that were assumed to be had from imperialism. With the establishment of higher tariff barriers in Europe in the last quarter of the century, nations began to look to colonies as potential free trade zones. Raw materials, such as the palm oil that was used as an industrial lubricant or precious metals such as gold and silver, led individuals to the African heartland.

Yet those imperialists who saw colonies as a source of unimaginable wealth were going to be disappointed, because many colonies lacked any economic value, or if they did, the extensive investments necessary to make them economically viable never arrived from Europe. The exception to this was India, where the British were able to extract enough wealth for it to be justifiably referred to as the “jewel in the crown.”

Other motivating factors came from social imperialists, who viewed imperialism as a means of relieving certain domestic social problems such as overpopulation. This would also prove to be disappointing because, for example, in the case of Italy, those who left the country much preferred to go to the United States, rather than to an uncertain existence in the Italian colonies in East Africa.

Nationalism also played a major role in empire building. European states believed that the only way they could matter on a global scale would be through the establishment of colonies. For France, building an overseas empire was a way of showing it still mattered, even after its horrific defeat by the Prussians in 1870.

Religion also served as a motivating factor, and Christian missionaries were actually the first Europeans to penetrate central Africa. Some skeptics questioned the actual motivation behind the missionaries, as can be seen in a German political cartoon from the period, which showed an English preacher droning on while behind a curtain, a businessman involves himself in the real business of empire—financially squeezing the Africans.

Balance-of-power politics was perhaps the most significant reason for the acquisition of even unprofitable pieces of land. Nations wanted colonies so that other nations would not get them. Great Britain in particular, led by the adventurer Cecil Rhodes, attempted to gain colonial advantage from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo.

Social Darwinism and the New Imperialism

Social Darwinism also influenced the new imperialism. There was a genuine belief that the white races were destined to have sovereignty over the inferior peoples of Asia and Africa. Paintings would often show colonists with local children, the implied message being that all Africans were children who would benefit from the guidance of Europeans in the role of parents. Elements of this noblesse oblige can be found in Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) famous poem “The White Man’s Burden,” in which he writes that Europeans have a moral obligation to “bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives’ need.” The so-called moral imperative behind imperialism was also discussed at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), ostensibly called to deal with the control of the Congo, where it was stated that one of the goals for the imperialist nations was “to care for the improvement of the conditions of their (the Africans’) moral and material well-being and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the slave trade.”

In what has become known as the “mad scramble” for colonies, Europeans drew new borders that demonstrated their lack of concern for tribal and cultural differences with imperial territories. The Berlin conference ultimately set up rules for the establishment of colonies. Organized by Bismarck, nations had to prove that they established sufficient authority in a territory to protect existing rights, such as freedom of trade and transit. This set off the mad dash that left every square inch of Africa divided among the European powers, with the exception of Ethiopia, which repelled an Italian invasion in 1896, and the small state of Liberia on the west coast of Africa, which remained independent as a result of its unique historical link to the United States.

British dominance over India began to take shape following the withdrawal of the French from the Indian subcontinent as a result of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). As the 19th century continued, additional, formerly independent Indian territories fell under British control, with the last being the Punjab region in 1849. Following what the British refer to as the “Indian Mutiny” or “Sepoy Rebellion” of 1857, colonial control became more centralized with the establishment of an administrative structure to replace the British East India Company. By 1877, Prime Minister Disraeli went so far as to make Queen Victoria the Empress of India, thus flattering his queen while perhaps more importantly issuing a warning to the other European powers on the significance of India for Great Britain.

In China, Great Britain was the first European state to practice what is referred to as “informal empire,” where a state has significant influence over another nation’s economy without actual territorial or political control. After fighting and losing a series of wars with assorted European powers in the second half of the century, China was forced to grant European states sovereign control over a series of “treaty ports” along the coast. In Southeast Asia, although Thailand was able to maintain its independence, the French seized control over Indochina with its vital rubber plantations.

Other nations involved in colonialism in Asia included the Dutch, who controlled Indonesia, and the United States, which seized the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Japan, which had imitated Britain and Germany in its economic transformation into an industrial power, would also mimic their taste for colonial expansion by seizing control over Korea in 1910 after the Russo-Japanese War.

Colonialism could also provide certain benefits for the colonized nation. Again, the example of India stands out because here, the British made actual investments in infrastructure. Irrigation systems, railways, and cities were all byproducts of British rule. Concepts such as nationalism and political liberty, which were later to be used by colonial people as a tool for their own liberation, were also European exports. It was those Africans and Asians who had the most contact with the West, often through study abroad in Europe, who were the most committed nationalists.

Colonialist Violence

Violence was often a part of the colonial enterprise. The German explorer Carl Peters (1856–1914), whom Hitler admired, established a German colony in East Africa where he was referred to by the local population as the “man with blood on his hands.” The most horrific example of colonial exploitation took place in the Belgian Congo. King Leopold II (r. 1876–1909), one of the pioneers in the scramble for Africa, personally established this massive colony many times the size of Belgium and expected the proceeds from this wealthy land to line his own pocket. Millions were enslaved, maimed, or killed in the crazed pursuit of profits. Eventually, there was an international outcry over these atrocities, including the publication of Mark Twain’s sarcastic King Leopold’s Soliloquy, forcing the king to concede control to the Belgian government, which corrected some of the worst abuses.

