Unit 7: 19th Century Perspectives and Political Developments (1815 - 1914)
Notes From Other
Notes From Textbook (LTs)
Napoleon III in France (LT 1)
Question #1: How did Napoleon III seek to reconcile popular and conservative forces in an authoritarian nation-state?
Question #2: Analyze how Louis Napoleon as a practitioner of Realpolitik used nationalism to strengthen and unify France.
France’s Second Republic
- Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had played no part in French politics before 1848, universal male suffrage and widespread popular support gave him three times as many votes as the four other presidential candidates combined in the French presidential election of December 1848.
- 1st: He had the great name of his uncle, whom romantics had transformed into a demigod after 1820.
- 2nd: Karl Marx stressed at the time, middle-class and peasant property owners feared the socialist challenge of urban workers and the chaos of the revolution of 1848, and they wanted a tough ruler to protect their property and provide stability.
- 3rd: Louis Napoleon enunciated a positive program for France in pamphlets widely circulated before the election.
- Louis Napoleon promoted a vision of national unity and social progress.
- He believed that the government should represent the people and help them economically.
→ This leader would be linked to each citizen by direct democracy his sovereignty uncorrupted politicians and legislative bodies.
- Louis Napoleon was required by the constitution to share power with the National Assembly, which was overwhelmingly conservative.
- He signed conservative-sponsored bills that increased greatly the role of the Catholic Church in primary and secondary education and deprived many poor people of the right to vote.
- But in 1851, after the Assembly failed to cooperate with the last aim, Louis Napoleon began to conspire with key army officers.
- On December 2, 1851, he illegally dismissed the legislature and seized power in a coup d’état.
- Restoring universal male suffrage and claiming to stand above political bickering, Louis Napoleon called on the French people, as the first Napoleon had done; to legalize his actions.
→ 92 percent voted to make him president for ten years
→ A year later, 97 percent in a plebiscite made him hereditary emperor.
Napoleon III’s Second Empire
- Emperor Napoleon III experienced both success and failure between 1852 and 1870, when he fell from power.
- In the 1850s his policies led to economic growth.
- His government promoted the new investment banks and massive railroad construction that were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution on the continent.
- It also fostered general economic expansion through an ambitious program of public works, which included rebuilding Paris to improve the urban environment.
- The profits of business owners soared, rising wages of workers outpaced inflation, and unemployment declined greatly.
- In 1860s Louis Napoleon granted workers the right to form unions and the right to strike - important economic rights denied by earlier governments.
- Louis Napoleon restricted but did not abolish the newly reformed Assembly.
- They tried to entice notable people, even those who had opposed the regime, to stand as government candidates in order to expand the base of support.
- The government used its officials and appointed mayors to spread the word that election of the government’s candidates - and defeats of the opposition - would provide roads, tax rebates, and a thousand other local benefits.
- In 1857 and again in 1863, Louis Napoleon’s system worked brilliantly and produced overwhelming electoral victories for government-backed candidates.
- Napoleon had wanted to reorganize Europe on the principle of nationality and gain influence and territory for France and himself in the process.
- Problems in Italy and the rising power of Prussia led to increasing criticism at home from his Catholic and nationalist supporters.
- The middle- class liberals who had always wanted a less authoritarian regime denounced his rule.
- He gave the Assembly greater powers and opposition candidates greater freedom, which they used to good advantage.
- In 1869 the opposition, consisting of republicans, monarchists, and liberals, polled almost 45 percent of the vote.
- Louis Napoleon again granted France a new constitution, which combined basically parliamentary regime with a hereditary emperor as chief of state.
- 7.5 million Frenchmen approved the new constitution - only 1.5 opposed it.
Answer #1: He made good terms with the Catholic Church, by signing conservative-sponsored bills. He kept his position by using plebiscites to vote for him and make him emperor. However, he mostly improved his nations with economic growth and social reforms. He promoted new investment banks, massive railroad construction, rebuilt Paris to improve the urban environment. He granted workers the right to form unions and the right to strike. He lastly granted France a new constitution, combined a parliamentary regime with a hereditary emperor as chief of state.
Answer #2: idk
Nation Building in Italy, Germany, and the United States (LT 2A) - Italy
Question #1: How did conflict and war lead to the construction of strong nation-states in Italy, Germany, and the United States?
Question #2: Describe the impacts of the unification of Italy and Germany on the balance of power in Europe.
Italy to 1850
- A battleground for the Great Powers after 1494, Italy was reorganized 1815 at the Congress of Vienna into a hodgepodge of different states.
- Between 1815 and 1848 the goal of a unified Italian nation captured the imaginations of many Italians.
- Giuseppe Mazzini called for a centralized democratic republic based on universal male suffrage.
- Vincenzo Gioberti, a Catholic priest, called for a federation of existing states under the presidency of a progressive pope.
