Knowt
Ultimate Guide: AP EU History
Flashcard Reviewer of Important EU History Dates
Period 1: The Renaissance to the Wars of Religion (1450–1648)
1.1: The Renaissance: An Overview
Georgio Vasari
A 16th-century painter, architect, and writer.
He used the Italian word rinascita (rebirth) to describe the Renaissance era.
In the mid-15th century, the printing press was invented which allowed these cultural trends to spread to other parts of Europe.
This led to the creation of the Northern Renaissance movement.
Italian Renaissance writers — focused on secular concerns.
Northern Europe Renaissance writers — focused on religious concerns.
This led to the creation of the Protestant Reformation Movement.
1.2: The Italian City-States
Renaissance Italy's City-states: Located at the heart of Europe's economic, political, and cultural life during the 14th to 15th century.
Holy Roman Empire: They were in control of the town of northern Italy during the Middle Ages.
Popolo (the people): An urban underclass who wanted their share of wealth and political power.
Ciompi Revolt (1378): A revolt formed by the Popolo who expressed their dissatisfaction with the political and economic order by staging a violent struggle against the government in Florence.
In Milan, the resulting social tensions that occurred led to the rise of a signor (tyrant), and the city became dominated by Sforza — a family of mercenaries.
Medici: This family used their banking wealth to establish themselves as the Florentine republic's behind-the-scenes rulers and later as hereditary dukes of the city.
Central Italy in the Mediterranean was ideal for creating links between the Greek culture of the East and the Latin culture of the West.
Southern Italy had been home to many Greek colonies and later served as the center of the Roman Empire.
Classic Civilization has never disappeared to the Italian mainland.
1.3: Humanism
Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374)
Considered the founder of humanism.
Coined the phrase “Dark Ages” — to denote what he thought was the cultural decline that took place following the collapse of the Roman world in the 5th century.
Was engaged with the works of Cicero — a philosopher and a politician who provided accounts of the collapse of the Roman Republic.
His goal is to write in the Ciceronian style.
His works inspired the ‘civic humanists’ — a group of young wealthy Florentines.
The revival of Greek is one of the most significant aspects of the Italian Renaissance.
Oration on the Dignity of Man — written by Pico Della Mirandola; expressed here is the positive Platonic view of human potential.
Florentine Platonic Academy — which is sponsored by Cosimo de Medici; merged platonic philosophy with Christianity to Neoplatonism.
The Courier (1528) — written by Castiglione.
Renaissance Man: A person who knew several languages, was familiar with classical literature, and was also skilled in arts
Lorenzo Valla
He realized that languages can tell a history all their own.
He proved that the Donation of Constantine turned control of the western half of his empire over to the papacy, and could not have been written by Constantine.
He also took his critical techniques to the Vulgate Bible and showed that its author, Jerome, had mistranslated several critical passages from Greek sources.
Vulgate Bible: The standard Latin Bible of the Middle Ages.
Leonardo Bruni
He was affected that women don’t have access to humanist teachings.
He established an educational program for women — tellingly left out of his curriculum the study of rhetoric — those critical parts of male education.
Christine de Pisan
A daughter of the physician to the French King Charles V.
She wrote The City of Ladies (1405) to counter the popular notion that women were inferior to men and incapable of making moral choices.
She wrote that women have to go out of their comfort zones or move to a “City of Ladies” to flourish their abilities.
1.4: Renaissance Art
With the rise of individualism, Renaissance artists have significant individuals in their own right.
To become well-known and wealthy, these artists competed for the patronage of nonreligious people.
These wealthy people preferred art that showcased their accomplishments over medieval art's spiritual message.
These patrons demanded a more naturalistic style, and the invention of fresh artistic techniques helped to fulfill their demands.
Filippo Brunelleschi’s Dome over the Cathedral of Florence — the first dome to be completed in western Europe since the downfall of the Roman Empire.
Fresco: A method of art painting that is done on wet plaster or tempera on wood.
Oil Painting: It was developed in northern Europe and became the dominant method in Italy.
Chiaroscuro: The use of contrasts between light and dark, to create three-dimensional images.
Single-point perspective: A painting style that enables painters to create more realistic environments for their work by having all of the features converge at one point in the distance.
High–Renaissance movement started at the end of the 15th century.
During this movement, the center of the Renaissance moved from Florence to Rome.
This movement lasted until around the 1520s and is also called Late Renaissance or Mannerism.
The artworks featured twisted figures and muddled concepts, which may have represented the growing sense of crisis in the Italian world as a result of both political and religious issues.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Labeled as a Renaissance man.
He was a military engineer, an architect, a sculptor, a scientist, and an inventor whose sketchbooks reveal a remarkable mind that came up with workable designs for submarines and helicopters.
Recent reconstructions of his designs reveal that he even created a handbag.
Mona Lisa is one of his famous paintings.
Raphael (1483–1520)
He came from the beautiful Renaissance city of Urbino and died at the early age of 37.
Aside from his wonderfully gentle images of Jesus and Mary, he connects his times to the classical past in “The School of Athens”, which depicts Plato and Aristotle standing together in a fanciful classical structure and employs the deep, single-point perspective.
Michelangelo (1475–1564)
David: One of his sculptural masterpieces was commissioned by Florence, as a propaganda work to inspire the citizens in their long struggle against the overwhelming might of Milan.
He was tasked to create a tomb for Julius II himself.
Julius II also employed him to work at the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
He exemplified in his final work in the Sistine Chapel, the brilliant yet disturbing Final Judgment.
1.5: The Northern Renaissance
By the late 15th century, Italian Renaissance humanism began to affect the rest of Europe.
Northerners were still trying to deepen their Christian faith and show their humanism.
Northern Renaissance: A more religious movement than the Italian Renaissance.
Christian Humanists: These are northern writers who criticized their mother church.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536)
In Praise of Folly: He used satire as a means of criticizing what he thought were the problems of the Church.
Handbook of Christian Knight: He emphasized in this work the idea of inner faith as opposed to the outer forms of worship.
He also made a Latin Translation of the New Testament — it helped understand the life of the early Christians through its close textual analysis of the Acts of the Apostles.
He wanted to reform the Church, not abandon it.
Sir Thomas More (1478–1535)
He is a friend of Erasmus.
He wrote the classic work Utopia.
He also coined the word utopia, which means ‘nowhere.’
He was very critical of some church practices, but in the end, he gave his life to uphold his convictions.
He was put to death because he refused to swear an oath recognizing Henry as Head of the Church of England.
Northern Renaissance Culture
Albrecht Dürer: A brilliant draftsman, whose woodcuts powerfully lent support to the doctrinal revolution brought about by his fellow German Martin Luther.
The greatest achievements in the arts in Northern Europe in the 16th to 17th centuries — took place in England.
Canterbury Tales was written by Geoffrey Chaucer, which was based on The Decameron by Boccaccio.
Elizabeth Renaissance: Explains the emergence of the sheer number of men possessing exceptional talent during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson — though they were both writers of significant repute, this age produced an unrivaled genius— Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
He only had a basic education.
He was able to write plays like King Lear and Hamlet, which exhibit an unmatched comprehension of the human psyche and a genius for dramatic intensity.
Printing Press
The traditional method of producing books, which involved a monk working diligently in a monastic scriptorium, was incapable of meeting the increased demand.
Johannes Gutenberg
He introduced a movable type of printing press to western Europe.
Between 1452 and 1453, he printed approximately 200 Bibles.
He spent a great deal of money making his Bibles as ornate as any handwritten version.
Historians regard the printing press as one of the most culturally significant inventions of all time.
The ability to disseminate printed material quickly almost certainly contributed to the spread of the Reformation.
1.6: Protestant Reformation
Protestant Reformation: This movement caused a great split in Western Christendom, displacing the pope as Europe's sole religious authority.
Although it took decades, the Catholic Reformation movement took a response to the protestants’ challenge.
The humanism in Renaissance led individuals to question certain parties, such as the efficacy of religious relics and the value to one’s salvation of living the life of a monk.
The printing press made Bibles more widely available, making the Church's exclusive right to interpret Scripture particularly vexing to those who could read texts.
Problems Facing the Church on the Eve of Reformation
Black Death: A ferocious outbreak of plague, struck the population of Europe.
Anticlericalism: A measure of contempt for the clergy, arising in part from what many saw as individual clergymen's poor performance during the plague's crisis years.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s The Decameron reveal some of the satirical edges with which literate society now greeted clergymen.
Pietism: The notion of a direct relationship between the individual and God — thereby reducing the importance of the hierarchical Church based in Rome.
The 14th century was a disaster for the Church — with the papacy under French dominance in the city of Avignon for almost 70 years.
During the Great Schism of the early 15th century, there were three popes at the same time — all trying to excommunicate one another.
One of the problems included a poorly educated lower clergy.
Peasant priests proved to be unable to put forward a learned response to Luther’s challenge to their church.
Simony: The selling of church offices.
In facing some of these problems, some movements arose in the late Middle Ages that were declared heretical by the church.
In England, John Wycliffe questioned the Church's material wealth, the miracle of sacramental, and penance doctrines, and, in a foretaste of Luther's ideas, the sale of indulgences.
He urged followers (the Lollards) to read the Bible and interpret it themselves — which led him to translate the Bible into English.
In Bohemia, Jan Hus led a revolt that combined religious and nationalistic elements.
He believed the Bible, not the church, was most authoritative.
He was horrified by what he saw as the clergy's immoral behavior.
Jan Hus was called before the Council of Constance in 1415 by Pope Martin V, though he was promised a safe passage, he was condemned as a heretic and burnt at the stake.
Martin Luther (1483–1546)
The first issue that brought attention to Luther was the debate over indulgences.
The selling of indulgences was a practice that began during the time of the Crusades.
The papacy sold indulgences that exempted knights from purgatory to recruit them for the crusades and raise money.
After the crusade movement ended, the Church began to grant indulgences as a means of filing its treasury.
In 1517, Albert of Hohenzollern, who had already held two bishoprics, was offered the Archbishopric of Mainz.
He had to raise 10,000 ducats so he borrowed from the Fuggers — the great banking family of the age.
To repay his debt, the papacy allowed him to preach an indulgence, with half of the proceeds going to Rome to finish St. Peter's Basilica.
Johann Tetzel — was sent to preach indulgence throughout Germany with the famous phrase “As soon as the gold in the basin rings, right then the soul to heaven springs.”
Luther was outraged by Tetzel's actions and posted his 95 Theses on Wittenberg's Castle Church to start a debate.
In 1505, he was caught in a thunderstorm and a bolt of lightning struck near him.
He cried, “St. Anne help me; I will become a monk. ”
He kept his promise, joined the Augustinian Order, and got dissatisfied with leading his life as a monk.
Following the publication of 95 Theses, Luther was then involved in a public challenge.
John Eck: A prominent theologian challenged Luther.
He called Luther a Hussite.
In 1520, Luther wrote three of his most important political tracts.
In his Address to the Christian Nobility, he urged that a secular government had the right to reform the Church.
In his On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he attacked other teachings of the Church, such as the sacraments.
In his Liberty of a Christian Man, he hit on what would become the basic elements of Lutheran belief: grace is the sole gift of God; therefore, one is saved by faith alone, and the Bible is the sole source of this faith.
In response to Luther’s works, Pope Leo X decided to act.
The Pope issued a papal bull (an official decree) that demanded that Luther recant the ideas found in his writings or be burnt as a heretic.
Luther publicly burned the bull to show that he no longer accepted papal authority. In turn, the pope excommunicated Luther.
Frederick, the Elector of Saxony was sympathetic to Luther’s ideas or at least wanted him to be given a public hearing.
In 1521, Luther appeared before the Diet of Worms — a meeting of the German nobility.
He got into a conversation with Charles V, the Holy Roman Empire.
“Do you or do you not repudiate your books and the errors they contain?” Charles V asked him.
Luther answered: “Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.”
Luther was then banned from the Empire but was safely hidden over the next year in Wartburg Castle by the Elector of Saxony.
Luther and his friend Philip Melanchthon decided to establish a new church free of papal control based on his revolutionary ideas.
Instead of the seven sacraments of the Catholic church. He reduced them into two — baptism and communion.
He rejected transubstantiation — the priest-only process of turning bread and wine into Christ's flesh and blood.
He claimed that Christ was already present in the Sacrament.
Luther also abolished the practice of monasticism and the requirement of clergy celibacy.
He had a happy marriage with a former nun, with whom he had several children.
Why did the Reformation Succeed?
Protestantism spread to many northern German, Scandinavian, English, Scottish, Dutch, French, and Swiss states within three decades of Luther's 95 Theses.
Protestantism: The term today is used very broadly and means any non-Catholic or non-Eastern Orthodox Christian faith.
In 1529, a group of Lutherans attended the Diet of Speyer to negotiate with the Catholic Church but "protested" the final document.
German Peasants’ Revolt (1525)
German peasants' worsening economic situation and their belief, expressed in the Twelve Articles, that Luther's call for a "priesthood of all believers" was social egalitarianism led to the revolt.
The revolt and the distortion of his ideas horrified Luther.
He published a violently angry tract entitled “Against the Robbing and Murderous Hordes of Peasants,” in which he urged that no mercy be shown to the revolutionaries.
When Emperor Maximilian died in 1519, his grandson and heir Charles V was caught in a struggle with French King Francis I to see who would sit on the imperial throne.
Charles V was unable to deal with the revolt in Germany because he was involved in extended wars with France and with the Ottoman Empire.
In the 1540s, Schmalkaldic War was fought between Charles and some of the Protestant princes.
For a time Charles has the upper hand, he was forced to sign the Peace of Augsburg by 1555.
This treaty legalized Lutheranism in Lutheran-ruled territories and kept Catholic territories Catholic.
Radical Reformation
Radical Reformation: Describes a variety of religious sects that developed during the 16th century, inspired in part by Luther’s challenge to the established Church.
Anabaptists: A group who denied the idea of infant baptism.
They believed that baptism works only when it is practiced by adults who are fully aware of the decision they are making.
Rebaptism: It as declared a capital offense throughout the Holy Roman Empire, something on which both the pope and Luther heartily agreed.
Anabaptists were persecuted even more when they tried to establish an Old Testament theocracy that allowed men to have multiple wives.
Antitrinitarians: A group who denied the scriptural validity of the Trinity, were part of the Radical Reformation.
Zwingli and Calvin
Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531)
His teachings began to make an impact on the residents of the Swiss city of Zurich.
He accused monks of indolence and high living.
In 1519, he specifically rejected the veneration of saints and called for the need to distinguish between factual and fictional accounts of their lives.
He announced that unbaptized children were not damned to eternal life.
He also questioned the power of ex-communication.
His most powerful statement was his attack on the claim that tithing was a divine institution.
He was a strict sacramentarian in that he denied all the sacraments.
To him, the Holy Communion was simply a memorial of Christ’s death.
He died leading the troops of Zurich against the Swiss Catholic cantons in battle.
John Calvin (1509–1564)
His main ideas are found in his Institutes of the Christian Religion — he argued that grace was bestowed on relatively few individuals, and the rest were consigned to hell.
This philosophy of predestination was the cornerstone of his thought and one that does not make any room for free will.
Calvinism began to spread rapidly in the 1540s and 1550s, becoming the established church in Scotland.
In France, the Calvinists were known as Huguenots.
It was said that Calvinism saved the Protestant Reformation.
In the mid-16th century, it was the dynamic Calvinism that stood in opposition to a newly aggressive Catholic Church during the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
In Europe's shipbuilding capital, they saved enough money to build two ships and sail across the Atlantic Ocean to Massachusetts, where they founded the pilgrims.
1.7: English Reformation
Henry VIII (r. 1509–1546)
A powerful English Monarch was supportive of the Catholic Church.
He criticized Luther by writing a pamphlet — The Defence of the Seven Sacraments.
He was never comfortable with Protestant Theology.
The "King's Great Matter," King Henry VIII's attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon, began the English Reformation.
He had grown concerned that Catherine had failed in producing sons, leaving him without a male heir.
He then fell in love with a young woman at his court, Anne Boleyn, who refused to sleep with him unless he made her his queen.
But then the papacy showed no signs of granting Henry’s annulment to Catherine since she was the aunt of the powerful Charles V.
In November 1529, he began the Reformation Parliament. He used a tool to give him ultimate authority on religious matters.
This led him to bribe Anne Boleyn to sleep with him and have a secret marriage — which led to Anne’s pregnancy.
In April 1533, Parliament enacted a statute, “Act in Restraint of Appeals” — which declared that all spiritual cases within the kingdom were within the king’s jurisdiction and authority and not the pope’s.
In September 1533, Anne Boleyn’s child was born, but it was a baby girl, Elizabeth Tudor.
Since Henry was desperate to have a male heir, he was married a total of six times — until his third wife, Jane Seymour, gave birth to Edward.
The Act of Supremacy of 1534 limited the English Reformation by declaring the King of England the Supreme Head of the Church of England.
The brief reign of his son Edward V (r. 1574–1553) saw an attempt to institute genuine Protestant theology into the church that Henry had created.
During the short reign of Mary Tudor (r. 1553–1558) — the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, there was an attempt to bring England back into the orbit of the Catholic Church.
She discovered that many Protestants remained after restoring formal links between England and the papacy.
To end this, she allowed hundreds of Englishmen to be burnt at the stake, earning her the sobriquet — Bloody Mary.
In the long successful reign of Elizabeth Tudor (r. 1558–1603), a final religious settlement was worked out, one in which the Church of England followed a middle-of-the-road Protestant course.
1.8: Counter-Reformation
Historians refer Protestant Reformation as Counter-Reformation — which in fact, it was commonly known as Catholic Reformation.
It was a Counter-Reformation in the sense that the Catholic Church was taking steps to counteract some of the successes of the Protestant side.
Among these steps was the creation of the Index of Prohibited Books — including the works of Erasmus and Galileo.
The Papal Inquisition was also revived, and people who were deemed to be heretics were put to death for their religious beliefs.
Council of Trent: It was the centerpiece of the Catholic Reformation.
It was dominated by the papacy and enhanced its power.
It took steps to address some of the issues that sparked the Reformation, including placing limits on simony.
They mandated that a seminary for the education of clergy should be established in every diocese.
The council refused to concede any point of theology to the Protestants.
They created the idea of the Baroque style and it urged that a more intensely religious art be created.
Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
Organized by Ignatius Loyola — a Spanish noble who was wounded in battle and presented his recuperation time reading various Catholic tracts.
Loyola believed that even if the Bible did not exist, there was still the spirit.
The Jesuits established themselves as a teaching order while also serving as Catholic missionaries in areas where Lutheranism had made significant inroads.
Poland was a prime example of the re-proselytization of Catholicism.
1.9: Portuguese and Spanish Empires
Portugal built an empire mostly by sea, while Spain built empires on land.
Portugal kept looser control over its properties, while Spain maintained a tighter grip over its tributary empire.
Portugal lost their holdings quickly, while the Spanish maintained its overseas properties until the 19th century.
While Portugues is having a head start on the African Route to the Indian Ocean, the Spanish decided to try an Atlantic route to the east.
In 1415, Prince Henry the Navigator participated in the capture of the North African port of Ceuta by the Muslims.
This conquest spurred his interest in Africa.
He was inspired to sponsor a navigational school in Lisbon and a series of navigation.
His goal is not only to develop trade with Africa but also to find a route to India and the Far East around Africa and cut out the Italian middlemen.
In 1487, Bartholomew Dias, a Portuguese captain, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa.
In 1489, Vasco de Gama reached the coast of India.
The Portuguese first mounted cannons on their ships and developed squadrons, giving them an advantage over the Arab fleets patrolling the Indian Ocean.
They controlled the lucrative spice trade on the western coast of India.
On August 2, 1492, Christopher Columbus, a sailor from Genoa, set sail certain that he would find the eastern route.
He believed that he would fulfill medieval religious prophecies that spoke of converting the whole world to Christianity.
After 33 days of voyage from the Canary Islands, he landed in the eastern Bahamas — which he insisted was an undeveloped part of Asia.
He called the territory “Indies” and the indigenous people “Indians”.
In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe and he never saw the end of his voyage because he died in the Philippines.
He proved where Columbus landed was not the Far East — but an unknown territory.
In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico with a small force of 600 men.
He arrived at the heart of the Aztec Empire — a militaristic state, which through conquest had carved out a large state with a large capital: Tenochtitlán.
The Aztecs viewed the Spaniards, who were riding on horses wearing armor, and carrying guns, as gods.
Montezuma: The Aztec ruler tried to appease the Spaniards with gifts of gold — but the Spanish just seized the city and held him hostage — which led to his unknown death.
The Aztecs' ability to fight was stopped by smallpox brought by the conquerors to the Indigenous people.
By 1521, Cortés declared the former Aztec Empire to be New Spain.
In 1531, Francisco Pizarro set out to Peru with a tiny force of 200 men.
Inca Empire of Peru: The Incas had carved out a large empire by conquering and instigating harsh rule over many other tribes.
He treacherously captured Atahualpa (Inca Emperor), who then had his subjects raise vast amounts of gold for ransom.
By 1533, Pizarro had grown tired of ruling through Atahualpa and had to kill him.
The Spanish set out to create haciendas, to exploit both the agricultural and mineral riches of the land.
Due to a forced labor system, and encomienda, the indigenous population continued to die at an incredible pace from both disease and overwork.
The Spanish and Portuguese began transporting captured Africans to the New World to work on farms and mines for their estates.
The European powers relied upon the Catholic Church to justify their atrocious overseas behavior. Their mission is:
To use thousands of missionary priests to convert indigenous people to Christianity.
To acquire massive amounts of land in the New World and sell them to the European landowning classes.
Columbian Exchange
The transatlantic transfer of animals, plants, diseases, people, technology, and ideas among Europe, the Americas, and Africa.
Mercantilism had a strong effect on European governance.
The practitioners believe that the government needs to actively regulate the economy of its population.
By doing so, the rulers maintained a favorable trade balance, monitored the import and export of raw materials and finished goods, and funded the search for precious metals, the country's main source of wealth.
1.10: The Development of Monarchical States
Large, unified nation-states began to develop in northern Europe during the early modern period.
They came to dominate the Italian peninsula and contributed to the transition away from the medieval notion of feudal kingship.
In the age of the new monarchical state, it was believed that monarchical power was divinely granted and so by definition absolute.
In the Middle Ages, Parliamentary institutions arose throughout Europe as a means of limiting kings.
French Monarchy
An example of how the power shift came about.
It was not an easy victory for them, which had to deal with assorted aristocratic and religious conflicts that threatened to destroy the state.
Under Louis XIV, France created a centralized monarchy in which the power of the King was absolute.
However, it came at a high price as it helped pave the way for the late-century French Revolution.
In England, the Stuart Monarchs, who reigned for most of the 17th century, were interested in adapting French-style royal absolutism but the English parliament stood in their way.
England became embroiled in what one historian has labeled as a “century of revolution,” which eventually resulted in the supremacy of Parliament over the monarchy.
Important Characteristics of New Nation-States
Growing Bureaucratization
The monarchy in France created a new independent office, which hired individuals to collect taxes on the monarch's behalf.
The previous arrangement in England, where the crown and its powerful subjects worked together, was kept.
Existence of a Permanent Mercenary Army
In the 14th century, Swiss mercenary infantrymen formed a phalanx of 6,000 men and used their pikes to slaughter aristocratic horsemen.
England is an exception once more because it did not establish a permanent army until the end of the 17th century when it was firmly under parliamentary control.
Growing Need to Tax
In France, taxes are required to fund their permanent armies.
Medieval monarchs were traditionally expected to live off their incomes; however, the Price Revolution increased the costs of running a centralized state, making this impossible.
1.11: Italy
Treaty of Lodi (1454)
It provided a balance of power among the major Italian city-states.
It created an alliance between long-term enemies Milan and Naples and also included the support of Florence.
Ludovico il Moro
He invaded Naples and invited the French into Italy four years later to settle their claims to Naples.
Charles VIII, the King of France, immediately ordered his troops across the Italian Alps.
Charles and his forces crossed into Florence, Savonarola, led the Florentine population in expelling the Medici rulers, and then established a puritanical state.
This complete religious and political transformation ended Florence's Renaissance scholarship and art.
By 1498, Ludovico il Moro realized his mistake and joined an anti-French Italian alliance that expelled the French from Florence and restored the Medici.
The Medici promptly burnt Savonarola at the stake with the support of the papacy.
Throughout the 16th century, Italy became the battlefield in which Spain and France fought for dominance.
Niccolò Machiavelli
He wrote what is generally seen as the first work of modern political thought, The Prince.
The Prince is a resume of sorts in which Machiavelli tried to convince the Medici to partake of his services.
When the Republic was overthrown by the Medici, Machiavelli was forced into exile to his country's estate.
1.12: England
Henry Tudor (Henry VII)
He won the central authority in Egland and established the Tudor Dynasty — following his defeat of Richard III in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth Field.
Henry VIII
He ascended to the throne and continued his father's policies to strengthen the crown.
While England was under papacy rule, he believed his sovereignty would not be apparent.
In 1534, he made a political decision when he broke up with Rome and created the Church of England.
Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603)
The greatest of all Tudors — Henry VIII’s daughter with Anne Boleyn.
She was smart and studied classical Italian humanism. She worked hard and was political like her father.
She chose ministers who would serve the crown well, but she always made the final decisions.
She did seem to regard marriage as incompatible with her sovereignty.
Since she remained unmarried — Mary Stuart, the ruler of Scotland, was her legal heir.
In the Treaty of Berwick (1586), Elizabeth entered into a defensive alliance with Scotland.
She recognized James, Mary’s son who was being raised as a Protestant, as the lawful king, gave him an English pension and would be known as the heir to her throne.
In 1587, Elizabeth ordered the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
In 1588 came the greatest moment in Elizabeth’s reign—the defeat of Philip II’s Spanish Armada, ensuring that England would remain Protestant and free from foreign reign.
Mary Stuart
Her paternal grandmother is Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII.
She lived as Elizabeth’s prisoner for years.
Elizabeth believed Mary was plotting against her, so she kept her under house arrest.
Only after Mary conspired with Philip II of Spain did Elizabeth decide to settle relations with the Scots and distance herself from Mary.
1.13: Spain
Before the 15th century, Spain was divided into:
Christian kingdoms in the north; and
Islamic control in the south.
The marriage of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile, laid the groundwork for the eventual consolidation of the peninsula.
The final stage of the Reconquista took place in 1492 when their armies conquered the last independent Islamic outpost in Grenada, Spain.
Spanish Inquisition: An effective method that the Spanish monarchy would later use to root out suspected Protestants.
Charles V
Ferdinand and Isabella’s grandson.
He eventually controlled a vast empire that dominated Europe in the first half of the 16th century.
His Spanish possessions were the primary source of his wealth.
He gave his brother Ferdinand the troublesome eastern Habsburg lands of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary and his title of Holy Roman Emperor when he was exhausted from fighting Protestantism.
Philip (1556–1598)
Charles V’s son
He received the more valuable part of the empire: Spain and its vast holdings in the New World, along with southern Italy and the Netherlands.
He spent most of his reign in debt as he used his riches to maintain Spanish influence.
In the Mediterranean, the Spanish fought for supremacy against the Ottoman Empire and won against that eastern power at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.
Inquisition-based efforts such as the Duke of Alva’s Council of Troubles failed, as did the effort of Don Juan.
This is the reason why Philip launched the Spanish Armada in an attempt to conquer England during Queen Elizabeth’s rule.
By 1609, the Spanish conceded for independence and in 1648, they formally acknowledged their independence.
Golden Age in Spain
This age featured the writings of Cervantes, Spain’s greatest writer.
He wrote Don Quixote which bemoans the passing of the traditional values of chivalry in Spain.
This is the period of the Spanish’s remarkable painter, El Greco.
By the 17th century, Spain's power had declined due to wars, the Price Revolution, and the Castilian economy's collapse.
1.14: The Holy Roman Empire
Holy Roman Empire
A large state that straddled central Europe when the Saxon King Otto I was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope.
In the late 10th and 11th centuries, the Empire was the most powerful state in Europe, but it was eventually weakened as a result of a series of conflicts with the papacy.
By 1356, the practice of electing the emperor was formally defined in the Golden Bull of Emperor Charles IV.
This document showed that the emperor was elected rather than hereditary and gave seven German princes the power to choose one.
The electors typically opted for weak leaders who wouldn't obstruct their political objectives.
Peace of Augsburg (1555)
It ended Charles V's religious disputes by upholding the prince's right to choose the territory's religion.
The treaty did not grant recognition to Calvinists, creating problems when Frederick III converted to Calvinism in 1559.
As Palatinate ruler, Frederick's status as one of the Holy Roman Emperor's seven electors complicated matters.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)
It began when Ferdinand of Styria was crowned king of Bohemia.
Protestant Bohemians were outraged by Ferdinand's intolerance.
In May of 1618, a large group of Bohemian Protestant nobles surrounded two of Ferdinand’s Catholic advisors and threw them out of a window.
In 1619, Matthias, the Holy Roman Emperor died and Ferdinand, the King of Bohemia was elected Emperor.
Frederick — the Calvinist Elector of the Palatinate, was elected as the King of Bohemia, a few hours after Ferdinand was elected emperor.
Since Ferdinand doesn’t have an army, he turned to the Duke of Bavaria to ask for help against Frederick.
At the Battle of White Mountain, the Bavarian forces won a major victory, and Frederick became known as the Winter King.
By 1622, he lost not only Bohemia but also Palatinate.
Ferdinand confiscated the defeated Protestant prince's lands in the North and forged a unified state under Habsburg control.
He needed to find a new army since he won’t be able to rely on the Duke of Bavaria.
He then found a Bohemian noble — Albrecht von Wallenstein — who promised to create a vast army, here then started the war’s second phase.
By 1628, Wallenstein controlled an army of 125,000 and had won a series of major victories in the North.
The high-water mark for Habsburg's success in the Thirty Years’ War came with the Edict of Restitution (1629)
It outlawed Calvinism in the empire and required Lutherans to turn over all property seized since 1552.
This resulted in Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden to enter the war, triggering the third phase.
Though he claimed that he became involved to defend Protestant rights in Germany, he was also interested in German territory along the Baltic.
Cardinal Richelieu: France’s chief minister, was concerned about the increase of Habsburg strength in Germany.
In 1632, Adolphus died, which made the Swedes roll back the Habsburgs.
In 1633, Wallenstein was murdered.
The last phase of the war consisted of the French and Swedes fighting against the Austrian Habsburgs and their Spanish allies.
The most destructive phase of the war.
German towns were completely destroyed, and famine and general agricultural collapse followed.
By the end of the war in 1648, the Empire had eight million fewer inhabitants than it had in 1618.
Peace of Westphalia (1648)
It marked the end of the struggle.
The treaty made sure that the Emperor would continue to be a weak force in German politics while the Holy Roman Empire maintained its numerous political divisions.
1.15: France
After Francis I’s reign, it seemed as though the newly strong centralized monarchy had won the conflict between the feudal aristocracy and the monarchy.
The French Wars of Religion revealed that struggles were not quite over.
Religious conflicts rose to the surface following the French monarch Henry II’s 1559 death — when his eye got pierced with a lance while celebrating the end of wars.
On his death, Francis II, his 15-year-old son, came to the throne.
Francis was then replaced by his brother Charles IX after months.
14 years later, Henry III replaced Charles — the last of the Valois kings.
All three boys were influenced by their mother, Catherine de’ Medici.
Behind the scenes of the French monarchy, a power struggle began to emerge among three prominent families.
Guises: The most powerful family, turned toward a militant, reactionary form of Catholicism.
Admiral Coligny: The leader of the Montmorency family — converted to Calvinism.
The Prince of Conde, the leading Bourbon converted to Calvinism as well.
The Wars of Religion first began in 1562 when the Duke of Guise ordered the execution of several Huguenot worshippers after becoming enraged at their presence in a barn.
The Huguenots had the upper hand after 10 years of combat — both the Duke and the Prince were killed.
Henry of Navarre: A young Bourbon prince married King Charles IX’s sister.
Catherine de' Medici worried about the Valois family's political decline and sought to balance aristocratic power to protect her sons.
In 1572, Catherine encouraged her son, the King, to set in motion the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which killed around 3000 people in Paris.
Possibly 20,000 Huguenots were killed in simultaneous attacks across France.
Admiral Coligny was murdered, but Henry of Navarre was spared because he promised to return to Catholicism.
In 1574, Henry III, the last of the Valois kings, turned to the Huguenots to defeat the powerful Catholic League.
He then made Henry of Navarre his heir and became King Henry IV in 1598 — following his assassination led to the start of the Bourbon Dynasty.
Henry IV struggled with Spain and was pressured because most Parisians remained Catholic — he then permanently converted to Catholicism.
His action instigated a new way of thinking in France and the idea of Politique, putting the interests of France before the goal of religious unity.
Although Henry's Calvinist allies and Anglican Queen Elizabeth were horrified by his final religious conversion, he never forgot them.
In 1598, Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, granting the Huguenots freedom of worship and assembly as well as the right to maintain fortified towns for their protection.
Period 2: Monarchical States to Napoleon: (1648-1815)
2.1: France (Royal Absolutism)
Henry IV (1553–1610)
Until Henry IV’s assassination, he worked to revitalize his kingdom.
Duke of Sully: Henry’s finance minister, established government monopolies to restore the finances of the monarchy.
He limited the power of the French nobility by reining in its influence over regional parliaments.
His assassination in 1610 and the ascension of his son, Louis XIII — made France vulnerable to aristocratic rebellion and potential religious wars.
Louis XIII (1601–1643)
Louis XIII needed a strong minister and he found one in Cardinal Richelieu.
Richelieu defeated the Huguenots and took away many of the military and political privileges granted them by the Edict of Nantes.
He brought France into the Thirty Years’ War on the side of the Protestants.
The death of Louis XIII in 1643 left France with a minor on the throne — the five-year-old Louis XIV.
Louis XIV (1638–1715)
Ann of Austria — Louis XIV’s mother, selected Cardinal Mazarin to be the regent during the king’s childhood.
However, Mazarin had a less sure political hand than Richelieu.
Louis XIV decided to rule without the Chief Minister and dealt with central issues on his own.
He achieved this by advocating a political philosophy — the notion that the monarch enjoyed certain divine rights.
Bishop Bossuet: Louis XIV’s chief political philosopher, wrote that because the king was chosen by God, only God was fit to judge the behavior of the king, not parliamentary bodies or angry nobles.
He built the palace of Versailles, 12 miles outside of Paris, as a way to dominate the French nobility and the Parisian mob.
No member of the high aristocracy attended the daily council sessions at Versailles.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert: Louis most important minister — he centralized the French economy by instituting a system known as mercantilism.
Its goal is to build up the nation’s supply of gold by exporting goods to other lands and earning gold from their sale.
Colbert succeeded in helping to create France’s vast overseas empire.
French East Indian Company: Organized by Louis to compete with the Dutch.
In 1685, he revoked the Edict of Nantes. He demolished the Huguenot churches, and schools, and took their civil rights away.
France was involved in a series of wars as a means to satiate Louis' desire for territorial expansion.
William of Orange: The leader of the Netherlands and was committed to waging total war against Louis.
After 1688, a 25-year war broke out including the — War of Spanish Succession between the French and the English and Dutch allies.
This war lasted from 1702 to 1713 and ended in the Treaty of Utrecht, which left a Bourbon (Louis's grandson) on the throne of Spain.
These wars ultimately left the French peasantry hard-pressed to pay the taxes to support Louis XIV's constant desire for glory.
2.2: England
The Stuarts
King James VI (1603–1625)
He inherited the throne after Elizabeth died childless in 1603.
James was ill-suited for the role of English king.
In the relationship between the king and Parliament at the start of the 17th century, the monarch held the upper hand and could summon a parliament at will.
He had to consult two house parliaments when he needed to raise additional revenue beyond ordinary experiences.
House of Commons; and
House of Lords.
Puritans emerged during the Stuart period.
They wanted to see the Church “purified” of all traces of Catholicism.
James believed the Church of England’s Episcopal structure — which suited to his idea of the divine rights of the kings.
James then established a three-part program:
To unite England with Scotland;
To create a continental-style standing army; and
To set up new system of royal finance.
King Charles (1625–1649)
Charles I did not possess even the somewhat limited political acumen of his father.
He lent his support to the so-called Arminian wing of the Anglican Church.
He believed that this faction provided the greatest stability for his state.
Arminius: A Dutch theologian of the early 17th century who argued in favor of free will as opposed to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
In 1633, Charles named William Laud as his Archbishop of Canterbury.
His relationship with the Parliament started badly when the Parliament granted him tonnage and poundage for only a year instead of his time in monarchy.
He was forced to pay for the military disasters that he caused and forced himself to loan — however, the Parliament refused to pay his loans and throw him in jail.
Petition of Rights
These included provisions that the King could not demand a loan without the consent of the Parliament.
It also prohibited individuals from being imprisoned without a published case.
It outlawed using martial law against civilians, which Charles had used to collect his forced loan.
In August 1628, Charles’s chief minister, Duke of Buckingham, was murdered by an embittered sailor who blamed him for England’s recent military disasters.
In January 1629, the Parliament was called, and both sides felt that the issue of exclusive rights would lead to the Parliament and the King’s conflict.
In March 1629, his messengers announced the dissolution of the Parliament.
For the next 11 years, Personal Rule of Charles was the law of land.
By 1637, Charles was at the height of his power. He had a balanced budget, and his government policies and restructuring appeared to be effective.
A civil war broke out in the nation four years after he reached his peak, destabilizing his position of authority.
The Scots rioted and signed a national covenant that pledged their allegiance to the king, but also vowed to resist all changes to their Church.
In 1640, he called an English Parliament because he believed it would be willing to grant money to put down the Scottish rebellion.
It was then called “Short Parliament” because it met for only three weeks and was dissolved right after they didn’t meet Charles’s needs.
Charles was still determined to punish the Scots.
The Scots were the victors on the battlefield and invaded northern England.
They refused to leave England unless Charles signed a settlement and forced him to pay £850 per day.
To pay those, he was forced to call another Parliament — the “Long Parliament”, which lasted 20 years.
The House of Commons launched the Long Parliament by impeaching Charles’s two chief ministers and executing them.
They abolished the king’s prerogative courts, which became the tools for Royal Absolutism.
They supported the Grand Remonstrance — a list of 204 parliamentary grievances.
They also added two demands:
The king name ministers whom Parliament could trust; and
That a synod of the Church of England is called to reform the Church.
Charles then attempted to sieve five of the rulers of the House of Commons — which led to failure, resulting in him to leave London in January 1642.
The English Revolution
Oliver Cromwell (1653–1658)
He created the New Model Army, a regularly paid, disciplined force with extremely dedicated Puritan soldiers.
By 1648, the King was defeated and in the following year, he made a decision to execute Charles.
From 1649 to 1660, England became a Republic — The Commonwealth; a military dictatorship governed by Cromwell.
He then made conflicts among his own supporters.
The Independents wanted a state church, but were also willing to grant a measure of religious freedom for others.
The Presbyterians wanted a state church that would not allow dissent.
Cromwell dealt with the rise of radical factions within his army — the Levellers and the Diggers.
In 1649, Cromwell destroyed the Leveller elements in his army.
In 1650, he led an army to Ireland, where he displayed incredible brutality in putting down resistance by supporters of the Stuarts.
In 1652, he brought his army into London to disperse a Parliament.
In 1665, Cromwell gave up on the idea of governing alongside a legislature and divided England into 12 military districts.
By the time Cromwell passed away, a worn-out England desired to restore the Stuart dynasty.
James II (1685–1688)
In 1660, Charles II returned to the throne.
Their return turned back the clock to 1642 as the same issues that had led to the revolution against Charles’s father remained unresolved.
These issues were not fully addressed during Charles’s reign.
In 1685, Charles's brother, James II, succeeded the throne.
Test Act: An act passed during Charles II’s reign that effectively barred Catholics from serving as royal officials or in the military.
Declaration of Indulgence: It suspended all religious tests for office holders and allowed for freedom of worship.
James wanted a Royal Absolutism
The final stages of this conflict took place in 1688.
Seven Anglican bishops were put in jail by him for declining to read James' suspension of the laws against Catholics from the pulpit.
In June 1688, he unexpectedly fathered a son, having a male heir raised as a Catholic, as opposed to his previous daughter's heir, Mary, who was raised as a Protestant.
William, the Stadholder from the Netherlands, a husband of Mary, overthrown James after the Glorious Revolution and they took the throne.
Constitutional Settlements
The Bill of Rights (1689)
It prohibited the use of royal prerogative rights, which Charles and James had previously exercised.
The authority to suspend and repeal laws was declared illegal.
Parliamentary elections were to be free of royal interference.
All taxes were now required to be approved by Parliament.
The Act of Toleration (1689)
It granted Protestant nonconformists the right to public worship but not Unitarians or Catholics.
The Test Act remained in effect until the 19th century, when it was amended to allow nonconformists, Jews, and Catholics to sit in Parliament.
The Mutiny Act (1689)
It allowed civil law to be used to govern the army, which had previously been governed solely by royal decree.
It also made desertion and mutiny civil offenses for which soldiers could be punished even during times of peace.
The Act of Settlement (1701)
It was enacted to prevent the Catholic Stuart line from gaining control of the English throne.
The Act of Union (1707)
This marked the political reunification of England and Scotland, resulting in the formation of the country known as Great Britain.
2.3: The Netherlands
A Center of Commerce and Trades
The Netherlands had already achieved a central role in inter-European trade due to its geographic position and large merchant marine fleet.
Amsterdam became the center of commerce in Northern Europe.
Antwerp declined after it was sacked in 1576 during the Dutch War for Independence.
The Peace of Westphalia concluded the permanent closing of the Scheldt River that led to Antwerp’s harbor.
The Bank of Amsterdam established Amsterdam as the financial hub of Europe, issued its own currency, and increased the amount of capital that was available.
In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was founded.
The company was financed by both public and private investment and operated under quasi-governmental control.
This gave rise to the popularity of joint-stock companies.
The Golden Age in the Netherlands produced a high standard of living, with wealth being more equally distributed than in any other place in Europe.
Political Decentralization
Dutch Autonomous: In the 17th century, the Netherlands was politically centralized, with each of the seven provinces retaining significant autonomy.
Wealthy merchants dominated the provincial Estates.
The executive power came from the House of Orange, whose family members had achieved prominence for leading the revolt against Spain.
Stadholder: The male head of the family.
The Netherlands shifted its focus from fighting for independence from Spain to fighting against England and attempting to survive against France.
During the struggle with Louis XIV’s France,
The power of provincial Estates declined; and
William of Nassau, the head of the House of Orange, powers increased tremendously.
A Golden Age of Art
Because most Dutch artists were Calvinists, they did not receive large commissions to place their works in churches.
The Dutch painters chose to paint for private collectors.
When prices reached speculative levels, pictures were treated like commodities.
The art market didn’t flourish in Amsterdam as well.
Franz Hals: A great portrait painter from Haarlem.
Jan Vermeer: A great Dutch painter who composed genre scenes of everyday Dutch life.
Rembrandt van Rijn: One of the Dutch Golden Age painters who focused more on a painting based on his, fraught with deep emotional complexity.
The Night Watch (1642): One of his paintings, meaning it transforms a standard group portrait of a military company into a revealing psychological study.
2.4: Economic and Social Life in Early Modern Europe
Economic Expansion and Population Growth
Population growth was the main factor in Europe's economic expansion.
The increase in consumers brought more food and other necessities to market as a result of the growing population in Europe.
Price Revolution: This is the significant increase in prices in the early modern period.
This significant increase was caused by population growth, which pushed up the prices of basic commodities.
A price increase of this magnitude was shocking to a society accustomed to stable prices.
Rural Life and the Emergence of Economic Classes
Gentry: A class of individuals, who often had their economic roots in fortunes made in towns and cities.
The land-buying habits of the gentry forced up the price of land.
Members of the gentry were able to use their social connections to get local authorities to accept the enclosure of lands for their own personal use.
Rural poverty became significantly worse in the early modern period.
Farmers became beggars.
Overpopulation then became a problem in most of Western Europe.
Low population density was much a more serious problem in Eastern Europe.
Farm Life
Life was bleak and revolved around a never-ending struggle to find resources to survive.
Life was centered in the small village, with most people never venturing more than a few miles beyond their birthplace.
Rural village housing provided little protection from the cold and wet winters.
The furnishings in these homes were as simple as their surroundings.
Workdays were longer in the summer and shorter in the winter.
Three-Field System: Crops were rotated across three pieces of land; mostly used in Northern Europe.
Two-Field System: Crops rotated on two pieces of land; predominated in the Mediterranean.
Farmland was laid out in long strips in most rural areas, with individual peasant families owning a portion of land in each of the strips.
City and Town Life
Townspeople in general lived better than their rural counterparts.
Guilds: They emphasized working on specialization skills, with specific tasks such as baking or brewing taking place in specific quarters of the town.