Views and Consequences of the New Imperialism

In recent years, historians have asked whether imperialism was ever actually popular among the mass of population, and the question has not been fully answered. Newspaper editors, who enjoyed an enlarged readership in this age of growing literacy, apparently saw imperialism as a topic of interest to their readers because they filled their pages with colonial exploits. In Britain, the pro-imperial Primrose League had more than a million members, and in Germany, Italy, and France, similar organizations existed, although with far fewer members. The Boer War (1899–1902) possibly helped dim public support in Great Britain for empire, although across Europe, the working class seemed to have little interest in such affairs.

Although some hoped that the building of colonies would lead to a diminishing of tensions on the European continent, the opposite was the case. Rivalries among the European powers led to further imperial expansion, as in the case with British establishment of a protectorate over Egypt and the Suez Canal in 1882 in order to ensure Britain’s dominance over India. Both the British and Russians were involved in what was referred to as the “great game”—a struggle over the generally worthless territory of Afghanistan—because for the Russians, British control over this region would put Russia’s recent expansion into Central Asia in jeopardy, whereas the British were once again concerned for the security of India.

Also, Britain and France almost went to war over Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898, and France and Germany twice almost went to war over Morocco in 1905 and 1911. One of the problems that helped bring about the First World War was the sense among leading German political and military figures that their country did not have a colonial empire commensurate with its position in Europe. The problem dated back to Bismarck’s lack of interest in colonies, which he once displayed by pointing to a map of Europe and stating, “This is my Africa” to show his true object of fascination. Bismarck’s lack of interest was opposed by those Germans who joined the Society for German Colonization (1884). When Kaiser Wilhelm II pushed Bismarck into retirement in 1890, one of his reasons for removing the chancellor was his lack of interest in colonies, something by which the new kaiser simply couldn’t abide.

CHAPTER 6 TIMELINE

CHAPTER 6

Key Terms, Places and Events

conservatism

nationalism

liberalism

individual rights

utilitarianism

socialism

bourgeoisie and proletariat

Das Kapital

July Ordinances

Decembrist revolt

Chartism

People’s Charter of 1838

Great Reform Bill

Corn Laws

Revolutions of 1848

June Days

Concert of Europe

Zollverein

Austro-Prussian War

Franco-Prussian War

Paris Commune

Bessemer process

Second Industrial Revolution

railroads

Luddites

age of the middle class

Dreyfus Affair

Zionism

cult of domesticity

suffragettes

Romantics

new imperialism

Berlin Conference of 1885

Sepoy Rebellion: or Indian Mutiny

Key People

Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population

David Ricardo, “Iron Law of Wages”

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Jeremy Bentham

Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx, Das Kapital

Charles X

Carbonari

Louis Napoleon (Emperor Napoleon III)

Count Cavour

Giuseppe Garibaldi

Victor Emmanuel

Otto von Bismarck

Benjamin Disraeli

William Gladstone

Tsar Alexander II

Francis Joseph

Queen Victoria

Sultan Abdul Hamid II

Alfred Nobel

Marie Curie

Ernest Rutherford

Max Planck

Albert Einstein

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sigmund Freud

Louis Pasteur

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Descent of Man

Charles Dickens

William Wordsworth

Claude Monet

Wolfgang von Goethe

Ludwig von Beethoven

King Leopold II

CHAPTER 6 REVIEW QUESTIONS

Try these questions to assess how well you understood and retained the information covered in the chapter. Answers and explanations are in Chapter 8.

Questions 1 to 5 refer to the passage below:

Mr. Matthew Crabtree, called in; and Examined.

What age are you? — Twenty-two.

What is your occupation? — A blanket manufacturer.

Have you ever been employed in a factory? — Yes.

At what age did you first go to work in one? — Eight.

How long did you continue in that occupation? — Four years.

Will you state the hours of labour at the period when you first went to the factory, in ordinary times? — From 6 in the morning to 8 at night.

Fourteen hours? — Yes.

With what intervals for refreshment and rest? — An hour at noon.

When trade was brisk what were your hours? — From 5 in the morning to 9 in the evening.

Sixteen hours? — Yes.

With what intervals at dinner? — An hour.

How far did you live from the mill? — About two miles.

Was there any time allowed for you to get your breakfast in the mill? — No.

Did you take it before you left your home? — Generally.

During those long hours of labour could you be punctual; how did you awake? — I seldom did awake spontaneously; I was most generally awoke or lifted out of bed, sometimes asleep, by my parents.

Were you always in time? — No.

What was the consequence if you had been too late? — I was most commonly beaten.

Severely? — Very severely, I thought.

In those mills is chastisement towards the latter part of the day going on perpetually? — Perpetually.

So that you can hardly be in a mill without hearing constant crying? — Never an hour, I believe.