- Looked to the autocratic kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont for leadership.
- Sardinia’s king, Victor Emmanuel II, crowned in 1849, retained the liberal constitution granted by his father under duress the previous year.
- This constitution combined a strong monarchy with a fair degree of civil liberties and parliamentary government.
- Sardinia appeared to be a liberal, progressive states ideally suited to drive Austria out of northern Italy and lead a united Italy.
- Mazzini’s brand of democratic republicanism seemed unrealistic and too radical.
- The initial cautious support for unification by Pius IX had given way to hostility after he was temporarily driven from Rome during the upheavals of 1848.
- In 1864 in the Syllabus of Errors, Pius IX denounced rationalism, socialism, separation of church and state, and religious liberty, denying that “the Roman pontiff can and ought to reconcile and align himself with progress, liberalism and modern civilization”
Cavour and Garibaldi in Italy
- Count Cavour he sought unity for the states of northern and perhaps central Italy in a greatly expanded kingdom of Sardinia in 1859.
- His program of building highways and railroads, expanding civil liberties, and opposing clerical privilege increased support for Sardinia throughout northern Italy.
- He established a secret alliance with Napoleon III against Austria in July 1858.
- Cavour then goaded Austria into attacking Sardinia in 1859, and Louis Napoleon came to Sardinia’s defense.
- Napoleon switched up because he was worried by criticism from French Catholics for supporting the pope’s declared enemy, he abandoned Cavour and made a compromise peace with the Austrias in July 1859.
- Sardinia would receive only Lombardy, the area around Milan, from Austria.
- Pro-Sardinian nationalists in Tuscany and elsewhere in central Italy encouraged popular revolts that easily toppled their ruling princes.
- Nationalist leaders in central Italy called for fusion with Sardinia.
- Returning to power in early 1860, Cavour gained Napoleon III’s support by ceding Savoy and Nice to France.
- Giuseppe Garibaldi emerged in 1860 as an independent force in Italian politics.
- Cavour secretly supported Garibaldi’s bold plan to “liberate” the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
- Garibaldi’s guerrilla band of a thousand Red Shirts, (The guerrilla army of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who invaded Sicily in 1860 in an attempt to liberate it, winning the hearts of the Sicilian peasantry) captured the imagination of the peasantry, which rose in bloody rebellion against their landlords.
- The Garibaldi and his men crossed to the mainland, marched triumphantly toward Naples, and prepared to attack Rome and the pope.
- Cavour quickly sent Sardinian forces to occupy most of the Papal States (but not Rome) and to intercept Garibaldi.
- Cavour realized that an attack on Rome would bring a war with France, and he feared Garibaldi’s radicalism and popular appeal.
- The patriotic Garibaldi did not oppose Cavour, and the people of the south voted to join the kingdom of Sardinia.
- Cavour had successfully controlled Garibaldi and turned popular nationalism in a conservative direction.
- The new kingdom of Italy, which expanded to include Venice in 1866 and Rome in 1870, was parliamentary monarchy under Victor Emmanuel II, neither radical nor fully democratic.
- The common people remained divided.
- Growing social and cultural gap also separated the progressive, industrializing north from the stagnant, agrarian south.
Answer #1: Key aspects of war in Italian Nation-Building was when Cavour established a secret alliance with France Against Austria which gained Sardinia Lombardy. The Garibaldi’s guerrilla band of a thousand Red Shirts that caused peasantry to rebel against their landlords. Then the role of Diplomacy and Nationalism played when Cavour gained Napoleon III’s support by ceding Savoy and Nice to France, and before using France to go against Austria.
Answer #2: idk
Nation building in Italy, Germany, and the United States (LT 2B) - Germany
Question: How did conflict and war lead to the construction of strong nation-states in Italy, Germany, and the United States?
Question #2: Describe the impacts of the unification of Italy and Germany on the balance of power in Europe.
Growing Austro-Prussian Rivalry
- After Austria and Russia blocked Prussian king Frederick William IV’s attempt in 1850 to unify Germany, tension grew between Austria and Prussia as they struggled to dominate the Germany Confederation.
- Austria had not been included in the German Customs Union, or Zollverein, (Recall: the formation of a customs union - was a coalition of German states led by Prussia that created a free-trade area and uniform tariff system -) when it was founded in 1834 to stimulate trade and increase state revenues.
- By the end of 1853 Austria was the only state in the German Confederation outside the union.
- Prussia had emerged from the upheavals of 1848 with a weak parliament, which was in the hands of the wealthy liberal middle class by 1859.
- These middle-class representatives wanted to establish once and for all that the parliament, not the king, held ultimate political power, including control of the army.
- William I and his top military advisers pushed to raise taxes and increase the defense budget in 1862, and the liberals triumphed completely in new elections.
- King William then appointed Count Otto von Bismarck as Prussian prime minister and encouraged him to defy the parliament.