Capitalist Entrepreneurs: They provide money and focus on organizational skills.
They produced clothing in a much larger skill.
This work provided a benefit to some rural households to become one of their important source of revenue during the long winter months.
The guild members saw those as competitions and created greater hardships — which led them to dissatisfaction.
Family Life and Structure
The average family contains no more than three or four children.
Women marry at around the age of 25, while men marry at around the age of 27.
Marriages were traditionally either arranged or formally approved by the parents.
Weddings are significant community events because the married couple are now considered full-pledged members of society.
Single adults were looked at as troublemakers or thieves.
The Role of Men in the Family
The father is regarded as the family's patriarchal head.
In wealthier families, the oldest male child inherited the majority of the estate, ensuring that the family's wealth remained intact.
Younger sons were steered toward careers in the Church, the military, or the expanded opportunities provided by the early modern state's administration.
Boys as young as seven worked as servants or trade apprentices among the poor.
The Role of Women in the Family
A daughter's only claim on her parents' estate would be the dowry she receives upon marriage.
Wives usually decided who would receive their dowry when their husband died.
Domestic service was usually the only option for poor girls, leaving them with the difficult task of raising their own dowries.
The Family as Economic Unit
Early modern families, whether rich or poor, can be seen as economic units.
Men played a larger role in the public sphere; such as plowing, planting, and commerce.
Women had their responsibilities at home.
In agricultural communities, everyone is required to work.
Among merchant classes, the private sphere includes bookkeeping and other administration of the family business.
The main distinction between women's and men's work was that women's work included all the men's work, as well as housekeeping and cooking.
The upper classes and nobility had the strongest division between men's and women's roles.
2.5: Events Leading to the Scientific Revolution
An Anatomy of the World: Written by an English poet, John Donne; he reflected on the multitude of ways that his world had changed as a result of the new discoveries in science.
The scientific discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries brought about a fundamental change in the way Europeans viewed the natural world.
Discovery of the New World
The discovery of new plant and animal life may have increased interest in natural sciences.
The connection between navigation and astronomy sparked interest in learning more about the stars.
Invention of the Printing Press
The printing press enabled scientific knowledge to spread much more quickly.
Many books and newsletters kept people up to date on the most recent scientific discoveries by the second half of the 17th century.
Thomas Hobbes great invention made scientific discoveries spread throughout Europe.
Rivalry Among Nation-States
The constant warfare between various nation-states may have pushed scientific development by emphasizing technology.
Europe was a region with many powerful leaders capable of funding scientific research.
China's technological development has slowed in comparison to Europe's.
Reformation
Max Weber: The founder of sociology.
He argued that Protestantism's worldly asceticism aided in the creation of capitalism, which in turn aided in the advancement of the Scientific Revolution.
These theories ignore the fact that Catholic Italy contributed significantly to the Scientific Revolution.
The telescope and microscope, as well as the new botany, were invented in Italy.
The Protestant Reformation did contribute to a larger reading public by encouraging people to read the Bible.
Renaissance Humanism
Humanist interest in classical world writings extended to ancient Greek scientific texts as well.
The Renaissance rediscovered Archimedes' mathematical writings and Galen's anatomical studies.
Although the ideas contained in such works were eventually rejected by the Scientific Revolution, this basic familiarity with the past was a necessary stage for modern scientific thought to mature.
2.6: Pre-Scientific Overview
Scholasticism: A synthesis of Christian theology with the scientific beliefs of the ancient authors.
Thomas Aquinas: The great architect of scholasticism, who took the works of Aristotle and harmonized them with the teachings of the church.
Knowledge of God remained the supreme act of learning and was to be attained through both reason and revelation.
Viewing science outside of this religious framework was simply unthinkable in the Middle Ages.
The concept of the four elements gave rise to the idea of alchemy — the perfect compound of the four elements in their perfect proportions.
The four-element approach also dominated the practice of medicine.
The four elements combined in the human body to create what was known as the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
Astronomy was not a popular subject in the Middle Ages.
2.7: The Copernican Revolution
Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)
He’s a Polish mathematician and astronomer.
He wrote Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.
Copernicus was a cleric, and he waited many years before publishing his work because he was afraid of the implications of his ideas.
He cautiously dedicated the book to Pope Paul II.
He simply proposed that if the Earth revolved around the Sun, it would solve at least some of the Ptolemaic system's problematic epicycles.
Since the Heliocentric system explains that the planets move in a circular motion around the Sun, it did not completely eliminate all the epicycles.
His theories did not cause a revolution in how people perceived the planets and stars.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Galileo designed his own telescope that magnified far-away objects 30 times the naked eye’s capacity.
He noticed that the Moon had a mountainous surface very much like the Earth.
Galileo also observed that the distance between the planets and stars was much greater.
He observed that Jupiter had her own four moons.
Sunspots and Saturn's rings cast doubt on the entirety of the Ptolemaic system.
Following the publication of his Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632), the Catholic Church began to condemn Galileo’s work.
Galileo received a warning from church officials not to publish any more astronomy-related writings.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
The greatest figure of Scientific Revolution.
He wanted to solve the problem posed by the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo: how do you explain the orderly manner in which the planets revolve around the Sun?
Newton worked on the problem for nearly two decades before publishing his masterpiece, Principia, in 1687.
Newton wondered what force kept the planets in an elliptical orbit around the Sun when they should have been moving in a straight line.
The same force that drew the apple when it fell from the tree may explain planetary motion — gravity.
He was very religious. When he gives scientific talks, he wonders why audiences are more interested in science than theology.
Newton is also the founder of differential calculus.
He later became the President of the British Royal Society, an organization dedicated to spreading the new spirit of experimentation.
2.8: The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Philosophy
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
He was a lawyer, an official in the government of James I, a historian, and an essayist.
The only things he never did probably in his life is to perform scientific experiments.
What he did contribute to science was the experimental methodology.
He developed the known system: inductive reasoning, or empiricism*.*
In France, this system became known as the conflict between the ancients and the moderns.
In England, this system was known as the Battle of the Books*.*
René Descartes (1596-1650)
He developed deducting reasoning, or Rationalism.
A better understanding of the universe was obtained by using reason rather than the experimental method to move from a general principle to a specific principle.
He also thought that all of the outdated ideas needed to be cast into doubt because they were so oppressive.
Cartesian Doubt: I think; therefore I am, he stripped away his belief in everything except his own existence.
The system of methodical skepticism that defined his thought.
Descartes was also a highly gifted mathematician who invented analytical mathematics.
Descartes’s system can be found in his Discourse on Method (1637).
In his work, there are two distinct elements:
The world of the mind involved the soul and the spirit, and Descartes left that world to the theologians.
The world of matter was made up of an infinite number of particles.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
He saw life as an act of balancing. He tried to reconcile atheists and Jesuit dogmatists.
His life’s attempt to achieve this balance is found in his Pensées.
Pascal’s Wager: He came to the conclusion that it was better to bet on the existence of God than not because believing always has a greater expected value than not believing.
He was also a Jansenist, a Catholic group that believed St. Augustine's theory of human sinfulness and the need for salvation through faith because we are predestined.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
He personally knew Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes as well as William Harvey.
William Harvey (1578-1657): He who, rather than relying on the writings of the Ancient Greeks, used dissections to show the role the heart plays in the circulation of blood through the body.
Hobbes was inspired by prominent scientists to apply experimental methods to politics.
Hobbes wrote in his classic work, Leviathan, that life without government was “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’s view of the depravity of human nature led him to propose the necessity for absolutism.
The Great Leviathan — “Man formed states.” Men were the necessary constructs that worked to restrain the human urges to destroy one another.
His absolutism, which rejected divine right, offended traditional English royalists.
John Locke (1632-1704)
His Two Treatises on Government — written before the Revolution 1688, was after William and Mary came to the throne and served as a defense of the revolution as well as a basis for the English Bill of Rights.
Locke argued that although man is born free in nature, government is necessary as society develops to organize it.
Humans are free and logical beings who do not relinquish their unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property when they enter into a social contract with the state.
He disapproved of religious fervor.
In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke attacked the idea that Christianity could be spread by force.
His influential Essay on Human Understanding contained the idea that children enter the world with no set ideas.
At birth the mind is tabula rasa — a blank slate, the infants do not possess the Christian concept of predestination or original sin.
2.9: The 18th-Century Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
There is no better answer to the question “What is the Enlightenment?” than offered by him.
His answer was clear: “Dare to know.”
He implied that people should discard outdated ideas out of respect for custom or intellectual laziness. We should reason about humanity.
He believed that all previously generations latched the ultimate reward — freedom.
Enlightenment writers questioned slavery because this freedom extended to politics and religion.
The Enlightenment has historically been linked to France, where the term "philosophes" is used to describe the period's thinkers.
Republic of Letters: An international community of writers who communicated in French.
This extended throughout Europe and American colonies, where the ideas of Enlightenment are expressed.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
He was considered as greatest philosophes.
When Voltaire went to England, it altered his brain chemistry.
He was amazed at the level of religious acceptance and the freedom to publish one's opinions.
He was also astounded by the respect the English extended to Newton when the scientist was laid to rest at a state funeral amid great ceremony.
England seemed to offer personal happiness, which France lacked.
He hated the Catholic Church and all religions for their narrowness and bigotry.
He was also a Deist — one who believes that God created the universe and then stepped back from creation to allow it to operate under the laws of science.
Voltaire felt that religion crushed the human spirit and that to be free.
Écrasez l’infame! — Crush the horrible thing!; his famous anti-religous slogan.
Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
He wrote one of the most influential works of the Enlightenment; the Spirit of the Laws (1748).
He became president of the Parliament of Bordeaux — a body of nobles that functioned as the province’s law court.
He was a conservative who opposed a republic and wanted France to restore aristocratic rule to limit royal absolutism.
In Persian Letters (1721), he critiques his native France through a series of letters between two Persians traveling in Europe.
To avoid royal and church censorship, he wrote a satirical work attacking religious zealotry.
He also saw slavery as being against the natural law.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
The Encyclopédie — one of the greatest collaborative achievements of the Enlightenment and was executed the Republic of Letters.
It exemplifies the 18th-century belief that all knowledge could be organized and presented scientifically.
The first of 28 volumes appeared in 1751.
Copies of it were sent and reached Russia, Scandinavia and North America
The Catholic Church was furious at the censors' thinly veiled attacks on its religious practices.
Diderot also admired manual laborers and wrote about tools that made people more productive.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
He lived a deeply troubled and solitary existence.
He antagonized many of the other leading philosophes.
He was perhaps the most radical of the philosophes.
He believed in the creation of a direct democracy.
Rousseau helped set the stage for the Romantic Movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries.
His novel Emile (1762) deals with a young man who receives an education that places higher regard on developing his emotions over his reason.
In his The Social Contract (1762), “All men are born free, but everywhere they are in chains.”
He had little faith in the individual’s potential to use reason as a means of leading a more satisfactory life.
During the Scientific Revolution, thinkers used reason to discover universal laws behind the natural world.
During the Enlightenment, thinkers used reason to discover universal laws behind human behavior.
2.10: The Spread of Enlightenment Thought
Germany
The greatest figure of the German Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant.
In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued that all knowledge was not empirical, since the mind shaped the world through unique experiences.
Kant emphasized that there are levels of knowledge above and beyond that which is known through reason.
Italy
Cesare Beccaria in his work On Crimes and Punishment (1764), called for a complete overhaul in the area of jurisprudence.
It was obvious that criminals deserved some basic rights.
He opposed both the use of the death penalty and the use of torture to coerce confessions of guilt.
The overarching Enlightenment theme of humanitarianism can be seen in Beccaria's creative work.
Scotland
This is the place that hitherto had not been at the center of European intellectual life.
David Hume (1711–1776)
He went beyond the thinking of French deists and directly entered the atheistic world.
In his Inquiry into Human Nature, Hume questioned revealed religion, claiming that no empirical evidence supports the existence of miracles, which are central to Christianity.
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
He reflected the growing interest in history that was first seen during the Enlightenment with his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
His work criticized Christianity in that he viewed its rise within the Roman Empire as a social phenomenon rather than a divine interference.
He also claimed that Christianity lessened the Empire's vitality and caused it to fall.
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
A professor at the University of Glasgow.
In 1776, he published an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in which he argued against mercantilism.
He became associated with the concept of laissez-faire (leave alone) because he argued that individuals should be free to pursue economic gain without being hampered by the state.
2.11: Women and the Enlightenment
Women played an important role in the Enlightenment.
The majority of Parisian salons were organized by women.
These wealthy and aristocratic people helped philosophers avoid legal trouble with their sociopolitical connections.
Given their enormous assistance, the male thinkers were generally not strong supporters of women's rights and abilities.
The Encyclopédie barely bothered to address the condition of women, though the work would never be famous without the help of Marquise de Pompadour — Louis XV’s mistress.
In Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, he included a discussion of the restrictive nature of the Eastern harem, which, by implication, was a criticism of the treatment of women in Western Europe.
Rousseau believed women should not be educated equally and should have separate spheres of influence.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) wrote in her Vindication of the Rights of Women that women should enjoy the right to vote as well as to hold political office.
2.12: European Powers in the Age of Enlightenment
The 18th century witnessed a number of significant developments for the European nation-states.
Prussia and Russia — emerged over the course of the century.
Austria, France, and Great Britain — adjusted to changing political, economic, and social circumstances.
Enlightened Absolutists
Catherine the Great of Russia,
Joseph II of Austria
Frederick II of Prussia
Most philosophers were monarchists, so they could experiment without fear of losing power.
Prussia and Russia
In the 17th century, Prussia was a poor German state that was left devastated after the Thirty Years’ War.
In Peace of Westphalia, Prussia did receive some minor territorial gains
By the 16th century, serfdom had been established due to the relatively poor agricultural land and labor shortages.
Junkers — Prussian nobility, who looked to the ruler to ensure control over their serfs.
Frederick William, the Great Elector (r. 1640-1688)
Three separate areas of land without natural borders made up his state.
Since he lacked sufficient resources on his own to build an army, he turned to the Junkers for assistance.
That was the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial relationship between the Prussian monarchy and the Junkers.
He left his son, Frederick III, a well-organized army, an expanded territorial base, and arguably the most efficient civil service in all of Europe.
He made Prussia into a Kingdom in 1701, gaining the title of King Frederick I.
Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786)
He was often cited as an enlightened absolutist.
At his palace of Sans Souci, he established a glittering intellectual center, where Voltaire would live for a time and where the king himself participated by writing philosophical tracts.
Frederick freed the serfs on the royal estates.
He also reduced the use of corporal punishment against serfs and abolished the death penalty.
Frederick used rational thought to promote royal centralization and absolutism, not individual rights or participatory political institutions.
Empress Maria Theresa pushed a series of reforms that removed some of the hardships that had been placed on the serf population.
Joseph II, Theresa's son, wanted religious tolerance to limit the Catholic Church's power in his domains.
He saw the Church as opposed to his plan for more centralized authority.
In 1781, he issued the first of a series of Edicts of Toleration granting Jews, Lutherans, and Calvinists freedom of worship.
After Joseph's death, Leopold II had to abandon some of Joseph's progressive policies to quell aristocratic and peasant uprisings.
The roots of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) began during the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI (r. 1711–1740).
Charles pushed the other European states to accept Pragmatic Sanction — allowing for the assorted Habsburg lands under his control to remain intact under one ruler.
Also granting the right of a female to succeed to the throne of Austria if there was no direct male heir.
When Charles died without leaving a son, his daughter Maria Theresa came to the throne.
Charles's death became an opportunity for Prussia and France to gain territory at the expense of the Austrians.
Frederick launched an attack to seize Silesia, the richest part of the Austrian empire, at the northeastern border of Bohemia.
The conflict became a general European war.
Austria gained support from Russia, Sweden, Denmark, and eventually Great Britain.
Opposing them was an alliance made up of Prussia, France, and Spain.
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748): The Austrian throne was ultimately saved for the Habsburgs
Diplomatic Revolution: The reversal of longstanding alliances in Europe between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War.
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)
It all began in 1756, when Frederick launched an attack to quickly defeat his enemies.
Only Peter III, in 1762 staved off the complete destruction of the Prussian state.
French and Indian War (1754–1763): It was the North American conflict in Seven Years’ war.
The Seven Years’ spanned five continents, resulted in the confiscation of French colonies in Canada and India — called by the Winston Churchill: the first world war.
Russia
Until the 18th century, Russia remained largely closed off to Western Europe as a result of the Mongol invasion of the 13th century.
During the reign of Ivan the Terrible (r. 1533–1584), there was an expansion of the territory under the control of Muscovy.
He sought violence to gain control over a recalcitrant nobility.
After his death, Russia enter to the period of “Time of Troubles” — which lasted until the selection of tsar from the Romanov Family (1603).
Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725)
He was determined to Westernize his state.
He raised royal revenue by head-taxing Russian serfs and monopolizing essential goods.
In keeping with his desire to keep a “window to the West,” Peter established the eponymous city of St. Petersburg in 1703.
He defeated the Swedes in the Great Northern War (1700–1721).
Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796)
She began revising and codifying Russian law, but only dabbled in reform.
Later in her reign, she realized enlightened thought could threaten her monarchy and abandoned the idea.
Spain
Charles III (r.1759-1788) was the well-regarded King of Naples.
Benito Feijóo: Spain’s foremost Enlightenment thinker,
In 1759, Charles III ascended to the Spanish throne following the death of his brother.
He was determined to continue his Enlightenment-inspired reforms.
He continued his goal of limiting the Church’s power in his sovereign state.
He was able to decrease the number of clergies.
Poland
Prince Mieszko's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 966 is considered to be the official beginning of Polish history.
Being vulnerable to attacks, they had to deal with the attacks from:
Mongols from the east; and
Teutonic Knights from the west.
In order to defeat these groups, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was established.
It occurred when the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jagiello, married the Polish Queen Jadwiga.
The Polish-Lithuanian state's fatal flaw was failing to establish a strong, centralized government in the face of a recalcitrant nobility afraid of losing power.
The Polish-Lithuanian state remained a significant player in Europe until the end of the century.
King Jan Sobieski played a critical role in driving the Turks from the gates of Vienna in 1683.
When Stanislaw August Poniatowski became king in 1764, he displayed an independent streak.
This action just led to the displeasure of the country’s neighbors.
In 1772, Russia, Prussia, and Austria forced Poland to accept a partition that cost Poland 30% of its territory.
In 1791, the Polish-Lithuanian parliament produced Europe’s first written constitution.
This constitution was never fully implemented, it angered many nobles.
The anti-Poniatowski nobles applied to the Russians for assistance.
In 1793, the Second Partition was carried out as a result of Russia and Prussia's insistence on the constitution's removal.
This led to the loss of vast lands in the eastern part of the nation and reduced Poland to a rump state
In 1794, a Polish revolt broke out under the military leadership of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who had fought with distinction in the American Revolution.
In 1795, the third and final partition took place, wiping Poland off the map.
An independent Polish state would not be revived until the aftermath of World War I.
Great Britain
After the turmoil of the 17th century, Great Britain became the most stable nation in Europe in the 18th century.
George I (r. 1714–1721): He is the ruler of the German state of Hanover, and his sole qualification was that he was the late Queen Anne's Protestant cousin.
George II (r. 1727–1760): He could reign as an unquestioned absolutist, rather than having to deal with the independent-minded British Parliament.
Robert Walpole: Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1721 to 1741.
He was given complete freedom to alter the political structure to his benefit.
To keep hold of the House of Commons, he employed a sophisticated system of political patronage.
He resigned in 1741 over British foreign policy.
Two Parliamentary blocks:
Tories: They supported the monarch's prerogative rights and the Church of England.
Whigs: They were more closely associated with the spirit of the 1688 Revolution and the idea of religious tolerance.
George III (r. 1760–1820): He claimed that he wanted the throne to rise above party strife.
The British government won the Seven Years' War but had a huge deficit.
In 1763, John Wilkes was arrested for publishing a satirical attack on George III in his paper The North Briton.
In 1774, American anger at what was viewed as high-handed British policies led to the establishment of the First Continental Congress
In 1783, the Americans won their independence with the help of France and Spain.
In 1792, political reform in the UK was resisted after the French Revolution's violence and radicalism.
Any expansion of suffrage would have to wait until the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
France
Jansenists: A Catholic sect that held beliefs on predestination that were similar to the Calvinist point of view.
Louis XV (r. 1714–1774): He wished to support the papal decree and ban the group, but found himself blocked by the various provincial parlements.
Parlements: Law courts primarily made up of nobles who had the prerogative right of registering royal edicts before they could be enforced.
Louis XV abolished the parlements but Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) felt forced to bring them back.
2.13: The French Revolution
Key Timeline
Before 1789: Pre-revolutionary period (Ancien Régime)
1789–1792: Liberal phase (Constitutional Monarchy)
1792–1793: Moderate Republic (Girondins)
1793–1794: Radical Republic (Jacobins)
1795–1799: Directory (Moderate Republic)
1799–1804: Consulate
1804–1815: Napoleonic Empire
The Ancient Régime
The major problem facing the monarchy was financial.
France was not bankrupt in 1789.
Throughout the 18th century, the country had been at war, mostly with Great Britain, a conflict that dated back to the Glorious Revolution (1688).
France's debts grew so large that interest and debt payments consumed slightly more than half the annual budget.
In the 17th century, the French monarch had basically granted the nobility freedom from most taxation.
Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792): His task is to try to convince the nobility to give up their cherished tax-free status.
The Calling of the Estates General and the Demand for National Assembly
Assembly of Notables: Leading aristocrats and churchmen were called by Louis XVI to see if they would willingly pay a new land tax that would apply to all.
Estates General: An institution from medieval times that consisted of a three-house body made up of:
The First Estate — clergy.
The Second Estate — nobility, and
The Third Estate — commons.
Commons: It refers to everyone from the bourgeoisie to peasants who were neither clergy nor nobility.
Writers began to declare that the Third Estate was the real embodiment of the political will of the nation.
This sense of wanting change can be seen in the thousands of Cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances) that were presented to the King.
While many demanded lessening royal absolutism, all were loyal to the idea of monarchy.
May 5, 1789 — marked the first day of the meeting of the Estates General.
On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate declared that it would not meet as a medieval estate based on social status.
They demanded a national assembly with Three Estates representatives representing the political will of the entire French nation.
Tennis Court Oath: Members of the Third Estate gathered at a tennis court on the grounds of Versailles and promised to continue to meet “until the constitution of the kingdom is established and consolidated upon solid foundations.”
On June 27, 1789, Louis XVI formally agreed to the consolidation of all three estates into a new national assembly.
The Storming of the Bastille and the Great Fear
Bastille: A fortress prison in Paris, famous as a symbol of royal despotism because it had held critics of the monarchy.
Commune of Paris: The new municipal government that would come to play a pivotal role in the later stages of the Revolution.
Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834): Appointed by Louis XVI to be the leader of National assembly.
Great Fear: An agricultural panic over rumors that the nobility was using the increasingly anarchical situation at Versailles and Paris to organize thugs to steal from the peasants.
Peasants began to attack some of the great noble estates.
On August 4, 1789, aristocrats in the National Assembly decided that the only way to halt the violence in the countryside was by renouncing their feudal rights.
As a result, France's citizens were all subject to the same laws and social obligations.
The Constitutional Monarchy
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen — written by Lafayette, one of the most influential documents in European history.
In Enlightenment language, the work claimed political sovereignty for the nation, not a monarch.
Citizens were also declared equal before the law and in their rights and responsibilities as members of society.
The Rights of Women (1791) — written by Olympe de Gouges.
She believed women should have the right to education, property, and divorce.
Civil Constitution of the Church: In 1790, the king was forced to accept this passage.
This legislation made the Church a department of state.
Bishops were to be chosen by assemblies of parish priests.
Clergy was now civil servants with salaries to be paid by the state.
They pledged loyalty to France and the Church's Civil Constitution.
In response, Pope Pius VI denounced the Civil Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
This set in motion a major 19th-century conflict, the dispute between church and state.
In 1791, a constitution for France was promulgated, creating a constitutional monarchy.
France's men were divided into two groups: active and passive citizens.
Only men who paid three days' worth of laborers’ wages in taxes were eligible to vote for electors.
To vote for members of the assembly, electors had to meet higher property requirements.
The old French province system was abandoned in favor of 83 departments.
Full political rights were granted to Jews and Protestants.
Slavery was abolished in France.
The End of Monarchy
Count of Artois: The youngest brother of Louis XVI, and it was he who made the fatal decision to encourage his brother to flee France.
On June 20, 1791, the royal family reached the French town of Varennes, where the king was recognized and escorted back to Paris.
Jacobins: A political club, and so was named because they met in the Jacobin monastery in Paris.
Girondins: The Gironde political club in southwestern France supported a revolutionary war to liberate absolutist states.
The war in April 1792 brought about an increasingly radical situation in Paris.
The sans-culottes tried to deal with the scarce supply of bread and feelings of chagrin at being labeled passive citizens without the right to vote.
They were also fearful of the Duke of Brunswick — which promised that he would destroy Paris if the royal family was harmed.
On August 10, 1792, a large mob of sans-culottes stormed the Tuileries palace, where the king and the queen were living, and slaughtered 600 of the king’s Swiss guards.
On September 21, 1792, France became an official Republic and the royal family was placed under arrest.
European Reactions to the French Revolution
In Great Britain, the immediate reaction to the fall of the Bastille and the abolition of French feudalism was quite friendly.
Britain was eventually brought into the Europe-wide war sparked by the Revolution.
By the fall of 1792, French armies were pushing the enemy back and began to occupy territories.
They captured the Austrian Netherlands.
They also captured much of the Rhineland and Frankfurt.
Wherever French armies went, they brought with them the ideas of the Revolution.
Edmund Burke: A leading British politician attached to the Whig faction.
In his Reflections of the French Revolution (1790), he expressed his opposition to the revolution.
He wasn't opposed to the reform; in fact, he has a personal interest in changing some aspects of English political life.
He was concerned that the removal of the conventional defense system would change the roles of the monarchy and the church.
He then predicted that the Revolution would take more into a more violent direction.
2.14: The Reign of Terror
In the Convention, the Girondins and Jacobins continued to disagree over the direction of the Revolution.
The Jacobins sat on the left side of the hall, this seating arrangement earned them the label, “the Mountains.”
The Girondins sat on the right side of the hall.
In the middle section of the hall sat those who were not directly tied to either faction; “the Plain.”
The Plain held the key to the Revolution because whichever side they aligned with would ultimately triumph.
The Girondins wished to make a clean break from the absolutist government of the pr
The Girondins favored laissez-faire, the idea that the government should not play an active role in regulating the economy.
The Jacobins believed that the king was a traitor and should therefore be executed.
They also felt that the only way to maintain the spirit of the revolution was through a powerful, centralized government in Paris.
They favored the sans-culottes, in terms of their economic stand.
In the spring of 1793, marked the beginning of “Reign of Terror.”
It was inspired by the Vendee, a counter-revolutionary revolt that began in March in a western region of France.
French armies met a major defeat that same month in the Austrian Netherlands.
In response to these provocations, the Convention created two committees:
The Committee of General Security
The Committee of Public Safety
The leaders of the security committee included Danton, Carnot, and Robespierre, a lawyer — they were all associated with the Jacobins faction.
In August 1793, Lazare Carnot, the head of the military, issued his famous proclamation calling for a levée en masse, drafting everyone for military service.
Once in power, the Jacobins worked to create what they considered to be the Republic of Virtue.
They believed they had to eradicate all signs of the previous monarchical order.
They created a new calendar based on 10-day weeks as a result.
The seasons were reflected in the renamed months, and 1792—the first year of the Republic—was designated as year one.
Cult of the Supreme Being: Established by Robespierre to move people away from what he thought was the corrupting influence of the Church.
It turned the cathedral of Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason.
From the summer of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety first began by banning political clubs and popular societies of women.
They executed leading Girondins politicians who were accused of being traitors, and the guillotine became a symbol of the age.
By March 1794, under the leadership of Robespierre, the Terror had an extremely radical faction known as the Hébertists.
They were violently anti-Christian and wanted to see the government implement further economic controls.
Danton and his followers were brought to the guillotine for arguing that it was time to bring the Terror to a close.
On 8 Thermidor (July 26, 1794), Robespierre spoke before the Convention about the need for one more major purge.
This led him and his supporters to be arrested by the Thermidorians, after a quick trial, 100 leading Jacobins were escorted to the guillotine.
2.15: The Directory (1795–1799)
Following the execution of the leading members of the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety, the Thermidorians abolished the Paris Commune.
This led to the establishment of the government known as the Directory.
Led by an executive council of five men who possessed the title of director.
The new constitution provided for a two-house legislator:
Council of the Ancients
Council of Five Hundred
The Directory had to be concerned with the possibility of a royalist reaction.
On 13 Vendémiaire (October 5, 1795), a royalist rebellion did break out in parts of Paris.
Napoleon Bonaparte was told to put down the rebellion, and with a “whiff of grapeshot,” his cannon dispersed the rebels.
The Directory had been saved, but soon it was to be destroyed by its savior.
2.16: Napoleon
Napoleon was born in 1769 to a family of minor nobles on the island of Corsica, which had been annexed by France the year prior to his birth.
He attended a French military academy, and in 1785 he was commissioned as an artillery officer.
The Revolution offered tremendous opportunities to young men of ability, and Napoleon became a strong supporter of the Revolution.
In 1793, after playing a major role in the campaign to retake the French port of Toulon from the British, he was made a general.
In a series of stunningly quick victories, Napoleon destroyed the combined Austrian and Sardinian armies.
He also decided to invade Egypt in order to cut Britain’s ties with its colony of India.
He was unable to do much with his victories on land because a British fleet under the command of Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated a French fleet at the Battle of Abukir on August 1, 1798.
Napoleon retreated from his army and hurried back to France, where he had learned that the Directory was becoming more unstable.
On 19 Brumaire (November 10, 1799), Napoleon joined the Abbé Siéyès staged a coup d’état, and overturned the Directory.
Siéyès then established a new constitution with a powerful executive made up of three consuls: Roger-Ducos, Siéyès, and Napoleon.
One month after the coup, Napoleon set up a new constitution with himself as First Consul.
He staged a plebiscite, a vote by the people, for his new constitution to show popular support, and they passed it overwhelmingly.
Since Napoleon required that public servants be loyal to him only, he was able to use the talents of those Jacobins and monarchists who were willing to accept his dominance over the French state.
Napoleon treated those who were not willing with brutal cruelty.
He established a secret police force to root out his opponents.
He then purged the Jacobins.
He also kidnapped and executed the Duke of Enghien after falsely accusing the Duke of plotting against him.
In 1801, Napoleon created a concordat with Pope Pius VII.
It declared that “Catholicism was the religion of the great majority of the French.”
However, it didn’t reestablish the Catholic Church as the official state religion.
The papacy would choose bishops, but only on the First Consul's advice.
All clergy was required to take an oath supporting the state, and the state would pay their salaries.
The Church was able to persuade Napoleon to abolish the Jacobin calendar.
In 1802, following a plebiscite that made him Consul for Life, Napoleon set about to reform the French legal system.
The Civil Code of 1804 (Napoleonic Code) provided for a single, unitary legal system for all of France.
The code established the equality of all people before the law and protected property holders' rights.
The code reaffirmed France's paternalistic nature.
Women and children were legally obligated to rely on their husbands and fathers.
In 1804, Napoleon decided to make himself emperor.
He invited the Pope to attend the ceremony, which was held at Notre Dame.
Napoleon wanted to make it clear that he was Emperor of France not by the will of God or by chance of birth, but rather by the weight of his own achievements.
2.17: France at War with Europe
Constant warfare was a hallmark of the reign of Napoleon.
In 1792, with the levée en masse, French armies became larger than their opponent’s forces.
Napoleon saw the Treaty of Amiens (1802) as a temporary measure to limit British influence.
After most of the French troops died from disease, Napoleon turned his interest away from the colonies.
He even sold the Louisiana Territory to the USA for the paltry sum of around $15 million.
On October 21, 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Nelson died in the struggle that ultimately destroyed the French fleet and with it any hope of the French landing in England.
Third Coalition: Formed in which Austria and Russia joined Great Britain.
Napoleon set out to first destroy the Austrians, a goal which he achieved at the Battle of Ulm in October 1805.
He then won his greatest victory over a Russian force at Austerlitz.
Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire and created the Confederacy of the Rhine, a loose grouping of 16 German states under French rule.
Napoleon’s victories in Germany resulted in the redrawing of the map.
When the Prussians saw the extent of French control over German territories, they rushed to join the Third Coalition.
Napoleon quickly gathered his forces, and at the Battle of Jena he obliterated the Prussian army and occupied their capital city of Berlin.
The Russian Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) decided that it was necessary to make peace with France, after the complete collapse of the Prussian army.
He met with Napoleon on a raft on the Nieman River, and on July 7, 1807, the two monarchs signed the Treaty of Tilsit.
Because of this, Prussia was saved from extinction and was forced to be an ally of France.
Seeing that he could not defeat the British navy, Napoleon decided to wage economic war.
He established the Continental System, an attempt to ban British goods from arriving on the continent.
This system weakened the economies of the state that Napoleon had conquered.
2.18: The Defeat of Napoleon
The War in Spain
In 1807, a French army passed through Spain on its way to conquer Portugal, an ally of Great Britain.
In 1808, a revolt broke out against Spanish King Charles IV bringing his son Ferdinand VII (r. 1808–1833) to the throne.
Napoleon decided to take this opportunity to occupy Spain and place his brother Joseph on its throne.
The Spanish nation rose up in a nationalistic fervor to expel the French, who in turn used tremendous brutality against the Spanish people.
Napoleon was forced to leave his 350,000 troops in Spain.
Growing Nationalism in Europe
While Napoleon was still suffering from his "Spanish ulcer," stirrings of nationalism began to churn in other parts of Europe.
Baron von Stein (1757–1831) and Count von Hardenberg (1750–1822): They were hardly democratic reformers; wanted to see the continuation of monarchical power and aristocratic privilege.
They did end Junker monopoly over the ownership of land and abolished serfdom.
Stein appointed some bourgeois officers while dismissing some of the more inept Junker officers.
He founded a professional war ministry. He then eased military discipline to inspire peasant soldiers to fight for the state.
The 1812 Invasion of Russia
Napoleon's advisers warned him that the wars would hurt the French economy. He still sought new conquests.
Russia seemed a suitable target because it was still standing as a strong continental rival.
In June 1812, Napoleon took his “Grand Army” of 600,000 men into Russia, where he fully expected to defeat the Russians in open battle.
The Russians merely retreated within their vast landscape.
When Napoleon invaded Moscow in September, the tsar's retreating army had set fires to the city, leaving no one to fight and no supplies.
He then decided to withdraw his army.
Only 40,000 of the original Grand Army finally returned to France.
In 1813, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain formed a coalition to fight together until all of Europe was freed from French forces.
By March 1814, they were in Paris and by the following month, Napoleon abdicated.
2.19: The Congress of Vienna, the Bourbon Restoration, and the Hundred Days
In victory, the allies demanded the restoration of the Bourbon monarchs, Louis XVIII sat on the throne.
Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean, where he maintained the title of Emperor and a small army while his allies paid off his debts.
In September 1814, the allies met at the Congress of Vienna to create a lasting peace.
The four great powers, Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, dominated the proceedings.
Prince Metternich (1773–1859) an Australian Chancellor, He wanted to ensure that ideas derived from the French Revolution, such as nationalism and liberalism, had no place in a redrawn Europe.
By giving the territory to the Tsar of Russia as the Duchy of Poland, they ensured that Polish demands for a free and independent Poland went unmet.
The major powers also wanted to make sure that no country would ever again rule Europe.
The major powers also built a number of states that would prevent further French expansion.
The Dutch region and the Austrian Netherlands to the south formed the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
They granted Prussia significant lands along the Rhine to thwart French expansion to the east in the future.
They also gave Piedmont the territory of Genoa.
On March 15, 1815, Napoleon returned to France, having escaped from Elba.
As the Bourbons returned and sparked a violent white terror against Jacobins and Bonaparte supporters, he had many supporters in the army and country.
White Terror: White, signifying the royalist flag and those loyal to the monarchy.
At the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815), Wellington aided by Marshal Blucher defeated Napoleon.
Hundred Days: The name given to Napoleon’s remarkable return, he was exiled once again.
He was exiled to the distant island of St. Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic, and died in 1821.
Period 3: Age of Revolutions to World War I: (1815–1914)
3.1: Restoration and Revolution
No institution had suffered as much from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as the Church.
In 1799, Novalis wrote, “Catholicism is almost played out. The old papacy is laid in the tomb, and Rome for the second time has become a ruin.”
The Restoration period saw a remarkable recovery for European churches, both Catholic and Protestant.
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.
In Spain, the Inquisition was once again allowed to operate following its disappearance during the Napoleonic domination of Spain.
3.2: An Age of Competing Ideologies
Restoration period: A highly ideological period in which ideas inspired either from support or commendation of the French Revolution played a role in whether one was committed to the restored order that emerged after 1815.
This era is also known as the “age of -isms.”
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.
His emphasis on the role of tradition as the basic underpinning for the rights of those in positions of authority.
Reactionary conservatism appeared in the writings of such men as Joseph de Maistre.
He’s an émigré during the French Revolution.
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: It is based on the idea that all people’s 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.
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.
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.
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 tied to liberalism because many nationalists wanted political equality and human freedom to serve as the bedrock for the new state.
Liberalism
The foundation of liberalism can be found in the writings of the philosophers of the Enlightenment:
With their emphasis on the individual’s natural rights;
Support for limits on political authorities through the writing of constitutions; and
The formation of parliamentary bodies.
Liberalism is connected to the events of the early stages of the French Revolution:
With the establishment of the constitutional monarchy; and
Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man serves 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.
Classical School
Formed by the early liberal economists.
Adam Smith published his most important work — An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (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.
Smith realized that the true wealth of one’s nation is the labor of the citizens.
Smith presented two revolutionary ideas:
Specialists have natural skills and can produce their specialties better and faster than others. Trade could enrich everyone.
Government price-fixing was unnecessary and counterproductive. They should follow a laissez-faire policy and let individual businesses set their own prices and production levels.
This is the basis of free-market capitalism.
Economics is sometimes referred to as “the dismal science.”
Thomas Maltus 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.
If workers were better compensated, they would produce more children — leading to only more misery as increasing numbers of workers competed for fewer jobs and less food.
David Ricardo asserted that the only way for factory owners to gain a competitive advantage was to offer lower wages, resulting in a steady downward spiral in their earnings — the Iron Law of Wages.
This pleased factory owners because their thriftiness could be presented as if it were actually essential for the public good.
Some writers also began to question certain classical, liberal orthodoxies on the workings of the economy and the role of the state.
John Stuart Mill: He began as a disciple of Jeremy Bentham — who had provided a justification for an expanded role of government by suggesting that governments should seek to provide “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”
Bentham’s utilitarian views 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.
Mill’s most famous work, On Liberty, was a clarion call for personal freedom.
Mill was greatly influenced by the feminist thought of his wife, Harriet Taylor.
Inspired by her, he wrote The Subjection of Women, arguing in favor of granting full equality to women.
Socialism
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.
Utopian Socialists: A phrase coined by Karl Marx — he viewed and felt they offered non-scientific, unrealistic solutions to the problems of modern society.
They believed that expansive possibilities were available to mankind and that poor environments corrupted human nature.
They also believed that capitalism overemphasized production, underemphasized distribution, and possessed other serious flaws.
Early Socialists
Henri de Saint-Simon
He 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 a lot of those on the bottom of the social ladder.
Charles Fourier
He created a blueprint for a cooperative community.
It consisted of a self-contained group of precisely 1,620 people living oa 5,000 acres of land.
He hoped to make the workday more satisfying by rotating tasks so that everyone would do the boring tasks but not exclusively.
He thought that because children liked to play with dirt, they should take care of the community’s garbage.
Robert Owen
He blamed the environment for man’s corruption.
In response built New Lanark, a mill town in Scotland, where workers were housed decently and children received an education.
3.3: Political Restoration and Reform
France
Restoration: Refers to the events in France when the Bourbons were restored to the throne following the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
Charter of 1814: A hastily written constitution—that contained many of the freedoms from the revolutionary period.
It contained no notion of popular sovereignty.
This 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.
In 1820, the son of the younger brother of Louis, Duke de Berry, was assassinated.
Ultra Loyalists: People who wanted to see the revival of absolute monarchy.
They used the assassination to pressure the king to clamp down on the press and to give more rights to the aristocracy.
In 1824, political repression increased after the death of Louis XVIII.
Louis’s younger brother, Charles X, came to the throne.
Charles felt more bitter about the Revolution than his brother Louis had.
He introduced a Law of Sacrilege, which ruled the death as the penalty for any attack on the Church.
In 1829, Charles appointed the Prince of Polignac as his chief minister, who was disliked for being an ultra-royalist.
Polignac issued July Ordinances, which dissolved the newly elected assembly, took away the right to vote from the upper bourgeoisie, and imposed rigid censorship.
July Revolution (1830): It sparked revolutions throughout Europe, and ended with the crowning of Louis Phillipe and the creation of the bourgeois, or July monarchy.
Revolutionary Movements
Spain
King Ferdinand VII had been restored to the throne following the collapse of French control in 1814.
He is restored to honor the liberal constitution of 1812 drawn up by the Cortés — the Spanish Parliament.
Once restored to his throne, Ferdinand dissolved the Cortés 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.
Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia wanted to intervene to stem the tide of the revolt.
The British refused to directly intervene.
Two years later, a French army acted unilaterally and restored Ferdinand to absolute power.
Italy
A more serious revolt broke out in Naples, a revolt that Metternich labeled as the “greatest crisis” of his career.
Neapolitan army officers, perhaps inspired by French ideas, joined with members of the bourgeoisie and began, with the assistance of secret nationalistic societies.
The revolt led to nationalistic stirrings throughout Italy and to another revolt in the Kingdom of Sardinia, which ultimately came to nothing
Troppau Protocol: Stated that the great European powers had the right to intervene in revolutionary situations.
The rebellion in Naples was put down with the help of Austrian troops.
Greece
Western European liberals looked to the Greek revolt of 1821 to free the “birthplace of democracy” from “Eastern despotism.”
Lord Byron: He sent his own money to refit the Greek fleet and died amidst the struggle in Greece.
By 1827, Britain, France, and Russia organized a merged naval force to engage on the side of the Greek revolutionaries, and the Russians attacked the Ottomans on land the following year.
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; the Sick Man of Europe.
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 the size of South Carolina, located north of Greece on the Austro-Hungarian Empire's southern border.
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
Alexander I had ruled Russia and at various times had toyed with the idea of political reform.
Alexander’s death in 1825 produced confusion as to the succession;
Constantine, the older of his two surviving brothers, turned down the throne.
Nicholas I decided to sat on the throne.
“Decembrist” revolt: It broke out because they wanted to support Constantine.
This was eventually put down with great brutality.
Nicholas I ruled with an iron fist, making certain to stamp out any additional reform movements within his vast empire.
Great Britain
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.
Peterloo Massacre: Soldiers on hand shot 11 members of the crowd during the meeting.
Six Acts: Passed by the Parliament which banned demonstrations and imposed censorship.
Combination Acts: They 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.
It expanded the electorate to include those who had become wealthy.
However, only one in five males in Great Britain could vote.
It reduced the number of so-called rotten boroughs, which were sparsely populated electoral districts.
Poor Law of 1834: It forced the destitute to enter into workhouses where conditions were purposefully miserable to discourage people from seeking assistance.
In 1833, slavery was banned in the British Empire.
Factory Act of 1833: It reduced the number of hours that children could work in factories and established government inspectors to ensure adequate working conditions.
The 1846 elimination of the Corn Laws — which had imposed high tariffs on imported grain to support domestic growers.
3.4: The Revolutions of 1848
On January 12, 1848, there was a rebellion in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies against King Ferdinand II.
The first of approximately 50 revolts convulsed Europe in the first four months of that year.
Emperor Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916)
He 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.
Hungry Forties: The terrible decade for agriculture during the 1840s.
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
In 1848, a rebellion in France created the spark for revolution throughout Europe.
The wealthy bourgeoisie dominated the July Monarchy. The workers felt they only received little for their efforts.
François Guizot
Louis Phillipe’s chief minister.
He 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.”
Louis Blanc
A socialist journalist that led the radicals.
He spoke of the need for fundamental social and economic change.
His supporters successfully pressured the provisional government to set up national workshops to provide jobs for the unemployed.
Outside of Paris, the nation was more conservative, as seen by the national assembly election held on April 23 — elected an assembly made up primarily of moderate republicans.
The election 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.
June Days: The termination of the workshops wherein a violent class struggle in the streets of Paris in which 10,000 people died.
It strengthened the hands of the moderate republicans.
In November, 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.
Louis Napoleon
The first elected president from the election in December, a nephew of the Emperor.