Do you think that if the overlooker were naturally a humane person it would still be found necessary for him to beat the children, in order to keep up their attention and vigilance at the termination of those extraordinary days of labour? — Yes; the machine turns off a regular quantity of cardings, and of course, they must keep as regularly to their work the whole of the day; they must keep with the machine, and therefore however humane the slubber may be, as he must keep up with the machine or be found fault with, he spurs the children to keep up also by various means but that which he commonly resorts to is to strap them when they become drowsy.

At the time when you were beaten for not keeping up with your work, were you anxious to have done it if you possibly could? — Yes; the dread of being beaten if we could not keep up with our work was a sufficient impulse to keep us to it if we could.

When you got home at night after this labour, did you feel much fatigued? — Very much so.

Had you any time to be with your parents, and to receive instruction from them? — No.

What did you do? — All that we did when we got home was to get the little bit of supper that was provided for us and go to bed immediately. If the supper had not been ready directly, we should have gone to sleep while it was preparing.

Did you not, as a child, feel it a very grievous hardship to be roused so soon in the morning? — I did.

Were the rest of the children similarly circumstanced? — Yes, all of them; but they were not all of them so far from their work as I was.

And if you had been too late you were under the apprehension of being cruelly beaten? — I generally was beaten when I happened to be too late; and when I got up in the morning the apprehension of that was so great, that I used to run, and cry all the way as I went to the mill.

Transcript of an interview with Matthew Crabtree, given to the Sadler Committee, England, 1832.

1. The themes in this passage are most similar to the themes in the fiction of

(A) Lewis Carroll

(B) Charles Dickens

(C) Jane Austen

(D) William Shakespeare

2. The argument against child labor was NOT weakened by which of the following facts?

(A) Many children had also worked in agricultural jobs before the Industrial Revolution.

(B) A child’s income was often essential to the family’s survival.

(C) Textile mills often forced long hours and inhumane conditions upon the children employed.

(D) Anglican ministers often believed that a child learned the value of effort and discipline through work.

3. One problem that children did NOT encounter in early 19th-century English factories was

(A) inadequate education

(B) unfair contracts

(C) poor health

(D) sexual abuse

4. The socioeconomic and political inequalities of English industrial life were addressed by all of the following EXCEPT

(A) Chartism

(B) Reform Act of 1867

(C) The Corn Laws

(D) Utilitarianism

5. The statement “if the overlooker were naturally a humane person” indicates that

(A) by the time of the interview, establishing a more just civil society had become a concern for English society

(B) the rationality of the Enlightenment had led to concern for the welfare of the downtrodden

(C) the radicalism and violence of the French Revolution resulted in excessive attention to the poor

(D) England’s refusal to buckle under Napoleon’s embargo had a lasting effect upon how the English people viewed domestic manufacturing

Questions 6 to 10 refer to the passage below:

“The history of every age proves that no people can attain a high degree of intelligence and morality unless its feeling of nationality is strongly developed. This noteworthy fact is an inevitable consequence of the laws that rule human nature….Therefore, if we so ardently desire the emancipation of Italy—if we declare that in the face of this great question all the petty questions that divide us must be silenced—it is not only that we may see our country glorious and powerful but that above all we may elevate her in intelligence and moral development up to the plane of the most civilized nations….This union we preach with such ardor is not so difficult to obtain as one might suppose if one judged only by exterior appearances or if one were preoccupied with our unhappy divisions. Nationalism has become general; it grows daily; and it has already grown strong enough to keep all parts of Italy united despite the differences that distinguish them.”

Count Cavour, 1846

6. One way that the northern Italian nationalist movement differed from the southern Italian nationalist movement was the fact that

(A) the northern movement relied upon the support of Austria, whereas southern movement relied upon the power of the papal states

(B) the northern movement had been attempting to unite Switzerland, but the southern movement hadn’t regarded it as a proper part of Italy

(C) the northern movement was mostly religious, but the southern movement was mostly financial

(D) the northern movement was engineered by elite diplomatic action, but the southern movement was a primarily populist movement

7. The process of national unification in Italy resembled the process of national unification in Germany in that both

(A) trampled on the rights of minorities

(B) provoked unnecessary wars to build a sense of unity in the people

(C) increased tax rates upon the wealthiest citizens

(D) tried to settle disputes with neighboring countries

8. To achieve unification, Count Cavour manipulated and eventually co-opted which southern Italian revolutionary figure?

(A) Giuseppe Mazzini

(B) Giordano Bruno

(C) Giuseppe Garibaldi

(D) Benito Mussolini

9. Nationalism did NOT necessarily rely upon a shared

(A) Folklore

(B) Custom

(C) Language

(D) Religion

10. The nationalist movement weakened what other intellectual movement of the 19th century?

(A) Socialism

(B) Liberalism

(C) Anarchism

(D) Capitalism

REFLECT

  • For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you have achieved sufficient mastery to answer multiple-choice questions correctly?

  • For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you have achieved sufficient mastery to discuss effectively in an essay or short answer?

  • For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you need more work before you can answer multiple-choice questions correctly?

  • For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you need more work before you can discuss effectively in an essay or short answer?

  • What parts of this chapter are you going to re-review?

  • Will you seek further help outside of this book (such as a teacher, tutor, or AP Students) on any of the content in this chapter—and, if so, on what content?