Bismarck and the Austro-Prussian War
- Otto von Bismarck (1815 - 1898) took office as prime minister in 1862, in the midst of the constitutional crisis caused by the deadlock on the military budget.
- Declaring the William’s government would rule without parliamentary consent, he lashed out at liberal middle-class opposition.
- Bismarck had the Prussian bureaucracy go right on collecting taxes, even though the parliament refused to approve the budget.
- And for four years, from 1862 to 1866, votes continued to express their opposition by sending large liberal majorities to the parliament.
- The extremely complicated question of Schleswig-Holstein - two provinces that belonged to Denmark but were members of the German Confederation - provided a welcome opportunity.
- The Danish king tried, as he had in 1848, to bring these two provinces into a more centralized Danish state against the will of the German Confederation, Prussia enlisted Austria in a short and successful. war against Denmark.
- Bismarck, however, was convinced that Prussia had to control completely the northern, predominantly Protestant part of the confederation, which meant expelling Austria from German affairs.
- The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 that followed lasted only 7 weeks.
- Using railroads to quickly mobilize troops, who were armed with new and more efficient breech-loading rifles, the Prussian army defeated Austria decisively at the Battle of Sadowa.
- Austria paid no reparations and lost no territory to Prussia, although Venetia was ceded to Italy.
- The existing German Confederation was dissolved, and Austria agreed to withdraw from German affairs.
- The mainly Catholic states of the south remained independent but allied with Prussia.
- Bismarck’s fundamental goal of Prussian expansion was partially realized.
Taming the German Parliament
- Bismarck defended would have to make peace, on its own terms, with the liberal middle class and nationalists.
- He realized that nationalists were not necessarily hostile to conservative, authoritarian government.
- The consolidate Prussian control, Bismarck fashioned a federal constitution for the new North German Confederation.
- The federal government - William I and Bismarck - controlled the army and foreign affairs.
- There was also a legislature with members of the lower house elected by universal male suffrage.
- Bismarck opened the door to popular participation and the possibility of going over the head of the middle class directly to the people.
- Bismarck asked the parliament to pass a special indemnity bill to approve after the fact all the government’s spending between 1862 and 1866.
- The constitutional struggle in Prussia ended, and the German middle class came to accept the monarchial authority that Bismarck represented.
The Franco-Prussian War
- Bismarck calculated that a patriotic war with France would drive the south German states into his arms.
- Bismarck pressed France.
- By 1870 the French leaders of the Second Empire, goaded by Bismarck and alarmed by their powerful new neighbor, declared war to teach Prussia a lesson.
- As soon as war began, Bismarck had the whole hearted support of the support German states.
- Bismarck’s generosity to Austria in 1866 paid big dividends - German forced under Prussian leadership decisively defeated the main French army at Sedan on September 1, 1870.
- After five months, in January 1871, a besieged and starving Paris surrendered, and France accepted Bismarck’s harsh peace terms.
- By this time, the south German states had agreed to join a new German Empire.
- With Bismarck by his side, William I was proclaimed emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors in the palace of Versailles (France).
- As in the 1866 constitution, the king of Prussia and his ministers had ultimate power in the new German Empire, and the lower house of the legislature was elected by universal male suffrage.
- Bismarck imposed a severe penalty on France: payment of colossal indemnity of 5 billion francs and loss of the rich eastern province of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany.
- The Franco-Prussian War released an enormous surge of patriotic feeling in the German Empire.
- The weakest of the Great Powers in 1862, Prussia with united Germany had become the most powerful state in Europe in less than a decade, and most Germans were enormously proud.
- Semi-authoritarian nationalism and a new conservatism, based on an alliance of the landed nobles and middle classes, had triumphed in Germany.
Slavery and Nation Building in the United States
- The country was divided by slavery from its birth, and economic development in the young republic carried free and slave-holding states in very different directions.
- By 1850 an industrializing, urbanizing North was also building canals and railroads and attracting most of the European immigrants arriving in the nation.
- Europeans immigrants largely avoided the region (the South).
- Plantation owners holding 20 or more slaves dominated the economy and society.
- These profit-minded slave owners used gangs of black slaves to establish a vast plantation economy across the Deep South.
- By 1850, the region produced 5 million bales a year, supplying textile mills in Europe and New England.
- The rise of the cotton empire greatly expanded slave-based agriculture in the South, spurred export and played a key role in igniting rapid U.S. economic growth.
- The large profits flowing from cotton led influential Southerners to defend slavery.
- Tensions reached climax after 1848 when the United States gained through war with Mexico a vast area stretching from west Texas to the Pacific Ocean.
- Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in 1860 gave Southern secessionists the chance they had been waiting for.
- Determined to win independence, 11 states left the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.
- The resulting Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history ended with the South decisively defeated and the Union preserved.