He was able to capitalize on the appeal of his name and made vague promises to aid the embittered workers.
He created a rather conservative government.
In 1851, he assumed dictatorial powers.
In 1852, he made himself Emperor Napoleon III.
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 — two shots rang out and struck two people.
Frederick became horrified and ordered his army to leave the city — leaving him no defense.
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.
It created a two-house legislature with adult-male universal suffrage for the lower house.
This provision was watered down by giving weighted votes to those who paid more taxes.
In Hungary, Lajos Kossuth 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.
In Vienna, it 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.
By June, the revolt in Prague was put down by military force.
In November, the emperor was firmly in control in Vienna.
A 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, united under German rule.
Kleindeutsch supporters felt that the more realistic solution would be to include only Prussia and the smaller German states.
The delegates settled on the Kleindeutsch, and they offered the German Imperial throne to William IV, the King of Prussia.
He did not want a “crown picked up from the gutter” and declined the offer.
This became a lost opportunity to build a German nation under liberal parliament rather than a militaristic Prussian state.
Frankfurt Parliament
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.
It was hampered by the political inexperience of its participants and by conflicting aims; while all wanted to see a unified German nation.
The Italian States
The revolt that first broke out in Sicily led Ferdinand II to grant a liberal constitution.
Revolts broke out next in Tuscany and Sardinia.
The Papal States even granted a liberal constitution when they saw the revolts.
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, took up the banner of Italian nationalists and bombarded Lombardy, only to be defeated by the Austrians.
For Italy, the lesson for the future was that unification would not take place under the auspices of the papacy.
The possibility of the Kingdom of Sardinia serving as the foundation for a unified state improved
Only Sardinia remained constitutional monarchical after 1848.
A final important lesson 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.
In Great Britain (1848), marked the peak year for Chartism.
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:
Universal adult-male suffrage;
The secret ballot;
Abolition of property requirements for Members of Parliament;
Payment to Members of Parliament;
Equal electoral districts; and
Annual parliament6s with yearly elections.
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.
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, but the House refused to even debate the clauses contained in the petition.
Reform did eventually come about in incremental stages; by the early 20th century, five of the six acts of the Charter were established parts of the British Constitution.
3.5: The Industrial Revolution
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.
Great Britain’s Industrial Lead
Great Britain was the first European nation to begin the process of industrialization.
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain achieved political stability that encouraged economic investment.
Great Britain permitted a much greater degree of religious toleration.
Britain’s increased population size produced not only a large body of potential low-wage workers for the factories but also a steady supply of consumers.
The Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century, initiated by men such as Jethro Tull — introduced scientific farming to Great Britain.
Crop rotation increased crop yield and boosted turnips and beets, which could feed more animals in the winter.
As a result of the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of cottage industries, England was already involved in manufacturing industries.
Enclosure Acts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries:
It forced small-scale farmers into urban areas, making larger farms more efficient and providing low-paid factory labor.
The increased prosperity of English farms led to an increase in capital that could be used to invest in new industries.
Great Britain also had a central bank that encouraged the flow of money in the economy
The 18th century witnessed a significant increase in Great Britain’s overseas trade.
It provided the nation with the world’s largest merchant marine.
The 18th century also witnessed the height of the Atlantic slave trade.
Transportation within Great Britain was enhanced by the fact that the entire nation lies within close proximity to the sea.
A network of navigable rivers and the creation of canals made water transport efficient.
Turnpike trusts built new roads in Great Britain on a scale not seen since the end of Roman rule.
Great Britain’s two critical natural resources of the Early Industrial Revolution: coal and iron.
The first 18th-century technological advances occurred in cotton manufacturing.
In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which increased the speed at which weavers could make cloth.
This invention created a problem: cloth could be made so rapidly that it outstripped the supply of thread.
By 1765, James Hargreaves, solved Kay’s problem, by inventing the spinning jenny.
A machine that initially spun 16 spindles of thread at one time.
Improvements allowed it to spin as many as 120 spindles at once.
Richard Arkwright’s invention of the water frame marked the development of the Industrial revolution.
It is 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, making a half-million-pound fortune for himself.
Labor-saving was useful because British cloth manufacturing was constrained by labor supply.
Huge thanks to cotton imports and increased wool supply, labor savings actually resulted in more cloth to sell.
Colonization and slavery made cotton imports possible, fueling the Industrial Revolution.
The first factories were built along streams and rivers to harness energy for machinery.
Steam engines made it possible for factories to work on these locations.
James Watt studied the steam pump and adapted it for use in industry.
His invention was the first true steam engine.
He also invented an engine that turned a wheel. This made factories independent of waterpower.
Smelting iron is one of the greatest factors that contributed to the Industrial Revolution.
Iron was smelted traditionally in extremely hot ovens fueled by charcoals.
Abraham Darby discovered a means of smelting iron using coal.
Another important invention in the 19th century Industrial revolution is the railroad.
The first passenger railroad traveled between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.
By the middle of the century, Britain was crisscrossed with railroad tracks.
that carried passengers and goods throughout the land.
Some of the machines and structures associated with railroads included engines, tracks, stations, tunnels, and hotels for travelers.
Belgium was the first to industrialize, it had a plentiful supply of coal and iron.
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.
The Impact of Industrialization
Industrialization replaced the putting-out (or domestic) system, where peasants received raw materials and merchants collected and sold finished products.
Great Britain became the first nation to have more people living in the cities than in the countryside.
The cities that grew from the ground up tended to be awful places for the working poor.
Urban residents had higher mortality rates than rural residents due to poor ventilation and sanitation.
Cholera killed tens of thousands in early 19th-century cities because animal and human feces contaminated the water supply.
Industrialization also affected the family structure.
The family no longer worked together under one roof.
Great Britain’s Sadler Committee exposed that children were being beaten in the factories.
The House of Commons passed the Factory Act (1833), which mandated:
that children younger than 9 could not work in textile mills,
that children younger than 12 could work no more than 9 hours per day, and
that children younger than 18 couldn’t work more than 12 hours each day.
Working-Class Responses to Industrialization
Workers’ traditional way of life was threatened by machinery.
Some of them tried to destroy the machines.
Ned Laud: The workers’ fictional leader.
Luddite: Termed for those who refuse to embrace new technologies.
Machinery also caused hardship for many laborers on the farms.
Captain Swing: The farmers’ imaginary character who righted the wrongs imposed on hardworking individuals by the advent of technology.
Workers sought to create cooperative societies, small associations within a given trade that provided funeral benefits and other services for their members.
Friendly societies were organized as well in the late 19th century which eventually evolved into full-blown unions once the ban on such activities was lifted in 1824.
In the 1860s, 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 later evolved into the Trade Union Congress, pulling together workers from disparate industries.
By the end of the 19th century, unions were being formed by dockworkers and other non-skilled workers.
Socialism and Karl Marx
Scientific Socialism: The most significant strand in socialist thought — offered by Karl Marx.
Marx was born in the German city of Trier and eventually received a university education at Jena.
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.
This led Marx to seek the freer intellectual climate of Paris.
The French 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 organized a Communist League to link the far-flung German Socialists who were living in exile.
In 1848, they teamed up to write “The Communist Manifesto.”
It viewed all the history from the beginning of time, an idea that was labeled as historical materialism.
The origin of this idea can be found in the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
The development of capitalism led to the creation proletariat — a working class.
In what Marx admitted would be a violent struggle by the workers, the state would dominate, but it would wither away when all other classes were eliminated.
Das Kapital: An enormous treatise on capitalism that explains the mechanics by which capitalists extract profit from labor.
First International (1864): Marx founded it to "afford a central medium of communication and cooperation" for organizations seeking "protection, advancement, and complete emancipation of the working classes."
Trade Unionists, Mazzini Republicans, Marxists, and Anarchists were all members of the First International.
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.
3.6: The Age of National Unification
Metternich once remarked that Italy was “a mere geographical expression.”
He could have said the same for Germany, as both countries had several independent territories until the second half of the 19th century, 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 led to the monarchy annexing Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine.
By the early 19th century, Germans and Italians wanted to create a nation-state to unite all Italians or Germans under one political banner because they shared a culture, language, or fear of foreign dominance.
The Crimean War (1854–1856)
A dispute over who would control access to Jerusalem's Christian holy sites sparked the war.
British and French officials worried that Ottoman weakness was encouraging Russian adventurism in the Balkans and that the Russians could occupy Istanbul and gain access to the Mediterranean.
After the Ottomans' naval defeat, France and Great Britain declared war on the Russians.
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) revolutionized nursing after most of the half-million casualties died from disease in filthy field hospitals.
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.
The Russians were reluctant to quit, but the Austrians threatened to join the British and French if Russia didn't accept the peace terms. Russia had to cede Danube River territories and accept a Black Sea warship ban.
Without power in the Black Sea or along the Danube, the Russian navy was trapped in Baltic ports, subject to Swedish and Danish tolls.
The real cost of war was that the Concert of Europe, the idea that the great powers should work together—a concept that emerged from the Congress of Vienna —was finally shattered.
During the Crimean War, the Germans and other Europeans had no sense of unity on such questions.
The Crimean crisis horrified the British public, making them more isolationist toward Europe.
The Unification of Italy
In 1848, Italian liberals made an aborted attempt to create an Italian state.
After regaining power in Rome, Pope Pius IX promoted reactionary policies.
Liberals no longer believed in a pope-led Italian federation.
Risorgimento: The true architect of Italian unification — Count Camillo di Cavour, Victor Emmanuel’s chief minister.
Cavour was more practical and focused on boosting Sardinian power.
He cleverly entered the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the Crimean War on France and Great Britain's side, earning Napoleon III's gratitude.
Napoleon III also wanted to help the Sardinians because Austria was a French enemy.
Napoleon III also sought foreign military adventures to live up to his famous namesake, which ultimately doomed him.
The war began in April 1859. After defeating the Austrians in several battles, Napoleon decided to end the war before expelling them from Italy.
He was horrified by the conflict's high casualties and threatened by Prussia's Rhine troop buildup to aid the Austrians.
Cavour resigned as prime minister after Napoleon's aborted war and betrayal of the Sardinia treaty, but he returned a year later.
Napoleon and Cavour wanted to unite northern Italy. Napoleon feared a unified Italy would threaten France.
Giuseppe Garibaldi: One of the most intriguing characters in Italian history.
He was a Young Italy member of Mazzini's romantic Italian nationalism.
Garibaldi was horrified by the treaty between Sardinia and France, which required Italy to cede Savoy and Nice to France.
He initially threatened to attack France.
Instead, Cavour advised Garibaldi to invade the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, believing it would be suicidal.
Garibaldi's 1,000 "red shirts" overthrew the Bourbons' incompetent rule in southern Italy.
Cavour was appalled at the prospect of Garibaldi unifying Italy under his charismatic leadership rather than Piedmont's.
Cavour sent troops to Naples to halt Garibaldi.
He wanted the papal lands, so he waited for a popular revolt and then sent Sardinian troops into all of the pope's lands except Rome to restore order.
This was followed by the declaration of Victor Emmanuel as the first king of Italy on March 17, 1861.
Only Venetia and Rome were not under Italian rule after the papal invasion.
Italy took Venetia in 1866 after Prussia defeated Austria.
After the Franco-Prussian War, Italy added Rome as its capital in 1870.
The industrialized north of Italy and the impoverished south remain economically divided.
The Catholic Church's hostility, which banned Catholics from voting in national elections despite widespread defiance, was a major issue for the new state.
The Church did not reconcile with Italy until 1929, when Mussolini returned Vatican City's sovereignty to the papacy.
German Unification
The military and economic power of a unified Germany in 1871 changed Europe's power balance.
The story of German unification is rooted in the Napoleonic era.
Napoleon's rule over large parts of Germany unified Germany and increased German patriots' desire for unification.
Frederick William refused the crown from the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, delaying German unification until the Prussians found a better way.
Prussia's Zollverein gave it economic dominance over the other member states, while Austria was specifically excluded.
Prussia had industrialized while Austria remained agricultural by mid-century.
Prussia was German-dominated, while the Austrian Empire was multilingual.
Prussia enjoyed the services of one of the most remarkable statesmen of the 19th century, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898).
One of the 19th century's greatest statesmen, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), served Prussia.
William fought parliament over military reforms to challenge Austrian supremacy in the German Confederation.
He gave the Prussian army modern weapons to unify Germany.
This plan began in 1864 with an alliance with Austria against Denmark over Schleswig and Holstein.
Schleswig was ruled by Prussia and Holstein by the Austrians after Prussia was easily defeated the Danes in the Danish war.
By 1866, Prussia had allied with Italy and secured a French promise of nonparticipation.
Prussia, under Bismarck's orders, declared war on Austria over a minor dispute over Holstein's governance.
The Seven Weeks' War saw the Prussian army defeat Austria in seven weeks after modernizing.
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.
Prussia convinced northern German states to join 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, Bismarck started the Franco-Prussian War, completing his plan.
Bismarck, who desired war, rewrote the "Ems dispatch," a telegram sent by the Prussian king to Bismarck informing him of his conversation with the French ambassador, to make it seem like the king had insulted France.
On January 18, 1871, William I was proclaimed in the palace of Versailles as German emperor.
The creation of the German Empire completely changed the direction of European history.
France lost Alsace and Lorraine and paid a huge indemnity to the new German state for starting the war.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, this new German state's economic power strained relations with Great Britain and spurred colonial expansion.
Bismarck encouraged the French to build an African empire to distract from Alsace-Lorraine.
All European nations wanted overseas empires.
It advanced their political and economic interests in Europe adjusting to a powerful German state.
Bismarck launched the "Kulturkampf" to control all church appointments and Catholic education, fearing that Catholics were more loyal to the church than to Germany.
In 1878, Bismarck petitioned the Reichstag to ban Socialists' right to assemble and publish.
He also established old-age pensions and other social benefits for all Germans to reduce the Socialists' appeal.
Bismarck ruled at the pleasure of the king, not the people, and his poor relations with Wilhelm II led to less able leaders taking his place, risking his fragile peace with Russia and sacrificing German stability for German glory.
France
The Third French Republic (1870–1940) brought stability, but it had to deal with a divided public.
Louis Napoleon was the only president of the short-lived Second Republic after winning the December 1848 election.
In 1851, after a constitutional dispute with the legislature, he held a plebiscite on whether to grant him dictatorial powers for 10 years.
France prospered greatly during the first 10 years of the reign of Napoleon III.
Government-subsidized credit spurred economic growth during this time.
Georges Haussmann cleared many of Paris's slums and built its wide avenues, transforming the city from medieval to modern.
In 1860, Napoleon made concessions due to the unpopularity of his Crimean and Italian wars.
His liberalization backfired, causing the people to openly disapprove of his rule.
In 1859, Napoleon declared a "liberal empire", making his state a constitutional monarchy.
After the Second Empire fell, France established the Third Republic.
The Republic had to suppress a Parisian uprising that led to the Paris Commune.
Paris Commune: A radical government formed from Franco-Prussian War anarchy.
After killing 25,000 Parisians, the republican government restored order in Paris.
By 1875, the republic had a two-house parliament with a chamber of deputies elected by all male voters and a senate elected indirectly.
Boulanger Affair severely weakened the monarchist movement.
Great Britain
Great Exhibition of 1851: Boasted more than 13,000 exhibitors displaying the variety of British goods that were now available as a result of industrialization.
John Paxton constructed a building with the greatest area of glass to date, which became known as the Crystal Palace.
The Crystal Palace revealed “the aesthetic bloom of its practical character, and of the practical tendency of the English nation.”
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, 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.
Russia
Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) recognized serfdom as Russia's biggest issue, but Nicholas I was too reactionary to consider reform.
In 1861, he freed the serfs, but they had to pay for their freedom over 50 years.
Alexander established zemstvos, or district assemblies, to handle local issues like education and social services.
Some Russian reformers saw the zemstvos as a chance for greater political freedom, but they were dominated by the local gentry.
Alexander revised the legal system, but he remained an autocrat and saw no need to introduce a written constitution or parliamentary bodies.
His inflexibility on these issues fueled revolutionary groups like the People's Will, which assassinated Alexander in 1881.
His reactionary son Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) took the throne and repressed even the modest 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 Austro-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.
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.
The Ottoman Empire
This is most commonly know as “the sick old man of Europe.”
Under Sultan Abdul Mejid (r. 1839–1861), the Tanzimat reform initiative sought to modernize the Ottoman economy and introduce Western ideas like equality before the law and religious freedom.
Western education helped create the liberal "Young Turks."
In 1876, the Young Turks helped establish the Ottoman state as a constitutional monarchy.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) abolished the constitution to subjugate non-Muslims in his empire.
His policies led to the deaths of thousands of Armenians.
His policies also led to general repression throughout the state.
Ottoman weakness continued to plague the empire up until it sided with the Central Powers in the First World War.
3.7: The Second Industrial Revolution
Steel
Henry Bessemer invented the Bessemer Process in 1856 to produce more steel at lower cost.
William Siemens, a German, developed a better steel-making method that produced a higher-quality product at lower cost.
Steel revolutionized architecture and shipbuilding due to its strength and durability.
Electricity
In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lamp.
In 1881, the first electrical power station was built in Great Britain.
In late 19th-century London and Paris, where public opera houses and theaters grew, electric lights made cities safer and increased nighttime activities.
Transportation
Europe's rail network grew to over 100,000 miles by the end of the century.
In 1869. the French built the Suez Canal.
In 1875, the British took control of a waterway that halved travel time from Great Britain to India.
Steamships replaced clipper ships, which set Atlantic Ocean crossing records.
Trains and steamships using ice-making machines from the 1870s could transport perishables around the world, making the US, Australia, and Argentina major European suppliers.
In 1885, Karl Benz invented a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine.
Until 1908, only the rich could afford cars when Henry Ford introduced Model T.
In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright, bicycle builders, launched the first successful airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Communication and Education Advances
Britain was the first European nation to establish a national postal system, offering penny letters to almost everyone.
Universal public education also encouraged writing.
By 1844, Europe had telegraph lines.
By 1900, Germans made 700 million calls per year after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876.
Some of those calls may have been to arrange social events around new entertainment options like motion pictures, which debuted in the 1890s.
In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph that was perfect for homebodies.
Other developments
The introduction of synthetic dyes revolutionized the textile industry.
The invention of man-made fertilizers led to increased crop yields.
Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite allowed him to blast tunnels through rock and remove nature's inconvenient hills.
Michael Faraday pioneered electromagnetism and electricity.
James Joule defined many of the laws of thermodynamics.
Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table by arranging known elements by atomic weight and leaving spaces for predicted but undiscovered elements.
In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen made an accidental discovery of X-rays.
Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity.
The Curies, Marie and Pierre, spent their lives studying radioactivity.
In 1910, Marie Curie isolated radium.
Ernest Rutherford demonstrated that atomic particles had a nucleus.
In 1901, Max Planck proposed that energy was delivered in discrete units, or quanta.
His quantum physics ended Newtonian mechanistic physics.
Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, in which time, space, and movement are relative to the observer.
Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche: Began to question and even to reject the ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment.
In his most influential work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche famously declared that "God is dead" to break free from traditional morality.
He had to "kill" God because religion was the foundation of Western civilization, which he hated.
Nietzsche hated Bismarck's Germany and wanted the artist-warrior superman.
After his 1900 death, his pro-Nazi sister edited his writings to support Hitler's extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud: The founder of psychoanalysis.
He proposed a talking cure for mental illness by exploring the subconscious.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud believed dreams revealed the subconscious and created a list of Freudian symbols—items or events that appear in dreams that represent unconscious memories.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud questioned the idea of human progress and instead proposed that violence is at the core of our being.
Advances in Medicine
In 1846, surgery changed William Morton introduced ether anesthesia, followed by chloroform a few years later.
Louis Pasteur discovered that microbes—small, invisible organisms—caused diseases.
Pasteur also explained how smallpox vaccines stimulated the immune system to produce antibodies after contact with a weak form of the bacilli.
After Pasteur's discoveries, Joseph Lister used carbolic acid as a surgical disinfectant.
Ignaz Semmelweis, made childbirth much safer for women.
He showed that doctors and nurses who thoroughly washed their hands before delivery could significantly reduce "childbed fever" deaths.
Darwin
Charles Darwin: An English naturalist who traveled on the H.M.S. Beagle to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of South America.
Charles Lyell: Claimed that geological evidence proved that the Earth was much older than the biblical age of approximately 6,000 years.
Herbert Spencer: He first used the phrase “survival of the fittest.”
Social Darwinism: It was used to justify the racist idea that Europeans were superior to Africans and Asians and therefore should dominate them.
Darwin explained change before anyone else.
Darwin believed some members of a species may inherit traits that help them survive.
Darwin called this "natural selection" in On the Origin of Species (1859).
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin argued that humans evolved from simpler life forms.
Social Class in the Second Industrial Revolution
The French Revolution established meritocracy, eliminating birth privileges.
In Great Britain, refrigerated railcars allowed cheaper agricultural imports from the US, Argentina, and Australia.
Competitive civil service and military exams reduced the aristocracy's role in government administration and military command.
"Age of the Middle Class" describes the second half of the 19th century.
During the Renaissance, a different "middle class" transformed society.
That middle class was made up of wealthy, city-dwelling merchants who fell between medieval society's three "estates"—the peasants, the priesthood, and the nobility.
Merchants' money and secular interests advanced Renaissance intellectualism.
In the late 19th century, the middle class was growing.
New and wealthy professions joined the merchants.
They were "middle class" because they were outside the old class system.
Middle-class families had one servant, while wealthy families had large staffs.
In the 18th century, a "Grand Tour" of Europe's capitals was part of a young gentleman's education. Only the wealthy could afford it.
Thomas Cook popularized travel among the middle class by organizing day trips to London's Great Exhibition.
Eduard Bernstein challenged some of Marx’s basic ideas in Evolutionary Socialism (1898).
He and his "revisionist" followers claimed capitalism would not collapse as Marx predicted.
Joseph Proudhon is often considered to be the founder of anarchism.
Proudhon, who coined the term "anarchist," believed that society's true laws came from its nature, not authority.
Anarchism advocated exposing these laws as society's ultimate goal.
Karl Kautsky defended Marx's "laws" and called revisionists heretics.
He said the proletarian revolution would be peaceful.
3.8: Social and Cultural Developments
Religion
After 1815, organized religion recovered from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic era.
After the 1848 revolutions, secular rulers supported religion as a social order fortifier.
Catholicism
Spain declared Catholicism the only religion of the Spanish people in 1851, while Austria repealed Joseph II's late 18th-century reforms of the Catholic Church.
In Rome, a revolution forced Pope Pius IX to flee.
After French troops restored him to power, he issued the encyclical Syllabus of Errors**,** which listed liberalism as a modern error.
In 1870, Pius introduced the controversial doctrine of "papal infallibility," which held that the pope could not err in matters of faith.
Bismarck believed Catholicism could divide Germany because Catholics were loyal to a supranational institution.
Bismarck and German liberals seized Catholic schools and bishops to fight the Kulturkampf (cultural war) against Catholic institutions.
In 1878, Bismarck stopped this harassment because it wasn't working.
In the late 19th century, Catholic and Protestant clergy felt religion should address social issues.
Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) issued Rerum Novarum in 1891, reaffirming private property and condemning socialism but stating that Christians and the Church had a duty to the poor.
In Catholic countries like France and Italy, this message inspired the Catholic Social Movement, while Protestant churches increased their work for the poor.
The Bible as History
In the early 19th century, German theologians studied the Bible as history to find the "historical" Jesus.
In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
Strauss believed the Bible was a collection of early Christian myths that produced a "Christ of faith, rather than the Jesus of history."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Eliot translated Strauss's Life and Ludwig Feuerbach's (1804–1872) Essence of Christianity, which argued that God was a man-made device that reflected our inner divine.
Religion for the Working Class and Peasants
In 1851, a British religious census found that church attendance was much lower than expected and that the working class had little religious affiliation.
In 1858, a French peasant girl named Bernadette claimed she saw the Virgin Mary 18 times.
The Lourdes grotto waters, where she saw the vision, became a religious shrine.
Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism
In 1858, Great Britain allowed Jews into the House of Commons, and in the following decade, Austria-Hungary and Germany granted Jews full political rights.
Jews were blamed for modern economic trends like the department store, which drove small shopkeepers out of business.
Prejudice rose during the decade-long economic depression of 1873.
Economic resentment was mixed with a new form of anti-Semitism based on Social Darwinist views of Jews as a race rather than a religion.
Germany had anti-Semitic political parties, and the Dreyfus Affair helped create Action Française, a monarchist group that was anti-Semitic.
Hitler lived in Vienna under anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger.
Theodore Herzl appalled by the Dreyfus Affair's anti-Semitism, advocated Zionism.
He founded the First Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897 to achieve his goal of a Jewish state in The Jewish State.
The Rights and Role of Women
This Victorian idealization of the household and women's role in it led to the "cult of domesticity."
Women were supposed to make the home a paradise.
Women were expected to be submissive, pure, and religious because they were in charge of the family's religion.
Books were written to help women manage their households and raise their children.
Working-class women worked as hard as men in factories, homes, and as servants.
Many worked multiple jobs and had little time or energy to read books on raising children.
Middle-class women would visit the working class to teach them home economics.
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
Women began attending the University of Zurich in 1865 and the University of London in 1878.
Professional societies in medicine and law generally excluded women, creating another barrier for women.
Frances Power Cobbe was one of the first women to work as a journalist and later campaigned against medical vivisection.
Josephine Butler broke a Victorian law by publicly discussing sex.
In 1869, Butler founded the Ladies National Association, an all-female organization that opposed the Contagious Diseases Act, which allowed women suspected of having STDs to be dragged off the street for testing while men were left alone.
Women’s Struggles for Increased Rights
Feminists formed organizations to effect change.
In conservative Greece, a feminist newspaper with 20,000 readers advocated for professional and civil rights for over 20 years.
There was transatlantic cooperation between feminist groups and US feminists.
Clara Zetkin in Germany believed socialism was the only way to free women.
Suffragists, women who peacefully campaigned for the vote, were sometimes overshadowed by members of Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union.
With her daughter Christabel, Emmeline and her Suffragettes heckled political speakers, broke church windows, and set fires.
Suffragettes were arrested and beaten for their threat to society. They were force-fed after a prison hunger strike.
In 1918, women in Great Britain finally achieved the right to vote.
There is an ongoing historical debate over whether the suffragettes or suffragists deserve credit for this monumental achievement.
Cultural Changes
Maria Montessori exemplifies this new woman in Europe at the turn of the century.
Her teaching methods made her a famous doctor and educator.
Birth control, education, and career opportunities opened new doors for women.
In an essay, British novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote that women were now "pointed and they want everything."
History
Barthold Niebuhr pioneered the use of primary sources in classical history.
His Roman History influenced Leopold von Ranke, who challenged the idea that history revealed a grand design, whether it was God's or secular.
Like Niebuhr, Ranke believed that historical texts were unreliable and that original sources were needed.
Anthropology
The new imperialism led to the sudden expansion of European dominance over large parts of the world.
National anthropological societies were founded across Europe, but due to "scientific" racism of the time, they often studied the "inferiority" of non-Europeans.
Sociology
Sociology, the study of human social behavior, was inspired by governments' growing interest in citizen statistics.
Émile Durkheim held the first chair in sociology at the University of Bordeaux, an appointment that was met with skepticism by the more traditional faculty.
Archaeology
In the 19th century, amateur archaeologists like Heinrich Schlieman, a German businessman who searched for Troy, and Sir Arthur Evans, an Englishman who excavated the Minoan culture of Crete, used scientific methods.
Romanticism in Literature
In Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a natural education for a young man.
Romantics praised nature's beauty and mystery. The supernatural also fascinated them.
Folklore and traditional peasant life were romanticized because country people lived closer to nature.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected classical poetic forms by ignoring punctuation in their Lyrical Ballads.
Wolfgang von Goethe
In his epistolary novel Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther commits suicide when his love for a woman is rejected.
Goethe dominated the Sturm und Drang generation of German Romantic writers of the 1770s and 1780s.
Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo's novels like Ivanhoe and The Hunchback of Notre Dame popularized the Middle Ages.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 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.
Mask of Anarchy was written as a political protest after the Peterloo massacre.
Lord Byron rebelled against the Ottoman Turks in Greece and died.
Amandine-Aurore Dupin, writing as George Sand, challenged women's oppression. Sand had a famous affair with Frédéric Chopin, who told his family,
In Indiana, a desperate woman is abused by her husband and a self-centered lover.
Sand's pen name, cigar smoking, masculine dress, and affairs with married men defied stereotypes.
John Wesley, an Anglican preacher, traveled across Great Britain and Ireland, preaching to villages, organizing small religious societies, and appointing leaders to continue social change after his departure.
Methodism: A Romantic religion—emerged from this revival movement.
Music
Ludwig von Beethoven changed classical forms by lengthening his compositions and adding a vocal soloist to the last movement.
Beethoven was the first composer to earn enough from compositions and performances to avoid aristocratic or religious patrons.
Franz Schubert invented the lied, or art song, with a solo voice singing a melody to piano accompaniment.
Hector Berlioz set Goethe's Faust to music, which was the first attempt to tell a story without singers or a text.
Frederic Chopin was influenced by the music of the peasants of his native Poland.
Franz Liszt wrote music based on traditional Romani music.
In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev's ballet The Rite of Spring seemed to reject classical ballet with its bizarre costumes, strange dancing, and Igor Stravinsky's discordant music.
Art
Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People captures the stirring events of the revolution in the streets of Paris
Photography was a new art form and a major influence on painting by mid-century.
In 1835, Louis Daguerre accidentally created an image by placing an exposed plate in a chemical cupboard with mercury vapor.
He developed the daguerreotype process to fix the image after several years.
Photography would enter into the mainstream with the introduction of celluloid film.
In the 1880s, George Eastman introduced flexible film and the first box camera, making photography affordable for everyone.
Realists: Those who sought to paint the world around them without any illusions.
Gustave Courbet painted works like The Stone-Breakers that rejected romanticism and depicted peasant life in all its grimness.
Jean-François Millet's The Sowers depicts impoverished peasants who appear to be growing from the ground.
Honoré Daumier is best known for his July Monarchy cartoons that exposed corrupt politicians and legal systems.
The Third Class Carriage: It depicts a group of French peasants, their faces creased from hardship, sitting in an obviously uncomfortable railcar.
Realism in Literature
Charles Dickens used his brief experience in a blacking factory to criticize industrialized society.
In Hard Times, noble workingman Stephen Blackpool fights forces beyond his control.
Mary Ann Evans 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.
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary marries a mediocre village doctor and discovers that marriage is not as romantic as she thought.
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina features another beautiful but bored woman who has a disastrous affair.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent 10 years in Siberia after almost being executed for his involvement in an illegal political group.
He wrote Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Émile Zola found himself applying the social sciences to the novel.
He wrote a series of "naturalistic" novels about a family over several generations, showing how environment and heredity caused their moral and physical degeneration.
In his L'Aurore front-page letter "J'accuse," Zola defended Alfred Dreyfus from treason charges.
Post-Realist Art: The Impressionists and Expressionists
Édouard Manet was inspired by the realists, they wished to push their techniques in new directions.
His Luncheon on the Grass shows a rather peculiar picnic, with two fully clothed males and a nude female.
When they were denied entry to the 1863 Salon, Paris's annual public exhibition, Manet and other innovative artists were embroiled in a controversy.
Napoleon III created the Salon des Refusés, or "exhibition of the rejected," after the public protested the hanging committee's refusal to show these paintings.
Impressionism
After Claude Monet's Impression: Sunrise was criticized in 1874, the term "impressionist" was used to deride artists who copied Manet's style.
Impressionists were the first to use outdoor easels to capture light's shimmering effects.
Monet would paint a haystack or Rouen Cathedral at different times of day or seasons to show how light changed it.
Auguste Renoir captured couples flirting in a dance hall.
Edgar Degas painted many ballet backstage scenes.
Paul Cézanne challenged composition, color, and perspective.
His work influenced 20th-century artists, earning him the title "father of modern art."
Cézanne wanted to make impressionism "solid and durable, like the art of the museums."
Expressionism
20th-century Expressionists were influenced by Vincent Van Gogh.
His 10-year career was cut short by suicide.
His style changed after a trip to Paris, where he met several leading artists through his brother Theo's gallery.
The Potato Eaters show his deep sensitivity to the economically struggling.
He painted his most famous sunflower and cypress tree landscapes in Arles, southern France, using bright colors and broad brush strokes to convey deep emotion.
Pablo Picasso, whose nearly abstract Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) broke with Western art's single-point perspective since the Italian Renaissance.
The Scream by Edvard Munch revealed emotions rather than appearances.
Gustav Klimt rejected mass society's values and shocked viewers with vibrant colors or unfamiliar classical images.
The New Imperialism: Colonization of Africa and Asia
The New Imperialism: It is used to distinguish the period from earlier overseas conquests, such as the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, and to describe how European rule changed life in those regions.
Breech-loading rifles, which allowed prone firing, were superior to muzzle loaders used by African gun owners.
Steamships crossed oceans quickly without wind power, and smaller steam-driven riverboats allowed Europeans to penetrate Africa.
The Telegraph reduced communication between India and London to a day from two years at the start of the century.
In 1820, quinine, made from cinchona tree bark, was discovered to treat malaria, a tropical disease.
The new imperialism was built on technological advances. They relied on technology, but it would have failed without the various factors that drove Europeans to conquer other countries.
In the last quarter of the century, Europe raised tariffs, prompting nations to consider colonies as free trade zones.
People traveled to Africa for palm oil, gold, and silver.
Social imperialists saw imperialism as a way to solve domestic issues like overpopulation.
Nationalism also played a major role in empire-building.
European states believed that was the only way to matter globally.
France built an overseas empire to prove it still mattered after its 1870 defeat by Prussia.
Christian missionaries were the first Europeans to enter central Africa.
Balance-of-power politics was the main reason for buying unprofitable land.
Nations sought colonies to deny others.
Cecil Rhodes sought colonial advantage from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo.
Social Darwinism influenced new imperialism. White people believed they would rule Asia and Africa.
"The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling states that Europeans must "bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives' need," exemplifying noblesse oblige.
At the Berlin Conference, called to discuss Congo control, imperialist nations pledged "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."
Europeans drew new borders that ignored tribal and cultural differences with imperial territories in the "mad scramble" for colonies.
The Berlin conference regulated colonization.
Bismarck organized nations to prove they had enough authority in a territory to protect rights like trade and transit.
This started the mad dash that left every square inch of Africa divided among the European powers.
Ethiopia repelled an Italian invasion in 1896. Liberia repulsed on the west coast, which remained independent due to its unique historical link to the United States.
After the French left India after the Seven Years' War, Britain took over them.
In 1849, Punjab became British territory.
After the "Indian Mutiny" or "Sepoy Rebellion" of 1857, an administrative structure replaced the British East India Company, centralizing colonial control.
By 1877, Prime Minister Disraeli made Queen Victoria the Empress of India, flattering her and sending a message to Europe about Great Britain's importance to India.
Great Britain was the first European state to practice "informal empire" in China, where a state has significant influence over another nation's economy without territorial or political control.
China gave European states sovereignty over a series of "treaty ports" along the coast after losing several wars with European powers.
Despite Thailand's independence, the French took Indochina and its vital rubber plantations.
The Dutch ruled Indonesia and the US took the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.
After the Russo-Japanese War, Japan took control of Korea in 1910, following Britain and Germany's colonial expansion.
Colonialist Violence
Carl Peters, whom Hitler admired, founded a German colony in East Africa and was known as the "man with blood on his hands" by the locals.
The Belgian Congo was the worst colonial exploitation.
King Leopold II (r. 1876–1909), a pioneer in the scramble for Africa, founded this massive colony many times the size of Belgium and expected to profit from it. Profiteering enslaved, maimed, and killed millions.
After an international outcry, including Mark Twain's sarcastic King Leopold's Soliloquy, the king gave control to the Belgian government, which corrected some of the worst abuses.
Views and Consequences of the New Imperialism
Britain's pro-imperial Primrose League had over a million members, and Germany, Italy, and France had similar organizations with far fewer members.
The Boer War (1899–1902) may have reduced public support for empire in Great Britain, but the working class across Europe seemed uninterested.
In 1882, Britain established a protectorate over Egypt and the Suez Canal to ensure its dominance over India due to European rivalries.
British control over Afghanistan's worthless territory threatened Russia's recent Central Asian expansion and India's security.
In 1898, Britain and France nearly went to war over Fashoda in Sudan.
In 1905 and 1911, France and Germany nearly went to war over Morocco.
Leading German political and military figures felt their country lacked a colonial empire befitting its position in Europe, which contributed to the First World War.
Bismarck once pointed to a map of Europe and said, "This is my Africa," revealing his true interest.
The Society for German Colonization (1884) opposed Bismarck's apathy.
Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Bismarck into retirement in 1890 due to his lack of interest in colonies, which he couldn't stand.
Western-educated colonized people led resistance groups against the colonizers.
The Indian Congress Party, founded in 1885, was the main force behind Indian independence from the British Empire.
Other nationalist movements of the time included the Zulu resistance to the British in southern Africa, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan.
Period 4: Global Wars to Globalization: (1914-present)
4.1: The First World War
Political and Social Tensions in Europe
Great Britain and Ireland
Home Rule: A movement that campaigned for self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Nationalists were Catholic; Unionists were Protestant.
Unionism expanded in the northern Protestant regions of Ireland, particularly in the province of Ulster.
France
In 1894, the Dreyfus Affair began when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of giving military secrets to the Germans.
The incident showed the extent of French anti-Semitism and how much many French people hated republicanism.
Russia
In 1904, Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War again, revealing the Tsarist state's bankruptcy.
The Duma that would make Russia a constitutional monarchy was created early in the revolution.
Tsar Nicholas II accepted Duma's rule.
Tsarist rule resumed as an unwieldy autocracy.
Germany and Austria-Hungary
The kaiser and his inner circle feared a Socialist revolution in Germany due to rising worker agitation.
"Magyarization," the mandatory dominance of the Magyar language and culture, infuriated the other nationalities.
Entangling Alliances
In 1879, Bismarck created the Dual Alliance, a military treaty with the Austro-Hungarians.
Bismarck signed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887 to make it clear that the treaty with Austria-Hungary was purely defensive.
After Kaiser Wilhelm II ousted Bismarck, the Russians began to fear the Germans.
German fears of being encircled increased when Great Britain and France signed an Entente Cordiale in 1904 to settle colonial disputes.
German fears increased when Great Britain signed another entente with the Russians.
This is why during the First World War, Britain, France, and Russia were referred to as the “Entente” powers.
Increased Militarization
High Seas Fleet
For the British, navies were entirely different because they saw their fleet as their only line of defense for their sizable colonial empire.
The Battle of Jutland in 1916 was the only significant naval engagement of the First World War.
Crisis in the Balkans
Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, was the site of the initial crisis on June 28, 1914.
There, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the presumed heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, was killed.
A Bosnian Serb who desired Bosnia's inclusion in a larger Serbian state killed Ferdinand.
In 1908, the Balkan crisis brought Europe to the verge of war after Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Gavrilo Princip, the Archduke’s assassin, had operated with the full cooperation of the Black Hand.
Black Hand: A secret Serbian nationalist group with strong ties to Serbian officials in both the government and the army.
The Course of the War
On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, risking a wider European war.
Russia had promised to protect the Serbs.
Germany, the "blank check," supported Austria-Hungary, which started the war because it was the only power that could have stopped them.
Russia mobilized after the Austro-Hungarian declaration on Serbia.
As Russian mobilization continued, the Germans declared war on August 1.
The Second International parties, which had long opposed capitalist European wars and praised international brotherhood, voted in each nation to support the war effort.
Jean Jaurès: The idealistic French Socialist Party leader that opposed the war.
On the eve of the war, a fanatical French nationalist shot him.
Airplanes were used to spot enemy positions, making surprise offensives harder.
The Germans began the war by trying to implement the Schlieffen Plan.
Schlieffen Plan: Established that, in case of the outbreak of war, Germany would attack France first and then Russia.
Belgium, a nation created in 1830 with the promise of European neutrality, was invaded by Germany.
After the German invasion of Belgium broke this guarantee, Great Britain joined the French and Russians.
By early September, German troops threatened Paris, forcing the French government to flee.
The First Battle of the Marne, led by General Joffre, stopped the Germans after they crossed the river.
The armies on Flanders' northern coast scrambled to outflank each other throughout the fall.
Both sides settled into a longer war by the first winter.
As the stalemate continued, huge networks of defensive fortifications were built from quickly dug ditches.
As the war dragged on, soldiers faced rats eating corpses, artillery noise, and extreme boredom.
Unfortunately, both sides insisted on sending their soldiers "over the top" into no man's land to attack enemy trenches.
The war in the east was rather different from that in the west.
As the fighting in the west stalled, German forces shifted to the east and began to win against the brave but poorly equipped Russians.
Because of its massive size, the eastern front never became bogged down with trenches like the west.
In early 1915, poison gas began to be used by both sides.
Gas masks reduced gas-related casualties, but they also reinforced the inhumanity of modern warfare.
British forces attacked Turkey, a central power ally, to break the east's stalemate.
Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, devised a plan, which nearly ended his political career.
Churchill believed that defeating the Turks would allow the British to supply the beleaguered Russians via the Black Sea.
In April 1915, five divisions landed on the beach of Gallipoli
The Turks were well entrenched, so the attack failed for most Australian and New Zealand soldiers.
After suffering heavy losses, the British withdrew in January.
In 1916, the Germans launched a massive offensive against the French fortress of Verdun, which France had to defend at all costs or risk public opinion disaster.
German artillery included "Big Bertha" guns that fired ton-plus shells.
General Philippe Pétain led a spirited defense of the fortress against the Germans.
After the German victory in 1940, he became the disgraced leader of Vichy France.
In one of the war's costliest battles, the Germans attacked Verdun to bleed France dry, but both sides lost 600,000 troops.
Both Entente powers launched wasteful and ineffective offensives, such as the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Passchendaele, to break the German lines.
4.2: The End of the War
As Russia fell into revolution, the Bolshevik leaders sued Germany for peace in December 1917.
Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram caused the United States to enter the war on April 6, 1917, negating this German advantage.
Zimmermann Telegram: A secret German note to Mexico requesting support if the US entered the war.
In 1915, Germany declared the waters around Great Britain a war zone and threatened to sink any ship that tried to enter British ports.
In May 1915, a German U-boat sank the British passenger ship Lusitania, angering 120 American passengers.
The Germans stopped attacking neutral shipping after an American warning, but in early 1917, they resumed the practice.
In 1918, the Germans decided to move quickly to win before the Americans could send in large numbers of new troops.
Beginning in March, the Germans decided to gamble everything on victory.
For four months, German troops had the same success as in the war's beginning.
By summer, many Americans halted the German advance.
By August, Germany was exhausted and retreating.
The new German government, led by Prince Max von Baden asked American President Woodrow Wilson for an armistice based on Wilson's Fourteen Points.
Wilson's Fourteen Points: An idealistic document that sought to reduce future tensions between nations by maintaining free trade and ending secret negotiations.
In November, soldiers and workers formed soviets, or councils, and demanded that these loosely organized political debating societies rule the state.
Fearing that Germany would follow Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, the Kaiser was convinced to abdicate, creating a republic that was empowered to sign the armistice that ended the war on November 11, 1918.
4.3: The War on the Home Front
World War I was the first total war.
Political leaders realized they would need to mobilize all national resources after people realized their initial expectation of a quick war was wrong.
The war boosted government power in the 20th century.
Price controls, strike bans, rationing, and planned coal use supported the war effort.
The British government closed pubs in the afternoon to prevent factory workers from coming to work drunk.
Governments also began to play a larger role in trying to manipulate public opinion.
Censorship became a basic task for all governments. They read and censored soldiers' letters home to hide trench warfare's horrors.
Government propaganda offices produced films and posters to boost morale.
In the US, the First World War emancipated women, and the Second World War paved the way for the Civil Rights movement.
British female suffrage was growing before the war.
The Versailles Treaty and the Costs of the War
It is impossible to determine a precise count of the human costs of the war
Influenza killed 30 million people worldwide, dwarfing war deaths.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace estimated the war's cost at $338 billion.
Paris peace conference reached five settlements.
Treaty of Versailles — signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors
Woodrow Wilson wanted to reshape the world based on his Fourteen Points, which included national self-determination and the League of Nations to resolve international disputes.
Georges Clemenceau represented a completely different outlook from Wilson’s.
France endured the most suffering of any nation during the war, and Clemenceau had to placate a populace that wanted to ensure that Germany would never again pose a threat.
David Lloyd-George supported punishing Germany as well.
The treaty ultimately represented Clemenceau's position's victory over Wilson's.
Other treaties signed in Paris in 1919 reordered the map of Europe. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the decline of Germany resulted in the birth of new nations in central Europe.
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Romania
Yugoslavia
Poland
Finland
The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were carved out of parts of the former Russian Empire.
The Russian Revolution
Nicholas II, Russia's last tsar, misguidedly took personal command of the army in the second year of the war to emulate past warrior tsars.
In his absence, Nicholas left his wife Empress Alexandra in charge of the state.
She turned out to be completely ignorant in matters of statecraft.
She was also personally influenced by Gregory Rasputin who she thought possessed the ability to control her son’s hemophilia.
Rasputin persuades the empress to appoint his incompetent friends to important state posts.
False rumors spread that Alexandra and Rasputin were lovers and that the empress was trying to defeat Russia.
Rasputin was killed in 1916 by arch-monarchists who believed he was undermining the throne.
The Provisional Government
Duma: The Russian parliament that arose out of the 1905 revolution
The soviets consisted primarily of assorted Russian Socialists.
The majority belongs to Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary wings.
The minority belonged to the Bolsheviks.
In 1903, Vladimir Lenin proposed that a small group of professional revolutionaries could seize power for the working class, dividing Russian socialism.
His followers became known as the Bolsheviks.
Mensheviks: The group that believed Russia had to follow historical precedent to become a socialist nation.
They dominated the Petrograd Soviet to initially support the Provisional Government because they believed a bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist revolution.
The Provisional Government's refusal to end the First World War was controversial.
The Triumph of the Bolsheviks
In April, the Germans helped Lenin return from Switzerland in a sealed railcar.
Lenin was expected to undermine the Russian war effort so the Germans did this.
Over the next few months, the Bolsheviks gained strength from Petrograd's workers and soldiers.
By the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks were the largest party in the soviets.
On November 9, new Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky took over key city positions.
The Provisional Government collapsed, ending the revolution peacefully.
Over the next three years, the Bolsheviks fought a bloody civil war to maintain power.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and the new Bolshevik state ended Russia's involvement in the war by 1917.
Germans confiscated vast Russian land under the harsh treaty.
Germany's defeat and the Allies' refusal to let Germany gain eastern territories prevented its full implementation.
4.4: The Interwar Years
The German Weimar Republic
The German Weimar Republic's tragic story should not be surprising given its difficult birth at the end of a disastrous war.
In November 1918, Friedrich Ebert became the republic's first president.
Ebert used the old imperial officer corps to defeat Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg's Marxist rebellion and secure his republican regime.
Ebert approved Free Crops because the army could not put down the rebellion alone.
Free Crops: A voluntary paramilitary group often with extreme right-wing leanings.
The Kapp Putsch, a 1920 attempt by some Free Corps to overthrow the democratic state, was thwarted by a general strike.
Despite the Versailles Treaty penalties, the republic stabilized by 1924.
Gustav Stresemann, leader of the conservative German People's Party, was Chancellor of Germany in 1923.
By 1925, Germany was slowly rebuilding its relations with the other nations of Europe.
Germany accepted France's borders in the Locarno Agreement.
Germany joined the League of Nations the following year after Stresemann's efforts.
By 1929, the republic appeared to be gaining ground in Germany, but the Great Depression would show how little support it had.
The Soviet Experiment
The Communists worked to solidify their control over the vast Russian state.
For three years they had to fight a life-or-death struggle against the White Forces.
Anti-Communist monarchists and republicans are among them.
British and American troops, nominally sent to protect Allies' wartime supplies, supported the Whites.
Lenin and Trotsky justified their "Red Terror" against right-wing extremists and Bolshevik enemies during the Civil War.
By 1920, the Communists had defeated the various White armies and firmly established Bolshevik rule over Russia.
In 1919, the Russian Communists founded the Third International to aid in the cause of revolution.
The Comintern influenced western European Socialist parties as some Marxists looked to the new Soviet state for guidance.
Lenin's repression appalled most Socialists.
This split Europe into Communist and Socialist parties.
The German Communists saw the Social Democratic Party as a bigger threat than the Nazis, so this left-wing split helped the Nazis rise.
By 1920, the Comintern focused on aiding the Soviet Union, which held all leadership positions.
"War communism" tightly controlled the economy during the Civil War.
In 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt Naval Base, a Bolshevik stronghold, rebelled against this program.
Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP) after the rebellion was brutally crushed.
This policy gave the government the "heights of industry" but allowed private enterprise to flourish.
Trotsky wanted war communism's economic structure back because the NEP was too ideological.
As the leader of the "Left Opposition," Trotsky believed that communism could only survive if it spread to other countries.
Nikolai Bukharin, the "Right Opposition" leader, opposed him in this debate, building communism within the Soviet state.
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin, a Georgian who joined the party in 1902, played a minor role in the November 1917 coup.
He wanted power within the Soviet system.
Stalin and Bukharin cleverly ousted Trotsky.
In 1927, Trotsky and his ally Gregory Zinoviev were expelled from the party.
Stalin waited two years before he also ousted Bukharin.
In 1936, Stalin began a series of show trials in which his former opponents were tortured into confessing to state crimes.
Stalin eliminated the "Old Bolsheviks" who had joined the party before 1917, along with anyone else who’re disloyal.
In 1940, an agent sent by Stalin assassinated Trotsky.
Stalin adopted the Left Opposition's plan to rapidly industrialize Russia after gaining power.
In 1928 Stalin implemented the first Five-Year Plan, a comprehensive, centrally controlled plan for industrial expansion.
Stalin forced agricultural collectivization to pay for this unprecedented economic growth.
The state declared war on the kulaks (wealthy peasants) and sent party cadres to the countryside to kill those who refused to join the collective farm.
After destroying their crops and livestock, millions of kulaks were shot or starved.
The Soviet Union became a major industrial power by the end of the 1930s, while the West was in a deep economic depression.
The Great Depression
In May 1931, Vienna's most powerful bank, CreditAnstalt, collapsed.
German and eastern European banks failed as citizens questioned their solvency.
Banks stopped lending and people started saving.
Because demand fell, so did the number of jobs.
Maintaining a gold standard, a fixed exchange rate between currencies and gold, worsened these issues for many countries.
The gold standard prevented countries from using controlled inflation to escape the depression.
The gold standard's problems were exacerbated by the belief that the best way to deal with an economic depression was to tighten the money supply until all "bad loans" and "failed companies" went bankrupt.
Inflation allows people to save more while still having money to spend, but it also discourages them from saving too much because they realize their money will be worth less in the future.
John Maynard Keynes was almost a singular voice of dissent.
He believed that deficit spending could fix the problem of private sector demand by temporarily providing jobs and income to boost spending and revive the economy.
"Priming the pump" meant temporarily increasing government spending on public works to unfreeze the economy and get money moving again.
Government missteps like raising tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing worsened the depression.
By 1932, the economies of Europe were performing at only half the 1929 level.
In the US and Germany, almost one-third of the workforce was unemployed due to the depression.
In the US, a stable democracy, those in the depression elected Franklin Roosevelt and supported his New Deal.
In Germany, a weak democracy, republican institutions died and fascism triumphed.
Fascism
Fascism comes from fasces, a Roman symbol of authority and community.
Fascism promoted a nationalist and mystical racial identity.
Fascists despised parliamentary democracy as anarchic and effete.
Il Duce, the Italian Fascist leader, and the Führer, the German leader, represented the nation's hopes and dreams.
Fascist governments in Italy and Germany were elected which makes this anti-democracy stance odd.
Mussolini promised that an Italian fascist state would implement corporatism.
Corporatism: An industry-specific employer-worker association to resolve production and wage disputes.
Anti-Semitism was a key component of Fascist movements throughout Europe, except Italy, because Jews were seen as outside the arch-nationalistic identity so dear to all Fascists.
Fascism in Italy
Italy became the first country to have a fascist government before the Great Depression of 1929.
Fascism in Italy grew out of national dissatisfaction with its First World War participation.
In 1915, Italy joined the Entente powers to gain control over Austria-Hungary's Italian-speaking regions.
Italy's military participation was initially disastrous, leading to the near-collapse of the Italian front in 1917, but Italy stayed in the war and helped the Entente powers win.
In 1919, proportional representation gave parties legislative seats based on their national vote percentages.
In 1919 and 1920, angry workers occupied factories, threatening a Bolshevik state and changing Italian politics.
The founder and leader of the Italian Fascists were Benito Mussolini.
His father was a Socialist who named his son after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez.
Mussolini adopted his father’s Socialist beliefs and became the editor of the party newspaper.
Mussolini wrote, “The national flag is a rag that should be placed in a dunghill.”
National Fascist Party — founded by Mussolini.
The party quickly formed paramilitary squads to fight leftist groups, earning the gratitude of factory owners and landowners who gave the party much-needed cash.
By 1921, the party had begun to elect members of the Italian parliament.
By October 1922, Mussolini demanded that King Victor Emmanuel III appoint him and other Fascists to cabinet posts.
Mussolini ordered his black-shirted thugs to march on Rome and seize power to support his demands.
If the king had declared martial law and called in the army, the Fascists would have been easily defeated.
The Fascist march on Rome was a celebration, not a coup.
Fortunately for Mussolini, his consolidation of political power faced little opposition.
After taking over in 1922, he only played parliamentary leader for a few months.
He then made constitutional changes to remove democratic constraints.
In 1924, Mussolini and the party murdered a Socialist politician, which shattered his early power.
Mussolini struggled to make Italy Fascist, possibly due to the country's nature.
In 1929, he signed the Lateran Pact with the papacy, making peace with established institutions like the Catholic Church.
For the first time, the papacy officially recognized the Italian state.
Mussolini tried to implement the new Italy's corporatist economic program, but it failed.
German Fascism
In March 1930, Hermann Müller resigned over an unemployment insurance crisis that was becoming too much for the German government due to the depression.
This was Germany's last democratic government before WWII.
Paul von Hindenburg's presidency made the Weimar Republic's future uncertain.
Hindenburg selected Heinrich Brüning, the leader of a middle-of-the-road Catholic party.
Brüning's economic program would have increased left-right political opposition without fixing the economy.
Brüning used Article 48, a Weimar Constitution emergency decree, to govern by presidential decree because he could not win a parliamentary majority.
Brüning believed voters would support austerity.
Instead, the Nazis emerged as the big winners.
The Nazis went from 12 Reichstag seats to 102 after the election.
By the spring of 1932, Hindenburg replaced Brüning with wealthy anti-parliamentary conservative Franz von Papen.
In November, the Nazis won 196 Reichstag seats, making them the largest party.
In January 1933, Hindenburg asked Hitler to become chancellor.
It was a remarkable achievement for the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler.
Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party, one of the early Weimar Republic's extremist groups, in 1919.
By 1923, he believed the party was strong enough to seize power, so he launched the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich which led to failure.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in prison, expressing his extremist views and his desire to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, which many Germans shared.
After the Beer Hall failure in 1923, Hitler decided to use the political system to gain power instead of a coup.
Nazi-armed thugs supported their political rallies and disrupted Mussolini's Fascist meetings.
Street fighting became common in Berlin and other German cities in Weimar.
In 1933, Hitler became chancellor and quickly consolidated his power.
The Reichstag building in Berlin was set on fire on February 27, 1933, but the perpetrator is unknown.
Nazis, who may have started the fire, blamed the Communists.
Hitler convinced the Reichstag to grant him emergency powers, allowing him to abolish nearly all human rights and give the executive branch almost complete power.
Despite ruling Germany, the Nazis received only 44% of the vote in the last election before World War II.
Hitler's Enabling Act gave the party emergency powers to govern the state and merged the chancellor and president's powers into one with a non-republican title, the führer.
By the summer of 1933, Hitler had banned all political parties except the Nazis and attacked the independent trade union movement.
Sturmabteilung (S.A): The Nazi political army that had played such an important role in the party’s rise to power.
Once Hitler was in power, the S.A. was expendable.
In June 1934, Hitler organized the “Night of the Long Knives,” in which he murdered his old ally Ernst Röhm, the leader of the S.A., who had wanted to make it the backbone of a new revolutionary army
The Nazification of the German state soon proceeded apace.
The Nazis worked hard to establish a Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels to gain support for such a program.
The Nazis created a brutal police force to silence political opposition and intimidate anyone who might disagree with the party line.
Western Democracies in Crisis
Great Britain
Labour Party: Supplanted the liberals to become Britain’s second-largest political party.
Liberal Party, which preferred Victorian life to total war, had serious issues after the First World War.
David Lloyd-George's promise to make Britain a "land fit for heroes" after the war inspired British soldiers and civilians to fight hard.
France
France had defeated Germany and retaken Alsace-Lorraine.
In February 1934, several center-left parties formed a "Popular Front" to prevent a Fascist victory in France like in Germany.
In May 1936, the "Popular Front" of Communists, Socialists, and Radicals won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.
Léon Blum, the Socialist Party leader, became Prime Minister.
In June, they passed the Matignon Agreement:
allowing workers to collectively bargain with employers,
reducing the work week to 40 hours, and
granting fully paid vacations.
However, France had to deal with the Spanish Civil War, which threatened the Popular Front.
Spanish Civil War
In February 1936, a leftist Popular Front coalition defeated Spanish Fascists.
In the summer of 1936, General Francisco Franco's army officers seized control of much of Spain.
Republic loyalists bravely organized to fight nationalist insurgents, disproving their prediction that the republic would collapse.
Spain was swept into an incredibly brutal civil war.
On market day, in the city of Guernica, German and Italian planes bombed and strafed the civilian population.
Picasso’s Guernica: A reflection painted out of his horror over the attack.
In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell recounted how the Communists crushed the anarchist movement in June 1937.
The Road to the Second World War
Hitler always wanted to overturn the Versailles Treaty.
In 1935, he openly began the rearmament of Germany, something that was prohibited by Versailles.
Germany Invades Austria
Hitler wants Austria to join the German Reich in Mein Kampf's first sentence.
In March 1938, this became a reality as German troops moved into Vienna.
Despite Austrian claims that they were the first victims of Nazi aggression, most Austrians celebrated the Anschluss by wildly greeting Hitler on his arrival in the city and attacking their Jewish neighbors.
Germany Invades Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia was eastern Europe's success story, with a strong army, industrial base, and democracy.
It had nationality issues, especially with the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans in the west who hated the state.
France promised to aid Czechoslovakia if Germany attacked. Those assurances came to nothing.
Great Britain Tries to Appease Germany
The British eventually settled on a policy known as appeasement.
In 1937, Neville Chamberlain became British Prime Minister and head of a conservative government.
He recognized that events in 1936 had been detrimental to British interests.
These events included:
the German occupation of the Rhineland,
the creation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, and
the Olympic games that had been held that year in Berlin.
Appeasement began with British recognition of Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia.
The British did nothing when Hitler annexed Austria.
Germany threatened to invade Czechoslovakia unless the Sudetenland, a western region populated by ethnic Germans, was given to the Reich.
In September, Chamberlain flew to Munich to attend a four-power summit with France, Italy, and Germany to discuss Czechoslovakia's future.
The Munich Agreement gave Germany all Sudeten territories at this summit.
Hitler promised to respect Czechoslovakia's sovereignty.
One year later, the Germans ignored the Munich Agreement and took most of Czechoslovakia, destroying it.
Germany and the Soviet Union Invade Poland
Versailles created Poland from German territory.
The new nation was given a strip of territory that split East Prussia from Germany to give Poles sea access.
Chamberlain wanted to stop German aggression. He made a deal with France to defend Poland's borders.
The Soviet Union also asked if the British and French would form a military alliance against the Germans.
After Stalin's purge of the officer corps, the British and French doubted the Soviet military's effectiveness and found little evidence that Stalin was more honest than Hitler.
On August 22, 1939, Stalin announced that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact.
Germany would invade Poland, while the Soviets took eastern Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, which Russia had lost in the First World War.
4.5: The Second World War (1939–1945)
The war began on September 1, 1939, with an attack on Poland.
Blitzkrieg warfare —fast attacks with tanks and other mobile units supported by warplanes — was learned from the First World War by the Germans.
Over the winter of 1939–1940, little warfare occurred, earning the time period the nickname the “Phony War.”
In April 1940, the Germans attacked Norway and Denmark to get iron ore for Germany, ending the lull.
The Fall of France
French political and military leaders were pessimistic after the eastern blitzkrieg and Scandinavian defeat.
The French built the Maginot Line during the interwar period to protect their soldiers in what they assumed would be another war of stagnant positions.
The Germans simply bypassed the fortifications, which were not extended to the Belgian frontier, and encircled the French armies.
The British, seeing that France was about to fall, staged a heroic retreat from the Belgian beaches at Dunkirk, using every available British ship, to bring the army back to Great Britain to fight another day.
France's new government was led by Marshal Pétain, the hero of the Battle of Verdun.
In the First World War, Pétain was a pessimist, and he used the opportunity to create a more authoritarian French government by pulling France out of the war.
One charismatic general, Charles de Gaulle, arrived in London and called for French forces in the colonies to form a new French army to restore national honor.
The Maquis, or French resistance, fought the Germans and Vichy state in France.
Germany Against Great Britain
The Battle of Britain was not the one-sided struggle that is often portrayed.
It is true that the Luftwaffe, the German air force, had many more planes and trained pilots. But the British had radar, which had been developed at Cambridge University and could detect oncoming German attacks.
The British Spitfires and Hurricanes were better planes than the German Messerschmitts. The British had also cracked the German secret military code.
Hermann Göring, the inept morphine addict in charge of the German air force, ordered the Luftwaffe to attack British cities after a token number of British planes bombed Berlin.
He made the decision to stop the successful raids on British air bases that had been carried out.
The Blitz was a terrible strategy that caused a lot of suffering in the cities, but it gave the Royal Air Force (RAF) time to recover.
Hitler decided to abandon his plan to invade Britain by the end of September 1940 and focus instead on achieving his ultimate goal—defeating the Soviet Union.
The Holocaust
The Holocaust: The slaughter of six million Jews.
Nuremberg Laws: Depriving Jews of citizenship and forcing them to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing whenever they left their homes.
Marriage and sex between Jews and Gentiles were also forbidden.
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis launched Kristallnacht.
That night, several hundred Jews were killed and 30,000 sent to concentration camps, proving the Germans wanted to exterminate them.
The Nazis' obsession with the "Jewish Question" is shown by their decision to use war resources to exterminate European Jewry even though the Russians were resisting.
Hitler ordered his top lieutenants to implement the "Final Solution" to deal with them and the many Jews from other conquered territories.
By 1941, one million Jews had been killed, most in mobile vans poisoned by carbon monoxide gas or machine-gunned by S.S. troops.
In January 1942, the top leaders met in Wannsee, Berlin, to plan a more efficient slaughter.
Auschwitz was the most notorious Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland.
S.S. Doctors, including Dr. Josef Mengele, sorted prisoners into work camps and gas chambers upon arrival.
Roma, homosexuals, gender-nonconformists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Russian POWs, Communists, and other "undesirables" were also imprisoned.
6 million Jews and 7 million such individuals were killed.
Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial, has a row of trees in honor of Gentiles who risked their lives to rescue Jews.
France's Vichy government rounded up Jews and handed them over to the Nazis before the Germans asked for their help.
Locals in Ukraine, Croatia, and other Eastern European countries exterminated their Jewish neighbors on their own.
The Turning of the Tide
Germany Invades the Soviet Union
They caught the Soviet forces completely unprepared.
By 1942, the Germans had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad and Leningrad, but the Russian forces' tenacity and the Soviet people's sacrifices kept them from falling.
The US and USSR formed an unlikely alliance to defeat the Third Reich and shape the postwar world due to their shared enemy.
The War in North Africa
By 1941, the war had become a global conflict.
As France collapsed, Mussolini's Italy joined Germany's war.
The Italians tried to expel the British from Egypt, extending the war to North Africa.
Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox," was one of the Germans' top commanders in this war.
He achieved great success, reaching Alexandria, Egypt, 60 miles away.
At the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942, General Montgomery's British army drove the German and Italian forces to Tunisia.
U.S. Involvement
The US joined the Axis powers after Pearl Harbor and Hitler's 1941 declaration of war.
By 1943, the Allies had defeated the Axis in Africa and sent troops to Italy, the "soft underbelly" of the Axis.
By 1943, Italy was out of the war, but its campaign had little impact on the war's outcome.
In November 1943, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met in Tehran and agreed to invade western Europe from Great Britain.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched the D-Day invasion.
The Allied landing in Europe and the Russian counterattack after Leningrad's siege ended Nazi Germany.
On May 8, 1945, a week after the suicide of Hitler, Germany surrendered unconditionally
Japan entered the Second World War to build a vast empire in the Pacific to exploit the natural resources of conquered lands and sell Japanese goods.
On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by a second on Nagasaki two days later.
On August 14, the Japanese surrendered, ending history's bloodiest war.
The Aftermath
Most of the 50 to 60 million people who died in the conflict were civilians.
The Soviet Union lost 25 million people, though the exact number will never be known.
After the Germans bombed Warsaw in 1939 and followed up in Rotterdam and London, cities across Europe were leveled.
Dresden was firebombed by the Allies, killing 50,000 people and destroying almost every German military, economic, and administrative target.
The Truemmerfrauen, or "rubble ladies," removed wreckage by hand in Berlin and other German cities without men or machinery.
After the First World War, the victors' capitals chanted "Hang the kaiser!" but did nothing to punish the war's perpetrators.
After the liberation of the Nazi death camps and the realization of the unspeakable scale of the slaughter, the Allies agreed to denazify Germany and punish the perpetrators.
The first Nuremberg Trial's defendants were charged with "crimes against humanity" under the new legal concept.
Hermann Göring, who swallowed poison smuggled into his cell to avoid execution while 11 others were executed.
Dr. Josef Mengele and other Nazis fled to the Middle East and South America, but Gestapo officer Adolf Eichmann was caught.
By June 1946, the German legal authorities quietly completed denazification after the Americans handed it over.
West Germans called 1945 "Zero Hour," the darkest moment in their history.
Over the next 20 years, Europe recovered completely, transforming lives and ushering in a period of political and social stability.
4.6: European Stability
In 1941, President Roosevelt proposed the Atlantic Charter to replace the ineffective League of Nations.
In 1945, delegates from 50 nations met in San Francisco to establish the United Nations.
In July 1945, the U.S. Senate ratified the agreement, signaling that the US would continue to support European recovery and stability.
Revanchism destabilized European affairs during the interwar period as many nations sought to reclaim territories lost in the peace treaties after World War I.
Postwar fringe groups chanted it rather than national governments.
The rise of democratic governments that were able to improve their citizens' economic conditions.
A new social contract gave workers full employment, living wages, and social welfare in exchange for their most extreme demands.
4.7: The Beginning of Cold War
There have been three major schools of thought on the causes of the Cold War.
Traditionalists blamed the Soviet Union's brutal dictatorship under Joseph Stalin for East-West hostilities.
Revisionists believed that in 1945, the US was more concerned with protecting American trade than democracy.
Post-Revisionists believed the US was more to blame than Traditionalists, even though the Soviet Union was primarily responsible.
The Yalta Conference on the Future of Germany
At Yalta, the Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin) agreed to divide Germany into four zones after the war, with an Allied Control Council to make decisions.
Yalta gave each Ally the chance to transform their zone, so the Soviet Union transformed its zone differently from the Western Allies.
Walter Ulbricht, the Soviet-appointed leader of the German Communist Party, believed that most Germans didn't want to return to Weimar's capitalist crises and would support the KPD.
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands — KPD.
Mass rape, factory dismantling for the Soviet Union, and land reform failure angered the Soviets and their KPD clients.
In 1946, Ulbricht forced the KPD and the more popular Social Democratic Party to merge, creating a one-party state that the Soviets used to take over Eastern European governments.
Reparations tensions increased during these political developments.
At Yalta, the Americans and British agreed to 20 billion dollars in reparations.
At Potsdam, the occupying powers agreed to collect reparations in their zones, with the Soviets receiving 25% of the total.
In May 1946, General Lucius Clay, the commander of the American zone, stopped collecting reparations, which stopped goods from reaching the Soviet Union.
Increasing Tensions Outside of Europe
In 1941, the Soviets and British divided and occupied Iran, agreeing to leave at the war's end.
In 1945, the British left, but the Soviets refused and demanded oil concessions.
When Truman learned that Soviet tanks were heading to Tehran, the Iranian capital, he sent warships into the Persian Gulf, and Stalin withdrew his troops.
Stalin also tried to intimidate neutral Turkey into giving the Soviets naval bases along the straits to give the Soviet fleet access to the Mediterranean.
George Kennan, a State Department official, also shaped American policy.
In 1947, Kennan wrote the Long Telegram, stating that the Soviets saw us as an ideological enemy and would never seek coexistence.
Kennan developed the policy of containment, which required "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies," in this and other Foreign Affairs articles under the pseudonym "X."
Containment and the Creation of NATO
Greece's Communist-led insurgency tested containment as a policy.
On March 12, 1947, Truman declared the Truman Doctrine to a joint session of Congress: "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
He requested $400 million for the Greek and Turkish governments.
In 1949, the United States established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to directly counter the threat posed by millions of Soviet soldiers in Eastern Europe.
In 1952, Great Britain, France, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Norway joined the US initially, with Greece and Turkey joining.
4.8: Soviet Dominance Over Eastern Europe
In 1944, Winston Churchill met with Stalin in Moscow as Soviet troops advanced through Eastern Europe.
Percentages Agreement
It divided the various nations of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence based on percentages.
Soviet influence was 90% in Romania and 50% in Hungary.
The agreement was flawed because Poland was excluded.
The USA rejected the agreement.
The British and Americans convinced the Soviets to sign a noble Declaration of Liberated Europe in Yalta.
It ordered "broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population" governments and immediate free elections in Axis or liberated countries.
Poland
Stalin's only concession on Poland was that an unspecified number of London-based anticommunist Poles would join his provisional government.
In 1947, Poland's promised elections were held under intimidation, and the Communists won 80 percent and ended multi party rule.
The Soviets knew they would have to use force to maintain Communist control over Poland because they were hated in that nation—a loathing that grew worse when the Soviets were revealed to have killed 15,000 Polish officers in Katyn at the start of the war.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe
The interwar economic and social failure of Eastern European states seemed to help the Soviet Union achieve this goal.
The Soviet Union initially tried to establish "People's Democracies" in Eastern Europe, except Poland.
This was a go-slow program for the Communists, with governments that were more proletarian than in the bourgeois West but not ready for a Soviet-style Communist system.
The Marshall Plan's offer of money to all European nations influenced the push for tighter control over Eastern Europe.
Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a threat to informal Soviet control over countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia because taking the money would lead them to the capitalist West.
In Hungary, Communists used "salami" tactics to isolate non-Communist political leaders.
The Hungarian Communist Party eliminated the Smallholders' Party by 1948 and won a tainted election with 95% of the vote the following year.
Czechoslovakia
President Eduard Benes ruled the postwar government.
Benes, a non-Communist, understood that Czechoslovakia needed a pro-Soviet foreign policy to maintain its independence.
The Czechs saw the Soviet Union as liberators and felt no debt to the West, which had sold them out at Munich in 1938.
Czech Communists formed a "People's Militia" to pressure Benes into forming a Communist government.
This intimidated Benes into forming a new government dominated by Communists.
When Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk's body was found shattered outside his window, it was clear that a multiparty Czechoslovak state was ending.
The Social Democrats were forced into the Communist Party, and in controlled elections in May 1948, the Communists won a complete victory and established a Soviet-style state.
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavian resistance initially united against the German-installed Croatian puppet government.
The Communists, led by Josip Broz Tito, fought the royalist Chetniks in a civil war as the war continued.
Tito's Communists won the civil war, but Stalin never trusted him because of the British and American aid he received and because he didn't like indigenous Communist movements he couldn't control.
By 1948, relations between the two states had deteriorated.
Tito's independent foreign policy made him the West's favorite Communist, but he ran a brutal police state at home.
4.9: The End of Imperialism
On August 15, 1947, India declared independence, starting decolonization across the Empire.
Israel
After the Holocaust, Jewish nationalism and Arabic nationalism increased.
The UN partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab homelands in response.
On May 14, 1948, the Jewish state of Israel was founded, but its Arab neighbors attacked it immediately.
Egypt and Africa
Egypt had been independent since 1922 until Abdul Nasser became president.
He nationalized the British-controlled Suez Canal in 1956.
Britain, France, and Israel planned a surprise attack on Egypt.
The British decolonized sub-Saharan Africa soon after.
Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Kenya followed Ghana's 1957 independence from Great Britain.
In 1965, many British settlers in Rhodesia formed a white supremacist government and declared independence from Britain.
Africans took control of that land, renaming it Zimbabwe, in 1980.
Indonesia, Vietnam and Algeria
The Dutch fought a costly and ultimately losing battle in the East Indies to keep the land they first occupied in the 17th century.
By 1949, the Netherlands reluctantly recognized Indonesian independence.
France nearly disintegrated trying to keep Algeria.
This followed a bitter loss in Indochina, where Ho Chi Minh led a nationalist movement that fought first the Japanese during the Second World War and then the French as they tried to reestablish colonial rule.
By 1954, France realized it was impossible and divided Vietnam into a Communist-led north and a US-dominated south.
Algeria was different from Indochina because it had been a French possession since 1830 and had over a million native French residents.
In 1958, France nearly erupted in a civil war over the Algerian question until de Gaulle became president and used his prestige four years later to grant Algerian independence.
4.10: The Creation of a European Union
Concern over the Soviet Union led to NATO, which promoted European unity.
Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC)
It managed US Marshall Plan funds.
The US insisted that Europeans use the money cooperatively and did not want it used to revive unprofitable industries to restore national pride.
The OEEC started lowering tariffs and removing trade barriers in assisted states.
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
The ECSC managed steel and coal resources from France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Robert Schuman, the ECSC's main architect, said that "any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible."
The ECSC also created models for European unity, such as the European Parliament, a court of justice, and direct tax revenue for the Community.
European Economic Community (EEC)
In 1973, Britain, Ireland, and Denmark joined the EEC, which lifted almost all trade restrictions.
In 1986, the European Single Act allowed capital, labor, and services like banking and insurance to move freely among member nations.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 established the Euro, which went into circulation in January 2002, except in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, which refused to give up the pound.
The EEC became the European Union (EU) after the Maastricht Treaty expanded cooperation into defense, justice, and environmental issues.
Recent and Future Expansion of the European Union
The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all former Warsaw Pact members, joined the EU.
Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.
Turkey negotiated membership in 2005.
For many reasons, Turkey's EU bid is controversial.
Some EU officials doubt Turkey's economic or human rights commitment.
European Constitution: The caveat being that all EU members had to approve the constitution for it to go into effect.
In May 2005, France, a leader in European cooperation, voted "no" in a referendum.
4.11: Post-WWII Developments in Western Europe
Great Britain
Sir William Beveridge, a Liberal Party member, proposed in 1942 that all adults pay a weekly contribution to provide benefits to the sick, unemployed, retired, and widowed.
Labour established the National Health Service (NHS), which provided for a comprehensive system of free health care.
In 1945, the government took over the Bank of England, railroads, and electric, iron, and steel industries.
The existing owners received fair compensation, and professional managers—often the same ones—continued to run the company.
The "Age of Austerity" lasted until 1954, when wartime butter and sugar rationing ended.
By the 1951 general election, the Labour Party and the public were tired of change, giving Churchill's Conservatives another chance.
The "Politics of Consensus" emerged because the two major parties agreed on social services and economic management, even though they disagreed on funding.
By the 1950s, Western Europe's economies had grown faster than Britain's.
After the war, Germany rebuilt its factories with the latest technology, while Britain relied on older factories.
Britain also lacked central economic planning and faced aggressive unions that demanded higher wages without productivity gains.
In 1979, Prime Minister James Callaghan's Labour government couldn't handle a wave of strikes that hurt road transport and public services — the “winter of discontent.”
Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister, led the Conservative Party to victory.
Thatcherism—her economic policies—included tight money supply control to reduce inflation, sharp cuts in public spending, and tax cuts, especially for higher earners.
Thatcher was a divisive leader, and if not for the 1982 Falkland Islands war, her career might have ended early.
In her third term, Thatcher tried to apply market principles to the NHS and education system, and her party split over her opposition to European integration.
After 18 years in opposition, Tony Blair's Labour Party won in 1997.
Blair, who became party leader in 1994, created "New Labour" by moving Labour away from socialism.
Labour under Blair focused on improving Britain's social services, reforming the House of Lords, and devolving power to Wales and Scotland.
Blair won a second term in 2001 and a third in 2005, but anger over Blair's support for the Iraq War reduced Labour's margin of victory in 2005.
Gordon Brown, Blair's longtime Chancellor of the Exchequer, became Labour Party leader and UK prime minister in May 2007.
Brown served until 2010, when David Cameron became prime minister.
Cameron resigned in June 2016 after Britain voted for Brexit.
Theresa May became the Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister in July 2016.
France
France in 1945 had to deal with the grim aftermath of 1940's "Strange Defeat."
Although it took several years, Marcel Ophuls's powerful 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity opened the door to questioning these national myths.
From 1995 to 2007, President Jacques Chirac addressed France's role in the deportation of 66,000 Jews to Germany and other wartime collaboration issues.
Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French government-in-exile, was expected to rule France after the war.
When the Fourth Republic refused to establish a strong presidency, de Gaulle left politics.
The Fourth Republic dealt with colonial issues like the 1954 Indochina defeat and the 1954 Algerian revolt.
After the Algerian crisis raised fears of a military coup in France, de Gaulle returned to politics and led the 1958 plebiscite that established the Fifth Republic, which included the powerful presidency he now held.
France refused to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty and detonated its first hydrogen bomb in 1968 to defend itself.
France also had an independent foreign policy, withdrawing from NATO's unified command in 1966 and recognizing China's Communist government over the US's objections.
In 1945, five million men returned from Germany and needed jobs, the transport system was shattered by heavy fighting in the last year of the war, and coal and food supplies were low.
This dire situation favored the French Communist Party, which had a good wartime resistance record and appeared to offer economic solutions.
The Soviet Union invasion turned the party against the German occupiers.
Jean Monnet, a European Community founder, designed France's economic program.
The Monnet Plan created the Commissariat Général du Plan (CGP) to run the economy with nonpolitical technocrats.
It also created Americanization.
By 1968, young people were disillusioned with French life and angry about overcrowded classrooms, laboratories, and libraries as more students went to college. Paris was the worst.
Students and workers formed an alliance, but the students' demand for a complete reordering of French society clashed with the workers' more limited demands for wage increases and better working conditions.
Gaullists ruled France until 1981 when Socialist François Mitterrand became the longest-serving president.
In 1995, Paris mayor Jacques Chirac succeeded Mitterrand, who was reelected in 1988.
He was the second-longest serving French president, serving two full terms for 12 years.
He promised tax cuts, job programs, and social reform.
In May 2007, Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy defeated Socialist Segolene Royal in a runoff to succeed Chirac.
He promised to control immigration and modernize the country.
After Sarkozy, François Hollande of the Socialist party took office in 2012.
In May of 2017, Emmanuel Macron was elected president under the banner of En Marche!, a centrist political party he had founded the previous year.
Italy
Christian Democrats ruled Italy until the 1990s.
The Communists remained a significant opposition party.
Antonio Gramscim, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, encouraged political flexibility that was lacking in the French Communist Party.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Italy was known as the "economic miracle."
Italy's early commitment to the Common Market and the 6 million southern Italians who moved north in the 1960s provided cheap labor.
By the 1970s, high unemployment, inflation, and strikes had caused a huge loss of workdays.
Despite their flaws, the Christian Democrats remained in power because there was no other choice.
The southern mafia revived, and extreme left political terrorism targeted politicians, judges, and business leaders.
In 1978, the Red Brigade kidnapped former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and murdered him when the government refused to negotiate his release.
Silvio Berlusconi, a conservative media magnate who controls most of Italy's major media outlets outside government control, was defeated in 2006 over corruption allegations.
In May 2006, Olive Tree leader Romano Prodi became prime minister again.
Germany
Berlin, like the rest of Europe, was divided into four occupation zones, making it a potential flashpoint for Cold War violence.
In June 1948, the US and UK introduced a new currency without Soviet approval, sparking a series of crises over the divided city.
Stalin retaliated by completely blocking Berlin from the west.
The Berlin Airlift lasted ten-and-a-half months until Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949.
In 1949, the US, UK, and France formed the Federal Republic of Germany with Bonn as its capital, capitalizing on the airlift's success.
Several months later, the Soviet Union declared its eastern German zone the Communist-dominated German Democratic Republic.
Berlin remained the Cold War's epicenter in Germany.
In 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave the West six months to leave Berlin and let East Germany control access.
President Eisenhower insisted on another Berlin Airlift if necessary.
On August 13, 1961, East German border police began erecting a barbed-wire barrier between East and West Berlin at 2:00.
Over the next few days, the Berlin Wall was built.
By 1949, over 2.5 million educated East Germans had left for West Germany, causing a brain drain that the Communists considered necessary.
Konrad Adenauer, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader and chancellor from 1949 to 1963, shaped the early history of Germany.
Adenauer, an anti-Nazi conservative who had been mayor of Cologne in the Weimar Republic, feared the Soviet Union and preferred a West German state tied to the West to a unified Germany forced into neutrality.
His government paid Holocaust victims and Israel directly to address the Nazis' atrocities.
Gerhard Ritter, Adenauer's minister of economics and chancellor after his 1961 retirement, engineered this economic boom without high inflation.
During the Adenauer/Ritter years, the Social Democrats appeared to be in permanent opposition.
In 1955, the party dropped Marxist class struggle language and elected charismatic Willy Brandt as leader.
Brandt felt it necessary to reach out to the Soviets and their satellite states in Eastern Europe while remaining firmly tied to the West.
Ostpolitik established de facto recognition of the East German state by signing treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
Helmut Schmidt, Brandt's successor as chancellor, led the Social Democrats to victory in 1976 despite the 1973 oil crisis.
As in Great Britain and the United States, the early 1980s seemed to represent a surge in conservative politics, and in 1982, the CDU achieved an electoral comeback under Helmut Kohl.
In 1990, Helmut Kohl moved quickly to reunite Germany.
He promoted the EU-creating Maastricht Treaty with French President François Mitterand.
At 16 years, Kohl was Germany's longest-serving chancellor since Otto von Bismarck.
In 1998, Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats won again.
In November 2005, the CDU's Angela Merkel became Germany's first female chancellor.
In September of that year, no party won a majority of Bundestag seats, prompting this deal.
4.12: The Collapse of the Communist Bloc
East Germany and the Berlin Wall
In 1953, East German workers protested the government's productivity plan and later demanded political freedom.
By 1961, millions of East Germans fled to the West, prompting the Soviets to build the Berlin Wall.
Power Struggles in the Soviet Union
After Stalin's 1953 death, the USSR changed.
Nikita Khrushchev, the power struggle winner, did not execute the losers.
Khrushchev claimed that Stalin's government had deviated from Marxism-Leninism's political program, rather than being a natural outgrowth of it, and that only Marxist-Leninist reforms would be acceptable.
By October 1962, the two nuclear superpowers nearly went to war when the Soviets placed missiles in Cuba.
However, U.S. President Kennedy's crisis management prevented a nuclear disaster.
Leonid Brezhnev, Stalin’s successor, did not restore Stalinist terror, but he did strengthen the party bureaucracy and KGB and restrict reform in satellite states.
Dissatisfaction with this step backward sparked a Czechoslovakian reform movement by 1968. The "Prague Spring” sought a more humanistic socialism within the Soviet Bloc.
Brezhnev declared the "Brezhnev Doctrine," stating that the Soviet Union would support any Eastern European communist state threatened by internal strife.
Reform in Poland and Eastern Europe
Poland's 1978 election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II was the Brezhnev Doctrine's biggest challenge.
In 1980, Lech Walesa led a massive strike at the Gdansk Lenin shipyard,demanding the right to form an independent trade union. an independent trade union.
Solidarity survived martial law and being outlawed by going underground with the Catholic Church's help.
By 1989, the Polish economy was so bad that the government had to negotiate with Walesa and his union.
The negotiations led to multiparty elections, which in that year defeated all Communist candidates.
Mikhail Gorbachev, a reformer, opposed the "Brezhnev Doctrine" when he became Kremlin leader.
As Communist-led regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Albania collapsed peacefully, 1989 was one of the most remarkable years of the century.
In East Germany, the collapse of the regime in that same year was followed in 1990 by the reunification of East and West Germany and the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
As Nicolae Ceausescu desperately clung to power in Romania, this peaceful transformation failed.
On Christmas Day 1989, his government collapsed and he and Elena, his wife, were executed.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chernobyl nuclear accident showed how bad the nation was.
Gorbachev wanted to limit the extent of this change.
He accepted:
Glasnost: Openness in debate.
Perestroika: An economic restructuring of the state.
By 1990, Gorbachev appointed hard-liners to government positions, making reform unlikely and bringing the system down.
The rivalry between Gorbachev and Russian Parliament chairman Boris Yeltsin contributed to this.
In August 1991, hard-line communists staged a coup in Gorbachev's Crimean home, arresting him for threatening the Communist Party. The coup failed, ending Communist control.
By 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed as various republics left. After that, Gorbachev resigned.
A New Russian Republic
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation with 57% of the vote in 1991.
Yeltsin began his first term by rapidly transitioning the economy from state control to free-market capitalism, a policy supported by many foreign economists, including IMF advisors.
The new Russian state's official corruption and massive mafia-style criminal organizations also hurt Yeltsin's popularity.
In October 1993, the Congress of People's Deputies began impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin after a series of conflicts with Parliament over his economic policies.
Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell Congress and dissolved the legislature.
He established the Duma — a new constitution with increased presidential power.
Despite several strokes and public drunkenness, Yeltsin ran for reelection in 1996, surprising Kremlin observers.
Yeltsin easily won reelection, but his second term was notable only for negotiating a Chechnya peace treaty.
Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as prime minister before resigning in December 1999.
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, immediately shielded Yeltsin and his family from corruption charges.
Putin's rapid rise and Yeltsin's resignation surprised other presidential candidates, giving him a huge political advantage. He was easily elected in 2000.
Putin would have been easily reelected in 2004 even without his media monopoly.
His popularity was boosted by rising oil prices, which boosted the Russian economy, but Russia is in danger of repeating the Soviet mistake of the 1970s by becoming too dependent on this one commodity.
Ethnic Warfare in former Yugoslavia
After the war, Josip Tito helped found a Yugoslav state independent of the Soviet Bloc.
After his death in 1980, Slovenia and Croatia split from Yugoslavia.
In 1992, most Bosnian Muslims and Croats wanted to follow suit.
Bosnia's Serbs refused to join a minority Bosnian state.
With the help of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević, they carried out "ethnic cleansing," the forced removal and sometimes genocidal murder of Muslims and ethnic Bosnians in regions under their control.
The Serb shelling of Sarajevo, especially on market days when more people were out, was one of the century's final atrocities.
The 1995 American-brokered Dayton Accords brought temporary peace after such horrors.
The Serbs saw Kosovo, a Yugoslav province, as the cradle of their national identity after their defeat in the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Turks in 1389.
In 1998, Milošević justified his invasion of Kosovo by citing KLA attacks on Serbs.
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA): A small militant group that wanted to see the creation of an independent Kosovo.
In March 1999, NATO bombed Serbia for 74 days after the Serbs refused to sign a treaty giving the Kosovars more autonomy.
NATO's first offensive action against a sovereign nation forced Serbian troops to leave Kosovo.
In 2000, he was forced to call new elections, which he lost to Vojislav Kostunica.
Milošević reluctantly handed over power to Kostunica after hundreds of thousands of Serbs took to the streets to demand he accept the election results.
In 2001, President Kostunica changed his mind and turned Milošević over to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to receive badly needed economic aid from the West, but he died of a heart attack while his trial was still underway in 2006.
In February 2007, the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) found no evidence linking Serbia under Slobodan Milošević to Bosnian War genocide and war crimes.
In January 2009, the European Parliament declared July 11 a day of remembrance and mourning for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.
In July 1995, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed and nearly 25,000 women, children, and elderly were forcibly deported.
The Rise of Far-Right Reactionaries and Brexit
In the first two decades of the 21st century, Europe found itself gripped by a rise in the popularity of far-right nationalism.
Conservative social values, exacerbated by minority slights, define this movement.
Ultra-nationalism, especially against Middle Eastern immigration, and explicit racism are also present.
These ultra-conservative parties have advanced in European parliamentary elections:
Marine Le Pen’s French Front National (FN)
Geert Wilder’s Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV)
Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)
These groups openly support EU dismantlement.
In the 2016 Brexit vote, the British Isles voted 53–47 to leave the EU.
Granted, the U.K. had always been a bit of an outlier in the EU.
As an island nation, it has maintained a distinct national identity and never adopted the euro.
UK leaders rejected the EU's withdrawal terms three times, making withdrawal agreement negotiations tense.
In January 2020, the UK officially withdrew from the European Union.