- Powerful business corporations emerged, steadfastly supported by the Republican Party during and after the war.
- The Homestead Act of 1862, which gave western land to settlers, and the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865, which ended slavery reinforced the concept of free labor taling its chances in a market economy.
Answer #1: Factors that included war was Prussia allying with Austria against Denmark because Denmark was going against the German Confederation to have Schleswig-Holstein under Denmark’s control. The Austro-Prussian war was to exclude Austria from German affairs because Prussia had the Protestant part of the Confederation. Lastly the Franco-Prussian war was because Napoleon III was pressed by Bismarck and went to fight Prussia, then losing to them, and having to accept their harsh peace terms. Factors in state-building was that Prussia joined Germany to become Europe’s most powerful nation.
Answer #2: idk
The Modernization of Russia and the Ottoman Empire (LT3) - Russia
Question #1: What steps did Russia and the Ottoman Turks take toward modernization, and how successful were they?
Question #2: Explain the causes and effects of the Crimean War.
The “Great Reforms” in Russia
- Almost 90 percent of the people lived off the land, and industrialization developed slowly.
- Bound to the lord from birth, the peasant serf was little more than a slave, and by the 1840s serfdom had become a central moral and political issue for the government.
- Marxists clamoring for socialist revolution to middle-class intellectuals who sought a liberal constitutional state.
- The Crimean War, (A conflict fought between 1853 and 1856 over Russian desires to expand into Ottoman territory; Russia was defeated by France, Britain, and the Ottomans, underscoring the need for reform in the Russian Empire) grew out of the breakdown of the European balance of power established at the Congress of Vienna, general Great Power competition over the Middle East.
- Russian-French dispute over the protection of Christian shrines in Jerusalem sparked conflict.
- Russia alone lost about 450,000 soldiers.
- By 1856 France and Great Britain, aided by the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia, had decisively defeated Russia.
- The war convinced Russia’s leaders that they had fallen behind industrializing nations of western Europe.
- Russia needed railroads, better armaments, and military reform to remain a Great Power.
- Military disaster forced liberal-leaning Tsar Alexander II and his ministers along the path of rapid social change and modernization.
- Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861, About 22 million emancipated peasants received citizenship rights and the chance to purchase, on average about half of the land they cultivated.
- Yet they had tp pay fairly high prices, and because the land was to be owned collectively, each peasant village was jointly responsible for the payments of all the families in the village.
- Collective ownership made it difficult for individual peasants to improve agricultural methods or leave their villages.
- In 1864 the government established a new institution of local government ,the zemstvo.
- Members of this local assembly were elected by three-class system of townspeople, peasants villagers, and noble landowners.
- The zemstvo’s remained subordinate to the traditional bureaucracy and the local nobility.
- The government relaxed by did not remove censorship, and somewhat liberated policies toward Russian Jews.
- Transportation and industry , both vital to the military, were transformed in two industrial surges.
- After 1860, the railroads enabled Russia to export grain and thus earn money to finance further development.
- Industrial suburbs grew up around Moscow and St. Petersburg, and a class of modern factory workers began to take shape.
- Industrial development and the growing proletariat class helped spread Marxist through and spurred the transportation of the Russian revolutionary movement after 1890.
- Strengthened by industrial development, Russia began seizing territory in far eastern Siberia, on the border with Chine; in Central Asia, north of Afghanistan: and in the Islamic lands of the Caucasus.
- The expansion of the Russian empire to the south and east excited ardent Russian nationalists and super-patriots, who became some of the government’s most enthusiastic supporters.
- Alexander II also suppressed nationalist movements among Poles, Ukrainians, and Baltic peoples on the western borders of the empire.
- Alexander II’s political reformers outraged reactionaries but never went far enough for liberals and radicals.
- In 1881 a member of the “People’s Will,” a small; anarchist group, assassinated the tsar, and the era of reform came to an abrupt end.
- Alexander III was determined reactionary. From 1890 to 1900 economic modernization and industrialization surged ahead for the second time, led by Sergei Witte.
- Witte believed that industrial backwardness threatened Russia’s greatness.
- Witte established high protective tariffs to support Russian industry, and he put the country on the gold standard to strengthen Russian finances.
- Witte’s greatest innovation was to use Westerners to catch up with the West.He encouraged foreigners to build factories in Russia.
- His efforts to entice western Europeans to locate their factories in Russia were especially successful in southern Russia.
- In 1900 peasants still constituted the great majority of the population, but Russia was catching up with the more industrialized West.
The Russian Revolution of 1905
- By 1903 Russia had established a sphere of influence in Chinese Manchuria and was eyeing northern Korea, which put Russia in conflict with the goals of equally imperialistic Japan.
- When Tsar Nicolas II, who replaced his father in 1894 (Alexander III), ignored their diplomatic protests, the Japanese launched a surprise attack in February 1903.
- After Japan scored repeated victories, which included annihilating a Russia fleet, Russia surrendered in September 1905.
- Urban factory workers were organized in a radical and still-illegal labor movement.
- Peasants had gained little from the era of reforms and suffered from poverty and overpopulation.
- The empire’s minorities and subject nationalities, such as the Poles, the Ukrainians, and the Latvians, continued to call for self-rule.
- On a Sunday in January 1905, massive crowd of workers and their families converged peacefully on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition to Nicolas II.
- Suddenly troops opened fire, killing and wounding hundreds.
- The Bloody Sunday, (A massacre of peaceful protesters at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1905, triggering a revolution that overturned absolute tsarist rule and made Russia into a conservative constitutional monarchy) of peaceful massacre produced a wave of general indignation that turned many Russians against the tsar.
- By the summer of 1905 strikes and political rallies, peasant uprising, revolts among minority nationalities, and mutinies by troops were sweeping the country.
- The revolutionary surge culminated in October 1905 in a paralyzing general strike that forced the government to capitulate.
- The tsar then issued the October Manifesto, (The result of paralyzing general strike in October 1905, a Russian decree that granted full civil right and promised a popularity elected Duma (parliament) with real legislative power).
- Duma, (The Russian parliament that opened in 1906, elected indirectly by universal male suffrage but controlled after 1907 by the tsar and the conservative classes).
- Frightened middle-class leaders embraced it, which helped the government repress the popular uprising and survive as a constitutional monarchy.
- On the eve of the opening of the first Duma in May 1906, the government issued the new constitution, the Fundamental Laws.
- The Duma, elected indirectly by universal male suffrage with a largely appointive upper house, could debate and pass laws, but the tsar had an absolute veto,
- The predominantly middle-class liberals, the largest group in the newly elected Duma, saw the Fundamental Laws as a step backward.
- Cooperation with Nicholas II’s ministers soon broke down, and after months of deadlock the tsar dismissed the Duma.
- His government then pushed through important agrarian reforms designed to break down collective village ownership of land and encourage the more enterprising peasants - a “wager on the strong” meant to encourage economic growth.
- In 1914, on the eye of the First World War, Russia was partially modernized, a conservative constitutional monarchy with a peasant-based but industrializing economy.
The Modernization of Russia and the Ottoman Empire (LT4) - Ottoman Empire
Reform and Readjustment in the Ottoman Empire
- Russia had occupied Ottoman provinces on the Danube River in the last decades of the 18th century and grabbed more during the Napoleonic Wars.
- In 1816 the Ottomans were forced to grant Serbia local autonomy.
- On 1830 the Greeks won independence, and French armies began their long and bloody takeover of Ottoman Algeria.
- Egyptian forces under the leadership of Muhammed Ali, the Ottoman governor in Egypt, restored order in the Islamic holy land and conquered significant portions of Sudan, south of Egypt.
- His modernizing reforms of agriculture, industry, and the military helped turn Egypt into the most powerful state in the eastern Mediterranean.
- His growing strength directly challenged the Ottoman sultan and Istanbul’s ruling elite.
- From 1831 to 1840 Egyptian troops under the leadership of Muhammed Ali’s son Ibrahim occupied and governed the Ottoman province of Syria and Palestine, and threatened to depose the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II.
- Mahmud II’s dynasty survived. but only because the European powers, led by Britain, allied with the Ottomans to discipline Muhammad Ali.
- In 1839 liberal Ottoman statesmen launched an era of radical reforms as the Tanzimat, (A set of reforms designed to remake the Ottoman Empire on a western European model).
- Abdul Mejid issued the Imperial Rescript of 1856, just after the Crimean War.
- As part of the reform policy, and under economic pressure from the European powers that had paid for the empire’s war against Russia in Crimea, Ottoman leaders adopted free-trade policies.
- New commercial laws removed tariffs on foreign imports and permitted foreign merchants to operate freely throughout the empire.
- Yet the bulk of the profits went to foreign investors rather than Ottoman subjects.
- In 1851 Sultan Mejid was forced to borrow 55 million francs from British and French bankers to cover state deficits.
- Intended to bring revolutionary modernization, the tanzimat permitted partial recovery but fell short of its goals.
- the Ottoman initiatives did not curtail the appetite of Western imperialism, which secured a stranglehold on the imperial economy via issuing loans.
- The reforms also failed to halt the growth of nationalism among some Christian subjects in the Balkans, which resulted in crises and increased pressure from neighboring Austria and Russia.
Equality before the law for al citizens, regardless of religious affiliation, actually increased religious disputes, which were often encouraged and manipulated by the Europeans powers eager to seize any pretext for intervention.
- Religious conservatives in both Muslim and Greek Orthodox communities detested the religious reforms, which they viewed as an impious departure from tradition.