Ultimate Guide: AP EU History
Flashcard Reviewer of Important EU History Dates
Period 1: The Renaissance to the Wars of Religion (1450–1648)
1.1: The Renaissance: An Overview
Georgio Vasari
A 16th-century painter, architect, and writer.
He used the Italian word rinascita (rebirth) to describe the Renaissance era.
In the mid-15th century, the printing press was invented which allowed these cultural trends to spread to other parts of Europe.
This led to the creation of the Northern Renaissance movement.
Italian Renaissance writers — focused on secular concerns.
Northern Europe Renaissance writers — focused on religious concerns.
This led to the creation of the Protestant Reformation Movement.
1.2: The Italian City-States
Renaissance Italy's City-states: Located at the heart of Europe's economic, political, and cultural life during the 14th to 15th century.
Holy Roman Empire: They were in control of the town of northern Italy during the Middle Ages.
Popolo (the people): An urban underclass who wanted their share of wealth and political power.
Ciompi Revolt (1378): A revolt formed by the Popolo who expressed their dissatisfaction with the political and economic order by staging a violent struggle against the government in Florence.
In Milan, the resulting social tensions that occurred led to the rise of a signor (tyrant), and the city became dominated by Sforza — a family of mercenaries.
Medici: This family used their banking wealth to establish themselves as the Florentine republic's behind-the-scenes rulers and later as hereditary dukes of the city.
Central Italy in the Mediterranean was ideal for creating links between the Greek culture of the East and the Latin culture of the West.
Southern Italy had been home to many Greek colonies and later served as the center of the Roman Empire.
Classic Civilization has never disappeared to the Italian mainland.
1.3: Humanism
Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374)
Considered the founder of humanism.
Coined the phrase “Dark Ages” — to denote what he thought was the cultural decline that took place following the collapse of the Roman world in the 5th century.
Was engaged with the works of Cicero — a philosopher and a politician who provided accounts of the collapse of the Roman Republic.
His goal is to write in the Ciceronian style.
His works inspired the ‘civic humanists’ — a group of young wealthy Florentines.
The revival of Greek is one of the most significant aspects of the Italian Renaissance.
Oration on the Dignity of Man — written by Pico Della Mirandola; expressed here is the positive Platonic view of human potential.
Florentine Platonic Academy — which is sponsored by Cosimo de Medici; merged platonic philosophy with Christianity to Neoplatonism.
The Courier (1528) — written by Castiglione.
Renaissance Man: A person who knew several languages, was familiar with classical literature, and was also skilled in arts
Lorenzo Valla
He realized that languages can tell a history all their own.
He proved that the Donation of Constantine turned control of the western half of his empire over to the papacy, and could not have been written by Constantine.
He also took his critical techniques to the Vulgate Bible and showed that its author, Jerome, had mistranslated several critical passages from Greek sources.
Vulgate Bible: The standard Latin Bible of the Middle Ages.
Leonardo Bruni
He was affected that women don’t have access to humanist teachings.
He established an educational program for women — tellingly left out of his curriculum the study of rhetoric — those critical parts of male education.
Christine de Pisan
A daughter of the physician to the French King Charles V.
She wrote The City of Ladies (1405) to counter the popular notion that women were inferior to men and incapable of making moral choices.
She wrote that women have to go out of their comfort zones or move to a “City of Ladies” to flourish their abilities.
1.4: Renaissance Art
With the rise of individualism, Renaissance artists have significant individuals in their own right.
To become well-known and wealthy, these artists competed for the patronage of nonreligious people.
These wealthy people preferred art that showcased their accomplishments over medieval art's spiritual message.
These patrons demanded a more naturalistic style, and the invention of fresh artistic techniques helped to fulfill their demands.
Filippo Brunelleschi’s Dome over the Cathedral of Florence — the first dome to be completed in western Europe since the downfall of the Roman Empire.
Fresco: A method of art painting that is done on wet plaster or tempera on wood.
Oil Painting: It was developed in northern Europe and became the dominant method in Italy.
Chiaroscuro: The use of contrasts between light and dark, to create three-dimensional images.
Single-point perspective: A painting style that enables painters to create more realistic environments for their work by having all of the features converge at one point in the distance.
High–Renaissance movement started at the end of the 15th century.
During this movement, the center of the Renaissance moved from Florence to Rome.
This movement lasted until around the 1520s and is also called Late Renaissance or Mannerism.
The artworks featured twisted figures and muddled concepts, which may have represented the growing sense of crisis in the Italian world as a result of both political and religious issues.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Labeled as a Renaissance man.
He was a military engineer, an architect, a sculptor, a scientist, and an inventor whose sketchbooks reveal a remarkable mind that came up with workable designs for submarines and helicopters.
Recent reconstructions of his designs reveal that he even created a handbag.
Mona Lisa is one of his famous paintings.
Raphael (1483–1520)
He came from the beautiful Renaissance city of Urbino and died at the early age of 37.
Aside from his wonderfully gentle images of Jesus and Mary, he connects his times to the classical past in “The School of Athens”, which depicts Plato and Aristotle standing together in a fanciful classical structure and employs the deep, single-point perspective.
Michelangelo (1475–1564)
David: One of his sculptural masterpieces was commissioned by Florence, as a propaganda work to inspire the citizens in their long struggle against the overwhelming might of Milan.
He was tasked to create a tomb for Julius II himself.
Julius II also employed him to work at the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
He exemplified in his final work in the Sistine Chapel, the brilliant yet disturbing Final Judgment.
1.5: The Northern Renaissance
By the late 15th century, Italian Renaissance humanism began to affect the rest of Europe.
Northerners were still trying to deepen their Christian faith and show their humanism.
Northern Renaissance: A more religious movement than the Italian Renaissance.
Christian Humanists: These are northern writers who criticized their mother church.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536)
In Praise of Folly: He used satire as a means of criticizing what he thought were the problems of the Church.
Handbook of Christian Knight: He emphasized in this work the idea of inner faith as opposed to the outer forms of worship.
He also made a Latin Translation of the New Testament — it helped understand the life of the early Christians through its close textual analysis of the Acts of the Apostles.
He wanted to reform the Church, not abandon it.
Sir Thomas More (1478–1535)
He is a friend of Erasmus.
He wrote the classic work Utopia.
He also coined the word utopia, which means ‘nowhere.’
He was very critical of some church practices, but in the end, he gave his life to uphold his convictions.
He was put to death because he refused to swear an oath recognizing Henry as Head of the Church of England.
Northern Renaissance Culture
Albrecht Dürer: A brilliant draftsman, whose woodcuts powerfully lent support to the doctrinal revolution brought about by his fellow German Martin Luther.
The greatest achievements in the arts in Northern Europe in the 16th to 17th centuries — took place in England.
Canterbury Tales was written by Geoffrey Chaucer, which was based on The Decameron by Boccaccio.
Elizabeth Renaissance: Explains the emergence of the sheer number of men possessing exceptional talent during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson — though they were both writers of significant repute, this age produced an unrivaled genius— Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
He only had a basic education.
He was able to write plays like King Lear and Hamlet, which exhibit an unmatched comprehension of the human psyche and a genius for dramatic intensity.
Printing Press
The traditional method of producing books, which involved a monk working diligently in a monastic scriptorium, was incapable of meeting the increased demand.
Johannes Gutenberg
He introduced a movable type of printing press to western Europe.
Between 1452 and 1453, he printed approximately 200 Bibles.
He spent a great deal of money making his Bibles as ornate as any handwritten version.
Historians regard the printing press as one of the most culturally significant inventions of all time.
The ability to disseminate printed material quickly almost certainly contributed to the spread of the Reformation.
1.6: Protestant Reformation
Protestant Reformation: This movement caused a great split in Western Christendom, displacing the pope as Europe's sole religious authority.
Although it took decades, the Catholic Reformation movement took a response to the protestants’ challenge.
The humanism in Renaissance led individuals to question certain parties, such as the efficacy of religious relics and the value to one’s salvation of living the life of a monk.
The printing press made Bibles more widely available, making the Church's exclusive right to interpret Scripture particularly vexing to those who could read texts.
Problems Facing the Church on the Eve of Reformation
Black Death: A ferocious outbreak of plague, struck the population of Europe.
Anticlericalism: A measure of contempt for the clergy, arising in part from what many saw as individual clergymen's poor performance during the plague's crisis years.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s The Decameron reveal some of the satirical edges with which literate society now greeted clergymen.
Pietism: The notion of a direct relationship between the individual and God — thereby reducing the importance of the hierarchical Church based in Rome.
The 14th century was a disaster for the Church — with the papacy under French dominance in the city of Avignon for almost 70 years.
During the Great Schism of the early 15th century, there were three popes at the same time — all trying to excommunicate one another.
One of the problems included a poorly educated lower clergy.
Peasant priests proved to be unable to put forward a learned response to Luther’s challenge to their church.
Simony: The selling of church offices.
In facing some of these problems, some movements arose in the late Middle Ages that were declared heretical by the church.
In England, John Wycliffe questioned the Church's material wealth, the miracle of sacramental, and penance doctrines, and, in a foretaste of Luther's ideas, the sale of indulgences.
He urged followers (the Lollards) to read the Bible and interpret it themselves — which led him to translate the Bible into English.
In Bohemia, Jan Hus led a revolt that combined religious and nationalistic elements.
He believed the Bible, not the church, was most authoritative.
He was horrified by what he saw as the clergy's immoral behavior.
Jan Hus was called before the Council of Constance in 1415 by Pope Martin V, though he was promised a safe passage, he was condemned as a heretic and burnt at the stake.
Martin Luther (1483–1546)
The first issue that brought attention to Luther was the debate over indulgences.
The selling of indulgences was a practice that began during the time of the Crusades.
The papacy sold indulgences that exempted knights from purgatory to recruit them for the crusades and raise money.
After the crusade movement ended, the Church began to grant indulgences as a means of filing its treasury.
In 1517, Albert of Hohenzollern, who had already held two bishoprics, was offered the Archbishopric of Mainz.
He had to raise 10,000 ducats so he borrowed from the Fuggers — the great banking family of the age.
To repay his debt, the papacy allowed him to preach an indulgence, with half of the proceeds going to Rome to finish St. Peter's Basilica.
Johann Tetzel — was sent to preach indulgence throughout Germany with the famous phrase “As soon as the gold in the basin rings, right then the soul to heaven springs.”
Luther was outraged by Tetzel's actions and posted his 95 Theses on Wittenberg's Castle Church to start a debate.
In 1505, he was caught in a thunderstorm and a bolt of lightning struck near him.
He cried, “St. Anne help me; I will become a monk. ”
He kept his promise, joined the Augustinian Order, and got dissatisfied with leading his life as a monk.
Following the publication of 95 Theses, Luther was then involved in a public challenge.
John Eck: A prominent theologian challenged Luther.
He called Luther a Hussite.
In 1520, Luther wrote three of his most important political tracts.
In his Address to the Christian Nobility, he urged that a secular government had the right to reform the Church.
In his On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he attacked other teachings of the Church, such as the sacraments.
In his Liberty of a Christian Man, he hit on what would become the basic elements of Lutheran belief: grace is the sole gift of God; therefore, one is saved by faith alone, and the Bible is the sole source of this faith.
In response to Luther’s works, Pope Leo X decided to act.
The Pope issued a papal bull (an official decree) that demanded that Luther recant the ideas found in his writings or be burnt as a heretic.
Luther publicly burned the bull to show that he no longer accepted papal authority. In turn, the pope excommunicated Luther.
Frederick, the Elector of Saxony was sympathetic to Luther’s ideas or at least wanted him to be given a public hearing.
In 1521, Luther appeared before the Diet of Worms — a meeting of the German nobility.
He got into a conversation with Charles V, the Holy Roman Empire.
“Do you or do you not repudiate your books and the errors they contain?” Charles V asked him.
Luther answered: “Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.”
Luther was then banned from the Empire but was safely hidden over the next year in Wartburg Castle by the Elector of Saxony.
Luther and his friend Philip Melanchthon decided to establish a new church free of papal control based on his revolutionary ideas.
Instead of the seven sacraments of the Catholic church. He reduced them into two — baptism and communion.
He rejected transubstantiation — the priest-only process of turning bread and wine into Christ's flesh and blood.
He claimed that Christ was already present in the Sacrament.
Luther also abolished the practice of monasticism and the requirement of clergy celibacy.
He had a happy marriage with a former nun, with whom he had several children.
Why did the Reformation Succeed?
Protestantism spread to many northern German, Scandinavian, English, Scottish, Dutch, French, and Swiss states within three decades of Luther's 95 Theses.
Protestantism: The term today is used very broadly and means any non-Catholic or non-Eastern Orthodox Christian faith.
In 1529, a group of Lutherans attended the Diet of Speyer to negotiate with the Catholic Church but "protested" the final document.
German Peasants’ Revolt (1525)
German peasants' worsening economic situation and their belief, expressed in the Twelve Articles, that Luther's call for a "priesthood of all believers" was social egalitarianism led to the revolt.
The revolt and the distortion of his ideas horrified Luther.
He published a violently angry tract entitled “Against the Robbing and Murderous Hordes of Peasants,” in which he urged that no mercy be shown to the revolutionaries.
When Emperor Maximilian died in 1519, his grandson and heir Charles V was caught in a struggle with French King Francis I to see who would sit on the imperial throne.
Charles V was unable to deal with the revolt in Germany because he was involved in extended wars with France and with the Ottoman Empire.
In the 1540s, Schmalkaldic War was fought between Charles and some of the Protestant princes.
For a time Charles has the upper hand, he was forced to sign the Peace of Augsburg by 1555.
This treaty legalized Lutheranism in Lutheran-ruled territories and kept Catholic territories Catholic.
Radical Reformation
Radical Reformation: Describes a variety of religious sects that developed during the 16th century, inspired in part by Luther’s challenge to the established Church.
Anabaptists: A group who denied the idea of infant baptism.
They believed that baptism works only when it is practiced by adults who are fully aware of the decision they are making.
Rebaptism: It as declared a capital offense throughout the Holy Roman Empire, something on which both the pope and Luther heartily agreed.
Anabaptists were persecuted even more when they tried to establish an Old Testament theocracy that allowed men to have multiple wives.
Antitrinitarians: A group who denied the scriptural validity of the Trinity, were part of the Radical Reformation.
Zwingli and Calvin
Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531)
His teachings began to make an impact on the residents of the Swiss city of Zurich.
He accused monks of indolence and high living.
In 1519, he specifically rejected the veneration of saints and called for the need to distinguish between factual and fictional accounts of their lives.
He announced that unbaptized children were not damned to eternal life.
He also questioned the power of ex-communication.
His most powerful statement was his attack on the claim that tithing was a divine institution.
He was a strict sacramentarian in that he denied all the sacraments.
To him, the Holy Communion was simply a memorial of Christ’s death.
He died leading the troops of Zurich against the Swiss Catholic cantons in battle.
John Calvin (1509–1564)
His main ideas are found in his Institutes of the Christian Religion — he argued that grace was bestowed on relatively few individuals, and the rest were consigned to hell.
This philosophy of predestination was the cornerstone of his thought and one that does not make any room for free will.
Calvinism began to spread rapidly in the 1540s and 1550s, becoming the established church in Scotland.
In France, the Calvinists were known as Huguenots.
It was said that Calvinism saved the Protestant Reformation.
In the mid-16th century, it was the dynamic Calvinism that stood in opposition to a newly aggressive Catholic Church during the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
In Europe's shipbuilding capital, they saved enough money to build two ships and sail across the Atlantic Ocean to Massachusetts, where they founded the pilgrims.
1.7: English Reformation
Henry VIII (r. 1509–1546)
A powerful English Monarch was supportive of the Catholic Church.
He criticized Luther by writing a pamphlet — The Defence of the Seven Sacraments.
He was never comfortable with Protestant Theology.
The "King's Great Matter," King Henry VIII's attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon, began the English Reformation.
He had grown concerned that Catherine had failed in producing sons, leaving him without a male heir.
He then fell in love with a young woman at his court, Anne Boleyn, who refused to sleep with him unless he made her his queen.
But then the papacy showed no signs of granting Henry’s annulment to Catherine since she was the aunt of the powerful Charles V.
In November 1529, he began the Reformation Parliament. He used a tool to give him ultimate authority on religious matters.
This led him to bribe Anne Boleyn to sleep with him and have a secret marriage — which led to Anne’s pregnancy.
In April 1533, Parliament enacted a statute, “Act in Restraint of Appeals” — which declared that all spiritual cases within the kingdom were within the king’s jurisdiction and authority and not the pope’s.
In September 1533, Anne Boleyn’s child was born, but it was a baby girl, Elizabeth Tudor.
Since Henry was desperate to have a male heir, he was married a total of six times — until his third wife, Jane Seymour, gave birth to Edward.
The Act of Supremacy of 1534 limited the English Reformation by declaring the King of England the Supreme Head of the Church of England.
The brief reign of his son Edward V (r. 1574–1553) saw an attempt to institute genuine Protestant theology into the church that Henry had created.
During the short reign of Mary Tudor (r. 1553–1558) — the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, there was an attempt to bring England back into the orbit of the Catholic Church.
She discovered that many Protestants remained after restoring formal links between England and the papacy.
To end this, she allowed hundreds of Englishmen to be burnt at the stake, earning her the sobriquet — Bloody Mary.
In the long successful reign of Elizabeth Tudor (r. 1558–1603), a final religious settlement was worked out, one in which the Church of England followed a middle-of-the-road Protestant course.
1.8: Counter-Reformation
Historians refer Protestant Reformation as Counter-Reformation — which in fact, it was commonly known as Catholic Reformation.
It was a Counter-Reformation in the sense that the Catholic Church was taking steps to counteract some of the successes of the Protestant side.
Among these steps was the creation of the Index of Prohibited Books — including the works of Erasmus and Galileo.
The Papal Inquisition was also revived, and people who were deemed to be heretics were put to death for their religious beliefs.
Council of Trent: It was the centerpiece of the Catholic Reformation.
It was dominated by the papacy and enhanced its power.
It took steps to address some of the issues that sparked the Reformation, including placing limits on simony.
They mandated that a seminary for the education of clergy should be established in every diocese.
The council refused to concede any point of theology to the Protestants.
They created the idea of the Baroque style and it urged that a more intensely religious art be created.
Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
Organized by Ignatius Loyola — a Spanish noble who was wounded in battle and presented his recuperation time reading various Catholic tracts.
Loyola believed that even if the Bible did not exist, there was still the spirit.
The Jesuits established themselves as a teaching order while also serving as Catholic missionaries in areas where Lutheranism had made significant inroads.
Poland was a prime example of the re-proselytization of Catholicism.
1.9: Portuguese and Spanish Empires
Portugal built an empire mostly by sea, while Spain built empires on land.
Portugal kept looser control over its properties, while Spain maintained a tighter grip over its tributary empire.
Portugal lost their holdings quickly, while the Spanish maintained its overseas properties until the 19th century.
While Portugues is having a head start on the African Route to the Indian Ocean, the Spanish decided to try an Atlantic route to the east.
In 1415, Prince Henry the Navigator participated in the capture of the North African port of Ceuta by the Muslims.
This conquest spurred his interest in Africa.
He was inspired to sponsor a navigational school in Lisbon and a series of navigation.
His goal is not only to develop trade with Africa but also to find a route to India and the Far East around Africa and cut out the Italian middlemen.
In 1487, Bartholomew Dias, a Portuguese captain, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa.
In 1489, Vasco de Gama reached the coast of India.
The Portuguese first mounted cannons on their ships and developed squadrons, giving them an advantage over the Arab fleets patrolling the Indian Ocean.
They controlled the lucrative spice trade on the western coast of India.
On August 2, 1492, Christopher Columbus, a sailor from Genoa, set sail certain that he would find the eastern route.
He believed that he would fulfill medieval religious prophecies that spoke of converting the whole world to Christianity.
After 33 days of voyage from the Canary Islands, he landed in the eastern Bahamas — which he insisted was an undeveloped part of Asia.
He called the territory “Indies” and the indigenous people “Indians”.
In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe and he never saw the end of his voyage because he died in the Philippines.
He proved where Columbus landed was not the Far East — but an unknown territory.
In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico with a small force of 600 men.
He arrived at the heart of the Aztec Empire — a militaristic state, which through conquest had carved out a large state with a large capital: Tenochtitlán.
The Aztecs viewed the Spaniards, who were riding on horses wearing armor, and carrying guns, as gods.
Montezuma: The Aztec ruler tried to appease the Spaniards with gifts of gold — but the Spanish just seized the city and held him hostage — which led to his unknown death.
The Aztecs' ability to fight was stopped by smallpox brought by the conquerors to the Indigenous people.
By 1521, Cortés declared the former Aztec Empire to be New Spain.
In 1531, Francisco Pizarro set out to Peru with a tiny force of 200 men.
Inca Empire of Peru: The Incas had carved out a large empire by conquering and instigating harsh rule over many other tribes.
He treacherously captured Atahualpa (Inca Emperor), who then had his subjects raise vast amounts of gold for ransom.
By 1533, Pizarro had grown tired of ruling through Atahualpa and had to kill him.
The Spanish set out to create haciendas, to exploit both the agricultural and mineral riches of the land.
Due to a forced labor system, and encomienda, the indigenous population continued to die at an incredible pace from both disease and overwork.
The Spanish and Portuguese began transporting captured Africans to the New World to work on farms and mines for their estates.
The European powers relied upon the Catholic Church to justify their atrocious overseas behavior. Their mission is:
To use thousands of missionary priests to convert indigenous people to Christianity.
To acquire massive amounts of land in the New World and sell them to the European landowning classes.
Columbian Exchange
The transatlantic transfer of animals, plants, diseases, people, technology, and ideas among Europe, the Americas, and Africa.
Mercantilism had a strong effect on European governance.
The practitioners believe that the government needs to actively regulate the economy of its population.
By doing so, the rulers maintained a favorable trade balance, monitored the import and export of raw materials and finished goods, and funded the search for precious metals, the country's main source of wealth.
1.10: The Development of Monarchical States
Large, unified nation-states began to develop in northern Europe during the early modern period.
They came to dominate the Italian peninsula and contributed to the transition away from the medieval notion of feudal kingship.
In the age of the new monarchical state, it was believed that monarchical power was divinely granted and so by definition absolute.
In the Middle Ages, Parliamentary institutions arose throughout Europe as a means of limiting kings.
French Monarchy
An example of how the power shift came about.
It was not an easy victory for them, which had to deal with assorted aristocratic and religious conflicts that threatened to destroy the state.
Under Louis XIV, France created a centralized monarchy in which the power of the King was absolute.
However, it came at a high price as it helped pave the way for the late-century French Revolution.
In England, the Stuart Monarchs, who reigned for most of the 17th century, were interested in adapting French-style royal absolutism but the English parliament stood in their way.
England became embroiled in what one historian has labeled as a “century of revolution,” which eventually resulted in the supremacy of Parliament over the monarchy.
Important Characteristics of New Nation-States
Growing Bureaucratization
The monarchy in France created a new independent office, which hired individuals to collect taxes on the monarch's behalf.
The previous arrangement in England, where the crown and its powerful subjects worked together, was kept.
Existence of a Permanent Mercenary Army
In the 14th century, Swiss mercenary infantrymen formed a phalanx of 6,000 men and used their pikes to slaughter aristocratic horsemen.
England is an exception once more because it did not establish a permanent army until the end of the 17th century when it was firmly under parliamentary control.
Growing Need to Tax
In France, taxes are required to fund their permanent armies.
Medieval monarchs were traditionally expected to live off their incomes; however, the Price Revolution increased the costs of running a centralized state, making this impossible.
1.11: Italy
Treaty of Lodi (1454)
It provided a balance of power among the major Italian city-states.
It created an alliance between long-term enemies Milan and Naples and also included the support of Florence.
Ludovico il Moro
He invaded Naples and invited the French into Italy four years later to settle their claims to Naples.
Charles VIII, the King of France, immediately ordered his troops across the Italian Alps.
Charles and his forces crossed into Florence, Savonarola, led the Florentine population in expelling the Medici rulers, and then established a puritanical state.
This complete religious and political transformation ended Florence's Renaissance scholarship and art.
By 1498, Ludovico il Moro realized his mistake and joined an anti-French Italian alliance that expelled the French from Florence and restored the Medici.
The Medici promptly burnt Savonarola at the stake with the support of the papacy.
Throughout the 16th century, Italy became the battlefield in which Spain and France fought for dominance.
Niccolò Machiavelli
He wrote what is generally seen as the first work of modern political thought, The Prince.
The Prince is a resume of sorts in which Machiavelli tried to convince the Medici to partake of his services.
When the Republic was overthrown by the Medici, Machiavelli was forced into exile to his country's estate.
1.12: England
Henry Tudor (Henry VII)
He won the central authority in Egland and established the Tudor Dynasty — following his defeat of Richard III in 1485 at the battle of Bosworth Field.
Henry VIII
He ascended to the throne and continued his father's policies to strengthen the crown.
While England was under papacy rule, he believed his sovereignty would not be apparent.
In 1534, he made a political decision when he broke up with Rome and created the Church of England.
Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603)
The greatest of all Tudors — Henry VIII’s daughter with Anne Boleyn.
She was smart and studied classical Italian humanism. She worked hard and was political like her father.
She chose ministers who would serve the crown well, but she always made the final decisions.
She did seem to regard marriage as incompatible with her sovereignty.
Since she remained unmarried — Mary Stuart, the ruler of Scotland, was her legal heir.
In the Treaty of Berwick (1586), Elizabeth entered into a defensive alliance with Scotland.
She recognized James, Mary’s son who was being raised as a Protestant, as the lawful king, gave him an English pension and would be known as the heir to her throne.
In 1587, Elizabeth ordered the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
In 1588 came the greatest moment in Elizabeth’s reign—the defeat of Philip II’s Spanish Armada, ensuring that England would remain Protestant and free from foreign reign.
Mary Stuart
Her paternal grandmother is Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII.
She lived as Elizabeth’s prisoner for years.
Elizabeth believed Mary was plotting against her, so she kept her under house arrest.
Only after Mary conspired with Philip II of Spain did Elizabeth decide to settle relations with the Scots and distance herself from Mary.
1.13: Spain
Before the 15th century, Spain was divided into:
Christian kingdoms in the north; and
Islamic control in the south.
The marriage of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile, laid the groundwork for the eventual consolidation of the peninsula.
The final stage of the Reconquista took place in 1492 when their armies conquered the last independent Islamic outpost in Grenada, Spain.
Spanish Inquisition: An effective method that the Spanish monarchy would later use to root out suspected Protestants.
Charles V
Ferdinand and Isabella’s grandson.
He eventually controlled a vast empire that dominated Europe in the first half of the 16th century.
His Spanish possessions were the primary source of his wealth.
He gave his brother Ferdinand the troublesome eastern Habsburg lands of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary and his title of Holy Roman Emperor when he was exhausted from fighting Protestantism.
Philip (1556–1598)
Charles V’s son
He received the more valuable part of the empire: Spain and its vast holdings in the New World, along with southern Italy and the Netherlands.
He spent most of his reign in debt as he used his riches to maintain Spanish influence.
In the Mediterranean, the Spanish fought for supremacy against the Ottoman Empire and won against that eastern power at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.
Inquisition-based efforts such as the Duke of Alva’s Council of Troubles failed, as did the effort of Don Juan.
This is the reason why Philip launched the Spanish Armada in an attempt to conquer England during Queen Elizabeth’s rule.
By 1609, the Spanish conceded for independence and in 1648, they formally acknowledged their independence.
Golden Age in Spain
This age featured the writings of Cervantes, Spain’s greatest writer.
He wrote Don Quixote which bemoans the passing of the traditional values of chivalry in Spain.
This is the period of the Spanish’s remarkable painter, El Greco.
By the 17th century, Spain's power had declined due to wars, the Price Revolution, and the Castilian economy's collapse.
1.14: The Holy Roman Empire
Holy Roman Empire
A large state that straddled central Europe when the Saxon King Otto I was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope.
In the late 10th and 11th centuries, the Empire was the most powerful state in Europe, but it was eventually weakened as a result of a series of conflicts with the papacy.
By 1356, the practice of electing the emperor was formally defined in the Golden Bull of Emperor Charles IV.
This document showed that the emperor was elected rather than hereditary and gave seven German princes the power to choose one.
The electors typically opted for weak leaders who wouldn't obstruct their political objectives.
Peace of Augsburg (1555)
It ended Charles V's religious disputes by upholding the prince's right to choose the territory's religion.
The treaty did not grant recognition to Calvinists, creating problems when Frederick III converted to Calvinism in 1559.
As Palatinate ruler, Frederick's status as one of the Holy Roman Emperor's seven electors complicated matters.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)
It began when Ferdinand of Styria was crowned king of Bohemia.
Protestant Bohemians were outraged by Ferdinand's intolerance.
In May of 1618, a large group of Bohemian Protestant nobles surrounded two of Ferdinand’s Catholic advisors and threw them out of a window.
In 1619, Matthias, the Holy Roman Emperor died and Ferdinand, the King of Bohemia was elected Emperor.
Frederick — the Calvinist Elector of the Palatinate, was elected as the King of Bohemia, a few hours after Ferdinand was elected emperor.
Since Ferdinand doesn’t have an army, he turned to the Duke of Bavaria to ask for help against Frederick.
At the Battle of White Mountain, the Bavarian forces won a major victory, and Frederick became known as the Winter King.
By 1622, he lost not only Bohemia but also Palatinate.
Ferdinand confiscated the defeated Protestant prince's lands in the North and forged a unified state under Habsburg control.
He needed to find a new army since he won’t be able to rely on the Duke of Bavaria.
He then found a Bohemian noble — Albrecht von Wallenstein — who promised to create a vast army, here then started the war’s second phase.
By 1628, Wallenstein controlled an army of 125,000 and had won a series of major victories in the North.
The high-water mark for Habsburg's success in the Thirty Years’ War came with the Edict of Restitution (1629)
It outlawed Calvinism in the empire and required Lutherans to turn over all property seized since 1552.
This resulted in Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden to enter the war, triggering the third phase.
Though he claimed that he became involved to defend Protestant rights in Germany, he was also interested in German territory along the Baltic.
Cardinal Richelieu: France’s chief minister, was concerned about the increase of Habsburg strength in Germany.
In 1632, Adolphus died, which made the Swedes roll back the Habsburgs.
In 1633, Wallenstein was murdered.
The last phase of the war consisted of the French and Swedes fighting against the Austrian Habsburgs and their Spanish allies.
The most destructive phase of the war.
German towns were completely destroyed, and famine and general agricultural collapse followed.
By the end of the war in 1648, the Empire had eight million fewer inhabitants than it had in 1618.
Peace of Westphalia (1648)
It marked the end of the struggle.
The treaty made sure that the Emperor would continue to be a weak force in German politics while the Holy Roman Empire maintained its numerous political divisions.
1.15: France
After Francis I’s reign, it seemed as though the newly strong centralized monarchy had won the conflict between the feudal aristocracy and the monarchy.
The French Wars of Religion revealed that struggles were not quite over.
Religious conflicts rose to the surface following the French monarch Henry II’s 1559 death — when his eye got pierced with a lance while celebrating the end of wars.
On his death, Francis II, his 15-year-old son, came to the throne.
Francis was then replaced by his brother Charles IX after months.
14 years later, Henry III replaced Charles — the last of the Valois kings.
All three boys were influenced by their mother, Catherine de’ Medici.
Behind the scenes of the French monarchy, a power struggle began to emerge among three prominent families.
Guises: The most powerful family, turned toward a militant, reactionary form of Catholicism.
Admiral Coligny: The leader of the Montmorency family — converted to Calvinism.
The Prince of Conde, the leading Bourbon converted to Calvinism as well.
The Wars of Religion first began in 1562 when the Duke of Guise ordered the execution of several Huguenot worshippers after becoming enraged at their presence in a barn.
The Huguenots had the upper hand after 10 years of combat — both the Duke and the Prince were killed.
Henry of Navarre: A young Bourbon prince married King Charles IX’s sister.
Catherine de' Medici worried about the Valois family's political decline and sought to balance aristocratic power to protect her sons.
In 1572, Catherine encouraged her son, the King, to set in motion the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which killed around 3000 people in Paris.
Possibly 20,000 Huguenots were killed in simultaneous attacks across France.
Admiral Coligny was murdered, but Henry of Navarre was spared because he promised to return to Catholicism.
In 1574, Henry III, the last of the Valois kings, turned to the Huguenots to defeat the powerful Catholic League.
He then made Henry of Navarre his heir and became King Henry IV in 1598 — following his assassination led to the start of the Bourbon Dynasty.
Henry IV struggled with Spain and was pressured because most Parisians remained Catholic — he then permanently converted to Catholicism.
His action instigated a new way of thinking in France and the idea of Politique, putting the interests of France before the goal of religious unity.
Although Henry's Calvinist allies and Anglican Queen Elizabeth were horrified by his final religious conversion, he never forgot them.
In 1598, Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, granting the Huguenots freedom of worship and assembly as well as the right to maintain fortified towns for their protection.
Period 2: Monarchical States to Napoleon: (1648-1815)
2.1: France (Royal Absolutism)
Henry IV (1553–1610)
Until Henry IV’s assassination, he worked to revitalize his kingdom.
Duke of Sully: Henry’s finance minister, established government monopolies to restore the finances of the monarchy.
He limited the power of the French nobility by reining in its influence over regional parliaments.
His assassination in 1610 and the ascension of his son, Louis XIII — made France vulnerable to aristocratic rebellion and potential religious wars.
Louis XIII (1601–1643)
Louis XIII needed a strong minister and he found one in Cardinal Richelieu.
Richelieu defeated the Huguenots and took away many of the military and political privileges granted them by the Edict of Nantes.
He brought France into the Thirty Years’ War on the side of the Protestants.
The death of Louis XIII in 1643 left France with a minor on the throne — the five-year-old Louis XIV.
Louis XIV (1638–1715)
Ann of Austria — Louis XIV’s mother, selected Cardinal Mazarin to be the regent during the king’s childhood.
However, Mazarin had a less sure political hand than Richelieu.
Louis XIV decided to rule without the Chief Minister and dealt with central issues on his own.
He achieved this by advocating a political philosophy — the notion that the monarch enjoyed certain divine rights.
Bishop Bossuet: Louis XIV’s chief political philosopher, wrote that because the king was chosen by God, only God was fit to judge the behavior of the king, not parliamentary bodies or angry nobles.
He built the palace of Versailles, 12 miles outside of Paris, as a way to dominate the French nobility and the Parisian mob.
No member of the high aristocracy attended the daily council sessions at Versailles.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert: Louis most important minister — he centralized the French economy by instituting a system known as mercantilism.
Its goal is to build up the nation’s supply of gold by exporting goods to other lands and earning gold from their sale.
Colbert succeeded in helping to create France’s vast overseas empire.
French East Indian Company: Organized by Louis to compete with the Dutch.
In 1685, he revoked the Edict of Nantes. He demolished the Huguenot churches, and schools, and took their civil rights away.
France was involved in a series of wars as a means to satiate Louis' desire for territorial expansion.
William of Orange: The leader of the Netherlands and was committed to waging total war against Louis.
After 1688, a 25-year war broke out including the — War of Spanish Succession between the French and the English and Dutch allies.
This war lasted from 1702 to 1713 and ended in the Treaty of Utrecht, which left a Bourbon (Louis's grandson) on the throne of Spain.
These wars ultimately left the French peasantry hard-pressed to pay the taxes to support Louis XIV's constant desire for glory.
2.2: England
The Stuarts
King James VI (1603–1625)
He inherited the throne after Elizabeth died childless in 1603.
James was ill-suited for the role of English king.
In the relationship between the king and Parliament at the start of the 17th century, the monarch held the upper hand and could summon a parliament at will.
He had to consult two house parliaments when he needed to raise additional revenue beyond ordinary experiences.
House of Commons; and
House of Lords.
Puritans emerged during the Stuart period.
They wanted to see the Church “purified” of all traces of Catholicism.
James believed the Church of England’s Episcopal structure — which suited to his idea of the divine rights of the kings.
James then established a three-part program:
To unite England with Scotland;
To create a continental-style standing army; and
To set up new system of royal finance.
King Charles (1625–1649)
Charles I did not possess even the somewhat limited political acumen of his father.
He lent his support to the so-called Arminian wing of the Anglican Church.
He believed that this faction provided the greatest stability for his state.
Arminius: A Dutch theologian of the early 17th century who argued in favor of free will as opposed to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
In 1633, Charles named William Laud as his Archbishop of Canterbury.
His relationship with the Parliament started badly when the Parliament granted him tonnage and poundage for only a year instead of his time in monarchy.
He was forced to pay for the military disasters that he caused and forced himself to loan — however, the Parliament refused to pay his loans and throw him in jail.
Petition of Rights
These included provisions that the King could not demand a loan without the consent of the Parliament.
It also prohibited individuals from being imprisoned without a published case.
It outlawed using martial law against civilians, which Charles had used to collect his forced loan.
In August 1628, Charles’s chief minister, Duke of Buckingham, was murdered by an embittered sailor who blamed him for England’s recent military disasters.
In January 1629, the Parliament was called, and both sides felt that the issue of exclusive rights would lead to the Parliament and the King’s conflict.
In March 1629, his messengers announced the dissolution of the Parliament.
For the next 11 years, Personal Rule of Charles was the law of land.
By 1637, Charles was at the height of his power. He had a balanced budget, and his government policies and restructuring appeared to be effective.
A civil war broke out in the nation four years after he reached his peak, destabilizing his position of authority.
The Scots rioted and signed a national covenant that pledged their allegiance to the king, but also vowed to resist all changes to their Church.
In 1640, he called an English Parliament because he believed it would be willing to grant money to put down the Scottish rebellion.
It was then called “Short Parliament” because it met for only three weeks and was dissolved right after they didn’t meet Charles’s needs.
Charles was still determined to punish the Scots.
The Scots were the victors on the battlefield and invaded northern England.
They refused to leave England unless Charles signed a settlement and forced him to pay £850 per day.
To pay those, he was forced to call another Parliament — the “Long Parliament”, which lasted 20 years.
The House of Commons launched the Long Parliament by impeaching Charles’s two chief ministers and executing them.
They abolished the king’s prerogative courts, which became the tools for Royal Absolutism.
They supported the Grand Remonstrance — a list of 204 parliamentary grievances.
They also added two demands:
The king name ministers whom Parliament could trust; and
That a synod of the Church of England is called to reform the Church.
Charles then attempted to sieve five of the rulers of the House of Commons — which led to failure, resulting in him to leave London in January 1642.
The English Revolution
Oliver Cromwell (1653–1658)
He created the New Model Army, a regularly paid, disciplined force with extremely dedicated Puritan soldiers.
By 1648, the King was defeated and in the following year, he made a decision to execute Charles.
From 1649 to 1660, England became a Republic — The Commonwealth; a military dictatorship governed by Cromwell.
He then made conflicts among his own supporters.
The Independents wanted a state church, but were also willing to grant a measure of religious freedom for others.
The Presbyterians wanted a state church that would not allow dissent.
Cromwell dealt with the rise of radical factions within his army — the Levellers and the Diggers.
In 1649, Cromwell destroyed the Leveller elements in his army.
In 1650, he led an army to Ireland, where he displayed incredible brutality in putting down resistance by supporters of the Stuarts.
In 1652, he brought his army into London to disperse a Parliament.
In 1665, Cromwell gave up on the idea of governing alongside a legislature and divided England into 12 military districts.
By the time Cromwell passed away, a worn-out England desired to restore the Stuart dynasty.
James II (1685–1688)
In 1660, Charles II returned to the throne.
Their return turned back the clock to 1642 as the same issues that had led to the revolution against Charles’s father remained unresolved.
These issues were not fully addressed during Charles’s reign.
In 1685, Charles's brother, James II, succeeded the throne.
Test Act: An act passed during Charles II’s reign that effectively barred Catholics from serving as royal officials or in the military.
Declaration of Indulgence: It suspended all religious tests for office holders and allowed for freedom of worship.
James wanted a Royal Absolutism
The final stages of this conflict took place in 1688.
Seven Anglican bishops were put in jail by him for declining to read James' suspension of the laws against Catholics from the pulpit.
In June 1688, he unexpectedly fathered a son, having a male heir raised as a Catholic, as opposed to his previous daughter's heir, Mary, who was raised as a Protestant.
William, the Stadholder from the Netherlands, a husband of Mary, overthrown James after the Glorious Revolution and they took the throne.
Constitutional Settlements
The Bill of Rights (1689)
It prohibited the use of royal prerogative rights, which Charles and James had previously exercised.
The authority to suspend and repeal laws was declared illegal.
Parliamentary elections were to be free of royal interference.
All taxes were now required to be approved by Parliament.
The Act of Toleration (1689)
It granted Protestant nonconformists the right to public worship but not Unitarians or Catholics.
The Test Act remained in effect until the 19th century, when it was amended to allow nonconformists, Jews, and Catholics to sit in Parliament.
The Mutiny Act (1689)
It allowed civil law to be used to govern the army, which had previously been governed solely by royal decree.
It also made desertion and mutiny civil offenses for which soldiers could be punished even during times of peace.
The Act of Settlement (1701)
It was enacted to prevent the Catholic Stuart line from gaining control of the English throne.
The Act of Union (1707)
This marked the political reunification of England and Scotland, resulting in the formation of the country known as Great Britain.
2.3: The Netherlands
A Center of Commerce and Trades
The Netherlands had already achieved a central role in inter-European trade due to its geographic position and large merchant marine fleet.
Amsterdam became the center of commerce in Northern Europe.
Antwerp declined after it was sacked in 1576 during the Dutch War for Independence.
The Peace of Westphalia concluded the permanent closing of the Scheldt River that led to Antwerp’s harbor.
The Bank of Amsterdam established Amsterdam as the financial hub of Europe, issued its own currency, and increased the amount of capital that was available.
In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was founded.
The company was financed by both public and private investment and operated under quasi-governmental control.
This gave rise to the popularity of joint-stock companies.
The Golden Age in the Netherlands produced a high standard of living, with wealth being more equally distributed than in any other place in Europe.
Political Decentralization
Dutch Autonomous: In the 17th century, the Netherlands was politically centralized, with each of the seven provinces retaining significant autonomy.
Wealthy merchants dominated the provincial Estates.
The executive power came from the House of Orange, whose family members had achieved prominence for leading the revolt against Spain.
Stadholder: The male head of the family.
The Netherlands shifted its focus from fighting for independence from Spain to fighting against England and attempting to survive against France.
During the struggle with Louis XIV’s France,
The power of provincial Estates declined; and
William of Nassau, the head of the House of Orange, powers increased tremendously.
A Golden Age of Art
Because most Dutch artists were Calvinists, they did not receive large commissions to place their works in churches.
The Dutch painters chose to paint for private collectors.
When prices reached speculative levels, pictures were treated like commodities.
The art market didn’t flourish in Amsterdam as well.
Franz Hals: A great portrait painter from Haarlem.
Jan Vermeer: A great Dutch painter who composed genre scenes of everyday Dutch life.
Rembrandt van Rijn: One of the Dutch Golden Age painters who focused more on a painting based on his, fraught with deep emotional complexity.
The Night Watch (1642): One of his paintings, meaning it transforms a standard group portrait of a military company into a revealing psychological study.
2.4: Economic and Social Life in Early Modern Europe
Economic Expansion and Population Growth
Population growth was the main factor in Europe's economic expansion.
The increase in consumers brought more food and other necessities to market as a result of the growing population in Europe.
Price Revolution: This is the significant increase in prices in the early modern period.
This significant increase was caused by population growth, which pushed up the prices of basic commodities.
A price increase of this magnitude was shocking to a society accustomed to stable prices.
Rural Life and the Emergence of Economic Classes
Gentry: A class of individuals, who often had their economic roots in fortunes made in towns and cities.
The land-buying habits of the gentry forced up the price of land.
Members of the gentry were able to use their social connections to get local authorities to accept the enclosure of lands for their own personal use.
Rural poverty became significantly worse in the early modern period.
Farmers became beggars.
Overpopulation then became a problem in most of Western Europe.
Low population density was much a more serious problem in Eastern Europe.
Farm Life
Life was bleak and revolved around a never-ending struggle to find resources to survive.
Life was centered in the small village, with most people never venturing more than a few miles beyond their birthplace.
Rural village housing provided little protection from the cold and wet winters.
The furnishings in these homes were as simple as their surroundings.
Workdays were longer in the summer and shorter in the winter.
Three-Field System: Crops were rotated across three pieces of land; mostly used in Northern Europe.
Two-Field System: Crops rotated on two pieces of land; predominated in the Mediterranean.
Farmland was laid out in long strips in most rural areas, with individual peasant families owning a portion of land in each of the strips.
City and Town Life
Townspeople in general lived better than their rural counterparts.
Guilds: They emphasized working on specialization skills, with specific tasks such as baking or brewing taking place in specific quarters of the town.
Capitalist Entrepreneurs: They provide money and focus on organizational skills.