- Sultan Abdülhamid II halted the reform movement and turned away from European liberalism in his long and repressive reign.
- Abdülhamid II’s government failed to halt foreign efforts to fragment and ultimately take control over key Ottoman territories.
- By the 1890s the government failures had encouraged a powerful resurgence of the modernizing impulse under the banner of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), and umbrella organization that united multiethnic reformist groups from across the empire,
- These fervent patriots unofficially called Young Turks, ( Fervent patriots who seized power in 1908 coup in the Ottoman Empire, forcing the conservative sultan to implement reforms)
- the Young Turks helped prepare the way for the birth of modern secular Turkey after the defeat and collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.
The Responsive National State 1871-1914 (LT 5) - Germany and France
Question #1 - What general domestic political trends emerged after 1871?
Question #2 - Describe the efforts for reform that occurred across various nation states in the late 19th century.
The German Empire
- The new german Empire was a federal union of Prussia and 24 smaller states.
- Much of the everyday business of government was conducted by the separate states, but there was a strong national government with a chancellor until 1890, Bismarck - and a popularly elected lower house called the Reichstag, (The popularly elected lower house of government of the new German Empire after 1871).
- The National Liberals backed Bismarck’s attack on the Catholic Church, the so-called Kulturkampf, (Bismarck attack on the Catholic Church within Germany from 1870 to 1878, resulting from Pius IX’s declaration of papal infallibility).
- The middle-class National Liberals were alarmed by Pius IX’s declaration of papal infallibility in 1870.
- Kulturkampf initiatives aimed at making the Catholic Church subject to government control.
- However, only in Protestant Prussia did the Kulturkampf have even limited success, because elsewhere Catholics generally voted for the Center Party which blocked passage of laws hostile to the church.
- By revoking free-trade policy and enacting high tariffs on cheap grain from the United States, Canada, and Russia, Bismarck won over both the Catholic Center and the conservative Protestant Junkers, nobles with large landholdings.
- The 1880s and 1890s saw a widespread return to protectionism in Europe.
- By raising tariffs, European governments offered an effective response to a major domestic economic problem - foreign competition - in a way that won greater popular loyalty.
- New tariffs led to international name-calling and nasty trade wars.
- After the failure of the Kulturkampf, Bismarck’s government tried to stop the growth of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), (A German working-class political party founded in the 1870s, the SPD championed Marxism but in practice turned away from marxist revolution and working instead for social and workplace reforms in the german parliament).
- In 1878 Bismarck pushed through the Reichstag the Anti-Socialist Laws, which banned Social Democratic associations meetings, and publications.
- The Social Democratic Party was driven underground, but it maintained substantial influence, and Bismarck decided to try another tack.
- In an attempt to win working-class support, Bismarck urged the Reichstag to enact a variety of state-supported social welfare measures.
- Bismarck and his supporters carried the day, and his essentially conservative nation state pioneered in providing social welfare programs.
- In 1883 he pushed through the Reichstag the first of several social security laws to help wage earners by providing national sickness insurance.
- An 1884 law created accident insurance; one from 1889 established old-age pensions and retirements benefits.
- This national social security system, paid for through compulsory contributions by wage earners and employers as well as grants from the state, was the first of its kind anywhere.
- It did give them a small stake in the system and protect them from some of the uncertainties of the complex, modern industrial economy.
- Was a product of political competition, as well as government efforts to win popular support by defusing the SPD’s radical appeal.
- William II, opposed Bismarck’s attempt to renew the Anti-Socialist Laws.
- Eager to rule in his own right and to earn the support of the workers, William II forced Bismarck to resign.
- German foreign policy changed profoundly and mostly for the worse, but the government did pass new laws to aid workers and legalize socialist political activity.
- Social Democrats won more and more seats in the Reichstag, becoming Germany’s largest single party in 1912.
- The revolutionary socialists had actually become less radical in Germany.
- The SPD broadened its base by adopting a more patriotic tone, allowing for greater military spending and imperialist expansion.
Republican France
- In 1871 France seemed hopelessly divided once again.
- The patriotic republicans who proclaimed the Third Republic in Paris after the military disaster at Sedan refused to admit defeat by the Germans.
- They defended Paris with great heroism for weeks, they were staved into submission by German armies in January 1871.
- When the next national elections sent a large majority of conservatives and monarchists to the national Assembly and France’s new leaders decided they had no choice but tot to surrender Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, the Parisians exploded in patriotic frustration and proclaimed the Paris Commune in March 1871.
- The leaders of the Commune wanted to govern Paris without interference from the conservative French countryside.
- The National Assembly, politician Adolphe Thiers, ordered the French army into Paris and brutally crushed the Commune.
- June 1848, it was Paris against the provinces, French against French.
- 1875 the monarchists in the ostensibly republican national Assembly had a majority but could not agree on who should be king.