They produced clothing in a much larger skill.
This work provided a benefit to some rural households to become one of their important source of revenue during the long winter months.
The guild members saw those as competitions and created greater hardships — which led them to dissatisfaction.
Family Life and Structure
The average family contains no more than three or four children.
Women marry at around the age of 25, while men marry at around the age of 27.
Marriages were traditionally either arranged or formally approved by the parents.
Weddings are significant community events because the married couple are now considered full-pledged members of society.
Single adults were looked at as troublemakers or thieves.
The Role of Men in the Family
The father is regarded as the family's patriarchal head.
In wealthier families, the oldest male child inherited the majority of the estate, ensuring that the family's wealth remained intact.
Younger sons were steered toward careers in the Church, the military, or the expanded opportunities provided by the early modern state's administration.
Boys as young as seven worked as servants or trade apprentices among the poor.
The Role of Women in the Family
A daughter's only claim on her parents' estate would be the dowry she receives upon marriage.
Wives usually decided who would receive their dowry when their husband died.
Domestic service was usually the only option for poor girls, leaving them with the difficult task of raising their own dowries.
The Family as Economic Unit
Early modern families, whether rich or poor, can be seen as economic units.
Men played a larger role in the public sphere; such as plowing, planting, and commerce.
Women had their responsibilities at home.
In agricultural communities, everyone is required to work.
Among merchant classes, the private sphere includes bookkeeping and other administration of the family business.
The main distinction between women's and men's work was that women's work included all the men's work, as well as housekeeping and cooking.
The upper classes and nobility had the strongest division between men's and women's roles.
2.5: Events Leading to the Scientific Revolution
An Anatomy of the World: Written by an English poet, John Donne; he reflected on the multitude of ways that his world had changed as a result of the new discoveries in science.
The scientific discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries brought about a fundamental change in the way Europeans viewed the natural world.
Discovery of the New World
The discovery of new plant and animal life may have increased interest in natural sciences.
The connection between navigation and astronomy sparked interest in learning more about the stars.
Invention of the Printing Press
The printing press enabled scientific knowledge to spread much more quickly.
Many books and newsletters kept people up to date on the most recent scientific discoveries by the second half of the 17th century.
Thomas Hobbes great invention made scientific discoveries spread throughout Europe.
Rivalry Among Nation-States
The constant warfare between various nation-states may have pushed scientific development by emphasizing technology.
Europe was a region with many powerful leaders capable of funding scientific research.
China's technological development has slowed in comparison to Europe's.
Reformation
Max Weber: The founder of sociology.
He argued that Protestantism's worldly asceticism aided in the creation of capitalism, which in turn aided in the advancement of the Scientific Revolution.
These theories ignore the fact that Catholic Italy contributed significantly to the Scientific Revolution.
The telescope and microscope, as well as the new botany, were invented in Italy.
The Protestant Reformation did contribute to a larger reading public by encouraging people to read the Bible.
Renaissance Humanism
Humanist interest in classical world writings extended to ancient Greek scientific texts as well.
The Renaissance rediscovered Archimedes' mathematical writings and Galen's anatomical studies.
Although the ideas contained in such works were eventually rejected by the Scientific Revolution, this basic familiarity with the past was a necessary stage for modern scientific thought to mature.
2.6: Pre-Scientific Overview
Scholasticism: A synthesis of Christian theology with the scientific beliefs of the ancient authors.
Thomas Aquinas: The great architect of scholasticism, who took the works of Aristotle and harmonized them with the teachings of the church.
Knowledge of God remained the supreme act of learning and was to be attained through both reason and revelation.
Viewing science outside of this religious framework was simply unthinkable in the Middle Ages.
The concept of the four elements gave rise to the idea of alchemy — the perfect compound of the four elements in their perfect proportions.
The four-element approach also dominated the practice of medicine.
The four elements combined in the human body to create what was known as the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
Astronomy was not a popular subject in the Middle Ages.
2.7: The Copernican Revolution
Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)
He’s a Polish mathematician and astronomer.
He wrote Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.
Copernicus was a cleric, and he waited many years before publishing his work because he was afraid of the implications of his ideas.
He cautiously dedicated the book to Pope Paul II.
He simply proposed that if the Earth revolved around the Sun, it would solve at least some of the Ptolemaic system's problematic epicycles.
Since the Heliocentric system explains that the planets move in a circular motion around the Sun, it did not completely eliminate all the epicycles.
His theories did not cause a revolution in how people perceived the planets and stars.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Galileo designed his own telescope that magnified far-away objects 30 times the naked eye’s capacity.
He noticed that the Moon had a mountainous surface very much like the Earth.
Galileo also observed that the distance between the planets and stars was much greater.
He observed that Jupiter had her own four moons.
Sunspots and Saturn's rings cast doubt on the entirety of the Ptolemaic system.
Following the publication of his Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632), the Catholic Church began to condemn Galileo’s work.
Galileo received a warning from church officials not to publish any more astronomy-related writings.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
The greatest figure of Scientific Revolution.
He wanted to solve the problem posed by the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo: how do you explain the orderly manner in which the planets revolve around the Sun?
Newton worked on the problem for nearly two decades before publishing his masterpiece, Principia, in 1687.
Newton wondered what force kept the planets in an elliptical orbit around the Sun when they should have been moving in a straight line.
The same force that drew the apple when it fell from the tree may explain planetary motion — gravity.
He was very religious. When he gives scientific talks, he wonders why audiences are more interested in science than theology.
Newton is also the founder of differential calculus.
He later became the President of the British Royal Society, an organization dedicated to spreading the new spirit of experimentation.
2.8: The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Philosophy
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
He was a lawyer, an official in the government of James I, a historian, and an essayist.
The only things he never did probably in his life is to perform scientific experiments.
What he did contribute to science was the experimental methodology.
He developed the known system: inductive reasoning, or empiricism*.*
In France, this system became known as the conflict between the ancients and the moderns.
In England, this system was known as the Battle of the Books*.*
René Descartes (1596-1650)
He developed deducting reasoning, or Rationalism.
A better understanding of the universe was obtained by using reason rather than the experimental method to move from a general principle to a specific principle.
He also thought that all of the outdated ideas needed to be cast into doubt because they were so oppressive.
Cartesian Doubt: I think; therefore I am, he stripped away his belief in everything except his own existence.
The system of methodical skepticism that defined his thought.
Descartes was also a highly gifted mathematician who invented analytical mathematics.
Descartes’s system can be found in his Discourse on Method (1637).
In his work, there are two distinct elements:
The world of the mind involved the soul and the spirit, and Descartes left that world to the theologians.
The world of matter was made up of an infinite number of particles.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
He saw life as an act of balancing. He tried to reconcile atheists and Jesuit dogmatists.
His life’s attempt to achieve this balance is found in his Pensées.
Pascal’s Wager: He came to the conclusion that it was better to bet on the existence of God than not because believing always has a greater expected value than not believing.
He was also a Jansenist, a Catholic group that believed St. Augustine's theory of human sinfulness and the need for salvation through faith because we are predestined.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
He personally knew Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes as well as William Harvey.
William Harvey (1578-1657): He who, rather than relying on the writings of the Ancient Greeks, used dissections to show the role the heart plays in the circulation of blood through the body.
Hobbes was inspired by prominent scientists to apply experimental methods to politics.
Hobbes wrote in his classic work, Leviathan, that life without government was “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’s view of the depravity of human nature led him to propose the necessity for absolutism.
The Great Leviathan — “Man formed states.” Men were the necessary constructs that worked to restrain the human urges to destroy one another.
His absolutism, which rejected divine right, offended traditional English royalists.
John Locke (1632-1704)
His Two Treatises on Government — written before the Revolution 1688, was after William and Mary came to the throne and served as a defense of the revolution as well as a basis for the English Bill of Rights.
Locke argued that although man is born free in nature, government is necessary as society develops to organize it.
Humans are free and logical beings who do not relinquish their unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property when they enter into a social contract with the state.
He disapproved of religious fervor.
In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke attacked the idea that Christianity could be spread by force.
His influential Essay on Human Understanding contained the idea that children enter the world with no set ideas.
At birth the mind is tabula rasa — a blank slate, the infants do not possess the Christian concept of predestination or original sin.
2.9: The 18th-Century Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
There is no better answer to the question “What is the Enlightenment?” than offered by him.
His answer was clear: “Dare to know.”
He implied that people should discard outdated ideas out of respect for custom or intellectual laziness. We should reason about humanity.
He believed that all previously generations latched the ultimate reward — freedom.
Enlightenment writers questioned slavery because this freedom extended to politics and religion.
The Enlightenment has historically been linked to France, where the term "philosophes" is used to describe the period's thinkers.
Republic of Letters: An international community of writers who communicated in French.
This extended throughout Europe and American colonies, where the ideas of Enlightenment are expressed.
Voltaire (1694-1778)
He was considered as greatest philosophes.
When Voltaire went to England, it altered his brain chemistry.
He was amazed at the level of religious acceptance and the freedom to publish one's opinions.
He was also astounded by the respect the English extended to Newton when the scientist was laid to rest at a state funeral amid great ceremony.
England seemed to offer personal happiness, which France lacked.
He hated the Catholic Church and all religions for their narrowness and bigotry.
He was also a Deist — one who believes that God created the universe and then stepped back from creation to allow it to operate under the laws of science.
Voltaire felt that religion crushed the human spirit and that to be free.
Écrasez l’infame! — Crush the horrible thing!; his famous anti-religous slogan.
Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
He wrote one of the most influential works of the Enlightenment; the Spirit of the Laws (1748).
He became president of the Parliament of Bordeaux — a body of nobles that functioned as the province’s law court.
He was a conservative who opposed a republic and wanted France to restore aristocratic rule to limit royal absolutism.
In Persian Letters (1721), he critiques his native France through a series of letters between two Persians traveling in Europe.
To avoid royal and church censorship, he wrote a satirical work attacking religious zealotry.
He also saw slavery as being against the natural law.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
The Encyclopédie — one of the greatest collaborative achievements of the Enlightenment and was executed the Republic of Letters.
It exemplifies the 18th-century belief that all knowledge could be organized and presented scientifically.
The first of 28 volumes appeared in 1751.
Copies of it were sent and reached Russia, Scandinavia and North America
The Catholic Church was furious at the censors' thinly veiled attacks on its religious practices.
Diderot also admired manual laborers and wrote about tools that made people more productive.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
He lived a deeply troubled and solitary existence.
He antagonized many of the other leading philosophes.
He was perhaps the most radical of the philosophes.
He believed in the creation of a direct democracy.
Rousseau helped set the stage for the Romantic Movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries.
His novel Emile (1762) deals with a young man who receives an education that places higher regard on developing his emotions over his reason.
In his The Social Contract (1762), “All men are born free, but everywhere they are in chains.”
He had little faith in the individual’s potential to use reason as a means of leading a more satisfactory life.
During the Scientific Revolution, thinkers used reason to discover universal laws behind the natural world.
During the Enlightenment, thinkers used reason to discover universal laws behind human behavior.
2.10: The Spread of Enlightenment Thought
Germany
The greatest figure of the German Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant.
In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued that all knowledge was not empirical, since the mind shaped the world through unique experiences.
Kant emphasized that there are levels of knowledge above and beyond that which is known through reason.
Italy
Cesare Beccaria in his work On Crimes and Punishment (1764), called for a complete overhaul in the area of jurisprudence.
It was obvious that criminals deserved some basic rights.
He opposed both the use of the death penalty and the use of torture to coerce confessions of guilt.
The overarching Enlightenment theme of humanitarianism can be seen in Beccaria's creative work.
Scotland
This is the place that hitherto had not been at the center of European intellectual life.
David Hume (1711–1776)
He went beyond the thinking of French deists and directly entered the atheistic world.
In his Inquiry into Human Nature, Hume questioned revealed religion, claiming that no empirical evidence supports the existence of miracles, which are central to Christianity.
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
He reflected the growing interest in history that was first seen during the Enlightenment with his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
His work criticized Christianity in that he viewed its rise within the Roman Empire as a social phenomenon rather than a divine interference.
He also claimed that Christianity lessened the Empire's vitality and caused it to fall.
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
A professor at the University of Glasgow.
In 1776, he published an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in which he argued against mercantilism.
He became associated with the concept of laissez-faire (leave alone) because he argued that individuals should be free to pursue economic gain without being hampered by the state.
2.11: Women and the Enlightenment
Women played an important role in the Enlightenment.
The majority of Parisian salons were organized by women.
These wealthy and aristocratic people helped philosophers avoid legal trouble with their sociopolitical connections.
Given their enormous assistance, the male thinkers were generally not strong supporters of women's rights and abilities.
The Encyclopédie barely bothered to address the condition of women, though the work would never be famous without the help of Marquise de Pompadour — Louis XV’s mistress.
In Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, he included a discussion of the restrictive nature of the Eastern harem, which, by implication, was a criticism of the treatment of women in Western Europe.
Rousseau believed women should not be educated equally and should have separate spheres of influence.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) wrote in her Vindication of the Rights of Women that women should enjoy the right to vote as well as to hold political office.
2.12: European Powers in the Age of Enlightenment
The 18th century witnessed a number of significant developments for the European nation-states.
Prussia and Russia — emerged over the course of the century.
Austria, France, and Great Britain — adjusted to changing political, economic, and social circumstances.
Enlightened Absolutists
Catherine the Great of Russia,
Joseph II of Austria
Frederick II of Prussia
Most philosophers were monarchists, so they could experiment without fear of losing power.
Prussia and Russia
In the 17th century, Prussia was a poor German state that was left devastated after the Thirty Years’ War.
In Peace of Westphalia, Prussia did receive some minor territorial gains
By the 16th century, serfdom had been established due to the relatively poor agricultural land and labor shortages.
Junkers — Prussian nobility, who looked to the ruler to ensure control over their serfs.
Frederick William, the Great Elector (r. 1640-1688)
Three separate areas of land without natural borders made up his state.
Since he lacked sufficient resources on his own to build an army, he turned to the Junkers for assistance.
That was the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial relationship between the Prussian monarchy and the Junkers.
He left his son, Frederick III, a well-organized army, an expanded territorial base, and arguably the most efficient civil service in all of Europe.
He made Prussia into a Kingdom in 1701, gaining the title of King Frederick I.
Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786)
He was often cited as an enlightened absolutist.
At his palace of Sans Souci, he established a glittering intellectual center, where Voltaire would live for a time and where the king himself participated by writing philosophical tracts.
Frederick freed the serfs on the royal estates.
He also reduced the use of corporal punishment against serfs and abolished the death penalty.
Frederick used rational thought to promote royal centralization and absolutism, not individual rights or participatory political institutions.
Empress Maria Theresa pushed a series of reforms that removed some of the hardships that had been placed on the serf population.
Joseph II, Theresa's son, wanted religious tolerance to limit the Catholic Church's power in his domains.
He saw the Church as opposed to his plan for more centralized authority.
In 1781, he issued the first of a series of Edicts of Toleration granting Jews, Lutherans, and Calvinists freedom of worship.
After Joseph's death, Leopold II had to abandon some of Joseph's progressive policies to quell aristocratic and peasant uprisings.
The roots of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) began during the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI (r. 1711–1740).
Charles pushed the other European states to accept Pragmatic Sanction — allowing for the assorted Habsburg lands under his control to remain intact under one ruler.
Also granting the right of a female to succeed to the throne of Austria if there was no direct male heir.
When Charles died without leaving a son, his daughter Maria Theresa came to the throne.
Charles's death became an opportunity for Prussia and France to gain territory at the expense of the Austrians.
Frederick launched an attack to seize Silesia, the richest part of the Austrian empire, at the northeastern border of Bohemia.
The conflict became a general European war.
Austria gained support from Russia, Sweden, Denmark, and eventually Great Britain.
Opposing them was an alliance made up of Prussia, France, and Spain.
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748): The Austrian throne was ultimately saved for the Habsburgs
Diplomatic Revolution: The reversal of longstanding alliances in Europe between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War.
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)
It all began in 1756, when Frederick launched an attack to quickly defeat his enemies.
Only Peter III, in 1762 staved off the complete destruction of the Prussian state.
French and Indian War (1754–1763): It was the North American conflict in Seven Years’ war.
The Seven Years’ spanned five continents, resulted in the confiscation of French colonies in Canada and India — called by the Winston Churchill: the first world war.
Russia
Until the 18th century, Russia remained largely closed off to Western Europe as a result of the Mongol invasion of the 13th century.
During the reign of Ivan the Terrible (r. 1533–1584), there was an expansion of the territory under the control of Muscovy.
He sought violence to gain control over a recalcitrant nobility.
After his death, Russia enter to the period of “Time of Troubles” — which lasted until the selection of tsar from the Romanov Family (1603).
Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725)
He was determined to Westernize his state.
He raised royal revenue by head-taxing Russian serfs and monopolizing essential goods.
In keeping with his desire to keep a “window to the West,” Peter established the eponymous city of St. Petersburg in 1703.
He defeated the Swedes in the Great Northern War (1700–1721).
Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796)
She began revising and codifying Russian law, but only dabbled in reform.
Later in her reign, she realized enlightened thought could threaten her monarchy and abandoned the idea.
Spain
Charles III (r.1759-1788) was the well-regarded King of Naples.
Benito Feijóo: Spain’s foremost Enlightenment thinker,
In 1759, Charles III ascended to the Spanish throne following the death of his brother.
He was determined to continue his Enlightenment-inspired reforms.
He continued his goal of limiting the Church’s power in his sovereign state.
He was able to decrease the number of clergies.
Poland
Prince Mieszko's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 966 is considered to be the official beginning of Polish history.
Being vulnerable to attacks, they had to deal with the attacks from:
Mongols from the east; and
Teutonic Knights from the west.
In order to defeat these groups, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was established.
It occurred when the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jagiello, married the Polish Queen Jadwiga.
The Polish-Lithuanian state's fatal flaw was failing to establish a strong, centralized government in the face of a recalcitrant nobility afraid of losing power.
The Polish-Lithuanian state remained a significant player in Europe until the end of the century.
King Jan Sobieski played a critical role in driving the Turks from the gates of Vienna in 1683.
When Stanislaw August Poniatowski became king in 1764, he displayed an independent streak.
This action just led to the displeasure of the country’s neighbors.
In 1772, Russia, Prussia, and Austria forced Poland to accept a partition that cost Poland 30% of its territory.
In 1791, the Polish-Lithuanian parliament produced Europe’s first written constitution.
This constitution was never fully implemented, it angered many nobles.
The anti-Poniatowski nobles applied to the Russians for assistance.
In 1793, the Second Partition was carried out as a result of Russia and Prussia's insistence on the constitution's removal.
This led to the loss of vast lands in the eastern part of the nation and reduced Poland to a rump state
In 1794, a Polish revolt broke out under the military leadership of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who had fought with distinction in the American Revolution.
In 1795, the third and final partition took place, wiping Poland off the map.
An independent Polish state would not be revived until the aftermath of World War I.
Great Britain
After the turmoil of the 17th century, Great Britain became the most stable nation in Europe in the 18th century.
George I (r. 1714–1721): He is the ruler of the German state of Hanover, and his sole qualification was that he was the late Queen Anne's Protestant cousin.
George II (r. 1727–1760): He could reign as an unquestioned absolutist, rather than having to deal with the independent-minded British Parliament.
Robert Walpole: Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1721 to 1741.
He was given complete freedom to alter the political structure to his benefit.
To keep hold of the House of Commons, he employed a sophisticated system of political patronage.
He resigned in 1741 over British foreign policy.
Two Parliamentary blocks:
Tories: They supported the monarch's prerogative rights and the Church of England.
Whigs: They were more closely associated with the spirit of the 1688 Revolution and the idea of religious tolerance.
George III (r. 1760–1820): He claimed that he wanted the throne to rise above party strife.
The British government won the Seven Years' War but had a huge deficit.
In 1763, John Wilkes was arrested for publishing a satirical attack on George III in his paper The North Briton.
In 1774, American anger at what was viewed as high-handed British policies led to the establishment of the First Continental Congress
In 1783, the Americans won their independence with the help of France and Spain.
In 1792, political reform in the UK was resisted after the French Revolution's violence and radicalism.
Any expansion of suffrage would have to wait until the Great Reform Bill of 1832.
France
Jansenists: A Catholic sect that held beliefs on predestination that were similar to the Calvinist point of view.
Louis XV (r. 1714–1774): He wished to support the papal decree and ban the group, but found himself blocked by the various provincial parlements.
Parlements: Law courts primarily made up of nobles who had the prerogative right of registering royal edicts before they could be enforced.
Louis XV abolished the parlements but Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) felt forced to bring them back.
2.13: The French Revolution
Key Timeline
Before 1789: Pre-revolutionary period (Ancien Régime)
1789–1792: Liberal phase (Constitutional Monarchy)
1792–1793: Moderate Republic (Girondins)
1793–1794: Radical Republic (Jacobins)
1795–1799: Directory (Moderate Republic)
1799–1804: Consulate
1804–1815: Napoleonic Empire
The Ancient Régime
The major problem facing the monarchy was financial.
France was not bankrupt in 1789.
Throughout the 18th century, the country had been at war, mostly with Great Britain, a conflict that dated back to the Glorious Revolution (1688).
France's debts grew so large that interest and debt payments consumed slightly more than half the annual budget.
In the 17th century, the French monarch had basically granted the nobility freedom from most taxation.
Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792): His task is to try to convince the nobility to give up their cherished tax-free status.
The Calling of the Estates General and the Demand for National Assembly
Assembly of Notables: Leading aristocrats and churchmen were called by Louis XVI to see if they would willingly pay a new land tax that would apply to all.
Estates General: An institution from medieval times that consisted of a three-house body made up of:
The First Estate — clergy.
The Second Estate — nobility, and
The Third Estate — commons.
Commons: It refers to everyone from the bourgeoisie to peasants who were neither clergy nor nobility.
Writers began to declare that the Third Estate was the real embodiment of the political will of the nation.
This sense of wanting change can be seen in the thousands of Cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances) that were presented to the King.
While many demanded lessening royal absolutism, all were loyal to the idea of monarchy.
May 5, 1789 — marked the first day of the meeting of the Estates General.
On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate declared that it would not meet as a medieval estate based on social status.
They demanded a national assembly with Three Estates representatives representing the political will of the entire French nation.
Tennis Court Oath: Members of the Third Estate gathered at a tennis court on the grounds of Versailles and promised to continue to meet “until the constitution of the kingdom is established and consolidated upon solid foundations.”
On June 27, 1789, Louis XVI formally agreed to the consolidation of all three estates into a new national assembly.
The Storming of the Bastille and the Great Fear
Bastille: A fortress prison in Paris, famous as a symbol of royal despotism because it had held critics of the monarchy.
Commune of Paris: The new municipal government that would come to play a pivotal role in the later stages of the Revolution.
Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834): Appointed by Louis XVI to be the leader of National assembly.
Great Fear: An agricultural panic over rumors that the nobility was using the increasingly anarchical situation at Versailles and Paris to organize thugs to steal from the peasants.
Peasants began to attack some of the great noble estates.
On August 4, 1789, aristocrats in the National Assembly decided that the only way to halt the violence in the countryside was by renouncing their feudal rights.
As a result, France's citizens were all subject to the same laws and social obligations.
The Constitutional Monarchy
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen — written by Lafayette, one of the most influential documents in European history.
In Enlightenment language, the work claimed political sovereignty for the nation, not a monarch.
Citizens were also declared equal before the law and in their rights and responsibilities as members of society.
The Rights of Women (1791) — written by Olympe de Gouges.
She believed women should have the right to education, property, and divorce.
Civil Constitution of the Church: In 1790, the king was forced to accept this passage.
This legislation made the Church a department of state.
Bishops were to be chosen by assemblies of parish priests.
Clergy was now civil servants with salaries to be paid by the state.
They pledged loyalty to France and the Church's Civil Constitution.
In response, Pope Pius VI denounced the Civil Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
This set in motion a major 19th-century conflict, the dispute between church and state.
In 1791, a constitution for France was promulgated, creating a constitutional monarchy.
France's men were divided into two groups: active and passive citizens.
Only men who paid three days' worth of laborers’ wages in taxes were eligible to vote for electors.
To vote for members of the assembly, electors had to meet higher property requirements.
The old French province system was abandoned in favor of 83 departments.
Full political rights were granted to Jews and Protestants.
Slavery was abolished in France.
The End of Monarchy
Count of Artois: The youngest brother of Louis XVI, and it was he who made the fatal decision to encourage his brother to flee France.
On June 20, 1791, the royal family reached the French town of Varennes, where the king was recognized and escorted back to Paris.
Jacobins: A political club, and so was named because they met in the Jacobin monastery in Paris.
Girondins: The Gironde political club in southwestern France supported a revolutionary war to liberate absolutist states.
The war in April 1792 brought about an increasingly radical situation in Paris.
The sans-culottes tried to deal with the scarce supply of bread and feelings of chagrin at being labeled passive citizens without the right to vote.
They were also fearful of the Duke of Brunswick — which promised that he would destroy Paris if the royal family was harmed.
On August 10, 1792, a large mob of sans-culottes stormed the Tuileries palace, where the king and the queen were living, and slaughtered 600 of the king’s Swiss guards.
On September 21, 1792, France became an official Republic and the royal family was placed under arrest.
European Reactions to the French Revolution
In Great Britain, the immediate reaction to the fall of the Bastille and the abolition of French feudalism was quite friendly.
Britain was eventually brought into the Europe-wide war sparked by the Revolution.
By the fall of 1792, French armies were pushing the enemy back and began to occupy territories.
They captured the Austrian Netherlands.
They also captured much of the Rhineland and Frankfurt.
Wherever French armies went, they brought with them the ideas of the Revolution.
Edmund Burke: A leading British politician attached to the Whig faction.
In his Reflections of the French Revolution (1790), he expressed his opposition to the revolution.
He wasn't opposed to the reform; in fact, he has a personal interest in changing some aspects of English political life.
He was concerned that the removal of the conventional defense system would change the roles of the monarchy and the church.
He then predicted that the Revolution would take more into a more violent direction.
2.14: The Reign of Terror
In the Convention, the Girondins and Jacobins continued to disagree over the direction of the Revolution.
The Jacobins sat on the left side of the hall, this seating arrangement earned them the label, “the Mountains.”
The Girondins sat on the right side of the hall.
In the middle section of the hall sat those who were not directly tied to either faction; “the Plain.”
The Plain held the key to the Revolution because whichever side they aligned with would ultimately triumph.
The Girondins wished to make a clean break from the absolutist government of the pr
The Girondins favored laissez-faire, the idea that the government should not play an active role in regulating the economy.
The Jacobins believed that the king was a traitor and should therefore be executed.
They also felt that the only way to maintain the spirit of the revolution was through a powerful, centralized government in Paris.
They favored the sans-culottes, in terms of their economic stand.
In the spring of 1793, marked the beginning of “Reign of Terror.”
It was inspired by the Vendee, a counter-revolutionary revolt that began in March in a western region of France.
French armies met a major defeat that same month in the Austrian Netherlands.
In response to these provocations, the Convention created two committees:
The Committee of General Security
The Committee of Public Safety
The leaders of the security committee included Danton, Carnot, and Robespierre, a lawyer — they were all associated with the Jacobins faction.
In August 1793, Lazare Carnot, the head of the military, issued his famous proclamation calling for a levée en masse, drafting everyone for military service.
Once in power, the Jacobins worked to create what they considered to be the Republic of Virtue.
They believed they had to eradicate all signs of the previous monarchical order.
They created a new calendar based on 10-day weeks as a result.
The seasons were reflected in the renamed months, and 1792—the first year of the Republic—was designated as year one.
Cult of the Supreme Being: Established by Robespierre to move people away from what he thought was the corrupting influence of the Church.
It turned the cathedral of Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason.
From the summer of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety first began by banning political clubs and popular societies of women.
They executed leading Girondins politicians who were accused of being traitors, and the guillotine became a symbol of the age.
By March 1794, under the leadership of Robespierre, the Terror had an extremely radical faction known as the Hébertists.
They were violently anti-Christian and wanted to see the government implement further economic controls.
Danton and his followers were brought to the guillotine for arguing that it was time to bring the Terror to a close.
On 8 Thermidor (July 26, 1794), Robespierre spoke before the Convention about the need for one more major purge.
This led him and his supporters to be arrested by the Thermidorians, after a quick trial, 100 leading Jacobins were escorted to the guillotine.
2.15: The Directory (1795–1799)
Following the execution of the leading members of the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety, the Thermidorians abolished the Paris Commune.
This led to the establishment of the government known as the Directory.
Led by an executive council of five men who possessed the title of director.
The new constitution provided for a two-house legislator:
Council of the Ancients
Council of Five Hundred
The Directory had to be concerned with the possibility of a royalist reaction.
On 13 Vendémiaire (October 5, 1795), a royalist rebellion did break out in parts of Paris.
Napoleon Bonaparte was told to put down the rebellion, and with a “whiff of grapeshot,” his cannon dispersed the rebels.
The Directory had been saved, but soon it was to be destroyed by its savior.
2.16: Napoleon
Napoleon was born in 1769 to a family of minor nobles on the island of Corsica, which had been annexed by France the year prior to his birth.
He attended a French military academy, and in 1785 he was commissioned as an artillery officer.
The Revolution offered tremendous opportunities to young men of ability, and Napoleon became a strong supporter of the Revolution.
In 1793, after playing a major role in the campaign to retake the French port of Toulon from the British, he was made a general.
In a series of stunningly quick victories, Napoleon destroyed the combined Austrian and Sardinian armies.
He also decided to invade Egypt in order to cut Britain’s ties with its colony of India.
He was unable to do much with his victories on land because a British fleet under the command of Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated a French fleet at the Battle of Abukir on August 1, 1798.
Napoleon retreated from his army and hurried back to France, where he had learned that the Directory was becoming more unstable.
On 19 Brumaire (November 10, 1799), Napoleon joined the Abbé Siéyès staged a coup d’état, and overturned the Directory.
Siéyès then established a new constitution with a powerful executive made up of three consuls: Roger-Ducos, Siéyès, and Napoleon.
One month after the coup, Napoleon set up a new constitution with himself as First Consul.
He staged a plebiscite, a vote by the people, for his new constitution to show popular support, and they passed it overwhelmingly.
Since Napoleon required that public servants be loyal to him only, he was able to use the talents of those Jacobins and monarchists who were willing to accept his dominance over the French state.
Napoleon treated those who were not willing with brutal cruelty.
He established a secret police force to root out his opponents.
He then purged the Jacobins.
He also kidnapped and executed the Duke of Enghien after falsely accusing the Duke of plotting against him.
In 1801, Napoleon created a concordat with Pope Pius VII.
It declared that “Catholicism was the religion of the great majority of the French.”
However, it didn’t reestablish the Catholic Church as the official state religion.
The papacy would choose bishops, but only on the First Consul's advice.
All clergy was required to take an oath supporting the state, and the state would pay their salaries.
The Church was able to persuade Napoleon to abolish the Jacobin calendar.
In 1802, following a plebiscite that made him Consul for Life, Napoleon set about to reform the French legal system.
The Civil Code of 1804 (Napoleonic Code) provided for a single, unitary legal system for all of France.
The code established the equality of all people before the law and protected property holders' rights.
The code reaffirmed France's paternalistic nature.
Women and children were legally obligated to rely on their husbands and fathers.
In 1804, Napoleon decided to make himself emperor.
He invited the Pope to attend the ceremony, which was held at Notre Dame.
Napoleon wanted to make it clear that he was Emperor of France not by the will of God or by chance of birth, but rather by the weight of his own achievements.
2.17: France at War with Europe
Constant warfare was a hallmark of the reign of Napoleon.
In 1792, with the levée en masse, French armies became larger than their opponent’s forces.
Napoleon saw the Treaty of Amiens (1802) as a temporary measure to limit British influence.
After most of the French troops died from disease, Napoleon turned his interest away from the colonies.
He even sold the Louisiana Territory to the USA for the paltry sum of around $15 million.
On October 21, 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Nelson died in the struggle that ultimately destroyed the French fleet and with it any hope of the French landing in England.
Third Coalition: Formed in which Austria and Russia joined Great Britain.
Napoleon set out to first destroy the Austrians, a goal which he achieved at the Battle of Ulm in October 1805.
He then won his greatest victory over a Russian force at Austerlitz.
Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire and created the Confederacy of the Rhine, a loose grouping of 16 German states under French rule.
Napoleon’s victories in Germany resulted in the redrawing of the map.
When the Prussians saw the extent of French control over German territories, they rushed to join the Third Coalition.
Napoleon quickly gathered his forces, and at the Battle of Jena he obliterated the Prussian army and occupied their capital city of Berlin.
The Russian Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) decided that it was necessary to make peace with France, after the complete collapse of the Prussian army.
He met with Napoleon on a raft on the Nieman River, and on July 7, 1807, the two monarchs signed the Treaty of Tilsit.
Because of this, Prussia was saved from extinction and was forced to be an ally of France.
Seeing that he could not defeat the British navy, Napoleon decided to wage economic war.
He established the Continental System, an attempt to ban British goods from arriving on the continent.
This system weakened the economies of the state that Napoleon had conquered.
2.18: The Defeat of Napoleon
The War in Spain
In 1807, a French army passed through Spain on its way to conquer Portugal, an ally of Great Britain.
In 1808, a revolt broke out against Spanish King Charles IV bringing his son Ferdinand VII (r. 1808–1833) to the throne.
Napoleon decided to take this opportunity to occupy Spain and place his brother Joseph on its throne.
The Spanish nation rose up in a nationalistic fervor to expel the French, who in turn used tremendous brutality against the Spanish people.
Napoleon was forced to leave his 350,000 troops in Spain.
Growing Nationalism in Europe
While Napoleon was still suffering from his "Spanish ulcer," stirrings of nationalism began to churn in other parts of Europe.
Baron von Stein (1757–1831) and Count von Hardenberg (1750–1822): They were hardly democratic reformers; wanted to see the continuation of monarchical power and aristocratic privilege.
They did end Junker monopoly over the ownership of land and abolished serfdom.
Stein appointed some bourgeois officers while dismissing some of the more inept Junker officers.
He founded a professional war ministry. He then eased military discipline to inspire peasant soldiers to fight for the state.
The 1812 Invasion of Russia
Napoleon's advisers warned him that the wars would hurt the French economy. He still sought new conquests.
Russia seemed a suitable target because it was still standing as a strong continental rival.
In June 1812, Napoleon took his “Grand Army” of 600,000 men into Russia, where he fully expected to defeat the Russians in open battle.
The Russians merely retreated within their vast landscape.
When Napoleon invaded Moscow in September, the tsar's retreating army had set fires to the city, leaving no one to fight and no supplies.
He then decided to withdraw his army.
Only 40,000 of the original Grand Army finally returned to France.
In 1813, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain formed a coalition to fight together until all of Europe was freed from French forces.
By March 1814, they were in Paris and by the following month, Napoleon abdicated.
2.19: The Congress of Vienna, the Bourbon Restoration, and the Hundred Days
In victory, the allies demanded the restoration of the Bourbon monarchs, Louis XVIII sat on the throne.
Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean, where he maintained the title of Emperor and a small army while his allies paid off his debts.
In September 1814, the allies met at the Congress of Vienna to create a lasting peace.
The four great powers, Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, dominated the proceedings.
Prince Metternich (1773–1859) an Australian Chancellor, He wanted to ensure that ideas derived from the French Revolution, such as nationalism and liberalism, had no place in a redrawn Europe.
By giving the territory to the Tsar of Russia as the Duchy of Poland, they ensured that Polish demands for a free and independent Poland went unmet.
The major powers also wanted to make sure that no country would ever again rule Europe.
The major powers also built a number of states that would prevent further French expansion.
The Dutch region and the Austrian Netherlands to the south formed the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
They granted Prussia significant lands along the Rhine to thwart French expansion to the east in the future.
They also gave Piedmont the territory of Genoa.
On March 15, 1815, Napoleon returned to France, having escaped from Elba.
As the Bourbons returned and sparked a violent white terror against Jacobins and Bonaparte supporters, he had many supporters in the army and country.
White Terror: White, signifying the royalist flag and those loyal to the monarchy.
At the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815), Wellington aided by Marshal Blucher defeated Napoleon.
Hundred Days: The name given to Napoleon’s remarkable return, he was exiled once again.
He was exiled to the distant island of St. Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic, and died in 1821.
Period 3: Age of Revolutions to World War I: (1815–1914)
3.1: Restoration and Revolution
No institution had suffered as much from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as the Church.
In 1799, Novalis wrote, “Catholicism is almost played out. The old papacy is laid in the tomb, and Rome for the second time has become a ruin.”
The Restoration period saw a remarkable recovery for European churches, both Catholic and Protestant.
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.
In Spain, the Inquisition was once again allowed to operate following its disappearance during the Napoleonic domination of Spain.
3.2: An Age of Competing Ideologies
Restoration period: A highly ideological period in which ideas inspired either from support or commendation of the French Revolution played a role in whether one was committed to the restored order that emerged after 1815.
This era is also known as the “age of -isms.”
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.
His emphasis on the role of tradition as the basic underpinning for the rights of those in positions of authority.
Reactionary conservatism appeared in the writings of such men as Joseph de Maistre.
He’s an émigré during the French Revolution.
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: It is based on the idea that all people’s 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.
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.
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.
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 tied to liberalism because many nationalists wanted political equality and human freedom to serve as the bedrock for the new state.
Liberalism
The foundation of liberalism can be found in the writings of the philosophers of the Enlightenment:
With their emphasis on the individual’s natural rights;
Support for limits on political authorities through the writing of constitutions; and
The formation of parliamentary bodies.
Liberalism is connected to the events of the early stages of the French Revolution:
With the establishment of the constitutional monarchy; and
Lafayette’s Declaration of the Rights of Man serves 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.
Classical School
Formed by the early liberal economists.
Adam Smith published his most important work — An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (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.
Smith realized that the true wealth of one’s nation is the labor of the citizens.
Smith presented two revolutionary ideas:
Specialists have natural skills and can produce their specialties better and faster than others. Trade could enrich everyone.
Government price-fixing was unnecessary and counterproductive. They should follow a laissez-faire policy and let individual businesses set their own prices and production levels.
This is the basis of free-market capitalism.
Economics is sometimes referred to as “the dismal science.”
Thomas Maltus 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.
If workers were better compensated, they would produce more children — leading to only more misery as increasing numbers of workers competed for fewer jobs and less food.
David Ricardo asserted that the only way for factory owners to gain a competitive advantage was to offer lower wages, resulting in a steady downward spiral in their earnings — the Iron Law of Wages.
This pleased factory owners because their thriftiness could be presented as if it were actually essential for the public good.
Some writers also began to question certain classical, liberal orthodoxies on the workings of the economy and the role of the state.
John Stuart Mill: He began as a disciple of Jeremy Bentham — who had provided a justification for an expanded role of government by suggesting that governments should seek to provide “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”
Bentham’s utilitarian views 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.
Mill’s most famous work, On Liberty, was a clarion call for personal freedom.
Mill was greatly influenced by the feminist thought of his wife, Harriet Taylor.
Inspired by her, he wrote The Subjection of Women, arguing in favor of granting full equality to women.
Socialism
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.
Utopian Socialists: A phrase coined by Karl Marx — he viewed and felt they offered non-scientific, unrealistic solutions to the problems of modern society.
They believed that expansive possibilities were available to mankind and that poor environments corrupted human nature.
They also believed that capitalism overemphasized production, underemphasized distribution, and possessed other serious flaws.
Early Socialists
Henri de Saint-Simon
He 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 a lot of those on the bottom of the social ladder.
Charles Fourier
He created a blueprint for a cooperative community.
It consisted of a self-contained group of precisely 1,620 people living oa 5,000 acres of land.
He hoped to make the workday more satisfying by rotating tasks so that everyone would do the boring tasks but not exclusively.
He thought that because children liked to play with dirt, they should take care of the community’s garbage.
Robert Owen
He blamed the environment for man’s corruption.
In response built New Lanark, a mill town in Scotland, where workers were housed decently and children received an education.
3.3: Political Restoration and Reform
France
Restoration: Refers to the events in France when the Bourbons were restored to the throne following the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
Charter of 1814: A hastily written constitution—that contained many of the freedoms from the revolutionary period.
It contained no notion of popular sovereignty.
This 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.
In 1820, the son of the younger brother of Louis, Duke de Berry, was assassinated.
Ultra Loyalists: People who wanted to see the revival of absolute monarchy.
They used the assassination to pressure the king to clamp down on the press and to give more rights to the aristocracy.
In 1824, political repression increased after the death of Louis XVIII.
Louis’s younger brother, Charles X, came to the throne.
Charles felt more bitter about the Revolution than his brother Louis had.
He introduced a Law of Sacrilege, which ruled the death as the penalty for any attack on the Church.
In 1829, Charles appointed the Prince of Polignac as his chief minister, who was disliked for being an ultra-royalist.
Polignac issued July Ordinances, which dissolved the newly elected assembly, took away the right to vote from the upper bourgeoisie, and imposed rigid censorship.
July Revolution (1830): It sparked revolutions throughout Europe, and ended with the crowning of Louis Phillipe and the creation of the bourgeois, or July monarchy.
Revolutionary Movements
Spain
King Ferdinand VII had been restored to the throne following the collapse of French control in 1814.
He is restored to honor the liberal constitution of 1812 drawn up by the Cortés — the Spanish Parliament.
Once restored to his throne, Ferdinand dissolved the Cortés 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.
Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia wanted to intervene to stem the tide of the revolt.
The British refused to directly intervene.
Two years later, a French army acted unilaterally and restored Ferdinand to absolute power.
Italy
A more serious revolt broke out in Naples, a revolt that Metternich labeled as the “greatest crisis” of his career.
Neapolitan army officers, perhaps inspired by French ideas, joined with members of the bourgeoisie and began, with the assistance of secret nationalistic societies.
The revolt led to nationalistic stirrings throughout Italy and to another revolt in the Kingdom of Sardinia, which ultimately came to nothing
Troppau Protocol: Stated that the great European powers had the right to intervene in revolutionary situations.
The rebellion in Naples was put down with the help of Austrian troops.
Greece
Western European liberals looked to the Greek revolt of 1821 to free the “birthplace of democracy” from “Eastern despotism.”
Lord Byron: He sent his own money to refit the Greek fleet and died amidst the struggle in Greece.
By 1827, Britain, France, and Russia organized a merged naval force to engage on the side of the Greek revolutionaries, and the Russians attacked the Ottomans on land the following year.
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; the Sick Man of Europe.
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 the size of South Carolina, located north of Greece on the Austro-Hungarian Empire's southern border.
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
Alexander I had ruled Russia and at various times had toyed with the idea of political reform.
Alexander’s death in 1825 produced confusion as to the succession;
Constantine, the older of his two surviving brothers, turned down the throne.
Nicholas I decided to sat on the throne.
“Decembrist” revolt: It broke out because they wanted to support Constantine.
This was eventually put down with great brutality.
Nicholas I ruled with an iron fist, making certain to stamp out any additional reform movements within his vast empire.
Great Britain
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.
Peterloo Massacre: Soldiers on hand shot 11 members of the crowd during the meeting.
Six Acts: Passed by the Parliament which banned demonstrations and imposed censorship.
Combination Acts: They 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.
It expanded the electorate to include those who had become wealthy.
However, only one in five males in Great Britain could vote.
It reduced the number of so-called rotten boroughs, which were sparsely populated electoral districts.
Poor Law of 1834: It forced the destitute to enter into workhouses where conditions were purposefully miserable to discourage people from seeking assistance.
In 1833, slavery was banned in the British Empire.
Factory Act of 1833: It reduced the number of hours that children could work in factories and established government inspectors to ensure adequate working conditions.
The 1846 elimination of the Corn Laws — which had imposed high tariffs on imported grain to support domestic growers.
3.4: The Revolutions of 1848
On January 12, 1848, there was a rebellion in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies against King Ferdinand II.
The first of approximately 50 revolts convulsed Europe in the first four months of that year.
Emperor Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916)
He 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.
Hungry Forties: The terrible decade for agriculture during the 1840s.
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
In 1848, a rebellion in France created the spark for revolution throughout Europe.
The wealthy bourgeoisie dominated the July Monarchy. The workers felt they only received little for their efforts.
François Guizot
Louis Phillipe’s chief minister.
He 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.”
Louis Blanc
A socialist journalist that led the radicals.
He spoke of the need for fundamental social and economic change.
His supporters successfully pressured the provisional government to set up national workshops to provide jobs for the unemployed.
Outside of Paris, the nation was more conservative, as seen by the national assembly election held on April 23 — elected an assembly made up primarily of moderate republicans.
The election 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.
June Days: The termination of the workshops wherein a violent class struggle in the streets of Paris in which 10,000 people died.
It strengthened the hands of the moderate republicans.
In November, 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.
Louis Napoleon
The first elected president from the election in December, a nephew of the Emperor.