- The compromise Bourbon candidate refused to rule except under the white flag og his absolutist ancestors - a completely unacceptable condition for many supports of a constitutional monarchy.
- France therefore reluctantly retained republican government.
- As President Thiers cautiously said this was “the government which divides us least.”
- Léon Gambetta was a stabilizing factor because of his skill and determination of moderate republican leaders in the early years.
- By 1879 the great majority of members of both the upper and the lower houses of the National Assembly were republicans.
- The moderate republicans sought to preserve their creation by winning the hearts and minds of the next generation.
- The Assembly legalized trade unions, and France worked to expand its colonial empire.
- A series of laws between 1879 and 1886 greatly expanded the state system of public, tax-supported schools and established free compulsory elementary education for both girls and boys.
- The expansion of public education served as a critical nation0building tool in the late 19th century.
- Although the educational reforms of the 1880s disturbed French Catholics, many of them railed to the republic in the 1890s.
- The limited acceptance of the modern world by the more liberal Pope Leo XIII eased tensions between church and state.
- Dreyfus affair, (A divisive case in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely accused and convicted of treason. The Catholic Church sided with the anti-Semites against Dreyfus; after Dreyfus was declared innocent, The French government severed all ties between the state and the church)
- In 1898 and 1899 the case split France apart. On one side was the army which had manufactured evidence against Dreyfus, joined by anti-Semites and most of the Catholics establishment. On the other side stood civil libertarians and most of the more radical republicans.
- The government stopped paying priests’ and bishops; salaries and placed committees lay Catholics in control of all churches.
- On their financially, Catholic schools soon lost a third of their students, greatly increasing the state school system’s reach and thus its power of indoctrination.
- Only the growing socialist movement, with its very different and thoroughly secular ideology, stood in opposition to republican nationalism.
The Responsive National State 1871-1914 (LT 5) - Great Britain and Ireland, and Austria- Hungary
Question #1:
Question #2
Great Britain and Ireland
- Where an effective two-party parliament skillfully guided the country from classical liberalism to full-fledged democracy with hardly a misstep.
- After the right to vote was granted to males of the wealthy middle class in 1832, opinion leaders and politicians wrestled for some time with further expansions of the franchise.
- In 1867 the Second Reform Bill of Benjamin Disraeli and the Conservative Party extended the vote to all middle-class males and the best-paid workers in order to broaden their own base of support beyond the landowning class.
- Hence the Third Reform Bill of 1884 gave the vote to almost every adult male.
- While the House of Commons drifted toward democracy, the House of Lords was content to slumber nobly.
- Acting as supreme court of the land, it ruled against labor unions in two important decisions.
- And after the Liberal Party came to power in 1906, the Lords vetoed several measures passed by the Commons, including the so-called People’s Budget, (A bill proposed after the Liberal Party came to power in Britain in 1906, it was designed to increase spending on social welfare services, but was initially vetoed in the House of Lords).
- The Lords finally capitulated, as they had with the reform Bill of 1832, when the king threatened to create enough new peers to pass the bill, and aristocratic conservatism yielded to popular democracy.
- 1906 and 1914 the Liberal Party, inspired by Welshman David Lloyd George, enacted the People’s Budget and substantially raised taxes on the rich.
- This income helped the government pay for national health insurance, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, and host of other social measures.
- Ireland brought Great Britain to the brink of civil war,
- The terrible Irish famine of the 1840s and early 1850s had fueled an Irish revolutionary movement.
- The English slowly granted concessions, such as rights for Irish peasants and the abolition of the privileges of the Anglican Church.
- Liberal prime minister William Gladstone introduced bills to give Ireland self-government, or home rule, in 1886 and in 1893.
- They failed to pass, but in 1913 Irish nationalists finally gained such a bill for Ireland.
- The Emerald Isle, was on the brink of achieving self-government.
- The Catholic majority in the southern countries wanted home rule, the Protestants of the northern countries of Ulster came to oppose it.
- The Ulster Protestants refused to submerge themselves in a majority Catholic Ireland, just as Irish Catholics just refused to submit to Protestant Britain.
- By December 1913 they had raised one hundred thousand armed volunteers, and much of English public opinion supported their cause.
- In 1914, then, the Liberals in the House of Lords introduced a compromise home-rule bill that did not apply to the northern countries.
This bill, which openly betrayed promises made to Irish nationalists, was rejected in the Commons, and in September the original home-rule bill passed but with its with its implementation delayed.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire
- In 1848 Magyar nationalism had driven Hungarian patriots to declare an independent Hungarian republic, which Russian and Austrian armies savagely crushed in the summer of 1849.
- Throughout the 2850s Hungary was ruled as a conquered territory, and Emperor Francis Joseph and his bureaucracy tried hard to centralized the state and Germanize the language and culture of the different ethnic groups there.