He was able to capitalize on the appeal of his name and made vague promises to aid the embittered workers.
He created a rather conservative government.
In 1851, he assumed dictatorial powers.
In 1852, he made himself Emperor Napoleon III.
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 — two shots rang out and struck two people.
Frederick became horrified and ordered his army to leave the city — leaving him no defense.
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.
It created a two-house legislature with adult-male universal suffrage for the lower house.
This provision was watered down by giving weighted votes to those who paid more taxes.
In Hungary, Lajos Kossuth 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.
In Vienna, it 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.
By June, the revolt in Prague was put down by military force.
In November, the emperor was firmly in control in Vienna.
A 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, united under German rule.
Kleindeutsch supporters felt that the more realistic solution would be to include only Prussia and the smaller German states.
The delegates settled on the Kleindeutsch, and they offered the German Imperial throne to William IV, the King of Prussia.
He did not want a “crown picked up from the gutter” and declined the offer.
This became a lost opportunity to build a German nation under liberal parliament rather than a militaristic Prussian state.
Frankfurt Parliament
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.
It was hampered by the political inexperience of its participants and by conflicting aims; while all wanted to see a unified German nation.
The Italian States
The revolt that first broke out in Sicily led Ferdinand II to grant a liberal constitution.
Revolts broke out next in Tuscany and Sardinia.
The Papal States even granted a liberal constitution when they saw the revolts.
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, took up the banner of Italian nationalists and bombarded Lombardy, only to be defeated by the Austrians.
For Italy, the lesson for the future was that unification would not take place under the auspices of the papacy.
The possibility of the Kingdom of Sardinia serving as the foundation for a unified state improved
Only Sardinia remained constitutional monarchical after 1848.
A final important lesson 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.
In Great Britain (1848), marked the peak year for Chartism.
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:
Universal adult-male suffrage;
The secret ballot;
Abolition of property requirements for Members of Parliament;
Payment to Members of Parliament;
Equal electoral districts; and
Annual parliament6s with yearly elections.
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.
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, but the House refused to even debate the clauses contained in the petition.
Reform did eventually come about in incremental stages; by the early 20th century, five of the six acts of the Charter were established parts of the British Constitution.
3.5: The Industrial Revolution
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.
Great Britain’s Industrial Lead
Great Britain was the first European nation to begin the process of industrialization.
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain achieved political stability that encouraged economic investment.
Great Britain permitted a much greater degree of religious toleration.
Britain’s increased population size produced not only a large body of potential low-wage workers for the factories but also a steady supply of consumers.
The Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century, initiated by men such as Jethro Tull — introduced scientific farming to Great Britain.
Crop rotation increased crop yield and boosted turnips and beets, which could feed more animals in the winter.
As a result of the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of cottage industries, England was already involved in manufacturing industries.
Enclosure Acts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries:
It forced small-scale farmers into urban areas, making larger farms more efficient and providing low-paid factory labor.
The increased prosperity of English farms led to an increase in capital that could be used to invest in new industries.
Great Britain also had a central bank that encouraged the flow of money in the economy
The 18th century witnessed a significant increase in Great Britain’s overseas trade.
It provided the nation with the world’s largest merchant marine.
The 18th century also witnessed the height of the Atlantic slave trade.
Transportation within Great Britain was enhanced by the fact that the entire nation lies within close proximity to the sea.
A network of navigable rivers and the creation of canals made water transport efficient.
Turnpike trusts built new roads in Great Britain on a scale not seen since the end of Roman rule.
Great Britain’s two critical natural resources of the Early Industrial Revolution: coal and iron.
The first 18th-century technological advances occurred in cotton manufacturing.
In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which increased the speed at which weavers could make cloth.
This invention created a problem: cloth could be made so rapidly that it outstripped the supply of thread.
By 1765, James Hargreaves, solved Kay’s problem, by inventing the spinning jenny.
A machine that initially spun 16 spindles of thread at one time.
Improvements allowed it to spin as many as 120 spindles at once.
Richard Arkwright’s invention of the water frame marked the development of the Industrial revolution.
It is 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, making a half-million-pound fortune for himself.
Labor-saving was useful because British cloth manufacturing was constrained by labor supply.
Huge thanks to cotton imports and increased wool supply, labor savings actually resulted in more cloth to sell.
Colonization and slavery made cotton imports possible, fueling the Industrial Revolution.
The first factories were built along streams and rivers to harness energy for machinery.
Steam engines made it possible for factories to work on these locations.
James Watt studied the steam pump and adapted it for use in industry.
His invention was the first true steam engine.
He also invented an engine that turned a wheel. This made factories independent of waterpower.
Smelting iron is one of the greatest factors that contributed to the Industrial Revolution.
Iron was smelted traditionally in extremely hot ovens fueled by charcoals.
Abraham Darby discovered a means of smelting iron using coal.
Another important invention in the 19th century Industrial revolution is the railroad.
The first passenger railroad traveled between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.
By the middle of the century, Britain was crisscrossed with railroad tracks.
that carried passengers and goods throughout the land.
Some of the machines and structures associated with railroads included engines, tracks, stations, tunnels, and hotels for travelers.
Belgium was the first to industrialize, it had a plentiful supply of coal and iron.
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.
The Impact of Industrialization
Industrialization replaced the putting-out (or domestic) system, where peasants received raw materials and merchants collected and sold finished products.
Great Britain became the first nation to have more people living in the cities than in the countryside.
The cities that grew from the ground up tended to be awful places for the working poor.
Urban residents had higher mortality rates than rural residents due to poor ventilation and sanitation.
Cholera killed tens of thousands in early 19th-century cities because animal and human feces contaminated the water supply.
Industrialization also affected the family structure.
The family no longer worked together under one roof.
Great Britain’s Sadler Committee exposed that children were being beaten in the factories.
The House of Commons passed the Factory Act (1833), which mandated:
that children younger than 9 could not work in textile mills,
that children younger than 12 could work no more than 9 hours per day, and
that children younger than 18 couldn’t work more than 12 hours each day.
Working-Class Responses to Industrialization
Workers’ traditional way of life was threatened by machinery.
Some of them tried to destroy the machines.
Ned Laud: The workers’ fictional leader.
Luddite: Termed for those who refuse to embrace new technologies.
Machinery also caused hardship for many laborers on the farms.
Captain Swing: The farmers’ imaginary character who righted the wrongs imposed on hardworking individuals by the advent of technology.
Workers sought to create cooperative societies, small associations within a given trade that provided funeral benefits and other services for their members.
Friendly societies were organized as well in the late 19th century which eventually evolved into full-blown unions once the ban on such activities was lifted in 1824.
In the 1860s, 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 later evolved into the Trade Union Congress, pulling together workers from disparate industries.
By the end of the 19th century, unions were being formed by dockworkers and other non-skilled workers.
Socialism and Karl Marx
Scientific Socialism: The most significant strand in socialist thought — offered by Karl Marx.
Marx was born in the German city of Trier and eventually received a university education at Jena.
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.
This led Marx to seek the freer intellectual climate of Paris.
The French 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 organized a Communist League to link the far-flung German Socialists who were living in exile.
In 1848, they teamed up to write “The Communist Manifesto.”
It viewed all the history from the beginning of time, an idea that was labeled as historical materialism.
The origin of this idea can be found in the writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
The development of capitalism led to the creation proletariat — a working class.
In what Marx admitted would be a violent struggle by the workers, the state would dominate, but it would wither away when all other classes were eliminated.
Das Kapital: An enormous treatise on capitalism that explains the mechanics by which capitalists extract profit from labor.
First International (1864): Marx founded it to "afford a central medium of communication and cooperation" for organizations seeking "protection, advancement, and complete emancipation of the working classes."
Trade Unionists, Mazzini Republicans, Marxists, and Anarchists were all members of the First International.
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.
3.6: The Age of National Unification
Metternich once remarked that Italy was “a mere geographical expression.”
He could have said the same for Germany, as both countries had several independent territories until the second half of the 19th century, 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 led to the monarchy annexing Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine.
By the early 19th century, Germans and Italians wanted to create a nation-state to unite all Italians or Germans under one political banner because they shared a culture, language, or fear of foreign dominance.
The Crimean War (1854–1856)
A dispute over who would control access to Jerusalem's Christian holy sites sparked the war.
British and French officials worried that Ottoman weakness was encouraging Russian adventurism in the Balkans and that the Russians could occupy Istanbul and gain access to the Mediterranean.
After the Ottomans' naval defeat, France and Great Britain declared war on the Russians.
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) revolutionized nursing after most of the half-million casualties died from disease in filthy field hospitals.
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.
The Russians were reluctant to quit, but the Austrians threatened to join the British and French if Russia didn't accept the peace terms. Russia had to cede Danube River territories and accept a Black Sea warship ban.
Without power in the Black Sea or along the Danube, the Russian navy was trapped in Baltic ports, subject to Swedish and Danish tolls.
The real cost of war was that the Concert of Europe, the idea that the great powers should work together—a concept that emerged from the Congress of Vienna —was finally shattered.
During the Crimean War, the Germans and other Europeans had no sense of unity on such questions.
The Crimean crisis horrified the British public, making them more isolationist toward Europe.
The Unification of Italy
In 1848, Italian liberals made an aborted attempt to create an Italian state.
After regaining power in Rome, Pope Pius IX promoted reactionary policies.
Liberals no longer believed in a pope-led Italian federation.
Risorgimento: The true architect of Italian unification — Count Camillo di Cavour, Victor Emmanuel’s chief minister.
Cavour was more practical and focused on boosting Sardinian power.
He cleverly entered the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the Crimean War on France and Great Britain's side, earning Napoleon III's gratitude.
Napoleon III also wanted to help the Sardinians because Austria was a French enemy.
Napoleon III also sought foreign military adventures to live up to his famous namesake, which ultimately doomed him.
The war began in April 1859. After defeating the Austrians in several battles, Napoleon decided to end the war before expelling them from Italy.
He was horrified by the conflict's high casualties and threatened by Prussia's Rhine troop buildup to aid the Austrians.
Cavour resigned as prime minister after Napoleon's aborted war and betrayal of the Sardinia treaty, but he returned a year later.
Napoleon and Cavour wanted to unite northern Italy. Napoleon feared a unified Italy would threaten France.
Giuseppe Garibaldi: One of the most intriguing characters in Italian history.
He was a Young Italy member of Mazzini's romantic Italian nationalism.
Garibaldi was horrified by the treaty between Sardinia and France, which required Italy to cede Savoy and Nice to France.
He initially threatened to attack France.
Instead, Cavour advised Garibaldi to invade the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, believing it would be suicidal.
Garibaldi's 1,000 "red shirts" overthrew the Bourbons' incompetent rule in southern Italy.
Cavour was appalled at the prospect of Garibaldi unifying Italy under his charismatic leadership rather than Piedmont's.
Cavour sent troops to Naples to halt Garibaldi.
He wanted the papal lands, so he waited for a popular revolt and then sent Sardinian troops into all of the pope's lands except Rome to restore order.
This was followed by the declaration of Victor Emmanuel as the first king of Italy on March 17, 1861.
Only Venetia and Rome were not under Italian rule after the papal invasion.
Italy took Venetia in 1866 after Prussia defeated Austria.
After the Franco-Prussian War, Italy added Rome as its capital in 1870.
The industrialized north of Italy and the impoverished south remain economically divided.
The Catholic Church's hostility, which banned Catholics from voting in national elections despite widespread defiance, was a major issue for the new state.
The Church did not reconcile with Italy until 1929, when Mussolini returned Vatican City's sovereignty to the papacy.
German Unification
The military and economic power of a unified Germany in 1871 changed Europe's power balance.
The story of German unification is rooted in the Napoleonic era.
Napoleon's rule over large parts of Germany unified Germany and increased German patriots' desire for unification.
Frederick William refused the crown from the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, delaying German unification until the Prussians found a better way.
Prussia's Zollverein gave it economic dominance over the other member states, while Austria was specifically excluded.
Prussia had industrialized while Austria remained agricultural by mid-century.
Prussia was German-dominated, while the Austrian Empire was multilingual.
Prussia enjoyed the services of one of the most remarkable statesmen of the 19th century, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898).
One of the 19th century's greatest statesmen, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), served Prussia.
William fought parliament over military reforms to challenge Austrian supremacy in the German Confederation.
He gave the Prussian army modern weapons to unify Germany.
This plan began in 1864 with an alliance with Austria against Denmark over Schleswig and Holstein.
Schleswig was ruled by Prussia and Holstein by the Austrians after Prussia was easily defeated the Danes in the Danish war.
By 1866, Prussia had allied with Italy and secured a French promise of nonparticipation.
Prussia, under Bismarck's orders, declared war on Austria over a minor dispute over Holstein's governance.
The Seven Weeks' War saw the Prussian army defeat Austria in seven weeks after modernizing.
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.
Prussia convinced northern German states to join 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, Bismarck started the Franco-Prussian War, completing his plan.
Bismarck, who desired war, rewrote the "Ems dispatch," a telegram sent by the Prussian king to Bismarck informing him of his conversation with the French ambassador, to make it seem like the king had insulted France.
On January 18, 1871, William I was proclaimed in the palace of Versailles as German emperor.
The creation of the German Empire completely changed the direction of European history.
France lost Alsace and Lorraine and paid a huge indemnity to the new German state for starting the war.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, this new German state's economic power strained relations with Great Britain and spurred colonial expansion.
Bismarck encouraged the French to build an African empire to distract from Alsace-Lorraine.
All European nations wanted overseas empires.
It advanced their political and economic interests in Europe adjusting to a powerful German state.
Bismarck launched the "Kulturkampf" to control all church appointments and Catholic education, fearing that Catholics were more loyal to the church than to Germany.
In 1878, Bismarck petitioned the Reichstag to ban Socialists' right to assemble and publish.
He also established old-age pensions and other social benefits for all Germans to reduce the Socialists' appeal.
Bismarck ruled at the pleasure of the king, not the people, and his poor relations with Wilhelm II led to less able leaders taking his place, risking his fragile peace with Russia and sacrificing German stability for German glory.
France
The Third French Republic (1870–1940) brought stability, but it had to deal with a divided public.
Louis Napoleon was the only president of the short-lived Second Republic after winning the December 1848 election.
In 1851, after a constitutional dispute with the legislature, he held a plebiscite on whether to grant him dictatorial powers for 10 years.
France prospered greatly during the first 10 years of the reign of Napoleon III.
Government-subsidized credit spurred economic growth during this time.
Georges Haussmann cleared many of Paris's slums and built its wide avenues, transforming the city from medieval to modern.
In 1860, Napoleon made concessions due to the unpopularity of his Crimean and Italian wars.
His liberalization backfired, causing the people to openly disapprove of his rule.
In 1859, Napoleon declared a "liberal empire", making his state a constitutional monarchy.
After the Second Empire fell, France established the Third Republic.
The Republic had to suppress a Parisian uprising that led to the Paris Commune.
Paris Commune: A radical government formed from Franco-Prussian War anarchy.
After killing 25,000 Parisians, the republican government restored order in Paris.
By 1875, the republic had a two-house parliament with a chamber of deputies elected by all male voters and a senate elected indirectly.
Boulanger Affair severely weakened the monarchist movement.
Great Britain
Great Exhibition of 1851: Boasted more than 13,000 exhibitors displaying the variety of British goods that were now available as a result of industrialization.
John Paxton constructed a building with the greatest area of glass to date, which became known as the Crystal Palace.
The Crystal Palace revealed “the aesthetic bloom of its practical character, and of the practical tendency of the English nation.”
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, 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.
Russia
Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) recognized serfdom as Russia's biggest issue, but Nicholas I was too reactionary to consider reform.
In 1861, he freed the serfs, but they had to pay for their freedom over 50 years.
Alexander established zemstvos, or district assemblies, to handle local issues like education and social services.
Some Russian reformers saw the zemstvos as a chance for greater political freedom, but they were dominated by the local gentry.
Alexander revised the legal system, but he remained an autocrat and saw no need to introduce a written constitution or parliamentary bodies.
His inflexibility on these issues fueled revolutionary groups like the People's Will, which assassinated Alexander in 1881.
His reactionary son Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) took the throne and repressed even the modest 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 Austro-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.
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.
The Ottoman Empire
This is most commonly know as “the sick old man of Europe.”
Under Sultan Abdul Mejid (r. 1839–1861), the Tanzimat reform initiative sought to modernize the Ottoman economy and introduce Western ideas like equality before the law and religious freedom.
Western education helped create the liberal "Young Turks."
In 1876, the Young Turks helped establish the Ottoman state as a constitutional monarchy.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) abolished the constitution to subjugate non-Muslims in his empire.
His policies led to the deaths of thousands of Armenians.
His policies also led to general repression throughout the state.
Ottoman weakness continued to plague the empire up until it sided with the Central Powers in the First World War.
3.7: The Second Industrial Revolution
Steel
Henry Bessemer invented the Bessemer Process in 1856 to produce more steel at lower cost.
William Siemens, a German, developed a better steel-making method that produced a higher-quality product at lower cost.
Steel revolutionized architecture and shipbuilding due to its strength and durability.
Electricity
In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lamp.
In 1881, the first electrical power station was built in Great Britain.
In late 19th-century London and Paris, where public opera houses and theaters grew, electric lights made cities safer and increased nighttime activities.
Transportation
Europe's rail network grew to over 100,000 miles by the end of the century.
In 1869. the French built the Suez Canal.
In 1875, the British took control of a waterway that halved travel time from Great Britain to India.
Steamships replaced clipper ships, which set Atlantic Ocean crossing records.
Trains and steamships using ice-making machines from the 1870s could transport perishables around the world, making the US, Australia, and Argentina major European suppliers.
In 1885, Karl Benz invented a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine.
Until 1908, only the rich could afford cars when Henry Ford introduced Model T.
In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright, bicycle builders, launched the first successful airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Communication and Education Advances
Britain was the first European nation to establish a national postal system, offering penny letters to almost everyone.
Universal public education also encouraged writing.
By 1844, Europe had telegraph lines.
By 1900, Germans made 700 million calls per year after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876.
Some of those calls may have been to arrange social events around new entertainment options like motion pictures, which debuted in the 1890s.
In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph that was perfect for homebodies.
Other developments
The introduction of synthetic dyes revolutionized the textile industry.
The invention of man-made fertilizers led to increased crop yields.
Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite allowed him to blast tunnels through rock and remove nature's inconvenient hills.
Michael Faraday pioneered electromagnetism and electricity.
James Joule defined many of the laws of thermodynamics.
Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table by arranging known elements by atomic weight and leaving spaces for predicted but undiscovered elements.
In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen made an accidental discovery of X-rays.
Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity.
The Curies, Marie and Pierre, spent their lives studying radioactivity.
In 1910, Marie Curie isolated radium.
Ernest Rutherford demonstrated that atomic particles had a nucleus.
In 1901, Max Planck proposed that energy was delivered in discrete units, or quanta.
His quantum physics ended Newtonian mechanistic physics.
Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, in which time, space, and movement are relative to the observer.
Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche: Began to question and even to reject the ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment.
In his most influential work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche famously declared that "God is dead" to break free from traditional morality.
He had to "kill" God because religion was the foundation of Western civilization, which he hated.
Nietzsche hated Bismarck's Germany and wanted the artist-warrior superman.
After his 1900 death, his pro-Nazi sister edited his writings to support Hitler's extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud: The founder of psychoanalysis.
He proposed a talking cure for mental illness by exploring the subconscious.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud believed dreams revealed the subconscious and created a list of Freudian symbols—items or events that appear in dreams that represent unconscious memories.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud questioned the idea of human progress and instead proposed that violence is at the core of our being.
Advances in Medicine
In 1846, surgery changed William Morton introduced ether anesthesia, followed by chloroform a few years later.
Louis Pasteur discovered that microbes—small, invisible organisms—caused diseases.
Pasteur also explained how smallpox vaccines stimulated the immune system to produce antibodies after contact with a weak form of the bacilli.
After Pasteur's discoveries, Joseph Lister used carbolic acid as a surgical disinfectant.
Ignaz Semmelweis, made childbirth much safer for women.
He showed that doctors and nurses who thoroughly washed their hands before delivery could significantly reduce "childbed fever" deaths.
Darwin
Charles Darwin: An English naturalist who traveled on the H.M.S. Beagle to the Galápagos Islands off the coast of South America.
Charles Lyell: Claimed that geological evidence proved that the Earth was much older than the biblical age of approximately 6,000 years.
Herbert Spencer: He first used the phrase “survival of the fittest.”
Social Darwinism: It was used to justify the racist idea that Europeans were superior to Africans and Asians and therefore should dominate them.
Darwin explained change before anyone else.
Darwin believed some members of a species may inherit traits that help them survive.
Darwin called this "natural selection" in On the Origin of Species (1859).
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin argued that humans evolved from simpler life forms.
Social Class in the Second Industrial Revolution
The French Revolution established meritocracy, eliminating birth privileges.
In Great Britain, refrigerated railcars allowed cheaper agricultural imports from the US, Argentina, and Australia.
Competitive civil service and military exams reduced the aristocracy's role in government administration and military command.
"Age of the Middle Class" describes the second half of the 19th century.
During the Renaissance, a different "middle class" transformed society.
That middle class was made up of wealthy, city-dwelling merchants who fell between medieval society's three "estates"—the peasants, the priesthood, and the nobility.
Merchants' money and secular interests advanced Renaissance intellectualism.
In the late 19th century, the middle class was growing.
New and wealthy professions joined the merchants.
They were "middle class" because they were outside the old class system.
Middle-class families had one servant, while wealthy families had large staffs.
In the 18th century, a "Grand Tour" of Europe's capitals was part of a young gentleman's education. Only the wealthy could afford it.
Thomas Cook popularized travel among the middle class by organizing day trips to London's Great Exhibition.
Eduard Bernstein challenged some of Marx’s basic ideas in Evolutionary Socialism (1898).
He and his "revisionist" followers claimed capitalism would not collapse as Marx predicted.
Joseph Proudhon is often considered to be the founder of anarchism.
Proudhon, who coined the term "anarchist," believed that society's true laws came from its nature, not authority.
Anarchism advocated exposing these laws as society's ultimate goal.
Karl Kautsky defended Marx's "laws" and called revisionists heretics.
He said the proletarian revolution would be peaceful.
3.8: Social and Cultural Developments
Religion
After 1815, organized religion recovered from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic era.
After the 1848 revolutions, secular rulers supported religion as a social order fortifier.
Catholicism
Spain declared Catholicism the only religion of the Spanish people in 1851, while Austria repealed Joseph II's late 18th-century reforms of the Catholic Church.
In Rome, a revolution forced Pope Pius IX to flee.
After French troops restored him to power, he issued the encyclical Syllabus of Errors**,** which listed liberalism as a modern error.
In 1870, Pius introduced the controversial doctrine of "papal infallibility," which held that the pope could not err in matters of faith.
Bismarck believed Catholicism could divide Germany because Catholics were loyal to a supranational institution.
Bismarck and German liberals seized Catholic schools and bishops to fight the Kulturkampf (cultural war) against Catholic institutions.
In 1878, Bismarck stopped this harassment because it wasn't working.
In the late 19th century, Catholic and Protestant clergy felt religion should address social issues.
Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) issued Rerum Novarum in 1891, reaffirming private property and condemning socialism but stating that Christians and the Church had a duty to the poor.
In Catholic countries like France and Italy, this message inspired the Catholic Social Movement, while Protestant churches increased their work for the poor.
The Bible as History
In the early 19th century, German theologians studied the Bible as history to find the "historical" Jesus.
In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.
Strauss believed the Bible was a collection of early Christian myths that produced a "Christ of faith, rather than the Jesus of history."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Eliot translated Strauss's Life and Ludwig Feuerbach's (1804–1872) Essence of Christianity, which argued that God was a man-made device that reflected our inner divine.
Religion for the Working Class and Peasants
In 1851, a British religious census found that church attendance was much lower than expected and that the working class had little religious affiliation.
In 1858, a French peasant girl named Bernadette claimed she saw the Virgin Mary 18 times.
The Lourdes grotto waters, where she saw the vision, became a religious shrine.
Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and Zionism
In 1858, Great Britain allowed Jews into the House of Commons, and in the following decade, Austria-Hungary and Germany granted Jews full political rights.
Jews were blamed for modern economic trends like the department store, which drove small shopkeepers out of business.
Prejudice rose during the decade-long economic depression of 1873.
Economic resentment was mixed with a new form of anti-Semitism based on Social Darwinist views of Jews as a race rather than a religion.
Germany had anti-Semitic political parties, and the Dreyfus Affair helped create Action Française, a monarchist group that was anti-Semitic.
Hitler lived in Vienna under anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger.
Theodore Herzl appalled by the Dreyfus Affair's anti-Semitism, advocated Zionism.
He founded the First Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897 to achieve his goal of a Jewish state in The Jewish State.
The Rights and Role of Women
This Victorian idealization of the household and women's role in it led to the "cult of domesticity."
Women were supposed to make the home a paradise.
Women were expected to be submissive, pure, and religious because they were in charge of the family's religion.
Books were written to help women manage their households and raise their children.
Working-class women worked as hard as men in factories, homes, and as servants.
Many worked multiple jobs and had little time or energy to read books on raising children.
Middle-class women would visit the working class to teach them home economics.
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
Women began attending the University of Zurich in 1865 and the University of London in 1878.
Professional societies in medicine and law generally excluded women, creating another barrier for women.
Frances Power Cobbe was one of the first women to work as a journalist and later campaigned against medical vivisection.
Josephine Butler broke a Victorian law by publicly discussing sex.
In 1869, Butler founded the Ladies National Association, an all-female organization that opposed the Contagious Diseases Act, which allowed women suspected of having STDs to be dragged off the street for testing while men were left alone.
Women’s Struggles for Increased Rights
Feminists formed organizations to effect change.
In conservative Greece, a feminist newspaper with 20,000 readers advocated for professional and civil rights for over 20 years.
There was transatlantic cooperation between feminist groups and US feminists.
Clara Zetkin in Germany believed socialism was the only way to free women.
Suffragists, women who peacefully campaigned for the vote, were sometimes overshadowed by members of Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union.
With her daughter Christabel, Emmeline and her Suffragettes heckled political speakers, broke church windows, and set fires.
Suffragettes were arrested and beaten for their threat to society. They were force-fed after a prison hunger strike.
In 1918, women in Great Britain finally achieved the right to vote.
There is an ongoing historical debate over whether the suffragettes or suffragists deserve credit for this monumental achievement.
Cultural Changes
Maria Montessori exemplifies this new woman in Europe at the turn of the century.
Her teaching methods made her a famous doctor and educator.
Birth control, education, and career opportunities opened new doors for women.
In an essay, British novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote that women were now "pointed and they want everything."
History
Barthold Niebuhr pioneered the use of primary sources in classical history.
His Roman History influenced Leopold von Ranke, who challenged the idea that history revealed a grand design, whether it was God's or secular.
Like Niebuhr, Ranke believed that historical texts were unreliable and that original sources were needed.
Anthropology
The new imperialism led to the sudden expansion of European dominance over large parts of the world.
National anthropological societies were founded across Europe, but due to "scientific" racism of the time, they often studied the "inferiority" of non-Europeans.
Sociology
Sociology, the study of human social behavior, was inspired by governments' growing interest in citizen statistics.
Émile Durkheim held the first chair in sociology at the University of Bordeaux, an appointment that was met with skepticism by the more traditional faculty.
Archaeology
In the 19th century, amateur archaeologists like Heinrich Schlieman, a German businessman who searched for Troy, and Sir Arthur Evans, an Englishman who excavated the Minoan culture of Crete, used scientific methods.
Romanticism in Literature
In Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a natural education for a young man.
Romantics praised nature's beauty and mystery. The supernatural also fascinated them.
Folklore and traditional peasant life were romanticized because country people lived closer to nature.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected classical poetic forms by ignoring punctuation in their Lyrical Ballads.
Wolfgang von Goethe
In his epistolary novel Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther commits suicide when his love for a woman is rejected.
Goethe dominated the Sturm und Drang generation of German Romantic writers of the 1770s and 1780s.
Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo's novels like Ivanhoe and The Hunchback of Notre Dame popularized the Middle Ages.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 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.
Mask of Anarchy was written as a political protest after the Peterloo massacre.
Lord Byron rebelled against the Ottoman Turks in Greece and died.
Amandine-Aurore Dupin, writing as George Sand, challenged women's oppression. Sand had a famous affair with Frédéric Chopin, who told his family,
In Indiana, a desperate woman is abused by her husband and a self-centered lover.
Sand's pen name, cigar smoking, masculine dress, and affairs with married men defied stereotypes.
John Wesley, an Anglican preacher, traveled across Great Britain and Ireland, preaching to villages, organizing small religious societies, and appointing leaders to continue social change after his departure.
Methodism: A Romantic religion—emerged from this revival movement.
Music
Ludwig von Beethoven changed classical forms by lengthening his compositions and adding a vocal soloist to the last movement.
Beethoven was the first composer to earn enough from compositions and performances to avoid aristocratic or religious patrons.
Franz Schubert invented the lied, or art song, with a solo voice singing a melody to piano accompaniment.
Hector Berlioz set Goethe's Faust to music, which was the first attempt to tell a story without singers or a text.
Frederic Chopin was influenced by the music of the peasants of his native Poland.
Franz Liszt wrote music based on traditional Romani music.
In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev's ballet The Rite of Spring seemed to reject classical ballet with its bizarre costumes, strange dancing, and Igor Stravinsky's discordant music.
Art
Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People captures the stirring events of the revolution in the streets of Paris
Photography was a new art form and a major influence on painting by mid-century.
In 1835, Louis Daguerre accidentally created an image by placing an exposed plate in a chemical cupboard with mercury vapor.
He developed the daguerreotype process to fix the image after several years.
Photography would enter into the mainstream with the introduction of celluloid film.
In the 1880s, George Eastman introduced flexible film and the first box camera, making photography affordable for everyone.
Realists: Those who sought to paint the world around them without any illusions.
Gustave Courbet painted works like The Stone-Breakers that rejected romanticism and depicted peasant life in all its grimness.
Jean-François Millet's The Sowers depicts impoverished peasants who appear to be growing from the ground.
Honoré Daumier is best known for his July Monarchy cartoons that exposed corrupt politicians and legal systems.
The Third Class Carriage: It depicts a group of French peasants, their faces creased from hardship, sitting in an obviously uncomfortable railcar.
Realism in Literature
Charles Dickens used his brief experience in a blacking factory to criticize industrialized society.
In Hard Times, noble workingman Stephen Blackpool fights forces beyond his control.
Mary Ann Evans 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.
Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary marries a mediocre village doctor and discovers that marriage is not as romantic as she thought.
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina features another beautiful but bored woman who has a disastrous affair.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent 10 years in Siberia after almost being executed for his involvement in an illegal political group.
He wrote Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Émile Zola found himself applying the social sciences to the novel.
He wrote a series of "naturalistic" novels about a family over several generations, showing how environment and heredity caused their moral and physical degeneration.
In his L'Aurore front-page letter "J'accuse," Zola defended Alfred Dreyfus from treason charges.
Post-Realist Art: The Impressionists and Expressionists
Édouard Manet was inspired by the realists, they wished to push their techniques in new directions.
His Luncheon on the Grass shows a rather peculiar picnic, with two fully clothed males and a nude female.
When they were denied entry to the 1863 Salon, Paris's annual public exhibition, Manet and other innovative artists were embroiled in a controversy.
Napoleon III created the Salon des Refusés, or "exhibition of the rejected," after the public protested the hanging committee's refusal to show these paintings.
Impressionism
After Claude Monet's Impression: Sunrise was criticized in 1874, the term "impressionist" was used to deride artists who copied Manet's style.
Impressionists were the first to use outdoor easels to capture light's shimmering effects.
Monet would paint a haystack or Rouen Cathedral at different times of day or seasons to show how light changed it.
Auguste Renoir captured couples flirting in a dance hall.
Edgar Degas painted many ballet backstage scenes.
Paul Cézanne challenged composition, color, and perspective.
His work influenced 20th-century artists, earning him the title "father of modern art."
Cézanne wanted to make impressionism "solid and durable, like the art of the museums."
Expressionism
20th-century Expressionists were influenced by Vincent Van Gogh.
His 10-year career was cut short by suicide.
His style changed after a trip to Paris, where he met several leading artists through his brother Theo's gallery.
The Potato Eaters show his deep sensitivity to the economically struggling.
He painted his most famous sunflower and cypress tree landscapes in Arles, southern France, using bright colors and broad brush strokes to convey deep emotion.
Pablo Picasso, whose nearly abstract Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) broke with Western art's single-point perspective since the Italian Renaissance.
The Scream by Edvard Munch revealed emotions rather than appearances.
Gustav Klimt rejected mass society's values and shocked viewers with vibrant colors or unfamiliar classical images.
The New Imperialism: Colonization of Africa and Asia
The New Imperialism: It is used to distinguish the period from earlier overseas conquests, such as the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, and to describe how European rule changed life in those regions.
Breech-loading rifles, which allowed prone firing, were superior to muzzle loaders used by African gun owners.
Steamships crossed oceans quickly without wind power, and smaller steam-driven riverboats allowed Europeans to penetrate Africa.
The Telegraph reduced communication between India and London to a day from two years at the start of the century.
In 1820, quinine, made from cinchona tree bark, was discovered to treat malaria, a tropical disease.
The new imperialism was built on technological advances. They relied on technology, but it would have failed without the various factors that drove Europeans to conquer other countries.
In the last quarter of the century, Europe raised tariffs, prompting nations to consider colonies as free trade zones.
People traveled to Africa for palm oil, gold, and silver.
Social imperialists saw imperialism as a way to solve domestic issues like overpopulation.
Nationalism also played a major role in empire-building.
European states believed that was the only way to matter globally.
France built an overseas empire to prove it still mattered after its 1870 defeat by Prussia.
Christian missionaries were the first Europeans to enter central Africa.
Balance-of-power politics was the main reason for buying unprofitable land.
Nations sought colonies to deny others.
Cecil Rhodes sought colonial advantage from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo.
Social Darwinism influenced new imperialism. White people believed they would rule Asia and Africa.
"The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling states that Europeans must "bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives' need," exemplifying noblesse oblige.
At the Berlin Conference, called to discuss Congo control, imperialist nations pledged "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."
Europeans drew new borders that ignored tribal and cultural differences with imperial territories in the "mad scramble" for colonies.
The Berlin conference regulated colonization.
Bismarck organized nations to prove they had enough authority in a territory to protect rights like trade and transit.
This started the mad dash that left every square inch of Africa divided among the European powers.
Ethiopia repelled an Italian invasion in 1896. Liberia repulsed on the west coast, which remained independent due to its unique historical link to the United States.
After the French left India after the Seven Years' War, Britain took over them.
In 1849, Punjab became British territory.
After the "Indian Mutiny" or "Sepoy Rebellion" of 1857, an administrative structure replaced the British East India Company, centralizing colonial control.
By 1877, Prime Minister Disraeli made Queen Victoria the Empress of India, flattering her and sending a message to Europe about Great Britain's importance to India.
Great Britain was the first European state to practice "informal empire" in China, where a state has significant influence over another nation's economy without territorial or political control.
China gave European states sovereignty over a series of "treaty ports" along the coast after losing several wars with European powers.
Despite Thailand's independence, the French took Indochina and its vital rubber plantations.
The Dutch ruled Indonesia and the US took the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.
After the Russo-Japanese War, Japan took control of Korea in 1910, following Britain and Germany's colonial expansion.
Colonialist Violence
Carl Peters, whom Hitler admired, founded a German colony in East Africa and was known as the "man with blood on his hands" by the locals.
The Belgian Congo was the worst colonial exploitation.
King Leopold II (r. 1876–1909), a pioneer in the scramble for Africa, founded this massive colony many times the size of Belgium and expected to profit from it. Profiteering enslaved, maimed, and killed millions.
After an international outcry, including Mark Twain's sarcastic King Leopold's Soliloquy, the king gave control to the Belgian government, which corrected some of the worst abuses.
Views and Consequences of the New Imperialism
Britain's pro-imperial Primrose League had over a million members, and Germany, Italy, and France had similar organizations with far fewer members.
The Boer War (1899–1902) may have reduced public support for empire in Great Britain, but the working class across Europe seemed uninterested.
In 1882, Britain established a protectorate over Egypt and the Suez Canal to ensure its dominance over India due to European rivalries.
British control over Afghanistan's worthless territory threatened Russia's recent Central Asian expansion and India's security.
In 1898, Britain and France nearly went to war over Fashoda in Sudan.
In 1905 and 1911, France and Germany nearly went to war over Morocco.
Leading German political and military figures felt their country lacked a colonial empire befitting its position in Europe, which contributed to the First World War.
Bismarck once pointed to a map of Europe and said, "This is my Africa," revealing his true interest.
The Society for German Colonization (1884) opposed Bismarck's apathy.
Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Bismarck into retirement in 1890 due to his lack of interest in colonies, which he couldn't stand.
Western-educated colonized people led resistance groups against the colonizers.
The Indian Congress Party, founded in 1885, was the main force behind Indian independence from the British Empire.
Other nationalist movements of the time included the Zulu resistance to the British in southern Africa, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan.
Period 4: Global Wars to Globalization: (1914-present)
4.1: The First World War
Political and Social Tensions in Europe
Great Britain and Ireland
Home Rule: A movement that campaigned for self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Nationalists were Catholic; Unionists were Protestant.
Unionism expanded in the northern Protestant regions of Ireland, particularly in the province of Ulster.
France
In 1894, the Dreyfus Affair began when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of giving military secrets to the Germans.
The incident showed the extent of French anti-Semitism and how much many French people hated republicanism.
Russia
In 1904, Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War again, revealing the Tsarist state's bankruptcy.
The Duma that would make Russia a constitutional monarchy was created early in the revolution.
Tsar Nicholas II accepted Duma's rule.
Tsarist rule resumed as an unwieldy autocracy.
Germany and Austria-Hungary
The kaiser and his inner circle feared a Socialist revolution in Germany due to rising worker agitation.
"Magyarization," the mandatory dominance of the Magyar language and culture, infuriated the other nationalities.
Entangling Alliances
In 1879, Bismarck created the Dual Alliance, a military treaty with the Austro-Hungarians.
Bismarck signed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887 to make it clear that the treaty with Austria-Hungary was purely defensive.
After Kaiser Wilhelm II ousted Bismarck, the Russians began to fear the Germans.
German fears of being encircled increased when Great Britain and France signed an Entente Cordiale in 1904 to settle colonial disputes.
German fears increased when Great Britain signed another entente with the Russians.
This is why during the First World War, Britain, France, and Russia were referred to as the “Entente” powers.
Increased Militarization
High Seas Fleet
For the British, navies were entirely different because they saw their fleet as their only line of defense for their sizable colonial empire.
The Battle of Jutland in 1916 was the only significant naval engagement of the First World War.
Crisis in the Balkans
Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, was the site of the initial crisis on June 28, 1914.
There, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the presumed heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, was killed.
A Bosnian Serb who desired Bosnia's inclusion in a larger Serbian state killed Ferdinand.
In 1908, the Balkan crisis brought Europe to the verge of war after Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Gavrilo Princip, the Archduke’s assassin, had operated with the full cooperation of the Black Hand.
Black Hand: A secret Serbian nationalist group with strong ties to Serbian officials in both the government and the army.
The Course of the War
On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, risking a wider European war.
Russia had promised to protect the Serbs.
Germany, the "blank check," supported Austria-Hungary, which started the war because it was the only power that could have stopped them.
Russia mobilized after the Austro-Hungarian declaration on Serbia.
As Russian mobilization continued, the Germans declared war on August 1.
The Second International parties, which had long opposed capitalist European wars and praised international brotherhood, voted in each nation to support the war effort.
Jean Jaurès: The idealistic French Socialist Party leader that opposed the war.
On the eve of the war, a fanatical French nationalist shot him.
Airplanes were used to spot enemy positions, making surprise offensives harder.
The Germans began the war by trying to implement the Schlieffen Plan.
Schlieffen Plan: Established that, in case of the outbreak of war, Germany would attack France first and then Russia.
Belgium, a nation created in 1830 with the promise of European neutrality, was invaded by Germany.
After the German invasion of Belgium broke this guarantee, Great Britain joined the French and Russians.
By early September, German troops threatened Paris, forcing the French government to flee.
The First Battle of the Marne, led by General Joffre, stopped the Germans after they crossed the river.
The armies on Flanders' northern coast scrambled to outflank each other throughout the fall.
Both sides settled into a longer war by the first winter.
As the stalemate continued, huge networks of defensive fortifications were built from quickly dug ditches.
As the war dragged on, soldiers faced rats eating corpses, artillery noise, and extreme boredom.
Unfortunately, both sides insisted on sending their soldiers "over the top" into no man's land to attack enemy trenches.
The war in the east was rather different from that in the west.
As the fighting in the west stalled, German forces shifted to the east and began to win against the brave but poorly equipped Russians.
Because of its massive size, the eastern front never became bogged down with trenches like the west.
In early 1915, poison gas began to be used by both sides.
Gas masks reduced gas-related casualties, but they also reinforced the inhumanity of modern warfare.
British forces attacked Turkey, a central power ally, to break the east's stalemate.
Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, devised a plan, which nearly ended his political career.
Churchill believed that defeating the Turks would allow the British to supply the beleaguered Russians via the Black Sea.
In April 1915, five divisions landed on the beach of Gallipoli
The Turks were well entrenched, so the attack failed for most Australian and New Zealand soldiers.
After suffering heavy losses, the British withdrew in January.
In 1916, the Germans launched a massive offensive against the French fortress of Verdun, which France had to defend at all costs or risk public opinion disaster.
German artillery included "Big Bertha" guns that fired ton-plus shells.
General Philippe Pétain led a spirited defense of the fortress against the Germans.
After the German victory in 1940, he became the disgraced leader of Vichy France.
In one of the war's costliest battles, the Germans attacked Verdun to bleed France dry, but both sides lost 600,000 troops.
Both Entente powers launched wasteful and ineffective offensives, such as the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Passchendaele, to break the German lines.
4.2: The End of the War
As Russia fell into revolution, the Bolshevik leaders sued Germany for peace in December 1917.
Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram caused the United States to enter the war on April 6, 1917, negating this German advantage.
Zimmermann Telegram: A secret German note to Mexico requesting support if the US entered the war.
In 1915, Germany declared the waters around Great Britain a war zone and threatened to sink any ship that tried to enter British ports.
In May 1915, a German U-boat sank the British passenger ship Lusitania, angering 120 American passengers.
The Germans stopped attacking neutral shipping after an American warning, but in early 1917, they resumed the practice.
In 1918, the Germans decided to move quickly to win before the Americans could send in large numbers of new troops.
Beginning in March, the Germans decided to gamble everything on victory.
For four months, German troops had the same success as in the war's beginning.
By summer, many Americans halted the German advance.
By August, Germany was exhausted and retreating.
The new German government, led by Prince Max von Baden asked American President Woodrow Wilson for an armistice based on Wilson's Fourteen Points.
Wilson's Fourteen Points: An idealistic document that sought to reduce future tensions between nations by maintaining free trade and ending secret negotiations.
In November, soldiers and workers formed soviets, or councils, and demanded that these loosely organized political debating societies rule the state.
Fearing that Germany would follow Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, the Kaiser was convinced to abdicate, creating a republic that was empowered to sign the armistice that ended the war on November 11, 1918.
4.3: The War on the Home Front
World War I was the first total war.
Political leaders realized they would need to mobilize all national resources after people realized their initial expectation of a quick war was wrong.
The war boosted government power in the 20th century.
Price controls, strike bans, rationing, and planned coal use supported the war effort.
The British government closed pubs in the afternoon to prevent factory workers from coming to work drunk.
Governments also began to play a larger role in trying to manipulate public opinion.
Censorship became a basic task for all governments. They read and censored soldiers' letters home to hide trench warfare's horrors.
Government propaganda offices produced films and posters to boost morale.
In the US, the First World War emancipated women, and the Second World War paved the way for the Civil Rights movement.
British female suffrage was growing before the war.
The Versailles Treaty and the Costs of the War
It is impossible to determine a precise count of the human costs of the war
Influenza killed 30 million people worldwide, dwarfing war deaths.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace estimated the war's cost at $338 billion.
Paris peace conference reached five settlements.
Treaty of Versailles — signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors
Woodrow Wilson wanted to reshape the world based on his Fourteen Points, which included national self-determination and the League of Nations to resolve international disputes.
Georges Clemenceau represented a completely different outlook from Wilson’s.
France endured the most suffering of any nation during the war, and Clemenceau had to placate a populace that wanted to ensure that Germany would never again pose a threat.
David Lloyd-George supported punishing Germany as well.
The treaty ultimately represented Clemenceau's position's victory over Wilson's.
Other treaties signed in Paris in 1919 reordered the map of Europe. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the decline of Germany resulted in the birth of new nations in central Europe.