- Its defeat by Prussia in 1866 and loss of northern Italy, a weakened Austria agreed to a compromise in 1867 established the so called dual monarchy.
- The Austrian Empire was divided in two, and the Magyars gained virtual independence for Hungary.
- The two states still shared the same monarch and common ministries for finance, defense, and foreign affairs.
- In Austria, ethnic German were only 1/3 of the populations, and many germans saw their traditional dominance threatened by Czechs, Poles, and other Slavs.
- From 1900 to 1914 the legislature was so divided that ministries generally could not obtain. a majority and ruled instead by decree.
- Efforts by both conservatives and socialists to defuse national antagonisms by stressing economic issues that cut across ethnics lines were largely unsuccessful.
- The Magyar nobility in 1867 restored the constitution of 1848 and used it to dominate both the Magyar peasantry and the minority populations until 1914.
- Only the wealthiest ¼ of adult males had the right to vote, making the parliament the creature of the Magyar elite.
- Laws promoting the use of the Magyar language in schools and government were bitterly resented, especially by Croatians and Romanians.
- While Magyar extremists campaigned loudly for total separation from Austria, the radical leader of their subjects nationalists dreamed of independence from Hungary.
- After 1871, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was progressively weakened by it.
The Nation and the People - (LT6)
Question #1:
Question #2:
Making National Citizens
- As the nation-state extended voting rights and welfare benefits to more and more people, the question of national loyalty became more and more pressing: politicians and nationalist ideologues made forceful attempts to ensure the people‘s conformity to their laws, but how could they ensure that national governments would win their citizens’ allegiance?
- In Italy, only about 2 percent of the population spoke the language that could become official Italian.
- In Germany, regional and religious differences and strong traditions of local political autonomy undermined unity.
- In Great Britain, deep class differences still dampened national unity, and across central and eastern Europe, overlapping ethnic groups with distinct languages and cultures challenged the logic of nation building.
- In France, where national boundaries had been fairly stable for several centuries, only about 50 percent of the people spoke correct French.
- The 60 percent of the population that still lived in rural areas often felt stronger allegiance to their village or region than the distant nation headquartered in Paris.
- Various reasons for nationalism’s growing popularity
- modern nation-states imposed centralized institutions across their entire territories, which reached even the lowliest citizen.
- Universal military conscription, introduced in most of Europe after the Franco-Prussian War (Britain was an exception), yanked peasants off their land and workers out of their factories and exposed young male conscripts to patriotic value.
- Free compulsory education leveled out language differences and taught children about glorious national traditions.
- In Italy and Germany, the introduction of common currency, standard weights and measurements, and a national post office eroded regional differences.
- Boasting images of grand historical event s of prominent leaders, even postage stamps and banknotes could impart a sense of national solidarity.
- Improved transportation and communication networks broke down regional differences and reinforced the national idea as well.
- The extension of railroad service into hinterlands and the improvement of local roads shattered rural isolation, boosted the growth of national markets for commercial agriculture and helped turn “peasants into Frenchmen.”
- Literacy rates and compulsory schooling advanced rapidly in the late 19th century, and more and more people read about national history or the latest political events growing numbers of newspapers, magazines, and books.
- A diverse group of intellectuals, politicians, and ideologues of all stripes eagerly promoted national pride.
- For example, prominent historian Heinrich von Treischlke championed German superiority, especially over archival Great Britain
- Scholars uncovered the deep roots of national identity in ancient folk traditions; in shared language, customs, race, and religion; and in historic attachments to national territory.
- Ernest Renan, who suggested that national identity was based more on a people’s current desire for a common life and invented heroic past than on actual historical experiences.
- Each nation had its own unique capital city, flag, military uniform, and national anthem.
- New symbols, such as Britain’s doughty, John Bull, France’s republican, Marianne, American’s stern Uncle Same, and Germany’s solid Michel, supposedly embodied shared national characteristics.
- All citizens could participate in in newly invented national holidays, such a Bastile Day in France, first held in 1880 commemorate the French revolution, or Sedan Day in Germany, instituted to celebrate Germany’s victory over France in 1871.
- Public squares and parks received prominent commemorative statues and monuments, such as the grand memorial to Victor Emmanuel II in central Rome, or the ostentatious Monument to the Battle of Nations built in Leipzig to honor German victory in the Napoleonic Wars.
Nationalism and Racism
- The ideal of national belonging had from the state created an “us-them” outlook: after 1871 new supposedly scientific understandings of racial difference added new layers of meaning to this dichotomy.
- Most people in the late 19th century believed that race was a product of heredity.
- Many felt pride in their own national racial characteristics - French, English, german, Jewish, Slav, and many others - that were supposedly passed down from generation to generation.
- Unfortunately, pride in one’s own heritage easily leads to denigration of someone else’s.
- Race theorists such as Count Arthur de Gobineau and Huston Stewart Chamberlian