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Romania
Yugoslavia
Poland
Finland
The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were carved out of parts of the former Russian Empire.
The Russian Revolution
Nicholas II, Russia's last tsar, misguidedly took personal command of the army in the second year of the war to emulate past warrior tsars.
In his absence, Nicholas left his wife Empress Alexandra in charge of the state.
She turned out to be completely ignorant in matters of statecraft.
She was also personally influenced by Gregory Rasputin who she thought possessed the ability to control her son’s hemophilia.
Rasputin persuades the empress to appoint his incompetent friends to important state posts.
False rumors spread that Alexandra and Rasputin were lovers and that the empress was trying to defeat Russia.
Rasputin was killed in 1916 by arch-monarchists who believed he was undermining the throne.
The Provisional Government
Duma: The Russian parliament that arose out of the 1905 revolution
The soviets consisted primarily of assorted Russian Socialists.
The majority belongs to Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary wings.
The minority belonged to the Bolsheviks.
In 1903, Vladimir Lenin proposed that a small group of professional revolutionaries could seize power for the working class, dividing Russian socialism.
His followers became known as the Bolsheviks.
Mensheviks: The group that believed Russia had to follow historical precedent to become a socialist nation.
They dominated the Petrograd Soviet to initially support the Provisional Government because they believed a bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist revolution.
The Provisional Government's refusal to end the First World War was controversial.
The Triumph of the Bolsheviks
In April, the Germans helped Lenin return from Switzerland in a sealed railcar.
Lenin was expected to undermine the Russian war effort so the Germans did this.
Over the next few months, the Bolsheviks gained strength from Petrograd's workers and soldiers.
By the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks were the largest party in the soviets.
On November 9, new Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky took over key city positions.
The Provisional Government collapsed, ending the revolution peacefully.
Over the next three years, the Bolsheviks fought a bloody civil war to maintain power.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and the new Bolshevik state ended Russia's involvement in the war by 1917.
Germans confiscated vast Russian land under the harsh treaty.
Germany's defeat and the Allies' refusal to let Germany gain eastern territories prevented its full implementation.
4.4: The Interwar Years
The German Weimar Republic
The German Weimar Republic's tragic story should not be surprising given its difficult birth at the end of a disastrous war.
In November 1918, Friedrich Ebert became the republic's first president.
Ebert used the old imperial officer corps to defeat Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg's Marxist rebellion and secure his republican regime.
Ebert approved Free Crops because the army could not put down the rebellion alone.
Free Crops: A voluntary paramilitary group often with extreme right-wing leanings.
The Kapp Putsch, a 1920 attempt by some Free Corps to overthrow the democratic state, was thwarted by a general strike.
Despite the Versailles Treaty penalties, the republic stabilized by 1924.
Gustav Stresemann, leader of the conservative German People's Party, was Chancellor of Germany in 1923.
By 1925, Germany was slowly rebuilding its relations with the other nations of Europe.
Germany accepted France's borders in the Locarno Agreement.
Germany joined the League of Nations the following year after Stresemann's efforts.
By 1929, the republic appeared to be gaining ground in Germany, but the Great Depression would show how little support it had.
The Soviet Experiment
The Communists worked to solidify their control over the vast Russian state.
For three years they had to fight a life-or-death struggle against the White Forces.
Anti-Communist monarchists and republicans are among them.
British and American troops, nominally sent to protect Allies' wartime supplies, supported the Whites.
Lenin and Trotsky justified their "Red Terror" against right-wing extremists and Bolshevik enemies during the Civil War.
By 1920, the Communists had defeated the various White armies and firmly established Bolshevik rule over Russia.
In 1919, the Russian Communists founded the Third International to aid in the cause of revolution.
The Comintern influenced western European Socialist parties as some Marxists looked to the new Soviet state for guidance.
Lenin's repression appalled most Socialists.
This split Europe into Communist and Socialist parties.
The German Communists saw the Social Democratic Party as a bigger threat than the Nazis, so this left-wing split helped the Nazis rise.
By 1920, the Comintern focused on aiding the Soviet Union, which held all leadership positions.
"War communism" tightly controlled the economy during the Civil War.
In 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt Naval Base, a Bolshevik stronghold, rebelled against this program.
Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP) after the rebellion was brutally crushed.
This policy gave the government the "heights of industry" but allowed private enterprise to flourish.
Trotsky wanted war communism's economic structure back because the NEP was too ideological.
As the leader of the "Left Opposition," Trotsky believed that communism could only survive if it spread to other countries.
Nikolai Bukharin, the "Right Opposition" leader, opposed him in this debate, building communism within the Soviet state.
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin, a Georgian who joined the party in 1902, played a minor role in the November 1917 coup.
He wanted power within the Soviet system.
Stalin and Bukharin cleverly ousted Trotsky.
In 1927, Trotsky and his ally Gregory Zinoviev were expelled from the party.
Stalin waited two years before he also ousted Bukharin.
In 1936, Stalin began a series of show trials in which his former opponents were tortured into confessing to state crimes.
Stalin eliminated the "Old Bolsheviks" who had joined the party before 1917, along with anyone else who’re disloyal.
In 1940, an agent sent by Stalin assassinated Trotsky.
Stalin adopted the Left Opposition's plan to rapidly industrialize Russia after gaining power.
In 1928 Stalin implemented the first Five-Year Plan, a comprehensive, centrally controlled plan for industrial expansion.
Stalin forced agricultural collectivization to pay for this unprecedented economic growth.
The state declared war on the kulaks (wealthy peasants) and sent party cadres to the countryside to kill those who refused to join the collective farm.
After destroying their crops and livestock, millions of kulaks were shot or starved.
The Soviet Union became a major industrial power by the end of the 1930s, while the West was in a deep economic depression.
The Great Depression
In May 1931, Vienna's most powerful bank, CreditAnstalt, collapsed.
German and eastern European banks failed as citizens questioned their solvency.
Banks stopped lending and people started saving.
Because demand fell, so did the number of jobs.
Maintaining a gold standard, a fixed exchange rate between currencies and gold, worsened these issues for many countries.
The gold standard prevented countries from using controlled inflation to escape the depression.
The gold standard's problems were exacerbated by the belief that the best way to deal with an economic depression was to tighten the money supply until all "bad loans" and "failed companies" went bankrupt.
Inflation allows people to save more while still having money to spend, but it also discourages them from saving too much because they realize their money will be worth less in the future.
John Maynard Keynes was almost a singular voice of dissent.
He believed that deficit spending could fix the problem of private sector demand by temporarily providing jobs and income to boost spending and revive the economy.
"Priming the pump" meant temporarily increasing government spending on public works to unfreeze the economy and get money moving again.
Government missteps like raising tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing worsened the depression.
By 1932, the economies of Europe were performing at only half the 1929 level.
In the US and Germany, almost one-third of the workforce was unemployed due to the depression.
In the US, a stable democracy, those in the depression elected Franklin Roosevelt and supported his New Deal.
In Germany, a weak democracy, republican institutions died and fascism triumphed.
Fascism
Fascism comes from fasces, a Roman symbol of authority and community.
Fascism promoted a nationalist and mystical racial identity.
Fascists despised parliamentary democracy as anarchic and effete.
Il Duce, the Italian Fascist leader, and the Führer, the German leader, represented the nation's hopes and dreams.
Fascist governments in Italy and Germany were elected which makes this anti-democracy stance odd.
Mussolini promised that an Italian fascist state would implement corporatism.
Corporatism: An industry-specific employer-worker association to resolve production and wage disputes.
Anti-Semitism was a key component of Fascist movements throughout Europe, except Italy, because Jews were seen as outside the arch-nationalistic identity so dear to all Fascists.
Fascism in Italy
Italy became the first country to have a fascist government before the Great Depression of 1929.
Fascism in Italy grew out of national dissatisfaction with its First World War participation.
In 1915, Italy joined the Entente powers to gain control over Austria-Hungary's Italian-speaking regions.
Italy's military participation was initially disastrous, leading to the near-collapse of the Italian front in 1917, but Italy stayed in the war and helped the Entente powers win.
In 1919, proportional representation gave parties legislative seats based on their national vote percentages.
In 1919 and 1920, angry workers occupied factories, threatening a Bolshevik state and changing Italian politics.
The founder and leader of the Italian Fascists were Benito Mussolini.
His father was a Socialist who named his son after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez.
Mussolini adopted his father’s Socialist beliefs and became the editor of the party newspaper.
Mussolini wrote, “The national flag is a rag that should be placed in a dunghill.”
National Fascist Party — founded by Mussolini.
The party quickly formed paramilitary squads to fight leftist groups, earning the gratitude of factory owners and landowners who gave the party much-needed cash.
By 1921, the party had begun to elect members of the Italian parliament.
By October 1922, Mussolini demanded that King Victor Emmanuel III appoint him and other Fascists to cabinet posts.
Mussolini ordered his black-shirted thugs to march on Rome and seize power to support his demands.
If the king had declared martial law and called in the army, the Fascists would have been easily defeated.
The Fascist march on Rome was a celebration, not a coup.
Fortunately for Mussolini, his consolidation of political power faced little opposition.
After taking over in 1922, he only played parliamentary leader for a few months.
He then made constitutional changes to remove democratic constraints.
In 1924, Mussolini and the party murdered a Socialist politician, which shattered his early power.
Mussolini struggled to make Italy Fascist, possibly due to the country's nature.
In 1929, he signed the Lateran Pact with the papacy, making peace with established institutions like the Catholic Church.
For the first time, the papacy officially recognized the Italian state.
Mussolini tried to implement the new Italy's corporatist economic program, but it failed.
German Fascism
In March 1930, Hermann Müller resigned over an unemployment insurance crisis that was becoming too much for the German government due to the depression.
This was Germany's last democratic government before WWII.
Paul von Hindenburg's presidency made the Weimar Republic's future uncertain.
Hindenburg selected Heinrich Brüning, the leader of a middle-of-the-road Catholic party.
Brüning's economic program would have increased left-right political opposition without fixing the economy.
Brüning used Article 48, a Weimar Constitution emergency decree, to govern by presidential decree because he could not win a parliamentary majority.
Brüning believed voters would support austerity.
Instead, the Nazis emerged as the big winners.
The Nazis went from 12 Reichstag seats to 102 after the election.
By the spring of 1932, Hindenburg replaced Brüning with wealthy anti-parliamentary conservative Franz von Papen.
In November, the Nazis won 196 Reichstag seats, making them the largest party.
In January 1933, Hindenburg asked Hitler to become chancellor.
It was a remarkable achievement for the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler.
Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party, one of the early Weimar Republic's extremist groups, in 1919.
By 1923, he believed the party was strong enough to seize power, so he launched the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich which led to failure.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in prison, expressing his extremist views and his desire to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, which many Germans shared.
After the Beer Hall failure in 1923, Hitler decided to use the political system to gain power instead of a coup.
Nazi-armed thugs supported their political rallies and disrupted Mussolini's Fascist meetings.
Street fighting became common in Berlin and other German cities in Weimar.
In 1933, Hitler became chancellor and quickly consolidated his power.
The Reichstag building in Berlin was set on fire on February 27, 1933, but the perpetrator is unknown.
Nazis, who may have started the fire, blamed the Communists.
Hitler convinced the Reichstag to grant him emergency powers, allowing him to abolish nearly all human rights and give the executive branch almost complete power.
Despite ruling Germany, the Nazis received only 44% of the vote in the last election before World War II.
Hitler's Enabling Act gave the party emergency powers to govern the state and merged the chancellor and president's powers into one with a non-republican title, the führer.
By the summer of 1933, Hitler had banned all political parties except the Nazis and attacked the independent trade union movement.
Sturmabteilung (S.A): The Nazi political army that had played such an important role in the party’s rise to power.
Once Hitler was in power, the S.A. was expendable.
In June 1934, Hitler organized the “Night of the Long Knives,” in which he murdered his old ally Ernst Röhm, the leader of the S.A., who had wanted to make it the backbone of a new revolutionary army
The Nazification of the German state soon proceeded apace.
The Nazis worked hard to establish a Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels to gain support for such a program.
The Nazis created a brutal police force to silence political opposition and intimidate anyone who might disagree with the party line.
Western Democracies in Crisis
Great Britain
Labour Party: Supplanted the liberals to become Britain’s second-largest political party.
Liberal Party, which preferred Victorian life to total war, had serious issues after the First World War.
David Lloyd-George's promise to make Britain a "land fit for heroes" after the war inspired British soldiers and civilians to fight hard.
France
France had defeated Germany and retaken Alsace-Lorraine.
In February 1934, several center-left parties formed a "Popular Front" to prevent a Fascist victory in France like in Germany.
In May 1936, the "Popular Front" of Communists, Socialists, and Radicals won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.
Léon Blum, the Socialist Party leader, became Prime Minister.
In June, they passed the Matignon Agreement:
allowing workers to collectively bargain with employers,
reducing the work week to 40 hours, and
granting fully paid vacations.
However, France had to deal with the Spanish Civil War, which threatened the Popular Front.
Spanish Civil War
In February 1936, a leftist Popular Front coalition defeated Spanish Fascists.
In the summer of 1936, General Francisco Franco's army officers seized control of much of Spain.
Republic loyalists bravely organized to fight nationalist insurgents, disproving their prediction that the republic would collapse.
Spain was swept into an incredibly brutal civil war.
On market day, in the city of Guernica, German and Italian planes bombed and strafed the civilian population.
Picasso’s Guernica: A reflection painted out of his horror over the attack.
In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell recounted how the Communists crushed the anarchist movement in June 1937.
The Road to the Second World War
Hitler always wanted to overturn the Versailles Treaty.
In 1935, he openly began the rearmament of Germany, something that was prohibited by Versailles.
Germany Invades Austria
Hitler wants Austria to join the German Reich in Mein Kampf's first sentence.
In March 1938, this became a reality as German troops moved into Vienna.
Despite Austrian claims that they were the first victims of Nazi aggression, most Austrians celebrated the Anschluss by wildly greeting Hitler on his arrival in the city and attacking their Jewish neighbors.
Germany Invades Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia was eastern Europe's success story, with a strong army, industrial base, and democracy.
It had nationality issues, especially with the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans in the west who hated the state.
France promised to aid Czechoslovakia if Germany attacked. Those assurances came to nothing.
Great Britain Tries to Appease Germany
The British eventually settled on a policy known as appeasement.
In 1937, Neville Chamberlain became British Prime Minister and head of a conservative government.
He recognized that events in 1936 had been detrimental to British interests.
These events included:
the German occupation of the Rhineland,
the creation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, and
the Olympic games that had been held that year in Berlin.
Appeasement began with British recognition of Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia.
The British did nothing when Hitler annexed Austria.
Germany threatened to invade Czechoslovakia unless the Sudetenland, a western region populated by ethnic Germans, was given to the Reich.
In September, Chamberlain flew to Munich to attend a four-power summit with France, Italy, and Germany to discuss Czechoslovakia's future.
The Munich Agreement gave Germany all Sudeten territories at this summit.
Hitler promised to respect Czechoslovakia's sovereignty.
One year later, the Germans ignored the Munich Agreement and took most of Czechoslovakia, destroying it.
Germany and the Soviet Union Invade Poland
Versailles created Poland from German territory.
The new nation was given a strip of territory that split East Prussia from Germany to give Poles sea access.
Chamberlain wanted to stop German aggression. He made a deal with France to defend Poland's borders.
The Soviet Union also asked if the British and French would form a military alliance against the Germans.
After Stalin's purge of the officer corps, the British and French doubted the Soviet military's effectiveness and found little evidence that Stalin was more honest than Hitler.
On August 22, 1939, Stalin announced that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact.
Germany would invade Poland, while the Soviets took eastern Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, which Russia had lost in the First World War.
4.5: The Second World War (1939–1945)
The war began on September 1, 1939, with an attack on Poland.
Blitzkrieg warfare —fast attacks with tanks and other mobile units supported by warplanes — was learned from the First World War by the Germans.
Over the winter of 1939–1940, little warfare occurred, earning the time period the nickname the “Phony War.”
In April 1940, the Germans attacked Norway and Denmark to get iron ore for Germany, ending the lull.
The Fall of France
French political and military leaders were pessimistic after the eastern blitzkrieg and Scandinavian defeat.
The French built the Maginot Line during the interwar period to protect their soldiers in what they assumed would be another war of stagnant positions.
The Germans simply bypassed the fortifications, which were not extended to the Belgian frontier, and encircled the French armies.
The British, seeing that France was about to fall, staged a heroic retreat from the Belgian beaches at Dunkirk, using every available British ship, to bring the army back to Great Britain to fight another day.
France's new government was led by Marshal Pétain, the hero of the Battle of Verdun.
In the First World War, Pétain was a pessimist, and he used the opportunity to create a more authoritarian French government by pulling France out of the war.
One charismatic general, Charles de Gaulle, arrived in London and called for French forces in the colonies to form a new French army to restore national honor.
The Maquis, or French resistance, fought the Germans and Vichy state in France.
Germany Against Great Britain
The Battle of Britain was not the one-sided struggle that is often portrayed.
It is true that the Luftwaffe, the German air force, had many more planes and trained pilots. But the British had radar, which had been developed at Cambridge University and could detect oncoming German attacks.
The British Spitfires and Hurricanes were better planes than the German Messerschmitts. The British had also cracked the German secret military code.
Hermann Göring, the inept morphine addict in charge of the German air force, ordered the Luftwaffe to attack British cities after a token number of British planes bombed Berlin.
He made the decision to stop the successful raids on British air bases that had been carried out.
The Blitz was a terrible strategy that caused a lot of suffering in the cities, but it gave the Royal Air Force (RAF) time to recover.
Hitler decided to abandon his plan to invade Britain by the end of September 1940 and focus instead on achieving his ultimate goal—defeating the Soviet Union.
The Holocaust
The Holocaust: The slaughter of six million Jews.
Nuremberg Laws: Depriving Jews of citizenship and forcing them to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing whenever they left their homes.
Marriage and sex between Jews and Gentiles were also forbidden.
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis launched Kristallnacht.
That night, several hundred Jews were killed and 30,000 sent to concentration camps, proving the Germans wanted to exterminate them.
The Nazis' obsession with the "Jewish Question" is shown by their decision to use war resources to exterminate European Jewry even though the Russians were resisting.
Hitler ordered his top lieutenants to implement the "Final Solution" to deal with them and the many Jews from other conquered territories.
By 1941, one million Jews had been killed, most in mobile vans poisoned by carbon monoxide gas or machine-gunned by S.S. troops.
In January 1942, the top leaders met in Wannsee, Berlin, to plan a more efficient slaughter.
Auschwitz was the most notorious Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland.
S.S. Doctors, including Dr. Josef Mengele, sorted prisoners into work camps and gas chambers upon arrival.
Roma, homosexuals, gender-nonconformists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Russian POWs, Communists, and other "undesirables" were also imprisoned.
6 million Jews and 7 million such individuals were killed.
Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial, has a row of trees in honor of Gentiles who risked their lives to rescue Jews.
France's Vichy government rounded up Jews and handed them over to the Nazis before the Germans asked for their help.
Locals in Ukraine, Croatia, and other Eastern European countries exterminated their Jewish neighbors on their own.
The Turning of the Tide
Germany Invades the Soviet Union
They caught the Soviet forces completely unprepared.
By 1942, the Germans had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad and Leningrad, but the Russian forces' tenacity and the Soviet people's sacrifices kept them from falling.
The US and USSR formed an unlikely alliance to defeat the Third Reich and shape the postwar world due to their shared enemy.
The War in North Africa
By 1941, the war had become a global conflict.
As France collapsed, Mussolini's Italy joined Germany's war.
The Italians tried to expel the British from Egypt, extending the war to North Africa.
Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox," was one of the Germans' top commanders in this war.
He achieved great success, reaching Alexandria, Egypt, 60 miles away.
At the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942, General Montgomery's British army drove the German and Italian forces to Tunisia.
U.S. Involvement
The US joined the Axis powers after Pearl Harbor and Hitler's 1941 declaration of war.
By 1943, the Allies had defeated the Axis in Africa and sent troops to Italy, the "soft underbelly" of the Axis.
By 1943, Italy was out of the war, but its campaign had little impact on the war's outcome.
In November 1943, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met in Tehran and agreed to invade western Europe from Great Britain.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched the D-Day invasion.
The Allied landing in Europe and the Russian counterattack after Leningrad's siege ended Nazi Germany.
On May 8, 1945, a week after the suicide of Hitler, Germany surrendered unconditionally
Japan entered the Second World War to build a vast empire in the Pacific to exploit the natural resources of conquered lands and sell Japanese goods.
On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by a second on Nagasaki two days later.
On August 14, the Japanese surrendered, ending history's bloodiest war.
The Aftermath
Most of the 50 to 60 million people who died in the conflict were civilians.
The Soviet Union lost 25 million people, though the exact number will never be known.
After the Germans bombed Warsaw in 1939 and followed up in Rotterdam and London, cities across Europe were leveled.
Dresden was firebombed by the Allies, killing 50,000 people and destroying almost every German military, economic, and administrative target.
The Truemmerfrauen, or "rubble ladies," removed wreckage by hand in Berlin and other German cities without men or machinery.
After the First World War, the victors' capitals chanted "Hang the kaiser!" but did nothing to punish the war's perpetrators.
After the liberation of the Nazi death camps and the realization of the unspeakable scale of the slaughter, the Allies agreed to denazify Germany and punish the perpetrators.
The first Nuremberg Trial's defendants were charged with "crimes against humanity" under the new legal concept.
Hermann Göring, who swallowed poison smuggled into his cell to avoid execution while 11 others were executed.
Dr. Josef Mengele and other Nazis fled to the Middle East and South America, but Gestapo officer Adolf Eichmann was caught.
By June 1946, the German legal authorities quietly completed denazification after the Americans handed it over.
West Germans called 1945 "Zero Hour," the darkest moment in their history.
Over the next 20 years, Europe recovered completely, transforming lives and ushering in a period of political and social stability.
4.6: European Stability
In 1941, President Roosevelt proposed the Atlantic Charter to replace the ineffective League of Nations.
In 1945, delegates from 50 nations met in San Francisco to establish the United Nations.
In July 1945, the U.S. Senate ratified the agreement, signaling that the US would continue to support European recovery and stability.
Revanchism destabilized European affairs during the interwar period as many nations sought to reclaim territories lost in the peace treaties after World War I.
Postwar fringe groups chanted it rather than national governments.
The rise of democratic governments that were able to improve their citizens' economic conditions.
A new social contract gave workers full employment, living wages, and social welfare in exchange for their most extreme demands.
4.7: The Beginning of Cold War
There have been three major schools of thought on the causes of the Cold War.
Traditionalists blamed the Soviet Union's brutal dictatorship under Joseph Stalin for East-West hostilities.
Revisionists believed that in 1945, the US was more concerned with protecting American trade than democracy.
Post-Revisionists believed the US was more to blame than Traditionalists, even though the Soviet Union was primarily responsible.
The Yalta Conference on the Future of Germany
At Yalta, the Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin) agreed to divide Germany into four zones after the war, with an Allied Control Council to make decisions.
Yalta gave each Ally the chance to transform their zone, so the Soviet Union transformed its zone differently from the Western Allies.
Walter Ulbricht, the Soviet-appointed leader of the German Communist Party, believed that most Germans didn't want to return to Weimar's capitalist crises and would support the KPD.
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands — KPD.
Mass rape, factory dismantling for the Soviet Union, and land reform failure angered the Soviets and their KPD clients.
In 1946, Ulbricht forced the KPD and the more popular Social Democratic Party to merge, creating a one-party state that the Soviets used to take over Eastern European governments.
Reparations tensions increased during these political developments.
At Yalta, the Americans and British agreed to 20 billion dollars in reparations.
At Potsdam, the occupying powers agreed to collect reparations in their zones, with the Soviets receiving 25% of the total.
In May 1946, General Lucius Clay, the commander of the American zone, stopped collecting reparations, which stopped goods from reaching the Soviet Union.
Increasing Tensions Outside of Europe
In 1941, the Soviets and British divided and occupied Iran, agreeing to leave at the war's end.
In 1945, the British left, but the Soviets refused and demanded oil concessions.
When Truman learned that Soviet tanks were heading to Tehran, the Iranian capital, he sent warships into the Persian Gulf, and Stalin withdrew his troops.
Stalin also tried to intimidate neutral Turkey into giving the Soviets naval bases along the straits to give the Soviet fleet access to the Mediterranean.
George Kennan, a State Department official, also shaped American policy.
In 1947, Kennan wrote the Long Telegram, stating that the Soviets saw us as an ideological enemy and would never seek coexistence.
Kennan developed the policy of containment, which required "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies," in this and other Foreign Affairs articles under the pseudonym "X."
Containment and the Creation of NATO
Greece's Communist-led insurgency tested containment as a policy.
On March 12, 1947, Truman declared the Truman Doctrine to a joint session of Congress: "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
He requested $400 million for the Greek and Turkish governments.
In 1949, the United States established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to directly counter the threat posed by millions of Soviet soldiers in Eastern Europe.
In 1952, Great Britain, France, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Norway joined the US initially, with Greece and Turkey joining.
4.8: Soviet Dominance Over Eastern Europe
In 1944, Winston Churchill met with Stalin in Moscow as Soviet troops advanced through Eastern Europe.
Percentages Agreement
It divided the various nations of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence based on percentages.
Soviet influence was 90% in Romania and 50% in Hungary.
The agreement was flawed because Poland was excluded.
The USA rejected the agreement.
The British and Americans convinced the Soviets to sign a noble Declaration of Liberated Europe in Yalta.
It ordered "broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population" governments and immediate free elections in Axis or liberated countries.
Poland
Stalin's only concession on Poland was that an unspecified number of London-based anticommunist Poles would join his provisional government.
In 1947, Poland's promised elections were held under intimidation, and the Communists won 80 percent and ended multi party rule.
The Soviets knew they would have to use force to maintain Communist control over Poland because they were hated in that nation—a loathing that grew worse when the Soviets were revealed to have killed 15,000 Polish officers in Katyn at the start of the war.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe
The interwar economic and social failure of Eastern European states seemed to help the Soviet Union achieve this goal.
The Soviet Union initially tried to establish "People's Democracies" in Eastern Europe, except Poland.
This was a go-slow program for the Communists, with governments that were more proletarian than in the bourgeois West but not ready for a Soviet-style Communist system.
The Marshall Plan's offer of money to all European nations influenced the push for tighter control over Eastern Europe.
Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a threat to informal Soviet control over countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia because taking the money would lead them to the capitalist West.
In Hungary, Communists used "salami" tactics to isolate non-Communist political leaders.
The Hungarian Communist Party eliminated the Smallholders' Party by 1948 and won a tainted election with 95% of the vote the following year.
Czechoslovakia
President Eduard Benes ruled the postwar government.
Benes, a non-Communist, understood that Czechoslovakia needed a pro-Soviet foreign policy to maintain its independence.
The Czechs saw the Soviet Union as liberators and felt no debt to the West, which had sold them out at Munich in 1938.
Czech Communists formed a "People's Militia" to pressure Benes into forming a Communist government.
This intimidated Benes into forming a new government dominated by Communists.
When Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk's body was found shattered outside his window, it was clear that a multiparty Czechoslovak state was ending.
The Social Democrats were forced into the Communist Party, and in controlled elections in May 1948, the Communists won a complete victory and established a Soviet-style state.
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavian resistance initially united against the German-installed Croatian puppet government.
The Communists, led by Josip Broz Tito, fought the royalist Chetniks in a civil war as the war continued.
Tito's Communists won the civil war, but Stalin never trusted him because of the British and American aid he received and because he didn't like indigenous Communist movements he couldn't control.
By 1948, relations between the two states had deteriorated.
Tito's independent foreign policy made him the West's favorite Communist, but he ran a brutal police state at home.
4.9: The End of Imperialism
On August 15, 1947, India declared independence, starting decolonization across the Empire.
Israel
After the Holocaust, Jewish nationalism and Arabic nationalism increased.
The UN partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab homelands in response.
On May 14, 1948, the Jewish state of Israel was founded, but its Arab neighbors attacked it immediately.
Egypt and Africa
Egypt had been independent since 1922 until Abdul Nasser became president.
He nationalized the British-controlled Suez Canal in 1956.
Britain, France, and Israel planned a surprise attack on Egypt.
The British decolonized sub-Saharan Africa soon after.
Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Kenya followed Ghana's 1957 independence from Great Britain.
In 1965, many British settlers in Rhodesia formed a white supremacist government and declared independence from Britain.
Africans took control of that land, renaming it Zimbabwe, in 1980.
Indonesia, Vietnam and Algeria
The Dutch fought a costly and ultimately losing battle in the East Indies to keep the land they first occupied in the 17th century.
By 1949, the Netherlands reluctantly recognized Indonesian independence.
France nearly disintegrated trying to keep Algeria.
This followed a bitter loss in Indochina, where Ho Chi Minh led a nationalist movement that fought first the Japanese during the Second World War and then the French as they tried to reestablish colonial rule.
By 1954, France realized it was impossible and divided Vietnam into a Communist-led north and a US-dominated south.
Algeria was different from Indochina because it had been a French possession since 1830 and had over a million native French residents.
In 1958, France nearly erupted in a civil war over the Algerian question until de Gaulle became president and used his prestige four years later to grant Algerian independence.
4.10: The Creation of a European Union
Concern over the Soviet Union led to NATO, which promoted European unity.
Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC)
It managed US Marshall Plan funds.
The US insisted that Europeans use the money cooperatively and did not want it used to revive unprofitable industries to restore national pride.
The OEEC started lowering tariffs and removing trade barriers in assisted states.
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
The ECSC managed steel and coal resources from France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Robert Schuman, the ECSC's main architect, said that "any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible."
The ECSC also created models for European unity, such as the European Parliament, a court of justice, and direct tax revenue for the Community.
European Economic Community (EEC)
In 1973, Britain, Ireland, and Denmark joined the EEC, which lifted almost all trade restrictions.
In 1986, the European Single Act allowed capital, labor, and services like banking and insurance to move freely among member nations.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 established the Euro, which went into circulation in January 2002, except in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, which refused to give up the pound.
The EEC became the European Union (EU) after the Maastricht Treaty expanded cooperation into defense, justice, and environmental issues.
Recent and Future Expansion of the European Union
The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all former Warsaw Pact members, joined the EU.
Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.
Turkey negotiated membership in 2005.
For many reasons, Turkey's EU bid is controversial.
Some EU officials doubt Turkey's economic or human rights commitment.
European Constitution: The caveat being that all EU members had to approve the constitution for it to go into effect.
In May 2005, France, a leader in European cooperation, voted "no" in a referendum.
4.11: Post-WWII Developments in Western Europe
Great Britain
Sir William Beveridge, a Liberal Party member, proposed in 1942 that all adults pay a weekly contribution to provide benefits to the sick, unemployed, retired, and widowed.
Labour established the National Health Service (NHS), which provided for a comprehensive system of free health care.
In 1945, the government took over the Bank of England, railroads, and electric, iron, and steel industries.
The existing owners received fair compensation, and professional managers—often the same ones—continued to run the company.
The "Age of Austerity" lasted until 1954, when wartime butter and sugar rationing ended.
By the 1951 general election, the Labour Party and the public were tired of change, giving Churchill's Conservatives another chance.
The "Politics of Consensus" emerged because the two major parties agreed on social services and economic management, even though they disagreed on funding.
By the 1950s, Western Europe's economies had grown faster than Britain's.
After the war, Germany rebuilt its factories with the latest technology, while Britain relied on older factories.
Britain also lacked central economic planning and faced aggressive unions that demanded higher wages without productivity gains.
In 1979, Prime Minister James Callaghan's Labour government couldn't handle a wave of strikes that hurt road transport and public services — the “winter of discontent.”
Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister, led the Conservative Party to victory.
Thatcherism—her economic policies—included tight money supply control to reduce inflation, sharp cuts in public spending, and tax cuts, especially for higher earners.
Thatcher was a divisive leader, and if not for the 1982 Falkland Islands war, her career might have ended early.
In her third term, Thatcher tried to apply market principles to the NHS and education system, and her party split over her opposition to European integration.
After 18 years in opposition, Tony Blair's Labour Party won in 1997.
Blair, who became party leader in 1994, created "New Labour" by moving Labour away from socialism.
Labour under Blair focused on improving Britain's social services, reforming the House of Lords, and devolving power to Wales and Scotland.
Blair won a second term in 2001 and a third in 2005, but anger over Blair's support for the Iraq War reduced Labour's margin of victory in 2005.
Gordon Brown, Blair's longtime Chancellor of the Exchequer, became Labour Party leader and UK prime minister in May 2007.
Brown served until 2010, when David Cameron became prime minister.
Cameron resigned in June 2016 after Britain voted for Brexit.
Theresa May became the Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister in July 2016.
France
France in 1945 had to deal with the grim aftermath of 1940's "Strange Defeat."
Although it took several years, Marcel Ophuls's powerful 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity opened the door to questioning these national myths.
From 1995 to 2007, President Jacques Chirac addressed France's role in the deportation of 66,000 Jews to Germany and other wartime collaboration issues.
Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French government-in-exile, was expected to rule France after the war.
When the Fourth Republic refused to establish a strong presidency, de Gaulle left politics.
The Fourth Republic dealt with colonial issues like the 1954 Indochina defeat and the 1954 Algerian revolt.
After the Algerian crisis raised fears of a military coup in France, de Gaulle returned to politics and led the 1958 plebiscite that established the Fifth Republic, which included the powerful presidency he now held.
France refused to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty and detonated its first hydrogen bomb in 1968 to defend itself.
France also had an independent foreign policy, withdrawing from NATO's unified command in 1966 and recognizing China's Communist government over the US's objections.
In 1945, five million men returned from Germany and needed jobs, the transport system was shattered by heavy fighting in the last year of the war, and coal and food supplies were low.
This dire situation favored the French Communist Party, which had a good wartime resistance record and appeared to offer economic solutions.
The Soviet Union invasion turned the party against the German occupiers.
Jean Monnet, a European Community founder, designed France's economic program.
The Monnet Plan created the Commissariat Général du Plan (CGP) to run the economy with nonpolitical technocrats.
It also created Americanization.
By 1968, young people were disillusioned with French life and angry about overcrowded classrooms, laboratories, and libraries as more students went to college. Paris was the worst.
Students and workers formed an alliance, but the students' demand for a complete reordering of French society clashed with the workers' more limited demands for wage increases and better working conditions.
Gaullists ruled France until 1981 when Socialist François Mitterrand became the longest-serving president.
In 1995, Paris mayor Jacques Chirac succeeded Mitterrand, who was reelected in 1988.
He was the second-longest serving French president, serving two full terms for 12 years.
He promised tax cuts, job programs, and social reform.
In May 2007, Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy defeated Socialist Segolene Royal in a runoff to succeed Chirac.
He promised to control immigration and modernize the country.
After Sarkozy, François Hollande of the Socialist party took office in 2012.
In May of 2017, Emmanuel Macron was elected president under the banner of En Marche!, a centrist political party he had founded the previous year.
Italy
Christian Democrats ruled Italy until the 1990s.
The Communists remained a significant opposition party.
Antonio Gramscim, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, encouraged political flexibility that was lacking in the French Communist Party.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Italy was known as the "economic miracle."
Italy's early commitment to the Common Market and the 6 million southern Italians who moved north in the 1960s provided cheap labor.
By the 1970s, high unemployment, inflation, and strikes had caused a huge loss of workdays.
Despite their flaws, the Christian Democrats remained in power because there was no other choice.
The southern mafia revived, and extreme left political terrorism targeted politicians, judges, and business leaders.
In 1978, the Red Brigade kidnapped former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and murdered him when the government refused to negotiate his release.
Silvio Berlusconi, a conservative media magnate who controls most of Italy's major media outlets outside government control, was defeated in 2006 over corruption allegations.
In May 2006, Olive Tree leader Romano Prodi became prime minister again.
Germany
Berlin, like the rest of Europe, was divided into four occupation zones, making it a potential flashpoint for Cold War violence.
In June 1948, the US and UK introduced a new currency without Soviet approval, sparking a series of crises over the divided city.
Stalin retaliated by completely blocking Berlin from the west.
The Berlin Airlift lasted ten-and-a-half months until Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949.
In 1949, the US, UK, and France formed the Federal Republic of Germany with Bonn as its capital, capitalizing on the airlift's success.
Several months later, the Soviet Union declared its eastern German zone the Communist-dominated German Democratic Republic.
Berlin remained the Cold War's epicenter in Germany.
In 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave the West six months to leave Berlin and let East Germany control access.
President Eisenhower insisted on another Berlin Airlift if necessary.
On August 13, 1961, East German border police began erecting a barbed-wire barrier between East and West Berlin at 2:00.
Over the next few days, the Berlin Wall was built.
By 1949, over 2.5 million educated East Germans had left for West Germany, causing a brain drain that the Communists considered necessary.
Konrad Adenauer, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader and chancellor from 1949 to 1963, shaped the early history of Germany.
Adenauer, an anti-Nazi conservative who had been mayor of Cologne in the Weimar Republic, feared the Soviet Union and preferred a West German state tied to the West to a unified Germany forced into neutrality.
His government paid Holocaust victims and Israel directly to address the Nazis' atrocities.
Gerhard Ritter, Adenauer's minister of economics and chancellor after his 1961 retirement, engineered this economic boom without high inflation.
During the Adenauer/Ritter years, the Social Democrats appeared to be in permanent opposition.
In 1955, the party dropped Marxist class struggle language and elected charismatic Willy Brandt as leader.
Brandt felt it necessary to reach out to the Soviets and their satellite states in Eastern Europe while remaining firmly tied to the West.
Ostpolitik established de facto recognition of the East German state by signing treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
Helmut Schmidt, Brandt's successor as chancellor, led the Social Democrats to victory in 1976 despite the 1973 oil crisis.
As in Great Britain and the United States, the early 1980s seemed to represent a surge in conservative politics, and in 1982, the CDU achieved an electoral comeback under Helmut Kohl.
In 1990, Helmut Kohl moved quickly to reunite Germany.
He promoted the EU-creating Maastricht Treaty with French President François Mitterand.
At 16 years, Kohl was Germany's longest-serving chancellor since Otto von Bismarck.
In 1998, Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats won again.
In November 2005, the CDU's Angela Merkel became Germany's first female chancellor.
In September of that year, no party won a majority of Bundestag seats, prompting this deal.
4.12: The Collapse of the Communist Bloc
East Germany and the Berlin Wall
In 1953, East German workers protested the government's productivity plan and later demanded political freedom.
By 1961, millions of East Germans fled to the West, prompting the Soviets to build the Berlin Wall.
Power Struggles in the Soviet Union
After Stalin's 1953 death, the USSR changed.
Nikita Khrushchev, the power struggle winner, did not execute the losers.
Khrushchev claimed that Stalin's government had deviated from Marxism-Leninism's political program, rather than being a natural outgrowth of it, and that only Marxist-Leninist reforms would be acceptable.
By October 1962, the two nuclear superpowers nearly went to war when the Soviets placed missiles in Cuba.
However, U.S. President Kennedy's crisis management prevented a nuclear disaster.
Leonid Brezhnev, Stalin’s successor, did not restore Stalinist terror, but he did strengthen the party bureaucracy and KGB and restrict reform in satellite states.
Dissatisfaction with this step backward sparked a Czechoslovakian reform movement by 1968. The "Prague Spring” sought a more humanistic socialism within the Soviet Bloc.
Brezhnev declared the "Brezhnev Doctrine," stating that the Soviet Union would support any Eastern European communist state threatened by internal strife.
Reform in Poland and Eastern Europe
Poland's 1978 election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II was the Brezhnev Doctrine's biggest challenge.
In 1980, Lech Walesa led a massive strike at the Gdansk Lenin shipyard,demanding the right to form an independent trade union. an independent trade union.
Solidarity survived martial law and being outlawed by going underground with the Catholic Church's help.
By 1989, the Polish economy was so bad that the government had to negotiate with Walesa and his union.
The negotiations led to multiparty elections, which in that year defeated all Communist candidates.
Mikhail Gorbachev, a reformer, opposed the "Brezhnev Doctrine" when he became Kremlin leader.
As Communist-led regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Albania collapsed peacefully, 1989 was one of the most remarkable years of the century.
In East Germany, the collapse of the regime in that same year was followed in 1990 by the reunification of East and West Germany and the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
As Nicolae Ceausescu desperately clung to power in Romania, this peaceful transformation failed.
On Christmas Day 1989, his government collapsed and he and Elena, his wife, were executed.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chernobyl nuclear accident showed how bad the nation was.
Gorbachev wanted to limit the extent of this change.
He accepted:
Glasnost: Openness in debate.
Perestroika: An economic restructuring of the state.
By 1990, Gorbachev appointed hard-liners to government positions, making reform unlikely and bringing the system down.
The rivalry between Gorbachev and Russian Parliament chairman Boris Yeltsin contributed to this.
In August 1991, hard-line communists staged a coup in Gorbachev's Crimean home, arresting him for threatening the Communist Party. The coup failed, ending Communist control.
By 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed as various republics left. After that, Gorbachev resigned.
A New Russian Republic
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation with 57% of the vote in 1991.
Yeltsin began his first term by rapidly transitioning the economy from state control to free-market capitalism, a policy supported by many foreign economists, including IMF advisors.
The new Russian state's official corruption and massive mafia-style criminal organizations also hurt Yeltsin's popularity.
In October 1993, the Congress of People's Deputies began impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin after a series of conflicts with Parliament over his economic policies.
Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell Congress and dissolved the legislature.
He established the Duma — a new constitution with increased presidential power.
Despite several strokes and public drunkenness, Yeltsin ran for reelection in 1996, surprising Kremlin observers.
Yeltsin easily won reelection, but his second term was notable only for negotiating a Chechnya peace treaty.
Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as prime minister before resigning in December 1999.
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, immediately shielded Yeltsin and his family from corruption charges.
Putin's rapid rise and Yeltsin's resignation surprised other presidential candidates, giving him a huge political advantage. He was easily elected in 2000.
Putin would have been easily reelected in 2004 even without his media monopoly.
His popularity was boosted by rising oil prices, which boosted the Russian economy, but Russia is in danger of repeating the Soviet mistake of the 1970s by becoming too dependent on this one commodity.
Ethnic Warfare in former Yugoslavia
After the war, Josip Tito helped found a Yugoslav state independent of the Soviet Bloc.
After his death in 1980, Slovenia and Croatia split from Yugoslavia.
In 1992, most Bosnian Muslims and Croats wanted to follow suit.
Bosnia's Serbs refused to join a minority Bosnian state.
With the help of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević, they carried out "ethnic cleansing," the forced removal and sometimes genocidal murder of Muslims and ethnic Bosnians in regions under their control.
The Serb shelling of Sarajevo, especially on market days when more people were out, was one of the century's final atrocities.
The 1995 American-brokered Dayton Accords brought temporary peace after such horrors.
The Serbs saw Kosovo, a Yugoslav province, as the cradle of their national identity after their defeat in the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Turks in 1389.
In 1998, Milošević justified his invasion of Kosovo by citing KLA attacks on Serbs.
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA): A small militant group that wanted to see the creation of an independent Kosovo.
In March 1999, NATO bombed Serbia for 74 days after the Serbs refused to sign a treaty giving the Kosovars more autonomy.
NATO's first offensive action against a sovereign nation forced Serbian troops to leave Kosovo.
In 2000, he was forced to call new elections, which he lost to Vojislav Kostunica.
Milošević reluctantly handed over power to Kostunica after hundreds of thousands of Serbs took to the streets to demand he accept the election results.
In 2001, President Kostunica changed his mind and turned Milošević over to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to receive badly needed economic aid from the West, but he died of a heart attack while his trial was still underway in 2006.
In February 2007, the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) found no evidence linking Serbia under Slobodan Milošević to Bosnian War genocide and war crimes.
In January 2009, the European Parliament declared July 11 a day of remembrance and mourning for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.
In July 1995, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed and nearly 25,000 women, children, and elderly were forcibly deported.
The Rise of Far-Right Reactionaries and Brexit
In the first two decades of the 21st century, Europe found itself gripped by a rise in the popularity of far-right nationalism.
Conservative social values, exacerbated by minority slights, define this movement.
Ultra-nationalism, especially against Middle Eastern immigration, and explicit racism are also present.
These ultra-conservative parties have advanced in European parliamentary elections:
Marine Le Pen’s French Front National (FN)
Geert Wilder’s Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV)
Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)
These groups openly support EU dismantlement.
In the 2016 Brexit vote, the British Isles voted 53–47 to leave the EU.
Granted, the U.K. had always been a bit of an outlier in the EU.
As an island nation, it has maintained a distinct national identity and never adopted the euro.
UK leaders rejected the EU's withdrawal terms three times, making withdrawal agreement negotiations tense.
In January 2020, the UK officially withdrew from the European Union.
